es of purple heath, could have been so
sublimely hilly as that ridge up to which the ranked furrows rose like
aspiring angels. No valley, confused with needless cottages and
towns, can have been so utterly valleyish as that abyss into which the
down-rushing furrows raged like demons into the swirling pit.

It is the hard lines of discipline and equality that mark out a
landscape and give it all its mould and meaning. It is just because the
lines of the furrow arc ugly and even that the landscape is living and
superb. As I think I have remarked elsewhere, the Republic is founded on
the plough.

The Philosophy of Sight-seeing

It would be really interesting to know exactly why an intelligent
person--by which I mean a person with any sort of intelligence--can and
does dislike sight-seeing. Why does the idea of a char-a-banc full of
tourists going to see the birth-place of Nelson or the death-scene of
Simon de Montfort strike a strange chill to the soul? I can tell quite
easily what this dim aversion to tourists and their antiquities does not
arise from--at least, in my case. Whatever my other vices (and they are,
of course, of a lurid cast), I can lay my hand on my heart and say that
it does not arise from a paltry contempt for the antiquities, nor yet
from the still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If there is one
thing more dwarfish and pitiful than irreverence for the past, it
is irreverence for the present, for the passionate and many-coloured
procession of life, which includes the char-a-banc among its many
chariots and triumphal cars. I know nothing so vulgar as that contempt
for vulgarity which sneers at the clerks on a Bank Holiday or the
Cockneys on Margate sands. The man who notices nothing about the clerk
except his Cockney accent would have noticed nothing about Simon de
Montfort except his French accent. The man who jeers at Jones for having
dropped an "h" might have jeered at Nelson for having dropped an arm.
Scorn springs easily to the essentially vulgar-minded, and it is as easy
to gibe at Montfort as a foreigner or at Nelson as a cripple, as to gibe
at the struggling speech and the maimed bodies of the mass of our comic
and tragic race. If I shrink faintly from this affair of tourists and
tombs, it is certainly not because I am so profane as to think lightly
either of the tombs or the tourists. I reverence those great men who
had the courage to die; I reverence also these little men who have