It cannot be denied that Violet treated such talk with the scorn that the professional has for the amateur; her passion was for operations and drains, and after listening for ten minutes or so to Mrs M----x----e she would burst forth “I’m not a valetudinarian - whats the word? And my cottage is a cottage, and my widow comes from slums and can’t cook”. And if no one sees the connection, I am not surprised, but it would really take too much time to fish the links from the sliding waters of Irish grandmothers and education and religion in which in Violet’s mind they lie submerged.

  But one of the flowers in the magic garden at St. John’s Wood, a tall rod of a plant with queer little tassels always quivering and austere silver leaves which prick you if you don’t know the way of them, was certainly Miss Violet Dickinson. She was often there, you saw her stride across the grass to slap some mournful dowager on the back, or she pulled out her note book and wrote directions for killing green fly on roses, or the address of the only man in London who can beeswax tiles, or she undertook to interview a specialist, or gave advice on the feeding of infants, the choice of husbands, or the writing of English prose.

  She, though not an aristocratic lady - stay though, she had a grandmother! - owned a country cottage. When, some pages back, I was trying to label different cycles of our century I should certainly have marked the year in which Violet bought her cottage as one of the most significant. That act of hers typifies a momentous change, which will be described one of these days by Mr. George Trevelyan in his work on “The Social Life of the Nineteenth Century”. “A new spirit,” he will write, breathed like the wind of a rosy dawn, from the works of George Meredith, and, stirring the dusty and arid leaves now beginning to shrivel on the stunted bushes of modern life, caused them to drop these perfectly inefficient shields, relics of a purblind aristocratic age, and to put forth whatever of youth or Spirit yet remained in them. Not much in most cases!” There he laughed, and then went on, sprinkling his page with notes, to tell us how gently born ladies took to porridge off earthenware, without stays, and how they dug in gardens, and how muscles grew on their arms, and their husbands called them “Comrade” and children in vast quantities, mostly of the male sex, were born to them, and how they toiled for human brotherhood, and the sap of life sang in their veins. The Comic Spirit laughed meanwhile. But as the most capricious of chroniclers I may select one seemingly irrelevant scene and let it stand for chapters of picturesque history. I will describe, then, how Violet was staying once at H------d, where her friend Lady R----t C-----l lived, the strange fritillary freaked with jet of the magic garden. It was summer time and had one been so minded, one might have conceived long narrative poems with English peers for the persons of Greek mythology, and English gardens and country houses for the slopes of Olympus and the Temples of Bacchus. And imagination would have had no cause to turn her head aside for all that came to her there would have painted her creatures with bright scales, and plumped their limbs.

  But Violet, as it was clear to any one who saw her, sitting on the most famous terrace in Europe, with the oldest oak trees in front of her, and the smoothest turf, and behind her the finest Elizabethan grey stone, had no mind for any form of narrative poetry. She was alone and had therefore no reason to veil her discontent; she had some six volumes in her lap, to fortify her solitude, but she did not look at them; four were novels hot from the press, one was a solemn Memoir and the other was a copy of the poetical works of John Keats. I repeat, it was summer morning, and a perfectly even sheet of air shifted up and down and smoothed the landscape like some subtle painters medium. Trees and little hills and far church spires all were blunted of their sharp angles, rounded and suffused, and at the same time made of solid body. You could hear, if you listened, either the kiss of the air or the chatter of insects, and suddenly a bird came swooping in a circle, with a little soft chuckle of its own. There never was a deeper or more tranquil scene, as though the colour had been steaming upwards through solid miles before it reached the earth’s surface and glowed there, and as though not one yelp or discord was contained in the whole seas of air which swam continually across the sky so fine was their texture. Fauns might be hiding behind the thick laurels, or suddenly a ring of naked maidens might burst from the grove, and run, scattering rose leaves and laughing across the turf; joining hands in a fantastic circle, with backward glances into the wood behind them, whence, in a moment, the branches cracking, tawny furry eared Fauns would leap, and the whole chase would flash across the grass, white and yellow upon its green. In truth the laurels did shelter some living creature, for Violet’s listless eye grew attentive and her lips smiled, as though the landscape had suddenly come to have meaning for her. It was an old ruddy bent gardener who wheeled a creaking barrow half full of laurel shoots which he had been clipping from the bushes—a somewhat prosaic interruption you might have thought, intent on your fauns, and you might have felt constrained to fit the English peasant into the picture, his servility, his brutality, his so many shillings a week, and the percentage due to the public house, his drudge of a wife and his dozen flaxen haired children. But Violet rose to her feet, with the action of a recumbent antelope, and strode towards him, as though she had the precise place ready for him in her mind.

