d, 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.

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE AESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY

_The Yellow Book_, the organ of a group of young writers and artists,
appeared (1894-97), representing a reasoned and intellectual reaction,
mainly suggested and influenced by the French. The group of
contributors was a peculiarly mixed one with only one thing in common.
And that was a conscious effort to repudiate the sugary airs and prim
romantics of the Victorian Era.

Almost the first act of the "new" men was to rouse and outrage their
immediate predecessors. This end-of-the-century desire to shock,
which was so strong and natural an impulse, still has a place of its
own--especially as an antidote, a harsh corrective. Mid-Victorian
propriety and self-satisfaction crumbled under the swift and energetic
audacities of the sensational younger authors and artists; the old
walls fell; the public, once