The Aesthetic movement.

At the end of the century, a reaction against the self satisfied morality and rigid orthodox respectability of the age was brought about by new generation of writers.

It came to be none as the antivictorian reaction and brought to a climax the rebellion which the pre-Raphaelites had already attempted on the whole, literature became less didactic and poetry in particular more sensuous and less moralizing.

One of the literary currents of the antivictiorian reaction was the so called Aesthetic movement.

The founder and theorist of the English Aesthetic movement was born in London in the 1839. He was Walter Pater.

Walter Pater (1849-1894).

His family was catholic. He attended Queen's College at Oxford where he received attentions for his works in the Classics and Philosophy. His passion for italian Renaissance took him to Italy. For Pater this was a confirmation, the ocnfirmation of an enthusiasm steadily growing in the proceeding years.

It coincided with the growth of the Aesthetic movement in Paris in the second part of the 8Oies.

A movement which was moving art away from its traditional role as teacher and moral guide.

Art had its own reason: art for art sake.

It was the motto of the Aesthetic movement, this together with his passion for the 16^th century Italian art was the ideological basis for Pater's studies of the Italian Renaissance.

Pater's message in the book was subtly but clearly potentially demoralizing, decadent and subversive.

Time flows incessantly like a river towards death.

The is no way of seizing its reality since it is continually changing in the face of the tragic brevity of the existence and uncertating of time.

Pater refuses faith and any other ethical system. Art is the only way of stopping time through the intensity of the ecstatic movement which is the only certainty or the only illusion.

This moment of ecstasy, the full comprehension of life and destiny, time and art and all, in one single figure, was the only kind of success worth persuing in life.

Critics and the academic world were hostile to him.

He left the University, he gape up teaching. The began writing "Marius the Epicurean":a description of a philosophical growth.

In 1887 he published "Imaginary portraits" and in 1894 "Plato and Platonism". Towards the end of his career he tried to correct the tendency begun by the "Renaissance" clarifying his message and moving towards a Christian vision of the world.

The poets research of beauty of the ecstatic movement the "hard-gem like flame" that Pater in his conclusion in the "Renaissance" described the real porpoise of life was the aim of the aesthetic theory of the artists.

The artist should care about form and technique and express himslef freely: he should not became the slave of fixed moral and ethical convention the hedonistic conception of art from radically rigid victorian tradition.

It alimented literature which sensations described frankness and rhythmic beauty. Dominant on the movement was the influence of French symbolists Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rembaud and Mallarmé.

Aetheticism followers in England were plenty but the most important famous were: Algernoon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), Walter Pater (1839-1894) and the most famous of all Oscar Wilde (1856-1900).

Rebellion against victorian values.

Because of her economic power Britain became the most powerful country in the world and, by the end of the century, control an Empire which covered a fifth of the hearth's surface. People became very patriotic and when Queen Victoria created Empress of India in 1871, had her diamond jubilee in 1887, it was a cause for national celebration.

Empire, however, brought duty and English men felt they had a special mission to civilize the more primitive people of the world.

It was this sense of duty, "the White man burden" which the writer R. Kipling (1865-1936) spoke of in the 1880ies and 1890ies.

For him an 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 something positive to do; helping the local people to solve their everyday problems which saved them 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 earlier 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.

Nore did they agree with Matthew Arnold or John Raskin that art should have moral and useful instead they shared with their predecessors (the pre-Raphaelites poets) and believe in art for art 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 the had no faith in reason believing [... ? ] could only be found through sense and beauty was the only things.

The most important thinker Walter Pater in his famous book introduciotn said that life was only a series of experiences and that the way to give meaning was to live this experiences as intensely as possible.

The most important think for Pater was beauty, life as usually ugly and sordid; only art could be real 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 a society which they considered too self satisfy.

Swinburne had been one of the first antivictorian writers. His "Poems and ballads" published in 1866 greatly shocked his contemporaries and was an inspiration for those who Oscar Wilde rebelled against victorian values and taste.

The Aesthetes escape from ugly industrial really a world of senses was the only partly the result for a new sort of culture; it was also like Kipling's idea of Empire an attempt to escape from the victorian crisis of a mind by the end of the century many of the (?) for Britain's confidence were disappearing: Germany and the U.S.A. were becoming more powerful and putting Britain's supremacy in doubt. Economic the pression in 1870 shows that free trade did not provide all the answers and that some sort of state control of the economy would probably be necessary.

The Franco-Prussian War of the 1871 left many in France demanding revendge and put at risk the peace which had allowed Britain to trade and became rich and powerful.

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