Chapter II: Part 2

Oh rash, and hurrying ignorance! Put the holder of so untenable a doctrine alone, for ever so short a time, especially in the winter, in the solitary depths of the country, and how soon a perception of his or her own utter transitoriness will begin to break through the thinly formed crust of the new, and the superimposed. Let him lift his garden latch, and step out beyond it into the open country. Let him saunter alone in the woods after dusk. Let him walk across the solitary, blackened heather. Let him look down upon the floods, lace-making over the lowlands. Let him--without taking so much trouble as this--merely lean out of his window after dusk, amid the thickening shadows, and he must be of a remarkably unimpressionable turn of mind if the sense of his own shadowiness, his own inherent transitoriness, is not the clearest, strongest, and most convincing of all his sensations.

Thus vanity provides its own solution, and the little inflated soul is driven into puncturing its own proudly swelling balloon. We discover--sometimes with no little dismay--that it is not alone in our flower-beds that the wild and the tame, the temporary and the permanent, the real and the artificial, meet, jostle, and rub shoulders together. Sir Primitive is a remarkably difficult person to escape from. His blood still courses unheeded through our own veins, and he is as much a part of ourselves as he is a part of the most sophisticated of our plants or our animals. We may imagine that we have left him behind us, and outgrown his teachings, and the very next day something will occur to show us that he is at our elbows all the time, as strong, as fresh, and as absolutely unaffected by any little modern innovations as he ever was.

SEPTEMBER 26, 1899

Yet, although undoubtedly our ancestor, Sir Primitive stands a good way back on the family tree, and other influences have grown up since his time to disturb his teachings. The fear of becoming too tidy, for instance, does not at first sight seem to be a very reasonable fear. It has not been imputed to many people as a failing, especially to those who happen to have been born to the westward of St. George’s Channel! Nevertheless there are moments when a wild passion for tidiness, a perfect thirst and craving for order, seems to sweep across the soul like a wave; when everything else that one habitually cares for is flung back, and overwhelmed before it, even as the hosts of Pharaoh were flung back, and overwhelmed before the cold, subduing waters of the Red Sea.

We are all the children of our age; there is no getting over that fact; heirs of a hardly won civilisation, let us call ourselves Wild Wilfulness, or any other law-defying name, as much as we please. Yearning to show that our spirits are above all trammels, that we are as free as the birds in the air, we nevertheless all sit in identical armchairs, eat the food the cooks provide us, and in most other respects exhibit about as much originality as so many stair-rods.

It is only necessary to consider what happens every day of the week in the garden to perceive that this is the case. We have adopted the most independent line possible; we have vowed that _our_ gardens shall be natural ones, or nothing. We adore flowery wildernesses, we declare. We want our plants to grow as Nature intended them to do, and not as the hireling gardener does. We intend to put a limit to the eternal bolstering up of our soil with all sorts of extraneous elements; above all we will have nothing to say to the clipping of our shrubs into unreal shapes, nor yet to the planting of our bulbs, and other flowering plants into lines, squares, and parallelograms, but all shall be a melting and a blending of one harmonious form into another; every detail, as far as the eye can reach, being subordinated to the larger and more important spirit of the landscape as a whole.

So we say! And yet, after the flag of freedom has been thus ostentatiously raised, what happens? As often as not we find ourselves, by the logic of facts, and by the realities of the situation, forced slowly to retreat, as other and equally eminent strategists have been forced before us. A flowery wilderness is delightful, but unless its owner is content with the flowers that grow in it by nature, or a few, very cautious additions, his flowery wilderness is apt after a time to become a wilderness, minus the flowers. Then perhaps a reaction sets in. A sense of failure gradually overtakes the too ardent amateur. The reins of authority drop more and more listlessly from his hands; until at last he lets them fall altogether, and, with a smile of kindly pity, the momentarily dispossessed professional once more resumes full, and henceforth undivided sway.

From so humiliating a finale may all the kindly divinities that watch over gardens deliver ourselves! Nevertheless there have been moments when such a fate has seemed to draw near, and even to look one in the eyes. Only three days ago I was engaged in that breathless struggle with the bracken. For the last two, aided by Cuttle and his assistant, I have been fighting ankle-deep against a perfect forest of couch-grass, which had practically overwhelmed the whole of our nursery-garden, helped rather than hindered by the fence, with which we had innocently hoped to keep back, not alone rabbits, but every other trespasser.

Worse than the conduct of the couch-grass, because of a certain personal element in it, has been the conduct of the rose-campion. Now I have been exceedingly kind to that rose-campion. Again and again I have intervened to rescue it, when it was on the point of being rooted out, and consigned to the dust-heap. Only last spring I carried its roots by hundreds with my own hands, and re-established them in a special reservation ground, where they might spread unmolested over a good half-acre or so of copse. What has been the result? They have indeed clothed their allotted space, but, not content with this, they have burst like a horde of Ojibeway Indians, or some such aborigines, out of their reservation, across the frontiers of civilisation, sending out myriads of seedlings ahead of them, like a flight of skirmishers, and are now nearly as numerous collectively, and far more luxuriant individually, in the nursery, than they are in the copse itself!

