THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT AND OSCAR WILDE 4 страница

Jude the Oscure (1895) is Hardy’s only novel with a contemporary setting. Jude Fawley, a self-educated stonemason is anxious to better himself and his decidedly “modern” cousin, Sue Bridehead. Jude is a working-class intellectual whose ambition is to study at Oxford. Disappointment is inevitable. His attempts to escape from obscurity brought the gods down upon Jude’s head. Sue’s “advanced” opinions about the needlessness of a formal marriage brought the critics down on Hardy’s head. Hardy’s last novels – Tess and Jude - were given a hostile reception by the public. It discouraged the author to such an extent that he ceased writing prose altogether. By that time he had written 14 novels.

In the late 90s, almost at the age of 60, he turned entirely to poetry. He achieved great masterly in the field of philosophical lyrics. In his philosophical lyrics Hardy treated mainly the same problems as those of his prosaic works. Wessex poems (1898) and Winter Words (1928) are written in the rhythm of old ballads and folk songs. Hardy presents the memories and reflections of a past long gone. The Dynasts (1904, 1906, 1908) is an epic drama of Napoleonic wars, the logical extreme of Hardy’s philosophy. The events are related to longer-term history, so what seems to be major happenings and great men are reduced in size and importance: men are no bigger than ants and all their work is the building of little hills.

In the last years of his life Hardy was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He is buried in Westminster Abbey and remains one of the best-loved English writers.

ALFRED TENNYSON (1809 – 1892)

Tennyson was the most famous poet of the Victorian age. He was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, fourth of twelve children in the family. The poet’s grandfather had violated tradition by making his younger son, Charles, his heir, and arranging for the poet’s father to enter the ministry. The contrast of his own family’s relatively straitened circumstances to the great wealth of his aunt and uncle (who lived in castles) made Tennyson feel particularly impoverished and led him to worry about money all his life. He also had a lifelong fear of mental illness, for several men in his family had a mild form of epilepsy. In the late 20s his father became paranoid, abusing, and violent. His brother Edward was confined in a mental institution after 1833, and he himself spent ten weeks under doctor’s care in 1843.

In 1827 Tennyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge, following his two elder brothers. The same year with his brother he published Poems by Two Brothers. In 1829 he joined The Apostles, an undergraduate club which met to discuss philosophical and literary issues. All the members of the club – Arthur Henry Hallam, James Spedding, Edward Lushington – eventually became famous. Hallam was going to marry Emily Tennyson, but died at the age of 22. The death shocked Tennyson and caused periodical depressions throughout his lifetime.

In 1832 he published a collection of Poems.The mixed reception of critics hurt the poet deeply. The success of the Poems of 1842 made him a popular poet. In 1845 he received a Civil List (government) pension. The appointment in 1850 as Poet Laureate finally established him as the most popular poet of the Victorian era.

In 1853 as the Tennysons were moving into their new house on the Isle of Wight, Prince Albert dropped in unannounced. Tennyson returned the favour by dedicating The Idylls of the King to his memory. Queen Victoria later summoned him to court several times, and at her insistence he accepted the title of the lord, which he had declined when it was offered to him by Disraeli and Gladstone, English prime-ministers.

Tennyson suffered from extreme short-sightedness – without a monocle he could not even see to eat. This disability in part accounts for his manner of creating poetry. He composed much of his poetry in his head, occasionally working on individual poems for many years. At Cambridge he often did not bother to write down his compositions, later he worked on his poems many times to achieve perfection. Revising his works he diminished merely descriptive passages and substituted one or two significant details for a fully drawn picture. His style is mannered and decorative. English poetry had produced nothing since Milton that is so obviously the result of strenuous pursuit of perfection of form. His topics were the common topics of his Romantic predecessors: nature, English pastorals ballad themes, medieval romance, classical legend, love and death. He was not as much a poet of passion as of moods, in which it is sometimes difficult to separate waking from dreaming. Like Coleridge, Tennyson from the start was a metrist, bold in experiment and happy in achievement. The metre of each poem was designed to convey a single, definite mood. Among the most famous poems are The Lady of Shallot, The Palace of Art, The Lotus-Eaters, Morte d’Arthur, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, In Memoriam.

