REBELLION AGAINST VICTORIAN VALUE

Because of her economic power, Britain become powerful, the most powerful country in the world, and, by the end of the century Britain controlled en empire which convered a fifth of the earth's surface.

People  become very patriotic and when Queen Victoria, created Empress of India in 1871, had her Diamond Jubelee in 1897, it was a cause of national Celebration.

Empire, however, brought duty and the English, especially the Englishman felt he had a special mission to cevilize the more primitive people of the world.

it was this sense of duty the "White Man's Burden", which Rudejard Kipling (1865-1936)  spoke in the 1880's and 1890's.

For him and many of his generation, the Empire was not so much an advantage as a responsability.

It was also, perhaps, an escape since  serving in India and Africa gave man something positive to do; helping the local people to solve another problem: the need to think too deeply.

However not all writers at the end of the century shared Kipling's seriousness, all the seriousness of the early realists.

The aesthetes, the most famous of whom Oscar Wilde, did not accept moddle class morality and the sense of earnestness which dominated Victorian public values.  Nor did they agreed with Matthew Arnold or Jhon Ruskin that art only should have a moral purpose and be useful. Instead they shared with their predecessors, the Pre-Raphaelits poets, such D. Gabriel Rossetti a belief in "Art for Art's Sake".

1. Art only needed to be beautiful to justify itself they rejected a simple type of realism: art, in their opinion, should not just reproduce the world but offer an alternative to it. Like the romantics they had no faith in reason, beliving that trough reality could only be found through senses and that  beauty was the only thing that had meaning.The most importan aesthetic thinker was on Oxford's professor: Walter Pater.

In the introduction to his book "Studies in the History of the Romanticism" (1873) he said thay life was only a series of experiences and that the way to give it a mean was to live these experiences an intensily as possible. The most important element for Pater was beauty. Life was usually ugly and sorded; only art could be really beautiful, so life should copy art.

This belif in the superiority of art  to life was the opposite of how most people so saw the metter and the aesthetes coltivated in order to shock a society which they considered too satisfied.

The aestheitc movement of the 1880's and 1890's was part of a wider European movement called Decadentism, which had originally developed from the work of the Freanch poet Chales Boudlaire's "Le freur de mar" published in 1857, influenced the hole generation of writer, including the french poet Rimbaud, Verlaine and Malarnme and the english poet Charles Swineburne (1837-1909).

swineburne had been one of the first "Antic Victorian" writers. His "Poems and Ballads" published in 1866  greately shocked his contemporary but was an ispiration for those, like Wilde, who were rebellious against Victorian values and taste. The aesthetics escape from ugly industrial reality into a world of a sense was only partly the result of looking a new soul of culture; it was also, like Keepling's idea of Empire and Carlyle's idea of work, an attempt to escape from the Victorian crisis mind.

Moreover, by the end of century, many of the reasons for the Britain confidence's were disappearing. Germany and the United States were becoming more powerful and putting Britain's supremacy in doubt, economic depression in the 1870's showed that free-trede did not provide all the answeres and that some salt of state controled of the economic would obably be necessary: the Franco-Prussian war of the 1870-1871 left many in France, demanded revange and put at risk the peace which had lasted since the Treate of vien in 1850 and which had allowed to Britain to trade and become rich and powerful.