The world always has trouble with its primary men, or with the men who
have any primary gifts, like Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Tolstoi,
Ibsen. The idols of an age are nearly always secondary men: they break no
new ground; they make no extraordinary demands; our tastes and wants are
already adjusted to their type; we understand and approve of them at once.
The primary men disturb us; they are a summons and a challenge; they break
up the old order; they open up new territory which we are to subdue and
occupy; the next age and the next make more of them. In my opinion, the
next age and the next will make more of Whitman, and the next still more,
because he is in the great world-current, in the line of the evolutionary
movement of our time. Is it at all probable that Tennyson can ever be to
any other age what he has been to this? Tennyson marks an expiring age,
the sunset of the feudal world. He did not share the spirit to which the
future belongs. There was not one drop of democratic blood in his veins.
To him, the people were an hundred-headed beast.