Hortus Vitae Part 1

Hortus Vitae.

by Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee.

DEDICATION

To MADAME TH: BLANC-BENTZON

MAIANO, NEAR FLORENCE, June 20, 1903.

MY DEAR MADAME BLANC,

The first copy of this little book was, of course, to have been for Gabrielle Delzant. I am fulfilling her wish, I think, in giving it, instead, to you, who were her oldest friend; as I, alas! had time to be only her latest.

She had read nearly all these essays; and, during those weeks of her illness which I spent last autumn in Gascony, she had made me rewrite several among them. She wanted to learn to read English aloud, and it amused her and delighted me that she should do so on my writings. Her French p.r.o.nunciation gave an odd grace to the sentences; the little hesitation s.p.a.ced and accentuated their meaning; and I liked what I had written when she read it. The afternoons at Paras which we spent together in this way! Prints of _Mere Angelique_ and _Ces Messieurs de Port Royal_ watching over us in her s.p.a.cious bedroom, brown and yet light like the library it had become; and among those Jansenist worthies, the Turin Pallas Athena, with a sprig of green box as an offering from our friend. Yes; what I had written seemed good when read by her. And then there were the words which had to be looked out in the dictionary, bringing discussions on all manner of subjects, and wonderful romantic stories, like the "Golden Legend," about grandparents and servants and neighbours, giving me time to rearrange the cus.h.i.+ons and to settle the fur over her feet. And the other words, hard to p.r.o.nounce (she must always invert, from sheer anxiety, the English _th'_s and _s'_s); I had to say them first, and once more, and yet again. And we laughed, and I kissed her beloved patient face and her dear young white hair. I don't think it ever occurred to tell her my intention of putting her name on this volume--it went without saying.

And besides, had not everything I could do or be of good belonged to her during the eighteen months we had been friends?

There was another reason, however, why this book more particularly should have been hers; and having been hers, dear Madame Blanc, yours.

Do you remember telling me how, years ago, and in a terrible moment of your experience, she had surprised you, herself still so young, by a remark which had sunk deep into your mind and had very greatly helped you? "We must," you told me she had said, "be prepared to begin life many times afresh." Now that is the thought, though never clearly expressed, which runs through these essays. And the essential goodness and fruitfulness of life, its worthiness to be lived over and over again, had come home to me more and more with the knowledge and the love of her who had made my own life so far happier and more significant. So that my endeavour to enumerate some of the unnoticed gifts and deepest consolations of life has come to be connected in my mind with this creature who consoled so many and gave herself, with such absolute gift of loving-kindness or grat.i.tude, to all people and all things that deserved it.

That life is worthy to be lived well, with fort.i.tude, tenderness, and a certain reserved pride and humility, was indeed the essential, unspoken tenet of Gabrielle Delzant's religion, into which there entered, not merely the teachings of Stoics and Jansenists, but the traditional gaiety and gallant bearing of the little southern French n.o.bles from whom she was descended. Her Huguenot blood, of which, with the dear self-contradictoriness of all true saints, she was inordinately proud; her Catholic doctrine, which by natural affinity was that of Port Royal and Pascal; this double strain of asceticism of both her faiths (for, like all deep believers, she had more than one) merely gave a solemn base, a zest, to her fine intuition of nature and joy. The refusal to possess (even her best-beloved books never bore her own name, and her beautiful bevelled wardrobes were found empty through sheer giving), the disdain for every form of property, only intensified her delight in all the beautiful things which could be shared with others. No one ever possessed, in the true sense of pa.s.sionate enjoyment, as Gabrielle Delzant possessed, for instance, the fine pa.s.sages of Corneille, or Maurice de Guerin, or Victor Hugo, which she asked her husband to read to us of an evening; as she possessed the refined lie of the land, the delicate autumn colouring of her modest and gracious southern country; and those old-fas.h.i.+oned Paris streets, through which we eagerly wandered, seeking obscure little churches and remote convents where Pascal had lived or Andre Chenier lay buried. Nay, no one, methinks, ever tasted so much of romance as this lady in her studious invalid's existence; for did she not extract wonderful and humorous adventures, not only out of the lives of her friends, but her own quiet comings and goings? Do you remember, dear Madame Blanc, that rainy day that she and I returned to you, brimful of marvellous adventures, when we had found a feather and sh.e.l.l shop built up against an old church in the Marais; or was it after wandering in the dripping Jardin des Plantes, peering at the white skeletons of animals of the already closed museum, and returning home in floods by many and devious trams and 'buses? Ah, no one could enjoy things, and make others enjoy them by sheer childlike lovingness, as she did!

