THE WOODEN HORSE.

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 85, 1 July 1927, Page 14

THE WOODEN HORSE.

AN OCCASIONAL COLUMN. Ami with great lies about bis wooden horse Set the crew laughing and forgot his course. —J. E. Flecker. A LITTLE while ago I was deploring the conscienceless inaccuracy of the literary anecdotter. Examples have turned up since, two or three a week, to keep me despondent; and the latest of them is this. Mrs or Miss Olive Heseltine has written a book on “Conversation,” in which she tells a Tennyson story. As she tells it, Tennyson is made to remark to a very shy girl: “Your stays are too tight.” she to reply, gaspingly, “Ob, i no. 1 assure you, indeed they are not!,” he to rejoin blithely. “Yes, they are, I can hear ’em creaking,” then ■ some time later to call out (so ending j this intellectual debate), “It wasn’t j your stays, it was my braces!” Ha, j ha. very goed. But, bless you. that’s not the story. Tennyson (with all ! proper deference to the down-with-j Tennyson-and-jump-on-him school of j critics) —Tennyson was not such a : , galoot as all that. Tennyson's rude- , ? ness was colossal; but he was rude on j great occasions. His rudeness was j not; colossal ineptitude, like the rudeness in the Heseltine story. No, Tennyson was not clumsily embarrassing a shy giil, he was dynamiting a tuft-hunter. He had been pursued by her. pursued even into the garden, where as he sat she plumped herself down beside him . . . "Madam,” said he, suddenly, with awful majesty, “Your stays creak,” and stalked away. Later on he repented him of the thunderbolt and returned to where the lady still; sat, overwhelmed. “Madam, j I was wrong: it was my braces”; and 1 he stalked away again. Mrs (or Miss) Jleseltine’s story -was all right—it was the details that were ■wrong, as in the famous case of the two men who met in Throgmorton Street: “Is (hat right.” said one. “that Abe Edelstein made £4OOO in rubbers at Amsterdam last summer?” “Weil,” replied the other, “the story is right, only the details are wrong. It wasn’t last summer, it was this spring. It wasn’t Amsterdam, it was in Paris. It wasn’t rubbers, it was oils. It I wasn’t £4OOO, it was £40,000. It wasn’t Abe. it was me. And I didn't make it, I lost it.” Tennvjjon was blessed, indeed, with the ability to relieve his feelings by explosive! rudeness. There was the excellent sherry explosion, for infitanee. Tennyson was the guest of Jowett, and after dinner was requested to read to the company one of his newly written poems. He brought down a manuscript from his room and (read out a poem. The respectful Quests waited, when all was over, for •Jewett to express their hearts. At last Jowett’s little silver voice broke si long and uneasy silence: “I wouldn’t (publish that, Tennyson, if I were you.” Tennyson glared. One may picture Jowett as a forlorn little Casabianca iabout to be blasted into Ewigkeit . . . Then the Tennysonian bellow: “Come to that, Master, the sherry you gave us at luncheon was positively filthy!” Everybody asked Tennyson to repffi, or at any rate Tennyson read to everybody. There is in Henry James’s “Middle Years” a wonderful account ‘-of these impressive performances, jvhen the poet roooolled out his lines: JJary the greanat Duke with an empire’s lamentaaation. “There’s a wonderful touch,” according to Mr Harold Nicolson, he say, “That’s very tender,” or “How*" beautiful that is”! All that was expected of the audience, says Mr Nicolson, again, was their rapt attention, and if, at the end, any comment was; exacted, it was eas3 r to evade the point by becoming “broken down.” Hear what Bayard Taylor says: I spoke of the Idyll of Guinevere as being perhaps his finest poem, and said that I could not read it aloud without my voice breaking down at certain passages. “Why, I can read it and keep my voice!” he exclaimed triumphantly. This I doubted, and he agreed to try, after we went down to our wives. But the first thing be did was to produce a magnum of wonderful sherry. (Tennyson sucked up his wine with gusto. If the phrase seems irreverent, blame Sir Edmund Gosse—“a gaunt, i black, tousled man, rough in speech, ! brooding like an old gipsy over his! inch of clay pipe stuffed with shag, and sucking in port wine with gus.to.”] .... We had two glasses apiece, when he said. “To-night you shall help me to drink one of the few bottles of my Waterloo—lßls.” The bottle was brought, and after another glass all round, Tennyson took up the “Idylls of the King.” His reading is a strange monotonous chant, with unexpected falling inflexions, which I cannot describe hut can imitate exactly. It was very impressive. In spite of myself I became very much excited as he went on. Finally, when Arthur Forgives the Queen, Tennyson’s voiice broke. I found tears on my cheeks and Mr and Mrs Tennyson were crying, one on either side of me. He made an effort and went on to the end, closing grandly. “How can you say,” I asked (referring to the previous conversations), “that you have no surety of permanent fame? This poem will only die with the language in which it is written.” Mrs Tennyson started up from her couch. “It is true!” she exclaimed; “I have told Alfred the same thing.” It is impossible, surely, to deny that there was a supremely moving qus.lity i In Tennyson’s port. The index to Sir Walter Raleigh’s j Letters guides me back to a Tennyson | passage: Leslie Stephen is a good man. He says that literature is a demcral- ! ising occupation, because success im- j plies publicity. There you have it. i Fancy grieving because having found ! a glow-worm and having written | down how you found it and printed 1 your account, you hear nobody say. j “How delightful.” But that’s where j poets get to —mostly. Think of i Tennyson, who, whenever he saw an ; American, ran to the nearest hedge and stuck his head into it, and lislcned with heating heart for the American’s remarks. And if the American said nothing he went home sick. Jolly sort of life, isn’t it? Fitzgerald was once over-bold. He said that the later poems seemed to him to want, perhaps, a little of the “champagne flavour” of the old: and this offensive remark estranged him and Tennyson for 40 years. J. H. E. Si The Prefect of Milan, who has undertaken to censor the epitaphs in his district, will not, one may hope, cramp the style of their composers in the way that a certain thrifty Scots legatee once did. His legacy carried a condition that he should erect a stone in memory of the dead and should grace it with a “verse of poetry.” The local stone-mason undertook tc produce this at so much a letter, but his offe.of Here lies the corp Of Thomas Thorp was rejected on the ground of exces- j sive length. Next day he submitted Thorp’s Corpse, and got the contract