Chapter IV: Part 4

“But the quincunx of heaven runs low, and ’tis time to close the first parts of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep, which often continueth precogitations, making cables, and cobwebs, and wildernesses of handsome graves. Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little, and the oneirocritical (!) masters have left such frigid interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of Paradise itself. Nor will the sweetest delights of gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and, though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.

“Night, which Pagan theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no advantage to the description of order, although no lower than that mass can we derive its genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the Ordainer of order, and of the mystical mathematicks of the city of heaven.

“Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rouse up Agamemnon, I find no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that hour which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbering thoughts at that time when sleep itself must end, and, as some conjecture, all shall awake again?”

* * * * *

Most melodious of rhetoricians, and most whimsical of prose-poets, I bid you a good-night. For by a coincidence which you would be the first to appreciate, twelve o’clock is striking even as I copy your last line, and I light a bedroom candle with the sound of those dim prognostications, and thunderous conjectures of yours still ringing sonorously about my ears. They do not alarm me, however; nay I would gladly carry them with me past the ivory gate. For, as you yourself say----

“Happy are they that go to bed with grand music like Pythagoras, or have ways to compose the fantastical spirit, whose unruly wanderings take off inward sleep, filling our heads with St. Anthony’s visions, or the dreams of Lipara, in the sober chambers of rest.”

MARCH 20, 1900

From the defence of Vanity, to the defence of England! “Attend to your transitions, my boy,” is said to have been the reply of a veteran orator, when pressed by a junior for some axiom that would sum up the whole art of oratory in a sentence. Literature also, like oratory, has to attend to her transitions, else dire confusion, and the just indignation of her readers, is the result. The diarist stands upon a slightly different footing. If there is such a being as a literary libertine, or harmless law-breaker, he perhaps is entitled to the name. His pages are filled up according to no settled plan, and with an eye to no particular convention. He claims to be free as the wind upon the tree-tops, free as all our unwritten moods, which are rarely quite the same for many consecutive hours. Such at least, is the claim of this particular diarist. To-day, for instance, leaving the garden, and all that relates to it, to take care of themselves, he has wandered away upon the theme, of all things in the world, of _Invasion_, moved thereto, partly by the desire which assails us at all times, of dilating upon what one knows least, partly by the equally inborn desire of running counter to conventions upon which one has been brought up, and which have been instilled into one’s mind ever since one could walk unaided.

That the difference between soldiers and civilians is an absolute difference, clear as glass, hard as adamant, is one of those conventions. Until the other day I never remember hearing it so much as questioned. Yet how does that fact now stand in the face of all that we have been hearing, seeing, reading about, during the last five months? If one thing more than another has been brought home to us by this present struggle it is that under modern conditions a civilian--without the slightest pretensions to be anything else, so long only as he is a good marksman--is not only as valuable, but under many circumstances, far _more_ valuable than the average soldier, who as a rule can just shoot, and nothing more, who has all the finer parts of his art still to learn, and is not at all likely to learn it when he has no more leisurely target to practise upon than the living man.

It is upon the strength of this revolution that I have been indulging this morning in a private Invasion of my own, specially designed for the exaltation of the rifle-shooting civilian, in whose doings I take a natural interest. Plans of Invasion are always rather fascinating, whatever the realities are likely to be. On this occasion I have only allowed myself a very small and cheap Invasion, just enough to put our rifle-shooting civilian standing in it and asking how he is to behave himself. It is not coming off in the orthodox place, which I take to be nearly opposite the bathing sands of Boulogne, but upon quite a new theatre, namely upon the shores of Dublin Bay. My invaders are probably French, but may be anything else, it does not in the least matter. Whoever they are they have succeeded in evading the Channel Fleet, have run the gauntlet of the forts--no impossible feat--and have disembarked some forty or fifty thousand strong somewhere between the Bailey of Howth and the foot of Bray Head.

As for their purpose in landing, so far as my information extends, it is simply to do as much damage as can be conveniently accomplished within a given time. If the defending fleet remains entangled elsewhere, and they can be reinforced, so much the better. In any case France can afford to lose some twenty or thirty thousand recruits in a good cause. Moreover he would be a poor sort of Frenchman who for the sake of burning, harassing, shooting, raiding, racking, ruining, and generally running amuck, amongst British possessions, would not run the risk of capture, and the, not after all, very uncomfortable, entertainment of a prisoner of war. Here, then, stands our military position; and now comes the question of what in such a case, are the rights and duties of the ordinary, peaceable but rifle-shooting civilian?

