But the fact remains that, with all these reasons, I cannot wholly fathom the true philosophy of lawn-mowing with my adult mind. I have set down all the joys that I remember, but some significant fact, some essential note of enchantment, is missing. What did I think about as I pressed to and fro with my lawn-mower? Sometimes, perhaps, I was a ploughman, guiding vast horses along the crests of mountains, and pausing now and again to examine the treasures that my labour had revealed in the earth, leather bags of guineas and jewelled crowns that sparkled through their mask of clay. Sometimes I might be a charioteer driving a team of mad horses round the circus for Nero’s pleasure, or a fireman driving a fire-engine scatheless through bewildered streets. But with all I believe that sometimes I was no more than a little boy, mowing the lawn of a sunny garden, loving the task for its own sake, and inspired by no subtler spirit than that which led Esau to cultivate cabbages with dogged enthusiasm. It would not do to condemn that dishonoured pirate because he saw heaven as a kitchen-garden and regarded flowers as the fond toys of the Olympian dotage. He, too, had his illusions; he, too, while he sowed the seed had visions of an impossible harvest. His ultimate fate eludes my memory, but doubtless he has finished with his husbandry by now. I, too, no longer mow the lawn save when arrayed in fantastic knickerbockers and dream-shod as of yore I trim the grass-plats of sleep with a lawn-mower that sings as birds no longer sing. What the purpose of my youthful labours may have been I do not know. . . . Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Perhaps I was already enrolled in the employment agency of destiny as a writer of idle articles.
CHILDREN AND THE SEA
The sea, like all very large things, can only be intimately understood by children. If we can conceive a sensible grown-up person looking at the sea for the first time, we feel that he should either yawn or wish to drown himself. But a child would take a sample of it in a bucket, and consider that in all its aspects; and then it would know that the sea is a great many bucketfuls of water, and further that by an odd freak of destiny this water is not fit to drink. Storms and ships and sand-castles and lighthouses and all the other side-shows would follow later; but in the meantime the child would have seen the sea in a bucket, as it had previously seen the moon in a looking-glass, so would know all about it. The moon is a variable and interesting kind of lamp; the sea is buckets and buckets and buckets full of water. I think the stars are holes in a sort of black curtain or ceiling, and the sun is a piece of brightness, except at sunset or in a mist, when it is a whole Dutch cheese. The world is streets and fields and the seaside and our house.
I doubt whether a child has any sense of what I may call the appeal of breadth. If it is confronted with a fine view, it will concentrate its interest on a windmill or a doll’s house, and the seaside is no more than a place where one wears no shoes or stockings, and the manufacture of mud pies becomes suddenly licit. The child does not share the torments of the adult Londoner, who feels that there is no room in the world to stretch his arms and legs, and therefore wins a pathetic sense of freedom in seeing the long yellow sands and the green wastes of the sea. Nor is it at all excited by the consideration that there is a lot more sea beyond the horizon; the extent of its interest in the water is the limit to which it may paddle.
Yet in some dim, strange way the child realises æsthetic values more here than elsewhere. I am quite sure it can see no real beauty in its normal surroundings. Sunsets and small houses lit for evening, the shining streets after rain, and even flowers and pictures and dolls, are never beautiful to a child in the sense that a story or an idea may be beautiful. But tacitly, for a child has no language to express such things, something of the blueness of the sea seems to seek expression in its eyes, something of the sparkle of the sand seems to be tangled in its hair, something of the sunshine burns in its rounded calves that glow like brown eggs. A child is always a thing of wonder. But on the edge of the sea this wonder deepens until the artificial observer is abashed. A seaside child is no creature to be petted and laughed over; it were as easy to pet the tireless waters, and to laugh over the grave of a little cat; children whom one has known very well indeed in town will find new playing fields by the sea into which it is impossible to follow them. Dorothy weighs five stone four pounds at Maida Vale; at Littlehampton the sea wind blows her along like a feather; she is become a wispy, spiritual thing, a faint, fair creature a-dance on light feet that would make the fairy-girl of a poet’s dream seem clumsy by comparison. She is nearer to us when she paddles. The warm sand creeping up through her toes, the silver thread of coolness about her legs, these things are within our comprehension though they fall no more within our experience. But when she flings herself along the beach with the wild hair and loose limbs and the song of an innocent Bacchante, when she bids the gold sands heave up and support her body, tired with play, when she stoops to gather diamonds and pearls from the shore made wet and smooth by the retreating waves, she is as far from us and our human qualities as a new-awakened butterfly. There have been sea-washed moments when I should not have been astonished if she had flung out a pair of mother-of-pearl wings and stood in the blue sky, like a child saint in a stained-glass window. There have been other moments when she has approached me with a number of impossible questions in wanton parody of her simple London self. Between these two extremes her moods vary from second to second, and she plays upon them as Pan upon his pipes, and to much the same tune. She loves the long tresses of seaweed and the pink shells like the nails of her own little hands; and her coloured pail, when she is not the architect of sea-girt palaces, is a treasury of salty wonders. To climb the rough rocks and call them mountains, to drive back the waves with a chiding foot, and to alter the face of Nature with a wooden spade, these were not tasks for the domesticated creature who shares the hearth-rug with the cat at home. But the spirit of the sea has changed Dorothy; she is now a little more and a little less than child; and she recognises no comrades but those other nymphs of the sea, who hold the beach with the sparkle of wet feet and careless petticoats, who run hither and thither in search of the big adventure, while their parents and guardians sleep in the sun. It is hard that age should deprive us of so many privileges, and least of all can we spare the glamour of the sands of the sea. Yet to the adult mind Brighton beach, sprinkled with newspapers and washed by a sea whose surface is black with smuts, brings little but disgust. We insist on having our fairy-lands clean and end, too often, by finding no fairy-land at all. The sea, after all, is no more than water that may be caught in a bucket; the sand may glitter on a child’s spade, and we who believe that the essential knowledge of the thing is ours are no wiser than the children. For me the sea is a restless and immeasurable waste of greens and blues and greys, and I know that its strength lies in its monotony. It is not the noisy turbulence of storms that moves me to fear, but the dull precision of the tides and the tireless succession of waves. And my impression is no truer than the children’s and lends itself less readily to a sympathetic manner of living. I feel that if I could once more hold the ocean in my bucket, if the whole earth might be uprooted by my spade, I should be nearer to a sense of the value of life than I am now. I see the children go trooping by with their calm eyes, not, as is sometimes said, curious, but rather tolerant of life, and I know that for them the universe is merely an aggregate of details, some agreeable and some stupid, while I must needs depress myself by regarding it as a whole. And this is the proved distinction between juvenile and adult philosophies, if we may be permitted to regard a child’s very definite point of view as the effect of a philosophy. Life is a collection of little bits of experience; the seaside bits are pleasant, and there is nothing more to be said.
