The Aesthetes in the Kitchen Garden

  When, a week or two ago, I came down among the hills of Kent, the country looked ancient and innocent enough. Save for birds and old men lapping hedges the visitor seemed to be in solitude. But all this was a mask — a delusion. This green England of ours is really bursting with literary men. Short story writers leap from behind hedges, minor poets drop from the trees like ripe fruit; you cannot walk through deep grass without stumbling over Sociologists. On dark, windy nights wild voices mingle with the wind, and the words ‘reactionary’, `superman’, `the Philistines’, and `raise the drama’ echo desolately from hill to hill. We see the vision of Fitz-James in `The Lady of the Lake’ which Scott describes in words (which I quote from memory):

  At once from copse and heath arose Roundels and fugues and lyric prose, From shingles grey their nocturnes start, The bracken bush cries, `Art is Art’, And every tuft of broom is rife With highly beastly views of life.

  I have met in meadows here some of the most terrible and beautiful people of Fleet Street. I have seen a cottage, decent and quiet on the outside, inside which, as I hope for heaven, there were Burne-Jones’s on the wall. In short, we are in the presence of a peculiar phenomenon. The people are not going `back to the land’ but the cultivated classes are.

  But there is something about these intellectual people in flannel shirts who come out and live in the country, where they play tennis and read Thoreau which gives me a haunting notion that they do not really belong to the country; they dwell rather than live in it.

  Now this is very false. Go into the country for your health; go into the country for your children; go into the country because the police are after you; go into the country because you like painting in water-colours, or because you like keeping chickens, or because you like spearing otters, or because you want beauty or contentment or the continual presence of cows. But do not go into the country because you like liberty, for there is of necessity less liberty in the country than anywhere else. The pressure of society on the individual must be much greater in a village than in a city. Public opinion must be much stronger; personal eccentricity much more difficult. And if the aesthetic people in the flannel shirts do not feel this pressure it is because they are not really living in the life of the village — that is to say, not really living in the life of the country. Liberty is a thing of the town; any Roman or Greek would have understood that. It is in the places where men live an intense and complicated life that they find the necessity for liberty, and that which is almost the same as liberty — loneliness. The routine of rural life, happy, dignified, sensible, but not inventive, and not free, has been going on almost unchanged from the beginning of the world.

  Amid all these philosophers and artists who run like rabbits about the woods of Kent I met one who really loved the country. He was driving a sort of wagonette which was plastered all over with little bills and placards announcing that now for the first time people could go from Westerham or Limpsfield to various places that I have never heard of for some singularly small price which I did not read. He was trotting his coach up and down the country roads by way of a preliminary pageant or advertisement, giving free lifts to highly amused pedestrians, or proclaiming the nature and glories of the route to dazed stonebreakers or wild-eyed gypsies. Something led me to make the acquaintance of this individual, and I discovered that driving a coach was by no means the first of his adventures, nor the most amusing. He has written books; he has stood for Parliament; he has conducted, I believe, a kind of wild newspaper. His name is Stuart Gray, and will probably be familiar to many of my readers, especially if they are interested in the movement for the colonisation of England, the return of the people to the land. It was a single sentence of his that convinced me that he had that really poetic feeling which the minor poets in the neighbourhood tend to lack. Before us lay a roll of country like the back of an unbroken wave, spacious, silent, meeting the sky. He stretched out his whip towards it, and said in what I can only call an awestruck voice, `If this were all kitchen gardens! Then you’d have people — people — people.’ Three times he said the sacred word of the republic. This article, you will perceive, is also written in a kitchen garden, and a witchery of onions is wafted with it.

  While standing in this kitchen garden I perceived what many of my readers must have perceived long ago, that of all things on earth the one perfectly beautiful thing is a kitchen garden. It has a hundred kinds of beauty richly blent into a solemn harmony. It has the beauty of an embroidery, for all the colours are quiet and yet varied infinitely. It has the beauty of an army, for all the vegetable regiments are set in ranks as if they had been drilled by God for the great battle against Nonentity. It has the beauty of a sepulchre, because so many of the shapes and colours that are seen are but the coloured crests or monuments upon the more precious bodies underground. It has the beauty of a store-cupboard, the beauty of a fairy tale. Cabbages alone have all the colours of the sea. I am forced, I find, to conclude these reflections for the moment. But I trust that before I resume my reflections on kitchen gardens someone will have brought out a book of amatory poems in which all the similes shall have been drawn from this nobler and more fruitful Eden. I do not see why he should not say that in a lady’s cheek the turnip and the carrot fought for supremacy. Such a description is far truer to the mellow and tawny quality in the human complexion than the violent similes of the rose and the lily. These latter, I may be fastidious, offend me as fantastic.

