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OSCAR WILDE: HIS LIFE, TIMES AND INFLUENCES

Fin de SiècleWE may not be sure what the spirit of an age is, but we can usually tell when it is giving

way to something else. What G. K. Chesterton called, in a book title, the 'Victorian Age

in Literature' seemed to be at its zenith when Dickens died in 1870; but ten years later, at

the death of George Eliot, the signs of change were unmistakable. The High Victorian

was becoming Late Victorian. The phrase fin de siècle came into common use, pointing

to a preoccupation with what the end of the century might portend. John Gross has

summed up the shifting mood in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters:

“Whatever one puts it down to-economic difficulties, foreign competition-it is undoubtedly possible to detect by the I880's a widespread faltering of Victorian self-confidence, a new edginess and uncertainty about the future. Among writers, such a climate might have been supposed to favour a mood of determined realism, and so, in some cases, it did. But the commonest reaction was withdrawal, a retreat into nostalgia, exoticism, fine writing, belles-lettres ”

In 1873 Walter Pater (1839-94) published his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, a work which was to be influential for many years. Pater was a shy, reclusive Oxford scholar but he was quietly subversive of Victorian certainties and assumptions. His book, whose name was later shortened to The Renaissance, is perhaps most famous for the passage of poetic prose describing Leonardo's Mona Lisa, beginning 'She is older than the rocks on which she sits.' But the Epilogue was the most influential part of the book, and is almost as celebrated. Pater was a historical relativist, sceptical about all fixed positions, doctrines, or theories; human life was fleeting and uncertain and instead of pursuing inaccessible ultimate truths man should strive to refine and purify his sensations and passing impressions:

“To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate at every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening”

It is in art, Pater believes, that the finest sensations are to be found and where we have the best hope of preserving the intense but fleeting moments of experience. This doctrine

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made Pater a revered master for the aesthetic poets and writers of the closing years of the century. One example of such a writer was Oscar Wilde, who met Pater at Oxford and who was deeply influenced by him.

In fiction the fin de siècle mood of withdrawal from everyday reality and the pursuit of a higher world of myth and art and imagination led to a taste for fictional romances, evident, for instance, in the short stories of Wilde and Yeats.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) made a cogent defence of fictional romance as a superior mode to the realistic novel that tried to capture 'life' itself: 'Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate.' But art could also improve on life by offering images of possibilities that for most people were unattainable in realistic terms.The idea that art could improve upon nature rather than mirror it, that it was superior to real life and that it should be pursued entirely for its own sake informed the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde. Stevenson's idea of fiction as art was quite other than that of the aesthetes and decadents; he found it best expressed in adventure stories, where human beings escape from the trivial contingencies of social life and are caught up in primitive and archetypal forms of action, such as 'fighting, sailing, adventure, death or child-birth. These aged things have on them the dew of man's morning. . .' Stevenson is still enjoyed as a master of adventure fiction, such as Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), which appeal to young readers, but not only to them. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) he presents the archetypal image of the Doppelganger in the guise of a horror story.

Stevenson argued that the romance could be more essentially truthful than realistic fiction. One new novelist who was initially regarded as a writer of romances was Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). His first novel Almayer's Folly appeared in 1895, and though his reputation was slow to develop, within a few years he was known and enjoyed as a writer of yarns about seafaring life, set in the East Indies and the South Seas. Conrad himself, who had undergone successive transformations, from a Polish gentleman to a merchant seaman to an English novelist, was a personally exotic figure. Knowing what we now know of his development after the turn of the century, when he proved himself to be a great novelist, the early response to Conrad seems ludicrously wide of the mark. Nevertheless, there are elements in his major fiction which continue to reflect his experience as a seaman: the sense that human life is a struggle against arbitrary hostile forces, and that society is a model of threatened and perilously maintained order, like a ship at sea. There is an inescapable and fascinating strangeness about Conrad's writing, as an aristocratic Polish sensibility is mediated through the forms and language of the English novel, in an English prose that is impeccable but idiosyncratic.

