is no harm in saying that I often need an interpreter. I had a
case the other night when a man I know brought in a friend for
consultation--a youth of the round-headed, flaxen, Teutonic type,
rather rare here, who came from a village still more remote from the
world than this one. Not one word of his fluent and frequent speeches
could I understand. It was largely a question of intonation I
believe--but there it was.

He had the wild, inspired look of a savage. He again could neither
read nor write, though he must have been at school within the last
ten or twelve years; but, as I think I have said elsewhere, it is not
uncommon for boys to go through the school course and fail to pass
the standards. There are here two families in particular, admirable
workmen, who for two generations have left school without having
acquired either writing or reading. One wonders deeply what kind of
processes go on in the minds of these fine young men, steady workmen,
as they are, good husbands, kind fathers, useful citizens oftener
than not. What is their conception of God, of human destiny? How does
Religion get at them? Or does it? Shall we ever know? Not if Mr. Hardy
cannot tell us. No other poet of peasant origin has done so--neither
Clare, nor Blomfield, nor even Burns. Mr. Hardy has told us something,
and might have told us a good deal more if by the time he had learned
his craft, he had not learned to be chiefly interested in himself.
That is the way of poets.

Then there's _The Shropshire Lad_, a fake perhaps, since its author
was not a peasant, but a divine little book. _The Shropshire Lad_ is
morbid, unless lads are so in Shropshire--in which case they, too, are
morbid; but it is a golden book of whose beauty and felicity I never
tire. Technically it is by far the most considerable thing since _In