A GARDEN DIARY (continued 2)

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!

Pending that desirable, but still rather remote, contingency, I have left the lanes, and returned homeward, and am now looking down at our own somewhat chaotic little garden, with its small brown beds, each edged with a neat white frost-frill. Poor little garden! I have felt so oblivious of it of late that a certain compunction comes over me as I look at it. After all, gratitude for such good things as have come in one’s way is an undoubted part of decent living, and the most practical way of showing that gratitude is to make the best of them. Well, the year is still young; there will be time enough for fulfilling that, and every other small social obligation in the course of it. Eleven and a half months! What unknown things have you got hidden away? What secrets, as yet unguessed at by any of us, do you keep concealed behind those picturesque, and friendly-sounding names of yours?

January 20, 1900

THE wind this morning was excruciatingly cold, with a hungry whistle, that belied the pale sunrays, which were doing their best to redeem the situation. On such a morning the good gardener’s thoughts, even before going out, fly to the younger and weaklier amongst his plants, and his imagination towards devising new shelters, and, if possible, more efficient ones. Creepers are, as a rule, easily protected; either there is a wall, against which mats can be laid, or, at worst, some post that they can be fastened to. It is shrubs in the open that present the greatest difficulty; nightcaps of sacking, or tents of matting not adding to the picturesqueness even of a winter garden.

Our more recently planted rhododendrons look anything but happy, and I have just been begging Cuttle to bestow a good shovelful of nourishment about the roots of each of them. It is not protection that they need, for they are hardy enough, but they sicken in this thin, dry soil, which seems to reach them through their two-foot blanket of peat.

Even when well grown and long established, rhododendrons hardly seem to me to be quite the ideal thing for these rustling oak copses of ours. We plant them, partly for the sake of their colour in its season, partly because we need evergreens, and the common ponticum is one of the best of evergreens, but they seem to me to remain exotics, and not altogether happy ones. There are two distinct varieties of scenery with both of which rhododendrons consort magnificently. One is heavy, boggy ground, deep, dark, and oozy, under large trees, into the recesses of which they can settle, spreading out in all directions, re-rooting themselves as they choose in the black earth; their flowers catching the divided sunrays, and turning every hollow place into a pool of colour. Another, and a yet more ideal place is a steep hillside, provided that it is furnished with boulders, and provided that the said boulders are not of limestone. There is one such hillside above the Bay of Dublin which I find it difficult to believe might not be able to hold its own, even though confronted with any similar extent of ground amongst the Himalayas themselves. It begins as a ravine, rising out of a rather thin wood. As one mounts the ravine opens, and the trees fall back. The boulders, with which the slopes are covered, rise higher and higher, and larger and larger, till they tower into the air over one’s head, perfect monoliths. In and out, above, behind, and between them grow the rhododendrons, in their flowering season an absolute feast of colour, the sort of thing that in a cultivated age pilgrimages will be formed to venerate. To see them in such a place is to get a new impression of the possibilities of heroic gardening. One’s eyes are caught, one’s whole mind and spirit is swept away upon a tide of colour; the grey micaceous granite of the ravine, the heather looking down over its top, the long blue river of sky, even the sea and its ships, seeming to be merely so many adjuncts and accessories of the central picture.

Such conditions are not to be found every day in the week, or in everybody’s back garden. We have to work out our own redemption, each of us as we best can, with such materials as the Fates have lent us. Happily, as regards natural conditions, here in West Surrey, the garden-lover, whatever other difficulties he may have to contend with, has much to be grateful for. Thanks to its blessed unproductiveness, the harrow has literally in many cases never passed over its soil; its very weeds being mostly those of Nature’s own introduction, not imported ones. Her handiwork is still plainly visible on every side. She looks up at him out of the bracken with an aspect not very different from what she wore at the Prime, and if he wishes to spoil her—well, he has to do it for himself! This to many excellent gardeners would seem a poor compensation for a sadly unproductive soil, and a deplorable lack of summer moisture. There are others, however, to whom a certain sense of indwelling peace, a certain feeling of underlying harmony, are the first of all requirements. Now both of these are more easily found than made.

February 5, 1900

NOT to devote an indefinite number of hours to the reading of war news; to eschew the luxury of idle hands, less on account of Dr. Watts’ reasons against it, as on account of more personal ones, which have taught me to reprobate the practice. Here are a couple of respectable resolutions for a bitterly cold February morning. “Books, and work, and healthful play”! Could a more commendable little programme be invented? or one that might be followed with greater advantage by many of us who only exhibit our superiority by laughing at it?

