"WEIGHING TENNYSON."
[TO THE EDITOR OF TEE "SPECTATOR.)
Sin,—It seems to me you yield the point substantially contended for in the Quarterly Review and Temple Bar, when in your article with the above heading you express yourself disposed to grant, despite your manifest partiality for the muse of Mr. Tennyson, that his place in the hierarchy of Poets is below that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth. How very much that estimate differs from the one commonly expressed during the last dozen years you must be aware. Thus in reality you justify our protest.
It is true, you elsewhere state that to you Mr. Tennyson seems a great poet, and Scott hardly more than a spirited and stirring versifier. It strikes me, that the counter-extravagance to this would be to assert that Scott is a great poet, and Mr. Tennyson only a subtle and elegant versifier ; an extravagance neither coramated nor approached in the Quarterly and Temple Bar. If you seriously think Scott to be what you describe him, I wonder what you think of Homer, of whom, in the opinion of many competent judges, he is the nearest poetical analogue produced during the space of nearly three thousand years.
Just one word, with your permission, upon your use of the epithets "coarse," "conceited," "bumptious," and "vulgar." To your application of them to myself I am unaffectedly indifferent. But, as a man of letters, I feel, and I think you on reflection will concede, that when attached to individuals they are neither serviceable nor ornamental to a controversy. Even when both parties are writing anonymously, their employment is undesirable. But when, as in the article in question, you go out of your way to state that you "seem to recognize in the Temple Bar critic, a writer of some name," it may plausibly be suspected that in a moment of forgetfulness you allowed yourself to use the epithets rather with the object of being offensive than of advancing the argument.—I am,
Sir, &c., THE AUTHOR OF THE PAPER ON Mn. TENNYSON
IN "TEMPLE BAR."
[We gladly print this letter, without, however, being able to retract or regret a single word of our comment on the author's composition. The passage in which our great poet's muse was described as "a Pegasus with very decent legs, small elegant head, right well groomed, and an uncommonly good mane and tail, but a Pegasus without wings," and other passages in the article, strike us as entirely deserving the epithets applied. So far from those epithets having been applied with reference to a suspected individual author, they were applied, as we think our language showed, in spite of our respect for the suspected author, and we are happy to find that the suspicion was utterly groundless. As to the reviewer's impression that our estimate in any way confirms his, it is simply laughable. Tennyson ranks to us certainly amongst the first half-dozen of our great English poets, far above Coleridge, Keats, and a crowd of others of high celebrity. Though not the widest, the most powerful, or the freest, we hold him the deepest by far, (Clough perhaps excepted, above whom, of course, in almost all other respects he must rank), of all English poets after Shakespeare, and superior to Byron in every characteristic of a poet, except one of the greater characteristics, fire. —ED. Spectator.]
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