First let me clear the ground for myself a little. In the course of certain profound researches upon the whole art and practice of war as laid down in the _Débâcle_, _La Guerre et la Paix_, and other recondite manuals, I have learnt that in the case of invasion the barrier between civilians and professional soldiers is even stricter and more menacing than at other times. The soldier, let his capacity or incapacity be what it may, is entitled in case of capture to honourable treatment. He may be nearly starved to death, if provisions run short, as the French soldier-prisoners were after Sedan. He may be shot out of hand, if he endeavours to escape, but with these trifling exceptions he is a person having definite rights and a definite status; a person the cold-blooded slaughter of whom would stamp the perpetrator of such a deed as a brute, no gentleman, and a man generally to be avoided, even by his own side. Turning now to the position of a civilian during invasion, I learn, by studying the same authorities, that he is an individual without rights of any kind should he attempt--no matter upon what provocation--to touch a weapon in war time. Although the weapon in question be his own familiar rifle or fowling-piece; although the spot he proposes to defend with it is his own hearth, with his own wife and daughters standing beside it, he is liable--legally and honourably liable, for that is the whole point--to be led away from that hearth, settled comfortably with his back against the nearest wall, and then and there uncomplainingly shot, his wife and the rest of his family looking on. This I am assured, or used to be assured, is the whole law and the gospel, as the law and the gospel is laid down for military purposes; a law the carrying out of which is not only permitted, but is the bounden duty of every honourable soldier and Christian officer. In no other way, so I have always been told, could the protection of the civil population be guaranteed during invasion. If a man, merely because the property destroyed is his own, were free to pot--we call it nowadays to snipe--at the destroyer of that property, what in such a case would become, one was asked, of the poor defenceless soldiery?

So much for the old rule, now for its modern application. Bearing all this in mind, I look away to South Africa, and what do I see? I see a crowd of fighting men, upon hardly one of whom--our own regulars and militia of course excepted--can I succeed in discovering any of the recognisable marks of a soldier. Here and there one or two such may be discerned, but the bulk are purely and avowedly civilian. They have walked out of their shops, their farms, their offices, their counting-houses, their clubs, or wherever else they come from, precisely as we see them. They can shoot, or they think so; they can ride--more or less--but in spite of these accomplishments they are no more soldiers than is the diarist who dips this eminently civilian pen into this utterly unmilitary inkpot. If the German commanders of 1870 refused to see in the _francs tireurs_ anything but unrecognisable freebooters; if Napoleon declined to accord the Tyrolese marksmen and their heroic leader decent treatment, mainly on the grounds that the latter was an innkeeper, what would either of them have said to the bulk of those fighting upon both sides to-day in South Africa?

All this, however, is merely preliminary. Our invasion is no problematic peril this time, but a peril that has actually arrived. They have _come_, the aggressors! they are already standing upon our sacred shore! the question now is what are we to do with them? Can there be any doubt upon that subject? Up, arm yourselves, and away! high and low, young and old, brave and the reverse--women first, as befits their daring! Up, and at the villains! Let them not carry their purpose an inch further. Let not one of them return to boast of where he has been! Yet hark! what sound is that? Surely it is not the luncheon bell? How _exceedingly_ inconvenient! Well, our invasion must be postponed for the moment. After all, as Peter Plymley wrote to his brother Abraham, “It is three centuries since an English pig has fallen in a fair battle upon English ground”; so, though this particular struggle is coming off not on English but Irish ground, it is not likely to be all over before this afternoon.

MARCH 20, 1900. 3 P.M.

That interruption disposed of, we now return to our Invasion. Owing, perhaps, to the dilatory nature of our proceedings, the invaders have already left the coast, and pushed their way some distance inland, the result being that matters are beginning to look exceedingly uncomfortable for the unfortunate invaded. The regular army in Ireland happens to be at an exceptionally low ebb. It has been heavily drawn on lately to fill up vacancies at the seat of war, no one in authority having of course dreamt of anything so improbable as a sudden incursion into Dublin Bay. The Commander-in-Chief is reported to be half dead with work and worry at the Royal Hospital. His subordinates are behaving like heroes. The “Polis"--otherwise the Royal Irish Constabulary--are doing soldiers’ work, and doing it a good deal better than most soldiers. Dublin is believed to be for the moment safe, but the condition of the country immediately south of it is critical to a degree. No one seems to be certain what the opinion of the bulk of the people really is. Invaders, especially French ones, are historically dear to their hearts, but the thing has been sprung upon them this time with rather uncomfortable rapidity, and there is something extremely sickening, so everybody admits, about the smell of burning roofs.

Immediately upon landing, the enemy established their headquarters, with no little strategical discretion, in a naturally defensible position upon the Wicklow Hills, from which point they are cheerfully engaged in sending out raiding parties over the whole of the adjacent country. The portion of Kildare nearest Wicklow has already been overrun, and most of its villages burnt, despite their nearness to the Curragh; Naas and Sallins are reported as likely to be the next assailed. The suddenness of the catastrophe has strained the military resources almost to breaking point, and the soldiers are forced to be kept together, not only to defend the approaches to the metropolis, but also in the hope of being able to bring on a general engagement in some more hopeful position than against the fortified camp in Wicklow. The result is that, beyond a limited number of constabulary, the general in command of the district is unable to spare a man for the protection of the smaller places.

