But to return to the spinney. We began our adventure a year ago, between the months of November and February, which are the limits within which transplanting can be done. A dozen spruce, two pines, a sycamore and two limes, all standing ten to a dozen feet in their boots, so to speak, were, with enormous gruntings, heavings and perspirations, borne to the chosen spot, and there placed in new-dug holes, earthed up, wired in position, and left to weather the storms. The handy-man shook his head over the operation—"didn't know but what they warn't too big to shift, but happen some on 'em would live." All through the spring and summer I watched those trees struggling for life, like a doctor walking the wards of a hospital and feeling the pulses of his patients. Month by month the spruces flickered on. The fairest of them all was the first to give up the ghost definitely, and then three others followed. It was August before any shoots of new foliage began to appear, and then one by one the remainder put forth tiny buds of life, the last sending out his faint signal of spring as late as October. "Ain't done so bad," said the handy-man, scratching his head to help him to a right judgment.
To-day with more heavings and gruntings the handy-man and I have transplanted another bunch of pines a good fifteen feet in height to the spinney, and for months to come I shall walk the wood again to catch signs of life in my new patients. Meanwhile, in order to provide for the future, we have planted young saplings among the big trees, and altogether my spinney, I think, makes a handsome show. I have just had a walk along the lane below to view it as a stranger might, and, speaking as a stranger, I remarked to myself that that was a nice little spinney beside the cottage on the hill, and when I came to the gate I, still as a stranger, was struck by the appropriateness of the name. I think that that spinney will be my memorial to the countryside, and I want no better. There is no pleasanter thing to be remembered by than trees. They are better than battles or books, for they do not record our passions, our ambitions, or our contentions. They record only that we once passed this way and loved the friendliness of the woods.
ON WEARING AN EYEGLASS
"Roughly speaking," says a writer in a recent issue of the New Statesman, "no man using or wearing a monocle should be appointed to any public post in the United States. Believe me, nothing short of his fine simplicity and intellectual integrity would have enabled Mr. William Archer to 'get away with it.'" The warning occurs in an admirable article dealing with the disastrous way in which official England is usually represented in America. It is a subject of first importance, on which I am in entire agreement with the writer, and about which I could say much from personal knowledge. But the eyeglass will serve. You can see the whole landscape surveyed by the writer through the Englishman's eyeglass.
And, first, let me clear away the suggestion about my good friend William Archer. It is true he carries an eyeglass, and I have seen him on occasion use it to examine documents. But he does not wear an eyeglass, and he does wear spectacles. Neither in fact nor in spirit can he be included in the ranks of the Eyeglass Englishman. Nor, indeed, can all those who do wear an eyeglass be included in that category. I have known men who succeeded in wearing an eyeglass without offence. I have even known a lady who wore one so naturally and with such a suggestion of unconsciousness that you yourself were almost unconscious that she wore it.
But, generally speaking, an eyeglass is an ostentation. It is an ostentation because it is so much more natural, easy and unaffected to wear spectacles, which serve precisely the same uses. You put a pair of spectacles on your nose and forget all about them. And the world forgets all about them. You cannot do that with an eyeglass. The world cannot do that with an eyeglass. Spectacles convey no implications, carry no comment; but an eyeglass is as declaratory as a Union Jack. It is a public announcement of ourselves. It is an intimation to the world that we have arrived. And the world takes note of the fact. When it thinks of Mr. Austen Chamberlain, it thinks of an eyeglass as inevitably as when it thinks of Nelson it thinks of an armless sleeve, or when it thinks of Richard III. it thinks of a hump-back. An eyeglass is as troublesome as a feverish baby. It is an occupation. It is almost a career. It is always dropping out and being reaffixed with an ugly contortion of the muscles of the eye-socket. And if, by long practice, it is kept in position without contortion, you are insensibly kept wondering how the feat is performed and waiting for the laws of Nature to operate.
In a word, a monocle calls attention to itself. It is a calculated affectation. It is an advertisement that we are someone in particular, and that we expect to be observed. It is as much a symbol of class consciousness as the red tie of the Socialist, and it is much less pleasing, for the red tie is an assertion of human equality, while the monocle sets up a claim to social exclusiveness. The wearer of the red tie wants everybody to wear red ties. The more red ties he sees, the happier he feels. If everybody wore red ties it would be very heaven. Surely the millennium is at hand, he would say. He would feel the spasm that Hyndman felt when he noticed that all the porters of a certain station were wearing red ties. "See," he said to John Burns, "see the red ties! the social revolution is on the march." "Nothing of the sort," said Burns. "It's a part of the station uniform." Hyndman's face fell, for he did really want to see everybody wearing the same coloured tie as himself. But if one morning Lord Dundreary (late of the Guards) saw the whole of Piccadilly bursting out into monocles, every policeman wearing a monocle, and every cabman wearing a monocle, and everybody in the buses wearing a monocle, he would feel that the pillars of the firmament were tumbling down. He would take off his monocle and grind it under his heel. He must belong to an exclusive set or cease to find life livable.
The philosophy of the eyeglass is explained in the familiar story of Disraeli and Chamberlain. When the famous Israelite, who was an artifice from the curl plastered on his forehead to the sole of his foot, saw through his eyeglass the terrible Radical Mayor of Birmingham enter the House for the first time, he turned to his neighbour and said: "He wears his eyeglass like a gentleman." He was satisfied. There was no reason to fear the Mayor of Birmingham. He was "one of us." No one would say that So-and-So "wears his spectacles like a gentleman" any more than he would say that he "wears his hat" (or his boots) "like a gentleman." What Disraeli meant was that Chamberlain could do an exceptional thing with the air of one who was doing an ordinary thing. He knew how to be conspicuous without being unhappy. He wore the badge of the superior person as if he had forgotten it was there. He wore it as though Nature had decorated him at birth with the Order of the Eyeglass. He was a Perfect Gentleman.
There is nothing wrong in being a Perfect Gentleman. It is a very proper ambition; but we ought not to label ourselves Perfect Gentlemen. We ought to be content to leave the world to discover that we are Perfect Gentlemen, and not proclaim the fact by means of a pane of glass hung perilously in the right eye. For, according to the practice of the best circles, it should always be in the right eye. The left eye may be as blind as a bat, but it would never do to wear a pane of glass there. If you do that you do not know the first law of the Cult of the Eyeglass. None of the best people wear the monocle in the left eye. It is like eating peas with your knife, or tucking your serviette in at your collar, as the Germans (who are most Imperfect Gentlemen) do, instead of wearing it on your knees, where it will not get in the way of anything that happens to fall.