Other modes of romance were directed not at remote areas of the present day world, but at the future. The knowledge that the nineteenth century was in its final years produced a strong and uneasy concern with what the twentieth century would reveal. Sometimes this concern took the form of a utopian projection of a new and better world; more often there were apocalyptic images of future wars and social disasters, and even of the

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disappearance of the human race in its familiar form. A celebrated instance of the utopian romance was News from Nowhere (1891) by William Morris, who had been active since the late 1850s as a poet, designer, and revolutionary socialist. News from Nowhere was written as a reply to an earlier novel set in the future, Looking Backward by the American, Edward Bellamy, which Morris found unacceptable as a vision of things to come. Morris's romance evokes a cleaner, finer London, after capitalism has been overthrown and a socialist commonwealth established; machinery, though not abolished, is kept unobtrusively out of sight. The book is more a dream than a blueprint, poetically beautiful rather than intellectually convincing as an analysis of social trends and possibilities; but it has proved an inspiration to many later socialists.

The other kind of fiction about the future was apocalyptic and pessimistic, and its most brilliant practitioner was H. G. Wells author of “War of the Worlds” and “The Time Machine.”

Although many writers responded to the uncertainties of the late Victorian mood by retreating into nostalgia and exoticism, others reacted with determined realism. Whatever the claims made for romance, the novel proper, which deals with the ordinary world of action and desire, was taking new directions in the 1880s. A century later, Stevenson's friend Henry James (1843-1916) appears to us as a novelist of greater stature than he was accorded by his contemporaries. James was an American who preferred to live and write in England, and he now occupies a pre-eminent place in both English and American literature. One should note, incidentally, that in James's lifetime no such distinction was made; in the present essay the prominence of Irish writers means that 'English' literature refers to language rather than nationality. James's expatriation meant that he never completely belonged anywhere, which some might see as the essential condition of the late-Romantic artist. Although much attached to English life and culture, James continued to think and feel like an American (he finally became a British subject during the First World War, not long before his death).

James's fiction of the 1870s and 1880s focuses on the adventures and misfortunes of Americans in Europe-though in one novel, The Europeans (1878), the pattern is reversed and the Europeans go to America-and it has become a critical cliche to say that James's theme is the collision of American innocence and European experience. This is too simplifying and reductive a formula; expatriation in James is metaphorical as well as literal, and pervading his fiction is a strong sense of human loneliness; the community of the High Victorian novel has ceased to exist. Nor is James much interested in the close rendering of the multiplicity of things and appearances that has always been central in the appeal of realistic fiction; in James the physical world is no more than a backcloth for the drama; and drama is central to James's art; he has a wonderful ability to render the subtleties, and the pain and the dismay, that exist in the mutual relations of human beings. Joseph Conrad called him the 'historian of fine consciences', and in Conrad's Gallic English 'conscience' echoes the French conscience, 'consciousness'. Yet no interpretation of James is definitive or final; this is ultimately true of all literature that is worth returning to, but it is more immediately and obviously true of the modernist masterpieces

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of the early twentieth century, and it is in this illustrious company that we now see James. If one way of reading James stresses the underlying themes of alienation and betrayal, another can detect a predilection for the melodramatic, while another emphasizes James's sense of humour and the fine social comedy that he extracts from the mutual misunderstandings of Americans and Europeans; or, indeed, Americans and Americans. All these aspects are apparent in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), one of James's most satisfying novels and one of his most popular.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), who was patronizingly referred to by James as 'the good little Thomas Hardy', was born three years before James. Both men began to publish novels in the I870s and both represent a departure from the familiar forms of Victorian fiction: they show us central figures who are or become alienated from their society and are never reintegrated with it. Hardy was deeply attached to the rural customs and ways of life that he knew as a boy, and which he celebrates in an early novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). At the same time he is conscious of the social changes and problems of his day, such as agricultural innovation in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) or the contradictions of contemporary sexual mores in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). Hardy’s last novel Jude the Obscure (1896) is pervaded by a fin de siecle sense of crisis and severance with the past. Hardy unfolds the tragic story of his two central characters, who represent new social types: Jude Fawley, the working man who is passionate for education and self-improvement, and the woman he marries, Sue Bridehead, a fascinating but neurotic example of what was known in the 1890S as the 'New Woman'.

