try is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" and his
portrait studies broke in on the old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott,"
with its pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of commonplace
into something very beautiful, was new.

We who succeeded Stedman by some years loved all the beauty of Tennyson
while we were not especially struck by those mediaeval lay figures which
he labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Percival." They
were too much like what the English people at that time insisted that
the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot would have profited in our
eyes by a touch of the fire of Milton's "Lucifer." But the lyricism of
Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now as it was then. It is
the desire for "independence," the fear of following a conventionality,
a fear that calls itself audacity, which brushes away the delicate and
scientific of this exquisite poet simply because he does not represent a
Movement. And yet all these new movements are very old movements. The
result of the education given me by books was to convince me that the
man of culture proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any literary
expression as really new and if he cannot enjoy the old, when the old is
of all time. The beautiful and the real can never be old or new because
they are the same through the movement of time. To explain what I mean,
let me come suddenly down to date and permit me to quote from Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch's "On the Art of Reading." He is writing of the Bible,
which is never old:

I daresay, after all, that the best way is not to bother a boy too
early and overmuch with history; that the best way is to let him
ramp at first through the Scriptures even as he might through "The
Arabian Nights": to let him take the books as they come, merely
indicating, for instance, that Job is a great poem, the Psalms
great lyrics, the story of Ruth a lovely idyll, the Song of Songs
the perfection of an Eastern love-poem. Well, and what then? He
will certainly get less of "The Cotter's Saturday Night" into it,
and certainly more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the
whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham
and Laban; the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn; the figures
of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rizpah beneath
the gibbet; Sisera bowing in weariness; Saul--great Saul--by the