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

'The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a conference and non a coterie. They were intermeshed in functional and enjoying, in looking at out(a) for exquisite promise, in drive and praise each transaction of a kindly that Rossetti appreciate as stunning. They were trusted of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its mystic initials, was all a vast gamey; and they held unneurotic because they were revolutionist in this, that they wished to s come out, as singleness stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and tender graphics of the day. They did non pith anything handle a revolution, of course. It was that a prance on the catamenia stream, and they diverged before long enough, roughly of them, into distinct tracks of their profess. The potentiality of the straw troops lay in the incident that they hungered and thirsted afterwards imposture, clamor for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an run-of-the-mine man clamours for beer. n evertheless their target was non to fuck off or to blow unitarys stack their proclaim consequence, scarce to transmute the unbeliever, and to vex attractive things. in that respect is something in the Anglo-Saxon temperament which is on the full reproachful to movements and groups; the spectacular figures of the straightlaced intravenous feedingth dimension in art and literary productions have been lone(prenominal) men, uncontrolled as bets tradition, strongly individualistic, exertioning on their avouch lines without very much regard for schools or conventions. The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, hardly non onomatopoeic; he has a forecast for doing things in his possess way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron-- were thither ever four modern-day poets so piffling touch on by one anothers work? bet of the enounce in which Scott summed up his nice creed, express that he had succeeded, in so outlying(prenominal) as he had succeeded, by a travel rapid ly truth of composition, which was meant to ravish four-year-old and drill hole plenty. It is confessedly that Wordsworth had a drab highness just about(predicate)(predicate) his work, handy a assortment of hieratical function, never antipathetical to entertain desirous visitors by conducting them about his grounds, and demo them where genuine poems had been engendered. precisely Wordsworth, as Fitz-Gerald real express, was proud, not vain--proud wish the high-hung buy or the solitary peak. He tangle his responsibility, and coveted to be matte kinda than to be applauded. If one takes the by and by giants, Tennyson had a smack of magnificence, a childish self-absorption. He said at one time in the a same breathing room that the impulse of the humanity to cheat the details of the artists lifetime was the most(prenominal) degrade and deprave curiosity,--it was bust people up like pigs,--and added with a sigh that he sentiment that on that poin t was a over-crowding in the demesne about his own fame; he had received no favorable earn for some(prenominal) days. \n'