Chapter 11 - Page 2

Balliol,
mingling, like Browning, with the undergraduates, to whom the
Master's hospitality was freely extended. Yet, where he was
familiar, Tennyson was a gay companion, not shunning jest or even
paradox. "As Dr Johnson says, every man may be judged of by his
laughter": but no Boswell has chronicled the laughters of Tennyson.
"He never, or hardly ever, made puns or witticisms" (though one pun,
at least, endures in tradition), "but always lived in an attitude of
humour." Mr Jowett writes (and no description of the poet is better
than his) -

If I were to describe his outward appearance, I should say that he
was certainly unlike any one else whom I ever saw. A glance at some
of Watts' portraits of him will give, better than any description
which can be expressed in words, a conception of his noble mien and
look. He was a magnificent man, who stood before you in his native
refinement and strength. The unconventionality of his manners was in
keeping with the originality of his figure. He would sometimes say
nothing, or a word or two only, to the stranger who approached him,
out of shyness. He would sometimes come into the drawing-room
reading a book. At other times, especially to ladies, he was
singularly gracious and benevolent. He would talk about the
accidents of his own life with an extraordinary freedom, as at the
moment they appeared to present themselves to his mind, the days of
his boyhood that were passed at Somersby, and the old school of
manners which he came across in his own neighbourhood: the days of
the "apostles" at Cambridge: the years which he spent in London; the
evenings enjoyed at the Cock Tavern, and elsewhere, when he saw
another side of life, not without a kindly and humorous sense of the
ridiculous in his fellow-creatures. His repertory of stories was
perfectly inexhaustible; they were often about slight matters that
would scarcely bear repetition, but were told with such lifelike
reality, that they convulsed his hearers with laughter. Like most
story-tellers, he often repeated his favourites; but, like children,
his audience liked hearing them again and again, and he enjoyed
telling them. It might be said of him that he told more stories than
any one, but was by no means the regular story-teller. In the
commonest conversation he showed himself a man of genius.

To this description may be added another by Mr F. T. Palgrave:-

Every one will have seen men, distinguished in some line of work,
whose conversation (to take the old figure) either "smelt too
strongly of the lamp," or lay quite apart from their art or craft.
What, through all these years, struck me about Tennyson, was that
whilst he never deviated into poetical language as such, whether in
rhetoric or