For her austerity, like that of the n.o.bler pagans (and there are no n.o.bler pagans, or more reverent to paganism, than true Christian saints, believe me) pruned all natural possibilities into fruitfulness of joy. And her reckless giving away of interest and of loving-kindness, enabled her, not merely to feed the mult.i.tude, but to carry home miraculous basketfuls, and more, methinks, than twelve.

And thus, to return to my main theme, there was, trans.m.u.ting all her orthodoxy (and making her accept some unorthodox among her fellow-wors.h.i.+ppers) a deep and fervent adoration of life and fruitfulness, and an abhorrence of death.

Her letters to me are full of it. Abhorrence of death. Death not of the body, for she held that but an incident, an accident almost, in a life eternal or universal; but death of the soul. And this she would have defined, though she was never fond of defining, as loss of the power of extracting joy and multiplying it through thankfulness.

A matter less of belief than of temper. Of course. Gabrielle Delzant was one of the elect, and filled with grace. And she had as little sense of tragedy as St. Francis or his skylarks; sympathy meaning for her less the fact of feeling the sufferings of others, than that of healing, of consoling, and of compensating.

With this went naturally that, in a very busy life, full--over-full, some of us thought--of the affairs of other folk, she never appeared worried or hurried. Of the numberless persons who carried their business to her, or whose secret troubles became manifest to her dear bluish-brown eyes, each must have felt as if she existed for him or her solely. And folk went to her as they go into a church of her religion, not merely for spiritual aid, but for the comfort of s.p.a.ce and rest in this world of crowding and bustle; for the sense of a piece of heaven closed in for one's need and all one's very own. Dear Madame Blanc, how many shy shadows do we not seem to see around us since her death; or rather to guess at, roaming disconsolate, lacking they scarce know what, that ever-welcoming sanctuary of her soul!

I have compared it with a church; but outwardly, and just because she was such a believer in life, it was more like a dwelling-place, like those brown corridors, full of books, at Paras; or that bedroom of hers, with the high lights all over the polished floor, and its look of a library. To me Gabrielle Delzant revealed the reality of what I had long guessed and longed for aimlessly, the care and grace of art, the consecration of religion, applied to the matters of every day. It hung together with her wors.h.i.+p of life, with her belief, as she expressed it to you, all those years ago, _that life must be begun many times anew_.

And it is this which, for all the appalling unexpectedness, the dreadful cataclysm of her temporal ending, has made the death of Gabrielle Delzant so strangely difficult, for me, at least, to realise as death at all.

Not death, but only absence; and that, how partial!

It is eight months and more, dear Madame Blanc, since she and I bade each other adieu in the body. She had been some while ill, though none of us suspected how fatally. It was the eve of her departure for Paris; and I was returning to Italy. She was grieved at parting from me, at leaving her dear old Southern relatives; and secretly she perhaps half suspected that she might never come back to her Gascon home. It was a November day, dissolving fitfully into warm rain, and very melancholy.

I was to take the late train to Agen with the two girls. And she and I, when all was ready, were to have the afternoon together. Of course we must have it serene, as if no parting were to close it. All traces of departure, of packing, were cleared away at her bidding, and when they had carried her on to her sofa, and placed by its side the little table with our books, and also my chair, she bade the dear Southern maids light a fine blaze of vine stumps, and fill all the jars with fresh roses--china roses, so vivid, surely none have ever smelt so sweet and poignant. We amused ourselves, a little sadly, burning some olive and myrtle branches I had brought for her from Corsica, and watching their frail silver twigs and leaves turn to embers and fall in fireworks of sparks and a smoke of incense. And we read together in one of my books (alas! that book has just come back this very same day, sent by her daughter), and looked up at the loose grey clouds suffused with rose and orange as the day drew to its end. Then the children shouted from below that the carriage was there, that I must go. We closed the books, marking the place, and I broke a rose from the nosegay on the fireplace. And we said farewell.

Thus have we remained, she and I. With the mild autumn day drawing to an end outside; and within, the fresh roses, the bright fire she had asked for; remained reading our books, watching those dried leaves turn to showers of sparks and smoke of incense. She and I, united beyond all power of death to part, in the loving belief that, even like that afternoon of packing up and bidding adieu, and rain and early twilight, life also should be made serene and leisurely, and simple and sweet, and akin to eternity.

And now I am going to put those volumes she and I had read together, on my own shelves, here in this house she never entered; and to correct the proofs of this new little book, which should have been hers, nay, rather _is_, and which is also, my dear Madame Blanc, for that reason, yours.

