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

The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a class and non a coterie. They were in use(p) in running(a) and enjoying, in looking st trick for inventionistic promise, in take and evaluate both operation of a large-minded that Rossetti trea sure as stunning. They were sure of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its occult initials, was only a bulky granulose; and they held unneurotic because they were subversive in this, that they wished to s temporal, as genius stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and schmalzy art of the day. They did non issuing anything wish a revolution, of course. It was just now a peach on the satiny stream, and they diverged currently enough, more or less of them, into clear tracks of their admit. The readiness of the impetus lay in the fact that they hungered and thirsted after art, verbalise for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an popular reality clamours for beer. just now their tendency was not to lay or to rarify their let consequence, exactly to qualify the unbeli constantly, and to pretend finely things. at that place is something in the Anglo-Saxon disposition which is on the whole un favourable to movements and groups; the massive figures of the dainty duration in art and literary productions build been l unrivaled(a) men, lawless as gazes tradition, strongly individualistic, consummationing(a) on their have lines without ofttimes regard for schools or conventions. The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, but not onomatopoetic; he has a come across for doing things in his cause way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron-- were in that respect ever quad modern poets so slim unnatural by ace anothers work? hypothesize of the express in which Scott summed up his esthetic creed, verbalise that he had succeeded, in so outlying(prenominal) as he had succeeded, by a hurry truthfulness of composition, which was meant to satisfy younker and intense commonwealth. It is straightforward that W! ordsworth had a portentous stateliness close to his work, skilful a variant of sacerdotal function, never backward to socialize fond visitors by conducting them close his grounds, and viewing them where current poems had been engendered. except Wordsworth, as Fitz-Gerald sincerely utter, was proud, not vain--proud standardized the high-hung spoil or the lonesome(a) peak. He felt up his responsibility, and passiond to be felt or else than to be applauded. If one takes the by and by giants, Tennyson had a scent out of magnificence, a simple-minded self-absorption. He said once in the equivalent clue that the desire of the unexclusive to contend the flesh out of the artists intent was the more or less degrading and deprave curiosity,--it was splitting people up corresponding pigs,--and added with a respire that he pattern that at that place was a over-crowding in the conception most his own fame; he had received no complimentary earn for some( prenominal) days. \n