A familiar response to Hardy is to call him a fatalist who shows his characters as oppressed and defeated by a malign destiny. There is plenty of evidence in Hardy's fiction to support such an interpretation; but it needs to be balanced or opposed by the view that Hardy's characters struggle bravely against their fates in a spirit of existential defiance, and that they are not always defeated.

Hardy was a poet in many lyrical passages in his novels, and he wrote formal poetry all his life. After the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure by critics who found it unacceptably shocking, Hardy gave up fiction, but he continued to write poetry prolifically until his death more than thirty years later. His poetry is engrained with a bleak, honest agnosticism that does not flinch from the grimmer sides of the human condition.

Literally the last word on the nineteenth century was uttered by Thomas Hardy in his poem 'The Darkling Thrush', which is dated 31 December 1900 (which Hardy regarded as the last day of the old century). Hardy conveys a sense of chill, shrunken uncertainty on this portentous date; then the mood changes as an old bedraggled thrush begins to sing cheerfully in the winter dusk, as if expressing 'Some blessed hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware'. A few days later, in the first month of the twentieth century, Queen Victoria died; an era had finally ended.

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Adapted from The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature

The Darkling ThrushDecember 31, 1900

I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray,And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day.The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres,And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be The Century's corpse outleant,His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament.The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry,And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overheadIn a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited;An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume,Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic soundWas written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around,That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night airSome blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy

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LIFE

Wilde was an important and prolific letter writer, a poet of some talent, an essayist, a writer of children's fiction and fantasy, and a superlative playwright. He was also a public speaker who could capture the toughest audiences, even the rough-and-tumble crowds of the western United States; he was a charmer who commanded the attention of some of the most dazzlingly beautiful actresses of his day, including Sarah Bernhardt and Lily Langtry; he was a reformer who campaigned for women's rights and Irish respect; he was an art critic who consistently wrote insightful assessments of art; he was a conversationalist who spoke spontaneously in complete, perfect sentences as if he had meticulously written them out the night before; and he was a piercing wit who effortlessly cranked out epigrams that both amused and provoked his listeners.

Throughout his life he remained an individualist who spoke his mind, unafraid to risk speaking the unpleasant truth in a most pleasant manner. But it was a dangerous game that Wilde played, alternately entertaining and challenging society. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, powerful elements in society turned on him. He was a homosexual in an age where, in Wilde’s words one “dare not speak it’s name.”Readings on Oscar Wilde (Greenhaven Press)

When Wilde confronted society on this issue he became mired in scandal, and was subject to a public backlash and the wrath of the authorities who punished him with two years of hard labour – a sentence which effectively ended his career as a writer and destroyed the man.

In an assessment of his life he wrote, “I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.”

But in a later reflection he confessed, “ I let myself be lured into long periods of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion…I became the spendthrift of my own genius…I was no longer Captain of my soul, and did not know it…I ended in horrible disgrace.”

1853: Born into an affluent Irish family. His father was a famous doctor and surgeon, his mother an Irish nationalist who wrote political and revolutionary verse under the name Speranza. She was known for her exquisite taste, her perceptive conversation and for the social events which she hosted for politicians, poets and artists.

1863: Wilde sent to attend Portora Royal School, a school famous for its high academic standards, where his giftedness was quickly recognized.

1870: Won a scholarship to Trinity College Dublin, where he excelled in the classics.

1872: Won a scholarship to study classics at Oxford.

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While at Oxford he became under the influence of two extraordinary thinkers - John Ruskin and Walter Pater (see below) who taught Wilde the power of art and the necessity of beauty.

1876: Wilde begins writing poetry and wins the university poetry prize for “Ravenna” which becomes his first published work.

1876: Wide’s father dies and his mother and brother move to London. Wilde follows with the expressed intention to become famous, and, if not famous notorious. He achieved both.

While in London, Wilde promotes himself as a flamboyant young aesthete, mixing with influential London socialites, artists and writers.

1881: Wilde tours America as part of the promotion for “Patience” a comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan satirizing British tradition, customs and manners, and in particular the aesthetic movement. The tour is a huge success and Wilde famously tells a US customs officer that he has “nothing to declare but his genius.”

1881: Wilde self-publishes his first book of poetry and begins to write plays.