Incidents like these wound one, and are more trying for that reason to the amateur gardener than to the professional one, who probably regards them as only to be expected. I am far from saying that they constitute a sufficient reason for surrender, but they certainly seem to need the aid of a higher quality than mere secular doggedness, to enable one to grapple with them as one ought. It is moreover such occurrences as these that produce that extraordinary thirst for order, that very unlooked-for passion for tidiness, which I just now noted. After a day or two passed in such struggles as these one begins to understand the pride of the colonist in pure, speckless Ugliness; in beautifully clean, naked earth, varied by straight lines of split-wood fences, or the like. I have not as yet reached that point myself, and am glad to feel that I can still tolerate Nature. All the same a sort of nurseryman’s attitude towards everything tainted with wildness is fast gaining upon me, and unless I can check both it, and this overweening love of tidiness while there is time, I plainly foresee that there will shortly be nothing else left!

SEPTEMBER 29, 1899

“Fountains; they are a great beauty and refreshment, but pools mar all, and make the garden unwholesome, full of flies and frogs.”

For two persons who have just been at some pains to establish a pool in their grounds, this is a hard saying! That the judgment has much to support it, apart from the weight of its utterer, I cannot deny. At the same time a better case can, I think, be made out for the culprits than may appear at first sight. Fountains in a copse, be they never so limpid, never so sparkling, would be stamped with an unendurable stamp of artificiality. Pools on the other hand, though there are certainly not many in these copses of ours, are at all events not inconceivable. In the present case we flatter ourselves that the particular spot we have selected for our pool was intended by Nature to contain one, and nothing but the incurable aridity of these dry hillsides hindered her from carrying out that intention. Where every drop of water has to be watched over like hid treasure, it may be doubted whether the amount that we can afford to have trickling through it in summer will suffice to hinder the water in it from becoming yellow, brown, or green. That is a point however which remains for future discovery. Our main preoccupation at present rests with the planting of the edges of our pool, especially with the clothing of the bank which, rising to the north of it, will absorb most of the midday sun, and will require therefore the most attention.

In its present condition a good deal of that bank looks bare to desperation, yet I strongly suspect that summer will prove it to have the reverse fault of being crowded with a dense, and inextricably entangled mass of vegetation. Fortunately half its present inhabitants, being biennials, will depart after the first season, when, the prospect clearing, the permanent inhabitants will stand forth confest and visible.

Omitting this temporary part of its furniture, I will jot the others down as they stand, which will enable us to see what we have, and also to form a better idea of what we still lack.

First and foremost a kindly gift; two large clumps of Arundo donax, easily supreme anywhere as pond-side decoration, the more so, as they quickly attain to their full size. No other plant of the reedy order, not even excepting a bamboo, gives quite the same impression of vigorous, of almost insolent energy as does this one. It adapts itself moreover perfectly to our sandy soil, and so long as one sees that it receives a reasonable amount of moisture, seems to ask for little else. Next follow two or three plants of Arundinaria japonica, and below these again Arundinaria, or Bambusa palmata, skirting the edge of the pond, and passing on into the so-called bog. This last came from Kildare, where it has established itself, and run practically wild along the edge of a lake. Here it seems to do its growing more slowly, but the plants are spreading, and I think promise fairly. Below the other bamboos, but above palmata come two large plants of Astilbe rivularis, placed so that their arching leaves will overhang their lower neighbours, and all but touch the water. Next, turning the corner of the pond, come various low-growing bushes. Berberis Darwini below, with the faithful Aquifolium, and the taller stenophylla above, ending in a fringe of bog-myrtle, and of Rodgersia podophylla, among which some Solomon’s seal are now barely discernible. After these come a few plants of Hemerocallis, both fulva and flava, which need continual dividing in the borders, but seem to flower well, and give no further trouble so long as they are within reach of an occasional splash. Acanthuses appear to be in the same position, the difference between their growth in wet and dry soil being extraordinary; indeed when one remembers how they abound in Spain and Italy, one fails to understand the limp and desolated aspect they see fit to assume here, under a very much more moderate dispensation of drought.

Next follows Funkia Sieboldi. Funkias are all meritorious plants, but Sieboldi, to my mind, towers head and shoulders above the rest. Apart from the beauty of the flower, its grey-green, almost iridescent foliage is like no other leaf that grows, and when the two are combined the result is High art, art at its best point. Such praise is, however, merely impertinent. It is more pertinent to say that the whole genus, but especially Sieboldi, belong to that very limited category of plants that are at once fit for the most orthodox of beds or borders, while at the same time they are free enough, and independent-looking enough, not to seem ridiculous in a bit of pure “wildness” such as this little pond-side purports to be. This is far from being a common virtue. One only needs to run over such words as “Hollyhock,” “Begonia,” “Pelargonium,” to perceive in a moment what would be intolerable outside of a more or less stiff parterre. It is not so much a question of beauty, as of fitness and adaptability, perhaps also of freedom from certain set associations, which, having once rooted themselves in our minds, make it impossible for us ever to rearrange our impressions, and recast them in a new form. This however is a digression. To go on with my list.

