ABSTRACT

The impact of 'English' art nouveau in fin-de-siècle Austria and Germany was such as to make it predictable that Keats, Pater, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne and Wilde would enjoy a comparable success there. In Germany it was not until the fin-de-siècle that poets were ready to consider the implications of Keats's work, and when they did, he seemed to them a part of the 'aesthetic' movement, a kind of elder brother to Rossetti and Wilde. The peculiarly verbal literary art of the 1890s is, typically, void of all morality save that which is, to the poet-aesthete, the most important of all—the morality of form. The idea that characterizes the end of the nineteenth century more than any other is the idea that truth is what Wilde calls it, a matter of style. German influence, in mid-century Oxford, was particularly strong in the humanities, but also in sciences such as chemistry and geology.