h I understand him only too well.

But the splendour of furrowed fields is this: that like all brave things
they are made straight, and therefore they bend. In everything that bows
gracefully there must be an effort at stiffness. Bows arc beautiful when
they bend only because they try to remain rigid; and sword-blades
can curl like silver ribbons only because they are certain to spring
straight again. But the same is true of every tough curve of the
tree-trunk, of every strong-backed bend of the bough; there is hardly
any such thing in Nature as a mere droop of weakness. Rigidity yielding
a little, like justice swayed by mercy, is the whole beauty of the
earth. The cosmos is a diagram just bent beautifully out of shape.
Everything tries to be straight; and everything just fortunately fails.

The foil may curve in the lunge, but there is nothing beautiful about
beginning the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong
doctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts: but that is
no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. Do not be
an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the opportunities; fate can
be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try to bend,
any more than the trees try to bend. Try to grow straight, and life will
bend you.

Alas! I am giving the moral before the fable; and yet I hardly think
that otherwise you could see all that I mean in that enormous vision
of the ploughed hills. These great furrowed slopes are the oldest
architecture of man: the oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldest
botany his object. And for geometry, the mere word proves my case.

But when I looked at those torrents of ploughed parallels, that great
rush of rigid lines, I seemed to see the whole huge achievement of
democracy, Here was mere equality: but equality seen in bulk is more
superb than any supremacy. Equality free and flying, equality rushing
over hill and dale, equality charging the world--that was the meaning
of those military furrows, military in their identity, military in their
energy. They sculptured hill and dale with strong curves merely because
they did not mean to curve at all. They made the strong lines of
landscape with their stiffly driven swords of the soil. It is not only
nonsense, but blasphemy, to say that man has spoilt the country. Man has
created the country; it was his business, as the image of God. No hill,
covered with common scrub or patch