Upon the actual edge of the pond we are at this moment planting some two dozen varieties of Iris Kæmpferi. These have recently come from Haarlem, and being still new-comers, have their destiny ahead of them. The common yellow iris, best and handsomest of all native, water-edge plants, had only to be transplanted, as it was already flourishing close at hand. As a successor to it comes Ranunculus Lingua, another indispensable native, but one that requires sharp watching; its capabilities as a coloniser being unlimited, the long, pink-tipped suckers pushing forward into the water at a rate that would soon turn any limited space of it into a mere jungle of triumphant buttercups.

In the part of the bank which, sloping rather quickly away, inclines towards the “glade,” come various low-growing shrubs, which carry the line down to the region of heather, which in its turn brings it to the level of the grass. The tallest of these,--rather too tall for the place,--is Viburnum opulus, common beside many a Surrey pond, but not nearly enough grown in gardens, as the best of amateur gardeners has recently reminded us. Its cultivated relation, Viburnum plicatum, is just beyond it, placed there, not because there is the slightest occasion for its being upon the water’s edge, simply because it happens to be one of those plants that never seem quite happy unless they have abundance of space to move about in, the long shoots, laden with blossom, having a wonderful power of reaching out to distances that at first sight seem to be quite beyond their grasp. Another plant of which the same may be said is Hydrangea paniculata. So far ours have spent their existence dully in tubs, the idea being that they required winter protection. Judging by some that were experimented upon last winter this seems to be a mistake, and I propose to try a few here, by way of successors to the foregoing, with which their equally industrious sprays seem to possess a sort of kinship.

Our grassy “glade” being now all but reached the remaining corner of the bank has been filled with various grass-leaved flowering plants, which seemed to come in appropriately. Of these the largest is Libertia formosa, green all the year round, and in summer bristling with white, iris-like flowers, and, by way of plant-fellow to it, Sisyrinchium Bermudianum (Plague upon these polysyllabic dog-latinists!), one of the friendliest of little plants that ever pined for a decent English name. Put it where one will--on a bank, in a bog, in a flower-bed--it seems equally happy and appropriate; always compact, yet increasing as rapidly as any weed; above all continually in flower, even, so I noticed last winter, in the middle of frost and snow, and when its leaves were so brittle that they snapped when they were touched, like any icicle.

My list seems to be already stretching to a tolerable length, yet there are plenty of things that have not yet found their way into it. Here is Bocconia cordata, for instance, impossible to do without in such a spot. Here are the spider-worts, both blue and white. Here are various spiræas, chiefly low-growing ones, such as “Anthony Waterer” and palmata, the latter only happy in a more or less damp place. In the peat-filled hollow beyond quite a little crowd of claimants rise up for notice. A good many of these are now only satisfactory in the retrospect. Of such are Primula japonica, and Primula rosea, sorry-looking tufts of brown shreds, with no new leaves as yet showing. Cypripedium spectabile is in the same plight, but Hellonias bullata is still green, Gentiana asclepiadea has a flower or two showing, Lobelia cardinalis, both the older and newer varieties, look red and happy, and Schizostylis coccinea promises fairly, though it never behaves with us quite as it ought to do, and as I have known it behave in kindlier soils.

Turning to the region of mere dryness, three or four rough stone steps, and a ridiculous little ridge, lead towards the azalea corner.

Here cistuses of various kinds have their home, and, being fairly sheltered, do well, though several require remembering in the winter. I find the same to be the case here with regard to the rosemaries, especially the younger plants, as they grow older they seem to harden. Lavenders fortunately are safe everywhere, in all weathers, and the same may be said of Skimmia japonica and Fortunei, two of the most satisfactory of small winter-flowering shrubs. These with a few tufts of Andromeda floribunda, and a small jungle of alpine rhododendron, bring us up to the azalea corner.

All these plants, especially the more recently planted ones, will need pretty constant looking after during the next year or so, but once that crucial period of their existence is over, it is my hope--possibly only my delusion--that they will learn so to arrange their affairs as merely to require the sort of attention that is necessary to see that they do not overcrowd one another, or--what is more serious--become invaded by wild neighbours, rose-campions, and the like, swarming in upon them to the point of suffocation. The safest way of avoiding this is undoubtedly to cover the ground with low, carpeting growths, which will remain green nearly all the year round, and at the same time not make too severe a demand upon the soil. The number of such kindly little evergreens, or semi-evergreens is a constant surprise when one comes to collect them, and the fact that there should be so many speaks volumes for a climate that we are none of us ever weary of abusing. Apart from absolute rock-plants, nearly all of which are evergreen, there are a number of others, which rarely or never lose their leaves, and whose presence saves banks and hollows like these from the reproach of bareness, and further takes away--certainly ought to take away--all excuses for visitations from that Tool of the Destroyer, the pitchfork. Of such plants none are better than certain campanulas, including our own hairbells, both the blue and the white. Wood-sorrels again are excellent in a shady place, or, for a sunnier one, there is their energetic cousin Oxalis floribunda, in this soil the most undaunted of colonisers, growing all the winter. “Creeping Jenny” again, and “Blue-eyed Mary,” delightful things with delightful names, will cover as much space as they are allowed to do. Of the more easily grown forget-me-nots there are at least four kinds--palustris, for planting close to the water, or in it; dissitiflora, happy all the summer, so long as it gets a little shade; sylvatica and alpestris, growing anywhere, and everywhere. Epimediums, again, are excellent, though apt to get a little rusty in the winter. So is Tellina grandiflora, an unwisely named plant, since its strength lies, not in its flowers, but its leaves. Thymes, too, are always available; likewise potentillas, erysimums, and veronicas, though these last may seem to be trenching upon the rock-plant region. Then, if we want larger growths, are there not all the megaseas, which may be torn in pieces two or three times a year, if we like? Of low-growing shrubs, such as Euonymus radicans, the various creeping cotoneasters, the savin, Gaultheria shallon, and others, there is no lack. Yet another, and one of the best of them all, Cornus canadensis, a true shrub, and an evergreen one, although no larger than a wild wood-strawberry.

