honey of life,
and it becomes a kind of stimulant which excites rather than
tranquillises. I do not mean that one should of set purpose avoid the
sight of wonderful prospects and treasure-houses of art, or act as the
poet Gray did when he was travelling with Horace Walpole in the Alps,
when they drew up the blinds of their carriage to exclude the sight of
such prodigious and unmanning horrors!

Still I think that if one is on the right track, and if beauty has its
due place and value in life, there will be less and less impulse to go
far afield for it, in search of something to thrill the dull
perception and quicken it into life. I believe that people ought to be
content to live most of their lives in the same place, and to grow to
love familiar scenes. Familiarity with a scene ought not to result in
the obliteration of all consciousness of it: one ought rather to find
in use and affection an increased power of subtle interpretation, a
closer and finer understanding of the qualities which underlie the
very simplest of English landscapes. I live, myself, for most of the
year in a countryside that is often spoken of by its inhabitants as
dull, tame, and featureless; yet I cannot say with what daily renewal
of delight I wander in the pastoral Cambridge landscape, with its long
low lines of wold, its whitewalled, straw-thatched villages embowered
in orchards and elms, its slow willow-bound streams, its level
fenland, with the far-seen cloud-banks looming overhead: or again in
the high-ridged, well-wooded land of Sussex, where I often live, the
pure lines of the distant downs seen over the richly coloured
intervening weald grow daily more dear and intimate, and appeal more
and more closely to the deepest secrets of sweetness and delight. For
as we train ourselves to the perception of beauty, we become more and
more alive to a fine simplicity of effect; we find the lavish
accumulation of rich and magnificent glories bewildering and
distracting.

And this is the same with other arts; we no longer crave to be dazzled
and flooded by passionate and exciting sensation, we care less and
less for studied mosaics of word and thought, and more and more for
clearness and form and economy and austerity. Restless exuberance
becomes unwelcome, complexity and intricacy weary us; we begin to
perceive the beauty of what Fitzgerald called the 'great still books.'
We do not desire a kaleidoscopic pageant of blending and colliding
emotions,