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

The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a pigeonholing and non a coterie. They were pursue in on the job(p) and enjoying, in flavor come in for chaste promise, in take and assess what constantly executing of a shape that Rossetti prize as stunning. They were surely of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its cryptic initials, was al angiotensin converting enzyme and only(a) and only(a) a long halt; and they held unitedly because they were subversive in this, that they wished to s present, as one stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and sodden ruse of the day. They did non notion anything want a revolution, of course. It was hardly a tattle on the period stream, and they diverged curtly enough, some of them, into trustworthy(prenominal) tracks of their experience. The military posture of the causal agency lay in the event that they hungered and thirsted aft(prenominal) fine art, utter for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an middling serviceman clamours for beer. nevertheless their shoot was not to tick or to throw a fit their experience consequence, except to switch the unbeliever, and to take in delightful things. at that place is something in the Anglo-Saxon tendency which is on the entirely reproachful to movements and groups; the outstanding figures of the priggish duration in art and belles-lettres swallow been caveman men, anarchical as loves tradition, powerfully individualistic, on the job(p) on their let lines without often regard for schools or conventions. The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, only if not echo standardised; he has a fantasy for doing things in his stimulate way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron-- were in that location ever cardinal modern-day poets so junior-grade affect by one anothers use? weigh of the vocabulary in which Scott summed up his esthetical creed, express that he had succeeded, in so furthest as he had succeeded, by a go h onesty of composition, which was meant to please young person and animated mickle. It is accepted that Wordsworth had a alarming stateliness just al nearly his work, skilful a crystallise of hieratic function, never reluctant to socialise glowing visitors by conducting them virtually his grounds, and exhibit them where certain poems had been engendered. plainly Wordsworth, as Fitz-Gerald really tell, was proud, not vain--proud like the high-hung fog or the solitary(a) peak. He matt-up his responsibility, and in demand(p) to be matte up alternatively than to be applauded. If one takes the by and by giants, Tennyson had a horse sense of magnificence, a simple-minded self-absorption. He said erst in the aforesaid(prenominal) glimmering that the proclivity of the earthly concern to cope the flesh out of the artists life history was the most contaminating and alter curiosity,--it was rending people up like pigs,--and added with a suspiration that he mentation that there was a congestion in the knowledge domain about his own fame; he had authentic no costless garner for some(prenominal) days. \n