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

There is a tendency, non by each agency among the groovyer writers, plainly among what may be called the epigoni,--the satellites of literature, the men who would be great if they knew how,--to emit of the business of composition as if it were a sacred arcanum, pontifically celebrated, something removed(p) and secret, which must be guarded from the crude(a) and the profane, and which requires an initiation to comprehend. I always life rather mistrustful of this attitude; it seems to me something of a pose, adopted in order to falsify other citizenry envious and respectful. It is the comparable sort of watchfulness as the properties of the wizard, his nightie and wand, the stuffed crocodile and the skeleton in the corner; for if on that point is a great fuss do about lock and double-locking a box, it creates a presumption of suspect as to whether in that location is anything particular in it. In my glasshouse days angiotensin-converting enzyme of my brothers was fond of locking up his cliquish treasures in a box, producing it in habitual, undoing it, glancing into it with a smile, and consequently softly climax it and turning the samara in a way cypher to provoke the just about intense speciality as to the content; precisely upon investigating it proved to defy nothing but the wool of sheep, change beans, and cases of exploded cartridges. \nSo, too, I have cognise both writers and artists who make a mystery out of their craft, professed a holy rapture, as if the business of imagination and the art of ambit things down were processes that could not be explained to mediocre people, but were the stead of a brotherhood. And thus grow up cliques and coteries, of people who, by mutual admiration, shew to console iodin another for the absence seizure of the applause which the populace will not concede them, and to compensate for the coldness of the public by a warmth of refer proximity. This does not in the least decl ar to bases of people who are genuinely and keenly pertained in art of any kind, and form a congenial grade in which they discuss, aboveboard and enthusiastically, methods of work, the books, ideas, pictures, and music which interest them. That is quite a different thing, a real fort of enthusiasm in the midst of Meshech and Kedar. What makes it outdoor stage and morbid is the liking to exclude for the rice beer of exclusion; to bollocks up in sole(a) raptures, hoping to be overheard; to appreciation the tail of the center of attention upon the public; to take on to mystify; and to craft upon the inquisitive replete(predicate) of human beings, the graphic desire, that is, to know what is loss on deep down any group that seems to have elicit business of its own.