Aspects of Tennyson, by James Knowles, 1893

 This isn't a paraphrase, it's an article from a periodical called The Nineteenth Century, which is online at archive.org, but the volume is so thick that it's hard for Tennyson fans to navigate to this article. Sir James Knowles was a writer himself, his best known book is about King Arthur. He was a personal friend of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and he wrote this just after Tennyson died.

-----------------------------------

pg 164 

from the periodical The Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1893. 

Aspects of Tennyson by James Knowles

II

(A Personal Reminiscence) 

If in the following pages I can contribute a few touches to the portrait of Lord Tennyson which his contemporaries alone can paint, my object in writing them will be accomplished. Of Tennyson the Poet his Poems will remain a 'monument more lasting than brass' to the remotest future. But of the man himself 'in his habit as he lived' the likeness can only be portrayed by those who knew him personally, and only now, while their memory of him is fresh, and before it passes away with them into oblivion. What would the world not give for such a picture of Shakespeare by his friends as may now be made of Tennyson?

In a letter of his which lies before me he draws a distinction between personal things which may be told of a man before and after his death, and complains of the neglect of that distinction during his life. He recognised that after death a Memoir of him was inevitable, and left the charge of it in its fulness to his son. What follow are but slight contributions towards any such complete biography, for only upon the few occasions which are here recorded did I make any note in writing of all Tennyson's talk heard and enjoyed for nearly thirty years. His own words I have printed always in italics.

More than thirty years ago I had the happiness of making his acquaintance. I was about to publish a little book on King Arthur, chiefly compiled from Sir Thomas Malory, and, as a stranger, had written to ask leave to dedicate it to him--a leave which was directly granted.

For some time afterwards I knew him merely by correspondence, but being in the Isle of Wight one autumn 1 called to thank him personally for what he had written to me, and then first saw him face to face. I found him even kinder than his letters, and from that time our acquaintance grew gradually closer until it became intimate.

Before long he asked me to become his architect for the new house he proposed to build near Haslemere ('Aldworth' as it was finally called), and the consultations and calculations which naturally followed as to his way of living, the plans, and the cost of building, led to much business confidence. This presently extended to the field of his own business transactions with his publishers, and from these in time to confidences about his Work and Art; until at length he came to tell me of Poems not yet in being, but contemplated, and to talk about them and show me their progress.

Then, and for many years after, under his roof or under mine, it was my great privilege to see and know him intimately; and the more he was known the more impressive were his greatness, tenderness, and truth. The simplicity, sensitiveness, freshness, and almost divine insight of a child were joined in him, as in no other man, to the dignity, sagacity, humour, and knowledge of age at its noblest. An immense sanity underlay the whole--the perfection of common-sense--and over all was the perpetual glamour of supreme genius.

Affectation was so alien from him that he spoke and acted exactly as he felt and thought everywhere and about everything. This at times would perplex and bewilder strangers. The shy were frightened at it; the affected took it for affectation (for, as he was fond of saying, 'every man imputes himself'), the rough for roughness, the bears for bearishness; whereas it was but simple straightforward honesty, and as such of the deepest interest to all who could watch and learn in it the ways of Nature with her greatest men.

The little affectations and insincerities of life so troubled him, and his natural shyness, increased by his disabling short sight, so fought with his innate courtesy to all, that general society was always an effort and a burden to him. His fame increased the trouble, and he often told me how he wished he could have had all the money which his books had made without the notoriety. Even a single stranger was, as such and at first, always a trial to him, and his instinctive desire was to hide as much of himself as possible from observation until he found his companion sympathetic. Then he expanded as a flower does in the sunshine, and he never hoarded or kept back any of the profuse riches and splendour of his mind. When Frederick Robertson of Brighton--the great preacher, who had written much and admirably about his poems, and for whom he had a high regard--first called upon him, 'I felt,' said Tennyson, 'as if he had come to pluck out the heart of my mystery--so I talked to him about nothing but beer.' He could not help it; it was impossible for him to wear his heart upon his sleeve.

The, shortness of his sight, which was extreme, tormented him always. When he was looking at any object he seemed to be smelling it. He said that he had 'never seen the two pointers of the Great Bear except as two intersecting circles, like the first proposition in Euclid,' and at my first visit to him he warned me, as I left, to come up and speak to him wherever I next met him, 'for if not,' he said, 'I shouldn't know you though I rubbed against you in the street.' His hearing, on the other hand, was exceptionally keen, and he held it as a sort of compensation for his blurred sight; he could hear 'the shriek of a bat,' which he always said was the test of a quick ear. Its real compensation, however, was in the quickness of his mental vision, which made more out of the imperfect indications of his bodily eyes than most men with perfect sight would see. I remember his telling me (in explanation of a passage,in 'Maud')--'If you tread on daisies they turn up underfoot and get rosy.' He could read a man through and through in a flash even from his face, and it was wonderful to hear him sum up a complex character in some single phrase. He told me that he was once travelling with an unknown person whose countenance he caught but for an instant from behind a newspaper, but whom he set down, from that flying glimpse, as a rogue. To his surprise he turned out to be somebody of the highest local standing and repute, but he nevertheless held by his impression and in the end was justified; for presently the man fled from justice and the country, leaving hundreds ruined who had trusted him.

His judgment of men was the more terrible because so naturally charitable and tender. Seldom, if ever, did he carry beyond words his anger even with those who had gravely injured him. 'I eat my heart with silent rage at --' he said one day of such a one. How different in this from Carlyle, whose open rage with mankind was so glaring! 'Ha! ye don't know,' he cried out to me one day,' 'ye don't know what d--d beasts men are.' Tennyson, quite otherwise, had the tenderest thought and hope for all men individually, however much he loathed that 'many-headed beast' the mob. 'I feel ashamed to see misery and guilt,' he said as he came out from going over Wandsworth Gaol; 'I can't look it in the face.' Yet he had no love for milksops. 'The only fault of So-and-so,' he said, 'is that he has no fault at all.'

