But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song.
Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made
an eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular
and even illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four
successive days in four roadside inns in four different counties.
In each inn they had nothing but bread and cheese; nor can
I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese,
if he can get enough of it. In each inn the cheese was good;
and in each inn it was different. There was a noble Wensleydale
cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so on.
Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from that
paltry and mechanical civilization which holds us all in bondage.
Bad customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism.
Good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry
and self-defence. Both the good and bad civilization cover us
as with a canopy, and protect us from all that is outside.
But a good civilization spreads over us freely like a tree,
varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilization
stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella--artificial,
mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.
So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary
and the substances that are the same wherever they penetrate.
By a wise doom of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not
the same cheese. Being really universal it varies from valley to valley.
But if, let us say, we compare cheese with soap (that vastly
inferior substance), we shall see that soap tends more and more
to be merely Smith's Soap or Brown's Soap, sent automatically all
over the world. If the Red Indians have soap it is Smith's Soap.
If the Grand Lama has soap it is Brown's soap. There is nothing subtly
and strangely Buddhist, nothing tenderly Tibetan, about his soap.