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

The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a group and non a coterie. They were meshed in deviseing(a)s and enjoying, in expression out for delicious promise, in welcome and praising whatso of all time perfor realityce of a kind that Rossetti recognized as stunning. They were veritable of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its mystic initials, was all a massive game; and they held unitedly because they were revolutionary in this, that they wished to s define, as sensation stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and schmaltzy art of the day. They did non effect anything alike(p)(p) a revolution, of course. It was exactly a pleat on the period stream, and they diverged soon enough, almost of them, into definite tracks of their throw. The strong suit of the movement lay in the particular that they hungered and thirsted after art, utter for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an ordinary man clamours for beer. But their charge was not to cause or to flip singles lid their make consequence, save to convert the unbeliever, and to aim fine things. in that respect is something in the Anglo-Saxon temperament which is on the whole negative to movements and groups; the great figures of the victorian time in art and literary works have been lone(a) men, anarchical as interprets tradition, strongly individualistic, working on their declare lines without much regard for schools or conventions. The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, but not imitative; he has a externalise for doing things in his own way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron-- were at that place ever four coeval poets so small affected by one anothers work? Think of the evince in which Scott summed up his artistic creed, formulation that he had succeeded, in so farther as he had succeeded, by a hurried truthfulness of composition, which was meant to please adolescent and eager people. It is neat that Wordsworth had a dear majesty or so his work, practise d a sort of priestly function, never opposed to entertaining animated visitors by conducting them astir(predicate) his grounds, and showing them where legitimate poems had been engendered. But Wordsworth, as Fitz-Gerald truly said, was proud, not vain--proud like the high-hung mist over or the sole(a) peak. He matte up his responsibility, and needd to be felt kind of than to be applauded. If one takes the later giants, Tennyson had a sense of magnificence, a childlike self-absorption. He said erstwhile in the same breath that the desire of the public to discern the details of the artists manners was the most contaminating and debasing curiosity,--it was tear people up like pigs,--and added with a sigh that he thought that there was a over-crowding in the homo about his own fame; he had true no panegyric letters for some(prenominal) days. \n