IIBOOKS AND GARDENS
The mind relaxing into needful sport,Should turn to writers of an abler sort,Whose wit well-managed, and whose classic styleGive truth a lustre and make wisdom smile.Cowper.
The mind relaxing into needful sport,Should turn to writers of an abler sort,Whose wit well-managed, and whose classic styleGive truth a lustre and make wisdom smile.Cowper.
The mind relaxing into needful sport,Should turn to writers of an abler sort,Whose wit well-managed, and whose classic styleGive truth a lustre and make wisdom smile.Cowper.
The mind relaxing into needful sport,
Should turn to writers of an abler sort,
Whose wit well-managed, and whose classic style
Give truth a lustre and make wisdom smile.
Cowper.
I have confessed that the books which please me most are the books that speak to the heart—books that greet one with the ease and familiarity of a friend. I desire to feel the humanity, the heart of an author. I desire to know that he is genial, kindly, well-disposed. I have no inclination for angry, fretful men of letters. I no more desire to meet such through the medium of a book, than I desire to make the acquaintance of quarrelsome individuals in the flesh. I, too, ‘find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence, full of doubts, difficulties, and disappointments, quite a hard enough life without dark countenances at my elbow.’ Give me pleasant company. Give megentlemen of letters. Still, I have no taste for the company of the maudlin or weak-kneed. Robert Louis Stevenson says that ‘we areall for tootling on the sentimental flute in literature; and not a man amongst us will go to the head of the march to sound the heady drums!’ Note with what grace he makes the observation! It is more in the nature of a good-tempered laugh than a growl. How gracefully he wears the title—a Gentleman of Letters! How pleasantly he addresses us! Little wonder if, in his presence, our failings are as open wounds. He has no need to probe. His gentlest touch is sufficient, more effective by far than the rough treatment of the irascible author.
Yes, for friends give me gracious authors. Give me the gentle Elia. Give me Jefferies, Goldsmith, Leigh Hunt, and De Quincey. These are the writers I would take into a garden on a summer’s afternoon. I need have no fear, whilst in such company, of the flowers being robbed of their fragrance. The song of the birds will not be silenced. The gentle whisperings of the trees will still be audible. The writers in mind are of the company who claim kinship with Nature. Whilst with them I may read and yet meditate. I may learn and yet hear and feel.
Where is the nature-lover who will not readily confess that when in a flowering-garden he is frequently torn between his devotion to thebook in his hand and the beauties that surround him? I confess that I, for one, like to mix ‘the dainties that are bred in books’ with the wondrous attractions of Nature. I am ready enough to take my favourite authors into a garden, but not so ready to give them my undivided attention. Another book—which must for ever remain unrivalled—claims my eyes, my attention. Richard Jefferies is pleasing, but not so pleasing as the beauties to be found in a garden. Goldsmith brings a warm glow, but see! the sun shines in the heavens. Lamb puts me in playful vein, but his tune is not so gay as the song of the birds in yonder bushes. The light touch of Leigh Hunt is delightful, but not so pleasing as the quickly shifting lights upon the tree-tops.
But it is good to have old friends at one’s elbow. And if I am able to enjoy myself without them on a summer’s afternoon, it is because they, on some winter’s evening, have opened my eyes and quickened my senses. It is they, I say, who have taught me to love the beauties of Nature. I am familiar with their golden passages, and whilst seated beneath the trees can recall them at my pleasure, or, should the mood arise, read them again, and yet again. How good, for example, to read sucha passage as this: ‘There is something beyond the philosophers in the light, in the grass-blades, the leaf, the grasshopper, the sparrow on the wall. Some day the great and beautiful thought which hovers on the confines of the mind will at last alight. In that is hope, the whole sky is full of abounding hope.’
Still, one does not always experience a sense of loss when reading in the open. Far from it! The heavens are not always blue. And prate as we will about the subtle beauty of grey skies and leafless trees, we are at times willing enough to escape from them. I, for one, am glad under such conditions to warm myself by the light of a printed page. Happily, I am of the company of men who can walk and read, and have frequently trodden snow-covered ground with my nose a few inches from an open book. Believe me, he who can read whilst walking has a long pull over the book-lover who must needs have quietude and a bended knee upon which to nurse his beloved books.
There is a worthy and distinguished company of book-lovers to whom reading whilst afoot is not only uncongenial but impossible. I seem to remember a passage in which that great book-lover Charles Lamb speaks of his inability to enjoy a book whilst out of doors. These, Ifind, are the words in mind: ‘I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister who was generally to be seen upon Snow Hill (as yet Skinner’s Street was not) between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter’s knot, or a bread-basket, would have quickly put to flight all the philosophy I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points.’
Thus the gentle Elia playfully dismissed the person who is pleased to boast of his ability to read whilst walking. Was there ever a writer so fastidious, yet so tolerant, so playful as he? Speaking of the conditions under which certain books should be read, he says: ‘Much depends uponwhenandwhereyou read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up theFaerie Queenefor a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes’ sermons? Milton almost requires a solemn service of music before you enter upon him. Winter evenings—and the worldshut out—with less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such seasonsThe Tempest, or his ownWinter’s Tale. Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide over only.’
I wish it was possible to add a few words from the same whimsical pen upon reading in a garden on a summer’s afternoon. I have a friend who is disposed to think that such writing would contain little about books andmuchabout Nature. We are told that Lamb was a lover of towns and crowded streets. Would it not be truer to say that he was a lover of the conditions in which he chanced to be placed? London claimed him—for the sanest reasons, no doubt—and lo! under his pen London became a garden.
It is well that some brave souls can make-believe that the noise of the traffic of a London thoroughfare makes good music!
It is well that some have the spirit to sound the ‘heady drums.’ But for my own part, give me a garden removed from the turmoil of a big town. I shall not then be over-particular as regards my reading. Let me drop in my breast-pocket a volume by one of the authors named, and I shall be content. I too shall then be able to say, ‘It matters nothingto me that the earth and the solar system are whirling through space at a rate of sixty miles a second, from no one knows where to no one knows whither, if I may sit in my garden (with a book for company) on a summer’s afternoon.’