Before that harassed and overdriven officer there suddenly appears--the Civilian! How many, or how few, is a detail. Few or many they are all civilians, undiluted, country-bred civilians, good shots and good riders; men of varying ages, but all with a more or less intimate knowledge of the local conditions. They are--but generalities are so unsatisfactory--let me take one of them, and suppose myself to be him, and I can be multiplied afterwards as required. Here I am; big and strong, level-headed and resolute; no boy--far from it--but sound in health and vigorous, a local magnate in a small way, fairly good at most sports, rather more than fairly good at rifle-shooting; a familiar figure formerly at Wimbledon, more recently at Bisley. Nothing can be further from my intentions than to obtrude my services; I wish that clearly to be understood. At the same time if I can be of any use under the circumstances, you had better say so!

With South Africa fresh in all our minds, can there be any question as to the answer? What more desirable material could unfortunate, under-manned commander have, or desire? As to what he could do with me there are plenty of answers ready. He might place me in certain chosen positions, rifle and field-glass beside me, and desire me to pick off certain of the enemy’s officers, who are known to be surveying the country. He might fill a country house or two with me and others like me, and so prepare pleasant little surprises for those who expected to find them vacant. He might do many things, only--and this is the point I am trying to arrive at--would he venture to do any of them? If such a man as I am representing myself to be were liable to be treated as the Germans in 1870 treated French fighting civilians, including women, and as the French would no doubt have treated German ones, in such a case it is hard to see how any responsible commander dare run such a risk, however great his need, or our willingness to serve. Risks are of course of the essence of war, but there are risks and risks. No one proposes to hunt with the hounds, and then run with the hares; to fight while fighting is reasonably safe, and afterwards slip hurriedly back into mufti; to play a soldier’s part, yet claim the immunities of civilians. Let the risks be no worse than those which any soldier runs, and our faithful civilian is satisfied, and asks no more. There are, however, risks which it is hardly proper, hardly I may say decent, for any self-respecting man to run. That our typical civilian would be really liable in these days to be shot in cold blood, most people would find a difficulty in conceiving, yet how does he stand officially? above all, how does he stand internationally? Have the risks of so monstrous, so utterly abhorrent a contingency, been once and for ever removed? and if so, since when? This is the point that one would like extremely to have authoritatively cleared up, seeing that the number of civilians, capable at a pinch of defending their own homes, possibly even their own fields and parishes, seem likely as the years go on to increase. Organised, or unorganised, the straight-shooting civilian has arrived, and he proposes to stay. He is still, however, an entirely new factor in the body politic, and, like other new-comers, he requires therefore to be neatly adjusted to the rest. That under no circumstances he could be of any use, few, I take it, would be bold enough to assert. These are hardly days when any possibly useful national asset can be left with safety upon the shelf. Let our sturdy civilian be able, in case of capture, to claim the same amount of amenity that is accorded in all decent warfare to the captured soldier, in that case I should say--speaking, of course, merely as a fool--that the more of him we had the better and the more comfortable for all of us.

MARCH 26, 1900

A view, a brand-new view, and in a garden supposed to be viewless! That our best point as regards scenery lies in the direction of the Dorking downs, is I think beyond question. The worst of it is that lying as they do nearly due north of us, the more of them we show the more the wind catches at our plants. Openings upon this side have, consequently, to be thought out with care, and executed only after long deliberation.

This time I think we are safe. A space of copse, ending in a fence, over which in summer tree-lupins and everlasting peas tumble together in friendly confusion, has been cleared. What was lately solid copse, fifteen to twenty feet high, has sunk to a mere russet-coloured growth, just bracken height, no more; three feet to four feet, that is to say, rising occasionally to five. This makes a broadish space, in which bracken and bramble, stunted elder, seedling birch, two or three low thorns, and some wild guelder-roses sprout together. Past this, sweeping up from the region of the larches, comes our new grass walk, eleven feet wide, consequently a walk of pride to people who have hitherto subsisted upon two-foot tracks! With a fine easy curve it turns away to the south, making for the gate which divides the garden from the copse. That turn being shared by the new opening, will I think ensure that no new rush of cold air can come tearing in upon the flower-beds. But for this no hatchet or billhook would have been conducted to the spot by me. Our new little view is--_pace_ our neighbour’s opinions--a remarkably nice little view, but did it display Alps or Andes, in place of the despised Dorking downs, the right-minded gardener would in the latter case hesitate; might even feel in the end that it would be too dearly purchased.

Now for the next question, and a serious one. Are we to allow ourselves to make any garden use of this new clearing or not? This touches upon the larger question of meddling generally. To meddle, or not to meddle? Is it permissible--as regards what lies outside the strict garden boundaries--to interfere, or ought we to leave the whole matter to Nature, in other words to Chance?

To lay down the law dogmatically upon this point would be to lay it down for every garden in Great Britain, or all not girded by kitchen gardens, or ploughed fields. Such a prospect, though enticing, might take some little time to carry out. Confining oneself for the moment to the immediate case, one finds that like most other cases, political, or horticultural, it is mainly one of compromise. Were our copse beginning to dwindle perilously, then, with a politician of the last generation, I should exclaim “_Can’t_ you leave it alone?” Seeing that, though we have been chopping assiduously ever since we came, two-thirds of our space is still covered with uninvaded copse, the case seems to me to be a fair one for experiment.

