Now and then, at regular intervals of the summer, the Suburb springs for
a time from its mediocrity; but an inattentive eye might not see why, or
might not seize the cause of the bloom and of the new look of humility
and dignity that makes the Road, the Rise, and the Villas seem suddenly
gentle, gay and rather shy.
It is no change in the gardens. These are, as usual, full, abundant,
fragrant, and quite uninteresting, keeping the traditional secret by
which the suburban rose, magnolia, clematis, and all other flowers grow
dull--not in colour, but in spirit--between the yellow brick house-front
and the iron railings. Nor is there anything altered for the better in
the houses themselves.
Nevertheless, the little, common, prosperous road, has bloomed, you
cannot tell how. It is unexpectedly liberal, fresh, and innocent. The
soft garden-winds that rustle its shrubs are, for the moment, genuine.
Another day and all is undone. The Rise is its daily self again--a road
of flowers and foliage that is less pleasant than a fairly well-built
street. And if you happen to find the men at work on the
re-transformation, you become aware of the accident that made all this
difference. It lay in the little border of wayside grass which a row of
public servants--men with spades and a cart--are in the act of tidying
up. Their way of tidying it up is to lay its little corpse all along the
suburban roadside, and then to carry it away to some parochial dust-heap.
But for the vigilance of Vestries, grass would reconcile everything. When
the first heat of the summer was over, a few nights of rain altered all
the colour of the world. It had been the brown and russet of
drought--very beautiful in landscape, but lifeless; it became a
translucent, profound, and eager green. The citizen does not spend
attention on it.
Why, then, is his vestry so alert, so apprehensive, so swift; in
perception so instant, in execution so prompt, so silent in action, so
punctual in destruction? The vestry keeps, as it were, a tryst with the
grass. The "sunny spots of greenery" are given just time enough to grow
and be conspicuous, and the barrow is there, true to time, and the spade.
(To call that spade a spade hardly seems enough.)
For the gracious grass of the summer has not been content within
enclosures. It has--or would have--cheered up and sweetened everything.
Over asphalte it could not prevail, and it has prettily yielded to
asphalte, taking leave to live and let live. It has taken the little
strip of ground next to the asphalte, between this and the kerb, and
again the refuse of ground between the kerb and the roadway. The man of
business walking to the station with a bag could have his asphalte all
unbroken, and the butcher's boy in his cart was not annoyed. The grass
seemed to respect everybody's views, and to take only what nobody wanted.
But these gay and lowly ways will not escape a vestry.
There is no wall so impregnable or so vulgar, but a summer's grass will
attempt it. It will try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the purple
slate, to reconcile stucco. Outside the authority of the suburbs it has
put a luminous touch everywhere. The thatch of cottages has given it an
opportunity. It has perched and alighted in showers and flocks. It has
crept and crawled, and stolen its hour. It has made haste between the
ruts of cart wheels, so they were not too frequent. It has been stealthy
in a good cause, and bold out of reach. It has been the most defiant
runaway, and the meekest lingerer. It has been universal, ready and
potential in every place, so that the happy country--village and field
alike--has been all grass, with mere exceptions.
And all this the grass does in spite of the ill-treatment it suffers at
the hands, and mowing-machines, and vestries of man. His ideal of grass
is growth that shall never be allowed to come to its flower and
completion. He proves this in his lawns. Not only does he cut the
coming grass-flower off by the stalk, but he does not allow the mere
leaf--the blade--to perfect itself. He will not have it a "blade" at
all; he cuts its top away as never sword or sabre was shaped. All the
beauty of a blade of grass is that the organic shape has the intention of
ending in a point. Surely no one at all aware of the beauty of lines
ought to be ignorant of the significance and grace of manifest intention,
which rules a living line from its beginning, even though the intention
be towards a point while the first spring of the line is towards an
opening curve. But man does not care for intention; he mows it. Nor
does he care for attitude; he rolls it. In a word, he proves to the
grass, as plainly as deeds can do so, that it is not to his mind. The
rolling, especially, seems to be a violent way of showing that the
universal grass interrupted by the life of the Englishman is not as he
would have it. Besides, when he wishes to deride a city, he calls it
grass-grown.
But his suburbs shall not, if he can help it, be grass-grown. They shall
not be like a mere Pisa. Highgate shall not so, nor Peckham.