Aestheticism

The French 19th-c literary doctrine of beauty as an end in itself, with no moral or political purpose. It was elaborated by Théophile Gautier in 1835 under the slogan ‘l'art pour l'art’ from Horace's ‘ars gratia artis’. The doctrine was adopted by Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert.

The Aesthetic movement is a loosely defined movement in art and literature in later nineteenth-century Britain. Generally speaking, it represents the same tendencies that Symbolism or Decadence stood for in France, and may be considered the English branch of the same movement.

The English decadent writers were deeply influenced by the homoerotic Oxford don Walter Pater and his essays published in 1867–68, in which he stated that life had to be lived intensely, following an ideal of beauty. Decadent writers used the slogan "Art for Art's Sake" (L'art pour l'art), coined by the philosopher Victor Cousin and promoted by Théophile Gautier in France, and asserted that there was no connection between art and morality.

The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. As a consequence, they did not accept John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold's utilitarian conception of art as something moral or useful. Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; The Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor in art. Life should copy Art, they asserted.

Aestheticism had its forerunners in John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and among the Pre-Raphaelites. Artists associated with the Aesthetic movement include James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Compton Mackenzie's novel Sinister Street makes use of the type as a phase through which the protagonist passes under the influence of older, decadent individuals. The novels of Evelyn Waugh, who was a young participant in aesthete society at Oxford, portray the aesthete mostly from a satirical point of view, but also from that of an insider.