[16] Mr. Harold Nicolson’s recently published book on Tennyson illustrates my point. The book is an acute and, in nearly every respect, a sympathetic piece of thinking, but it is coloured by the circumstance, due to the reaction of which I have spoken, that Mr. Nicolson often thinks Tennyson intellectually very little apples. And in this respect—in this respect alone—he patronises Tennyson, and the result is unfortunate, not for Tennyson but for Mr. Nicolson. It really will not do to say that Tennyson was an exquisite lyric poet but a blundering old prig intellectually. Tennyson’s intellectual approach and expression were not Mr. Nicolson’s, and it is perfectly right for Mr. Nicolson to stand for his own. But he should have remembered that Tennyson was not only the lyrist that he admits him to be, but, when all is said and done, a giant among the minds of a remarkable age. Had he done this he would not have marred what is otherwise a very beautiful piece of critical exposition.
[17] It is unnecessary here to discuss the claim that would place Sigurd in the region of epic.
[18] It is interesting to hear that the dealers are anticipating the moment when such things will become criterions of taste for the dilettante. Warehouses are being stocked for the new demand that may arise at any moment for rooms adorned by horsehair furniture.
[19] That is to say, by causing a reaction that supposes it to be outside poetry’s function to have any moral purpose whatever.
[20] I speak of this poem as though it were FitzGerald’s original composition, without reference to Omar, which for essential purposes it is.
[21] 1563–1618, the translator of du Bartas, and a prolific poet known to most readers by one lovely sonnet, but otherwise neglected far beyond his desert.