Page:Tennyson; the Leslie Stephen lecture.djvu/16

 has turned into the deeper wonder at the well-known, the familiar, the unfathomable beauty.

Where did the new music of Tennyson come from? It is the sort of question that the critic is always asking, and it is not as foolish as it looks. It is true that a good poem is a singular and miraculous thing; it is also true that most good poems have ancestors. Here we come to the other side of the matter. The plain man is justified in saying, as against the critic, that the Lady of Shalott and the Lotos Eaters are not spoilt by anything the critic may have to say about other things. But he is not justified if he says that the critic has no business to meddle with the ancestry of these poems; that it is irrelevant to look for the old story of Shalott, and impertinent to compare the Lotos Eaters with The Castle of Indolence. Here the weakness of the plain man is apt to show itself. He thinks too idolatrously of what he worships; he thinks that the more you know about the poem the less you will