THE SOUTH COUNTRY 5 



they are incomprehensible and not restful. I feel when I 

 am within them that I know why a dog bays at the 

 moon. They are much more difficult or, rather, I am 

 more conscious in them of my lack of comprehension, 

 than the hills or the sea; and I do not like the showmen, 

 the smell and look of the museum, the feeling that it is 

 admiration or nothing, and all the well-dressed and fly- 

 blown people round about. I sometimes think that 

 religious architecture is a dead language, majestic but 

 dead, that it never was a popular language. Have some 

 of these buildings lived too long, been too well preserved, 

 so as to oppress our little days with too permanent an 

 expression of the passing things ? The truth is that, 

 though the past allures me, and to discover a cathedral 

 for myself would be an immense pleasure, I have no 

 historic sense and no curiosity. I mention these trivial 

 things because they may be important to those who read 

 what I am paid for writing. I have read a great deal 

 of history in fact, a university gave me a degree out of 

 respect for my apparent knowledge of history but I 

 have forgotten it all, or it has got into my blood and is 

 present in me in a form which defies evocation or 

 analysis. But as far as I can tell I am pure of history. 

 Consequently I prefer the old brick houses round the 

 cathedral, and that avenue of archaic bossy limes to the 

 cathedral itself with all its turbulent quiet and vague 

 antiquity. The old school also close at hand ! I was 

 there after the end of the term once, and two boys were 

 kicking a football in a half-walled court; it was a bright, 

 cold, windy April afternoon; and the ancient brick was 

 penetrated with their voices and the sound of the ball, 



