f
the country. This is an error rooted in the intellectual pride of
mediocrity; and is one of the many examples of a truth in the idea
that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob one must
either be on a level with it (as I am) or be really high up, like the
saints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics; slang and rude dialect
can be relished by a really literary taste, but not by a merely bookish
taste. And when these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not talk of
Nature in an appreciative way, they really mean that they do not talk
in a bookish way. They do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones,
or pigs or slugs, or horses or anything you please. They talk piggishly
about pigs; and sluggishly, I suppose, about slugs; and are refreshingly
horsy about horses. They speak in a stony way of stones; they speak in
a cloudy way of clouds; and this is surely the right way. And if by any
chance a simple intelligent person from the country comes in contact
with any aspect of Nature unfamiliar and arresting, such a person's
comment is always worth remark. It is sometimes an epigram, and at worst
it is never a quotation.

Consider, for instance, what wastes of wordy imitation and ambiguity the
ordinary educated person in the big towns could pour out on the subject
of the sea. A country girl I know in the county of Buckingham had never
seen the sea in her life until the other day. When she was asked what
she thought of it she said it was like cauliflowers. Now that is a
piece of pure literature--vivid, entirely independent and original,
and perfectly true. I had always been haunted with an analogous kinship
which I could never locate; cabbages always remind me of the sea and
the sea always reminds me of cabbages. It is partly, perhaps, the veined
mingling of violet and green, as in the sea a purple that is almost dark
red may mix with a green that is almost yellow, and still be the blue
sea as a whole. But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that
curl over cavernously like waves, and it is partly again that dreamy
repetition, as of a pattern, that made two great poets, Eschylus and
Shakespeare, use a word like "multitudinous" of the ocean. But just
where my fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman rushed (so to
speak) to my imaginative rescue. Cauliflowers are twenty times better
than cabbages, for they show the wave breaking as well as curling, and
the efflorescence of the branching foam, blind