  The Need of Personalities in Politics

  The village I now inhabit (as a locum tenens in the temporary absence of the Village Beauty) was in a great stir last night, owing to the arrival of the Liberal Van, which was regarded with more gravity than I should have thought possible. It drew up on the village green; its speakers opened a meeting, and everything would have gone smoothly and respectably if it had not happened that among the promoters of the meeting, standing beside the van, was a man with that air of strained intellectuality which marks a reader of The Daily News. He heard my name by some social accident; and remembered seeing it in the paper. `I have read your articles,’ said this excellent Liberal, with a friendly smile, while I faintly condoled with him. Then he said, after a pause of some length, `I think I know what some of them mean’. I implored him to share with me this secret and painful knowledge, but he refused, and I shall go to my grave without it. But my encounter with the man had drawn me into the dangerous circle. And when the Chairman, a local Liberal magnate, was obliged to leave halfway through the meeting, they hoisted me into the chair instead of him. The chair was a kind of wooden ledge a little way above the shafts; and I took the chair with so dignified a decisiveness as almost to wreck the van. Then, I regret to say, the proceedings took on a more turbulent character. My rising to say anything was greeted (I cannot explain this phenomenon) with loud shouts coming exclusively from little boys. I think I somehow stirred in them a sickening hope that after all it was going to be a circus.

  Then there was a sombre Conservative on the outskirts of the crowd, who interrupted so consistently and continuously that it came to be a rather delicate logical question whether he was interrupting our speeches or we were interrupting his. But it was not so much the quantity as the quality of his interruptions that pleased and at the same time perplexed me. One thing was firmly embedded in his mind, the fruitful seed of continuously flowering satire. This was the conviction that all of us in the van were persons of enormous wealth. He even professed to know the sources of that wealth. When I was making some remarks about poverty, he hurled at my head, with a deadly aim, this mysterious sarcasm: ‘Ha! We ain’t all on the Civil List.’ I made, of course, the somewhat obvious retort, that some of us seemed to be on the Uncivil List; but to this moment I cannot imagine what was the meaning of that unfathomable sneer. Is there something in my air and manner, something of official dignity and decorum, touched with a servile prosperity, that suggests that I am in receipt of a bloated pension? Or has somebody really given or left me some money (poignant and improbable thought) since I have been away from town?

  Let us leave this merely personal enigma and pass on to the final development, which from a deeper point of view, at any rate, was the most interesting. The temperature of the meeting, I am proud to say, rose higher and higher: a perfect rattle of repartees, the sympathisers on each side rocked and roared, a large fat farmer of Conservative opinions was beginning with a dreadful and dangerous slowness to think of something to say; and when I wound up the meeting and thanked everybody for their patience, politeness, and good temper, they were ready to kick each other round the green.

  And then an interesting thing happened. Ten minutes after the end of the meeting the large, deliberate farmer of Conservative opinions was delivered of the thing that he wanted to say; and eclipse and thunder accompanied that portentous birth. The thing he wanted to say was — Could anybody there say he’d ever cut down any man’s wages? This seemed to me a very essential, a very serious, and a very manly challenge, immeasurably more important not only than anything said at our meeting, but than anything that is ever said in the House of Commons.

  It was followed by a kind of restless silence, such as occurs in such mobs at such moments, and in the next instant there was drama. A pale, coarse-looking lad, his arm half out of his coat with eagerness and anger, thrust his face forward. His wages had been cut down, he said; he had been underpaid, and underpaid by this man. The farmer, staring at him through the darkness, at first denied all knowledge of his face. Then a voice broke out of him, a loud and wrathful and decisive voice, crying, `Why, I know yer now. I know yer now, I sacked yer for—’. Then the sense of English respectability awoke suddenly in everybody, and the men were torn apart and soothed wildly by their friends. Whatever happened, we must not be asked to decide on a matter of real and diurnal right and wrong. Whatever happened we must not have a plain personal challenge answered by a plain personal reply. The farmer went away, shaking with his furious secret; the lad went away shaking with his. Yet here was present on that dark green, in that dim group, what is often the eternal substance and whole meaning of society and government. Two men were calling upon their neighbours to give judgment on their wrongs. This is politics. We had fixed the frontiers of India; we had examined the imports of Canada; we had meditated on the quarrels between Dutchmen and German Jews; we had criticised kindly but firmly the condition of the Prussian working classes; we had thought imperially and also in continents; we had seen the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.

  But this doing of justice between one angry man and another never crossed our minds as a public duty. This was the last business that could be expected of us — this which would be the first business of a primitive community, this which would be the first business of a tribe of Zulus. Our politics for the night had ended. Our politics had ended exactly at the point where all politics ought to begin.

  It seemed to me that on this little green, as on a green baize stage, was acted an allegory of the whole situation of our contemporary statesmanship. Everything goes on gaily as long as we are dealing with things. Everything stops abruptly the moment we come to men. We are allowed to say: ‘The supporters of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act are corrupt scoundrels.’ We are allowed to say, ‘Sir William Guppy is a supporter of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act’. We are not allowed to complete the syllogism. Everybody says with one accord in our English Parliament: `Let us have no personalities in politics.’ Every Briton says at his breakfast table: ‘At least, we are not like the French and the Irish; we have no personalities in our politics.’ And because we have no personalities we have no responsibilities.

