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308 The nineteenth century
Renaissance painting (notably Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci); Marius
the Epicurean (1885) used the form of fictional biography to explore
his concerns with Christianity, paganism and the classical world;
Appreciations: with an Essay on Style (1889) confirmed his status both
as a writer and an ‘aesthete’. It was Pater who introduced the phrase
‘the desire for beauty, the love of art for art’s sake’ into English, deriving
it from Theophile Gautier (1811–72) who had used the phrase l’art
pour l’art as early as 1835.
In the 1880s and 1890s, the Aesthetic movement became associated
with the kind of pale young man parodied in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
operetta Patience (1881) as:
A pallid and thin young man
A haggard and lank young man
who would
walk down Piccadilly
With a poppy or a lily
In his mediaeval hand.
The image of Pre-Raphaelite mediaevalism and delicate sensibility,
combined with affectation and sentimentalism, did little to attract public
sympathy.
Many tendencies in late Victorian writing come together in the works
of Oscar Wilde. His image as a dandy made his name known long
before his professional career as a journalist did, and the contrast
between image and reality can be seen to run through all his later
creative writing.
Wilde is remembered best as the author of theatrical comedies, and
for the humiliating end to his career when he was sentenced to two
years’ hard labour for homosexual offences (made illegal in 1885).
The dichotomy between the elegant social witticisms and the seeming
frivolity of the comic plots, and the shame and scandal of Wilde’s
private life, are almost emblematic of the whole crisis of Victorian
morals. Wilde’s ‘transgressive ethic’ was a fully conscious playing with