That being decided upon, what to experiment with becomes the next question, and here aspect is clearly the ruling factor. That no early morning sun will reach the place even in summer is certain. Four respectable oaks, of quite a gentlemanly girth, stand along the fence, and forbid it. They are not near enough for their roots to do much damage, but the firstlings of the sun’s rays they will certainly keep to themselves. This being so, there is a limit clearly as to what will answer. All things considered, especially with regard to the fact that the brambles could hardly be dislodged without a wrench which would disorganise everything, I am inclined to give my vote for more brambles, only this time civilised ones. There are plenty fortunately to choose from. There is, for instance, Rubus odoratus, showing a vigour, and a turn for colonisation hardly to be exceeded by the very wildest of wild brambles. There is the cut-leafed bramble; there is the bramble of the Nootka Sound; there is the whitewashed bramble; there is the salmon-berry; the cloudberry; the bramble of the Rocky Mountains, and others, all of which I already in fancy see tossing themselves up and down the bracken, and over their wilder brethren, in one delicious froth of white or rose-coloured blossom.

Another, and a yet more fascinating vision, sweeping over the field of my mind, has for a moment given it pause. What of a jungle, not of brambles, but of roses? None of your trim standards, of course, but some of the freer kinds--Rosa alba, Rosa lucida, Rosa brunonis, with some Ayrshires, some Dundee ramblers, and one commanding thicket of the biggest of the Polyanthas? It is a heady vision, and as a portion of the natural “wildness” might intoxicate the brain of Lord Bacon himself. In gardening it does not do, however, to be too easily intoxicated. We have to keep a sober head; we have to look at the matter from all its points of view; there is the question of aspect, already touched upon; there is the question of soil; above all there is the question of fertilisation--dear, delicate word! No, we must not allow ourselves to be carried off our feet by any vision, however roseate. We have always been a pair of sober horticulturists, and we will continue to be so still. Our rose-jungle must wait. It is only postponed: we will have it yet, and in a better place. Even if we never _did_ have it, even if the postponement had to be an eternal one, is it not, one sometimes asks oneself, the gardens that never have been planted--“whose flowers ne’er fed the bee”; whose dusky scented walks no foot has ever trod, that yield the deepest, the most unqualified enjoyment? “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” What then of unseen gardens? What wealth of blossoms! what a flood of sunshine, which yet never scorches! what green and translucent groves, which at the same time are never damp! what order, without the faintest touch of formality! what wildness, what heavenly entanglements, without so much as an approach to confusion! But I perceive that I am again wandering out of the domain of horticulture, into a much less attainable region, and it may be as well, therefore, to pause.

MARCH 28, 1900

Had we embarked upon a little stone house, instead of a little red-brick one, should we, I wonder, have had the energy to bestow upon ourselves a small flagged and stonewalled garden as an adjunct to it? I doubt it. For one thing flagged gardens are, I imagine, costly affairs. Moreover I have never myself seen a new one that appealed to me as quite satisfactory. An old, grey-walled, and grey-flagged garden, as part of an old, grey farmhouse, or manor, is one of the most ideal possessions that the heart of man could sigh after. Like most other ideal possessions, to have it, it is, unfortunately, necessary as a rule to have been born to it.

Be this as it may, I have never ceased to rejoice that we had the energy to embark at once upon our little red-brick garden. The comfort of knowing that there is always one spot sure to be clean, sure to be dry, sure to be a satisfaction to step into, even in such weather as we have of late been afflicted with, is a boon that can hardly be overrated. As a mere matter of appearance, the red-brick garden seems to be at least as “natural” an appanage of the red-brick house as the little grey-stone garden of the grey-stone one. Both require a certain amount of thought and contrivance, especially as regards proportion, but once this is attained, they soon learn to wear that inevitable aspect, which in garden making, as in all the other arts, great and small, is the first, and surely the least dispensable of all requirements?

That the grey-stone garden is on the whole the higher species of the two I admit. At the same time the red-brick one has this great advantage over its stony brother that it is essentially a winter’s day garden, whereas the stone one may, and in bad weather does, look grim, to the point of being almost forbidding. In both gardens some amount of hindrance is apt to arise with regard to the laying down of the walks. Flagging is a costly process, and where the walks are very narrow, the laying down of stone flags must be a matter of some difficulty. The same applies, though not quite to the same extent, to the red-brick garden. That it ought to be tiled, just as the other ought to be flagged, I feel sure. At the same time good, red gravel, or even bricks, broken fine, mixed with sand, and rolled, answers fairly. Another question arises in the matter of vases. Terra-cotta ones of the right design are not easily come by in this country, and, when come by, they often cost more than if imported direct from Italy. These, however, are details, while the question of what to plant in such gardens is still more obviously an open one. That the more of glaucous, grey-blue tints--such as that found in the foliage of carnations--we have the better, is I think certain, while if small bushes are wanted, lavender will provide the same shade. Where both walls and walks are of red brick, blue, white and violet seem to be the right prevailing colours; reds and yellows only to be admitted slowly, and with precaution. All this, however, savours of dogmatism!

