of the
Stoics. In every man's heart there is a revolution; how much more in
every poet's? The supreme business of criticism is to discover that part
of a man's work which is his and to ignore that part which belongs to
others. Why should any critic of poetry spend time and attention on that
part of a man's work which is unpoetical? Why should any man be
interested in aspects which are uninteresting? The business of a critic
is to discover the importance of men and not their crimes. It is true
that the Greek word critic carries with it the meaning of a judge, and
up to this point of history judges have had to do with the valuation of
men's sins, and not with the valuation of their virtues.

Tennyson's work, disencumbered of all that uninteresting accretion which
he had inherited or copied, resolves itself, like that of any other man
of genius, into those things which he really inaugurated. Underneath all
his exterior of polished and polite rectitude there was in him a genuine
fire of novelty; only that, like all the able men of his period, he
disguised revolution under the name of evolution. He is only a very
shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the
Conservative.

Tennyson had certain absolutely personal ideas, as much his own as the
ideas of Browning or Meredith, though they were fewer in number. One of
these, for example, was the fact that he was the first of all poets (and
perhaps the last) to attempt to treat poetically that vast and monstrous
vision of fact which science had recently revealed to mankind.
Scientific discoveries seem commonly fables as fantastic in the ears of
poets as poems in the ears of men of science. The poet is always a
Ptolemaist; for him the sun still rises and the earth stands still.
Tennyson really worked the essence of modern science into his poetical
constitution, so that its appalling birds and frightful flowers were
really part of his literary imagery. To him blind and brutal monsters,
the products of the wild babyhood of the Universe, were as the daisies
and the nightingales were to Keats; he absolutely realised the great
literary paradox mentioned in the Book of Job: "He saw Behemoth, and he
played with him as with a bird."

Instances of this would not be difficult to find. But the tests of
poetry are those instances in which this outrageous scientific
phraseology becomes natural and unconscious. Tennyson wrote one of his
own exquisite lyrics describing th