The ways of our musings are as devious, as unexpected, as those of a
general conversation: there is no presiding spirit to keep us to a
standing topic! This topic, with us, should be “Our Sentimental Garden.”
And our tattle should, really, be connected, even if but distantly; with
plants or scenery; with country life and friends ‹or foes›; with
emotions or reminiscences plausibly evoked by the flower side of life.
Happily it is pleasant enough to be brought back to the right theme; as
I am just now by a thought of the head-line.
[Illustration: two people by tall tree]
[Sidenote: REDISCOVERED DELIGHTS]
To one who has taken somewhat late in the day to a life in the country,
most of its interests seem to be a rediscovery of early, simple, and
intimate delights; to be connected with impressions long forgotten.
There is an episode in the biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which, if
I remember aright, bears upon this point. I have not got the
_Confessions_ by me—it is, no doubt, in that cynical autobiography that
the anecdote is recorded—nor, indeed, any other work of that exceedingly
antipathetic writer. ‹This is the usual course: the books I require for
reference when in the country happen oftener than not to be on my London
bookshelves; and _mutatis mutandis, vice versa_!› The precise wording
cannot in consequence be given here. But it is a small matter; the story
is to this effect:
In his young and singularly impressionable days, Jean-Jacques was taking
a country walk with one very near to his heart. At a certain spot of the
garden, or the wood, in which he was tasting the subtle joys of
_solitude à deux_, the lady suddenly exclaimed:
“See, yonder is a _pervenche_!”
“Indeed,” returned the youth, little intent then, upon the beauties of
the outer world, and gazed absently upon the tender blue peeping out of
the tender green. “So, that is a periwinkle?” And he resumed the thread
of his interrupted discourse.
But, later—much later on, in twilight days of his life—some one happened
again to say in his hearing:
“See—a Periwinkle!”
And Rousseau, now old Jean-Jacques, amazed the company by an almost
incredible exhibition of sensibility.
“_Une pervenche!_ Where—where?” he called out, throwing himself down on
his knees to look for the flower, with eyes bathed in tears.
If this is not quite the exact tale, it matters, as I said above, very
little. It is the story, in its essence. The age of sensibility ‹praise
be to our fate!› is no longer with us; but there is something
permanently true in the picture it sets forth. To the _philosophe_ of
mature years the mere word _pervenche_ suddenly recalled, in a
poignantly intimate manner, the first love of his spring-time. _Veteris
vestigia flammae!_
And we are not to wonder that the echo from a world irremediably lost
should have affected the morose, self-centred reprobate in an
uncontrollable manner. I venture to think that, with the least
sentimental of us, the sudden rediscovery, of some long forgotten
youthful impression can hardly fail to evoke, however transiently, a
certain dreamy emotion: half pleasure, half melancholy.
[Illustration: child outside with hoop]
Now, in the case of the Master of the House—and he is thankful to
realize it—early memories of delight in flowers and such things are
associated, not with the troublous times of young manhood’s protean
heart affairs, not with the _Sturm und Drang_ days of the dawning
moustache, but rather with the quaintly fanciful inner life of boyhood.
They come back borne upon the colours and odours of such early friends
as Lilac and Acacia; common Wallflower—_Giroflée_, our Gillyflower; wild
Violet and Primrose—_gallicé “Coucou”_; Hollyhock or rather
_Rose-trémière_; Lily-of-the-Valley; _Muguet_.... It is the old French
name that most readily slips from my pen.
Owing perhaps to a childhood spent almost wholly in France, and to the
completeness of the break that necessarily ensued when the English born
but French nurtured boy was at last allowed back to his own and proper
land, all these memories seem to belong to a world utterly apart—to
something rather fantastic, unconnected with later life and interests.
Moreover, being of childhood and of a time when the world seemed
uniformly kind, they retain an allurement all their own. One pleasant
recollection of those far-off days does not hook on to others, bitter,
regretful, or let it be even merely ruffling ... inevitable chain of
responsible experiences!
* * * * *
Our early memories are like works of art: they have a way of
perpetuating in beauty things that perhaps were not really beautiful in
themselves. About them there is an unconscious selection which, having
been made by a mind still essentially serene, has contrived a subtle
harmony of all the elements. Upon the pictures of its store, a child’s
memory lays an emphasis strangely different to that which the critical
powers of later growth would set. And it is this quaint insistence on
certain “odd corners of things” which ‹among other reasons› makes them
so dearly personal and private to the older mind.
In my own case, as I have said, they belong to a world still more remote
than the childhood of most men of “Grandpa” status—a world which has not
even the link of language to connect it with the present!
Paradoxically, this is perhaps the reason why I take so much pleasure in
finding these happy-hued and odorous things now rising, and living under
their right English names, in a garden of my own. To the other denizens
of Villino Loki they are part of the excellent general company
foregathering in our garden: but to me they are in many ways my
intimates. We seem “to have known things together”; things doubtless of
no importance, but pleasant to recall in casual intercourse.
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