Part 7

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?