Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

rooted and cast out. But it did not take long to discover that this plan was worth no more in horticulture than in politics; the well developed evil just naturally refused to be eradicated. "It grows like a weed." What hyperbole! Nothing in the world ever grew like a weed. If it grew that way then it would be a weed. I know now where Bergson got his concept of the élan vital, and Freud, his of the libido. You may plow weeds under, break them off, crush them, cut them, pull them up, and-lo! in a few days here they are back again. The fact is they prefer rough treatment. Like religion they thrive best under persecution. We have a small tract which showed promise of Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod and blackeyed Susans; and I gave this my care, hoping for a wild garden. Not a bit of it! These things would not have my care; they drooped in discouragement, lacking incentive; the smallest child might have entered our wild garden in perfect safety.

But see the moral of this happy struggle with adversity. And think, too, what a place would be without weeds. Why, it would be like a world in which all the reforms had been accomplished, or one in which the eugenists had succeeded in blocking evolution and genius. Think of the crushing ennui-all vice, all turbulence, all uncertainty, all worries removed; and no ambition, no hope, no necessity, no resolve, no mainspring in life, no character. Thank God, like a true gardener, on your knees, that such an existence was not inflicted upon us; and thank him, too, that neither reform nor eugenics can ever bring it about.

The innate God-given tendencies of man will happily prevent such misery. Not, of course, that we should be unreasonable here. We do not want too many weeds. Always Confucius and Aristotle are right: too much and too little are equally bad. There is indeed a kind of reformer that is truly dangerous, and that is the one with an obsession for lawmaking, the "anti." Here is one who is a real trouble-brewer, one who is increasing our weeds most uncomfortably. Nature, you know, has a way of fighting back. She has two ways of meeting efforts at suppression, two very good ways: she either multiplies the seeds more abundantly, or she develops new and more hardy varieties. But the fact is, further, many of the "evils" that are objected to by the soured egoists represent but a harmless leaking out of great primitive instincts, and it is not well to seal these up too hermetically. The safety-valve of a boiler may not be ornamental, but it has a decided value; and so with our psychological safety-valves. Even if one be annoyed by the occasional escape of steam therefrom, one is not warranted in plugging them up. Something may happen.

I am not so blind as not to recognize that there are repressions and laws that are in accord with the necessities of group life, but even these necessary restraints must be psychologically true and possible. Laws are not made, they are discovered, say Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Coolidge; and Heaven help the man who does not know them when he meets them. Heaven help, too, the nation that endeavors to substitute legal enactments for laws. You cannot make a

thing right or wrong. If it were wrong to start with, no law enforcement league, no decree of government, can ever make it otherwise. A false start may by logical develop ment attain to the dignity of a great social movement; it may receive the plaudits of nations-but it will still be false. And the longer it lasts and the greater hold it secures upon the people, the greater will be the catastrophe when it ultimately collapses when the floods come and the winds blow and smite upon it.

I wonder what it is about working on grass that makes one so dogmatic. "Every thing hath divers faces, sundry byasses, and several lustres," and one should never be too positive; but then, on the other hand, as Cromwell used to say, "if the fact be so, why sport with it?"

21

I return. This lawn of mine-I say "ours" when my wife is by, but "mine" at other times, as I live on it and she but admires it—this lawn of mine, then, is a cut-up acre dribbling round the house, with a splurge here and there to the road and the woods. There are oaks and tulippoplars, and spruce and arbor-vitæ, and pines, and hydrangeas and roses and lilacs and peonies and iris, and shrubs unknown to me by name. No straight up-and-down cutting this, but a twisting and turning and adjusting, up hill and down-a veritable epitome of life's progress.

It is in this leafy and bladed world that I have lived now for some months. Were I a chameleon I should have varied in shade but not in color-emerald green, grass green, and, occasionally, among the "blue" spruce, a Hooker's Green, No. 2.

It is, I suppose, this ever-present green shade, always so helpful to lucubration, that has invited this writing. Here is where I have lived and delved six days of the week, and then, on the seventh, done a little weeding and edging. Do not be shocked. Our city pastor, knowing his flock to be well armed against the devil by his, the pastor's, winter instruction, fully trusts us to browse for ourselves during the warmer months. But, after all, let us see: Lawn, compare Chaucer, laund, a moor; and the Welsh, llan, lan, lann, an open place, a cleared place, a place for a church, a CHURCH! What more can a man ask? On the seventh day, then, being the first day of the week, I go out to my church and there seek some little thought and improvement.

