to the grass, are
marvellous fine things to look upon....

But we want the ploughed fields beyond, the real woods with stacked-up
timber, German fashion; the orchards and the kitchen gardens; the tracks
across the high-lying sheep downs; the towing-paths where the barges
come up the rivers; the deep lanes where the hay-carts have left long
wisps on the overhanging elms; the high-roads running from village to
village, with the hooded carts and bicycles and even the solemn
Juggernaut traction-engines upon them. We want not only to rest from
living, to take refreshment in life's kindly pauses and taste (like
Candide in his arbour) the pleasantness of life's fruits. We want also
to live.

But there is living and living. There is, unfortunately, not merely such
breezy work-a-dayness as we have been talking of, but something very
different indeed beyond the walls of our private garden. There are
black, oozy factory yards and mangy grass-plots heaped with brickbat and
refuse; and miles of iron railing, and acres of gaunt and genteel
streets not veiled enough in fog; a metaphorical _beyond the garden
walls_, in which a certain number of us graduate for the ownership of
sooty shrubberies and clammy orchid houses. And we poor latter-day
mortals have become so deadly accustomed to the routine of useless work
and wasteful play, that a writer must needs cross all the _t_'s and dot
all the _i_'s of his conviction (held also by other sentimentalists and
cranks called Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) that the bread and wine of
life are not grown in the Black Country; no, nor life's flowers in the
horticultural establishments (I will not call them gardens) of suburban
villas.

Fortunately, however, this casual-looking universe is not without its
harmonies, as well as ironies. And one of these arrangements would seem
to be that our play educates the aims and methods of our work. If we lay
store by satisfactions which imply the envy and humiliation of other
folk, why then we set about such work as humiliates our neighbours or
fills them with enviousness, saving the case where others, sharing our
tastes, do alike by us. Without going to such lengths (the mention of
which has got me a reputation for lack of human sympathy) there remains
the fact that if our soul happen to take delight in, let us say,
futility--well, then, futility will litter existence with shreds of
coloured paper and plaster comfits trodden into mud, as after a day of
ca