bout art.
The canons of criticism are no more than the apology for our personal
preferences, no matter how gravely we back them. Sometimes it has
happened that a book or a poem has succeeded in winning the approval of
many generations, and so we may call it a classic. Yet what is the virtue
of a classic, or of the deliberate and stately billows going with the
wind when the world has sweep and is fair, or of a child with a flower,
or of the little smile on the face of the dead boy in the muck when the
guns were filling us with fear and horror of mankind? I don't know; but
something in us appears to save us from the punishing comet of Zeus.

XXI. The South Downs

MAY 22, 1920. The southern face of the hill fell, an abrupt promontory,
to the woods of the plain. Its face was scored by the weather, and the
dry drainage channels were headlong cascades of grey pebbles. Clumps of
heather, sparse oak scrub with young leaves of bronze, contorted birch,
and this year's croziers of the bracken (heaven knows their secret for
getting lush aromatic sap out of such stony poverty), all made a tough
life which held up the hill, steep as it was; though the hill was going,
for the roots of some of the oaks were exposed, empty coils of rope from
which the burden had slipped. In that sea of trees whose billows came to
the foot of our headland, and out of sight beneath its waves, children
were walking, gathering bluebells. We knew they were there, for we could
hear their voices. But there was no other sign of our form of life except
a neolithic flint scraper one of us had picked up on the hilltop. The
marks of the man who made it were as clear as the voices below. It had
been lost since yesterday, it might be--anyhow, about the day the first
Pyramid was finished. It depends on how one looks at the almanac. For you
could feel the sun fire was young. It had not been long kindled. Its heat
in the herbage was moist. One of the youngsters with me, bruising the
bracken and snuffing it, said it smelt of almond and cucumber. Another
said the crushed birch leaves smelt of sour apples. We could not say what
the oak leaves smelt like. Then another grabbed a handful of leafmould,
damp and brown and full of fibre. What did that smell of? They were not
sure that they liked it. Perhaps it was the smell of the hill. They
admitted that it wasn't a bad smell. They seemed a little afraid of that
odour.

But I was trying to read, and neolithic times an