and the dull consciousness of the poem of madness, with its dumb
gnawing confusion of pain and wandering memory; the hero being
finally left, in the author's words, "sane but shattered."

Tennyson's letters of the time show that the critics succeeded in
wounding him: it was not a difficult thing to do. Maud was
threatened with a broadside from "that pompholygous, broad-blown
Apollodorus, the gifted X." People who have read Aytoun's diverting
Firmilian, where Apollodorus plays his part, and who remember "gifted
Gilfillan" in Waverley, know who the gifted X. was. But X. was no
great authority south of Tay.

Despite the almost unanimous condemnation by public critics, the
success of Maud enabled Tennyson to buy Farringford, so he must have
been better appreciated and understood by the world than by the
reviewers.

In February 1850 Tennyson returned to his old Arthurian themes, "the
only big thing not done," for Milton had merely glanced at Arthur,
Dryden did not


"Raise the Table Round again,"


and Blackmore has never been reckoned adequate. Vivien was first
composed as Merlin and Nimue, and then Geraint and Enid was adapted
from the Mabinogion, the Welsh collection of Marchen and legends,
things of widely different ages, now rather Celtic, or Brythonic, now