Chapter I: CANNOT remember how old I was when I wrote the thrilling poem about the

tiger who swallowed the horse, nor am I quite certain that it was my first literary effort, but I know that I was still at the tight knickerbocker stage, and that my previous poems, if there had been any, had remained secrets of my own. It was due to a cousin that my conspiracy against the world of common sense was finally discovered. Woman-like, she tickled my ears with flattery, and persuaded me to let her read the precious document; and then, as soon as she had it in her hand, she fled to the camp of the Olympians, leaving me alone in the little dark room to reflect on the guiles of the sex. With straining ears I waited for the distant chorus of mocking laughter that would announce my failure, while my body tingled all over with shame. Yet beneath my fear I was conscious that I had not been wholly unwilling to be betrayed. It seemed to me that if I proved to be a great poet, my future traffic with the Olympians might be of a more agreeable character than it had been previously. On the other hand, I felt that life would be impossible if they greeted my poem with scorn. Conceived and perfected in solitude, it had become an intimate part of myself, and I turned dark thoughts to the purple berries that grew in the shrubbery, and provided us with wholly innocuous poison for our arrows. Even then, it would seem, I had an instinctive knowledge of the tragedy of failing as a poet.

And then, while I yet waited in suspense, I heard the sound of footsteps and knew that my cousin was returning. In a flash I realised how stupid I had been to remain in the room, when I might have hidden myself in some far corner of the attic and appeared no more until my shame had been forgotten. My legs trembled in sudden panic, and it seemed to me that my face was ticking like a clock. I received my first critic with my head buried in the cushions of the sofa.

Looking back, I perceive that the Olympians rose to the occasion, but at the time I could hardly believe my good-fortune. Long after my cousin had gone away I lay on the sofa turning over the pleasant message in my mind—and the magic half-crown in my hand. Praise I had desired, if not expected; but that the Olympians—whose function in life was to divert our tips into a savings-bank account that meant nothing to us, that these stern financiers should give me a whole half-crown in one sum, unhindered by any restrictions in the spending, was incredible. Yet I could feel its rough edge in the dark; and considering its source, I formed an erroneous idea of the influence of the arts on the minds of sane grown-up people, from which even now I am not wholly delivered.

After a while, with a mind strangely confused between pride and modesty, I stole into the room where the others were sitting. But with a quick sense of disappointment I saw that I need not have concerned myself at all with the proper attitude for a young poet to adopt. The Olympians, engaged in one of their meaningless discussions, did not notice my entrance, and only my brothers were interested when I crept silently into their midst.

“What are you going to spend it on?” they whispered.

Oddly, for I was the youngest of four, this success of mine was responsible for a literary outburst in our normally uncultured schoolroom, and one of the fruits of that intellectual disturbance, in the shape of a manuscript magazine, lies before me. It contains an editorial address to the “friendly reader,” two short stories full of murders, a quantity of didactic verse, and the first instalment of a serial, which commences gravely: “My father was a bootmaker of considerable richness.” Of literary achievement or even promise it would be hard to find a trace in these yellowing pages, but there is an enthusiasm behind every line of them that the critic would seek in vain in modern journalism. Indeed, those were the days in which to write, when paper and pencil and half an hour never failed to produce a masterpiece, and the finished work invariably thrilled the artist with “out-landish pride.” I cannot recall that any further half-crowns rewarded our efforts, and possibly that is the reason why three of the four boys who wrote that magazine are now regenerate and write no more.

And even the fourth must own to having lost that fine, careless trick of throwing off masterpieces, and to regretting, in moments of depression, the generous Olympian impulse that enabled him to barter his birthright of common sense for a silver coin with a rough edge. And the Olympians—they, too, have regretted it, I suppose, for the goddess of letters is an exacting mistress, and we do not willingly see our children engaging in her irregular service. Yet I do not see what else they could have done at the time.

A little while ago I discovered a small girl, to whom I act as a kind of illegal uncle, in the throes of lyrical composition. With soft words and flattering phrases, borrowed, perhaps, from the cousin of the past, I won the paper from her grasp. It was like all the poetry that children have ever written, and I was preparing to banter the young author when I saw that she was regarding me with curious intentness, and that her face turned red and white by turns. Even if my intentions had been honourable I could not have disregarded her signs of distress. “I think it’s very nice indeed,” I said; “I’ll give you half a crown for it.”

As her fingers closed on the coin I felt inclined to raise a shout of triumph. For now that I had paid the half-crown back I should be able gradually—for, of course, the habit of years is not broken in a minute—to stop writing. My only fear is that my conscience may have gone to sleep in my long years of aloofness from simplicity; for though I already detect a note of vagueness in the eyes of my niece, and her mother complains that she is becoming untidy, I hold my peace, and offer no explanation. For I feel sure that if I did I should recover my half-crown.

