order to feel like that." High living will reject the tomato. Plain
thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable
sinfulness of war. High living will convince us that nothing is more
materialistic than to despise a pleasure as purely material. And plain
thinking will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to
reserve our horror chiefly for material wounds.

The only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart. If
that be gone, it can be brought back by no turnips or cellular
clothing; but only by tears and terror and the fires that are not
quenched. If that remain, it matters very little if a few Early
Victorian armchairs remain along with it. Let us put a complex entree
into a simple old gentleman; let us not put a simple entree into a
complex old gentleman. So long as human society will leave my
spiritual inside alone, I will allow it, with a comparative submission,
to work its wild will with my physical interior. I will submit to
cigars. I will meekly embrace a bottle of Burgundy. I will humble
myself to a hansom cab. If only by this means I may preserve to myself
the virginity of the spirit, which enjoys with astonishment and fear. I
do not say that these are the only methods of preserving it. I incline
to the belief that there are others. But I will have nothing to do
with simplicity which lacks the fear, the astonishment, and the joy
alike. I will have nothing to do with the devilish vision of a child
who is too simple to like toys.

The child is, indeed, in these, and many other matters, the best guide.
And in nothing is the child so righteously childlike, in nothing does
he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity, than in the
fact that he sees everything with a simple pleasure, even the complex
things. The false type of naturalness harps always on the distinction
between the natural and the artificial. The higher kind of naturalness
ignores that distinction. To the child the tree and the lamp-post are
as natural and as artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them
are natural but both supernatural. For both are splendid and
unexplained. The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame
with which Sam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the
gold of fairy-tales. In the middle of the wildest fields the most
rustic child is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. And the only
spiritual or philosophical objection to steam