AESTHETICISM

 The Aesthetic Movement was a European phenomenon which developed during the latter part of the nineteenth century. It started in France. The movement was a reaction to the insistence of society that art must inculcate social and moral values.

French aestheticism was a self-conscious movement. It began with Theophile Gautier, who in defense of his art remarked that art had lacked all utility. The French writers Baudelaire, Flaubert, Mallarme, and many others began to produce literature which was written for its own sake and not for communicating social or moral values. these writers gained the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’.

The Aesthetic Movement developed into a movement called Decadence. This movement carried the ideology of art for art’s sake to the extreme. According to this movement, art was not handmaid to life, but life was handmaid to art. These writers therefore cultivated artifice and preferred elaborate dress to beautify the human body and cosmetics to increase physical charm by artificial means.

They violated natural standard norms of morality and sexual behavior. They become hedonists.

The doctrine of French Aestheticism was introduced into England by the painter, Whistler, in 1880’s. in the 1890’s Walter Pater expounded Aestheticism which was turned into Decadence Movement by writers like Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Ernest Dawson.

Aestheticism was a reaction to the Victorian attitude towards art and literature. The aesthetes opposed Ruskin and Arnold in their views about art. Ruskin who was a great critic of Industrialism had maintained that art through the evocation of beauty, must bring about cheer in the lives of man and art had to be didactic (when it teaches or preaches moral lessons). Arnold on the other hand upheld the view that poetry must be a criticism of life and must deal with the economic and moral problems of life.

Besides, the advocates of this movement were dissatisfied with the utilitarian and materialist creed, skepticism and pessimism generated by the development in physical and natural sciences. They therefore revolted against the standard function of art accepted by the Victorian writers. They maintained that all art should be beautiful. They maintained that all art must be creative and must be judged in relation to cannons of beauty rather than utility or propaganda. What the aesthetes emphasized was the experience itself and not the fruit of the experience. They also encouraged voluptuousness i.e., the love of the sensual and physical pleasures of life. The sounds of words which express the different aspects of experience became the resources of this technique.

Walter Pater is the master of the Aesthetic movement. He taught the precepts of the ideology of ‘art for art’s sake’ with an intellectual and detached zeal. He maintained that the love of art for art’s sake is the highest form of wisdom. He advocated that art must discover and analyze each particular manifestation of beauty. For Pater, the perfection of life lay in seeking experience in the spirit of the artist and in mysterious receptiveness to beauty.

Walter Pater’s aestheticism is an intellectual hedonism. He upheld the view that for the true artist, all social and moral considerations disappear, his chief and only end is a refined intellectual pleasure.

Pater advocated a consciously artistic prose where words were to be chosen with a loving care so as to express clearly and precisely the underlying thought. The entire emphasis of the artist is on the careful selection of words, on the architectural unity and completeness of design, as if the style were everything and the content were of indifferent value.

(In literature, two things are important in analyzing a work – form and content. Form deals with structure and the literary devices a writer might use. So, a poem may be classified as a sonnet, an ode, a ballad, a lyric, etc. Content is the subject matter, so it is important not just what is said but how it is said).

While Pater represented the aesthetic movement in its most earnest phase, Oscar Wilde belonged to fin de siècle (end of the century) period of the aesthetic movement. As the disciple of Walter Pater, he pushed Pater’s Aesthetic creed to the extreme.

He showed his enthusiasm for the movement by going about in flamboyant costumes and sporting the lily and sunflower in his buttonhole. The most notable effect of the aesthetic cult on him was his disregard for conventional morality. His gifts of satirical wit lent his talent superficial character.

Art said Wilde was a necessity of civilized life, but it had nothing to do with morals of art. Art was neither moral nor immoral. It should not imitate life, but life imitate life. For Wilde, therefore, the artist was not merely a man with certain faculties highly developed, but the artist was a being apart from common humanity, different in kind. The artist wrote only to please himself. The artist was a law unto himself.

In poetry, prose and drama, Wilde embodies the spirit of decadence. His writings are far removed from the realities of life and lack emotional depth but are ornately artistic in style. His plays, stores and novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’, are typical of the decadent aestheticism – ingenious, witty, polished and ornamental in style but lacking in human warmth.