It was touching to see his playfulness with children, and how he would win them from their nervousness of his big voice and rather awful presence. I have seen him hopping about on the floor like a great bird, enveloped in his big cloak and flapping hat, in a game of pursuing a little band of them until they shrieked with laughter. It reminded me of a scene in his Cambridge days which he had described to me when he, 'Charles Tennyson, Spedding, and Thompson of Trinity, danced a quadrille together in the upper room of a house opposite the "Bull."' There was a great abundance of playfulness under the grimness of his exterior, and as to humour, that was all-pervading and flavoured every day with salt. It was habitual with him, and seemed a sort of counteraction and relief to the intense solemnity of his also habitual gaze at life in its deeper aspects, which else would almost have overwhelmed him with awe. He had a marvellous fund of good stories which he loved to recount after dinner and over his 'bottle of port,' In later life he gave up the port, but not the stories. He used to say there ought to be a collection of the hundred best ones in the world chosen from different countries so as to show the national diversities, and he would give illustrations of such, declaring that for true and piercing wit the French beat all the others. Could they have been reported verbatim, as he gave them, they would have been models of English prose. More serious narratives he told thrillingly--one especially of how his own father, escaped from Russia as a young man after an incautious speech about the recent murder of the Emperor Paul; how he wandered for months in the Crimea, where 'the wild people of the country came about him' and explained to him that twice a year only, at uncertain times, a courier passed through the place blowing a horn before him, and that then was his only chance of safety; how he lay waiting and listening through the nights until the weird sound came, and how he fared through all the hair-breadth escapes that followed.

He would pretend to look upon his bottle of port as a sort of counsellor to be heard sometimes before finally making up his mind upon moot-points, and after the varying moods of the day about them. For instance, he told me: 'The night before I was asked to take the Laureateship, which was offered to me through Prince Albert's liking for my "In Memoriam," I dreamed that he came to me and kissed me on the cheek. I said, in my dream, "Very kind, but very German." In the morning the letter about the Laureateship was brought to me and laid upon my bed. I thought about it through the day, but could not make up my mind whether to take it or refuse it, and at the last I wrote two letters, one accepting and one declining, and threw them on the table, and settled to decide which I would send after my dinner and bottle of port.'

A notable thing was his comparative indifference to music as a separate art: it almost seemed as if the extreme fineness of his hearing was too fine for the enjoyment of its usual intervals and effects and craved the subtler and multitudinous distinctions and inflections and variations of sound, which only the instrument of language can produce. Certainly I hardly ever knew him to care greatly for any 'setting' of his own songs, which he justly felt had already their own music that was confused by the 'setting.' It is curious that Browning, whose music is so rare in his verse, was a masterly musician outside of it, while Tennyson, whose every line was music, cared so little for it except in poetry.

His way of working was much less like 'work' than inspiration. 'I can always write,' he said, 'when I see my subject, though sometimes I spend three-quarters of a year without putting pen to paper.' When he did 'see' it, his mind dwelt on it at all times and seasons, possessing him until he possessed, and perfected it. Sparkles and gleams might flash put at any moments from the anvil where his genius was beating his subject into shape, but the main creative process, where the vision was condensed into art, went on when he had shut himself up in his room with his pipe. He would do this two or three times a day--his 'most valuable hour,' as he often told me, being the hour after dinner--and then with his pipe in his mouth and over the fire he would weave into music what things 'came to him;' for he never accounted for his Poetry in any other way than that 'it came.' 'Many thousand fine lines go up the chimney,' he said to me, and indeed the mechanical toil of writing them down, made heavier by his short sight, was so great that it was easy to believe in the sublime waste--the characteristic profuseness of genius. When he came out from his room at such seasons, he would often have a sort of dazed and far-off dreamy look about him, as if seeing 'beyond this ignorant present,' and such as Millais alone has caught in his great portrait, where he looks like the Prophet and Bard that he was.* And then he might perhaps say aloud and almost as it were to himself, some passage he had just made, but seldom twice in the same words, and, unless written down at once, the first and original form of it was often lost or 'improved.' This was the beginning of that process of refinement by art until absolute perfection was attained which he always carried on--the cutting and polishing of the native diamonds into complete and brilliant beauty. (1) If interrupted during his hours of seclusion--which of course never happened except upon emergency--his look of 'sensitiveness' was surprising. He seemed ready to quiver at the faintest breath, or sound, or movement, and as though suddenly waked up out of a dream.

* Millais: Portrait of Alfred Tennyson, 1881 

(1) An Interesting example of these rapid modifications is given by an extra verse which he put to 'Locksley Hall' in a volume belonging to me. He wrote it with his own hand; but, as soon as he had finished it and handed it to me, he dictated the two successive altered readings which 1 here print in italics. The verse comes in just before the fourth verse from the end of the poems, and goes thus:--

win or lose it

 shall I lose it?

lose it, nay!

'Life is battle, let me fight it: surely I shall win the day:

Block my paths with toil and danger, 1 will find or force a way!'

After his hour of privacy he would often ask his friends to come to his room with him, and then would talk of present, past, and future in a way which was, in the Arab phrase, like 'the opening of many gates.'

Many personal things he told me at such times when alone with him, which are of course sacred from repetition; but of many other things he spoke openly to whomsoever might be there, and especially he loved to speculate freely on theological and metaphysical subjects.

