A History of English Literature

Shaw, a founder of the Fabian Society. After hearing Shaw speak, Oscar Wilde wrote

The Soul of Man under Socialism, which is, however, a plea for artistic individualism.

Some were strongly patriotic: W. E. Henley, Rudyard Kipling and Sir Henry Newbolt

for England, others for a Celtic identity. As beliefs diverged, codes of behaviour

assumed greater importance.

Aestheticism

The period saw a cult of beauty or Aestheticism, brought to public attention by the

opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, launching Edward Burne-Jones, G. F. Watts

and the American painter Whistler among others. The Aesthetic phase gave way in the

1890s to a decade called Decadent by the poet Arthur Symons, a decade indelibly asso-

ciated with the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898), the literary journal ‘The

Yellow Book’, and with Oscar Wilde, imprisoned for homosexuality offences in 1895.

It was not only or even chiefly a literary movement. Its importance in this history lies

not in the lifestyle of the Decadents, nor in their own work, but in a new idea: that

literature was an art, and worth living for. This idea shaped the lives of Yeats, and of

Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and many others less gifted. Keats’s Grecian

Urn had said: ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’, but Keats had weighed Beauty against

ideas of the good life. Tennyson too adhered to the view that beauty served truth by

making wisdom or noble conduct attractive. But the Aesthetes separated art from

morality. They quoted from Walter Pater’s Conclusion to The Renaissance (1873) – ‘the

desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake’, a formula found in Théophile Gautier

(1811–1872), who had in 1835 denied that art could be useful.

Walter Pater

Ruskin’s lectures on beauty and the dignity of labour inspired the Irishman Oscar

Wilde to manual work on the roads. After Oxford, Wilde left work to William Morris

and pursued beauty, taking his cue from Walter Pater, another Oxford don, who had

turned Keats’s wish for a life of sensations rather than thoughts into a programme.

The Conclusion to Pater’s The Renaissance contains this passage:

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the

sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is

irresistibly real and attractive to us – for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience,

but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a

variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the

finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always

at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? ... To

burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Oxford’s young men had heard of ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’ at their

public schools. Their still largely clerical University wished to put ‘a Christian gentle-

man in every parish’. Ecstasy upon ecstasy was a new ideal. Which were ‘the finest

senses’? The Conclusion was dropped in a second edition, shutting the stable door

after the horse had gone, as ‘it might possibly mislead some of those young men into

whose hands it might fall’. Pater made his own idea clearer in Marius the Epicurean

(1885),a historical novel commending an austere epicureanism in ‘the only great

prose in modern English’ (W. B. Yeats). It is a novel which, for all its studied

cadences, is still a pleasure to read. Yet this austere critic’s discussion of Leonardo da

312 11 · LATE VICTORIAN LITERATURE: 1880–1900

Fabian Society Founded in
1884, the Fabian Society was
dedicated to the gradual
achievement of socialism. It
was called after Quintus
Fabius Maximus, the Roman
general who defeated
Hannibal by avoiding battle
until the favourable moment
(he was nicknamed Cunctator,
the Delayer). Among its
artistic members, in addition
to Shaw, were Edward
Carpenter (1844–1929),
sexologist, environmentalist,
vegetarian and author of the
poem Towards Democracy(4
vols, 1883–1902); and later
the poet Rupert Brooke
(1887–1915) and the
children’s writer, E. Nesbit
(1858–1924).