From
this great and gracious student of humanity, what less, indeed, could
be expected? And if, as a converser, I were to compare him with
Socrates, as figured for us in the dialogues of his great disciple, I
think that I should have the assent of that eminently valued friend
of Tennyson's, whose long labour of love has conferred English
citizenship upon Plato.
We have called him shy and sensitive in daily intercourse with
strangers, and as to criticism, he freely confessed that a midge of
dispraise could sting, while applause gave him little pleasure. Yet
no poet altered his verses so much in obedience to censure unjustly
or irritatingly stated, yet in essence just. He readily rejected
some of his "Juvenilia" on Mr Palgrave's suggestion. The same friend
tells how well he took a rather fierce attack on an unpublished
piece, when Mr Palgrave "owned that he could not find one good line
in it." Very few poets, or even versifiers (fiercer they than poets
are), would have continued to show their virgin numbers to a friend
so candid, as Tennyson did. Perhaps most of the genus irritabile
will grant that spoken criticism, if unfavourable, somehow annoys and
stirs opposition in an author; probably because it confirms his own
suspicions about his work. Such criticism is almost invariably just.
But Campbell, when Rogers offered a correction, "bounced out of the
room, with a 'Hang it! I should like to see the man who would dare
to correct me.
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