At last my friend said:
"To cut it short, then, you mean that you will live in the country
because you won't like it. What on earth will you do here;
dig up the garden?"
"Dig!" I answered, in honourable scorn. "Dig! Do work at my
Country Seat; no, thank you. When I find a Country Seat, I sit
in it. And for your other objection, you are quite wrong.
I do not dislike the country, but I like the town more.
Therefore the art of happiness certainly suggests that I should live
in the country and think about the town. Modern nature-worship is
all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things;
terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side
of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.
I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and wants to go
to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness because I
am that sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again,
as rustics love it. Therefore (I quote again from the great Cockney
version of The Golden Treasury)--
"'Therefore, ye gas-pipes, ye asbestos? stoves,
Forbode not any severing of our loves.
I have relinquished but your earthly sight,
To hold you dear in a more distant way.
I'll love the 'buses lumbering through the wet,
Even more than when I lightly tripped as they.
The grimy colour of the London clay
Is lovely yet,'
"because I have found the house where I was really born;
the tall and quiet house from which I can see London afar off,
as the miracle of man that it is.
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