ON CHILDREN’S GARDENS

IN the well-ordered garden of every well-ordered house—that is, every house that numbers children in its treasury—there lies, screened perhaps by some inconvenient shrubbery but none the less patent to the stars and the winds and the polite visitor, a tormented patch of earth where sway in dubious security of tenure a number of sickly plants. For days they have lain parched and neglected in the summer sun; for days they have been beaten down into a morass by torrents poured from an excited watering-pot; their roots have regarded heaven for no less a period than their heads; and in the face of such unnatural conditions Ceres, one fancies, must have fallen back in confusion and left them to struggle on as best they can unaided. It is only the most hardy of plants that may survive the attentions of a youthful gardener, and it is a tribute to Nature’s obstinacy that any survive at all. I have in my mind a garden of this kind, and thereby hangs one of those rather tragic stories which grown-up people are apt to consider funny. The garden lay below an old brick wall, which must, I think, have faced south, for, as I remember it, it was always lit by the sun. It was the property of three children, and their separate estates were carefully marked off by decorative walls of shells and freakish pebbles. Here, early and late, two of the children waged a gallant war against Nature, thwarting and checking her with a hundred delicate attentions; but on the third had fallen that pleasant mood when it is nicer to lie in the shade and to dream of wine than to labour in the vineyard. His garden was a tangle of weeds and of healthy, neglected plants, and when the inevitable awakening came he saw that it would require days of unprofitable work to turn the wilderness into a proper garden. Yet to hear the uninformed comparisons of visitors was a shameful ordeal not to be borne. He solved the problem, I still think, in a very spirited manner. He cleared the garden by the simple process of removing plants and weeds alike, and sowed the ground with seeds, purchased alas! with a shilling extracted quite illegally from his money-box. But the secrecy of these movements had not escaped the notice of the Olympians, and later there fell on his horrified ears an entirely new and obviously truthful theory of botany; it seemed that the word “thief” could be plainly deciphered on the flowers of dishonest gardeners. There were no blossoms in that little boy’s garden that year. Like the monk in Browning’s poem, he pinched off all the buds before the sun was up.

They were simple flowers we sought to cultivate in those days, simple flowers with beautiful names. Violets and snowdrops, the reticent but cheerful pansy, otherwise known as “three faces under a hood,” love-lies-bleeding, wallflowers, stocks, and London pride, or “none so pretty”; of these and their unaffected comrades we made our gardens. Spades and pickaxes were denied us, but the simple gardening tools were ours, and he has lived in darkness who has not experienced the keen joy of smacking the earth with the convex side of a trowel. My hands tingle when I remember how sore weeding made the finger-tips, and there is something in the last ecstatic chuckle of a watering-pot as it runs dry that lingers in the ear. I am aware that there are persons of mature years who can find pleasure in the performance of simple garden tasks. But I am afraid that subconsciously it is the æsthetic aspect of flowers that attracts them, and that their gardening is only a means to an end. No such charge could be brought against our efforts. We cared little about flowers or results of any sort; we only wanted to garden, and it troubled us not at all that the labours of one day destroyed those of the day before. To dig a deep hole and to fill it with water when completed is, as far as I have observed, no part of the ordinary gardener’s daily work, but it was our favourite effort, and a share in the construction of these ornamental waters was the greatest favour that we could grant to a friend. There were always captivating insects with numerous and casual legs to be discovered in the digging, and great stones that parted from the earth as reluctantly as nuggets. And when we had hollowed a cup in the earth we would pour in the sea and set our hearts floating upon its surface in paper ships. The sides of the hole would crumble down into the water like real cliffs, and every little fall would send a real wave sparkling across the surface of the ocean. Then there were bays to be cut and canals, and soundings to be taken with pieces of knotted string weighted with stones. Water has been the friend of children ever since Moses floated in his little ark of rushes to the feet of Pharaoh’s daughter.

I question whether they know very much about this sort of gardening at Kew, a place which is, however, beloved of children for the sake of the excellent spiral staircases in the palm-houses. But every sensible child has the art at its finger-tips, and in the time that we take to reach Brighton in a fleet motor they will construct a brand new sea for themselves—a sea with harbours and islands and sunken reefs, a perfect sea of wonder and romance.

If we are prepared to set aside our preconceived ideas as to what a garden ought to be, we must own that the children are not far wrong after all. A garden is only a world in miniature, with prairies of flowers and forests of roses and gravel paths for the wide, dusty roads. When we plant flowers in our garden it is as though we added new territories to our empire, new reds and blues and purples to our treasury of colours. And so when a child has wrought a fine morning’s havoc in its little patch of ground it has added it may be an ocean, it may be only a couple of stars to the kingdom of imagination which we may no longer see. It only needs a sunny hour or two, a trowel, and a pair of dirty hands to change a few square yards of earth into a world. And the child may be considered fortunate in being able to express itself perfectly in terms of dust. Our books and pictures cumber the earth, our palaces strike the skies, and yet it is our common tragedy that we have not found expression; while down the garden behind the lilac-bushes at this very moment Milton may have developed Lycidas into a sticky marsh, and Shakespeare may have compressed Hamlet into a mud-pie. The works of the children end as they begin in dust; but we cannot pretend that ours are more permanent.

A DISTINGUISHED GUEST