Compare and contrast iwandered lovely as a cloud by william wordsworth and she walks in beauty by george gardon,lord byron
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please mark me as brainliest
says :
I wish to explain to you a scheme which has been suggested
to me by a distinguished American painter (Mr. Eichards) of the Munich school, well-known in Europe, and also in the United States. He thinks that the Essays in this book upon the principles of art are original, sensible, and convincing enough to deserve separate publication with illustrations.
1 What I have attempted to demonstrate in these Essays [is that the personality of the artist inevitably makes itself I felt in any attempt to imitate nature, and that this fact 'renders a thorough realism in art impossible, while it forces idealism of one sort or another on the artist's work.
' Now, to prove this, we propose to offer a prize for the best studies from the same nude figure to be competed for in the famous Ecole Julien, at Paris. When the best studies have been selected by impartial judges, we propose to photograph the model in the several attitudes copied by the students, and then to reproduce both the photograph of the model and the studies of the successful draughtsmen by a mechanical process of first-rate excellence invented by Herr Obernetter, of Munich. 1 The scheme, however, was never carried through.
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When the reviews began to appear they were not favour- able, and the reception accorded to the book hurt Symonds more than he was ever hurt before or after. Writing on September 1, he says : ' The review of my Essays in the Athenaum (last number) please read if you can. . . . This is the kind of review which makes one wish to publish nothing again, which blights any pleasure one may have had in one's work, and which puts truths about one's self (apparent as soon as expressed) in a way to dishearten. It does not matter after all. The day's headache has begun, and I must stop. That is worse than the " privy nip." ' But his fine courage and generous spirit could not be kept for long under depression. Only six days later he writes : * I wrote in a night-marish mood to you about an article in the Athenaum on my Essays. I see now that there is a great deal of truth in what the reviewer said. He has spoiled that book for me for ever. But I admit that he had the right to spoil my conceit of it, because he has shown me that my conceit was ill-founded ' ; and, again, the next day : ' You will see that I have taken the Athenceum in good part. ... It is over now, however ; and I am already the bptter for feeling humbled.' Still, the reception of the book was a bitter disappointment to Symonds, heightened, no doubt, by the continuous fever. ' The days in this fever-prison go so sadly, and the nights so strangely, that I am losing count of time ; Ruedi [his doctor] holds that the principal irritation is a recrudescence of the old wound in my lung.' But the spiritual reaction inevitable with a man of Symonds' vigorous spiritual fibre soon made itself felt. On October 18 he writes to Henry Sidgwick, * I have overlived my interest in those two volumes of Essays, and do not care what the Press says. I think I made a mistake in supposing I could do things of that sort well, and that I could acquire distinction by pruning off my personal proclivities towards certain kinds of rhetoric. . . . What do books matter in relation to the soul, when life is trembling in the balance, and the days and nights have no savour in them? Even so, I have love still, and am yours.' It is characteristic of Symonds that a month
PREFACE xiii
later, in November, he was seriously turning his atten- tion to another large piece of work the Life of Michel- angelo.
As a matter of fact, the reception of * Essays Speculative and Suggestive ' was not on the whole so chilling as Symonds imagined when under the depression of the earlier reviews. In private the book produced a marked effect on readers competent to judge, and Symonds received a large number of letters on the subjects he had discussed. Since his death letters have reached me from Australia and America which clearly show that Symonds had touched a very wide and various circle of readers. A second edition was issued in London just before Symonds' death, and from that edition, which had the benefit of his revision, the present edition is reprinted.
HORATIO F. BROWN.
Ca' Torresella, Venice. April 1907