But I find myself growing breathless, and the list of such kindly “carpeters” is in reality only begun. Flinging down woodruffs, wild pansies, foam-flowers, sedums, mossy saxifrages, waldsteinias, and periwinkles, as one might out of a basket, I will only now delay to find room for a few rock-pinks, particularly for these four--cæsius, cruentus, atro-rubens, and deltoides,--all of which may be sown broadcast in the spring, and all of which, especially the last, may be trusted to hold their own against any but the biggest and most ferocious of natives.

We have been honest caterers for our clients, as far as preparation went, and my hope, I may say my ideal, is that they will henceforward be content with receiving merely surface nourishment from time to time, and will neither look for or need that eternal process of renewal, and as a consequence of disorganisation, which is the bane, though I am willing to admit the unavoidable bane, of nearly every flower-bed and border.

Ideals are odd things, and this one of mine seems, even as I write it down, about as ridiculous and puny an ideal as any forlorn idealist was ever driven into making a boast of! Such as it is, however, I cling to it tenaciously. After all what does it mean? Written out a little large it means repose of mind, and a freedom from the strain of change; it even means a certain sense of finality, and that at a very sensitive spot in one’s small environment.

To a greater or less extent we all sigh for finality. Nobody has ever attained to it, that I have heard of, and not many people would perhaps relish it if they could do so. None the less it remains, something haunting; a dimly descried presence, to us vaguely desirable. To sit at ease under their own vines; to be at rest in their own shaded places, has from the earliest days flattered the imaginations of men, busy and idle ones alike. Dawdlers in sunny places, and haunters of gardens like ourselves are naturally assigned to the second of these categories. Since we have to support the reproach of idleness, let us at least then take heed that we secure the comfort of it. If Leisure is an acquaintance of ours he is an acquaintance of so few people nowadays, that we had better make the most of him. Now fuss the good man detests, and change, merely for change’s sake, is undoubtedly one of the very worst forms of fuss. Like every other pursuit and following, horticulture no doubt has its battlefields, and those who go out upon them must expect charge and countercharge, rapid assault and varying vicissitude, like other heroes upon other battlefields. For me such combats, I am free to confess, have not even a vicarious charm; Peace being the only deity to whom I would willingly raise even the smallest of garden altars. With other out-of-door conditions we all aver that it is their stability, their adorable unchangeableness, which lends them in our eyes their most persistent charm. Why then are we not to look for the same charm in our gardens, which after all come nearest home? That it is a charm easy of attainment I were loth to asseverate, but that seems hardly a reason for not endeavouring to attain to it. It is in this direction at all events that my own private plottings and plannings propose to turn. If I must moil and delve; if I must plant, dig, and contrive now, it is with the fixed and fond determination of before long sitting resolutely down, and doing absolutely nothing!

OCTOBER 27, 1899

Who dare forecast even his nearest future?

These last four weeks have been so charged with anxiety--not only, or even chiefly, war anxieties--that I have not made so much as a single entry in this diary. In fact there has been nothing to record. The poor little garden; its flowers; its weeds; the copse surrounding it; the entire _mise-en-scène_, with all the quips and jests which in sunnier hours it gives rise to, seems to have vanished bodily. It is as though the whole thing, erstwhile not without its own little importance, had dwindled to the size of one of those infinitesimal specks, which one sometimes sees in feverish dreams; specks so dim and small, so well-nigh invisible, that one wonders how in the first place one ever discovered them, and why, having done so, one should take the trouble of trying to keep them in sight. That being the case it is as well that I am leaving home to-morrow for several weeks, and, since I shall be chiefly in London, have a good excuse for leaving the garden diary, like the garden itself, behind me. Possibly, by the time I return to them, the old, now submerged, landmarks may have risen once more to the surface, or I may have grown a little better used to this changed landscape; seeing that we all have to get used to every variety of landscape; every admixture of weather; every cruel, blinding storm; every rain-washed shore, or bitter, wreck-strewn sea, which meets us in this very odd journey that we call our lives.

CHRISTMAS-DAY, 1899

There was a slight sprinkling of snow this morning, yet the garden looks exceedingly black. Save for a scarce discernible white line here and there, everything in it seems stiff, and hard, and black as iron; crumpled iron leaves against an iron floor. Black is the livery, not alone of sorrow, but of dismay, so that the garden does very well just now to wear it. There are moments in the individual life, moments, so it appears, even in an entire nation’s life, when the ordinary scheme of things seems to dissolve and change; when all the familiar landmarks for the time being melt away, and disappear under our eyes.

