at all, but a factitious admiration for certain isolated aspects of the
universe conventionally regarded as "natural." Few schoolmasters have
discovered that for every individual there are certain aspects of the
universe that especially appeal, and that that appeal is part of the
individuality--different from every human being, and quite outside
their range. Certain things that have been rather well treated by poets
and artists (for the most part dead and of Academic standing) they
regard as Nature, and all the rest of the world, most of the world in
which we live, as being in some way an intrusion upon this classic.
They propound a wanton and illogical canon. Trees, rivers, flowers,
birds, stars--are, and have been for many centuries Nature--so are
ploughed fields--really the most artificial of all things--and all the
apparatus of the agriculturist, cattle, vermin, weeds, weed-fires, and
all the rest of it. A grassy old embankment to protect low-lying fields
is Nature, and so is all the mass of apparatus about a water-mill; a
new embankment to store an urban water supply, though it may be one
mass of splendid weeds, is artificial, and ugly. A wooden windmill is
Nature and beautiful, a sky-sign atrocious. Mountains have become
Nature and beautiful within the last hundred years--volcanoes even.
Vesuvius, for example, is grand and beautiful, its smell of underground
railway most impressive, its night effect stupendous, but the glowing
cinder heaps of Burslem, the wonders of the Black Country sunset, the
wonderful fire-shot nightfall of the Five Towns, these things are
horrid and offensive and vulgar beyond the powers of scholastic
language. Such a mass of clotted inconsistencies, such a wild confusion
of vicious mental practices as this, is the stuff the schoolmaster has
in mind when he talks of children acquiring a love of Nature. They are
to be trained, against all their mental bias, to observe and quote
about the canonical natural objects and not to observe, but instead to
shun and contemn everything outside the canon, and so to hand on the