He formulated once and quite deliberately his own religious creed in these words: 'there's a something that watches over us; and our individuality endures: that's my faith, and that's all my faith.' This he said with such a calm emphasis that I wrote it down (with the date) exactly and at once. But he was by no means always so calm. His belief in personal immortality was passionate--I think almost the strongest passion that he had. I have heard him thunder out against an opponent of it: 'If there be a God that has made the earth and put this hope and passion into us, it must foreshow the truth. If it be not true, then no God, but a mocking fiend, created us, and' (growing crimson with excitement) 'I'd shake my fist in his almighty face, and tell him that I cursed him! I'd sink my head to-night in a chloroformed handkerchief and have done with it all.'

To one who said, 'My dearest object in life, when at my best, is to leave the world, by however little, better than I found it--what is yours?' he answered: 'My greatest wish is to have a dearer vision of God.'

He said: 'Men have generally taken God for the devil. . . The majority of Englishmen think of Him as an immeasurable clergyman in a white tie.'

He inclined somewhat to the theory of a Demiurge with whom alone man comes into direct contact, saying that this was perhaps 'the nearest explanation of the facts of the world which we can get;' and this he put into the mouth of the King in the 'Passing of Arthur,' where he cries:

O me! for why is all around us here

As if some lesser God had made the world.

But had not force to shape it as he would,

Till the High God behold it from beyond,

And enter it and make it beautiful?

He was disposed to doubt the real existence of a material world, and frequently adduced the infinite divisibility of matter as a difficulty which made it unthinkable. He leaned to the idealism of Berkeley, and in physical science preferred the term 'centres of force' to 'atoms' as not involving the idea of matter. He said to me one day; 'Sometimes as I sit here alone in this great room I get carried away out of sense and body, and rapt into mere existence, till the accidental touch or movement of one of my own fingers is like a great shock and blow and brings the body back with a terrible start.'

All such subjects moved him profoundly, and to an immense curiosity and interest about them. He told me that 'Tears, idle tears' was written as an expression of such longings. 'It is in a way like St. Paul's "groanings which cannot be uttered." It was written at Tintern when the woods were all yellowing with autumn seen through the ruined windows. It is what I have always felt even from a boy, and what as a boy I called the "passion of the past." And it is so always with me now; it is the distance that charms me in the landscape, the picture, and the past, and not the immediate to-day in which I move.'

At one time he contemplated writing a metaphysical poem on Spinoza, and talked much about it, but finally gave it up, saying he could not quite warm to it, 'from Spinoza's want of belief in a God.'

It was as the result of many such speculative debates with him that the idea of founding the late Metaphysical Society occurred to me. (2)

He and the Rev. Charles Pritchard (the Savilian Professor of Astronomy) were both staying in our house as guests, and one morning, after breakfast and much psychological guessing and wondering, one of us said: 'What a pity it is that these subjects cannot be investigated thoroughly in a scientific way and without prejudice and vehemence!' 'Modem science,' said Tennyson, 'has surely learned this much--how to separate heat from light.' 'Well,' I said, 'if you and Mr. Pritchard will agree to join it, I will try to get together in London a Society to discuss Metaphysics and Theology in the manner and with the method of the learned societies.' They promised to become the first members, and I then proceeded to enlist others until the roll of membership was completed.

At a preliminary meeting held at Willis's Rooms on Wednesday, April 21, 1869, there were present Mr. Tennyson, Professor Pritchard, Dean Stanley, Professor Huxley, Dr. Ward, the Rev. James Martineau, Sir John Lubbock, Mr. Seely, Dr. Carpenter, Mr. R. Hutton, Mr. Hinton, Mr. Roden Noel, and Mr. James Knowles (Hon. Sec.), and it was resolved--

"That a Society be established in London under the name of the Metaphysical and Psychological Society, to collect, arrange, and diffuse knowledge (whether objective or subjective) of mental and moral phenomena.

"That the Society may undertake--

"(1) To collect trustworthy observations upon such subjects as--Remarkable mental and moral phenomena, whether normal or abnormal. The relations of brain and mind, and generally of physics and metaphysics. The faculties of the lower animals, &e. &e.

"(2) To receive and to discuss with absolute freedom, at meetings to be held from time to time, oral or written communications made to it on such subjects as--The comparison of the different theories respecting the ultimate grounds of belief in the objective and moral sciences. The logic of the sciences, whether physical or social. The immortality and personal identity of the soul. The existence and personality of God The nature of conscience. The material hypothesis."

Among the original members of the Society not present at the preliminary meeting were (Cardinal) Archbishop Manning, Professor Tyndall, (Lord) Arthur Russell, Mr. W. E. Gladstone, Mr. Froude, Mr. Walter Bagehot, Dean Alford, Sir Alexander Grant, the Bishop of St. Davids (Thirlwall), the Duke of Argyll, Mr. Frederic Harrison, and (Bishop) Alfred Barry. (3) At its first formal meeting a poem especially written by Tennyson, and afterwards published as 'The Higher Pantheism,' was read by the Secretary in the absence of the author. In a note he sent me with it, Tennyson said: 'I am not coming up for your meeting -- i.e. I believe so to-day--and your request that you may read the poem at that meeting abashes me. If you are to read it, it ought to he stated surely that I have but ceded to your strongly exprest desire. Hutton can have a copy of it if he choose; but an I had known that such as he wanted it, I would have looked at it again before I let it go.' He did not often come to the meetings, and when he did so spoke but little. But he read with avidity all its transactions and discussed the subjects of them privately with endless interest. His reverence for Dr. Martineau was extreme, and he frequently declared that he was 'by far the greatest among us.'

