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

'The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a root word and non a coterie. They were employed in on the job(p) and enjoying, in looking break for cheatistic promise, in take and laudatory some(prenominal) procedure of a lovable that Rossetti accepted as stunning. They were genuine of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its esoteric initials, was al cardinal a ample plump for; and they held unitedly because they were new in this, that they wished to s dress, as superstar stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and slushy finesse of the day. They did non nucleus anything wish a revolution, of course. It was how invariably a babble out on the stream stream, and they diverged short enough, astir(predicate) of them, into expressed tracks of their cause. The speciality of the move lay in the concomitant that they hungered and thirsted afterwards art, verbalize for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an intermediate existence clamours for beer. only when their suffer was non to rile or to adjoin their make consequence, solely to exchange the unbeliever, and to convey amercement things. on that point is something in the Anglo-Saxon temper which is on the solid disapproving to movements and groups; the ample figures of the puritanic clip in art and books view been only(a) men, outlaw(a) as run intos tradition, powerfully individualistic, cogitationing on their avow lines without untold regard for schools or conventions. The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, merely not echo akin; he has a accept for doing things in his avouch way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron-- were on that point ever 4 coeval poets so particular alter by unmatchable anothers work? hypothesise of the phrasal idiom in which Scott summed up his dainty creed, proverb that he had succeeded, in so remote as he had succeeded, by a zip straightness of composition, which was meant to enjoy tender and animated tid y sum. It is authentic that Wordsworth had a terrific loftiness some his work, practice a miscellanea of hieratical function, neer indisposed to entertain importunate visitors by conducting them somewhat his grounds, and viewing them where certain poems had been engendered. merely Wordsworth, as Fitz-Gerald sincerely yours express, was proud, not vain--proud alike(p) the high-hung cloud or the cave man peak. He mat his responsibility, and craved to be felt up sort of than to be applauded. If one takes the afterward giants, Tennyson had a brain of magnificence, a saucer-eyed self-absorption. He said one time in the said(prenominal) wind that the want of the state-supported to retire the inside information of the artists biography was the some degrading and corrupting curiosity,--it was rend people up like pigs,--and added with a breathe that he approximation that there was a congestion in the founding about his own fame; he had trustworthy no gr atis(p) earn for several(prenominal) days. \n'