1883: After writing two unsuccessful plays, Wilde undertakes a lecture tour of England billed as “The Great Aesthete.” In this year he meets and befriends the great artist Whistler, a friendship which is to end in bitterness. Wilde becomes engaged to Constance Lloyd.

1884: Wilde marries Constance Lloyd.

1885-1887: Wilde establishes himself as a journalist and editor.

1888: Publishes “The Happy Prince.”

1889: First publication of “A Picture of Dorian Gray” which explores the relationship between art and morality. Wilde continues to promote his public persona as flamboyant aesthete, with extravagant tastes, long flowing hair and eccentric costumes. His reputation is enhanced when he is satirized in the influential magazine “Punch.”

1891: Wilde meets Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queensbury. Wilde pursues a homosexual affair with Douglass that will eventually lead to his downfall.

1892: “Lady Windermere’s Fan” opens successfully in London. “Salome” is refused a performance licence.

1893: Successful run of “A Woman of No Importance.”

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1895: Successful run of “An Ideal Husband.” Wilde subject of a scandal concerning a homosexual affair with the son of a well known London figure.

1895: February - “The Importance of Being Earnest” opens at the St James Theatre. Lord Queensbury tries to disrupt the opening night of the play but is prevented from entering the theatre. Wilde prosecutes Lord Queensbury for libel after Queensbury leaves a note at Wilde’s club accusing him of “posing as a sodomite”. Wilde loses his case.

1895: April – authorities arrest Wilde and he is put on trial for his illegal homosexual activities, and is sentenced to two year’s hard labour in Reading Gaol.

1897: Wilde writes a long letter to Douglas which is later published as “De Profundis.” He also writes his last serious work, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

1898: His estranged wife Constance dies.

1900: Wilde dies in Paris a destitute and broken spirited man.

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INFLUENCES

It was natural enough that sooner or later, the various influences which came to bear in the last two decades of the 19th century, which gave a new and puzzling import to beauty should find a propagandist. They were so strikingly summed up in Oscar O'Flahertie Wills Wilde that it has been carelessly assumed that he was the inventor of 'Aestheticism'. In fact he was merely its vehicle or advertisement. The striking assortment of his plumes, as a young man, was an interesting series of borrowings.

He had approached England, like George Moore before him, as a foreigner, that is to say, an Irishman, with the same open and receptive mind, though there the similarity between the two ends: for Wilde came not from the Homeric countryside but from the dingy magnificence of Merrion Square in Dublin. There lived his father, burly, amorous Sir William Wilde and Lady Wilde, the poetess Speranza, who maintained a genteel, nationalist salon. His education was more regular than Moore's and his talents earlier to show themselves. For though he was idle enough at Portora Royal School, he won an exhibition to Trinity College, Dublin, because of his interest in the classics, and this interest was strengthened at Trinity by the famous professor John Pentland Mahaffy with whom he visited Greece. Mahaffy was an enthusiast and the nature of his enthusiasm for the ancient world was typical of the Victorian age. Everywhere in the remnants of ancient Greece he saw the evidence of a perfect beauty.

Each age has its own picture of ancient times. To the product of the Elizabethan grammar school Greek culture was legendary and sylvan, a mythology of which the nymph and the satyr were the typical figures. To many an eighteenth-century grandee it represented the perfection of political oratory - conjured up a Demosthenes orating with scroll in hand just as a Pitt or a Burke might speak in the House of Commons. In our own time the effort has been made to stress the half-savage, half-oriental side of Greek art, to dismiss statues, previously accepted as perfect masterpieces, for debased Roman copies, this being in tune with a taste temporarily current for the primitive.

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But, to the Victorian idealist, the triumph of Greece was its creation or representation of a supreme form of human beauty. It was an idea which appealed particularly to schoolmasters because it was the aim of that essentially Victorian institution the public school, to create a human type - to turn a middle-class British youth into a strong and handsome aristocrat. Hence came an artificial emphasis on masculine perfection. His attention already directed to beauty in this definition, and Mahaffy having done his best to 'make an honest pagan out of him’,Wilde went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1874, and in Oxford he had something of that excitement of discovery that Moore had experienced in Paris. Here there were people of an eloquent power greater than Mahaffy's to whom beauty was all important.