(3) To those were afterwards added Father Dalgairns, (Sir) Geo. Grove, Prof. Henry Sidgwick, Shadworth Hodgson, the Rev. Mark Pattison, the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, Robert Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke), John Ruskin, Sir M. E. Grant Duff, W. R. Greg, A. C. Fraser, Sir Henry Acland, Prof. Mosley, the Archbishop of York (Thompson), the Bishop of Peterborough (Magee), Prof. Croom Robertson, Prof. Sylvester, Sir James Stephen, J. Bucknill, Sir Andrew Clark, Prof. W. K. Clifford, Prof. St. George Mivart, Lord Selborne, Leslie Stephen, Fred. Pollock, &c.

A frequent subject of his talk in the evenings, or in the long afternoon walks which were his habit, was, as might be expected, Poetry and the Poets. His acquaintance with all previous poetry was unlimited, and his memory of it amazing. He would quote again and again with complete delight the passages which were his favourites, stopping and calling upon his hearer to consider the beauty of this or that line, and repeating it to admire it the more.

His reading was always in a grand, deep, measured voice, and was rather intoning on a few notes than speaking. It was like a sort of musical thunder, far off or near--loud-rolling or 'sweet and low'--according to the subject, and once heard could never be forgotten.

It made no difference whence a fine line or passage came; it struck him equally with pleasure, when he heard or came across it, whether it were another man's or his own. He would pause in precisely the same way to call out 'That's magnificent,' 'What a line!' 'Isn't that splendid?' whether reading Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, or himself. He was struck by the beauty of the art without thinking for one moment of the artist. The shallow-pated, hearing him thus apostrophise his own work, which they may have begged him to read to them, might think in their vain hearts 'How vain!' But vanity had no more to do with it than they had; he was thinking solely of the subject and the music, and only cried out to his hearers for the sake of an echo to his own absorbing pleasure.

He often insisted that the grandest music in the English language was in Milton, and especially in the first book of Paradise Lost, and he would repeatedly chant out with the deepest admiration, as the finest of all, the passage--

Thammuz came next behind,

Whose annual wound to Lebanon allured

The Syrian damsels to lament his fate

In amorous ditties all a summer's day;

While smooth Adonis from his native rock

Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood

Of Thammuz yearly wounded; the love-tale

Infected Sion's daughters with like heat,

Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch

Ezekiel saw, when, by the vision led,

His eye surveyed the dark idolatries

Of alienated Judah.

As a single line he said he knew hardly any to exceed for charm

     "Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams,"

unless it were Wordsworth's great line in Tintern Abbey--

     "Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns."

'Poetry,' he would say at such times, 'is a great deal truer than fact.'

His own poetry, he declared, was easy enough to read aloud, if people would only read it just as it was written and not try to scan it or to force the accent. Some few passages, he admitted however, were difficult, such as that in 'Maud' beginning

"O, that 'twere possible,"

but this because 'it ought to be read, all through without taking breath:' the 'bugle song' in the 'Princess' was another.

The first thing I ever heard him read was his 'Boadicea,' for I said 'I never can tell how to scan it.' 'Read it like prose,' he said, 'just as it is written, and it will come all right.' And then, as if to confute himself, he began it, and in his weird and deep intoning, which was as unlike ordinary prose as possible, sang the terrible war song, until the little attic at Farringford melted out of sight and one saw the far-off fields of early Britain, thronged with the maddened warriors of the maddened queen, and heard the clashing of the brands upon the shields, and the cries which

     "Roar'd as when the rolling breakers boom and blanch on the precipices."

The image of some ancient bard rose up before one as he might have sung the story by the watch-fires of an army the day before a battle. It was perhaps from some such association of ideas that his name among his intimates became 'The Bard'--a way of recognising in one word and in ordinary talk his mingled characters of Singer, Poet, and Prophet.

When building Aldworth he desired to have, whenever the room was finally decorated, the following names of his six favourite poets carved and painted on the six stone shields which I had designed as part of the chimney-piece in his study, and in front of which he always sat and smoked--namely, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, Dante, and Goethe.

He used to say 'Keats, if he had lived, would have been the greatest of all of us;' he considered Goethe 'the greatest artist of the nineteenth century, and Scott its greatest man of letters;' and he said of Swinburne, 'He's a tube through which all things blow into music.' He said 'Wordsworth would have been much finer if he had written much less,' and he told Browning in my presence that 'if he got rid of two-thirds, the remaining third would be much finer.' After saying that, and when Browning had left us, he enlarged on the imperative necessity of restraint in art. 'It is necessary to respect the limits,' he said; 'an artist is one who recognises bounds to his work as a necessity, and does not overflow illimitably to all extent about a matter. I soon found that if I meant to make any mark at all it must be by shortness, for all the men before me had been so diffuse, and all the big things had been done. To get the workmanship as nearly perfect as possible is the best chance for going down the stream of time. A small vessel on fine lines is likely to float further than a great raft.'

Once, as we stood looking at Aldworth just after its completion, he turned to me and said, 'You will live longer than I shall. That house will last five hundred years.' I answered him, 'I think the English language will last longer.'

Another frequent subject of his talk was the criticism on his own work, when unfavourable. All the mass of eulogy he took comparatively little notice of, but he never could forget an unfriendly word, even from the most obscure and insignificant and unknown quarter. He was hurt by it as a sensitive child might be hurt by the cross look of a passing stranger; or rather as a supersensitive skin is hurt by the sting of an invisible midge. He knew it was a weakness in him, and could be laughed out of it for a time, but it soon returned upon him, and had given him from his early youth exaggerated vexation. When, remonstrated with for the Hogarth's perspective he thus made, he would grimly smile and say, 'Oh yes, I know. I'm black-blooded like all the Tennysons--I remember everything that has been said against me, and forget all the rest.' It was his temperament, and showed itself in other matters besides criticism. For instance, the last time I went with him to the oculist, he was most heartily reassured about his eyes by the great expert after a careful and detailed inspection. But as we left the door he turned to me and said with utter gloom, 'No man shall persuade me that I'm not going blind.' Few things were more delightful than to help chase away such clouds and see and feel the sunshine come out again, responsive to the call of cheerfulness. To one who had so cheered him he said; 'You certainly are a jolly good fellow, you do encourage me so much.' And at another time: 'I'm very glad to have known you. It has been a sort of lift in my life.' The clouds would gather on him most in the solitude of the country, and he often told me it was needful for him to come from time to time to London to rub the rust from off him. It must be added that so soon as ever the rust was rubbed off he hastened to be back among the woods and hills.