Towards the end of his life the tide of criticism began to turn against Tennyson, who was accused of being superficial and conformist. In the twentieth century his reputation was re-established by T.S. Eliot, who wrote that Tennyson had “the finest ear of any English poet since Milton”.

ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)

During the years of his marriage Robert Browning was sometimes referred to as "Mrs. Browning's husband." Elizabeth Barrett, who was regarded later as a lesser figure, was at that time a famous poet while her husband was a relatively unknown experimenter whose poems were met with misunderstanding or indifference. Not until the 1860s did he at last gain a public and become recognized as the rival or equal of Tennyson.

In the 20th century his poetry was admired by two groups of readers widely different in tastes. To one group, his work is a moral tonic. Such readers appreciate him as a man who lived bravely and as a writer showed life to be a joyful battle. Typical of this group are the Browning societies in England and America. Members of these societies usually regard their poet as a wise philosopher and religious teacher. A second group of readers enjoy Browning more for his attempt to solve the problems of how poetry should be written. Such poets as Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell have valued him as a major artist; they have recognized that more than any other 19th-century poet, Browning energetically hacked through a trail that subsequently become the main road of 20th century poetry. In Poetry and the Age (1953) Randall Jarrell remarked how “the dramatic monologue, which once had depended for its effect upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form or another the norm”. Another critic ranks Browning as "the most effective creator of character in English, after Dickens and Shakespeare.”

The dramatic monologue, as Browning uses it, separates the speaker from the poet in such a way that the reader must work through the words of the speaker to discover the meaning of the poet. In the well-known early monologue My Last Duchess, we listen to the duke as he speaks of his dead wife as if we were overhearing a man talking into the telephone in a booth adjacent to ours. From his one-sided conversation we piece together the situation, both past and present, and we infer what sort of woman the duchess really was and what sort of man the duke is. Ultimately, we may also infer what the poet himself thinks of the speaker he has created.

In addition to his experiments with the dramatic monologue, Browning also experimented with language and syntax. The grotesque rhymes and jaw-breaking diction that he often employs have been repugnant to some critics. But to those who appreciate Browning, the incongruities of language are functional, a humorous and appropriate counterpart to an imperfect world. Ezra Pound's who called him “Old Hippety-Hop o' the accents,” addresses Browning, affectionately:

“Heart that was big as the bowels of Vesuvius/ Words that were winged as her sparks in eruption, / Eagled and thundered as Jupiter Pluvius / Sound in your wind past all signs o' corruption”.

The personal life of Robert Browning falls into three phases: his years as a child and young bachelor, as a husband, and as a widower. Each of these phases is considered in relation to his development as a poet.

He was born in Camberwell, a London suburb. His father, a bank clerk, was a learned man with an extensive library. His mother was a kindly, religious-minded woman, interested in music. Until the time of his marriage, at the age of 34, Browning was rarely absent from his parents' home. He attended a boarding school near Camberwell, travelled a little (to Russia and Italy), and was a student at the University of London for a short period, but he preferred to pursue his education at home, where he was tutored in foreign languages, music, boxing, and horsemanship and where he read omnivorously. From this unusual education he acquired a store of knowledge on which to draw for the background of his poems. The "obscurity" of which his contemporaries complained in his earlier poetry is partly due to his overreliance on the erudition of his readers. Besides he avoided exposing himself too explicitly before his readers.

One way of reducing the personal element in his poetry was to write plays instead of soul-searching narratives or lyrics. His first play, Strafford,was a historical tragedy that lasted only four nights when it was produced in London in 1837. For ten years, the young writer struggled to produce other plays that would better hold the attention of an audience, but as stage productions they all remained failures. However, writing dialogue for actors led him to explore another form more congenial to his genius, the dramatic monologue. His first collection of such monologues, Dramatic Lyrics, appeared in 1842 butwas as poorly received by reviewers and public as his plays had been.

