ABSTRACT
Aestheticism is often associated chiefly with the nineties, the period of Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book. The tendency of aestheticism in the nineties was increasingly histrionic – towards a cult of dandyism, of deliberate mannerism in life and art. Practical aestheticism flourished in much of the verse of the time – in which Pater noted, 'ainid an admirable achievement of poetic form, a certain lack of poetic matter'. The development of 'aesthetic' ideas in England had not, however, simply come to a dead end. An outlook akin to that of nineteenth-century aestheticism persisted in the Bloomsbury circle in the early twentieth century; and one of its leading spirits, Roger Fry was already active in the nineties. The artist might if he chose take a mystical attitude, and declare that the fulness and completeness of the imaginative life he leads may correspond to an existence more real and more important than any that we know of in mortal life.