_________________________

His prose, though never treated with the careful art he lavished on his poems, was as musical and as lucid by nature, and with the same incommunicable quality of distinction about it which made all his utterances, whether in poetry or prose, more lofty than any other man's. By good fortune I am able to give an example of it, which came about in this way. While he was considering and completing the cycle of his 'Idylls,' he would often talk them over in detail to see how their treatment would 'come,' making, as it were, preliminary sketches before deciding to paint them as pictures. I suggested that he should dictate the scheme of one of them to me as a trial of that way of working. He liked the idea and gave out what follows, "ore rotundo," and with scarce any pause. It finally took shape as the Idyll of 'Balin and Balan,' but the unpremeditated prose form of it seems in some ways even more beautiful.

THE DOLOROUS STROKE

There came a rumour to the King of two knights who sat beside a fountain near Camelot, and had challenged every knight that passed and overthrown them. These things were told the King, and early one morning the spirit of his youth resumed upon him, and he armed himself, and rode out till he came to the fountain, and there sat two knights, Balin, and Balan; and the fountain bubbled out among hart's-tongue and lady-fern, and on one side of the fountain sat Balan, and on the other side sat Balin, and on the right of Balan was a poplar tree, and on the left of Balin was an alder-tree, and the horse of Balan was tied to the poplar tree, and the horse of Balin to the alder-tree. And Arthur said, 'Fair sirs, what do ye here?' And they said, 'We sit here for the sake of glory, and we be better knights than any of those in Arthur's hall, and that have we proven, for we have overthrown every knight that came forth against us.' And Arthur said, 'I am of his hall; see, therefore, whether me also ye can overthrow.' And Arthur lightly smote either of them down, and returned, and no man knew it.

Then that same day he sent for Balan and Balin, and when they were brought before him he asked them, saying, 'Answer ye me this question: who be ye?' And Balin said, 'I am Balin the savage, and that name was given to me, seeing that once in mine anger I smote with my gauntlet an unarmed man in thy hall and slew him, whereupon thou didst banish me for three years from thy court as one unworthy of being of thy table.

'But I yearn for the light of thy presence, and the three years are nigh fulfilled, and I have repented me of the deed that was unknightly; and so it seemed to me that if I sat by yon fountain and challenged and overthrew every knight that passed thou wouldst receive me again into thy favour. And this is my brother Balan, not yet a knight of thine.'

Which when the King heard and saw that he had indeed repented him, he received him again, and made his brother Balan knight. And the new knight demanded the first quest.

And there came one into Arthur's hall, and Balan rode away with him.

And as Balin moved about the court he marvelled at the knightliness and the manhood of Sir Lancelot, and at the worship he ever gave the Queen, and the honour in which the Queen held him. Then he thought within himself, 'Surely it is this Queen's grace and nobleness which have made him such a name among men, wherefore I too will worship the Queen an I may. And I will forget my former violences and will live anew, and I will pray the King to grant me to bear some cognisance of the Queen in the stead of mine own shield.'

And Arthur said, 'Ask thou my Queen what token she will give thee, and wear thou that.' And he was bold, and asked for the Queen's crown to wear upon his shield, and that he would amend himself, under the lustre thereof, of his old violence. So she turned her to the King and smiled and asked him, and the King said 'Yea, so that thereby he may be holpen to amend himself.' And Balin, said, 'The sight hereof shall evermore be bit and rein to all my savage heats.' Then Balin ever hovered about Lancelot and the Queen, so that he might espy in what things stood truest knighthood and courtesy towards women. Anon he came to wonder how so great a tenderness of love might be between two such as were not lover and damosel, but ever thrust away from him such thought as a shadow from his own old life. Yet he grew somewhat gloomy of heart and presently took his shield and arms and rode privily away to seek adventure.

So, many days, he traversed the thick forests, till he came upon the ancient castle of King Pelles, and there they said to him, 'Why wearest thou this crown royal on thy shield?' and he answered them 'Because the noblest and the chastest of all ladies hath granted me to wear it.' So at the high banquet in the hall sat one Sir Garlon, who likewise said, 'Why wearest thou a Queen's crown royal?' Unto him Sir Balin made the same answer. Whereat Sir Garlon grimly smiled and said, 'Art thou so simple, and hast yet come but now, as thou sayest, from the court? Hast thou not eyes, or at the least ears, and dost not know the thing that standeth (shame that groweth) between Lancelot and the Queen?' To which Sir Balin fiercely answered, 'Yea surely, because I have both eyes and ears and because I have diligently used them to learn how he, the greatest of all knights, doth gain his valour from the noblest of all ladies, I know that such a thing as this thou sayest is but a foul thing and a felon's talk.' But none the less Sir Garlon's talk made him full heavy and gloomy of heart, so that he wandered to and fro among the churls, and there heard marvellous tales. For they told him that Sir Garlon rode invisible and had wounded unto death many strong and good knights, striking them through the back, they warned him to beware of Sir Garlon.