Into which of the two latter categories gardening is to be ranged I am not quite clear; it depends, I should say, upon the number of rose-campions, “Snaking Tommys” and the like, that are to be found in the garden in question. Winter is supposed to be a time of year which gives comparatively little scope to the energies of the amateur gardener. If so, then in this respect, if in no other, I am in luck’s way this winter, for there is abundance to be done here; work moreover which must either be attended to now, or else not done at all. With such weather as we have of late had there is no margin either for dawdling. To-day seems to be an off day with the frost fiend’s gang, and we must try, therefore, to push our own work forward before they are back upon us in renewed strength. By the look of the sky, and the general feeling of things, it is evident that they are only just round the corner, and collecting themselves for a fresh assault. As I crossed the open end of the “glade” just now the wind met me with an edge, cruel and cutting as spite, or hatred. A few aconites and snowdrops are pushing out their flower-tips, but it is a mere bit of gallant bravado upon their part. By night the stars, seen through any uncurtained window, seem to wink at one derisively, and winter is still at the very top of its strength.

February 7, 1900

“AT the very top of its strength!” Cold as it has been of late, I hardly expected to find no garden left when I got up to-day! So it is however. Late last night everything seemed normal. This morning our little Dutch garden has vanished utterly; swept out of existence as though it had never existed. From centre to margin—beds, borders, walks, red walls, everything—the entire little depression has been covered with a uniform white blanket, effacing it completely, and restoring the landscape to what it was before man, woman, or measuring tapes arrived to trouble it. For the plants this new state of things is an improvement, but how about our work? Behold us suddenly reduced to a state of deadlock; all our various little activities brought to an absolute standstill. The paths that were being cut through the copse; the ground that was being got ready for grass-sowing; the flower-beds that had to be clipped into the right shape; the heather that was being brought from a distant common, where it could be cut discreetly; the entire bustle of the garden has been brought to a condition of arrest. Into the middle of our fussy little rhythm Nature has dropped her own imperious full-stop. Against that full-stop there is no appeal. In vain one protests that one is really in a great hurry; that unless these flower-beds are made, unless yonder piece of ground is got ready for grass-sowing, March will be upon us, and close at its heels, April; that the spring is coming on, and that we must get our work done. To this remonstrance Nature merely opens her eyes with a mildly sarcastic air, and replies, “Must you?” It is the case of the old woman of the nursery tale over again, who had to get her pig over the stile in order to give her old man his supper. In that case she did, after many repulses, find a complacent beast, I think, who undertook the task. The right spring was touched; the spell broken, and the whole state of deadlock dissolved at once. How we are to obtain so desirable a dissolution I have yet to learn. I see no spring to touch; no bird, beast, or element that could be appealed to with the slightest hope of success. The sky, iron-grey, with vicious, inky streaks across it, does not seem promising; neither does the wind, which keeps to its beloved north-east. The earth is invisible, consequently is for the moment out of reckoning; while as for the birds and beasts, they are much more disposed to turn to us for help, than to make any friendly propositions the other way.

It may be mere vanity upon my part, but it always seems to me that small birds recognise their heavy, wingless, two-legged kinsfolk with less difficulty during this sort of weather than at any other time of the year. The fact that one bribes them to such recognition by vulgar doles of breadcrumbs may have something to say to the matter, but I fancy that I read a distinctly kindlier expression in their eyes. They glance at us with an air of comparative condescension. They perceive that we share their own helplessness; that we are not so very different from themselves, only bigger and stupider. For instance, I have been publicly snubbed this whole winter by the tomtits. Under the eye and to the knowledge of the entire garden I set up a large post, hung over with cocoa-nuts for their convenience. Some of these cocoa-nuts were sawn into slices, others, more artfully, into rings, and I pleased myself by believing that they would sit and swing in them, as they pecked an unfamiliar, but not unpalatable meal. Will it be believed that not one tomtit has deigned to touch those cocoa-nuts? They have hopped to and fro on the boughs almost within peck of them, yet never so much as tried to ascertain whether they were eatable or not. They preferred, in fact, not to do so; in their family, they practically sent me word, they never ate victuals that had not been selected by themselves; other people might do so, and they had heard that sparrows were less particular, but it had never been their custom. I felt—as anyone would feel under the circumstances! To-day for the first time, thanks to the friendly connivance of the snow, this fastidiousness has broken down. With elation I perceive my disdainful blue neighbours, not only pecking at, but actually sitting and swinging in the long-despised brown rings. I am trying to bear my triumph meekly, and am helped towards doing so by reminding myself of the well-known fact that in times of stress and famine social distinctions are apt to break down. I shall have to wait till the weather relaxes to see whether this amiability is anything more than a truce, born of the hour of trouble, and not intended to last beyond it.

We are apt to talk as if the hyperborean conditions were no concern of ours, yet, as Alphonse Karr long ago remarked, we have only to sit still to find that these, and most other extremes of climate have come round to us. It was the tropical or sub-tropical regions of the globe that not long ago were good enough to send us specimens of their weather, as enterprising trades-people enclose samples of their goods in envelopes.

There were many days last summer—to be accurate, I believe, there were forty-three—when it was by no means necessary to go to the Sahara in order to ascertain what a condition of almost unendurable drought could be like. For the present I feel that these two samples will suffice me. I cannot, unfortunately, return them, since I do not know their sender’s address, but I feel under no obligation to charter either camels or whale-boats, in order to go and make their acquaintance upon a larger scale.

