Of Taking Root
WHEN the history of our time comes to be written, it may be that the
historian, remarking our many faults and weaknesses, and seeking to find
a reason for them, speculating on our civilisation as we now speculate
on the civilisations of Rome and Egypt, will come to see that the poor
blossoms of civic virtue which we put forth owe their meagreness and
deformity to the fact that our lives are no longer permitted to take
root in material possessions. Material possessions indeed we have--too
much of them and too many of them--but they are rather a dust that
overlays the leaves of life than a soil in which the roots of life can
grow.
A certain solidness of character, a certain quiet force and confidence
grow up naturally in the man who lives all his life in one house, grows
all the flowers of his life in one garden. To plant a tree and know that
if you live and tend it, you will gather fruit from it; that if you set
out a thorn-hedge, it will be a fine thing when your little son has
grown to be a man--these are pleasures which none but the very rich can
now know. (And the rich who might enjoy these pleasures prefer to run
about the country in motor cars.) That is why, for ordinary people, the
word "neighbour" is ceasing to have any meaning. The man who occupies
the villa partially detached from your own is not your neighbour. He
only moved in a month or so ago, and you yourself will probably not be
there next year. A house now is a thing to live in, not to love; and a
neighbour a person to criticise, but not to befriend.
[Illustration: THE SILVER TOWERS.]
When people's lives were rooted in their houses and their gardens they
were also rooted in their other possessions. And these possessions were
thoughtfully chosen and carefully tended. You bought furniture to live
with, and for your children to live with after you. You became familiar
with it--it was adorned with memories, brightened with hopes; it, like
your house and your garden, assumed then a warm friendliness of intimate
individuality. In those days if you wanted to be smart, you bought a new
carpet and curtains: now you "refurnish the drawing-room." If you have
to move house, as you often do, it seems cheaper to sell most of your
furniture and buy other, than it is to remove it, especially if the
moving is caused by a rise of fortune.
[Illustration: FURNITURE TO LIVE WITH.]
I do not attempt to explain it, but there is a certain quality in men
who have taken root, who have lived with the same furniture, the same
house, the same friends for many years, which you shall look for in
vain in men who have travelled the world over and met hundreds of
acquaintances. For you do not know a man by meeting him at an hotel, any
more than you know a house by calling at it, or know a garden by walking
along its paths. The knowledge of human nature of the man who has taken
root may be narrow, but it will be deep. The unrooted man who lives in
hotels and changes his familiars with his houses, will have a shallow
familiarity with the veneer of acquaintances; he will not have learned
to weigh and balance the inner worth of a friend.
In the same way I take it that a constant succession of new clothes is
irritating and unsettling, especially to women. It fritters away the
attention and exacerbates their natural frivolity. In other days when
clothes were expensive, women bought few clothes, but those clothes were
meant to last, and they did last. A silk dress often outlived the
natural life of its first wearer. The knowledge that the question of
dress will not be one to be almost weekly settled tends to calm the
nerves and consolidate the character. Clothes are very cheap
now--therefore women buy many new dresses, and throw the shoddy things
away when, as they soon do, they grow shabby. Men are far more
sensible. Every man knows the appeal of an old coat. So long as women
are insensible to the appeal of an old gown, they need never hope to be
considered, in stability of character, the equals of men.
The passion for ornaments--not ornament--is another of the unsettling
factors in an unsettling age. The very existence of the "fancy shop" is
not only a menace to, but an attack on the quiet dignity in the home.
The hundreds of ugly, twisted, bizarre fancy articles which replace the
old few serious "ornaments" are all so many tokens of the spirit of
unrest which is born of, and in turn bears, our modern civilisation.
