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DEDICATION

THE GARDEN OF LIFE--INTRODUCTORY

IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES

ON GOING TO THE PLAY

READING BOOKS

HEARING MUSIC

RECEIVING LETTERS

NEW FRIENDS AND OLD

OTHER FRIENDSHIPS

A HOTEL SITTING-ROOM

IN PRAISE OF COURTSHIP

KNOWING ONE'S MIND

AGAINST TALKING

IN PRAISE OF SILENCE

THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS

SERE AND YELLOW--INTERLUDE

A STAGE JEWEL

MY BICYCLE AND I

PUZZLES OF THE PAST

MAKING PRESENTS

GOING AWAY

COMING BACK

LOSING ONE'S TRAIN

THE HANGING GARDENS--VALEDICTORY

HORTUS VITAE

THE GARDEN OF LIFE

"Cela est bien dit," r?pondit Candide; "mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."--ROMANS DE VOLTAIRE.

THE GARDEN OF LIFE

This by no means implies that the whole of life is a garden or could be made one. I am not sure even that we ought to try. Indeed, on second thoughts, I feel pretty certain that we ought not. Only such portion of life is our garden as lies, so to speak, close to our innermost individual dwelling, looked into by our soul's own windows, and surrounded by its walls. A portion of life which is ours exclusively, although we do occasionally lend its key to a few intimates; ours to cultivate just as we please, growing therein either pistachios and dwarf lemons for preserving, like Voltaire's immortal hero, or more spiritual flowers, "sweet basil and mignonette," such as the Lady of Epipsychidion sent to Shelley; kindly rosemary and balm; or, as may happen, a fine assortment of witch's herbs, infallible for turning us into cats and toads and poisoning our neighbours.

But with whatever we may choose to plant the portion of our life and our thought which is our own, and whatsoever its natural fertility and aspect, this much is certain, that it needs digging, watering, planting, and perhaps most of all, weeding. "Cela est bien dit," r?pondit Candide, "mais il faut cultiver notre jardin." He was, as you will recollect, answering Dr. Pangloss. One evening, while they were resting from their many tribulations, and eating various kinds of fruit and sweetmeats in their arbour on the Bosphorus, the eminent optimistic philosopher had pointed out at considerable length that the delectable moment they were enjoying was connected by a Leibnitzian chain of cause and effect with sundry other moments of a less obviously desirable character in the earlier part of their several lives.

"What you say is true," answered Candide, "but we have to cultivate our garden."

And here I hasten to remark, that although I have quoted and translated these seven immortal words, I would on no account be answerable for their original and exact meaning, any more than for the meaning of more officially grave and reverend texts, albeit perhaps not wiser or nobler ones.

All these points remain obscure. But even as a play is said to be only the better for the various interpretations which it affords to as many great actors; so methinks, the wisest sayings are often those which state some principle in general terms, leaving to individuals the practical working out, according to their nature and circumstances. So, whether we incline to optimism or to pessimism, we must do our best in the half-hours we can bestow upon our little garden.

I speak advisedly of half-hours, and I would repeatedly insist upon the garden being little. For the garden, whatever its actual size, and were it as extensive as those of Eden and the Hesperides set on end, does not afford the exercise needful for spiritual health and vigour. And whatever we may succeed in growing there to please our taste or to heal our bruises, this much is certain, that the power of enjoyment has to be brought from beyond its limits.

Happiness, dear fellow-gardeners, is not a garden plant.

But we want the ploughed fields beyond, the real woods with stacked-up timber, German fashion; the orchards and the kitchen gardens; the tracks across the high-lying sheep downs; the towing-paths where the barges come up the rivers; the deep lanes where the hay-carts have left long wisps on the overhanging elms; the high-roads running from village to village, with the hooded carts and bicycles and even the solemn Juggernaut traction-engines upon them. We want not only to rest from living, to take refreshment in life's kindly pauses and taste the pleasantness of life's fruits. We want also to live.

Fortunately, however, this casual-looking universe is not without its harmonies, as well as ironies. And one of these arrangements would seem to be that our play educates the aims and methods of our work. If we lay store by satisfactions which imply the envy and humiliation of other folk, why then we set about such work as humiliates our neighbours or fills them with enviousness, saving the case where others, sharing our tastes, do alike by us. Without going to such lengths there remains the fact that if our soul happen to take delight in, let us say, futility--well, then, futility will litter existence with shreds of coloured paper and plaster comfits trodden into mud, as after a day of carnival at Nice. Nay, a still simpler case: if we cannot be happy without a garden as big as the grounds of an expensive lunatic asylum, why, then, all the little cottage gardens down the lane must be swept away to make it.