Also they told him how that King Belles was the true descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, and also how in hidden chambers of the castle lay wondrous treasures from the days of our Lord Christ --even the spear which ever bled since Longus smote our Lord withal, and many more such marvels, till Sir Balin doubted him whether he could believe aught that they told him of Sir Garlon or aught else. But on the morrow when Sir Garlon met him by the castle walls and mocked him, saying, 'Still then thou wearest that shameful token--'that crown scandalous,' then did Sir Balin's old nature break through its new crust, and he smote him on the helmet with his sword. But though he overthrew and left him lying, yet his sword was broken into diverse pieces, so that he cast the handle from him, and ran hastily to find some other weapon. For by now he saw men running upon him from the castle, and thought but to flee and to fight for his life. And as he fled he saw within a loophole window where a stack of spears lay piled, and burst the door and caught the tallest of them all, and, crying to his war-horse, leaped upon him and departed. And as he went he heard the voice of King Pelles to his knights: 'Slay, slay him: he defileth holy things beyond his wit to know of.' But being hot and fleet with madness he plunged far into the woods, and drew no rein until his horse was nigh to dying. Then did he spy his golden crown and bemoaned himself, saying, 'Alas that I should so soon turn as a dog to his vomit! Alas! for now were I but wounded with the bleeding spear itself, and of a wound that should for ever bleed, 1 could be none too wounded for my deserts.'

So there as he lay bitter of heart he turned the shield away from him, not bearing to look upon it, and hung it to a bough hard by, and there it glistened in the sun the while he turned the other way and raged, and felt that he would dwell a savage man for evermore within the woods.

But anon came through the woods a damsel riding on a palfrey, and but a single squire attending. And when she saw the shield she stayed her horse and called her squire to search for him who owned it, for she marvelled to see Queen Guinevere's crown thereon.

Then when she had found Sir Balin she demanded straightway that he should help her through the woods, for that she was journeying to King Mark of Cornwall, and her good knight had met some misadventure and had left her with none but this squire. 'And I know thee for a worshipful man and one from Arthur's hall, for I see by this cognisance that thou art from the court'. Then did Sir Balin redden and say, 'Ask me not of it, for 1 have shamed it. Alas! that so great a Queen's name, which high Sir Lancelot hath lifted up, and been lifted up by, should through me and my villany come to disgrace!' Thereon the damsel, looking keenly at him, laughed, and when he asked her why, laughed long and loud, and cried that little shame could he do to the Queen or Lancelot either which they had not themselves already done themselves.

And when he stood as Lot's wife stood, salt-petrified, and stared at her, she cried again, 'Sir Knight, ye need not gaze thus at me as if I were a reder of fables and a teller of false tales. Now let me tell thee how I saw myself Sir Lancelot and the Queen within a bower at Camelot but twelve months since and heard her say "O sir, my lord Sir Lancelot, for thou indeed art my true lord, and none other save by the law."'

But when he heard her thus, his evil spirit leapt upon him and tare him and drove him mad, and then he cried with a great yell, and dragged the shield from off the tree, and then and there he cast it to the ground, drave his mailed foot through the midst of it, and split the royal crown in twain, and cast the two halves far from him among the long weeds of the wood. Then at that cry came Balan riding through the forest, and when he saw the broken shield and crown lie on the earth he spurred his horse and said, 'Sir Knight, keep well thyself, for here is one shall overthrow thee for the despite thou hast done the Queen!' At that, Sir Balin, for he knew not that it was Sir Balan, seeing that his newly granted shield had yet no bearing, called to the Squire to lend him his shield, and, catching up the spear he gat from Pelles' castle, ran his horse fiercely to meet Sir Balan. And so sore was their onset that either overthrew the other to the earth; but Balin's spear smote through Sir Balan's shield and made the first mark it had ever borne, and through the rent it pierced to Balan's side and thrust him through with deadly wounds, wherefrom the blood streamed and could not be stayed until he fainted with the loss of blood; and Balin's horse rolled on him as he fell, and wounded him so sorely that he swooned with agony.

But when they thus lay the damsel and her squire unlaced their helms and gave them air, and presently when they came to themselves they gazed as men gone newly wild upon each other, and with a mighty cry they either swooned away again, and so lay swooning for an hour. Then did the damsel wait and watch to see how this might end, and withdrew herself behind the leaves.

Anon Sir Balin opened first his eyes, and then with groanings which he could not hide for pain he slowly crawled to whither his brother lay. And then did he put from off his brother's face his hair,and leaned and kissed him, and left his face beblooded from his lips, for by now his life began to flow away from his hidden inner wounds.

Then presently thereafter Balan woke up also from his swoon, and when he saw his brother so hang over him he flung his arm about his neck and drew his face again down to him and said lowly in his ear, 'Alas, alas, mine own dear brother, that I should thus have given thee thy death! But wherefore hadst thou no shield, and wherefore was it rent asunder and defied? O brother! for it grieveth me more than death to see this thing.' Then did Sir Balin tell him all that Sir Garlon and afterwards the damsel had told him of the Queen, and when Sir Balan heard it he moaned greatly and cried out that Garlon was a felon knight, well known about those marches for his evil deeds and lies, and the damsel he well believed, if she were going to King Mark, was as bad as he. 'Perchance Sir Garlon, said he, 'was the very knight she said had left her: and would I could find her or her squire,' he said, 'for even dead man as I am I fain would now abolish her lest she work more evil than this dolorous stroke she hath caused betwixt us two.'

When the damsel heard them thus speak, she feared for her life lest the wounded knight might be recovered and might find her, and stealthily she sped away to King Mark and after to Arthur's court, and there she told how she had overheard from Knights of Arthur's Table scandal beyond all disproof about Sir Lancelot and the Queen. And thus in truth the Dolorous Stroke was struck, which first shook to its base the stately order of the Table Round.

Then when the damsel left them came the Lady of the Lake and found Sir Balin and Sir Balan at their last breaths, and caused them to be solemnly buried, and sang above them an high song.' 

