Introduction

Because of her economic power Britain became the most powerful country in the world and by the end of the century controlled an empire which covered a 5th of the earth’s surface. People became very patriotic and when Queen Victoria, created empress of India in 1871, had her diamond jubilee in 1897, it was a cause for national celebration.

Empire however brought duty and English men felt they had a special mission: to civilise the more primitive peoples of the world.

It was this sense of duty, the white men’s burden, which the writer Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) spoke of in the 1880’s. For him and many of his generation the empire was not so much an advantage as a responsibility. It was also, perhaps, an escape. Serving in India and Africa gave men something positive to do; helping the local people to solve their everyday problems was concrete action which saved them from the need to think too deeply.
However, not all writers, at the end of the century, shared Kipling’s seriousness or the seriousness of the early realists.

The Aesthetes, the most famous of whom was Oscar Wild, did not accept middle class morality and the sense of earnestness which dominated victorian public values.
Nor did they agree with Matthew Arnold or John Ruskin that art should have a moral purpose and be useful. Instead they shared with their predecessors, the Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a belief in “Art for Art’s Sake”: 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 that true reality could only be found through the senses and that beauty was the only thing that had any meaning.

The most important Aesthetic thinker was a professor from Oxford, Walter Pater. In the introduction to his work Studies in the Hystory of the Renaissance (1873) he said that life was only a serie of experiences and that the way to give it meaning was to live this life as intensive as possible. The most important thing 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 and the Aesthetes cultivated it in order to shock society which they considered to self-satisfied.

The Aesthetic 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 French poet Charles Baudelaire’s published in 1827 influence a whole generation of writers including the French poets Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé and the English poet Charles Swinburne. Swinburne had been one of the first anti-victorian writers. His Poems and Ballads published in 1866 greatly shocked his contemporaries but was an inspiration for those like Oscar Wild, who were rebels against victorian values and taste.

Aesthetism
The Aesthetic Movement developed in the last decades of the 19th (from France with Thèophile Gautier) and reflected the sense of frustration against the materialism and the restrictive moral code of the bourgeoisie and the need to re-define the role of art. Artists withdrew from the political and social scene and escaped into “Art for Art’s Sake”. The bohemian embodied the protest leading an unconventional existence, pursuing sensation and excess, and cultivating art and beauty.

The English Aesthetic Movement can trace his origins back to the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti and finds his main theorists in Walter Pater, who thought life should be lived in the spirit of art, filling each moment with intense experience, feeling all kinds of sensations. The artist was seen as the transcriber “not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it”. Art had no reference to life, and therefore it had nothing to do with morality and did not need to be didactic.

MAIN FEATURES in the work of Aesthetic artists:
• Evocative use of the language of the senses;
• Excessive attention to the self;
• A hedonist attitude;
• Perversity in subject matter
• Disenchantment with contemporary society;
• Absence of any didactic aim.

EXERCISES PG 347 348 349 350

PG. 347/348 – New Aesthetic Theories
1. READ and make notes:
1) The Aesthetic Movement developed in France in the last decades of the 19th century from the work of Théophile Gautier.
2/3) The movement reflected the artist’s sense of frustration and his reaction against the materialism and the restrictive moral code of the bourgeoisie during the Victorian Age. But also it revealed the need to re-define the role of art which moved away from politics or social themes and focuses on beauty pursuing “Art for Art’s Sake”.
4) The Aesthete lived an unconventional existence, a life of excess in search of sensations and cultivating art and beauty.

2. OPEN CLOZE
1) and
2) the
3) as
4) in
5) of
6) from
7) a
8) which
9) to
10) such
11) of
12) the

3. READ the text and underline the key phrases
The term “Pre-raphaelite” came into use when W.H. Hunt and J.E. Millais criticised the work of Raphael and rejected academic taste and “classical” doctrines. The movement began as an attempt to introduce in visual art naturalistic accuracy for detail. The pre-Raphaelite painters conceived the creation of beauty as a duty owed to society. Dante Gabriel rossetti was the strongest personality of the group.
The second phase, the Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism, developed from Rossetti which advocated the renewed use of handicraft and simple decoration in reaction to industrial machinery and contemporary aesthetic eclecticism. Rossetti emphasised medieval erotic themes, a combination of realism with elaborate symbolism and pictorial techniques which achieved a dreamy atmosphere.

PG. 349/3 – Aesthetism
1. READ and COMPLETE
The message of his works was subversive and demoralising: he substituted art, the only way to stop time, to religious faith and thought life should be lived in the spirit of art, filling each moment with intense experience, feeling all kinds of sensations. The writer's task is not to describe the world as mere fact, but to communicate the sense of it. As a result, art does not have to be didactic.

2. DISCUSS. Can you give your own definition of dandy?
Someone can be defined “dandy” if gives more importance to appearance than substance and his/her main objective is to is to be judged for his/her thinking but for his/her wearing or physical aspect.