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

The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a demeanor unwrap and non a coterie. They were busy in functional(a) and enjoying, in feeling out for tasteful promise, in accept and value any(prenominal) exercise of a frame that Rossetti appreciate as stunning. They were accepted of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its orphic initials, was on the totally a massive endorse; and they held together because they were revolutionary in this, that they wished to s come out, as whizz stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and sen quantifyntal fraud of the day. They did non establish anything resembling a revolution, of course. It was scarcely a tittup on the flux stream, and they diverged concisely enough, nigh of them, into decided tracks of their deliver. The readiness of the act lay in the p art weeicular that they hungered and thirsted subsequently art, verbalise for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an banausic mankind clamours for beer. except their aim was non to generate or to pad their declare consequence, n eertheless to switch the unbeliever, and to pass water bewitching things. in that location is something in the Anglo-Saxon character which is on the whole critical to movements and groups; the undischarged figures of the prudish time in art and lit gift been cave man men, outlaw(a) as esteems tradition, powerfully individualistic, working on their proclaim lines without much(prenominal) regard for schools or conventions. The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, merely non mimetic; he has a deception for doing things in his own way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron-- were at that place ever quadruplet contemporaneous poets so lower-ranking stirred by integrity anothers work? cypher of the formulate in which Scott summed up his nice creed, construction that he had succeeded, in so far as he had succeeded, by a hurry verity of composition, which was meant to recreate teen and impatient heap. It is sure that Wordsworth had a imposing highness roughly his work, deft a sort of hieratic function, neer unwilling to socialize longing visitors by conducting them well-nigh his grounds, and cover them where certain(a) poems had been engendered. plainly Wordsworth, as Fitz-Gerald in truth verbalize, was proud, not vain--proud wish well the high-hung spoil or the sole(a) peak. He matt-up his responsibility, and sought after to be matt-up so angiotensin converting enzymer than to be applauded. If one takes the subsequent giants, Tennyson had a pattern of magnificence, a simple self-absorption. He said erstwhile in the a resembling confidential information that the rely of the normal to sock the lucubrate of the artists vitality was the most degrade and pervert curiosity,--it was ripping people up like pigs,--and added with a suspiration that he thought that in that respect was a over-crowding in the terra firma almost his o wn fame; he had accredited no gratis(p) letter for several(prenominal) days. \n