The tall, floridly handsome young Irishman went to Ruskin's lectures and took part in the making of the Hinksey road. He haunted the rooms of Pater, met Simeon Solomon there, fell into the spirit of that mystical devotion to art for its own sake in which there was some exciting but unnamed undercurrent.

Pater influenced him more than Ruskin, though from the Professor he may have acquired some of that curious interest in gems and precious stones which later was to colour his writings. But as young Wilde knew nothing about art he was all the more prone to accept Pater's dictum that it was a mystery, and, as a mystery, the only interesting thing in modern life. He began therefore to be mysterious. He copied and unconsciously caricatured the languor, the devotional contemplation of the master. He burnt incense in his rooms, not from any personal interest in the High Church but because Pater loved the scented swelling fume in which the magic of dim past ritual seemed to coil. And he began to collect the 'blue' for which the vogue had been started by Rossetti and Whistler.

From his time at Oxford onward, Wilde was an unashamed self-publicist, who when moving to London, after Oxford, claimed to a friend that he expected to be famous and, if not famous, notorious.

Ruskin

Throughout the second half of the 19th Century the name of Ruskin was synonymous with refinement of thought and expression and

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Ruskin himself was admired by nearly all serious men of letters from Wordsworth to Proust. He also had a reputation as a great social reformer, a champion of the new social consciousness. Like Wilde Ruskin was gifted with powerful eloquence, verbal fluency and an exceptional command of the language.

Pater

As a schoolboy Walter Pater read John Ruskin's Modern Painters, which helped inspire his lifelong attraction to the study of art and gave him a taste for well-crafted prose. He gained a school exhibition, with which he proceeded in 1858 to Queen’s College, Oxford, and later was given a professorship at Brasenose College. He became acutely interested in art and literature, and started to write articles and criticism, and his sensitive study of Aesthetic Poetry, on William Morris and the literary Pre-Raphaelites, appeared in the Fortnightly Review, to be succeeded by essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola and Michelangelo. The last four, with other similar pieces, were collected in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), renamed The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry in the second and subsequent editions. The Leonardo essay contains his celebrated reverie on the Mona Lisa; the Botticelli essay helped revive interest in this great painter.

The brief “Conclusion” to The Renaissance was to be Pater's most influential publication. It contains the core of his aesthetic philosophy, advocating a cultivation of intense receptivity to beauty and to moments of sensation, in life, art, music and literature, but saying nothing in support of the Ruskinian emphasis on art as a source of moral or social edification.

At the centre of a small but gifted circle in Oxford (he tutored Gerard Manley Hopkins and Oscar Wilde), Pater was gaining respect in the London literary world and beyond, numbering some of the Pre-Raphaelites among his friends. Toward the end of his life Pater's writings were exercising a considerable influence. The principles of what would be known as the Aesthetic Movement were partly traceable to him, and his effect was particularly felt on one of the movement's leading proponents, Oscar Wilde.

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Whistler

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (July 11, 1834 – July 17, 1903) was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake".

A wit, dandy, and shameless self-promoter, Whistler influenced the art world and the broader culture of his time with his artistic theories and his friendships with leading artists and writers.

During his life, he had an impact upon two generations of artists, in Europe and in the United States. Whistler had significant contact and exchanged ideas and ideals with Realist, Impressionist, and Symbolist painters. Famous protégés for a time included Oscar Wilde and impressionist painter Walter Sickert.

William Morris

William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life.

The Pre-Raphaelites

The term Pre-Raphaelite, which refers to both art and literature, is confusing because there were essentially two different and almost opposed movements, the second of which grew out of the first.

The term itself originated in relation to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an influential group of mid-nineteenth-century avante garde painters associated with Ruskin who had great effect upon British, American, and European art. Those poets who had some connection with these artists and whose work

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presumably shares the characteristics of their art include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded in 1849 by William Holman Hunt, D.G. Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Thomas Woolner, and F. G. Stephens to revitalize the arts. (Even though William and Michael's sister, Christina, never was an official member of the Brotherhood, she was a crucial member of the inner circle.) Although the young would-be art revolutionaries never published a manifesto, their works and memoirs show that having read Ruskin's praise of the artist as prophet, they hoped to create an art suitable for the modern age.

