strength of the movement lay in the fact that they hungered and
thirsted after art, clamouring for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says,
as an ordinary man clamours for beer. But their aim was not to
mystify or to enlarge their own consequence, but to convert the
unbeliever, and to produce fine things.

There is something in the Anglo-Saxon temperament which is on the
whole unfavourable to movements and groups; the great figures of
the Victorian time in art and literature have been solitary men,
anarchical as regards tradition, strongly individualistic, working
on their own lines without much regard for schools or conventions.
The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, but not imitative; he has a fancy
for doing things in his own way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron--
were there ever four contemporary poets so little affected by one
another's work? Think of the phrase in which Scott summed up his
artistic creed, saying that he had succeeded, in so far as he had
succeeded, by a "hurried frankness of composition," which was meant
to please young and eager people. It is true that Wordsworth had a
solemn majesty about his work, practised a sort of priestly
function, never averse to entertaining ardent visitors by
conducting them about his grounds, and showing them where certain
poems had been engendered. But Wordsworth, as Fitz-Gerald truly
said, was proud, not vain--proud like the high-hung cloud or the
solitary peak. He felt his responsibility, and desired to be felt
rather than to be applauded.

If one takes the later giants, Tennyson had a sense of magnificence,
a childlike self-absorption. He said once in the same breath that
the desire of the public to know the details of the artist's life
was the most degrading and debasing curiosity,--it was ripping