Part 8 (2/2)

was a favourite of the poet

”What birds were these?” he is said to have asked a lady suddenly, when reading to a silent coested a listener, who did not probably remember any other fowl that is vocal in the dusk

”No, they were rooks,” answered the poet

”Co as Tennyson ever wrote, with a triu exultant note Then the poeedy comes, and remorse, and the beautiful interlude of the

”lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl”

Then follows the exquisite

”O that 'twere possible,”

and the dull consciousness of the poe confusion of pain and wanderingfinally left, in the author's words, ”sane but shattered”

Tennyson's letters of the ti hi to do Maud was threatened with a broadside froifted X” People who have read Aytoun's diverting Firifted Gilfillan” in Waverley, knoho the gifted X was But X was no great authority south of Tay

Despite the almost unanimous condemnation by public critics, the success of Maud enabled Tennyson to buy Farringford, so he must have been better appreciated and understood by the world than by the reviewers

In February 1850 Tennyson returned to his old Arthurian thelanced at Arthur, Dryden did not

”Raise the Table Round again,”

and Blackmore has never been reckoned adequate Vivien was first composed as Merlin and Niion, the Welsh collection of Marchen and legends, things of widely different ages, now rather Celtic, or Brythonic, now amplifications made under the influence of mediaeval French roust, and Tennyson learned Welsh enough to be able to read the Mabinogion, which is much more of Welsh than many Arthurian critics possess The two first Idylls were privately printed in the su very rare and much desired of collectors in this eun, in theconsort In autuyll at Inveraray: he was much attached to the Duke--unlike Professor Huxley Their love of nature, the Duke being as keen-eyed as the poet was short-sighted, was one tie of union The Indian Mutiny, or at least the death of Havelock, was the occasion of lines which the author was too wise to include in any of his volumes: the poem on Lucknoas of later composition

Guinevere was completed in March 1858; and Tennyson”What I particularly admired in him was that he did not press upon me any verses of his own” Tennyson would have found ht of the verses Neither he nor Mr Matthew Arnold was very encouraging to young poets: they had no sons in Apollo, like Ben Jonson But both were kept in a perpetual state of apprehension by the army of versifiers who send volumes by post, to whom that can only be said what Tennyson did say to one of them, ”As an a it” (verse) ”is all very well” It is the friends who do not find it ay of these pests of the Muses is bewildering They do not seem to read poetry, only to write it and launch it at unoffending strangers If they bought each other's books, all of them could afford to publish

The Master of Balliol, the e, appears to have advised Tennyson to publish the Idylls at once There had been years of silence since Maud, and the Master suspected that ”mosquitoes” (reviewers) were the cause

”There is a note needed to show the good side of human nature and to condone its frailties which Thackeray will never strike” To others it see this note: at that tihters, not to speak of other characters in The Virginians Who does not condone the frailties of Captain Costigan, and F B, and the Chevalier Strong?

In any case, Tennyson took his own ti Elaine There is no doubt that Tennyson was easily pricked by unsynificant source, and, as he confessed, he received little pleasure from praise All authors, without exception, are sensitive A sturdier author wrote that he would solad to meet his assailant ”where the muir-cock was bailie” We kno testily Wordsworth replied in defence to the gentlest co, ”As to the critics, their power is not really greatOne drop of natural feeling in poetry or the true statele new fact is already felt to be of ether” Yet even critics reat poets, Tennyson listened most obediently to their censures, as we have seen in the case of his early poeed silences after the attacks of 1833 and 1855 were occupied in work and reflection: Achilles was notin his tent, as some of his friends seem to have supposed An epic in a series of epic idylls cannot be dashed off like a romantic novel in rhy for maturity of conception and execution

Mrs Tennyson, doubtless by her lord's desire, asked the Master (then tutor of Balliol) to suggest theested, and is treated in The Grandly,” said the Master, ”that it is the duty of every one who has the good fortune to know a hten his work” To do every service in his power to everypractice He was not much at home, his letters shoith Burns, to whom he seems to have attributed John Anderson,Tam o' Shanter with e of To Mary in Heaven If Burns wept over Tahter