In a year when the roll and rumble of cannon have never ceased even for a day; when the rattle of rifle-shot has seemed like something that had become part of every brain; when all public life has centred round a single point, and the most reticent of races has flung its reticence utterly to the winds; in such a year so remote and speculative a fashion of looking at the matter strikes even the speculator himself as somewhat thin, and cold-blooded. “What right,” he turns round, and asks himself hotly, “what right have you, or such as you, people who, far from taking any part in the struggle, have kept out of even the very wind and whiff of it! Who have chartered no yachts, nursed no wounded, sung no war songs, or even—lowest of all the efforts of patriotism—so much as composed any! Who have remained at home the whole time; tending your own gardens, culling your own fancies, and sorrowing over your own sorrows. What right have such as you—idlers, cumberers, that you are!—so much as to mention the word “war” at all?
“Very true,” the other self answers submissively. And yet again, he reflects, as he looks around him, is it not, after all, just such little plots as these that the earthquake of battle has this year shaken the most fiercely? Is it not such gardens as these—not this one perhaps, but others almost identical; flowery places, where the robins peck about, and where no hostile foot has ever trod—is it not against these that the harshest blows have been struck, where the cruellest wounds have been received? Quick, quick, as in a dream, fancy conjures up a vision—a procession, rather—floating along upon the soft bands of autumn sunshine; a procession of mothers, of sisters, of betrothed ones, of wives. As each in turn passes by memory evokes the face, or the faces, that belong to it; then turns to linger last and longest with the mothers. Ah, those mothers! God’s pity, above all others, rest this year with the mothers. For whom hope can never be anything again but a delusive word; for whom the future can hold no compensations; for whom the very things that they love the best—their gardens; the walks they pace along; the flowers that they stoop to pick—must henceforth seem all bestreaked and shadowed over by the red, abhorrent shadow of the battlefield. Truly the garden is a place of peace, but it may also be a place of the most cruel, the most undeserved war, and the bullets that have been speeding thousands of miles away, have too often found their last, and their deadliest targets within its circle.
September 10, 1900
THE year has more than run its complete round since these loosely connected jottings were begun, so that it is high time that they shut the cover down upon themselves, and withdrew into a corner. Diary-keeping, like knitting, like whittling, like any other of the minor distractions, begins often with more or less effort, yet after a time becomes, first a habit, finally almost a necessity. Entered upon without any particular motive, it creates a place for itself, it fills a void, it becomes a solace. The practice of the diarist varies, of course, almost infinitely. It may mean merely that conscientious daily record, to which alone the words “journal,” “diary,” “day-book” properly belong, or it may enlarge its scope until it covers all those looser, and necessarily more intermittent outpourings, in which most of us from time to time indulge, whether for our weal or our woe depends largely upon circumstances.
One merit it certainly has. Few mediums of thought are equally fluid; few admit of greater variety; more diversity of mood; more ranging from topic to topic. Possibly the most satisfactory of all its developments is when it enables us to follow some well-beloved pursuit, keeping pace with its minutest ramifications, losing ourselves, as it were, in its existence, and thereby evading half those irritating points, half those wounding asperities that belong to every human lot. Amongst such beloved and healing pursuits that of gardening stands prominently forward. I have been assured that there are superior persons by whom it is held in exceedingly low repute; who regard it as a symptom, indeed, of mental degeneration, and, as a resource, below stamp-collecting, and about on a par with the acquisition of the idiot stitch. Were it my lot to be acquainted with any such superior persons there is one punishment that I must confess I should dearly love to bestow upon them; which is that they should first desperately need the comfort of such a solace, and afterwards—upon due probation and penitence—that they should come to find it! Few ideas are more bigoted, more essentially narrow and foolish, than this one about the elevating, or the non-elevating effect of our pursuits. It is upon a par with the equally pestilent notion that it is the narrowness of our lives, or the obscurity of our lots, that keeps our swelling souls from greatness. Greatness, like genius, is dependent upon no such trumpery circumstances, but is a self-existent quality, not to be concealed though it were hidden under all the rocks of Mount Ararat, or had every wave in the Atlantic piled upon its head. Let us then assert, roundly assert, that no pursuit—certainly no natural pursuit—can with any accuracy be called petty. It is, moreover, the great advantage of all such out-of-door pursuits that they enable their followers to confer with Nature at first hand, and not through any intermediary. This is recognised in the case of what are called the higher natural pursuits, but it is equally true of all. Like many other potentates Nature has her unpleasant, even her very dangerous aspects, but it is one of her best points that she is no respecter of persons. She is an autocrat, and an autocrat in whose eyes all subjects stand upon precisely the same level. At her court there is no superior, and no inferior. Geologist, botanist, zoologist, horticulturist—beetle-hunter, stone-breaker, weed-picker, crab-catcher—it matters not what we call ourselves, or what others call us, so long as it is herself alone we follow, she receives us all alike. Within those imperial and open-doored halls of hers all rapidly find their own level; all may speak to her on occasion face to face; all present their own credentials, and all are accepted by her with the same serene, the same absolutely indifferent toleration.