As for the mere ferocity and killing powers of Nature we are not without a taste of her capacity even in that respect. Apart from the wild creatures, which have to look out for themselves, she exacts in weather like this a pretty stiff list of victims from the old, the weakly, and the very young. My energetic chow Mongo insisted upon my taking him for a late run through the snow this afternoon, and, as we stood for a moment near the stile, there came up a melancholy little chorus of bleatings from some sheepfold in the valley below us. I peered over into the white darkness, but could see nothing; Mongo licked his lips, and I earnestly trust that he was not thinking of mutton. It may be mere weakness on my part, but I have always felt glad that in my various communings with the good green earth I have stopped short at the garden, the wood, the bog, the hillside, and have never once stepped into the paddock or the farmyard. In reading lately Mr. Rider Haggard’s Farmer’s Year, I found my pleasure a good deal interfered with by the eternal and the detestable apparition of the butcher! Whenever the small lambs, that frisked so delicately, were beginning to grow plump; whenever certain Irish bullocks, whose vicissitudes one followed, were pronounced to be not improving as they ought; even when the old milch cow, who had given so much good milk, and had brought so many calves into the world, began to flag—always there was that abominable apparition in a smeared apron waiting for them close at hand, or peering in sinister fashion from round a corner. No, whatever other functionary I might be willing to share my pursuits with, assuredly I could never consent to share them with Mr. Bones! The objection may be merely sentimental, but so are most of our likings and dislikings merely sentimental. As for these green clients of ours, it is true that they do die pretty frequently upon our hands, and the fact is, no doubt, very distressing, the more so as in nine cases out of ten we are aware that it is entirely our own fault. In their case there are at least no heartrending cries or groans, heard or unheard. They go to their own place in peace, wafted as it were by slow music towards the gentlest of dissolutions. While as for ourselves, if we are their murderers, well, we manage to hold up our heads, and take particular care never to allude to the subject. On the contrary, we put on an air of extra cheerfulness, and make haste to plant something else!

February 10, 1900

THAT resolution about the war and its newspapers I still feel to have been the right one. Unfortunately, like many excellent resolutions, it has only one drawback, which is that it is impossible to keep to it! The situation has grown too strained; it clutches at one like a demon; it rides one all day like some waking nightmare. In vain I assure myself that the proper attitude for all non-combatants is one of absolute patience. That it becomes us just now to study patience, as we might study one of the fine arts; to learn, that is to say, either to go about our own concerns, or else to wait till we are told—as we might be at the end of an operation—“All over!” “All well!” This, I have no doubt, is the proper and patriotic attitude, only how is it to be attained? or who is sufficient for such placidity? It is not so many days since I opened my paper at eight o’clock in the morning, and the message heliographed by Sir George White to Sir Redvers Buller sprang to meet my eye. “Very hard pressed” and immediately below it the comment—“Here the light failed”!

“Here the light failed!” That seems indeed to be the summary of the whole situation. One question at least we are all forced to ask, if not with our lips, at least inwardly. What of Ladysmith? Will it; can it now be reached? and if not what is the alternative? Such thoughts are gadflies, and would drive the tamest mad. Restlessness gets possession of one. The thirst for news, more news, ever more, and more, becomes a possession; one that is no sooner slaked than it revives afresh. My particular garden boy has been turned into a mere newspaper boy, and spends his whole days running downhill to the station, on the bare chance of another paper having come in, or of someone having seen someone, who may possibly know something.

Has it often happened I wonder in the history of a country that this sort of external and public news—the news of the street and of the newspaper—becomes to each individual his own absolutely private news; news that for the moment seems to supersede even the acutest personal grief; news that makes the tears start, the pulses throb, the heart, at apprehension of what may be going to happen, literally stand still from fear? The thought of Ladysmith, it is no exaggeration to say, amounts to an agony. One feels it in one’s very bones. Fear of what its fate may be is the last thought at night, and one awakens to remember it with a sensation of despair which would be ridiculous were it not so real.

For the odd part of it is that not a single creature near and dear to me is shut up within those walls. My interest in it is therefore a purely external one, the interest of a citizen, nothing more. If we—myself, and others in the like case—feel it thus acutely, how must the situation stand to-day, to-morrow, all these pitiless, interminable days, to some?

February 12, 1900

I HAD occasion to go to Guildford yesterday despite the weather, and met in the train our eminent horticultural acquaintance, Mr. R. P. We have always a good deal to say to one another on the subject of our respective gardens, although his is a long-established and renowned one, ours such a callow young thing that it is hardly fit as yet to be called a garden at all. On this occasion, seeing that he was coming from London, my first remark was not a horticultural one.

“Is there anything fresh?” I asked. “News seems so often to come in just after the morning papers are out.”

“Fresh? Oh, you mean about the war? No, I think not. Everybody seems to be pretty sick over the whole business. I saw Sir F. J. the day before yesterday, and he was very much in the dumps about it. He says the Tommies out there don’t like it one bit. That they have got their tails regularly between their legs, and I’m sure I don’t wonder.”

“How dare he!—I mean I don’t believe a word of that!” I exclaimed. “Anything else I am willing to believe, but not that. We have got our tails between our legs here at home if you like; I am quite ready to admit that. But they! Never!”