Standing here, staring blankly out of the window, I feel myself for the moment a sort of embodiment of all the other, vacant-eyed starers out of windows, up and down over the face of the country this Christmas morning. How many of them there must be! How many must be staring down at the dull ground, and telling themselves they will never care to walk in, or to look at their gardens again. It may not be an actual garden, but at least it will be a figurative one; some special plot of happiness; some quarter-acre of habitual enjoyment. I hope, indeed I feel sure, that in the great majority of cases they will sooner or later enjoy it again. Father Time is at bottom a kindly creature, kindlier than when in trouble we are inclined to believe him to be. For the moment however the idea seems unrealisable, and would scarcely be welcome if it were realised.

For hardly-pressed humanity there is, I believe, only one really satisfactory way of dealing with misfortune, which is--to refuse to believe in it! That is, I find, the method that our excellent Cuttle in the garden has adopted with regard to most of the recent events in South Africa. Anything exceptionally disagreeable, especially anything that has to do with the surrender of Englishmen, no matter under what circumstances, he simply declines to believe in. It is not that he is ignorant. He reads his paper diligently; he knows everything that is in it, but he refuses to accept more of the contents than he considers proper. When, a few weeks ago, the first of our Natal mishaps occurred, and the number of English prisoners captured was posted up in the village hall, Cuttle informed me the next morning that he had seen it, but that there wasn’t a word of truth in it! I demurred, but he stuck to his guns steadily. It was the same last Monday, when I saw him for the first time after our two most recent misfortunes, that of the Modder and the Tugela.

“This is bad news, Cuttle,” I said, as we met outside the greenhouse.

“Well ma’am, they do try to make it out to be baddish, but I wouldn’t believe it, if I was you.”

“But it is in all the papers, Cuttle.”

“Very likely it is ma’am, but what of that? I don’t hold with none of those papers. They must be a-stuffing themselves out with something.”

“But I’m afraid the generals admit it themselves.”

“Excuse me ma’am, but that’s just where you’re making a great mistake. We don’t know nothing about what the generals admit. All we know is that the papers _say_ they admit it, which is a very different story. Mark my words, you’ll find that it’ll turn out to be some of their muddlings. Just you mark my words for it, that’s how it is.”

I said meekly “I hope so, Cuttle,” and walked away, for really I had not the heart to try and shake his incredulity. Not that I imagine I could have done so had I tried. That good, homespun garment of British pride in which he had wrapped himself was proof against any assaults that I could have brought to bear upon it. I wish with all my heart that he would lend us each a piece of it. We want it badly. Pray heaven and all its saints that we may none of us ever need it much worse than we do this Christmas-day, 1899!

* * * * *

CHRISTMAS-DAY, 4 P.M.

Since luncheon I have been to see a neighbour, in the vague hope that some fresh war news might have arrived this morning. There was none of course, and I walked home again between banks of withered bracken and trailing bramble, under the big tree-hollies, glistening all over their surfaces with a thousand reminders of Christmas, and of its gifts. England is so big, and old, and sensible that she does not generally care about Christmas presents, but there is one present that, I take it, she would dearly like to have to-day. Shiploads of holly, forests of mistletoe are hers for the asking, but that one little leaf of victor’s laurel that she wants so badly, that she would so gladly pin upon that broad breast of hers, this, it seems, is denied her. It may come to-morrow. It _must_, we all, not alone Cuttle, feel convinced, come before long, but it will not come in time for her Christmas-box.

What an odd convention it is, when one thinks of it, that habit of embodying a country in an individual! Considered seriously the whole contention is absurd. To talk of a nation as a person is to talk sheer nonsense. If one handles the idea a little it tumbles to pieces in one’s fingers. The fiction of unity resolves itself into a mere vortex of atoms, all moving in different ways, and moreover with a different general drift in each successive generation. As a matter of fact I doubt whether Englishmen, who are nothing if not practical, ever do think of their own country as an individual, unless one of them happens to be called upon to design a coin or a cartoon. The whole idea is extraneous, a survival from classical days, and the lumbering absurdities which are now and then dragged about the streets only go to prove how far from the genius of the people such representations really are.

Perhaps it is because I am not English that I find myself falling so readily into the trick. There was a time,--not a very recent one--when I thought of England habitually in that light, and in the most truculent fashion possible. In my eyes she stood visibly out as the Great Bully, the Supreme Tyrant, red with the blood of Ireland and Irish heroes. It was always _she_ and _her_ then; indeed it was only by keeping up the fiction of an incarnate Saxondom that indignation could be retained at the proper boiling point. To turn from the past to the present was to spoil the whole effect. In place of War, Famine, Massacre, one only got dull political controversies, or equally dull agrarian disturbances. For the Raleighs, the Sydneys, the Straffords, the Cromwells,--vast impressive figures, large and lurid--only a group of rather harassed gentlemen, “well-meaning English officials,” painfully endeavouring to steer their way so as to offend everyone as little as possible. Yes, I had quite a respectable capacity for hatred in those days, and England--that historic England of which I knew absolutely nothing--enjoyed the greater part of it. Especially, I remember, that I used to gloat over the notion of some day or other a great national HUMILIATION befalling her--a Sedan, a Moscow--I hardly knew what; retribution at all events in some very visible and dramatic form. With what glee I used to picture her standing helplessly before the nations; without a friend or an ally to turn to; naked and ashamed; crushed bleeding to the earth, as she had so often crushed Ireland; a mark for every wagging head----

Well, well, thus we play the fool, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us! Here am I walking home along an English lane, and almost wringing my hands in despair because such a very mild and colourless version of those old cherished dreams has befallen mine ancient enemy!

