“Evidently you don’t agree with them, Uncle Tom. Now I want you to be perfectly frank and tell me just how you feel about Gervase.” “Well, I will.” The vicar spoke slowly and weightily. “Since you press the question, his whole outlook appears to me to be changing.” “But not for the worse, surely?” “That I cannot say. It is only my opinion and I give it for what it is worth, but I don’t quite approve this change which is coming over Gervase.” “Didn’t you find him happy and cheerful?” “I did. But that is not the point. My feeling is that if Gervase were perfectly rational he would not attach so much importance to the--er--lucubrations of this fellow, John Smith.” “But Gervase has always been a great lover of poetry,” said the surprised Millicent. “He took prizes for it at Eton, and at Oxford he won a medal. His love of poetry is really nothing new; in fact he passes for an expert on the subject.” “That is my point. I have always shared that view of Gervase. In common with the rest of the world, I have greatly admired his translations from the Greek. But that being the case, the question one must now ask oneself is, why does a man of sure taste, of real scholarship, suddenly surrender his mind to the fantastic trivialities of a half-baked, half-educated village loafer?” “But you’ve not read the poem,” said Millicent with a little air of triumph, in which, however, relief was uppermost. “No good thing can come out of Babylon. It isn’t reasonable to expect it. Why, I’ve known that fellow Smith nearly twenty years. I know exactly what education he has had, I know his record.” “I won’t venture to argue with you, Uncle Tom. Your opinion is worth so much more than mine, but isn’t there such a thing as genius?” “There may be. Although it is a thing I am rather skeptical about myself; that is to say I regard it primarily as an infinite capacity for taking pains, a natural fruit of learning and study. That is why to my mind it is more _wholesome_ to believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. Nay, it must have been so, for it is surely a rational canon that the most highly trained mind of the age wrote Hamlet, Othello and King Lear, rather than an inspired clodhopper who began life as a butcher’s apprentice.” “Well, Uncle Tom,” said his niece demurely, “of course I mustn’t argue with you, but aren’t your views rather like those of a character in a most amusing play I saw in London the other day? When a dramatic critic was asked to criticize a play, he said, ‘How can one begin to criticize a play until one knows the name of the author?’” “Quite so, quite so,” said Mr. Perry-Hennington triumphantly. “A very apt illustration of my point.” “But it is also an illustration of mine. At least I hope it is.” “Then I’m afraid we are arguing about entirely different things.”