“Well, I don’t know. I only tell you what I hear. They have had a baddish time, you must remember. Stormberg and all that!—quite enough to give anyone the jumps, I should say. Of course it has been kept out of the papers. In the papers the Tommies always figure as heroes. Is Anemone Blanda in flower with you yet?"—this with a sudden rise of animation.

“Anemone Blanda?” I repeated, feeling slightly confused by the rapidity of the transition. “Yes. At least no. I think not—I haven’t looked lately.”

“It is with me! Sixteen tufts in full flower—beauties! I shelter them a bit of course, but only to save them from getting knocked about. You never saw such a colour as they are! Yours were the pale blue ones, weren’t they? I know there’s a lot of that sort in the trade that are sold as Anemone Blanda, but they’re not the right Blanda at all. Mine are as blue as, oh, as blue as—blue paint.”

“We have numbers of bulbs at present in flower,” I said severely. “Scillas and chinodoxas, and daffodils, and tulips, and Iris Alata, and many others.”

“Ah, potted bulbs. They’re poor sort of things generally, don’t you think? Some people, I believe, like them though.”

“We have Cyclamen Coum in flower out of doors,” I added; garden vanity, or more probably deflected ill-humour, arousing in me a sudden spirit of violent horticultural rivalry.

“Oh, you have, have you?"—this in a tone of somewhat enhanced respect. “Don’t you shelter it at all?”

“Not in the least!” I replied contemptuously. “We grow it out in the copse; on the stones; in all directions. It is a perfect weed with us. No weather seems to make the slightest difference.”

I am really surprised that I did not assert that we had Orchids and Bougainvillæas growing out of doors in the snow! It is probable that I should have done so in another five minutes, for irritation sometimes takes the oddest forms. Luckily for my veracity our roads just then diverged; my horticultural acquaintance getting out at the next station, and I continuing on my way to Guildford.

I don’t think I have ever in my life felt more ruffled, more thoroughly exasperated than I was by that most uncalled-for remark about the Tommies. Had they been all individually my sons or my nephews I doubt if I could have felt more insulted! I adore my garden, and yield to no one in my estimation of its supreme importance as a topic; still there are moments when even horticulture must learn to bow its head; when the reputation of one’s Flag rises to a higher place in one’s estimation than even the reputation of one’s flower-beds. “Anemone Blanda!” I repeated several times to myself in the course of the afternoon, and each time with a stronger feeling of exasperation. “Anemone Blanda, indeed!”

February 13, 1900

IF what lies beyond the next few weeks could be suddenly laid open to us, what should we see? It is, I am aware, rank cowardice upon my part, but if by merely ruffling over the blank pages of this diary which I hold in my hand I could in an instant find out, I know that I should refuse to do so. The same feeling has beset me before now, but hitherto always with regard to personal matters; never, so far as I can remember, with regard to public ones. Three weeks! It is not a very long time. Only a few more crocuses and scillas will be out in our little Dutch garden; only a few more oaks and chestnuts cut in the copse, yet within that time the fate of Ladysmith must be decided. Should help fail to reach it—and it may well prove impossible—what shall we see? what will the world see? what will our various enemies see? Only two alternatives appear to be open: an unbelievable surrender, and an only too easily believable slaughter. That last of course is the central thought, the unendurable one; the vision that hangs before one’s eyes day and night. Death upon those iron hills; death without the possibility of accomplishing anything; death under the most unendurable of conditions; shot helplessly, like the furred or the feathered beasts of a battue. I write it down deliberately, in the hope of thereby getting rid of it, for it haunts one unendurably. With that perversity, which makes us all at times our own most ingenious torturer, my mind revolves continually around the disaster before it comes, and fills up every detail with the most diabolical distinctness. “Fall of Ladysmith! Fall of Ladysmith! Destruction of the garrison!” It seems to reverberate along the roads; it presents itself upon every village hoarding, as a friend of mine saw it several times this winter upon those of the Paris boulevards. Before I open my paper in the morning it seems to be hidden under the folds, ready like an asp to spring out and poison me. At night I fall asleep to the thought of it, and in my dreams it performs wild and Weirtz-like antics, projecting itself in and out of them with all that monstrous reduplication which the besetting idea has a way of achieving for itself, when the brain that originated it is nominally asleep, and at peace.

London, February 16, 1900

GOD be thanked! God be thanked! one of them, at least, is safe. Kimberley has been relieved, and the others, assuredly the others will follow? This leap from a midnight of gloom to a midday of joy has been almost too great; life, even for the most placid, has become too breathless, too crowded; let me pause a moment and recapitulate. I came to London upon Saint Valentine’s day, the 14th; S. S. being on her way south; circumstances delayed her a day, and in that day all this happened. We had gone to see a friend; she left me to take a turn in the Park; in a few minutes she returned breathlessly; she had met a park-keeper and he had told her the news. Five minutes more we were both in the park; had caught the same inspired park-keeper, and had fallen upon him simultaneously.

