w close, and which we can now rail at and insult in our revived
confidence in the green world.

Certainly this enthusiasm of ours for the spring is not all so
disinterested as it appears. We are hungry animals before we are
poetical animals, and we are often praising the promise of our food
when we seem to be most exalted in our raptures. It may be that even
the pleasure we take in the singing of birds is simply a relic of the
pleasure which primitive man felt as he heard the voice of many
dinners making its way back to him at the turn of the year. But the
appeal of music and colour need not be so detailedly stomachic as
that. Man may not have loved the lark's song because he wanted in
particular to eat the lark, or, indeed, any bird. He may have loved it
merely as a significant voice amid the chorus and banners of the
returning hosts of eatable things. If it were not so, many of our
tastes would be different. Among the smells and colours of spring
those we love most are not the smells and colours of eatable things,
but of inculinary things, like roses, and if we loved the music of
birds by some standard of the stomach, it is the crowing of the cock
and not the song of the lark that would inspire us to poetry. It is
the grunting of the pig and not the cuckoo's call which would startle
in us the thrill of romance.

There is, on the other hand, just a chance that natural man does
respond more sympathetically to the voice of the cock and the pig than
to the speech of the cuckoo and the skylark. The difference between
the farmer's and the artist's taste in landscape is proverbial. When
man looks at the world and sums it up in terms of food, he is
indifferent to masses of colour and runs of music. His favourite
colour is the colour of a good crop of corn or a field of grass that
will fatten the cattle. He cares less for silver streams than for the
drains in his turnip-fields. Whether the love of the more ornamental
things--the useless songs of the birds and the scent of flowers, which
is a prosaic thing only to the bees--is an advance on this passion for
utility may be questioned by the advocates of the simple life.
Ornament, they may contend, especially in woman's dress, is simply
mannikin's vainglory. Woman was first hung or robed with precious
things, not in order that she might be happy, but in order that man
might be able to boast of her among his neighbours. She was as sure a
sign of his power as a string of enemies'