The age commonly called Victorian came to an end about 1885. It was an
age distinguished by many true idealists and many false ideals. It
was, in spite of its notable artists, on an entirely different level
from the epoch which had preceded it. Its poetry was, in the main, not
universal but parochial; its romanticism was gilt and tinsel; its
realism was as cheap as its showy glass pendants, red plush, parlor
chromos and antimacassars. The period was full of a pessimistic
resignation (the note popularized by Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam) and a
kind of cowardice or at least a negation which, refusing to see any
glamour in the actual world, turned to the Middle Ages, King Arthur,
the legend of Troy--to the suave surroundings of a dream-world instead
of the hard contours of actual experience.
At its worst, it was a period of smugness, of placid and pious
sentimentality--epitomized by the rhymed sermons of Martin Farquhar
Tupper, whose _Proverbial Philosophy_ was devoured with all its
cloying and indigestible sweetmeats by thousands. The same tendency is
apparent, though far less objectionably, in the moralizing lays of
Lord Thomas Macaulay, in the theatrically emotionalized verses of
Robert Buchanan, Edwin Arnold and Sir Lewis Morris--even in the lesser
later work of Alfred Tennyson.
And, without Tupper's emptiness or absurdities, the outworn platitudes
again find their constant lover in Alfred Austin, Tennyson's successor
as poet laureate. Austin brought the laureateship, which had been held
by poets like Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey and Wordsworth, to an
incredibly low level; he took the thinning stream of garrulous poetic
conventionality, reduced it to the merest trickle--and diluted it.
The poets of a generation before this time were fired with such ideas
as freedom, a deep and burning awe of nature, an insatiable hunger for
truth in all its forms and manifestations. The characteristic poets of
the Victorian Era, says Max Plowman, "wrote under the dominance of
churchliness, of 'sweetness and light,' and a thousand lesser theories
that have not truth but comfort for their end."
The revolt against this and the tawdriness of the period had already
begun; the best of Victorianism can be found not in men who were
typically Victorian, but in pioneers like Browning and writers like
Swinburne, Rossetti, William Morris, who were completely out of
sympathy with their time.
But it was Oscar Wilde who led the men of the now famous 'nineties
toward an aesthetic freedom, to champion a beauty whose existence was
its "own excuse for being." Wilde's was, in the most outspoken manner,
the first use of aestheticism as a slogan; the battle-cry of the group
was actually the now outworn but then revolutionary "Art for Art's
sake"! And, so sick were people of the shoddy ornaments and drab
ugliness of the immediate past, that the slogan won. At least,
temporarily.