The supreme moment for such little plots is of course their spring-bulb time. Most people call them Dutch gardens, and whether common in Holland or not, the tulip undoubtedly seems born to flourish in them. When the tulips are over, plenty of other things come on however to take their places. Pansies, for instance, never look better than in such gardens, whether as a carpet for tea-roses, or in beds by themselves. The smaller campanulas, especially the white hairbells, the small double daisies, and a host of other things of the same sort, answer perfectly, while, if we want to stretch out our bulb season all we can, sparaxis, ixias, bobartias, the early white gladioli, and others, are all ready to hand, followed by the various lesser irises, winding up, at perhaps their best point, with xiphium and xiphioides.

The one indispensable point--here again dogmatism appears!--is that such gardens should be so close to the house as to keep up the idea of being merely an adjunct, or flowery courtyard to it. With this idea in our minds anything like distance is fatal. You must be free to step into your garden from your door, or with no more interval than two or three steps, or the breadth of a gravel walk. Garden fanatics as many of us already are, and--as life increases in strenuousness--more and more will yearly become, it is our interest obviously to spin out our playtime all we can. Now nothing so helps us towards this, or so effectually counteracts our Arch-enemy, as to have some little settled place so cunningly contrived that even _his_ malignity, backed by its worst agents--sleet, hail, fierce winds, cutting rains,--fails to reduce it to a condition of mere despairing sloppiness; mere forlorn, and death-suggesting desolation.

MARCH 29, 1900

Who would believe in being seriously tormented by a plague of oaks? Such nevertheless has been our lot for the last few weeks. As plagues go they are certainly better than locusts, not to speak of others that we read of in the Bible. For all that we find them quite troublesome enough. Although so young that they were only dropped from the parent bough last autumn, they already cling to the ground with all the tenacity of their ancestors; the most exasperated pull causing considerable fatigue to the puller, but producing no effect whatever upon the youthful athlete. Many of them are in the engaging condition of being still attached to their natal acorn, which, acting as a sort of grappling iron, effectually hinders their being drawn up, even through the soft soil of our flower-borders. Last year was a most bountiful one for acorns, and every sty in the neighbourhood revelled in plenty. Since we do not ourselves keep pigs, we hope that another season we may be less blessed!

Biologists have a theory--they would call it a law--which they call the law of “Multiplication in Geometrical Progression.” By that law the plants of any region would, under favouring conditions, increase from a hundred to a thousandfold every year. Happily for people who wish to walk about they never really do anything of the sort; on the contrary, the population of any given district, apart from man’s interference, remains for the most part all but stationary. Until a parent is considerate enough to die, and make way for it, every green child that is born is bound to die in its infancy. These little oaks of ours are an excellent example of that fact, as well as of the summary fashion with which Nature is in the habit of wielding her maternal sceptre. They are, as anyone can see, as hale and as vigorous as could be desired; hearts of oak, every one of them, and they know it. Not an oaklet amongst them but sees itself in nightly visions as an umbrageous giant, lifting high in air a mighty trunk, and spreading out branches that all the fowls of the air could lodge upon with comfort. Alas, for so much prospective dignity! Every one of these youthful monarchs is doomed to an early death, and it is merely a question of what stage of immaturity he will be called upon to perish at!

There is yet another biological dictum which these deluded young sovereigns may serve to illustrate. Before Darwin, or any other expositor, laid it down in prose, it had been already laid down in unforgettable verse--thus:--

“No being on this earthly ball
Is like another, all and all.”

Nothing certainly on this earthly ball can be truer. Never two living beings came into the world precisely alike, and these baby oaks differ each of them in some imperceptible fashion from its baby brother. Here is a handful plucked at random out of the flower-beds that will prove it. In this one that I hold in my fingers, it is easy to see that the future giant would have been a somewhat thick-set, and stunted colossus. This one again has already a tendency to self-division, and would probably have ended by becoming forked. Yet again this one would, if it had been spared--appropriate phrase--have grown up to be the very ideal of oaks; a glory of the woods; star-proof; sun-proof; magnificent in its life, and in its death destined to be converted into the very straightest and most wind-defying of masts. This last, by the way, is not a loss that we need delay to weep over, seeing that long before it could have reached maturity, masts will in all probability have gone to join the other relics of the past; even yachts being converted probably by that time into little electrical monsters, with ingenious arrangements for enabling them to become submarine ones, whenever the wars of that date threaten to interfere with the comfort of their owners.

