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| 資源型式：
自行填入
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| 提供者：Kate Liu / 劉紀雯; Raphael Schulte / 蕭迪雷
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The Aestheticism
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(by Richard
Altick)
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The Influence of
D.G. Rossetti |
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"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. |
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Walter
Pater |
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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 brassy hedonism of the
pleasure-pain calculus with the ethereal hedonism of pure beauty, however
captured and savored. |
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Oscar Wilde |
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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. . .
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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. |
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The Decadent |
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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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Richard Altick.
Victorian People and Ideas. NY: Norton, 1977: 291-97.
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