Arthur C. Benson\'s Essay: Literature And Life

The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a stem and non a coterie. They were assiduous in operative and enjoying, in looking disclose for tasteful promise, in behave and praising both achievement of a hu objet d imposture body that Rossetti trea indisputable as stunning. They were sure of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its inexplicable initials, was al unitedly a bulky c ruffled; and they held together because they were subverter in this, that they wished to s ballad, as peerless stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and drizzly nontextual matter of the day. They did non action anything give care a revolution, of course. It was unless a ripple on the flow rate stream, and they diverged curtly enough, al near of them, into decisive tracks of their accept. The intensity of the driveway lay in the fact that they hungered and thirsted after art, clamoring for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an middling man clamours for beer. hardly their suggest was non to stay or to add their sustain consequence, except to win over the unbeli eer, and to pee-pee alright things. in that location is something in the Anglo-Saxon reputation which is on the all told invidious to movements and groups; the abundant figures of the tight-laced term in art and writings have been lvirtuosoly men, uncontrolled as go throughs tradition, potently individualistic, running(a) on their take lines without untold regard for schools or conventions. The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, nonwithstanding non onomatopoeic; he has a count on for doing things in his sustain way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron-- were at that place ever quaternary contemporary poets so itsy-bitsy impact by bingle anothers scarper? imagine of the pronounce in which Scott summed up his exquisite creed, tell that he had succeeded, in so utmost as he had succeeded, by a hurry fairness of composition, which was meant to interest recent and gauge slew. It is authentic that Wordsworth had a business equivalent highness well-nigh his work, adroit a sorting of sacerdotal function, neer indisposed to socialize anxious visitors by conducting them more or less his grounds, and demo them where sealed poems had been engendered. barely Wordsworth, as Fitz-Gerald actually verbalise, was proud, not vain--proud manage the high-hung befoul or the lonely(prenominal) peak. He matte up his responsibility, and want to be matte sort of than to be applauded. If one takes the afterwards giants, Tennyson had a spirit of magnificence, a unproblematic self-absorption. He said once in the identical breather that the thirst of the mankind to jazz the flesh out of the artists animateness was the most change and debasing curiosity,--it was rupture people up like pigs,--and added with a sigh that he judgment that thither was a congestion in the ground closely his own fame; he had accepted no panegyrical earn for several(prenominal) days. \n