* * * * *

CHRISTMAS-DAY, 6 P.M.

I forgot to record quite an unlooked-for little pleasure which befell me on my way home this afternoon; one of those little incidents which are nothing in themselves, yet which mean much to us, and never more so than when life is going ill.

I had got as far as the grassy entrance to our copse when a sudden dazzling gleam of sunlight shot across it, sweeping over the fields beyond, and away up to the top of the downs. Though the day had been fairly fine for the time of year, the expectation of so dramatic a finale to it had never for a moment crossed my mind, and I stood gazing about me almost as if something had happened; feeling in fact as if something desirable and unlooked for _had_ happened.

The yellow oak scrub--withered but not leafless--glowed with a sudden russet splendour. Upon the little garden wall the terra-cotta pots shone with a momentary reminiscence of that Italy where they were born and baked. The air seemed to tingle; the tall birches glistened, one sheen of feathery silver up to their tiniest towering twigs. It was a kindly thought of whichever divinity sent that most unexpected and satisfactory beam to cheer this particular day. It did not last long of course, and the gloom of a winter’s night has followed quickly. For all that Christmas 1899 will never seem quite so dark, never so absolutely despairing in the retrospect, as it would have done without that last benevolent gleam at eventide.

JANUARY 3, 1900

The satisfactions of intercourse are apt to be overrated, yet there are times when they are certainly not without their uses. Living for the moment alone--if anyone can be said to be alone who possesses a few good neighbours, and one kind dog--I find myself in an oddly dualistic condition of mind. In bodily presence I am here at H----, engaged in sundry important avocations. I am path making; copse cutting; plant protecting; I am even bricks-and-mortar superintending in a small way. To my own private consciousness I am really engaged in quite another set of preoccupations, and a very long way from these green downs, and rustling oak copses of ours. The experience does not pretend to be particularly original, seeing that a large number of other people’s experience would probably just now bear it out. Solitude however emphasises these sort of odd dualities, and endows them with an air of greater distinction. Are mortals better and wiser, or worse and more foolish when they are alone?

The wisdom of the ages has hitherto declined to answer that question, a fact which probably proves its wisdom. Better or not, one thing is at least certain, and that is that they are extremely different. “Men descend to meet,” says Emerson, and he may be right. I am inclined myself however to think that that profundity, that peculiar mental greatness of which, like others, I am perfectly conscious when I am alone, is less a solid than a gaseous greatness; a sort of exaltation, dependent for the most part upon the fact of there being no one to contradict me. We are all of us at all times microcosms, but never are we so completely microcosms as when we are quite by ourselves. Then we seem to swell into a perfectly multitudinous host, all the members of which exhibit a singular unanimity, and moreover a touching desire to endorse our own views, however often these may contradict one another!

Like many other honest-minded civilians, my thoughts have of late been considerably taken up with schemes of amateur strategy. The plans of campaign that I have formulated in the course of the last two months would have puzzled Von Moltke, and might even have gone far to surprise Napoleon! If I have not forwarded any of them to our Generals in South Africa it has been mainly because I felt that it might be kinder to allow them to go on in their own way without any assistance of mine. I heard lately of someone, by the way, who actually had telegraphed out her recommendations to Sir Redvers Buller. As the story reached me the telegram took this form: “Please try to relieve Ladysmith.” I hope for the credit of human nature that the tale is true, but if so there is a simple innocence about this form of admonition of which I fear that I should have been personally quite incapable. My own ideas, my own forms of suggestion, are entirely different. They are large, nay grandiose, and moreover they are extremely intricate. As I walk about over these lanes and downs I see strategical possibilities in all directions, which cause me to thrill over the magnitude of my own conceptions.

