REVALUED REPUTATIONS.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 15276, 28 June 1923, Page 4

REVALUED REPUTATIONS.

No one has yet found a way to stop the regular process by which each generation in turn judges the great men—and especially the great poets—of the age before, and judges them, too, with a harshness that exasperates survivors of the past and entertains critics in the more equable future. We know that the men of the "New Learning" at the Renaissance and Reformation strewed the quadrangles of our colleges with the leaves of medieval manuscripts; we know that Mr Pepys said very curious things about Shakespeare's plays, and that Dryden saw no presumption in touching them up; and we may guess that the fanatics of the Romantic Revival would have been just as glad to rewrite Augustan poetry as to ruin classical churches with Gothic ornament. Today we are in full flood of reaction against the "Victorian era. Its ecclesiastics, its pedagogues, its warriors, and its rulers have duly received their meed of denigration; we are not surprised that it is now the poets' turn. Tennyson, who ranked, both by official recognition and by popular acclamation, as the authorised spokesman for the ideals of his time, was plainly marked to be the first objective of a new vance, and he has been this spring the target of a converging, though unconcerted, attack by critics of the younger school. He has, however, found defenders of tried skill, whose -literary trenches have proved stronger than some people suspected. The attack has been for the moment broken up, but It has been too exhilarating a fight for us not to extend some sympathy to the beaten side. It may be undue scepticism to hold that we can never reach a perfectly accurate and unbiassed estimate of any writer's worth (though tills is what some of the greatest critics, including M. Anatole France, have confessed), but it Is certain that a poet like Tennyson, with a religious and social message, is peculiarly hard to judge. He wove a vesture of beauty for a philosophy that seemed true to his own age; to a good many minds in ours it seems wholly or partly false, and the lapse of time, to which we look for justice, may bring instead a crueller indifference. No fate is so bad as that, and we even doubt if, in the long run, an author really suffers by being hated. Not only are his admirers thereby stirred to write admirable defences; his enemies, too, assist him to immortality by that minute delineation in which hostility delights. "Hate is sacred," declared a famous French novelist at the beginning of a volume bearing the title 'My Hatreds." We doubt if it is a very good thing for the hater, but it is sometimes uncommonly useful to his victim.