It is not, alas! presently possible for us as a nation to return to that
calmer, more dignified state when the lives of men were rooted in their
individual possessions, possessions adorned with memories of the past
and cherished as legacies to the future. But I wish I could persuade
women to buy good gowns and grow fond of them, to buy good chairs and
tables, and to refrain from the orgy of the fancy shop. So much of life,
of thought, of energy, of temper is taken up with the continual change
of dress, house, furniture, ornaments, such a constant twittering of
nerves goes on about all these things which do not matter. And the
children, seeing their mother's gnat-like restlessness, themselves, in
turn, seek change, not of ideas or of adjustments, but of possessions.
Consider the acres of rubbish specially designed for children and spread
out over the counters of countless toy-shops. Trivial, unsatisfying
things, the fruit of a perverse and intense commercial ingenuity: things
made to sell, and not to use.
When the child's birthday comes, relations send him presents--give him
presents, and his nursery is littered with a fresh array of undesirable
imbecilities--to make way for which the last harvest of the same empty
husks is thrust aside in the bottom of the toy cupboard. And in a couple
of days most of the flimsy stuff is broken, and the child is weary to
death of it all. If he has any real toys, he will leave the glittering
trash for nurse to put away and go back to those real toys.
When I was a child in the nursery we had--there were three of us--a
large rocking horse, a large doll's house (with a wooden box as annexe),
a Noah's Ark, dinner and tea things, a great chest of oak bricks, and a
pestle and mortar. I cannot remember any other toys that pleased us.
Dolls came and went, but they were not toys, they were characters, and
now and then something of a clockwork nature strayed our way--to be
broken up and disembowelled to meet the mechanical needs of the moment.
I remember a desperate hour when I found that the walking doll from
Paris had clockwork under her crinoline, and could not be comfortably
taken to bed. I had a black-and-white china rabbit who was hard enough,
in all conscience, but then he never pretended to be anything but a
china rabbit, and I bought him with my own penny at Sandhurst Fair. He
slept with me for seven or eight years, and when he was lost, with my
play-box and the rest of its loved contents, on the journey from France
to England, all the dignity of my thirteen years could not uphold me in
that tragedy.
It is a mistake to suppose that children are naturally fond of change.
They love what they know. In strange places they suffer violently from
home-sickness, even when their loved nurse or mother is with them. They
want to get back to the house they know, the toys they know, the books
they know. And the loves of children for their toys, especially the ones
they take to bed with them, should be scrupulously respected. Children
nowadays have insanitary, dusty Teddy Bears. I had a "rag doll," but
she was stuffed with hair, and was washed once a fortnight, after which
nurse put in her features again with a quill pen, and consoled me for
any change in her expression by explaining that she was "growing up." My
little son had a soap-stone mouse, and has it still.
The fewer toys a child has the more he will value them; and it is
important that a child should value his toys if he is to begin to get
out of them their _full_ value. If his choice of objects be limited, he
will use his imagination and ingenuity in making the objects available
serve the purposes of such plays as he has in hand. Also it is well to
remember that the supplementing of a child's own toys by other things,
_lent for a time_, has considerable educational value. The child will
learn quite easily that the difference between his and yours is not a
difference between the attainable and the unattainable, but between the
constant possession and the occasional possession. He will also learn to
take care of the things which are lent to him, and, if he sees that you
respect his possessions, will respect yours all the more in that some of
them are, now and then, for a time and in a sense, his.
[Illustration: THE TURQUOISE TEMPLE.]
40]
The generosity of aunts, uncles, and relations generally should be
kindly but firmly turned into useful channels. The purchase of "fancy"
things should be sternly discouraged.
With the rocking horse, the bricks, the doll's house, the cart or
wheel-barrow, the tea and dinner set, the Noah's Ark and the puzzle
maps, the nursery will be rudimentarily equipped. The supplementary
equipment can be added as it is needed, not by the sporadic outbursts of
unclish extravagance, but by well-considered and slow degrees, and by
means in which the child participates. For we must never forget that the
child loves, both in imagination and in fact, to create. All his dreams,
his innocent pretendings and make-believes, will help his nature to
unfold, and his hands in their clumsy efforts will help the dreams,
which in turn will help the little hands.