d
better assume it to be true.' It isn't better, it is only more comfortable.
A great many more people suffer from making up their mind too early and too
decisively than suffer from open-mindedness and the power to relate new
experience to old experience. No one can write you out a prescription for
life. You can't anticipate experience; and if you do, you will only find
that you have to begin all over again."

XXI

OF BEAUTY

Father Payne had been away on one of his rare journeys. He always
maintained that a journey was one of the most enlivening things in the
world, if it was not too often indulged in. "It intoxicates me," he said,
"to see new places, houses, people."

"Why don't you travel more, then?" said someone.

"For that very reason," said Father Payne; "because it intoxicates me--and
I am too old for that sort of self-indulgence!"

"It's a dreadful business," he went on, "that northern industrial country.
There's a grandeur about it--the bare valleys, the steep bleak fields, the
dead or dying trees, the huge factories. Those great furnaces, with tall
iron cylinders and galleries, and spidery contrivances, and black pipes,
and engines swinging vast burdens about, and moving wheels, are fearfully
interesting and magnificent. They stand for all sorts of powers and forces;
they frighten me by their strength and fierceness and submissiveness. But
the land is awfully barren of beauty, and I doubt if that can be wholesome.
It all fascinates me, it increases my pride, but it makes me unhappy too,
because it excludes beauty so completely. Those bleak stone-walled fields
of dirty grass, the lines of grey houses, are fine in their way--but one
wants colour and clearness. I longed for a glimpse of elms and
water-meadows, and soft-wooded pastoral hills. It produces a shrewd,
strong, good-tempered race, but very little genius. There is something
harsh about Northerners--they haven't enough colour."

"But you are always saying," said Rose, "that we must look after form, and
chance colour."

"Yes, but that is because you are _in statu pupillari_," said Father
Payne, "If a man begins by searching for colour and ornament and richness,
he gets clotted and glutinous. Colour looks after itself--but it isn't
clearness that I am afraid of, it is shrewdness--I think that is, on the
whole, a low quality, but it is awfully strong! What I am afraid of, in
bare laborious country like that, is that people should only think o