The faults of Tennyson, so far as they existed, were not half
so much in the common character of his sentiments as in the arrogant
perfection of his workmanship. He was not by any means so wrong in his
faults as he was in his perfections.
Men are very much too ready to speak of men's work being ordinary, when
we consider that, properly considered, every man is extraordinary. The
average man is a tribal fable, like the Man-Wolf or the Wise Man of the
Stoics. In every man's heart there is a revolution; how much more in
every poet's? The supreme business of criticism is to discover that part
of a man's work which is his and to ignore that part which belongs to
others. Why should any critic of poetry spend time and attention on that
part of a man's work which is unpoetical? Why should any man be
interested in aspects which are uninteresting? The business of a critic
is to discover the importance of men and not their crimes. It is true
that the Greek word critic carries with it the meaning of a judge, and
up to this point of history judges have had to do with the valuation of
men's sins, and not with the valuation of their virtues.
Tennyson's work, disencumbered of all that uninteresting accretion which
he had inherited or copied, resolves itself, like that of any other man
of genius, into those things which he really inaugurated. Underneath all
his exterior of polished and polite rectitude there was in him a genuine
fire of novelty; only that, like all the able men of his period, he
disguised revolution under the name of evolution.
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