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 an empire which covered a fifth of the Earth's surface. People become very patriotic and when Queen Victoria, created Empress of India in 1861, had her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, it was a cause of national Celebration.

Empire, however, thought duty 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 Rudejard Kipling (1865-1936) spoke in the 1880's and 1890's. For him and many generation, the Empire was not so much an advantage as a responsibility.

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

However not all writers at the end of the century shared Kipling's seriousness on the seriousness of the early realists. The aesthetes, the most famous of whom, Oscar Wilde, did not accept middle 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 moral principles should useful. Instead they shared with their predecessors, the Pre-Raphaelits poets, such D. Gabriel Rossetti a belief in "Art for Art's Sake".

Art only needed to be beautiful to justificate herself. 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, they believing that true reality could only be found through senses and that beauty was the only thing that had any meaning.

The most important aesthetic thinker was professor from Oxford: 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 mean was to live these experiences an extensively as possible. The most important element for Walter 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 so saw the matter and the aesthetes cultivated in order to shock a society which they considered too self-satisfaction.

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 Chales Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du mal" published in 1857, influenced the hole generation of writer, including the French poet Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé and the English poet Charles Swinburne (1837-1909).

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

The Aesthetics escape to ugly industrial reality in a world of a sense was only partly the result of looking a new soul of culture; it was also, like Kipling'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, from many reason Britain confidence were disappearing: Germany and the United States were becoming more powerful and putting Britain supremacy in doubt, economic depression in the 1870's showed that free-trade did not provide all the answers and that some sort of state control of the economic would probably served; the Franco-Prussian war of the 1870-1871 left many in France, the remaining revenge and put at risk the peace which had lasted since the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 and which had allowed to Britain to trade and become rich and powerful.