  “Good day,” she began, with a heartiness that made the bent old creature straighten himself and look at her. Yes, she was a real lady, and - what was that odd feeling she gave him? The crust of demeanour which sheltered all his natural passion and protected him from ladies and gentlemen and gave him a body wherewith to appear decently in their eyes, the crust that they both agreed to accept for the real man, since the real man was not presentable was pierced by this lady’s voice and her friendly gaze. He felt excited as though something long suppressed were now rising into daylight. Freedom gleamed in his eyes while he spoke, and he waved his shears towards the house as men waved bloodstained bayonnettes once before the Bastille. His conversation I must own, was as bent and smelt as strongly of the earth, as his ancient gnarled body, nor did it deal with heroic matters. He explained the best way of treating roses, and how to lay on manure, he was dogmatic on the grafting of Pyrus Japonica, and contradicted the lady flatly without apology, on the matter of Cyrus Asiatica, remembering that he knew more than she did. In short he stood there for half an hour telling her of his wife’s dyspepsia, how ‘caustic is poison for tumours’, how a drop warms the innards, how he would think over her words, and how if ever she came their way he would be proud to give her a cup of tea “not spirits” he said with a wink, and show her the way to treat phylloxera with paraffin. He forgot for the first time for twenty years that half hours are the property of the C---l family, and have been so “for centuries and centuries I dessay.”

  Violet, once indoors, got out her bible and found some very good reason there for preferring to build her own house with your own hands to living in a house built for you by others. She found a phrase for her discontent, among so much that was old and beautiful, which ended with “moth and rust” and suggested a figure to her mind of bodies crusted with precious stones, as some beetles are crusted with dry excrescences, trying painfully to scrape themselves smooth against gleaming walls of steel. It was not, you perceive, that she had no love of beauty but that - how can I explain it? - there was some illicit connection in her mind between beauty and riches, beauty and luxury, beauty and selfishness, tyranny and vice. But a mixed parentage will produce these confusions, as it produces also, by a lucky jerk of the seeds, genius, humour and virtue.

  When her hosts had placed her in one of the bedrooms of the house which history had painted with all manner of beautiful figures and tones, they did not guess any more than Violet herself, that they were vexing her days and haunting her nights. She would start up, when the ancient clock tolled two with a voice that seemed to break the news as gently as possible, in a temper that, if its object had been human, you would have called one of acute irritation. All she could say was that she felt suffocated, all she could do was to throw up her window and malign certain Elizabethan bolts which caught and grated. With one hand she would have torn the glass-grey tapestries from the wall, with the other she could not but point in admiration. If one could but copy them! That was her salvation.

  Instantly she lighted an extra candle and began to touch and scrutinise with envious fingers; she wrote little notes, and lay awake for hours planning where to buy, how much to pay, and all the practical activities which would somehow purge beauty of its fleshliness. She slept, nor did the sheet fret her limbs any more with its smoothness, nor did she feel, when the maid came gently with her breakfast, as one bound down by chains of air.

  This was the beginning of revolution, and the question which she put with tremendous animation, to her host at lunch. “Do tell me on what system is your drainage managed?” was the first shot of an attack which threatened the whole of the Elizabethan pile. They were sitting in the long gallery watching with calm benignant eyes the daily performance of sun and earth which had been so often repeated in front of them that they could almost prompt the actors. You had the impression, until Violet spoke, of an audience such as the audience of the hills beholding an evening sky; or the long gallery was a tranquil creek where ships that had done their voyages came to anchor—and then Violet spoke.

  No one could tell her how the drains were managed, for no one remembered that there were drains. And yet it stood to reason—someone went to the window and tapped the dry wall—another offered to ring for a footman, but there was a spirited feeling against this—a third said, “Yes, Miss Dickinson, in a house of this size the drainage system, you may be sure, is complicated.” But all, save that one restless spirit, felt a gloomy change, as though the huge honeycomb of brick were momentarily closing in on them with a gross weight; without drains it was as a body without nerves.

  “Can you tell me,” she piped suddenly, “where you get your roses?”

