A story is normally obliged to make progress of a kind too: to have things happen with purpose, so as to satisfy that ‘desire for orderly narration’ that George Eliot once strikingly identified as a mark of growing up. Tennyson read novels voraciously, and much admired Vanity Fair (IR 148, 113); and he was, by all reports, a marvellous teller of stories in the flesh, ‘told with such lifelike reality, that they convulsed his hearers with laughter’ (M. ii. 461). But in his poetry, says T. S. Eliot, ‘Tennyson could not tell a story at all’; at least, his storytelling in verse (of which there is a good deal) is customarily odd, marked by a kind of imaginative vacillation, analogous to those I have been describing in the previous chapter: a wavering between the purposeful business of narrative and curiously regressive counter-currents of feeling and idiom that embarrass the proper ambitions of plot. (A progress, W. David Shaw reminds us, is a kind of poem as well as a sort of movement, like Gray's ‘Progress of Poesy’, in which a history gradually unfolds along a learning curve: a Tennysonian example would be ‘The Palace of Art’, the relationship of which to the traditional sequentiality of the ‘progress’ genre is almost parodically evasive.) With admiring good humour, Henry James said of Tennyson's language, ‘When he wishes to represent movement, the phrase always seems to me to pause and slowly pivot upon itself, or at most to move backward.’ It was an unprogressive gift, which (as James thought) necessitated the failure of any attempt Tennyson might make to dramatize action. Certainly, gathering events to a denoument promises to be uphill work for a poet who finds his instinctive subject matter in things that are still to occur: picturesquely, like Galahad, questing for the grail, but not reaching it yet; or mundanely, like a walk to meet the mail, which, by the poem's end, is still only just about to arrive (R. (ii). 234, 273); or with alarming jollity, as in ‘The Voyage’, an upbeat Ancient Mariner, which describes a trip that never ends (‘We know the merry world is round, | And we may sail for evermore’ (R. (ii). 257, ll. 95–6)).