I am, meanwhile, your grateful and affectionate friend,

VERNON LEE.

HORTUS VITAE

THE GARDEN OF LIFE

(INTRODUCTORY)

"Cela est bien dit," repondit Candide; "mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."--ROMANS DE VOLTAIRE.

THE GARDEN OF LIFE

This by no means implies that the whole of life is a garden or could be made one. I am not sure even that we ought to try. Indeed, on second thoughts, I feel pretty certain that we ought not. Only such portion of life is our garden as lies, so to speak, close to our innermost individual dwelling, looked into by our soul's own windows, and surrounded by its walls. A portion of life which is ours exclusively, although we do occasionally lend its key to a few intimates; ours to cultivate just as we please, growing therein either pistachios and dwarf lemons for preserving, like Voltaire's immortal hero, or more spiritual flowers, "sweet basil and mignonette," such as the Lady of Epipsychidion sent to Sh.e.l.ley; kindly rosemary and balm; or, as may happen, a fine a.s.sortment of witch's herbs, infallible for turning us into cats and toads and poisoning our neighbours.

But with whatever we may choose to plant the portion of our life and our thought which is our own, and whatsoever its natural fertility and aspect, this much is certain, that it needs digging, watering, planting, and perhaps most of all, weeding. "Cela est bien dit," repondit Candide, "mais il faut cultiver notre jardin." He was, as you will recollect, answering Dr. Pangloss. One evening, while they were resting from their many tribulations, and eating various kinds of fruit and sweetmeats in their arbour on the Bosphorus, the eminent optimistic philosopher had pointed out at considerable length that the delectable moment they were enjoying was connected by a Leibnitzian chain of cause and effect with sundry other moments of a less obviously desirable character in the earlier part of their several lives.

"For, after all, my dear Candide," said Dr. Pangloss, "let us suppose you had not been kicked out of a remarkably fine castle, magnis ac cogentissimis c.u.m argumentis a posteriori; suppose also that, etc., etc.

had not happened, nor, furthermore, etc., etc., etc.; well, it is quite plain that you would not be in this particular place, _videlicet_ an arbour; and, moreover, in the act of eating preserved lemon-rind and pistachio nuts."

"What you say is true," answered Candide, "but we have to cultivate our garden."

And here I hasten to remark, that although I have quoted and translated these seven immortal words, I would on no account be answerable for their original and exact meaning, any more than for the meaning of more officially grave and reverend texts, albeit perhaps not wiser or n.o.bler ones.

Did the long-suffering hero of the Sage of Ferney accept the chain of cause and effect, and agree that without the kicks, the earthquake, the _auto-da-fe_, and all the other items of his uneasy career, it was impossible he should be eating pistachio nuts and preserved lemon-rind in that arbour? And, in consideration of the bitter sweet of these delicacies, was he prepared to welcome (retrospectively) the painful preliminaries as blessings in disguise? Did he even, rising to stoical or mystic heights, identify these superficially different phenomena and recognize that their apparent contradiction was real sameness?

Or, should we take it that, refraining from such essential questions, and pa.s.sing over his philosophical friend's satisfaction in the _causal nexus_, poor Candide was satisfied with pointing out the only practical lesson to be drawn from the whole matter, to wit, that in order to partake of such home-grown dainties, it had been necessary, and most likely would remain necessary, to put a deal of good work into whatever sc.r.a.p of the soil of life had not been devastated by those Leibnitzian Powers who further Man's felicity in a fas.h.i.+on so energetic but so roundabout?

All these points remain obscure. But even as a play is said to be only the better for the various interpretations which it affords to as many great actors; so methinks, the wisest sayings are often those which state some principle in general terms, leaving to individuals the practical working out, according to their nature and circ.u.mstances. So, whether we incline to optimism or to pessimism, we must do our best in the half-hours we can bestow upon our little garden.

I speak advisedly of half-hours, and I would repeatedly insist upon the garden being little. For the garden, whatever its actual size, and were it as extensive as those of Eden and the Hesperides set on end, does not afford the exercise needful for spiritual health and vigour. And whatever we may succeed in growing there to please our taste or (like some virtuous dittany) to heal our bruises, this much is certain, that the power of enjoyment has to be brought from beyond its limits.

Happiness, dear fellow-gardeners, is not a garden plant.