As a specimen of his more familiar prose, I select from a pile of his letters the following extract:--

'I got to the station a full quarter of an hour before the time, but the whole place was 'fourmillante.' I never saw such confusion before at any terminus, here or abroad. I stood and bawled ineffectually for porters till at last I took my portmanteau in hand and flung it into the truck of one of them, and told him to label 'Lymington,' which he promised to do; then I rushed to the ticket office, where I waited among the multitude, and only got my ticket after the time was up; ran out again, the whole platform seething and buzzing; could not find my luggage; at the very last saw it being wheeled trainward at the bottom of a heap of boxes; asked whether it was labelled 'Lymington;' bewildered porter knew nothing about it; train began to move. 1 caught hold of an open door, and was pulled in by two passengers. When I came to Brockenhurst no luggage for me; guard intimated that he had noticed such a portmanteau as the one I described labelled 'Southampton Junction;' accordingly I telegraphed up the line; then took an open boat and steered under the moon (previously warning my two boatmen that I couldn't see an inch before my nose) to Yarmouth; thence took a fly, and home about 10; and this morning sent a cart from Fairingford to meet the earliest boat, and recovered my luggage at last. You see, not only the Easter holiday-makers made the train double its ordinary length, but the Prince and Princess of Wales, with all their footmen and family, came along with us, and made confusion worse confounded.

_____________________________

From time to time and bit by bit he read over to me almost all his Poems, commenting on them as he read, and pausing to dictate a few words here and there for me to take down from his lips. The following are extracts from the notes so dictated by him.

As to the 'Poems by two Brothers,' he said: 'It was really by three brothers, for Frederic as well as Charles and myself wrote some of them--a very few--and would not acknowledge any, or allow his name as one of the brothers, This bookseller gave 45L in money and 5L worth of books, but the copyright was invalid, the authors being under age. This was tested afterwards when the successor to the original publisher wanted to republish, saying he could make 12,000L. The three brothers bound themselves to each other never to reveal who wrote this or that. None of the authors had ever been beyond their native county, and hardly beyond their native town. There were twenty-six misprints, but the publisher would not make a longer list of errata' than the seven which appear.

Of the 'Idylls of the King' (4) he said: 'When I was twenty-four I meant to write a whole great poem on it, and began it in the "Morte d'Arthur." I said I should do it in twenty years; but the reviews stopped me . . . By King Arthur I always meant the soul and by the Round Table the passions and capacities of a man. There is no grander subject in the world than King Arthur.'

(4) He bound up with one of the editions of the collected Idylls a letter which I sent to the Spectator on these poems, and he wrote to me; 'Your letter to the "Spectator" is the best, and indeed might he called the only true, critique of the Idylls. It is very succinctly and clearly written, and I liked it so much that I sent it by the Dean of Westminster' (Stanley), 'who was here the other day, to the Queen with the Idylls.'

When reading 'In Memoriam' he said: 'It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine. In the poem altogether private grief swells out into thought of and hope for, the whole world. It begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage--begins with death and ends in promise of a new life--a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at the close. It is a very impersonal poem as well as personal. There is more about myself in ''Ulysses" which was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than many poems in "In Memoriam." . . . It's too hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself . . . The general way of its being written was so queer that if there were a blank space I would put in a poem. ... I think of adding another to it, a speculative one, bringing out the thoughts of the "Higher Pantheism," and showing that all the arguments are about as good on one side as the other, and thus throw man back more on the primitive impulses and feelings.'

He explained that there were nine natural groups or divisions in the Poem, as follows: from Stanza I. to Stanza VlII.; from IX. to XX.; from XX. to XXVII.; from XXVIII. to XLIX.; from L. to LVIII.; from LIX. to LXXIL; from LXXII. to XCVIII.; from XCIX. to CIII.; from CIV. to CXXXI.

On Stanza XXXV., Verse 3, he said--

The meanings of the homeless sea, [The vastness of the future--'the enormity of the ages to come after your little life would act against that love.]

The sound of streams that swift or slow

Draw down Aeonian hills, and sow

The dust of continents to be.

Os Stanza XL., Verse 5--

And, doubtless, unto thee is given

A life that bears immortal fruit

In such great OFFICES AS SUIT [I hate that--I should not write so now--l'd almost rather sacrifice a meaning than let two s's come together.]

The full-grown energies of heaven. 

On Stanza XLVI., Verses 3 and 4--

A lifelong tract of time reveal'd;

The fruitful hours of still increase;

Days order'd in a wealthy peace,

And those five years ^ its richest field. [of our acquaintanceship] 

^ O Love, thy province were ^ not large, [Only five years!] ^ then

A bounded field, nor stretching far;

Look also, Love, a brooding star, [As if Lord of the whole life,]

A rosy warmth from marge to marge. 

On Stanza XLVII., Verse 4--

Upon the last and sharpest height,

Before the spirits fade away, ^ [^ into the Universal Spirit - but at least one last parting! and always would want it again -- of course.]

Some landing-place, to clasp and say,

'Farewell! We lose ourselves in light.' 

On Stanza LIII. 

LIII.

How many a father have I seen,

A sober man, among his boys,

Whose youth was full of foolish noise,

Who wears his manhood hale and green: 

And dare we to this fancy give,

That had the wild oat not been sown,

The soil, left barren, scarce had grown,

The grain by which a man may live?

[There's a passionate heat of nature in a rake sometimes - the nature that yields emotion--ally may come straighter than a prig's.]

Oh, if we held the doctrine sound

For life outliving heats of youth,

Yet who would preach it as a truth

To those that eddy round and round? [Yet don't you be making excuses for this kind of thing--it's unsafe. You must set a rule before youth.] 

Hold thou the good: define it well:

For fear divine Philosophy

Should push beyond her mark and be

Procuress to the Lords of Hell.