ON GOING TO BED
When the winter fires were burning their merriest in the grates, or when the summer sun was melting to crimson shadows down in the western fields, we, pressing our noses on the window-panes in placable discussion of the day’s cricket, or dreaming our quiet dreams on the playroom floor, would hear a heart-breaking pronouncement fall tonelessly from the lips of the Olympians: “Come, children, it is time you were in bed!” It needed no more than that to bring our hearts to zero with a run, and set our lips quivering in eloquent but supremely useless protest. Against this decree there was, we knew, no appeal; and we pleaded our hopeless cause rather from habit than from any expectation of success. And even while we uttered passionate expressions of our individual wakefulness, and vowed our impatience for the coming of that golden age when we should be allowed to sit up all night, we were collecting the honoured toys that shared our beds, in mournful recognition of the inevitable.
It was not that we had any great objection to bed in itself, but that fate always decreed that bed-time should fall in the brightest hour of the day. No matter what internecine conflicts, whether with the Olympians or each other, had rendered the day miserable, when bed-time drew near the air was sweet with the spirit of universal brotherhood, as though in face of our common danger we wished to propitiate the gods by means of our unwonted merit. Feuds were patched up, confiscated property was restored to its rightful owner, and brother hailed brother with a smiling countenance and that genial kind of rudeness that passed with us for politeness. This was the time of day, too, when the more interesting kind of Olympian would make his appearance, uncles—at least, we called them uncles—who could perform conjuring tricks and tell exciting stories, and aunts who kissed us, but had a compensating virtue in that they had been known to produce unexpected sweets. The house that might have been a gloomy prison of dullness during the long day became, by a sudden magic, entertaining and happily alive. The kitchen was fragrant with the interesting odours that come from the cooking of strange adult viands; the passages were full of strong men who could lift small boys to the ceiling without an effort, and who would sometimes fling sixpences about with prodigal lavishness; the whole place was gay with parcels to be opened, and lively, if incomprehensible, conversation. And ever while we were thrilling to find that our normal environment could prove so amusing, the Olympians would realise our existence in their remote eyries of thought, and would send us, stricken with barren germs of revolt, to our uneventful beds.
On me, as the youngest of the brothers, the nightly shock should have fallen lightly; for I was but newly emancipated from the shameful ordeal of going to bed for an hour in the afternoon, and I could very well remember, though I pretended I had forgotten, the sensations of that drowsy hour, when the birds sang so loudly outside the window and the sun thrust fingers of dusty gold through the crannies of the blind. I should therefore probably have been reconciled to the common lot, which spelt advancement to me, had I not newly discovered the joy of dreaming those dreams that men have written in books for the delight of the young. The Olympians were funny about books. They gave them to us, or at the least smiled graciously when other people gave them to us, but the moment rarely arrived when they could endure to see us reading, or spoiling our eyes as their dreadful phrase ran. And especially at nightfall, when the shadows crept in from the corners of the room and made the pages of the dullest book exciting, it was inviting an early bed-time to be detected in the act of reading. As sure as the frog was about to turn into a prince or the black enchantress had appeared with her embarrassing christening present, the book would be taken from my hands and I would be threatened with the compulsory wearing of old-maidish spectacles—an end that would make me an object of derision in the eyes of man. And even if I shut the book of my own accord, and sat nodding before the fire, working out the story in my own fashion with some one I knew very well to play the part of hero, some ruthless adult would accuse me of being “half asleep already,” and the veil of illusion would be torn beyond repair.
In winter-time the bedroom would seem cold after the comfortable kingdom of the hearth-rug, and the smell of scented soap was a poor substitute for the friendly fragrance of burning logs. So we would undress as quickly as possible, and lie cuddled up in the chilly bed-clothes, holding our own cold feet in our hands as if they belonged to somebody else. But if it happened that one of us had a bad cold, and there was a fire in the bedroom, we would keep high festival, sitting in solemn palaver round the camp-fire, and toasting our pink toes like Arctic explorers, while the invalid lay in bed crowing over his black-currant tea or hot lemonade. It was pleasant, too, when natural weariness had driven us to our beds, to lie there and watch the firelight laughing on the walls; and the invalid, for the time being, was rather a popular person.