, left him
considerably compromised.

There is something still more comic than this, however, to be got out of
his visits to George Eliot. The visit he paid her at Witley under the
"much-waved wing" of the irrepressible Mrs. Greville, who "knew no law
but that of innocent and exquisite aberration," had a superb conclusion,
which "left our adventure an approved ruin." As James was about to
leave, and indeed was at the step of the brougham with Mrs. Greville,
G.H. Lewes called on him to wait a moment. He returned to the
doorstep, and waited till Lewes hurried back across the hall, "shaking
high the pair of blue-bound volumes his allusion to the uninvited, the
verily importunate loan of which by Mrs. Greville had lingered on the
air after his dash in quest of them":--

"Ah, those books--take them away, please, away, away!" I hear him
unreservedly plead while he thrusts them again at me, and I scurry
back into our conveyance.

The blue-bound volumes happened to be a copy of Henry James's own new
book--a presentation copy he had given to Mrs. Greville, and she, in
turn, with the best intentions, had tried to leave with George Eliot, to
be read and admired. George Eliot and Lewes had failed to connect their
young visitor with the volumes. Hence a situation so comic that even its
victim could not but enjoy it:--

Our hosts hadn't so much as connected book with author, or author
with visitor, or visitor with anything but the convenience of his
ridding them of an unconsidered trifle; grudging, as they so
justifiedly did, the impingement of such matters on their
consciousness. The vivid demonstration of one's failure to
penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes's gesture, which
could scarcely have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom.

Henry James Was more fortunate in Tennyson as a host. Tennyson had read
at least one of his stories and liked it. All the same, James was
disappointed in Tennyson. He expected to find him a poet signed and
stamped, and found him only a booming bard. Not only was Tennyson not
Tennysonian: he was not quite real. His conversation came as a shock to
his guest:--

He struck me as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge.

As Tennyson read _Locksley Hall_ to his guests, Henry James had to pinch
himself, "not at all to keep from swooning, but much rather to set up
some rush of sensibility." What a lovely touch of malice