  The Largest Window in the World

  It is a terrible thing to have trod on battlefields before they were fought. It gives a man a cold and ghostly shiver, as of being the babe unborn. But I was a boy, and almost a babe, when I was first in Belgium; and I can only write down the reality that impressed me then. Beyond some streets burning with brassware, which seemed perpetually on sale, almost out of sight of the great Belfry, there is (or was) a sort of museum of the great Memlinc. Among the pictures was one which even as a boy I could not forget; and very few poets or prophets can even imagine how much a boy can forget. It was a picture in which the window seemed hardly wider than the crack of a door. Yet through that crack the human eye could almost, in the strong Scripture rhetoric, take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea.

  And I remember a voice near me speaking in an accent that was neither French nor Flemish nor my own: `You see how narrow the windows were in those days.’

  I did. I also began to see, for the first time, how narrow the minds are in these days. I looked at the little window again and I thought it the largest window in the world. Simply because the aperture was narrow, I knew the landscape was wide. If modern artists had swept it in a larger style, I should have noticed it no more than some hundred miles of wallpaper. Then note not only the pride of a small nation, but the pride of the rich peasantry. Look from the slit of a turret in Cumberland or Calabria and there is a chance that your eye may strike something slightly depressing. But any strip of Belgium will be a string of jewels. Note, thirdly, that the thinness of the outlook is largely due to the thickness of the walls. There is no trace of what vulgar people call `a vista’: the house does not open up indefinitely to the world outside. The man of Memlinc sees the world from his window. But it is still the final fact that the window was his window and the world is not his world. I should have thought it, then, quite inconceivable that any one would assail that turret. But I should have thought it equally inconceivable that any one should fail to defend it. A man living in such a house might almost shut the front door to protect the beauty of the window.

  I have never been in Belgium since; I have never met any who would possibly be in connection with any revolutionary or anti-national idea. Yet for me Belgium has continued to mean that small field of vision, making certain so vast a field of prosperity. That keyhole is still the largest window in the world.

  Since then I have not seen the country, except in frightful photographs. I have gradually begun to understand what was meant by my alien friend when he spoke of the needless narrowness of the medieval window. To judge by the photographs, he has broadened architectural effects very much; he has blown window into window and enlarged the premises; he has left long lines of street in which it is impossible to say whether he has combined the windows that exist, or spared the windows that never existed. He cannot make anything except a window; for a window is simply a hole. When he has blown everything to atoms, when no stack or stone stands about us for many miles, he will say, with an insane simplicity: `I have made the largest window in the world.’

  The Apostle and the Wild Ducks

  Last week I learned a historical lesson in some sense by going on a wild-goose chase. Perhaps it might more correctly be described as a wild-duck chase. Not that I had any intention of shooting wild ducks, though the country I visited was, I believe, specially suited to the sport; the country round about the Fens of Lincoln and the Broads of Norfolk. Those eastern flats generally are famous for such wild-fowl, as also for the remains of the rich medieval civilisation founded on the Flemish trade, and for expansive opportunities for the admiration of the sunset; or, for those of suitable habits, of the sunrise. Yet the wild duck I pursued was not entirely symbolical, though he was among other things a symbol. What happened in my own case was merely this: that a friend of mine told me that far in the interior of the Fens, in the heart of a labyrinth of lanes and dykes there was a little church which contained some medieval paintings in remarkable preservation. These pictures were said to represent scenes of medieval sport, dealing especially with ducks. After wanderings which might have led to the other end of nowhere, only that the endless road seemed to be perpetually turning inward instead of outward, we came at last to the place, in a wilderness of dusty grass and stunted and sprawling trees; with one of the great square towers of fine flints, that mark the Norfolk churches, alone filling the empty sky and dwarfing everything at its feet. And it was here that I found the feature that seemed to me a sort of symbol or summary for our understanding of the Middle Ages.

  Incidentally, of course that great tower was something of a symbol itself. It was not only a beacon or thing to be seen; it is a symbol of blindness as well as sight. Nothing is so strange in human history as the things men do not see. Over all those flat lands the only mountains were made by men; and they were made by medieval men. For that matter, in a thousand little villages all over England there has been for centuries only one tall, stately ornate and orderly building; all the rest was obvious patchwork and poverty. Yet the Puritans could successfully teach five generations of English people, and especially of East Anglian people, that the men who built the big systematic building were living in savagery and superstition, while the men who still tolerated the little hovels had emerged into liberty and enlightenment. In this case it is curiously true that faith can remove mountains; it can remove the mountain opposite a man’s door, if his prejudice has taught him that a mountain is only a myth. But this is a parenthesis; for my purpose here is not concerned with the old English churches in general, but with something that is to be found in this old Norfolk church in particular.