Mr Nicolson's Tennyson is incomparably better than his Verlaine, which he ruined by what must have been an assumed conventionality. He judges Tennyson from the point of view of an aesthete and man of the world: Mr Fausset criticizes him from the moral and intellectual standpoint. Mr Nicolson writes urbanely, but sometimes flippantly: Mr Fausset earnestly, but with a sort of post-war bitterness. Mr Nicolson’s Tennyson is a sensitive, melancholic, almost neurotic poet driven by ironic circumstances most unsuitably to play the Bard of the Victorian Age: Mr Fausset on the other hand maintains that he was the victim of his too sheltered life, and seems to think that if once he had come into the open, he might have become a great poet of moral ideas. I doubt if either of these explanations is satisfactory. Certainly he was some sort of a poet manqué; but what sort?
Even in his most depressing poems, in Enoch Arden, in The Idylls, in Tiresias, he keeps surprising you by some technical effect of quite sublime ingenuity. On occasion he could attain real magnificence of image: "Now lies the earth all Danae to the stars" seems to me one of the great lines of English poetry. But it is rare for his felicities to rise to the height where they can be called inspirations. A few lyrics are perfect, but how few! Hardly more than fifty different poets have brought off, whom no one has ever thought of making equal with Tennyson. But his occasional verse is astonishingly good, and on this Mr Nicolson rightly lays great emphasis. Though hardly, I think, enough; for I suggest very tentatively that Tennyson should have been a greater Prior instead of a worse Wordsworth. Which means of course that I agree with both Mr Nicolson and Mr Fausset in thinking that he was the victim of his milieu, but that I doubt if he had the genius appropriate to either of the destinies they respectively suggest for him. Passion is wanting. A great lyric poet would indeed have piped because he must; a great moral poet would have thrown off the bonds of time and place and confining circumstance. But Horace might conceivably have mistaken himself for a Catullus or a Lucretius.