Poor baby oaks! They gave me a great deal of trouble to pull up, and now, with that inopportune remorse, sometimes ascribed to murderers, I am disposed to grow quite pitiful over them. They have been so spoilt, moreover, in the process, that they are not even worth putting into a flower-vase. Imagine having been potentially capable of serving as the tutelary deity, the beloved shade, the _rendezvous_ of all the lovers of a parish for possibly half a dozen generations, and being found actually unfit to fill a bow-pot for an hour! Could poet or pessimist hit upon instance of malicious destiny more dramatically or tragically complete?

APRIL 2, 1900

At last we are in April. The winter corner is turned, and a new era entered upon. But April this year is an incongruous sort of an April, though the incongruity is possibly only in one’s own fancy. We are apt to fashion our notions of the becoming, and to expect Nature to conform to them. A desperately dry April it certainly is. The days are hard, and cold, parched, and nipping; at night the wind howls, but with no accompaniment of desirable drops. The garden cries to the sky for rain, but no rain falls upon it, yet the only days I have spent in London were days of unceasing downpour. Such favouring of the Metropolis at the expense of the country is manifestly unjust.

April is such a lovely word, that it ought also to be always a lovely thing. If one imagines it--or rather her--as she might appear to us in dreams, or an allegory, we should deck her out of course in the tenderest green. Floating gossamers would hover around her; small pink buds would bend down to kiss her small pink feet. So encompassed she would come to meet us along the wood paths, a vision of grace and maidenly beauty; the traditional smile on her lips, the equally traditional tear in her eye. She would look up in our faces with an appealing glance, and then begin suddenly to weep, she herself knew not why. A maiden with the most maidenly of dreams, enclosing a whole enchanted world of visionary hopes, fears, delights, anticipations, which it would be the dull business of Experience to dissipate as the year rolled on.

But April, as she presents herself before us this year, is not that sort of maiden at all. She is a remarkably uncompromising sort of young woman, with hardly any visible green about her costume. She does not care for the colour apparently, but prefers drabs, and greys, and browns. As for tears she is not nearly as much given to them as we could desire. She thinks poorly of them evidently, and considers them out of date. Her smiles too are doled out in the same penurious fashion as her tears. She gives us what no doubt she considers our due of both, but nothing to spare. Her impulses are all dull, decorous, mechanical; as for her feet, far from being bare, they are clad in warm winter shoes and stockings, which indeed they have every reason to be.

Doubtless I am old-fashioned, but I cannot admire such sedate damsels. Give me a little more spontaneity; a little more youthful impetuosity and dash--

“Robes loosely flowing, hair as free;
Such sweet neglect more taketh me.”

To drop metaphor, which has a tendency to drop itself, we are in despair over this dryness, and as a consequence have had to resort already to the aid of our watering-pots. Now in April the watering-pot ought in my opinion to be still reposing in its tool shed, with the early spider weaving his first web across its spout. So strongly is this impressed upon my mind that I feel as if there were something illicit, something I might almost go so far as to call unprincipled, in resorting to its assistance thus prematurely. After all though, a gardener’s first virtue, I reflect, is to save his plants, and unless we promptly take some step of the kind, ours for a surety will for the most part die.

APRIL 11, 1900

One advantage we have secured out of our dry April. Ever since our arrival we have wanted an additional water-stand for the garden, but various causes, chiefly I think dislike to making any more inroads upon the bracken, have hindered us from setting one up. When it comes to dragging watering-pots several hundred yards while the year is still only three months old, imagination pictures what fatigues will be ours in July and August. A new stand accordingly has been established, and an ugly scar the laying of it has made through the copse. Now however that part of the business is done; the grass sods, carefully laid on one side, are back in their places again, and one must only hope that the bracken, safely curled away underground, knows little or nothing about the transaction.

As its practical outcome we have, rising out of the ground, a short stiff pipe of lead, which has been more or less dexterously hidden away in the heart of one of our stunted oaks. I am ashamed to confess the intense, the childish satisfaction I found this morning in turning our new tap for the first time, and seeing the water gush out in one free bound, as if glad of its escape; looking as clear too, as if newly come from the heart of a glacier, or upon its way to the edge of some Atlantic cliff, there to be caught by the wind, as I have often seen it caught, and sent back high overhead, in one dancing, rainbow-coloured feather of light.

“Take you at your commonest, at your ugliest, and what a lovely thing you are!” I thought, as I let the tap run for a few minutes, and stood to watch the water beginning to create little rills and runnels for itself, and to feed the dry copse, the dead leaves, brambles, withered bracken, everything within reach, with the first full rush of its benevolence.

I do not know that I am more given than other people to proclaiming aloud that I have too many blessings; that Nature has been too generous, and too bountiful in her benefits on my behalf. Now and then however it has occurred to me to ask myself what I--or, for that matter, other people--have done to deserve this free unstinted gift of clear, pure water. In and out of our houses; through our pipes and conduits; into all our tubs and washhand basins, it flows and flows continually, and we take it as an absolute matter of course that it should do so, rarely even taking the trouble to say “Thank you.”

By way of commentary upon the above reflection I have just taken up a newspaper from the table, and this is what has met my eye. It is an extract apparently out of a letter home.