Towards evening, especially, the sense of what might be,--of what, for aught anyone can say to the contrary, still may be,--rises almost palpably; a beckoning ghostly phantom of the Great Coming Invasion. Dorking--that scene of crushing British disaster--is not far off; were I to clamber up the opposite ridge I should be looking down on it. Moreover, between one landscape and another the difference becomes much less when all detail is reduced to one vast blur. I have a friendly knoll upon which I sometimes take my stand towards sunset hour, and from which I have of late conjured up Biggars-bergs, inaccessible and kopje-covered as heart could desire. It is true that the enemy holding them is absolutely invisible, but then so he probably would be in any case. Evening has moreover in my experience an odd power of loosening the tie of the actual. The mind seems to be less fixed to its shell than in the earlier, and more garish hours of the day. As the shadows lengthen stronger and stronger becomes the impression that the world is after all but a small place, and that the scenes that one is thinking of are nearly, if not quite, as close as those that one is actually looking at. Thought flits over the wave-crests between this and South Africa more lightly than one of Mother Carey’s chickens, and alights dry-shod upon the veldt. One is amongst them. One is standing in the midst of them. One can see, literally all but see, that tattered, sunburnt, rather dilapidated-looking host--friends, cousins, kinsfolk; countrymen and fellow-subjects at all events. How odd you all look, dear friends, and yet how familiar! Big English frames, shrewd Scotch faces, tender, devil-may-care Irish hearts. Surely one knows you? Surely you are very near to us, disguise yourselves as you may? The setting may be new, the remoteness considerable, but neither setting nor remoteness can hinder one from feeling at home in the midst of you!

JANUARY 6, 1900

“Bullets--The air was a sieve of them.--They beat upon the boulders like a million hammers. They tore the turf like a harrow!”

These three lines came out of a recent number of the _Daily Mail_, and they describe Elandslaagte. Is it, I wonder, because Literature is so much more familiar to me than War that I seem to require the aid of the one in order to bring home to me the reality of the other? These three lines are certainly literature, literature of the impressionist kind, which, if not the best in the abstract, is at any rate the best for such a purpose. Trying to put oneself into the position of such a bystander as the writer of them, I am able to fancy that if the bullets came thick enough they really _might_ seem to tear the turf like a harrow. In what way exactly the air could be said to be a sieve of them, I am not clear, yet the phrase seems to live, and therefore to carry its own justification. As it happens I was out yesterday in a rather exceptionally imposing hail-storm. It was so dry that there was no occasion to hurry, and I stood still for a while to study effects. The stones, as they pattered and rattled round me, might--danger apart--have quite served as a suggestion of the other sort of rattling and pattering. Looking at them dispassionately I inquired of myself, “Would one run?” and Truth--there being no one else present--promptly replied, “Madly!” So, save for the grace of acquired training, I take it would nearly everybody. My hail bullets seemed to be in a prodigious hurry, and were being prodigally, if not very scientifically, directed by marksmen concealed somewhere above Leith hill. They hissed, they danced, they ricochetted off the trees, they bespattered the ground in all directions in a very businesslike and realistic fashion. There was a good deal of snow still lying unmelted in corners, and into that snow the new-comers as they fell cut deep little pits, and disappeared from sight in an instant. Elsewhere they drove in white flocks over the ground, hardly melting at all. They were not quite so large as carrots, as someone assured me that he had once seen hailstones, but they were certainly as large as fair-sized gooseberries. Through such a furious hail--only appropriately black--the famous Bagarrah cavalry rode to their deaths last September year. Through such a hail, as thick, as fierce, as brutally indifferent, who that one knows, that one cares for, may not be riding or walking to-day?

JANUARY 8, 1900

We have been enveloped all this morning in a cloud of smoke, not exactly battlesmoke, but nearly as thick, perhaps, in these days of smokeless powder, rather thicker. Our indefatigable Cuttle has decreed that we must at all costs get rid of those mountains of garden rubbish, which seem to be for ever accumulating. Hence this smoke! Never in my life did I see such volumes! They rolled in blackish blue columns all about our leafless copse, till towards the afternoon, a wind getting up, they were swept finally westward, across the downs, somewhere in the direction of Guildford.

Personally I like the smell, acrid though it undoubtedly is. The pile itself is moreover the nearest approach one ever gets in these degenerate days to a bonfire, for which I still retain the most infantile affection, and which never seems to be so familiar, or so endearing, as upon the afternoon of a winter’s day. Who can explain those incredibly remote, yet at the same time perfectly definite feelings of association, of which we are all at times more or less aware? Why should certain perfectly commonplace things awaken dreams, reminiscences, suggestions; whereas others, every bit equally qualified to do so, find us blank, and indifferent? Of all such aids to impersonal memory, commend me to an out-of-door fire! The wild, keen smell of it. The red eye of flame, blinking at one out of the heap. The sleepy rolls of smoke, tumbling about, and making one’s eyes water. The sudden “crick, crick, crackle” of a snapping twig, travelling sharply through the frosty air. All these separately, or the whole combined, bring with them trains of association that have been accumulating very much longer, or I am much mistaken, than the course of any one single lifetime. Reminiscences, who can tell, of that remote day when the human hearth was for the most part not an indoor, but an out-of-door one?

A friend and neighbour of ours has recently improved upon such casual burnings by having what may be called a permanent bonfire in her grounds, and I wonder more people who love their gardens, and spend whole winters in the country, do not adopt the plan. In one respect it is certainly an inferior bonfire, for its main constituents are, not leaves and sticks, but anthracite coal. To make amends, it burns merrily away night and day, only needing to be replenished, I am assured, once in twenty-four hours. Her garden lies in the heart of a big pinewood, and the fire has its home in an open lodge or gazebo, supported by larch poles, without door or window, but made possible to sit in in cold weather, by being match-boarded upon two sides, the south and south-east sides alone being widely open. Until one has actually tried, it is difficult to believe how comfortable one can be in such a spot even on a very frosty evening, both feet extended to the blaze, and a rug tucked round one to keep off stray draughts. As daylight wanes the red glow increases, lighting up the big pine trunks, and awakening in one’s mind vagrant suggestions of camp fires, and forest settlements, while at other times it has the practical advantage of making many garden operations possible which, without such a speedy refuge to fly to, would in this chill-evoking climate of ours scarce be practicable.

