Chapter 10

--1890.

In the year 1889 the poet's health had permitted him to take long
walks on the sea-shore and along the cliffs, one of which, by reason
of its whiteness, he had named "Taliessin," "the splendid brow." His
mind ran on a poem founded on an Egyptian legend (of which the source
is not mentioned), telling how "despair and death came upon him who
was mad enough to try to probe the secret of the universe." He also
thought of a drama on Tristram, who, in the Idylls, is treated with
brevity, and not with the sympathy of the old writer who cries, "God
bless Tristram the knight: he fought for England!" But early in
1890 Tennyson suffered from a severe attack of influenza. In May Mr
Watts painted his portrait, and

"Divinely through all hindrance found the man."

Tennyson was a great admirer of Miss Austen's novels: "The realism
and life-likeness of Miss Austen's Dramatis Personae come nearest to
those of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is a sun to which Jane
Austen, though a bright and true little world, is but an asteroid."
He was therefore pleased to find apple-blossoms co-existing with ripe
strawberries on June 28, as Miss Austen has been blamed, by minute
philosophers, for introducing this combination in the garden party in
Emma. The poet, like most of the good and great, read novels
eagerly, and excited himself over the confirmation of an adult male
in a story by Miss Yonge. Of Scott, "the most chivalrous literary
figure of the century, and the author with the widest range since
Shakespeare," he preferred Old Mortality, and it is a good choice.
He hated "morbid and introspective tales, with their oceans of sham
philosophy." At this time, with catholic taste, he read Mr Stevenson
and Mr Meredith, Miss Braddon and Mr Henry James, Ouida and Mr Thomas
Hardy; Mr Hall Caine and Mr Anstey; Mrs Oliphant and Miss Edna Lyall.
Not everybody can peruse all of these very diverse authors with
pleasure. He began his poem on the Roman gladiatorial combats;
indeed his years, fourscore and one, left his intellectual eagerness
as unimpaired as that of Goethe. "A crooked share," he said to the
Princess Louise, "may make a straight furrow." "One afternoon he had
a long waltz with M- in the ballroom." Speaking of

"All the charm of all the Muses
Often flowering in a lonely word"

in Virgil, he adduced, rather strangely, the cunctantem ramum, said
of the Golden Bough, in the Sixth AEneid. The choice is odd, because
the Sibyl has just told AEneas that, if he be destined to pluck the
branch of gold, ipse volens facilisque sequetur, "it will come off of
its own accord," like the sacred ti branches of the Fijians, which
bend down to be plucked for the Fire rite. Yet, when the predestined
AEneas