  “We get them - let me see - I could find out, I could ask - ”

  “James Cookson?”

  “Is he a flower dealer?”

  “He’s a gardener My lord, aged 72, and he has been in your service thirty years, and he has two sons now in your glasshouses, and knows more about roses than any man in Hertfordshire.”

  And then Violet obeying some native instinct that was certainly not polite, gave such a picture drawn in coloured detail of the Cookson family, that no one could help laughing; no one had been heard to laugh so loud for twenty or thirty or forty years. That night Violet heard a tap at her door.

  “Is it true Violet, what you were telling us, about old Cookson,” said a plaintive lady’s voice.

  “Every word on my honour,” said Violet, who was tracing figures on a sheet of paper, with her hair down.

  “Do you know it seems to me - well don’t you think Violet - it would be very nice ---- ”

  “To have a cottage of one’s own? Yes, my good woman,” cried Violet.

  “With real drains, and real roses, and a place to sit out in, and one’s own china, and no ancestors,” continued Lady R------t. Such was the beginning of the great revolution which is making England a very different place from what it was.

  Not a month after the words I have quoted were spoken, a figure, tall, spare and infinitely vigorous might have been seen as the novelists say, striding along a country road, not many miles from Welwyn. She only needed a couple of terriers at her heels, and a whip in her hand to look the part which in effect she did not play, the Squire’s sporting daughter. When she came to a Gate she sprung over it, admitting herself to something known in county histories as a Copse, and then, secluded from the road, her behaviour was far more remarkable. She threw up her head and fairly snuffed the air, and strode among the trees as a general on a battle field. What there was to see except a cheerful little wood already beginning to smell of autumn it was not easy to say, but Violet’s eye was charged with fire and her lips moved with decision as though she issued commands to some phantom army. Sometimes she tapped a tree and nodded her head and wrote in the perennial notebook which swings by her side, as though her path through life were full of notes; sometimes she drew mystic lines on the turf with her walking stick; sometimes she dropped on her knees and smelt the ground. How does a healthy human being differ from the nobler sorts of quadrupeds? a spectator might have asked. Here were pure animal good spirits inspired by the mere mass pungency of earth. But little we know man-woman-or Violet kind. Within six months or perhaps a year, a religious service was being held where the wood had been, and wild beauty was reclaimed for ever to the service of the domestic virtues friendship and the Christian religion. There was a Cottage and the trees were gone -- but not all of them. Such as were left flourished like cannibals on the destruction of their fellows, drastically pruned, passionately loved by their austere mistress, serving my purpose as an allegory you will perceive. Nor can we pretend, much though we admire the satiric vein, that the rule which turned a scrubby suburban copse into a distinguished dwelling place all alive with the civilised graces of flowers and fruit, the sturdy virtue of cabbage and green pea, was altogether barbaric. On this lawn I have seen many worthy and delightful people refresh themselves; Coptic scholars digging for vegetable roots as for the roots of languages twenty times buried in Egyptian sand; distinguished authoresses matching the view with words, ladies with troubles and tempers forgetting them in a desire to have “a cottage just like yours”; hospital nurses cleansing their minds from the horrid incrustations of surgery and sickness; fashionable London “making believe” with pruning hook and knife that it loves the country, as you have seen little town bred children dig holes in a corner of the Square Garden and pretend that they are really camping out with tinned food, in the Indian jungle, and that the cats are roaring lions.

  But Violet was careful that too great a strain should not be laid on the imaginations of her friends; there was a real drawing room and a real kitchen and real beds when you were tired of pretending that you could do without them. And the fauns of Welwyn, whom the rites of the Christian church dislodged, were probably no more beautiful than Lady C-----r, no more witty than Lady R------t C---l (it is rumoured that she has a pointed ear), no more passionate than Mrs C-----m, no more learned than her husband, and if you have ever seen Lady B-----e T------e in her bath, studying the effects of sunlight dripping through the leaves onto naked flesh, as the French Impressionists painted it, you would not claim any superior beauty for the yellow skin of Fauns.

