There had been years of silence since Maud, and the
Master suspected that "mosquitoes" (reviewers) were the cause.
"There is a note needed to show the good side of human nature and to
condone its frailties which Thackeray will never strike." To others
it seems that Thackeray was eternally striking this note: at that
time in General Lambert, his wife, and daughters, not to speak of
other characters in The Virginians. Who does not condone the
frailties of Captain Costigan, and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong?
In any case, Tennyson took his own time, he was (1858) only beginning
Elaine. There is no doubt that Tennyson was easily pricked by
unsympathetic criticism, even from the most insignificant source,
and, as he confessed, he received little pleasure from praise. All
authors, without exception, are sensitive. A sturdier author wrote
that he would sometimes have been glad to meet his assailant "where
the muir-cock was bailie." We know how testily Wordsworth replied in
defence to the gentlest comments by Lamb.
The Master of Balliol kept insisting, "As to the critics, their power
is not really great. . . . One drop of natural feeling in poetry or
the true statement of a single new fact is already felt to be of more
value than all the critics put together." Yet even critics may be in
the right, and of all great poets, Tennyson listened most obediently
to their censures, as we have seen in the case of his early poems.
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