1 64 IDLER URST: 



touched in some sort this matter of popular song. 

 With a general democratising process at work, we 

 get naturally width, not point or edge ; taste being 

 unconcentrated, is vulgar ; there is a common igno- 

 rance of good verse exactly as there is of good 

 marrowfats. We are all pea-eaters (with our knives, 

 too, some of us) all critics ; and the standard, of 

 legume or laureate, drops to the multitudinous 

 average. Gervase fancies it is something like that. 

 None of the finer perceptions can be taught. People 

 think they know at least all about external nature 

 offhand. Some one lately referred quite reve- 

 rently to a passage in " Oliver Twist," where the sun- 

 light is reflected from a pool of blood on the floor 

 to the ceiling of Nancy Sikes's garret. " I told her," 

 says Gervase, "that I preferred Shelley's handling of 

 the angle of incidence and reflection 



' The lake-reflected sun illume, 

 The yellow bees in the ivy bloom.' 



' Oh, but that's only poetry ! ' says the precious critic. 

 One touch, of course, is sheer beastly impossibility ; 

 the other is an instantaneous photograph, besides the 

 ' immortality ' part of it." 



From this we strayed to considerations of natural 

 descriptions and landscape feeling in the poets. I 