“We found some water at last near Stinkfontein"--suggestive name--“but the place was very shallow, and the mud black and deep. We could not get the horses to look at it, but the men drank it greedily, and drank it too at the only place where they could reach it, which was where the hoofs had churned it into a blackish liquor, thick as soup.”

Poor Tommy! Yet there are people who declare that you are not fond of water! Evidently this is another of those libels of which you have been too long the subject.

APRIL 17, 1900

The west wind this morning had a rolling sonorousness which sent my thoughts flying, swift as light, across all the little intervening ridges, over the plains, over the villages, across endless housetops, through multitudinous suburbs, over the big, ugly, stately town; out again, over fresh sweeps of more or less encumbered green fields, hedgerows, lanes, roads; past meadows and orchards, redolent of centuries of care; past brickfields and coalfields, redolent only of defiling greed; over a fretful space of sea; across more fields, less enclosed, less cultivated, but certainly not less green. On and on breathlessly, until I stood--free of all encumbrances, free of any thought of luggage, conveyance, or the need of a roof to shelter under--upon a very familiar spot, close to the tumbling breast of the Atlantic.

The clearness, or lack of clearness, with which certain familiar spots rise before the eye is one of the minor mysteries of life; mysteries which like many larger ones we are never likely to clear up entirely to our satisfaction. There are moments in my experience when such a spot as this that I am thinking of, is in a sense _more_ vivid to me away from it than if I were standing there in person; when every tuft of bog myrtle becomes clearly visible; every yard of “drift” or of “boulder clay” shows in its entirety; the very stones fallen from them, and lying like small cannon-balls upon the beach, being all able to be counted. The waves toss; the clouds roll wearily; the seaweed rises and falls, as it naturally would. No scene in a cinematograph could by any possibility be clearer.

This is the vivid condition. An hour later one tries to conjure up the same familiar scene, and not a detail will rise to one’s bidding. Not a leaf, not a stone, not a wave will become manifest. Clearness is gone. A dull, blurred impression is all that remains. The landscape as a whole may be there, but its details are lost. That living, multitudinous-tinted foreground has vanished as though it had never existed.

It must have been the scent of the bog plants which conferred that momentary impression upon me this morning. That scents “open the wards of memory with a key” we all know. They do more, for they sweep away for the moment those films which ordinarily cover the mental eye, so that during that moment we really do see. Of all scents commend me for this awakening quality to the boggy ones. They alone in my experience are really transformatory. For the brief time that their aroma is in one’s nostrils one actually _is_ in the place that they recall.

It is a proof of the demoralising effect of ownership that one of my first impulses nowadays is a desire to transfer the plants that I see, sometimes that I merely remember, from where they are to where I happen to want them. Yet, when one thinks of it, what an outrage! Why should one desire to do anything of the sort? Conceive the contrast, the downfall; the roominess, the elemental breadth, the cool, rain-saturated comfort of the one setting; the cramped limitation, the unpalatable dryness of the other. Not that I would for worlds disparage our own faithful coppice; to do so would be to show myself the merest of ingrates. Was I not an alien, and did it not befriend me? Was I not roofless, and did it not offer its soil for us to lift a roof over? Still, when one tries to place the one scene beside the other the contrast becomes farcical. The very wind--the cold, unsentimental wind--must be sensible of such a difference. How much more then a root-extending, acutely sensitive, living thing!

I have a profound affection for bog plants, which I hope some of them respond to, for they thrive fairly. Others are exceedingly difficult to establish, and rarely look anything but starved and homesick. Amongst these are the butterworts. Why the translation should so particularly affect them I have yet to learn, but the fact is unmistakable. Not all the water of all our taps, not all the peat of all our hillsides will persuade them to be contented. In vain I have wooed them with the wettest spots I could find; in vain erected poor semblances of tussocks for their benefit; have puddled the peat till it seemed impossible that any creature unprovided with eyes could distinguish it from a bit of real bog. No, die they will, and die they hitherto always have.

The sundews, on the other hand, are much less hard to please. Indeed, considering that at least one species grows wild within a few miles of us, it would be the height of affectation were they to refuse to tolerate us. I find myself falling into the habit of thinking that I am inhabiting here a region of eternal thirstiness, devoid of the materials of sustaining any vegetable more requiring in the matter of water than a gaillardia. Yet, when one considers the matter seriously, England is not precisely the Great Sahara! There are brown streams, purling brooks, dripping wells, rushy meadows, even puddles and bog-holes, to be found a good deal nearer to this spot than the Atlantic. We are purblind citizens all of us; apt to dogmatise largely upon an uncommonly small substratum of knowledge. Like the moles and the blindworms we know remarkably well the few inches that we can actually feel and touch; but with regard to what John Locke calls “the rest of the vast expansum,” that we give up to fog and practical non-existence, thereby saving ourselves from the trouble of knowing anything about it.