Now, the cottage gardens, believe me, are the best. They are the only ones which, being small, may be allotted in some juster future to every man without dispossessing his neighbour. And they are also the only ones compatible with that fine arable or dairy country which we all long for. Stop and look over the hedges: their flowers leave no scrap of earth visible between them, like the bedded-out things of grander gardens; and their vivid crimsons, and tender rose and yellow, and ineffable blue, and the solemn white which comes out in the evening, are seen to most advantage against the silvery green of vegetables behind them, and the cornfield, the chalk-pit under the beech trees beyond. The cottage flowers come also into closer quarters with their owners, not merely because these breathe their fragrance and the soil's good freshness while stooping down to weed, and prune, and water; but also, and perhaps even more, because the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habit of blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetness which not the most skilful hired gardeners have ever taught the most far-fetched hybrids that they raise for clients.

IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES

Even before discovering that there was an old, gabled, lower town at Cassel, I felt the special gladness of the touch of Germany. It was an autumn morning, bright yet tender. I sped along the wide, empty streets, across the sanded square, with hedges of sere lime trees, where a big, periwigged Roman Emperor of an Elector presides, making one think of the shouts of "Hurrah, lads, for America!" of the bought and sold Hessians of Schiller's "Cabal and Love." At the other end was a promenade, terraced above the yellow tree-tops of a park, above a gentle undulating country, with villages and steeples in the distance. "Sch?neaussicht" the place called itself; and the view was looked at by the wide and many windows of pleasant old-fashioned houses, with cocked-hat roofs well pulled down over them, each in its little garden of standard roses, all quiet and smiling in the autumn sunshine.

I felt the special gladness of being in Germany , and glad that there should be in me something which answered to Germany's especial touch. We owe that, many of us, I mused, and with it a deep debt of gratitude, to our governesses. And I fell to thinking of certain things which an American friend had lately told me, sitting in the twilight with her head a little averted, about a certain governess of hers I can remember from my childhood. Pathetic things, heroic ones, nothings; all ending off in the story of a farewell letter, treasured many years, lost on a journey.... "Do you remember Fr?ulein's bonnet? The one she brought from Hanover and wore that winter in Paris?" And there it was in a faded, crinolined photograph, so dear and funny. Dear and funny--that is the point of this relationship with creatures giving often the best of the substance and form of our soul, that it is without the sometimes rather empty majesty of the parental one. And surely it is no loss, but rather a gain, to have to smile, as my friend did at the thought of that Teutonic bonnet, just when we feel an awkward huskiness in our voice.

There is, moreover, a particular possibility for good in the relation between a developing child and a woman still young, childless, or separated from her children, a little solitary, most often alien, differently brought up, and whose affection and experience must therefore take a certain impersonality, and tend to subdued romance. We are loved, when we are, not as a matter of course and habit, not with any claim; but for ourselves and with the delicate warmth of a feeling necessarily one-sided. And whatever we learn of life in this relationship is of one very different from our own, and seen through the feelings, the imagination, often the repressed home-sickness, of a mature and foreign soul. And this is good for us, and useful in correcting family and national tradition, and the rubbing away of angles by brothers and sisters, and general contemporaries, excellent educational items of which it is possible to have a little too much.

Be this as it may, it is to our German governesses that we owe the power of understanding Germany, more than to German literature. For the literature itself requires some introduction of mood for its romantic, homely, sentimental, essentially German qualities; the mere Anglo-Saxon or Latin being, methinks, incapable of caring at once for Wilhelm Meister, or Siebennk?s, or G?tz, or the manifold lyric of Forest and Millstream. To understand these, means to have somewhere in us a little sample, some fibres and corpuscles, of the German heart. And I maintain that we are all of us the better, of whatever nationality for such transfusion of a foreign element, correcting our deficiencies and faults, and ripening our own intrinsic qualities. It means, apart from negative service against conceit and canting self-aggrandisement, an additional power of taking life intelligently and serenely; a power of adaptation to various climates and diets of the spirit, let alone the added wealth of such varied climates and diets themselves. Italy, somehow, attains this by her mere visible aspect and her history: a pure, high sky, a mountain city, or a row of cypresses can teach as much as Dante, and, indeed, teach us to understand Dante himself. While as to France, that most lucid of articulately-speaking lands, explains herself in her mere books; and we become in a manner French with every clear, delightful page we read, and almost every thought of our own we ever think with definiteness and grace. But the genius of Germany is, like her landscape, homely and sentimental, with the funny goodness and dearness of a good child; and we must learn to know it while we ourselves are children. And therefore it is from our governesses that we learn a certain natural affinity with the Germany of humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or of purity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, and Goethe and Schiller, and was not ashamed to say "scharmant."

