I say, not God Himself can make man's best Without best men to help Him.
And next: I think direct personal portraiture--or caricature--is a bastard kind of satire that I am not disposed to think the better of because Aristophanes used it in relation to Socrates. Do you know that pretty story about Bishop Thirlwall? When somebody wanted to bring to him Forchhammer as a distinguished German writer, he replied, "No; I will never receive into my house the man who justified the death of Socrates!"
"O that we were all of one mind, and that mind good!" is an impossible-to-be-realized wish: and I don't wish it at all in its full extent. But I think it would be possible that men should differ speculatively as much as they do now, and yet be "of one mind" in the desire to avoid giving unnecessary pain, in the desire to do an honest part towards the general well-being, which has made a comfortable _nidus_ for themselves, in the resolve not to sacrifice another to their own egoistic promptings. Pity and fairness--two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life--seem to me not to rest on an unverifiable hypothesis but on facts quite as irreversible as the perception that a pyramid will not stand on its apex.
I am so glad you have been enjoying Ireland in quiet. We love our bit of country and are bent on keeping it as a summer refuge.
[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 6th Nov. 1877, from the Priory.]
_Apropos_ of authorship, I was a little uneasy on Sunday because I had seemed in the unmanageable current of talk to echo a too slight way of speaking about a great poet. I did not mean to say Amen when the "Idylls of the King" seemed to be judged rather _de haut en bas_. I only meant that I should value for my own mind "In Memoriam" as the chief of the larger works; and that while I feel exquisite beauty in passages scattered through the "Idylls," I must judge some smaller wholes among the lyrics as the works most decisive of Tennyson's high place among the immortals.
Not that my deliverance on this matter is of any moment, but that I cannot bear to fall in with the sickening fashion of people who talk much about writers whom they read little, and pronounce on a great man's powers with only half his work in their mind, while if they remembered the other half they would find their judgments as to his limits flatly contradicted. Then, again, I think Tennyson's dramas such as the world should be glad of--and would be, if there had been no prejudgment that he could not write a drama.