“Is it true? How do you know? Who told you?”

“Quite true ma’am. Quite true ladies. You’ll find it written up at the War Office.”

“But how? Where did they get in from? The enemy were right across; so——”

“Well ladies, as I understand it were like this. General French was sent north, and he fetched a big circuit as it were so. And——”

With our umbrellas we drew a hasty but effectual scheme of attack upon the park gravel, then hurried away from our gold-braided informant in the direction of Pall Mall.

Oddly enough St. James’s Palace did not appear to be in the least irradiated by the intelligence! its grim old face remained as unresponsive, and as dirty as usual. Everything else however had caught the glamour. It shone upon the cabs, or at any rate upon their cabbies; it lit up the sea of mud; it seemed to float along the pavements scoured by a recent shower. Men were coming out of the clubs in groups, talking loudly; everyone talked loudly; not an acquaintance was in sight, yet they seemed to be all acquaintances; more than acquaintances, friends, dear friends; we looked benignantly at them, and they looked benignantly back at us. In London; in St. James’ Street! Tall or short, stiff or pompous, young or old, it was all one; they were brothers; brothers in a common joy, brothers in a common relief from an all but maddening dread. To smile for no reason in some perfectly decorous stranger’s face seemed to be the most usual, the most natural behaviour. Safe! Safe! It was a chime, one which needed no joy bells to make it sound louder. Surely for us at least it was worth the strain, worth the long suspense, the almost hopeless anxiety for this? And Ladysmith? and Mafeking? The turn has come; the tide has changed! We shall shortly hear the same news of them. We shall be rejoicing over both of them to-morrow!

Surrey, February 26, 1900

THERE is a little tapestry fire-screen in my sitting-room here, which has been disturbing me quite seriously all this winter. It represents a group of Boers—when the tapestry was made I take it the word was spelt boors—of various ages and sexes, but all equally convulsed with laughter. The central figure is a big, square-jawed, good-natured looking fellow, who holds aloft in his hands a tiny, red-coated toy manikin, which he is causing to perform ridiculous antics for the amusement of a solid infant of two or three years old, who is trying to reach it. At a table close by an old man sits eating, in a suit of what appears to be greasy grey corduroys. He also grins with satisfaction at the performance. So does a woman—presumably the mother of the solid infant—who looks back laughingly from a doorway, over the dish which she carries in her hands. Other Boers, or boors, are to be seen in the background, all equally convulsed by the ludicrous figure cut by little Red-coat; all distorting jaws—wide enough by nature—into grimaces expressive of appreciation at his ridiculous position.

Since the original of this piece of tapestry was painted over three hundred years ago by a painter named Teniers, it is not at all likely that it was meant to represent our Boers of to-day, nor that the ridiculous little manikin in the red coat could be meant for an unfortunate Rooinek! In spite of that fact I have been unable for months to endure to look at this side of my harmless little fire-screen. Every morning on entering my sitting-room my first act has been to push it up through its sliding groove, until only a pair of prodigiously stout calves, and one infant’s shoe remain to be seen. To-day—and I write the fact down as a sign of changed times—my fire-screen remains untouched! More than this, I have found a malignant satisfaction in sitting down before it, and, as I warmed my feet—damp with gardening operations—surveying the row of grinning faces, with the little red manikin still performing his degrading antics in their midst.

“Laugh away, my friends!” I remarked. “Laugh away! Make the most of your time. Don’t disturb yourselves pray on my account. The unfortunate Rooinek is no doubt, as you say, a very ridiculous and helpless sort of creature. At the same time don’t be too sure that he may not make a sudden leap yet out of your fingers! Stranger things have happened.”

So many caricaturists, friendly and unfriendly, have made capital out of this struggle of ours that I rather wonder none of them seem to have hit upon this familiar Teniers. That accuracy that pertains to all genius is plainly visible, moreover, as one looks at it, for the portraits—evidently they are portraits—might be those of any group of our worthy enemies to-day. As for the old fellow at the table, it might be Oom Paul himself in proper person; the same air of somewhat sanctimonious rectitude; the same broad fleshy nose, the same protruding chin, the same semicircular sweep of grizzled beard. It sets one reflecting upon the persistency of national types. Centuries rise, and grow, and fade away; wars are made and cease again, but probably few things in this fluctuating world change so little, or with such a snail-like slowness, as the few broad lines upon which the characteristics of any given race have once got themselves legibly inscribed.

March 1, 1900

SURELY we need no satirist to point out the ironies of life, for they are for ever with us! Here is the latest in my own experience:—

After all my arrangements, my care about telegrams, my determination not to be defrauded of even half an hour’s satisfaction, I have heard at last of the relief of Ladysmith from a child by the roadside; from a child? nay but from a baby, a smudgy-faced cottage infant, that could barely walk, and certainly was quite unable to talk! It happened in this wise. I was hurrying along the lane on my way to take the train for Godalming, having waited till the last minute in hopes of a telegram which never came. My morning papers had told me nothing, or nothing beyond vague surmises, which I was quite competent to provide for myself; consequently I was famishing for more substantial fare. I had nearly reached the village, and was hurrying round the last corner. Suddenly out of one of the cottage doors came this creature, dragging after it a stick with something red tied to it, which I entirely failed to distinguish as having been even intended for a flag. Either it stumbled, or from sheer force of circumstances simply sat down in the middle of the road, right in front of me. I was delayed an instant, and in that instant out flew its mother, and plucked it to its feet again, with a sound maternal smack.

