The Aesthetic movement

The Aesthetic movement, which started around the half of the 19^th century, is part of the Anti-Victorian reaction against the rigid orthodox respectability of the age.

The founder of the English movement was Walter Pater (1839 – 1894), a passionate scholar of classics, philosophy and Italian Renaissance, who knew the Aesthetic movement in Paris in the second part of the 80ies. “Art for art’s sake” was the motto of the new movement, who gave to the art a different connotation, far from its traditional role as a teacher and moral guide. Pater thought time flows like a river towards death and there’s no possibility of measuring it, but art can stop time through the intensity of the ecstatic moment. This instant of ecstasies is the only certainty or the only illusion, the only kind of success pursuing in life.  Pater’s main works are Marius the Epicurean, Imaginary Portraits, Plato and Platonism. He supported an hedonistic conception of art, stating that the real purpose of poets is the research of beauty. This research needs the care about both form and technique. So the literature had to leave its traditional didactic an moral function and to evoke sensation. The movement was influenced by the French Symbolists poets (Baudelaire,Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmè) and represented by three dominant figures Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837/1909), Walter Pater (1839/1894), Oscar Wilde (1856/1900).

Wilde was in contrast with the Middle class ethics and the sense of duty which dominated Victorian public values, like the “white man’s burden” theorized by the writer Rudyard Kipling (1865/1936). He shared the Pre Raphaelite belief in art’s own reason, rejecting simple realism. Like the Romantics they have not faith in reason, believing senses could reach true reality and just beauty could add any meaning in life (usually ugly). So, for the Aestheticism, art is superior to life, because only art and not life can be really beautiful. Swinburne had been one of the first of the Antivictorian writers, and shocked his contemporaries with his Poems and Ballads.

The rebellion against Victorian values and the willing of escaping from ugly reality can be read as an escape from the Victorian crisis of the mind. Indeed, during this period, Britain lost many certainties which threatened its familiar world.  Germany and U.S.A. put under discussion its supremacy; the economic depression in the 1870’s showed free-trade trend’s limits; the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 put at risk the long period of peace it was living.