These thoughts came into my head that morning in the promenade at Cassel, brought to the surface by the mellow autumn sun and the special pleasure of being again in Germany. There mingled with them also that recent conversation about the lady with the bonnet from Hanover, who had written that paper so precious to my American friend. And I determined to take my pen some day I should feel suitably happy, and offer up thanks for all of us to our governesses, to those dear women, dead, dispersed, faded into distance, but not forgotten; our spiritual foster-mothers who put a few drops of the milk of German kindness, of German simplicity and quaintness and romance, between our lips when we were children.

ON GOING TO THE PLAY

We were comparing notes the other day on plays and play-going. My friend was Irish; so, finding to our joy that we disliked this form of entertainment equally, we swore with fervour that we would go to the play together.

READING BOOKS

The chief point to be made in this matter is: that books, to fulfil their purpose, do not always require to be read. A book, for instance, which is a present, or an "hommage de l'auteur," has already served its purpose, like a visiting-card or a luggage label, at best like a ceremonial bouquet; and it is absurd to try and make it serve twice over, by reading it. The same applies, of course, to books lent without being asked for, and, in a still higher degree, to a book which has been discussed in society, and thus furnished out a due amount of conversation; to read such a book is an act of pedantry, showing slavishness to the names of things, and lack of insight into their real nature, which is revealed by the function they have been able to perform. Fancy, if public characters had to learn to snuff--a practice happily abandoned--because they occasionally received gifts of enamelled snuffboxes from foreign potentates!

But there are subtler sides to this subject, and it is of these I fain would speak. We are apt to blunt our literary sense by reading far too much, and to lessen our capacity for getting the great delights from books by making reading into a routine and a drudgery. Of course I know that reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have to consider printed matter as the raw material whence we extract some of the information necessary to life. But long familiarity with an illiterate peasantry like the Italian one, inclines me to think that we grossly exaggerate the need of such book-grown knowledge. Except as regards scientific facts and the various practices--as medicine, engineering, and the like, founded on them--such knowledge is really very little connected with life, either practical or spiritual, and it is possible to act, to feel, and even to think and to express one's self with propriety and grace, while having simply no literature at all behind one. That this is really no paradox is proved by pointing to the Greeks, who, even in the time of Plato--let alone the time, whenever that was, of Homer--had not much more knowledge of books than my Italian servant, who knows a few scraps of Tasso, possesses a "Book of Dreams; or Key to the Lottery," and uses the literature I have foolishly bestowed upon him as blotters in which to keep loose bills, and wherein occasionally to do addition sums. So that the fact seems to be that reading books is useful chiefly to enable us to wish to read more books!

How many times does one not feel checked, when on the point of lending a book to what we call uneducated persons, by wondering what earthly texture of misapprehension and blanks they will weave out of its allusions and suggestions? And the same is the case of children. What fitter reading for a tall Greek goddess of ten than the tale of Cupid and Psyche, the most perfect of fairy stories with us; wicked sisters, subterranean adventures, ants helping to sort seeds, and terrible awaking drops of hot oil spilt over the bridegroom? But when I read to her this afternoon, shall I not see quite plainly over the edge of the book, that all the things which make it just what it is to me--the indescribable quality of the South, of antiquity and paganism--are utterly missed out; and that, to this divine young nymph, "Cupid and Psyche" is distinguishable from, say, "Beauty and the Beast" only by the unnecessary addition of a lot of heathenish names and the words which she does not even want to understand? Hence literature, alas! is, so to speak, for the literate; and one has to have read a great, great deal in order to taste the special exquisiteness of books, their marvellous essence of long-stored up, oddly mixed, subtly selected and hundredfold distilled suggestion.

Nay, such is the virtuous power of books, that, to those who are initiated and reverent, it can act from the mere title, or more properly, the binding. Of this I had an instance quite lately in the library of an old Jacobite house on the North Tyne. This library contained, besides its properly embodied books, a small collection existing, so to speak, only in the spirit, or at least in effigy; a door, to wit, being covered with real book-backs, or, more properly, backs of real books of which the inside was missing. A quaint, delightful collection! "Female traits," two volumes; four volumes of Webster's "Vittoria Corombona," etc., the "Siege of Mons," "Ancient Mysteries," "The Epigrams of Martial," "A Journey through Italy," and Cr?billon's novels. Contemplating these pseudo shelves of pageless tomes, I felt acutely how true it is that a book can do its work without being read. I lingeringly relished this mixed literature's flavour, humorous, romantic, and pedantic, beautifully welded. And I recognized that those gutted-away insides were quite superfluous: they had yielded their essence and their virtue.

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