Aestheticism 0. Wilde and his program. Neoromanticism and its representatives. R. Kipling.

LITERATURE OF THE LAST DECADES OF THE 19™ CENTURY

A new stage of social development began during the last two decades of the 19' century. Great Britain had become a highly developed capitalist country and a great colonial power. The merging of individual firms into monopolies began. With it Britain passed to a higher form of capitalism, known as imperialism. A violent economic crisis that occurred in the early 80s deepened the social contradictions in the country. On the one hand, the workers' movement became stronger. Socialist ideas began to influence it and many important strikes took place. On the other hand, reaction intensified. The bourgeoisie looked for ways of imperialist expansion in search of new markets. The monopolies demanded still larger profits and plundered colonial peoples robbing them of raw material. In 1899 Great Britain unleashed the shameful colonial Boer War in the Transvaal, a province in South Africa inhabited by the Boers (the Dutch settlers) who fought for their independence. Puritanical hypocrisy became the accepted form of benaviour in society. It was accompanied by a degradation of moral and cultural values. New literary trends — Decadence, neoromanticism and socialist literature — were a reaction to the atmosphere in Britain.

                                           DECADENCE

The general crisis of bourgeois ideology and culture was reflected in literature and fine arts by the trend that was given the name of Decadence. This French word means "decline" (of art or of literature). Decadence manifested itself in various trends that came into being at the end of the 19th century: symbolism, impressionism, imagism, neoromanticism, futurism and others. The most widely known manifestation of Decadence in the social life of bourgeois England was Aestheticism (a movement search of beauty). The roots of Aestheticism can be traced back to the beginning of the19th century, to some of the romanticists. It was governed by the principle of "Art for Art's Sake", that is to say "of pure art”. Like the neoromanticists, the aestheticists protested against the severe and vulgar reality, against bourgeois pragmatism. However, while the neoromanticists chose the world of adventure and the cult of the strong man, opposing these to the routine of life, the aestheticists concentrated their art on pure form.

    The aestheticists rejected both the social and the moral function of the art. One of the leaders of the aesthetic movement expressed its main idea in the phrase: "Art is indifferent to what is moral and what is immoral". The aestheticists tried to lead the readers away from the problems of the day into the world of dreams and beauty.

OSCAR WILDE (1854—1900)

  Oscar Wilde was the most outstanding representative of Decadence. He was the son of a well-known Irish physician. In his youth he was very much influenced by his mother, who was a highly educated woman. She wrote poetry and was an ardent Irish patriot. Her scornful attitude towards the hypocrisy of British bourgeois morals was probably responsible for the disrespect that characterized Wilde's approach toward; bourgeois customs and habits. Wilde's youth was a time of increasing crisis in bourgeois culture and the heyday of Aestheticism. The vulgarity ofbourgeois life in general, the money-making fever of the bourgeoisie, its hypocritical approach to moral standards, all this made the young man turn to the movement of the day — aestheticism. Attracted by its search for beauty and its motto "Art for Art's Sake", Wilde became an avowed aesthete and was very soon considered the leading figure of the movement. He studied at Oxford. After the publication of his first volume of poetry in 1881 he went on a lecture tour to America. Between the years 1881 and 1895 he wrote two volumes of fairy tales — The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and several plays. Oscar Wilde's work, like his outlook on life, is ven contradictory. His tales, probably his most popular works, were undoubtedly, much deeper in their approach to the problem of Good and Evil than most of the decadent literature.

    The writer laid great stress on the good qualities of the poor, and the vices of those who had power and money. Thus, in the tale The Devoted Friend, for example, Wilde produced a very bitter satirical portrait of a money-grabbing and hypocritical man of property. The Miller was Hans' "devoted friend" in summer, when he took flowers and fruit from him. Little Hans was always happy to give them to his "devoted friend". But when winter came the Miller would not give little Hans any flour to help him during the hungry months. Wilde achieved artistic heights of symbolic generalization in the story of little Hans, robbed in summer and sent to his death in winter by the rich Miller who called himself his "devoted friend". The tales do not, perhaps, have great depth of critical judgment on all aspects of the society of Wilde's time. However, his paradoxical form of expression is at times bitterly satirical as in The Devoted Friend. It is his originality in this genre, and it brings out the hypocrisy in human relations that so disgusted him. The endings in his tales are usually tragic — Good cannot triumph in a world of Evil. It is in these tales and in his comedies that the traditions of critical realism may be best seen. When Oscar Wilde turned to writing plays, he took up a new theme. He criticized the upper classes and gave satirical pictures of their members who were ruled by the love of power and money.

The most outstanding of those plays is An Ideal Husband (1895), in which the author discloses the sordid intrigues in the business and political circles of England. The figure of Sir Robert Chiltem is very convincing. He is an outstanding statesman, who enjoys the love of his wife and everybody's respect, because he is good, honest, and correct in his political activities. However, it turns out that this impeccable statesman began his career of a politician and started to make his fortune by selling a state secret. Wilde brands the corruption that exists in the world of business. However, his criticism is mild, everything is settled in favour of the main character.

