If I May | Page 3

Bee over again, with no other object in it but mere existence. If this

were all, there would be nothing to write on our tombstones but "Born
1800; Died 1880. He lived till then."
But it is not all, because--and here I strike my breast proudly--because
of us artists. Not only can we write on Shakespeare's tomb, "He wrote
Hamlet" or "He was not for an age, but for all time," but we can write
on a contemporary baker's tomb, "He provided bread for the man who
wrote Hamlet," and on a contemporary butcher's tomb, "He was not
only for himself, but for Shakespeare." We perceive, in fact, that the
only matter upon which any worker, other than the artist, can
congratulate himself, whether he be manual-worker, brain-worker,
surgeon, judge, or politician, is that he is helping to make the world
tolerable for the artist. It is only the artist who will leave anything
behind him. He is the fighting-man, the man who counts; the others are
merely the Army Service Corps of civilization. A world without its
artists, a world of bees, would be as futile and as meaningless a thing as
an army composed entirely of the A.S.C.
Possibly you put in a plea here for the explorer and the scientist. The
explorer perhaps may stand alone. His discovery of a peak in Darien is
something in itself, quite apart from the happy possibility that Keats
may be tempted to bring it into a sonnet. Yes, if a
Beef-Essence-Merchant has only provided sustenance for an Explorer
he has not lived in vain, however much the poets and the painters recoil
from his wares. But of the scientist I am less certain. I fancy that his
invention of the telephone (for instance) can only be counted to his
credit because it has brought the author into closer touch with his
publisher.
So we artists (yes, and explorers) may be of good faith. They may try to
pretend, these others, in their little times of stress, that we are
nothing--decorative, inessential; that it is they who make the world go
round. This will not upset us. We could not live without them; true. But
(a much more bitter thought) they would have no reason for living at all,
were it not for us.

A London Garden

I have always wanted a garden of my own. Other people's gardens are
all very well, but the visitor never sees them at their best. He comes
down in June, perhaps, and says something polite about the roses. "You
ought to have seen them last year," says his host disparagingly, and the
visitor represses with difficulty the retort, "You ought to have asked me
down to see them last year." Or, perhaps, he comes down in August,
and lingers for a moment beneath the fig-tree. "Poor show of figs," says
the host, "I don't know what's happened to them. Now we had a record
crop of raspberries. Never seen them so plentiful before." And the
visitor has to console himself with the thought of the raspberries which
he has never seen, and will probably miss again next year. It is not very
comforting.
Give me, therefore, a garden of my own. Let me grow my own flowers,
and watch over them from seedhood to senility. Then shall I miss
nothing of their glory, and when visitors come I can impress them with
my stories of the wonderful show of groundsel which we had last year.
For the moment I am contenting myself with groundsel. To judge by
the present state of the garden, the last owner must have prided himself
chiefly on his splendid show of canaries. Indeed, it would not surprise
me to hear that he referred to his garden as "the back-yard." This would
take the heart out of anything which was trying to flower there, and it is
only natural that, with the exception of the three groundsel beds, the
garden is now a wilderness. Perhaps "wilderness" gives you a
misleading impression of space, the actual size of the pleasaunce being
about two hollyhocks by one, but it is the correct word to describe the
air of neglect which hangs over the place. However, I am going to alter
that.
With a garden of this size, though, one has to be careful. One cannot
decide lightly upon a croquet-lawn here, an orchard there, and a
rockery in the corner; one has to go all out for the one particular thing,
whether it is the last hoop and the stick of a croquet-lawn, a

mulberry-tree, or an herbaceous border. Which do we want most--a
fruit garden, a flower garden, or a water garden? Sometimes I think
fondly of a water garden, with a few perennial gold-fish flashing
swiftly across it, and ourselves walking idly