The poet was hurt,
not angry; he had expected other things from Mr Browning: HE ought
to know his duty to youth. At the intercession of a relation Mr
Browning now did his best, and the minstrel, satisfied at last,
repeated his conviction of his superiority to the authors of The
Angel in the House and Beau Brocade. Probably no man, not even Mr
Gladstone, ever suffered so much from minstrels as Tennyson. He did
not suffer them gladly.
In 1846 the Poems reached their fourth edition. Sir Edward Bulwer
Lytton (bitten by what fly who knows?) attacked Tennyson in The New
Timon, a forgotten satire. We do not understand the ways of that
generation. The cheap and spiteful genre of satire, its forged
morality, its sham indignation, its appeal to the ape-like passions,
has gone out. Lytton had suffered many things (not in verse) from
Jeames Yellowplush: I do not know that he hit back at Thackeray, but
he "passed it on" to Thackeray's old college companion. Tennyson,
for once, replied (in Punch: the verses were sent thither by John
Forster); the answer was one of magnificent contempt. But he soon
decided that
"The noblest answer unto such
Is perfect stillness when they brawl."
Long afterwards the poet dedicated a work to the son of Lord Lytton.
He replied to no more satirists. {5} Our difficulty, of course, is
to conceive such an attack coming from a man of Lytton's position and
genius.
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