“There ain’t no sense in yer being run over, is there, ye little fule, not if Ladysmith is relieved!”

“Ladysmith!” I was upon the two of them in an instant, and had seized the bigger one by the arm, though she was not an acquaintance of mine.

“What did you say? Is Ladysmith relieved?”

“Lor bless you ma’am, don’t you know? Why hours and hours ago! We heard of it a little afore eleven we did!”

“But are you certain? Is there no mistake this time?”

“Mistake? Bless you, no ma’am, there ain’t no mistake! Why it were stuck up at the office by Mr. Smith hisself, just gone quarter to the hour. I was a-coming along with my husband’s second breakfast, for he’s working now for Mr. Bellew at the Mills. So as I was passing close to the office ‘Whatever is all this about,’ thinks I, for there was eight or ten people a-standin’ there, and a-readin’ somethink. And with that I sees——”

I too had seen something! A flag—unmistakably a Union Jack—hanging near the Church, I had overlooked it in my hurry. At sight of that, excitement, combined with the fear of missing my train, overcame my politeness, and I flew down the lane in the direction of the station.

The train was caught, but only by the narrowest margin. I sprang into a carriage, all but shaking hands as I did so with an absolutely unknown old gentleman, who was its only other occupant. Everyone knows the shrinking, the more than maidenly dread of the solitary travelling he, for the unknown travelling she, however harmless the latter may look. On this occasion public interest overcame even that terror. As a river bursts through its banks, so my old gentleman burst into a torrent of repressed information. He had just come from London; he had witnessed the scene at the Mansion House; he described to me the Lord Mayor coming to the window with a telegram in his hands; he dilated upon the crowds, the cheering, the flags, the block in the streets; above all upon the central fact of the situation, which was that he had himself been thereby made twenty minutes late at his board, or meeting, whatever it was. “For the first time in twenty-five years!—the very first time! They couldn’t make out what had happened to me; thought I must have been run over!” he assured me several times between Guildford and Godalming.

Well, well, it has come at last! All is right, all is well, and we may go back to our own little concerns; our housekeepings, and our marketings, our weedings, and our seed-sowing, with lighter; let us hope, perhaps also, with a trifle gratefuller hearts?

March 3, 1900

OUR good old Cuttle is leaving us; will be gone by this time next week, and I feel more sorry than seems quite reasonable! To-day, when we began talking the matter over together, a suspicious huskiness in my voice warned me that I should do well to get away from the subject before my character for propriety was quite lost!

It is better I know for many reasons that he should leave. He cannot, indeed will not, undertake sole charge of both flower and kitchen garden, and to have anyone over him in either department is not to be dreamed of. Moreover his own home is four miles away, all up and down a long crooked lane, and a walk like that after a hard day’s work would be enough to try anyone half his age. Under ordinary circumstances the departure of a man who, though he has been with us now nearly three years, came at first as a mere jobber, would be a small affair on either side. Our poor old Cuttle is however so identified with the very existence of this little possession of ours that to lose him seems like losing a piece, and moreover a considerable piece of it. If the pegs and the marking-tapes have been our contributions, all the solid work, the earth turning and delving, the trenching, the grass-sowing, the cutting down of trees, above all the interminable pitchfork operations, have been his, and his satellite’s. Surely then he has a right to regard himself as its creator? Our good, old, kindly, argumentative Cuttle! The familiar little nooks and corners, cultivated, wild, half wild, will hardly seem so entirely themselves; hardly so intimately familiar, without your friendly face!

March 5, 1900

ALLAH be praised for a leisurely life! I have been visiting A. R. D., whose days are filled with large and various activities; whose responsibilities are great; whose hours of work are long; of leisure few and scanty. I admire such indomitable workers, with an admiration which increases with every year I live, but I envy them, Oh ye gods, not at all!

