19th Century Literature

Aestheticism is the late-nineteenth-century claim that art exists for beauty, not for a moral lesson, a sermon, or a social use. Abrams: art is an autonomous end; the artist’s job is to make a beautiful object, not to improve the reader. The French tag is l’art pour l’art — art for art’s sake. Walter Pater’s gem-like flame (intensity of sensation) is the English critical voice; Oscar Wilde is the set name on this paper. The opposite climate is mid-Victorian earnestness in Houghton: duty, work, the useful book. Aestheticism is a revolt inside the same century, not a different country.

The set book is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91). The Preface states the doctrine in exam-ready sentences: there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, only well written or badly written; all art is quite useless. Dorian treats a face, a portrait and a life as things to be made exquisite. Lord Henry talks as if beauty were the only law. The plot then tests the doctrine: the portrait carries the moral stain the beautiful face refuses. Unit 4 will walk chapters. Unit 1 only needs the genre-claim: this novel is the paper’s exhibit of aestheticism, and also of its cost.

Keep three neighbours apart. Pre-Raphaelitism (later in this unit) still wants truth to nature and often a medieval moral subject; aestheticism drops the sermon and keeps the cult of beauty. Utilitarianism judges an act by use and happiness; aestheticism refuses use as a test of art. Hopkins’s inscape is exact looking, but it is sacramental — the pattern is God’s, not “art for art.” Do not call In Memoriam aesthetic: Tennyson is arguing faith, grief and good, not the uselessness of art. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is visionary terror, not a beauty-cult. If a question says aestheticism, start with Wilde’s Preface and the portrait, not with Tennyson’s island.