In plain English: happiness is not the aim of life, although it is life's furtherance and in the long run life's _sine qua non_. And not being life's aim, life often disregards the people who pursue it for its own sake. I am not, like Dr. Pangloss, a professional philosopher, and what philosophy I have is of no particular school, and neither stoical nor mystic. I feel no sort of call to vindicate the Ways of Providence; and on the whole there seems something rather ill-bred in crabbing the unattainable, and pretending that what we can't have can't be good for us. Happiness _is_ good for us, excellent for us, necessary for us, indispensable to us. But ... how put such transcendental facts into common or garden (for it is _garden_) language? But _we_--that is to say, poor human beings--are one thing, and life is quite another. And as life has its own programme irrespective of ours, to wit, apparently its own duration and intensifying throughout all changes, it is quite natural that we, its little creatures of a second, receive what we happen to ask for--namely, happiness--as a reward for being thoroughly alive.

Now, for some reason not of our choosing, we cannot be thoroughly alive except as a result of such exercises as come under the headings: Work and Duty. That seems to be the law of Life--of Life which does not care a b.u.t.ton about being aesthetic or wisely epicurean. The truth of it is brought home to us occasionally in one of those fine symbolical intuitions which are the true stuff of poetry, because they reveal the organic unity and symmetry of all existence. I am alluding to the sense of cloying and restlessness which comes to most of us (save when tired or convalescent) after a very few days or even hours shut up in quite the finest real gardens; and to that instinct, impelling some of us to inquire about the lodges and the ways out, the very first thing on coming down into some private park. Of course they are quite exquisite, those flowery terraces cut in the green turf, and bowling greens set with pines or statues, and bal.u.s.traded steps with jars and vases. And the great stretches of park land with their solemn furbelowed avenues and their great cedars stretching _moire_ skirts on to the gra.s.s, are marvellous fine things to look upon....

But we want the ploughed fields beyond, the real woods with stacked-up timber, German fas.h.i.+on; the orchards and the kitchen gardens; the tracks across the high-lying sheep downs; the towing-paths where the barges come up the rivers; the deep lanes where the hay-carts have left long wisps on the overhanging elms; the high-roads running from village to village, with the hooded carts and bicycles and even the solemn Juggernaut traction-engines upon them. We want not only to rest from living, to take refreshment in life's kindly pauses and taste (like Candide in his arbour) the pleasantness of life's fruits. We want also to live.

But there is living and living. There is, unfortunately, not merely such breezy work-a-dayness as we have been talking of, but something very different indeed beyond the walls of our private garden. There are black, oozy factory yards and mangy gra.s.s-plots heaped with brickbat and refuse; and miles of iron railing, and acres of gaunt and genteel streets not veiled enough in fog; a metaphorical _beyond the garden walls_, in which a certain number of us graduate for the owners.h.i.+p of sooty shrubberies and clammy orchid houses. And we poor latter-day mortals have become so deadly accustomed to the routine of useless work and wasteful play, that a writer must needs cross all the _t_'s and dot all the _i_'s of his conviction (held also by other sentimentalists and cranks called Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) that the bread and wine of life are not grown in the Black Country; no, nor life's flowers in the horticultural establishments (I will not call them gardens) of suburban villas.

Fortunately, however, this casual-looking universe is not without its harmonies, as well as ironies. And one of these arrangements would seem to be that our play educates the aims and methods of our work. If we lay store by satisfactions which imply the envy and humiliation of other folk, why then we set about such work as humiliates our neighbours or fills them with enviousness, saving the case where others, sharing our tastes, do alike by us. Without going to such lengths (the mention of which has got me a reputation for lack of human sympathy) there remains the fact that if our soul happen to take delight in, let us say, futility--well, then, futility will litter existence with shreds of coloured paper and plaster comfits trodden into mud, as after a day of carnival at Nice. Nay, a still simpler case: if we cannot be happy without a garden as big as the grounds of an expensive lunatic asylum, why, then, all the little cottage gardens down the lane must be swept away to make it.

Now, the cottage gardens, believe me, are the best. They are the only ones which, being small, may be allotted in some juster future to every man without dispossessing his neighbour. And they are also the only ones compatible with that fine arable or dairy country which we all long for.

Stop and look over the hedges: their flowers leave no sc.r.a.p of earth visible between them, like the bedded-out things of grander gardens; and their vivid crimsons, and tender rose and yellow, and ineffable blue, and the solemn white which comes out in the evening, are seen to most advantage against the silvery green of vegetables behind them, and the cornfield, the chalk-pit under the beech trees beyond. The cottage flowers come also into closer quarters with their owners, not merely because these breathe their fragrance and the soil's good freshness while stooping down to weed, and prune, and water; but also, and perhaps even more, because the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habit of blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetness which not the most skilful hired gardeners have ever taught the most far-fetched hybrids that they raise for clients.