Page:Tennyson; the Leslie Stephen lecture.djvu/14

 The Devil's Advocate is always worth listening to, and not always easy to refute. It may be true that Homer could not draw the maps of a campaign nor the plan of a country-house; that Dante was too reckless in his punishments and too careful about the spots in the moon; that Milton went wrong, if not as Bentley thought yet in the way Pope has described him. It is easy to collect instances of this kind, and of a much severer kind, about these and other great poets. But the plain man (though his authority would hardly be allowed either by Milton or Tennyson) is generally right, even if he may not be right in all particulars as to this sort of argument. The plain man feels simply that the good things are not touched; that even though the faults and errors may detract from one's estimate of the poet's work as a whole, they do not spoil the good things. Let us suppose that the Lady of Shalott and the Lotos Eaters and Tithonus are absolutely good; then they are not less good because other less good things were written by the