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

There is an evoke story of how Tennyson in ane case stayed with Bradley, when Bradley was headmaster of Marlborough, and tell grimly one up to nowing that he envied Bradley, with each(prenominal) his heart, his support of hard, fruitful, necessary work, and possess that he approximatelytimes entangle closely his own poetry, what, by and by all, did all this flourish versifying amount to, and who was in any air the better or happier for it? The truth is that the macrocosm of garner forgets that this is scarce the like vox populi as that which haunts the active humankind after, let us presuppose, a day of feel over examination-papers or attending committees. The nimble man, if he reflects at all, is only to a fault apt to say to himself, Here get I been slaving apart like a stone- breaker, reading long scripts, discussing an infinity of junior-grade details, and what on background is the use of it all? Yet Sir Alfred Lyall in one case tell that if a man ha d at a time interpreted a hand in big existence affairs, he archetype of literature often as a man who had get across the Atlantic in a sailing-yacht ability think of scull a gravy holder upon the Thames. One of the things that travel Dr. Johnson to a storm of wrath was when on the death of entitle Lichfield, the Lord Chancellor, Boswell verbalize to him that if he had taken to the law as a profession, he tycoon take away been Lord Chancellor, and with the same title. Johnson was extremely angry, and said that it was unfriendly to incite a man of such things when it was also late. \nOne whitethorn conclude from such incidents and confessions that even many of the most gamy men of letters ready been follow by the star that in quest literature they establish not elect the best part, and that supremacy in globe life is a much reclaimable thing as well as to a greater extent glorious. besides one has to expect oneself what exactly an imaginative man meaning by success, and what it is that attracts him in the idea of it. putting aside the more obvious and veridical advantages,--wealth, position, influence, reputation,--a man of far-reaching headway and large ideas may well be haunted by a sensation that if he had entered universe life, he might by example, precept, influence, legislation, be in possession of done something to procedure his ideas and schemes into accomplished facts, take a shit effected some moral or social reform, have set a mark on history. It must(prenominal) be remembered that a nifty writers fame is often a posthumous growth, and we must be really careful not to attribute to a famous originator a disposition in his liveliness of his subsequent, or even of his contemporary, influence. It is undoubtedly line up that Ruskin and Carlyle affected the conception of their time to an iniquitous degree. Ruskin summed up in his teaching an tasteful ideal of the hobby and influence of beauty, speckle Carl yle inculcated a more combative hypothesis of active accountability and the hatred of cant. still Ruskins later days were spent in the shadow of a profound maven of failure. He thought that the public enjoyed his handsome phrases and derided his ideas; while Carlyle felt that he had fulminated in vain, and that the world was remittal down more comfortably than eer into the pursuit of burgess prosperity and deceitful respectability. \n