Hortus Vitae / Essays on the Gardening of Life

by Vernon Lee

But we want the ploughed fields beyond, the real woods with stacked-up timber, German fashion; the orchards and the kitchen gardens; the tracks across the high-lying sheep downs; the towing-paths where the barges come up the rivers; the deep lanes where the hay-carts have left long wisps on the overhanging elms; the high-roads running from village to village, with the hooded carts and bicycles and even the solemn Juggernaut traction-engines upon them. We want not only to rest from living, to take refreshment in life's kindly pauses and taste (like Candide in his arbour) the pleasantness of life's fruits. We want also to live.

But there is living and living. There is, unfortunately, not merely such breezy work-a-dayness as we have been talking of, but something very different indeed beyond the walls of our private garden. There are black, oozy factory yards and mangy grass-plots heaped with brickbat and refuse; and miles of iron railing, and acres of gaunt and genteel streets not veiled enough in fog; a metaphorical beyond the garden walls, in which a certain number of us graduate for the ownership of sooty shrubberies and clammy orchid houses. And we poor latter-day mortals have become so deadly accustomed to the routine of useless work and wasteful play, that a writer must needs cross all the t's and dot all the i's of his conviction (held also by other sentimentalists and cranks called Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) that the bread and wine of life are not grown in the Black Country; no, nor life's flowers in the horticultural establishments (I will not call them gardens) of suburban villas.

Fortunately, however, this casual-looking universe is not without its harmonies, as well as ironies. And one of these arrangements would seem to be that our play educates the aims and methods of our work. If we lay store by satisfactions which imply the envy and humiliation of other folk, why then we set about such work as humiliates our neighbours or fills them with enviousness, saving the case where others, sharing our tastes, do alike by us. Without going to such lengths (the mention of which has got me a reputation for lack of human sympathy) there remains the fact that if our soul happen to take delight in, let us say, futility—well, then, futility will litter existence with shreds of coloured paper and plaster comfits trodden into mud, as after a day of carnival at Nice. Nay, a still simpler case: if we cannot be happy without a garden as big as the grounds of an expensive lunatic asylum, why, then, all the little cottage gardens down the lane must be swept away to make it.

Now, the cottage gardens, believe me, are the best. They are the only ones which, being small, may be allotted in some juster future to every man without dispossessing his neighbour. And they are also the only ones compatible with that fine arable or dairy country which we all long for. Stop and look over the hedges: their flowers leave no scrap of earth visible between them, like the bedded-out things of grander gardens; and their vivid crimsons, and tender rose and yellow, and ineffable blue, and the solemn white which comes out in the evening, are seen to most advantage against the silvery green of vegetables behind them, and the cornfield, the chalk-pit under the beech trees beyond. The cottage flowers come also into closer quarters with their owners, not merely because these breathe their fragrance and the soil's good freshness while stooping down to weed, and prune, and water; but also, and perhaps even more, because the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habit of blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetness which not the most skilful hired gardeners have ever taught the most far-fetched hybrids that they raise for clients.

Which, being interpreted, may be taken to mean that it is no use relying on artists, poets, philosophers, or saints to make something of the enclosed spaces or the waste portions of our soul: Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES

Even before discovering that there was an old, gabled, lower town at Cassel, I felt the special gladness of the touch of Germany. It was an autumn morning, bright yet tender. I sped along the wide, empty streets, across the sanded square, with hedges of sere lime trees, where a big, periwigged Roman Emperor of an Elector presides, making one think of the shouts of "Hurrah, lads, for America!" of the bought and sold Hessians of Schiller's "Cabal and Love." At the other end was a promenade, terraced above the yellow tree-tops of a park, above a gentle undulating country, with villages and steeples in the distance. "Schöneaussicht" the place called itself; and the view was looked at by the wide and many windows of pleasant old-fashioned houses, with cocked-hat roofs well pulled down over them, each in its little garden of standard roses, all quiet and smiling in the autumn sunshine.

I felt the special gladness of being in Germany (for every country has its own way of making us happy), and glad that there should be in me something which answered to Germany's especial touch. We owe that, many of us, I mused, and with it a deep debt of gratitude, to our governesses. And I fell to thinking of certain things which an American friend had lately told me, sitting in the twilight with her head a little averted, about a certain governess of hers I can remember from my childhood. Pathetic things, heroic ones, nothings; all ending off in the story of a farewell letter, treasured many years, lost on a journey…. "Do you remember Fräulein's bonnet? The one she brought from Hanover and wore that winter in Paris?" And there it was in a faded, crinolined photograph, so dear and funny. Dear and funny—that is the point of this relationship with creatures giving often the best of the substance and form of our soul, that it is without the sometimes rather empty majesty of the parental one. And surely it is no loss, but rather a gain, to have to smile, as my friend did at the thought of that Teutonic bonnet, just when we feel an awkward huskiness in our voice.

There is, moreover, a particular possibility for good in the relation between a developing child (not, of course, a mere growing young brute) and a woman still young, childless, or separated from her children, a little solitary, most often alien, differently brought up, and whose affection and experience must therefore take a certain impersonality, and tend to subdued romance. We are loved, when we are, not as a matter of course and habit, not with any claim; but for ourselves and with the delicate warmth of a feeling necessarily one-sided. And whatever we learn of life in this relationship is of one very different from our own, and seen through the feelings, the imagination, often the repressed home-sickness, of a mature and foreign soul. And this is good for us, and useful in correcting family and national tradition, and the rubbing away of angles (and other portions of soul) by brothers and sisters, and general contemporaries, excellent educational items of which it is possible to have a little too much.