The second form of Pre-Raphaelitism, which grows out of the first under the direction of D.G. Rossetti, is Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism, and it in turn produced the Arts and Crafts Movement, modern functional design, and the Aesthetes and Decadents. Rossetti and his follower Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) emphasized themes of eroticised medievalism (or medievalised eroticism) and pictorial techniques that produced moody atmosphere. This form of Pre-Raphaelitism has most relevance to poetry; for although the earlier combination of a realistic style with elaborate symbolism appears in a few poems, particularly those of the Rossettis, this second stage finally had the most influence upon literature. All the poets associated with Pre-Raphaelitism draw upon the poetic continuum that descends from Spenser through Keats and Tennyson — one that emphasizes lush vowel sounds, sensuous description, and subjective psychological states.

Pre-Raphaelitism in poetry had major influence upon the writers of the Decadence as well as upon Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.B. Yeats, both of whom were also influenced by Ruskin and visual Pre-Raphaelitism.

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The, Oxford University Museum of Natural History a building designed with Ruskin's collaboration as an experiment in modern Gothic.

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The Aestheticism

(by Richard Altick)  

 The Influence of D.G. Rossetti "The Aesthetic vogue of the later seventies and the eighties [in the 19th century] was an outgrowth of Pre-Raphaelitism, with a different cast of characters.  The connecting link was Rossetti, whose poetry and painting inspired the Aesthetes.  . . . Rightly or wrongly, . . . the Aesthetes interpreted his artistic aim as the pursuit of beauty, divorced from social meaning.  More justifiably, they recognized in him their own strong inclination to look into their soul's as they wrote or painted.  In Rossetti's poetry the Victorian bias in favor of objectivity was reversed, and the romantic mode of introspection and confession resumed.

Walter Pater Pater was the exponent of a carpe diem philosophy suited to an age when the old certainties were crumbling.  . . .Live "intensely"..., abandon your delicately responsive sensibility to the constant play of sensations and impressions--sight, sound, odor, touch, taste.     This is, intentionally, a gross over-simplification, though not necessarily a falsification, of Pater's "new Cyrenaicism," or hedonism.  It has the advantage of suggesting the way he was read and explaining the kind of influence he had.

[Pater's aesthetic philosophy] resulted in the apotheosis of beauty as the supreme experience of life, and of art as the superior reality, atoning for the deficiencies of nature and totally unlike any other kind of human activity . . . .  Aestheticism offered the mode of experience farthest removed from anything else available in an industrial world. . . .

 It followed that life itself was viewed as an art. The Aesthetes replaced the

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brassy hedonism of the pleasure-pain calculus with the ethereal hedonism of pure beauty, however captured and savored.

Oscar Wilde To Pater's disciples, the only reality worth seeking was not material goods but an intangible--the individual human experience.  . . . "Life," said Wilde in A Woman of No Importance, "is a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments."

And so Aestheticism involved a complete revulsion against received standards of values.   . . .

Nothing better symbolized this spirit of revolt against the contemporary bourgeois spirit than the flamboyant costumes of the publicity-conscious Wilde set adopted as an outward sign of their defiance.  It was most fitting that an age which had been ushered in by the Regency dandy should be ushered out by his grandchildren in velvet knee breeches.  Dandyism framed the Victorian period.   But these men and their willowy, Rossetti-inspired women postured, as their forebears decidedly had not done, in the cause of Beauty.  

The Decadent As a token of their contempt for respectability, the Decadents extended the Aesthetes' cultivation of the senses tothe realm of the abnormal and perverse (according to the prevailing moral standards): sexual aberration, drug-taking, absinthe-drinking--an array of viced sufficient to rend the whole massive monolith of Victorian morality.

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By Whistler: Symphonie in White Number One

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Nocturne in Blue and Green, Chelsea

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Rossetti:

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William Morris:

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Edward Burne Jones:

Andromeda

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Sir Galahad

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Burne-Jones stained glass window

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Millais: Ophelia

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Aubrey Beardsley:

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Morte d’Arthur

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Edgar Poe

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