Decline

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
--Walter Pater

The somewhat naive optimism and complacency that many of the Victorians enjoyed at the height of the period could not last. If the middle years of Victoria's reign saw the middle class enjoying an extension of the power once held almost exclusively by the landed aristocracy, what followed was the working class's attempt to follow suit. As Richard D. Altick notes,

The high Victorian era closed some time toward the end of the sixties, certainly no later than the middle seventies. If a single year may be taken to mark off the late Victorian period from the halcyon middle one, it would undoubtedly be 1867, when the Second Reform Bill doubled the electorate by enfranchising town workers. The Victorians were thereby brought face to face with an issue which had been slowly taking shape over several decades but which they had chosen not to think too much about: how to accommodate the nation's political structure and, even more importantly, its culture, to the power now within the grasp of the common man. The preceding decades had seen the middle class achieve its place in English society; now it was the manual workers' turn. Bitterly though many might deplore the advent of democracy, somehow it had to be accepted as an accomplished fact.

The national outlook was further clouded by the agricultural depression which began in 1873 and lasted, though relieved by intermittent spells of comparative prosperity, to the end of the century. A series of crop failures, the influx of cheap machine-harvested grain from the American prairies, and the introduction of refrigerator ships which brought meat from Australia and New Zealand reduced farming to a marginal place in an economy which until the last half-century had been squarely based on the land, and destroyed the balance between agriculture and industry which had made possible the prosperity of the middle years. One momentous result was that the large landowners finally had to surrender most of the political power to which they had clung despite the inroads of industrialism.

The shift in political balance caused by the decline of agriculture and the ascendancy of the workingmen's vote was but one of the many tendencies which complicated and in many ways darkened the later Victorian decades. The economic decline revived labor unrest. Trade unions, strengthened by legislation passed in the seventies, promoted strikes in many industries, and the socialist movement was re-invigorated. . . . (Victorian People and Ideas, New York: Norton, 1973, 14-15, emphasis mine)

With regard to the literature that we will study, a similar change is evident. Despite Alfred, Lord Tennyson's religious questionings, we find in the close of "Ulysses" what might be seen as the credo of High Victorian optimism: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." And in Robert Browning, we find the spiritual consolation of Andrea del Sarto's hopeful: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?" However, there are signs of a shift when we come to Matthew Arnold's social commentary in "The Scholar Gipsy," as he speaks of

. . . this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts,

That shift is further evident when we come to the "Transitional Poets," Hardy, Housman, and Hopkins. Hopkins is an anomaly, as we shall see, but with Hardy and Housman there is a definite pessimism which is in stark contrast to what we find earlier.

A later development is Aestheticism, or the Art for Art's Sake movement, which developed first with Walter Pater, whose ideas serve as an epigraph to this section, and later with the Decadents who took Pater's ideas further than he intended. Pater suggested in Appreciations that

the end of life was not action, however motivated, . . . but simply contemplation, "being as distinct from doing--a certain disposition of the mind." The artist . . . was "not to teach lessons, or enforce rules, or even stimulate us to noble ends; but to withdraw the thoughts for a little while from the mere machinery of life, to fix them, with appropriate emotions . . . 'on the great and universal passions of men.'"
(Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870, New Haven: Yale UP, 1978, 281)

The literature of the 1890's reflects a sense of decay (hence the term Decadence), of a falling away from the earnestness of the preceding generation. The works of Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson reveal that shift in attitude. [Select each author's name for an example.]