“Cling to the peace of obscurity; they shall be happy that love thee.” Where, I wonder, have I acquired that rather ignominious injunction? There is a seventeenth-century flavour about it which makes it sound respectable, yet at bottom I suppose it is merely a counsel of laziness. Work, far from the curse, is the alleviation of the curse; of that I am as convinced as anybody. At the same time a good deal of the work that goes on around one seems to be rather the product of the unasked volition of the worker, than of any violent external necessity. Obscurity and laziness moreover are far from interchangeable terms, seeing that the majority of the hard-workers of the world are, and as a necessity always will be, obscure. It is only in our little fussy artistic or literary coteries that the two ideas have attained to a sort of accidental connection. Personally I have a relish, I might almost say a passion for obscurity. The retort is of course easy, and I am able to reply to myself that the alternative has never been pressed upon my attention with any very urgent insistence. That is true, but does not really affect the matter. Honestly, I do regard obscurity as a blessing, apart from such satisfactions it may provide for laziness. For what does it mean? It means that you belong to yourself; that you have your years, your days, hours, and minutes undisposed of, unbargained for, unwatched, and unwished for by anybody. It means that you are free to go in and out without witnesses; free as the grass, free rather as the birds of the air. Further, I am inclined to think that only Obscurity can properly and heartily enjoy his sunsets, moon-rises, spring mornings, running streams, first flowers, and all the rest of the good cheap joys that lie about his path. The known and admired person is expected to make capital out of such matters, and he probably does so too, poor fellow! Yet upon the untrammelled enjoyment of such things how much, not only of the satisfaction, but of the peace of life depends? As was said by one—who, by the way, was very far himself from being an Obscurity—“Nothing startles me beyond the moment. A setting sun will always set me to rights, and if a sparrow comes hopping to my window, I can take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel.”

March 7, 1900

A SENTIMENTALIST sleeps in nearly everyone, whether he is aware of the fact or not; just as we are all potential poets or lovers, though some of us undoubtedly under rather a deep disguise. My particular vein of sentiment has lately taken the form of linking together sundry small spots here with others far away, upon the other side of St. George’s boisterous channel. Thus I have a Burren corner, a West Galway corner, a Kerry corner, a Kildare corner, even a green memento or two of the great lost forest of Ossory, of which only a few shadowy remnants survive to a remote, but happily not an indifferent generation.

That pleasure is to be found in such childishness might at first sight seem incredible. Since it is so, there is no use, however, in refusing to recognise it oneself. Take the Burren, for instance. Burren the wild, the remote, the austere, the solitary; to the few who know it a region absolutely unique, with its cyclopean terraces sloping slowly to the waves, that moan and mutter eternally around their bases. To represent the Burren—even the Burren plants—by three or four tiers of stones, which are not even limestones, might well seem even to oneself the very acme of absurdity. I refuse however to be ashamed of it, and if my Dryas octopetala and my Helianthemum canum, my Potentilla fruticosa, and my Cystopteris fragilis would but accept such hospitality as I can offer them; would but pretend that fragments of lime rubbish are slabs of limestone, I should be content, and ask no more of them.

Some are kindly enough, but others are hopelessly supercilious, and I am at my wits’ end how to cater for them. If distinguished visitors would only condescend to mention their wants plainly, how gladly, I have often thought, would one hasten to satisfy them. When they merely look disgusted, and, after sulking hopelessly for some months, die upon one’s hands, what is an unfortunate host or hostess to do? Here is Helianthemum canum, for instance, which for the last nine months I have been keeping from dying, as it were by main force. Up to now I have in a measure succeeded, and have even occasionally flattered myself that it was beginning to resign itself. I know perfectly well however that it has in reality made up its mind upon the subject, and that one of these mornings I shall hurry out to my “Burren” corner, only to find Helianthemum canum looking black but satisfied, having just succeeded in dying triumphantly on my hands!

March 8, 1900

THE pace at which some plants, no matter how discouraging the weather, manage to swell out their tissues, and to spring aloft under one’s very eyes, is an unfailing marvel, and in this unpropitious soil the marvel seems all the greater. So many quite common plants decline to live in it in its natural state, that one’s gratitude goes out all the more to the few that are willing to put up with us as we are. Foremost amongst such obliging vegetables stand the mulleins, and foremost amongst the mulleins stands that really noble person, Verbascum olympicum. If it has a fault it is that it is too good-natured, and too vigorous. Not only does it attain to its robust proportions at a rate that takes one’s breath away, but further it increases so rapidly, and with such a reckless prodigality, as threatens to people the whole neighbourhood with its descendants. Seeing that each of such descendants requires as much space for its development as does its parent, the perplexed gardener wonders at times how he is to dispose of his too obliging property, and ends by being not a little embarrassed by his own wealth.

There was one day last summer, when, returning home after a short absence, and going into the garden, I was not a little startled to discover what a congregation of the giants we had unwittingly been entertaining. A giant may of course be highly ornamental, and a giant that is eight feet high, and of a bright canary-yellow throughout the greater part of that length, is almost bound to be so. There were—I took the trouble to count them—one hundred and eleven such giants at that moment all in flower together in the garden. Now considering that the proportions of that garden are not those of Kew or Versailles, there is no denying that one hundred and eleven bright yellow giants, all occupying it at the same time, affected the mind with a certain sense of surplusage! They stood in rows along the grassy paths; they shouldered one another, and everything else out of any place they had been allowed to spring up in; they appeared unexpectedly in out-of-the-way corners of the copse, where the elderly oak-scrub found itself reduced to the position of a mere underling at the feet of these aspiring biennials. To come suddenly round a corner was to receive an impression of being surrounded by a crowd of gigantic, lemon-coated attendants, all standing respectfully at attention, an experience naturally rather trying to mere modest humanity.

