restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet
I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the
point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: "If all
the trees were bread and cheese"--which is, indeed a rich and gigantic
vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese
there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where
I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me
as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil and this anonymous
rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality
which we require in exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it
rhymes to "breeze" and "seas" (an essential point); that it is emphatic
in sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. For
their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often
say, "Cheese it!" or even "Quite the cheese." The substance itself is
imaginative. It is ancient--sometimes in the individual case, always
in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk,
which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with
soda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought
of it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale.
Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.

But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song.
Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made an
eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular and even
illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four successive
days in four roadside inns in four different counties. In each inn they
had nothing but bread and cheese; nor can I imagine why a man should
want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it. In each inn
the cheese was good; and in each inn it was different. There was a noble
Wensleydale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so
on. Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from that
paltry and mechanical civilization which holds us all in bondage. Bad
customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism. Good customs
are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence. Both
the good and bad civilization cover us as with a canopy, and protect us
from all that is outside. But a good civilization spreads over us
freely like a tree, varyi