And what thoughts come to one! I start with dandelions and dock, my attention all given to the matter in hand, and then, a black ant viciously attacking my knife as I encircle a root, off I go to Dr. Beebe and his Guiana laboratory. And then, recalling the doctor's aviation experience, I go with him to France; and then comes the franc, and Locarno, and Austen Chamberlain. Then Joey, the father, and so on to Birmingham, and to a Birmingham friend, a genial judge; and with this judge to Czechoslovakia, and to his work in Prague, and to Masaryk. And with Masaryk, remembering an early experience of his, I go to Edinburgh and to old John Chiene, my one-time professor of surgery there; and John Chiene brings me to John, my occasional helper in the garden and here I am back on the grass again.

I straightened up to take the kink out of my back-and to see how much I have accomplished during my sojourn in Europe and South America. Ah, this back of mine; I am growing old. But, speaking of kinks, unpleasant people sometimes try to detract from my merit by assuring me that, after all, I do this work only for my own pleasure. Some, they say, like one thing, and some like another. Such remarks come from shallow or vicious brains. This hedonistic theory is but the refuge of lazy people. One has many controls other than pleasure. I do this hard work because I have a sense of duty, or, that I may not sound vain, let us call it an obsession of task, and I cannot rest easy until this gets satisfied. It is not pleasure that I arrive at; it is but a relative absence of pain, mental pain-my body, of course may be racked like Caliban's.

I must put that thought down. What a blessing is a typewriter! One can use it even when one's fingers are all roughened and stiffened with grubbing. Lowell obstinately objected to this boon, said that he never could say what he had to say if he had to pick out his letters "like a learned pig." I remember a great English statesman who was equally bitter against the use of a steel pen. How we dislike innovations!

I go back, take breath, and proceed with my work. And I certainly must acknowledge to one pleasure in it: I have discovered through it an apology for one of my characteristics. We are all speciously expert in explaining away our defects, but here is a valid working argument. My friends say that I am critical and

not constructive, that I can see plenty of faults but do not help to build. Now how about making a garden? Here, since spring, my work has been "destructive." I have planted nothing-thrown a little grass-seed, but that is all—and yet this place, which would have received only a conventional compliment last May, is now lauded by all comers. My grass excites the most unrestrained and unforced enthusiasm, and so does all the rest of it. And what have I done? I have criticized only. Meretricious luxuriance I have clipped and discouraged; false starts I have frowned upon. As I obtained knowledge and an appreciation of values, I have discarded and removed the undesirable. And now, behold what destructive criticism can create!

But I am not through. I am a student of gardening, and a student is never through. And, literally, there is no limit to a gardener's work, for not only is the routine itself compelling, but one's vision is constantly enlarging. Like a mother, one has to keep everlastingly at it, or the work will get behind; and, like a mother too, one has ever the fondest of hopes. The true maternal feeling, of course, I should not claim, but I do have a sense of paternity as I walk around; and I do not like to have my child hurt. The other day

it was just after a rain and the sod was soft-what harrowing sight should I see, but an elderly man with a wooden leg plugging his way down the grass. "A literary man—with a wooden leg!" Silas did not "drop into poetry," but he did produce a much bethumbed letter setting forth that he was conducting a drive to

secure a more facile limb and, what with the high cost of living, had found it impossible to obtain the desired end unaided. Remembering that beggars may be messengers of Zeus, I contributed, and then watched, almost through tears, the timber-toed Mercury punch out another series of holes to the gate. But there is hardly a day that does not bring or at least threaten disaster. We have an Airedalenot really ours, but a sort of nephew -who loves our place and loves company, and who entertains by preference here. Have you ever seen an Airedale romp? Ruggs's friends include another Airedale, a Boston terrier, and a young collie. These, you may say, make up the Gang, and it is wonderful what they can do. After a truly successful party, after a really good time, an examination of the grass would seem to indicate that dogs have talons and that they are a great deal bigger and heavier than they look. I have learned now to view all paleontological reconstructions from footprints and other like traces as probably false. I know now that they need not have been produced by monsters, by dinosaurs or mammoths; they may just as likely have been produced by Airedales.