  It is clear I hope from the very few examples I have given, that Violet’s cottage stood for a symbol of many things; and that indeed is the pitfall into which her biographer is forever pitching himself. A gross brick wall would be the outcome of a lifetime of scrupulous solicitudes and the prayer with which she crowned the building the sum of many vows. At her knee as I have said swung a little notebook; things had a way of striking her, tremendous truths struck out from the conflicts of worlds in the most unlikely places, if indeed one place were more unlikely than another. But the truth of it is that no place was unlikely to Violet’s eye, so long as she could detect a human twist in it, and it was really only upon the Acropolis, in the British Museum, in the great picture galleries and concert rooms and libraries that she was horribly depressed as one forced to contemplate a corpse. But these reflections transcribed in brick and mortar made the cottage, and my pitfall is the temptation that besets me everywhere to leave these symbols unexpressed and to let my heroine hide herself behind them. Often she has whisked behind a paragraph and it was only when I had done it and set it proudly in its place in the pile raised to her honour that I discovered that she was behind and not in front, that I had made a screen and no pane of glass.

  At such times you would find her digging furiously in her garden or catching brambles by the neck as some deft animals catch snakes; and she would look at you with fierce melancholy and exclaim. “Nobody wants me, but I’m very happy alone. Why should they want me? I don’t know anythin’- - can’t do anythin’ except weed, yes I do think I can keep a garden tidy and do my accounts fairly. I’m a good sister, I tell the truth and - one other thing, Oh yes, I’m a very good judge of character. But as you say that’s only one, two, three, four, five good qualities, and that’s not enough to make a woman of.” At this she would master a tough bramble with great spines, as though it were the symbol of some creeping vice. Indeed one chapter of her tablet note book is called “Weeding Brambles, or how to kill Caterpillars”. But you had come not to discuss Violet’s faults but your own virtues; you had come all the way from F----y S-----e in the parish of St. Pancras for this purpose, and it was necessary not to waste time. So with whatever skill you had you recalled her to the fact of your humanity by bleating, chuckling, groaning, or offering to pull up weeds too. Then she would stride to the house and pull forth a long arm chair which she placed under a tree whence you might see a view, which you conceived as a nice blue foreground for certain human figures. Now with any good luck the talk played freely on the most interesting and instructive of subjects, modern English prose, how it is written by women, and then, for the sake of example, how it is written by one woman, its beauties, possibilities aims and, just to round the picture, defects. Indeed I should do my heroine a horrid injustice if I allowed it to be thought that she indulged literature any further than she indulged children or husbands and wives. I could of course, with time and space, disprove all her theories, and show them to be most fallaciously compounded from a confusion of morals and aesthetics, but it would be scarcely worth my while since at the end I should have to own that she was somehow, wrongly unmistakeably, unreasonably right. But as she insisted upon certain stringent virtues in character so she condemned an art without them. “Ah, if you ever wrote a word like”, and then came many distinguished names “I would - -”. She would have laid the book so written on the log fire, and burnt her illusions as thin as the black films of paper with sliding red eyes in them, that went out one by one. But how she came by such decision of judgment seeing that the printed page swam before her eyes, as we have shown, in a confusion of coloured shapes, of biblical texts, of odd facts relating to cabmen in the London hospital, or the love affairs of Prime Ministers, so that she would look up from Adonais in tears and say, “That reminds me I have not given Jack his ointment.” —how this was done, is and must remain, as far as I can explain it, a mystery. Nor can I attempt, the number of this page warning me that I have already attempted too much, to follow the course of those conversations with which the leaves in B-----m W—d still murmur. There were swift contrary currents on the surface, the wind veering or meeting its own blast half way, surfaces might be ruffled, and hair blown in bewilderment, but the stream steadied itself, changing its nature you perceive at the same time, as it bored beneath the obstacles on the surface, till, in the depths, it ran a swift course, straight as an arrow, ice cold, dark as steel, beneath black precipices, sparkling blue again when it ran out into the sun. Now as it is a fact that human beings will suffer almost any kind of chill and even bruise which will convince them that they live—“See, my hand -- it bleeds!” -- So B-----m W--d became as fashionable and famous for its healing properties as a German Spa. It would take me at least two more chapters to write out the significance of the place in the life of the time; how vows uttered in secret came fluttering down from the eaves of the house and settled on unexpectant heads, how odd half thoughts born in the Somersetshire school room, growing by fits and London drawing rooms, hospitals and streets fixed on other people and started eddies in their blood, which drove them to all kinds of unforeseen experiences, but it all goes to prove that the life of Miss Violet Dickinson is one of the most singular as well as the most prolific and least notorious that was lived in our age.