[There's need of rule to men also--though no particular one that 1 know of--it may be arbitrary.]

On Stanza LXI., Verse 3--

Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,

Where thy first form was made a man;

I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can

The soul of Shakspeare love thee more. [Perhaps he might--if he were a greater soul.] 

On Stanza LXIX., Verses 3, 4, and 5-- 

I met with scoffs, I met with scorns

From youth and babe and hoary hairs:

They call'd me in the public squares

The fool that wears a crown of thorns: [I tried to make my grief into a crown of these poems--but it is not to be taken too closely. To write verses about sorrow, grief and death is to wear a crown of thorns which ought to be put by, as people say.] 

They call'd me fool, they call'd me child:

I found an angel of the night;

The voice was low, the look was bright;

He look'd upon my crown and smiled: [The divine Thing in the gloom.] 

He reach'd the glory of a hand,

That seem'd to touch it into leaf:

The voice was not the voice of grief,

The words were hard to understand.

On Stanza LXXXVI.--

LXXXVI [This one I like too.]

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,

That rollest from the gorgeous gloom

Of evening over brake and bloom

And meadow, slowly breathing bare 

The round of space, and rapt below [The west wind--written at Bournemouth.]

Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood,

And shadowing down the horned flood

In ripples, fan my brows and blow 

The fever from thy cheek, and sigh

The full new life that feeds thy breath

Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,

Ill brethren, let THE FANCY fly [Imagination --the fancy--no particular fancy.]

From belt to belt of crimson seas

On leagues of odour streaming far,

To where in yonder orient star

A hundred spirits whisper 'Peace.' [The west wind rolling to the Eastern seas till it meets the evening star.]

On Stanza LXXXVII., Verse 6--

Where once we held debate, a band

Of youthful friends, on mind and art,

And labour, and the changing mart,

And all the framework of the land. [The 'Water Club,' because there was no wine. They used to make speeches--I never did.] 

On Stanza XCIV., Verse 3--

They haunt the silence of the breast, [I figure myself in this rather.]

Imaginations calm and fair,

The memory, like a cloudless air,

The conscience as a sea at rest.

pg 186 

On Stanza XCV., Verse 9 --

So word by word, and line by line,

The dead man touch'd me from the past,

And all at once it seem'd at last

THE living soul was flash'd on mine. [THE living soul--perchance of the Deity. The first reading was 'His living soul was flashed on mine'--but my conscience was troubled by 'his.' I've often had a strange feeling of being wound and wrapped in the Great Soul.] 

In Stanza CIII., Verses 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 12--

On that last night before we went

From out the doors where I was bred,

I dream'd a vision of the dead, [The dead man.]

Which left my after-morn content. 

Methought I dwelt within a hall,

And MAIDENS WITH ME: distant hills [All the human powers and talents that do not pass with life but go along with it.]

From HIDDEN SUMMITS fed with rills [The high--the divine--the origin of life.]

A RIVER sliding by the wall. [Life.] 

And which, tho' veil'd, was known to me,

The shape of him I loved, and love

For ever: then flew in a dove

And brought a summons from THE SEA. [Eternity.] 

And still as vaster grew the shore, [The great progress of the age as well as the opening of another world.]

And roll'd the floods in grander space, 

The maidens gather'd strength and grace

And presence, lordlier than before. 

As one would sing the death of war, [All the great hopes of science and men.]

And one would chant the history 

Of that great race, which is to be,

And one the shaping of a star. 

Whereat those maidens with one mind [He was wrong to drop his earthly hopes and powers--they will be still of use to him.]

Bewail'd their lot; I did them wrong: 

'We served thee here,' they said, 'so long,

And wilt thou leave us now behind?' 

In Stanza CXXII., Verse 1--

Oh, wast thou with me, dearest, then,

While I rose up against my doom, [Of grief.]

And yearn'd to burst the folded gloom, [If anybody thinks I ever called him 'dearest' in his life they are much mistaken, for I never even called him 'dear.']

To bare the eternal Heavens again. 

When reading 'Maud,' he said:

'It should be called "Maud, or the Madness." It is slightly akin to "Hamlet." No other poem (a monotone with plenty of change and no weariness) has been made into a drama where successive phases of passion in one person takes the place of successive persons. . . . The whole of the stanzas where he is mad in Bedlam, from "Dead, long dead," to "Deeper, ever so little deeper," were written in twenty minutes, and some mad doctor wrote to me that nothing since Shakspeare has been so good for madness as this.'

At the end of 'Maud' he declared, 'I've always said that "Maud" and "Guinevere" were the finest things I've written.'

--But want of space compels me to forego further quotations.

____________________

It is impossible to attempt, however slightly, any sketch of Tennyson 'in his habit as he lived,' without one brief and reverent word of reference to his domestic life and to her who was in every sense and way the half of it.

Not only did she take from off his shoulders all the burden of the details of existence and bear it on her own, but she was, besides, his continual counsellor, celtic, sympathiser, and friend in all his Art and Work. No marvel that he constantly exclaimed, 'My wife is the most wonderful woman in the world.'

His gratitude was profound, though mixed sometimes with pain at the devotion and laborious self-sacrifice which he vainly tried to moderate, and which undermined her strength and health.

'She has overwrought herself,' he wrote to me, 'with the multifarious correspondence of many years, and is now suffering for it. I trust that with perfect quiet she will recover; but it will never again do for her to insist upon answering every idle fellow who writes to me. I always prayed her not to do so, but she did not like the unanswered (she used to say) to feel wroth and unsatisfied with me.'

To his wife's perpetual and brooding love and care of him, and afterwards to his son's equal and measureless devotion, the world owes, under Providence, many years of Tennyson's prolonged life and many of his immortal Poems.

James Knowles. Jan. 1893.