en, my introductress having accompanied
us, I sat upstairs with him in his study, that he might read to us some
poem of his own that we should venture to propose, it was then that
mystifications dropped, that everything in the least dislocated fell
into its place, and that image and picture stamped themselves strongly
and finally, or to the point even, as I recover it, of leaving me almost
too little to wonder about. He had not got a third of the way through
Locksley Hall, which, my choice given me, I had made bold to suggest he
should spout--for I had already heard him spout in Eaton Place--before I
had begun to wonder that I didn't wonder, didn't at least wonder more
consumedly; as a very little while back I should have made sure of my
doing on any such prodigious occasion. I sat at one of the windows that
hung over space, noting how the windy, watery autumn day, sometimes
sheeting it all with rain, called up the dreary, dreary moorland or the
long dun wolds; I pinched myself for the determination of my identity
and hung on the reader's deep-voiced chant for the credibility of his: I
asked myself in fine why, in complete deviation from everything that
would have seemed from far back certain for the case, I failed to swoon
away under the heaviest pressure I had doubtless ever known the romantic
situation bring to bear. So lucidly all the while I considered, so
detachedly I judged, so dissentingly, to tell the whole truth, I
listened; pinching myself, as I say, not at all to keep from swooning,
but much rather to set up some rush of sensibility. It was all
interesting, it was at least all odd; but why in the name of poetic
justice had one anciently heaved and flushed with one's own recital of
the splendid stuff if one was now only to sigh in secret "Oh dear, oh
dear"? The author lowered the whole pitch, that of expression, that of
interpretation above all; I heard him, in cool surprise, take even more
out of his verse than he had put in, and so bring me back to the point I
had immediately and privately made, the point that he wasn't
Tennysonian. I felt him as he went on and on lose that character beyond
repair, and no effect of the organ-roll, of monotonous majesty, no
suggestion of the long echo, availed at all to save it. What the case
came to for me, I take it--and by the case I mean the intellectual, the
artistic--was that it lacked the intelligence, the play of
discrimination, I should have taken for granted in it, a