The trouble is with the wetness. This summer the ground has been fairly soaked. And here comes another thought. Will all my painfully gathered experience profit me another year? Next summer may be parched and dry, and my neatly laid plans will then go agley. When I started in, I proposed to keep a book, a sort of general log and account book; but the book petered

out, as I expected. I have been thinking of writing an essay to be entitled, ironically, and with apologies to Mr. Newton, "The Amenities of Book-keeping." This would tell, not of that effort which strives to prevent "ugly gashes" and bleeding gaps on one's shelves, which endeavors to maintain the happy balance between the recommending of a book and the lending of it; it would tell of more intricate and recondite matters, of figures, and additions, and estimates, and bills, and checkstubs. But, as I have said, I did start an account-book, and, having a canny appreciation of my weakness, I did not buy a new one. I found an old one, one nearly blank, the abandoned minute-book of a girls' clubthe Jolly Fifteen-and after the page headed "Moves Passed," I began my record. The second month shows no entries. If next summer should be dry, however, it will not matter. To-day I know will be dry. The Weather Bureau says, "Probably showers"; but look at these fairy-cambric webs lying here and there on the grass and hedges. You cannot fool a spider; he has inside information.

Literary men with wooden legs, dogs, ants, yes, and moles. I suppose that the condition of the soil has kept these last near the surface. There was great excitement among the maids one morning when I first discovered a sprung trap and proceeded to dig out the furry rooter. I wondered at their interest until I found that the chauffeur had informed them that a mole was about the size of Ruggs, the aforementioned Airedale. Our cook, it seems, was planning for a new coat. You see,

we all, even the maids, are city bred. But I have been thinking about that mole. Here I have killed in defense of order, my order. I have killed for an ideal, my ideal. What is an ideal? Is it not simply our own conception of the desirable? We get so wrapped up in our own mores and habits that these come to have moral values, and with these as material we then erect altars. "Democracy is an ideal." What does this mean? Simply that having been born to this political practice and having become adjusted to it we now believe it to be the best. Not a very weighty judgment that, is it? But this is all there can be to it, for otherwise one cannot well explain why democracy should be an ideal, when heaven, to which we all surely aspire, is itself an absolute monarchy.

But if an ideal is such a thin matter, what then is an idealist? Idealism has been identified as vision, an unusual perception of a distant and desirable goal. I cannot accept this. Vision is not limited to idealists. Other people can see as far-further! The test, to my mind, would be rather how one would go about attaining to one's vision, or indeed whether one would make any such effort at all. Does a man rush precipitately toward his desire, his picture, ignoring all obstacles and getting himself into a mess; or does he sit down and dream about it, doing nothing? In either case he will qualify; he is an idealist. I do not like to be unpleasant, but it seems to me that these idealists are either blind to the present, their far-sightedness being pathological and excluding that which is near, or they

are just lazy, abhorrers of routine, haters of work. This would explain why their homes are so often disorderly and uncomfortable. This would explain why they cannot make lawns. For a lawn must be plodded with. One must weed endlessly on, admitting no vain thoughts of perfection. One must, as it were, let a lawn unfold, advancing one's standard only as each new step is actually accomplished.

Does that sound like drudgery? Well, that depends. Drudgery is an attitude, not a fact. A pirate may get bored to extinction, and the village dressmaker may throb with romance. And there is, too, always the unexpected to cope with. Take two or three days of a heavy rain, for instance. Where is your routine now? After one of these downpours, a path of ours, running down to the woods, took its destiny into its own hands and actually did run! Here was a problem. So far, my experience in the filling of cavities had been limited to the part of passive sufferer; but no knowledge, I find, is ever really wasted. I first drilled and gouged out round the edges until I reached healthy tissue, then I shaped the cavity in most approved fashion, and finally I filled with stones from the brook and polished off the surface. It was a good filling too, and still holds, its original, painfully amalgam-like conspicuousness now softened to a more pleasing tone.

Did you notice where I got the stones? I am surprised that I have not told you sooner of this brook of ours. We generally take people down to see it before we have quite finished saying our welcome.

« AnkstesnisTęsti »