Browning's love affair with Elizabeth Barrett has been retold by novelists, dramatists, and movie producers. She was six years older than he was, a semi-invalid, jealously guarded by her possessively tyrannical father. But love swept aside all obstacles. After their elopement to Italy, the former semi-invalid was soon enjoying good health and a full life. The husband likewise seemed to thrive during the years of this remarkable marriage as his memorable volume of poems, Men and Women reflects.

The happy fifteen-year sojourn in Italy ended in 1861 with Elizabeth's death. The widower returned to London with his son. During the twenty-eight years remaining to him, the quantity of verse he produced did not diminish. Dramatis Personae(1864) is a volume containing some of his finest monologues, such as Caliban upon Setebos. In 1868 he published his greatest single poem, The Ring and the Book, which was inspired by his discovery of an old book of legal records concerning a murder trial in 17th century Rome. His poem tells the story of a brutally sadistic husband, Count Guido Franceschini. The middle-aged Guido grows dissatisfied with his young wife, Pompilia, and accuses her of having adulterous relations with a handsome priest who had tried to rescue her from the dragon’s den in which her husband confined her. Eventually Guido stabs his wife to death and is himself executed. In a series of twelve books, Browning retells this tale of violence, presenting it from the contrasting points of view of participants and spectators. Because of its vast scale, The Ring and the Book is like a Victorian novel, but in its experiments with multiple points of view it anticipates later novels such as Conrad's Lord Jim.

During his London years, Browning became abundantly fond of social life. He dined at the homes of friends and at clubs. He would talk about many topics – except his own poetry, about which he was usually reticent. Browning's character is thus not so clearly known as that of other poets of the time.

When he died, in 1889, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. On the occasion of his burial his friend and writer Henry James reflected that many oddities and many great writers have been buried there, “but none of the odd ones has been so great and none of the great ones has been so odd.”

Just as Browning’s character is harder to identify than that of Tennyson, so also are his poems more difficult to relate to the age in which they were written. Bishops and painters of the Renaissance, physicians of the Roman empire, musicians of eighteenth-century Germany seem to be in a world remote from the world of steam engines and disputes about human beings' descent from the ape. Yet many of these portraits explore problems that confronted Browning's contemporaries, especially problems of faith and doubt, good and evil, and problems of the function of the artist in modern life. Browning is considered to be an optimist but few writers, have been more aware of the existence of evil. His gallery of villains – murderers, sadistic husbands, mean and petty manipulators – is an extraordinary one.

What mostly separates Browning's poetry it from the Victorian age is its style. Victorian poets wrote in the manner of Keats, Milton, Spenser, and of classical poets such as Virgil. This is the central stylistic tradition in English poetry, one that favours smoothly polished texture, elevated diction and subjects, and pleasing liquidity of sound. Browning draws from a different tradition, more colloquial and discordant, a tradition that includes the poetry of John Donne, the soliloquies of Shakespeare, the comic verse of the early 19th century poet Thomas Hood, and certain features of the narrative style of Chaucer. If Browning seems out of step with other Victorian poets, he is by no means out of step with his contemporaries in prose. The grotesque, which plays such a prominent role in the style and subject matter of Dickens is equally prominent in Browning's verse: “Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!/ Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week./ Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough, / Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff”.

The link between Browning and the Victorian prose writers is not limited to style. With the later generation of Victorian novelists, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James, Browning shares a central preoccupation. Like Eliot in particular, he was interested in exposing the complexity of our motives. “My stress lay on incidents in the development of a human soul,” he wrote; “little else is worth study”. His psychological insights can be illustrated by such poems as The Bishop Orders His Tombor Dîs Miter Visum. In spite of Browning's role as a forerunner of 20th century literature he is essentially a Victorian. Energy is the most characteristic aspect of his writing and of the man (Turgenev compared Browning’s handshake to an electric shock). And energy is perhaps the most characteristic aspect of Victorian literature in general.