                                     NEOROMANTICISM

Together with the Decadents another group of writers took up the protest against bourgeois rule. They also searched for an escape from a life without either beauty or interest. One of those writers was Robert Louis Stevenson (1850—1894). He was the son of a Scotch engineer. His great love for the English language made him turn to writing, but he refused to follow the realistic method of reflecting life. The life that surrounded people, according to Stevenson, could give no pleasure to anyone; he believed that the writer should create beautiful or extraordinary pictures for the benefit of the reader, for the reader's pleasure. He expressed his belief in the following way: "Art in contemporary society is only necessary for entertainment". Stevenson became a recognized story-teller. His first novel, Treasure Island, was a great success. The story of the search for the treasure is well told and has its dramatic moments. His characters — strong, brave men — go through great difficulties to achieve their aim. However, Stevenson pays more attention to the story than to his characters. His other novels. Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, Catriona and The Master of Ballantrae were written along the same-lines: they had a historical setting and were full of adventure and mystery. The Master of Ballantrae, with a historical setting too, came last. Its main theme is the struggle of two brothers for an inheritance. Stevenson's outstanding prose work is his short novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which has at times been compared with the darkest fantasies of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Stevenson raises the age-old problem of the struggle between Good and Evil that exists in every man.

Dr. Jekyll, who is aware that he has in him both Good and Evil, experiences a terrible urge to create his own double that would possess the darker side of his nature. He is able to make a medicine,which transforms him into another person, whom he calls Mr. Hyde. Hyde possesses all of Jekyll's hidden, evil traits. While Dr. Jekyll appears to people in the daytime as a good and highly respected man, loved by all his acquaintances, Hyde appears in the dark of night and carries out all kind of evil deeds. He is frightfully ugly, bearing on his face and body the mark of sin and evil.

However, this experiment leads to a terrible misfortune: the mixture created by Jekyll begins to lose its strength and while he become Hyde easily every time he drinks it,. It is more and more difficult for him to turn back into Jekyll, to his normal self. When about to be captured for a murder committed by Hyde, Dr. Jekyll commits suicide.

A parallel may be drawn between this novel and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray written in 1890, two years after Stevenson's novel. The difference, however, lies in Wilde's purely aesthetical approach to the problem, while Stevenson's is an ethical one.

      Stevenson's hero is strong-willed and the author tries to show in him the better qualities of man: his energy, his thirst for knowledge. Stevenson stresses these qualities in order to keep them alive in the world, from which they are in danger of disappearing. The fantastic and the extraordinary that he opposes to everyday life make his romanticism somewhat more objective than the approach of the romanticists of the early 19th century.

Stevenson's love of beauty, his outstanding mastery of the language, made him a very good poet; among his best poetical works there is a book of poems for little children, published under the collective title of A Child's Garden of Verse, as well as one of the loveliest poems of the period, the ballad Heather Ale.

     Stevenson's romantic return to childhood in A Child's Garden of Verse as well as the return to the historical past of Scotland in Heather Ale, are ways of looking for beauty outside the terrible monotony of the money-grabbing world, which the author conquers through his creative art.

    Joseph Conrad (1857—1924). The son of a Polish rebel, whose real name was Juseph Teodor Konrad Korzieniewski, made his mark in English letters as a master of the sea-novel. Just as Stevenson did, Conrad rebelled against the dull, selfish existence that the bourgeoisie led. A man of the sea, who rose from sailor

To captain in the British merchant navy, Conrad found what he looked for in the vivid life of adventure, in the romance of  the sea and distant voyages.

  The characteristics of his hero are those of a strong, energetic man, who opposes bourgeois society and looks for a happiness elsewhere. Conrad was much influenced by Russian literature which he knew well, especially by Dostoyevski and this influence can be well seen in the psychological analysis of his characters, which went much deeper than Stevenson's. Among his many works Lord Jim is considered outstanding It is the story of a young officer who is guilty of leaving his ship danger, with passengers on board. He spends his life trying to pay for this crime, far away from his country. The romance of strong, energetic characters, either dedicated to science or to adventure, that we find in the works of the neoromanticists of the period had a strongly defined humanist approach.

        However, there were other writers of the period, whose praise of individual strength became a direct form of imperialist propaganda. Such was Rudyard Kipling (1865—1936). Kipling was the son of well-to-do parents, bom and brought up in India; his first impressions were those of India's countryside and people.

     He introduced a new theme into English literature — that of the life of British people in the colonies. Kipling asserted white man's, the Englishman's, right to rule over the native population, calling it "a white man's burden". In his books, however, the idea of colonial expansion concealed by descriptions of beautiful exotic things. Admiration for strength and activity sounded as a call to submit the weaker peoples: it was heard in the songs of the British soldiers, who were sent by their government to conquer India. At the very beginning of his work as a writer Kipling created his famous poems dedicated to the soldier of the British empire. His best ones, from the point of view of their poetical value, were the Barrack Room Ballads, addressed to Tommy Atkins. (Tommy Atkins generalized name for the British soldier.) These poems were written in the form of songs that could be sung to popular music: they have catchy, rhythmical refrains and their form is the traditional one of English folklore songs. But the content is entirely new; it is clearly military and racial, which is quite alien to English folklore.

Among Kipling's best works are the Jungle Book, a collection of stories of the jungle, in most of which Mowgli, a child brought up by a pack of wolves, plays the major role. By means of a logical system of images, in very simple but carefully selected words, he constructs his stories of man's mastery over the alien forces of nature. He gives the jungle beasts Indian names that make the stories sound mysterious and exotic (Sheer Khan, Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa). Kipling was the first writer to get the Nobel prize for short stories.