It is not even as if her greater secrets were reserved for the wiser and the more erudite of her followers, and were withheld from those that were less erudite, for the same partial revelations, the same profound concealments, seem, so far as can be ascertained, to be allotted to all alike. The Sphinx which looks up out of the heart of a toadflax or a columbine is the same Sphinx that speaks out of the stilly night, out of the clouds, out of the primæval rocks, out of the stars, and out of the inviolable sea. “And this,” she possibly murmurs, “is my lesson which I give to you. Cease to occupy yourself wholly with the shows of the surface, the toys of to-day; things which come and go, which pass and end in an hour. Look a little deeper. Follow any of these brown roots down to where the motherly earth receives them, and the dews and the rain nourish them, and all the complicated chemistry of my workshops have been at work from the beginning to bring them to perfection. On and on, deeper and deeper yet, towards that vaster laboratory across whose threshold even I have never glanced. There, in that incredible remoteness, thou and I; the small brown worm, and the goodly oak; the old, worn-out worlds, and the new, as yet only half-born stars; all the gay shows of this little green earth, and all the unknown things of the immeasurable Cosmos, meet, and are on a level. There is neither larger or smaller there, neither younger or older, neither wiser or more foolish, neither less or more important. For out of it came that by means of which all this that we see and know has come. There, once for all, was uttered that spell of which this huge teeming universe is but the outcome. There Life herself was born, and it may be therefore other powers, greater and more wide-embracing than even Life herself. But of what that spell consists, or what the name of it is, no bird, or beast, or man, or possibly other creature, has hitherto so much as even begun to guess.”
September 11, 1900
SO one ends. Yet, even in the very act of ending, qualms arise. Thinking of what lies under one’s hand, no longer as a sheaf of familiar manuscript, but as a full-blown book, printed, bound, stitched, and a’ the lave o’ it, misgivings awake, and are lively. Only yesterday I sounded the praises of the diary, and I do so still; yet the manifest destiny of every diary is to live a life of absolute seclusion, and, when it has served its turn, to feed the fire. It is true that one may murmur something to oneself about “subjective”; “subjective forms of literature,” but the words ring hollow, and have little validity. In a well-known passage Carlyle has described a visit which he paid to the Sage of Highgate, whom he found sitting in his Dodona oak grove—otherwise Mr. Gilman’s house and garden—“as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma.” “I still recollect,” Carlyle says, “his ‘object,’ and ‘subject,’ and how he sang and snuffled them into ‘om-m-mject’ and ‘sum-m-mject,’ with a kind of solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled along.” The diarist need not necessarily roll along, and has no pretensions certainly to be called a sage, yet he too is apt now and again to murmur “sum-m-mject,” “sum-m-mjective,” with a sound that even in his own ears rather resembles that of some bumble-bee upon a summer’s morning; extremely self-important, that is to say, but not particularly lucid. It is true that so far as self-importance is concerned he stands absolutely excused, seeing that egotism is his profession. To cease to be egotistic is to cease to be a diarist altogether. This is as clear as it is satisfactory, but it can hardly be said to meet the point. There is nothing odd, of course, about a man or a woman being confidential with himself or herself; it is when they proceed to drop their confidences into other, and less indulgent ears, that the oddity begins.
There are moreover seasons when such outpourings seem even less appropriate than others, and this year—September to September—appears, looking back, to be one of these. It has been a black, a despairingly black, twelve months for thousands; how black, how despairing, few of those thousands would have credited when it began. Amongst those incredulous ones, though on somewhat different grounds, the diarist might have been reckoned. Diary-keeping is not entirely a matter of egotism and of introspection, of fun, and of frolic, though it may appear to the non-diarist to be. What a nice innocent-looking book it seems, when its spaces are all blank, and the days they refer to are not yet born! yet such a book may come to look like a mere fragment of malicious destiny, bound in calf or calico. Holding it in his hands the would-be diarist turns the leaves over one by one with a smile. How will this, and this, and this space be filled up? he wonders. What odd little adventures will they have to record? What absurdities of his own, or of others, to recount? What books read? what expeditions made? what trees or shrubs planted? So he sets jauntily forth on his self-appointed task, to be met by—- What? A thought to give the lightest pause.
And yet, and yet. Let the very worst come to pass that can come to pass, even so an attitude of mere unmitigated despair hardly befits fast disappearing mortals, whose breath is in their nostrils. Looking backwards may seem all gloom and pain, and looking forward no better, possibly rather worse, and yet assuredly it is not all gloom, or all pain. Enchanting things spring up by thousands in the ugliest of clefts, and the barest of trees may serve as a perch for some winter-singing robin. Sorrow itself, carried out into the open air, under the benignant arch of heaven, changes in some degree its character. It is Sorrow still, but it is Sorrow with a difference. It seems to merge into the category of other things; terrible ones, it is true, but still natural—earthquakes, volcanoes, avalanches, pestilences, and so forth—things that we shrink from, but that we cannot reasonably resent. The sense of wrong, of hardship, of bitterness, of personal injustice, seems by degrees to melt away from it, and therefore it can be better faced. At least it is well that we should tell ourselves so.