At last we are in April. The winter corner is turned, and a new era
entered upon. But April this year is an incongruous sort of an April,
though the incongruity is possibly only in one’s own fancy. We are apt
to fashion our notions of the becoming, and to expect Nature to conform
to them. A desperately dry April it certainly is. The days are hard, and
cold, parched, and nipping; at night the wind howls, but with no
accompaniment of desirable drops. The garden cries to the sky for rain,
but no rain falls upon it, yet the only days I have spent in London were
days of unceasing downpour. Such favouring of the Metropolis at the
expense of the country is manifestly unjust.
April is such a lovely word, that it ought also to be always a lovely
thing. If one imagines it--or rather her--as she might appear to us in
dreams, or an allegory, we should deck her out of course in the
tenderest green. Floating gossamers would hover around her; small pink
buds would bend down to kiss her small pink feet. So encompassed she
would come to meet us along the wood paths, a vision of grace and
maidenly beauty; the traditional smile on her lips, the equally
traditional tear in her eye. She would look up in our faces with an
appealing glance, and then begin suddenly to weep, she herself knew not
why. A maiden with the most maidenly of dreams, enclosing a whole
enchanted world of visionary hopes, fears, delights, anticipations,
which it would be the dull business of Experience to dissipate as the
year rolled on.
But April, as she presents herself before us this year, is not that sort
of maiden at all. She is a remarkably uncompromising sort of young
woman, with hardly any visible green about her costume. She does not
care for the colour apparently, but prefers drabs, and greys, and
browns. As for tears she is not nearly as much given to them as we could
desire. She thinks poorly of them evidently, and considers them out of
date. Her smiles too are doled out in the same penurious fashion as her
tears. She gives us what no doubt she considers our due of both, but
nothing to spare. Her impulses are all dull, decorous, mechanical; as
for her feet, far from being bare, they are clad in warm winter shoes
and stockings, which indeed they have every reason to be.
Doubtless I am old-fashioned, but I cannot admire such sedate damsels.
Give me a little more spontaneity; a little more youthful impetuosity
and dash--
“Robes loosely flowing, hair as free;
Such sweet neglect more taketh me.”
To drop metaphor, which has a tendency to drop itself, we are in despair
over this dryness, and as a consequence have had to resort already to
the aid of our watering-pots. Now in April the watering-pot ought in my
opinion to be still reposing in its tool shed, with the early spider
weaving his first web across its spout. So strongly is this impressed
upon my mind that I feel as if there were something illicit, something I
might almost go so far as to call unprincipled, in resorting to its
assistance thus prematurely. After all though, a gardener’s first
virtue, I reflect, is to save his plants, and unless we promptly take
some step of the kind, ours for a surety will for the most part die.