REBELLION AGAINST VICTORIAN VALUES

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

People  become very patriotic and when Queen Victoria, created Empress of India in 1871, had her Diamond Jubilee ( 50 anni dalla carica di capo dello stato) in 1897, it was a cause of national Celebration.

 Empire, however, brought duty( portò il dovere)  and the English, especially the English man felt he had a special mission to civilize the more primitive people of the world.

It was this sense of duty, the "White Man's Burden", which the writer Rudyard 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 responsibility.( per alcuni era un vantaggio, per altri una responsabilità => Utile e Didattico)  

It was also, perhaps, an escape (fuga): serving in India and Africa gave man something positive to do; helping the local people to solve their problems: there was concrete action that help them to solve another problem, the need to think to deeply.

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

The aesthetes, the most famous of whom ( dei quali) was Oscar Wilde, did not accept middle class morality and the sense of earnestness (onestà) which dominated Victorian public values.  Nor did they agreed with Matthew Arnold or John Ruskin that are needed to be beautiful.

That art have a moral purpose and being useful. Instead they shared with their predecessors, the Pre-Raphaelites poets, such D. Gabriel Rossetti a belief in "Art for Art's Sake".

( Vittorianesimo con il principio di utile: ci sono quelli che credono che il colonialismo sia un vantaggio o che sia una responsabilità. Alcuni credevano che non tutto dovesse essere utile o didattico, condividevano invece i propri ideali con i preraffaelliti).

 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, believing in that true reality could only be found true senses and that  beauty was the only thing that had an  meaning.

The most important 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 that life was only a series of experiences and that the way to give it a meaning was to live these experiences an intensely is possible.

The most important element for Pater was beauty. Life was usually ugly and sordid; only art could be really beautiful, so life should copy art.

This belief in the superiority of art  to life was the opposite of how most people saw the matter (vedeva la faccenda) and the aesthetes cultivated in it in other to shock a society which they considered to satisfied.

The aestheitc movement of the 1880's and 1890's was part of a wider ( più ampio) European movement called Decadentism, which had originally developed from the work of the French poet Charles Baudelaire's "Le fleur de mar" published in 1857, influenced all writers, including the French poets Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarme and the English poet Charles Swinburne (1837-1909).

Swinburne was been one of the first "Antic Victorian" writers. His "Poems and Ballads" published in 1866  greatly shocked his contemporaries but was an inspiration for those, like Wilde, who were rebels against Victorian values and taste.

The aesthetics escape from ugly reality into a world of a sense was only partly the result of looking for a new soul of culture; it was also, like Kipling's idea of powe and Carlyle's idea of work, an attempt to escape from the Victorian crisis mind. ( non è più possible credere in quei valori)

Moreover, by the end of century, many of the reasons of Britain confidence ( fiducia) was 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-trade did not provide all the answers ( non forniva più le risposte) and that some sort of the state controlled of the economic would probably necessary.

The Franco-Prussian war of the 1870-1871 left many in France, demanded revenge (chiedevano una rivendicazione) and put at risk the peace which had lasted since the Treated of Vienna in 1850 and which had allowed to Britain to trade and become rich and powerful.

The familiar world which the Victorian had felt able to dominate was changing and moving out of control.