Hortus Vitae Essays on the Gardening of Life

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Title: Hortus Vitae

Essays on the Gardening of Life

Author: Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

Release Date: October 7, 2008 [EBook #26800]

Language: English

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HORTUS VITAE.

ESSAYS ON THE GARDENING OF LIFE

by

VERNON LEE

JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD

LONDON & NEW YORK. MDCCCCIV.

SECOND EDITION.

WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

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 pronunciation gave an odd grace to the sentences; the little hesitation spaced and accentuated their meaning; and I liked what I had written when she read it. The afternoons at Paraÿs which we spent together in this way! Prints of Mère Angélique and Ces Messieurs de Port Royal watching over us in her spacious 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 cushions and to settle the fur over her feet. And the other words, hard to pronounce (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 gratitude, to all people and all things that deserved it.

That life is worthy to be lived well, with fortitude, 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 nobles 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 passionate enjoyment, as Gabrielle Delzant possessed, for instance, the fine passages of Corneille, or Maurice de Guérin, 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-fashioned Paris streets, through which we eagerly wandered, seeking obscure little churches and remote convents where Pascal had lived or André Chénier 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 shell 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 nobler pagans (and there are no nobler 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 multitude, but to carry home miraculous basketfuls, and more, methinks, than twelve.

And thus, to return to my main theme, there was, transmuting all her orthodoxy (and making her accept some unorthodox among her fellow-worshippers) 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 space 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 Paraÿs; 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 worship 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