LEWIS CARROL (1832-1898)

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known to the world by his pen-name Lewis Carroll, was born on 12 January 1832 in Daresbury in northwest England. He was the first of eleven children. As a child Charles would entertain his brothers and sisters with invented games and puzzles, put on marionette shows and stories. He was to continue to be an entertainer of children for the rest of his life. Still, the influence of his father, a rector in the Anglican Church, who loved classics and mathematics, was strong too, and Charles followed in his father's footsteps in all ways except that of becoming an active churchman. Instead, after being educated in public schools, where he always won numerous prizes and awards, he went on to Christ Church College of Oxford University in 1850, where he would remain for the rest of his life. There he lived the exemplary life of an Oxford don, teaching and writing books on mathematics and carrying out his duties with the utmost precision and care. He was, by all accounts, a most fastidious and conservative man. Rules and propriety were everything to him. His students would never have described their teacher as humorous or personable. But this exemplary life was only part of the picture. He had another side to him: his great love of children and childhood. He saw his childhood as the happiest time of his life. As an adult, he truly enjoyed the company of small children. What is more, his friendship with them hardly ever lasted past puberty, because 'the child-friends, once so affectionate, became uninteresting acquaintances, whom I have no wish to see again.'

There was one child in particular whom he loved above all - Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of the dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell. In April 1856 Dodgson was invited to the Deanery gardens to photograph the three Liddell sisters, including the three-year-old Alice. This photography session was not a success - the three little girls would not sit still - but Charles and the Liddell girls became friends. As always, Dodgson took on the role of children's entertainer with his stories, games and puzzles. He also took the children on many outings. One outing, on 4 July 1862, has become legendary. Dodgson himself wrote of that summer day: “I made an expedition up the river with the three Liddells, we had tea on the bank there, and did not reach Christ Church till half-past eight.... on which occasion I told them the fairy tale of Alice's Adventures Underground, which I undertook; to write out for Alice.” This was the afternoon which saw the beginnings of what was to become Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865, and together with its companion volume(1871) destined to become one of the best-loved books in English literature and an odd masterpiece of Victorian writing. Besides all the millions of children who have loved these books, they have inspired many of the best modem writers, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, the French Surrealists and Vladimir Nabokov. The poet W.H. Auden explained how a children's book could be so appealing to adults by saying that “there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children. After all, every adult has been a child. “

In the Alice books Lewis Carrollmanages to see the upper-class Victorian world of severe rules and order through the child’s eyes. In both of these books, Alice is constantly meeting rather bossy adults who tell her to repeat her lessons, recite poems (one of the standard activities of Victorian schoolchildren) and respond to difficult, often absurd, questions. But for all this harassment and bossing around, Alice stands her ground. She may be confused by the absurdities of the adult world and she may even cry, but she is never stupid or helpless or sweetly innocent, and in the end she becomes Queen Alice. Besides these absurd adults, who appear in the form of chess pieces, mythological beasts, fairy-tale characters and so on, Alice must face terrible changes. She herself grows in bizarre ways after drinking from bottles labelled 'drink me' or after eating pieces of a magic mushroom; and death and the threat of being eaten are constants in these books which at times take on the semblance of nightmares. Lewis Carroll's acute representation of childhood without a trace of the moralism so characteristic of much of Victorian writing for both children and adults, revolutionized the writing of children's books. The various song scattered through the stories are sometimes parodies, as, for example, The White Knight’s Song, but more often they are classic examples of nonsense verse. Poems such as Jabberwocky exhibit a mathematician’s fondness for puzzles combined with a literary person’s fondness for word games.

Even though the great success of the Alice books brought Lewis Carroll fame and financial rewards, his life changed little, except for the fact that he now had the chance to frequent and photograph the famous artists and writers of his day, such as Ruskin, Tennyson and the Rossettis. As always, he continued to prefer the company of little girls and to carry out as punctiliously and properly as ever his duties at Christ Church College. He died of influenza in 1898.

THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT AND OSCAR WILDE

The aesthetic movement began as a reaction to the prevailing utilitarian social philosophies and to what was perceived as the ugliness and philistinism of the industrial age. Its philosophical foundations were laid in the 18^th century by Immanuel Kant, who postulated the autonomy of aesthetic standards from morality, utility, or pleasure. In England the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood since 1848 had sown the seeds of aestheticism and the work of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Swinburne exemplified it in expressing a yearning for ideal beauty through conscious medievalism. The attitudes of the movement were later represented by the writings of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde and the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley in the periodical The Yellow Book

Walter Pater (1839-1894) is a key figure in the transition from mid-Victorianism to the “decadence of the 1890s”. Although he was a mild-mannered Oxford don, he had almost a subversive effect on the circle of young poets and artista he drew around him. Studies in the History of Renaissance, a collection of essays published in 1873, was the first of the several volumes that established Walter Pater as the most important critical writer of the last Victorian period. At Oxford, he had heard the lectures of Matthew Arnold, who was then professor of poetry. After graduating, Pater remained at Oxford as a tutor of classics; the experience was described in his autobiographical sketch, The Child in the House.In view of his retiring disposition Pater was surprised by the impact made by his books on young readers of the 1870s and 1880s. To Pater’s disciples, his work seemed strikingly different. Instead of recommending a continuation of a quest for Truth, Pater assured his readers that the quest was pointless. Truth, he said, is relative. Instead of echoing Carlyle’s call to duty and social responsibilities, Pater reminded his readers that life passed quickly and that our only responsibility is to relish sensations, and especially the sensations provoked by works of art.

Pater is the author of impressionistic criticism as well as fiction. In his essays he tried to communicate what he called the “special unique impression of pleasure” made on him by the works of some artist or writer. His range of subjects included the dialogues of Plato, the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, the plays of Shakespeare. Of particular value are his studies of the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb in his volume of Appreciations(1889), and the poetry of William Morris in his essay Aesthetic Poetry (1868). These and other essays were praised by Oscar Wilde, who implemented Pater’s ideas in his work and his life.

Oscar Wilde(1854 – 1900) interpreted Pater’s ideas as the search for sensual as well as artistic pleasure. Wilde was born in Dublin to the family of distinguished surgeon, Sir William. His mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, was a poet and journalist. After majoring in classical studies at Trinity College, Dublin, he won a scholarship to Oxford and there established a brilliant academic record. At Oxford he came under the influence of the aesthetic theories of John Ruskin and Walter Pater.

After graduating in 1878, Wilde settled in London and quickly established himself as a spokesman for the school of “art for art’s sake”. In 1882 he visited America for a lengthy (and successful) lecture tour where he startled audiences by airing gospel of the aesthetic movement. He was a dazzling conversationalist. Yeats said: “I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences as if he had written them all overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous”. Wilde also delighted his listeners by uttering opinions that were both outrageous and incongruous, as for example his affirmation that Queen Victoria was one of the women he most admired and whom he would have married “with pleasure” (the other two were the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt and a mistress of Victoria’s son Edward, Lily Langtry).

In addition, Wilde had the gifts of an actor, who delights in gaining attentions. Like the dandies of the earlier decades of the 19th century he favoured colourful costumes in marked contrast to the sober black suits of the late-Victorian middle class. A green carnation in his buttonhole and velvet knee breeches became for him badges of his youthful iconoclasm. In a letter written when he was forty-two years old, he remarked: “The opinions of the old on the matters of Art are, of course, of no value whatever”.

His first published work was the book of children’s stories, The Happy Prince, a masterpiece enjoyed both by adults and children. In his writings, he excelled in a variety of genres: as a critic of literature and of society (The Decay of Lying, 1889, and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891) and also as a poet, novelist, and dramatist. Much of his prose develops Pater’s aestheticism, particularly its sense of superiority of art to life and its lack of obligation to any standards of mimesis. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray created a sensation when it was published in 1891. In the Preface to the novel Wilde states: “The artist is a creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. Vice and Virtue are to an artist materials for art. It is a spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. All art is quite useless”.

Although the preface to the novel emphasizes the ideas of aesthetic movement, in the novel itself the author seems to the expounding a moral lesson on the evils of selfish hedonism. The novel is a story of a handsome young man and his selfish pursuit of sensual pleasures.

Wilde’s most outstanding success was as a writer of comedies of manner which were staged in London and New York from 1892 through 1895, including Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of no Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. In these plays he revived the comedy of manners.