APRIL 18, 1900

Yet even dull, and quite unfeathered bipeds have their glimmerings now and then of sense, and of instinct. There are hours in which the great Mother befriends them, as she does the rest of her two-legged, four-legged, or many-legged offspring. That she should continue to do so is I think amiable, and rather surprising on her part, when one considers how they disobey and deride her; how they sit day after day in stuffy rooms, eating dinners of many courses; hardly ever getting up to see the sun rise, or doing any of the other things she directs, and which her better-behaved scholars invariably do.

In spite of this, when the right winds blow, when the spring is afoot, and the leaves are beginning to bud, she allows the old visions to return to them. She brings back the old voices from the old haunts, to whisper once more in their ears, so that for the moment they forget the years that the locust has eaten, and their own incredible stupidities, and all that has been, and time rolls itself up like a scroll, and they are once again in very deed, though but for a little while, as they once were.

There is a spot in a hill-wood barely a mile from this door, to which I have been a good many times this spring, and which each time I go gives me a curiously homely feeling. Ireland seems to breathe in it, even West Ireland, though I can hardly say why, the only apparent reason being the rather unpatriotic one that the fir trees, of which the wood consists, have been sadly neglected. It covers an unusually steep bit of hillside, and below expands into a tangle of brakes and brambles, circling about a hollow place, which in my mind’s eye I conceive to be a boggy pool, though, were I to clamber down to it, I should probably find it to be dust-dry. Far and near not a roof is within sight, else were that illusion for a certainty lost. Moreover, the only bit of distance visible seems to be houseless also, and in these grey, rather despondent-looking spring days wears just a touch of that wistful indefiniteness, the lack of which, one is apt to assert, amongst many beauties, to be England’s most conspicuous blemish.

Until the last great summons comes for us, we can never, happily, entirely lose what has once formed a part of our little mental patrimony. We may deliberately discard it, or, what oftener happens, it may get unintentionally overlaid with other matters, so that it appears to be gone, but a little search, or some happy accident, brings it flying swiftly back, and the pleasure of that repossession is so great that it seems almost worth while that the thing should have been temporarily mislaid.

Of all such inalienable possessions the love of out-of-door life is surely the most inalienable? And is it not profoundly natural that it should be so? For this race, to which one belongs, was after all born under an open sky, even though every individual of which it is composed may have been born to-day under roofs. We do not any longer require the comfort of sheltering boughs, nor yet to nestle at night in moss-lined hollows, but the thought of such places still lurks in our blood, and the life of out-of-doors remains as much a part of the natural inheritance of a man, as it is a part of the inheritance of a fox, or of a wood-pigeon, or of a tiger moth.

Back, back--like the touch of half-forgotten greetings--comes a flood of remembrances to the heart. Back flows the old stream along its old channels. No longer tearing along with a wild tumultuous rush, but still sweeping by, full and clear, with a pleasant afternoon patter, and showing many an unlooked-for nook, many a forgotten corner along its banks, once we surrender ourselves frankly to its guidance. Back the scenes return; ever back and back; now vividly; now with a dream-like vagueness; scenes, some of them, that we have ourselves known, others to which we have only as it were a communal right. Waking hours under the flickering shade of leaves; life as it was lived in a larger, freer world; a world without walls or hedgerows; without sign-posts, or notice-boards; a world without towns, or smoke; without dust, or crowds.

It has been often debated, and not perhaps very profitably, which of two types of men see deepest into that great arcanum of life which we roughly call Nature. Is it the Man of Science, whose business it is to chronicle what he sees and learns, but who must never travel half an inch beyond his brief? who must cling to fact, as the samphire-picker clings to his rope, and never for an instant relax his hold of it? Or is it on the other hand the Singer, who is only too ready to toss all fact to the winds, and to account it mere dust, and dregs and dross, so he can awaken in himself, and pass on to others, some hint, some passing impression, of what he would probably himself call the soul of things?

Time was when the barrier between these two types was held to be an absolutely impassable one. We call ours a prosaic age, but it is certainly one of its better points, and a mitigation of that prose, that those barriers hardly appear to us so absolutely impregnable as they once were. If we have never seen a great scientist combined with a great poet it is at least not inconceivable that the world may some day behold such a combination. Even within the generation just over, and in utilitarian England, there have been one or two men who have given us at all events an inkling of so desirable a possibility.

Given a mind that can feed on knowledge, without becoming surfeited by it; a mind to which it has become so familiar that it has grown to be as it were organic; a mind for which facts are no longer heavy, but light, so that it can play with them, as an athlete plays with his iron balls, and send them flying aloft, like birds through the air. Given such a mind, so fed by knowledge, so constituted by nature, and it is not easy to see limits to the realms of thought and of discovery, to the feats of reconstruction, still more perhaps to the feats of reconciliation, which may not, some day or other, be open to it.

APRIL 26, 1900

The reddening of our sundew patch has brought back to my mind various sundew experiments, carried on long since, with all the zeal of youth and enthusiasm. In this, as in every other walk of biology, the investigators of those days, amateur and scientist alike, followed with docility in the wake of their master. Darwin played the tune, and all the rest of us, great and small, danced to his piping.