It is odd what minute deviations from the everyday stir the mind, and help it to shake off that crust of routine, which it ought to be the aim of all of us to get rid of. In these days too, one is thankful to anything that gives a stir to existence, apart from the weary newspapers. It is, I think, one of the few merits of winter that spots, at other times tame to flatness, seem in fierce, or exceptionally cold weather to revert to an older, and a wilder condition. Snow admittedly recreates everything; our most familiar paths and shrubberies, nay our very stable runnels, growing quite arctic and hyperborean-looking under its disguise. Apart from snow, the same impression is produced by any really strong atmospheric variation. Crackling grass, and glittering ice-bound trees, awaken one set of suggestions. Roaring winds, a drenched earth, and inky clouds tumbling wildly over the sky, arouse quite others. Even objects inside the garden, plants that have been perhaps put there by one’s own hands; clumps say, of bamboos and reedy grasses--Arundo donax or the like--assume suddenly new, and slightly savage aspects when one sees them sweeping to and fro, or buckling like so many fishing rods under the lash of a sudden tempest. The commonplace is not really unescapable, though it often seems as though it were. There are wider, freer notes, which only need awakening to stir, and thrill us with their presence. The imagination leaps to meet them, and feels them to be its right. For we are all heirs to a large inheritance, though we are apt, as a rule, to be forgetful of the fact.

JANUARY 10, 1900

Two kindly days in a desperately grim winter have had the effect of reawakening in one’s mind half-forgotten thrillings; thrillings after long grass, and green shadows; after a thousand eye-caressing tints; after the pure, delicious life and companionship of flowers. There are times when all this seems rather to pain than to please. When the persistency of such perishable things appears but an added wrong, but an additional unkindness. Why should these last, and other, and higher ones, _not_ last? we demand; one of those questions which, seeing that they can never be answered, it were as well, perhaps, that they should remain permanently unasked.

Walking briskly along the lanes this morning, with a determination to think only of what lay immediately below my eyes, I have been struck afresh, as often before, by the capabilities of beauty possessed even by the poorest plots of ground; plots which, far from having been intentionally beautified, have been stripped, on the contrary, for utilitarian reasons of such beauty as Nature had originally endowed them with. Yet, under the influence of a little kindly sunshine, how they still gleam, those poor plots; how the few green things left in them manage to prink themselves out, and to respond genially to that genial greeting! “And is it not slightly discreditable,” I reflected, “that we, who call ourselves gardeners, and have deliberately taken in hand similar, often much better plots, specially with an eye to beautifying them, should again and again completely fail in doing so; should again and again spend thought, time, money, and the sweat of the brow--chiefly of other people’s brows--and all that they should, as often as not, be rather worse at the end than at the beginning?”

The truth is that this business of “beautifying,” into which many of us have recklessly plunged, is a very much more difficult and a very much more delicate operation than we are prepared to admit. To the truly discerning, the truly nature-loving eye, the smallest scrap of plant-producing ground, the homeliest corner of earth--“long heath, brown furze, anything"--has potentialities of beauty and interest which even the best gardener rarely develops as they might, and ought to be developed. It is not merely that individually our powers are weak, our taste poor, our ignorance great, our imagination defective, but that over and above all this we have in most cases not the faintest idea of what we are aiming at. With no clear vision of what we propose ultimately to produce, how in the name of reason can we hope to produce it, or anything else worth having?

The cause of the mischance in nine cases out of ten lies in the fact that we attempt too much. Our original combination may have been good, but we want to make it still better. Our gold gets overgilt; our lilies are painted till they almost cease to be lilies at all, and the result is failure all along the line. This sounds the reverse of encouraging, but I am not sure but what it is in some respects better that it should be so. I suspect that all gardeners--professionals and amateurs, experts and gropers,--are just now rather in a state of flux and indecision. Two chief schools hold the field, and are in some respects mutually destructive of one another. There is the school which avows itself the faithful, not to say the servile, follower and imitator of Nature, and there is the school that proposes to itself to improve upon her. The tendency of the first is to develop a good deal of picturesque disorder, a pleasant, rather easy-going sense of repose, and possibly some want of definite form and colour. The tendency of the second, or rather of its members, is to regard the garden as a battle-ground; colour, size, brilliancy, height, as so many tests of their own personal victory, and every plant, species and hybrid alike, as objects for them to shape and manipulate at their own good pleasure.

Will these two divergent schools ultimately combine into one harmonious whole? Will the over-strenuous science of the second strengthen and reform the airy, somewhat weed-encouraging grace of the first? Will the aspiration after beauty of the one, in time relax the utilitarian tension of the other? These are questions which must be left to be resolved in the still unplumbed future. Possibly the gardener of the twenty-first or twenty-second century may be able to reply to them!