Aestheticism was an artistic movement that was not limited to England nor to English Literature, but had developed in Europe: in France with Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle De Maupin and with the novel A Rebours (1884) by Huysmans and in Italy with D’Annunzio’s “Il Piacere”.
These texts are now considered to be Decadent rather than Aesthetic expressions of art, and certainly in England there was a difference between the Aestheticism of Walter Pater and early W.B.Yeats, which was a direct development of Keatsian Romantic Aesthetic and Pre-Raphaelite poetic traditions, and European Decadent-Aestheticism.

European Aestheticisrn had three principles:
1) That “art never expresses anything but itself’.
2) That “all bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals”.
3) That “life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”.

Art for art’s sake was Gautier’s concept adopted by the new Aesthetic Movement. Following these concepts, not only for art but also for life, artists became extravagant and unconventional, living only to experience sensations that might inspire them towards new creative ideas and modes.
Artists avoided the common everyday life to look for an escape into an idealized beauty that existed principally in the imagination. By the end of the century, Aestheticism developed into Decadent art, which presented the fin de siecle malaise that haunted European intellectuals.

THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST

The role of the Artist changed too. The Decadent Artist was the anti-Priest or Devil of art, upturning moral values and refusing a social role in society.
Wilde was one of the principle exponents of the ‘new aesthetic’ in England, following the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, mainly Rossetti and Swinburne, but going further into the realms of aestheticism by adding Pater and the French Symbolism and Decadent traditions. According to this theory, the artist was free and superior to other men.

Wilde’s contact with important French writers of the time and his knowledge of avant-garde European developments, separated him from most English artists works The Sphinx, Salome’ and The Picture of Dorian Gray were European in style and sensibility, ultimately remaining foreign and unacceptable to English tastes. Critics have likened Wilde to Byron in an attempt to see a developing tradition in English literature: both thought that life itself was a work of art, both had a heightened sense of the Artist as a superior man, and both hated and feared mediocrity and risked scandal and public censure rather than live ‘normal’ lives.