There is another equally large and complacent biennial, which, on account perhaps of that very complacence, I find myself constantly treating with the scantiest civility. It has not I think quite the solid strength and impressive bearing of the great mullein, but as regards height, is often even more gigantesque. This is the large variety of Œnothera biennis, familiar to most people as Œnothera Lamarckiana, but possessing no English name that I am aware of beyond the generic, and not very descriptive one of “Evening primrose.” There are a good many varieties of evening primroses in gardens, both perennials and biennials, and a few true species, of which missouriensis, otherwise macrocarpa, is undoubtedly one of the best. Lamarckiana on the other hand is hardly a subject for the garden proper. As a tenant of steep banks, of rough borders; of all sorts of half, or three-quarter wild places, it has in this soil no competitor, or only finds such competitors in the two biggest of the mulleins.

I have been trying this year the experiment of planting it along both sides of the green walk that crosses the upper part of our copse. Whether it will endure the amount of shade that it will find there remains to be seen. It is a sun-lover by nature, like most of its tribe, but its growth is so redundant that a little curtailment of it will do it no great harm. Though less spreading, it requires almost more room than the verbascums, for, if the space it covers is less, it is a true biennial, never failing in my experience to flower the year after it is sown. With Verbascum olympicum this is not so. There are some here at this moment that were sown three years ago, and have not yet flowered. They will do so no doubt this year, and with that event the cycle of their existence ends. The worst is that the gap they leave when they die is large; moreover, as in the case of foxgloves, the black stump is both an ugly object in itself, and a difficult one to get rid of. When are we to possess a really good perennial foxglove I wonder? There is a perennial yellow one, but it is a poor thing, hardly worthy of its name. Perennial verbascums are also few in number, most of the family showing a more or less aloe-like fashion of flowering. In their case one is able to console oneself. The imagination grows a trifle giddy in fact at the thought of every mullein one has seen spring from seed remaining as a permanent possession; always equally towering, and equally clamorous of space and sunlight. Many-acred would be the garden that could support them all!

March 19, 1900

SOME way back in this diary I was unwise enough to inveigh against that “pleasant herb called Vanity,” especially in its relation to gardens. A greater error I now feel there could not be, and I am convinced that if we only took care to cultivate a sufficient supply of it, it would not only be a satisfaction in itself, but an immense stimulus to the successful cultivation of all other desirable plants.

This is not, I am aware, the general view. The general idea being that the herb in question is a mere weed, one that will not only grow everywhere, and at all seasons, but that grows the most luxuriantly upon the poorest soil. Now this is certainly not the case. What amount of it is grown in other gardens I cannot say, no report—or only a very indirect one—being forwarded to any of the regular gardening periodicals. That there are poor varieties of it I am willing to admit, but a really good “strain” is always worth securing, if it can be done legitimately, and so I am sure every successful gardener would be the first to say. So convinced do I feel of its value that there are many succulent, and quite wholesome vegetables, that I would gladly see thrown away in order to make room for more of it!

That admirable essayist, and, from his own account, horticulturist also, Sir Thomas Browne, evidently grew a good deal of it in his garden, though with the odd humour that prevails amongst its cultivators, he imagined that he had very little, in fact none at all. Here is the Religio Medici, so I have only to turn to his panegyric of it, a panegyric all the more satisfactory because he apparently intended it to be the reverse. Perhaps though, as Mr. Pepys would say, “That was in mirth.”

“I thank God amongst those millions of vices I do inherit and hold from Adam, I have escaped this one.” [Millions of vices! now may heaven help thee, Sir Thomas! however one must remember that he was a rhetorician.] “Those petty acquisitions, and reputed perfections, that advance and elevate the conceits of other men, add no feather unto mine. I have seen a grammarian tower and plume himself over a single line in Horace, and show more pride in the construction of one ode, than the Author in the composure of the whole book. For my own part, besides the jargon and patois of several provinces, I understand no less than six languages; yet I protest I have no higher conceit of myself than had our fathers before the confusion of Babel, when there was but one language in the world, and none to boast himself either linguist or critick. I have not only seen several countries, beheld the nature of their climes, the chorography of their provinces, topography of their cities, but understand their several laws, customs, and policies; yet cannot all this persuade the dullness of my spirit unto such an opinion of myself as I behold in nimbler and conceited heads, that never looked a degree beyond their nests. I know the names, and somewhat more, of all the constellations in my horizon; yet I have seen a prating mariner, that could only name the Pointers, and the North star, out-talk me, and conceit himself a whole sphere above me. I know most of the plants of my country, and of those about me, yet....”

Nay Sir Thomas, dear Sir Thomas, let me not follow thee longer in this vein, else might one of the devoutest of thy followers lose some share of that devoutness! I hastily ruffle thy pages over, feeling certain before long of coming upon thee in a worthier one.

. . . . . . . . . . .

I have been longer over my search than I expected, having set my heart upon finding one particular passage, which I failed to do, a fact hardly to be wondered at, since, as it turned out, there was no copy of The Garden of Cyrus in the house. I have found it however, at last, safely hidden, like a sprig of myrtle, in the tight embrace of an ancient notebook.

“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:—

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.