1888: North Lodge to Sussex
How strange the English summer grows as one advances in years. The air carries less innocence than I recall and even my garden, in all its loveliness, seems to bloom against a world losing its sense of the natural. The Dorothy Perkins’ climb bravely over the pergola, their petals like small blushing faces against the stone. Old tea-roses, Rosa odorata, flourish still in their patient grace. Yet in their abundance I detect something that feels almost mournful—beauty persisting in defiance, not from harmony. Perhaps it is I who have grown melancholic but I think the roses know what I mean.
When I was a girl, the world seemed to possess its own rhythm—untidy, certainly but human. Now, all appears trimmed and registered, measured like accounts in some divine bureaucracy. I sometimes wonder what Saint Augustine might make of the manner in which we go about our “Christian” improvements—doing, as he might say, the devil’s work in God’s name. His notion that all creation, even the smallest creature, praises its Maker simply by being itself, seems forgotten. Had he walked through our new England, with its railways, schedules and ledgers, I imagine He would have sighed and said that man has learned bookkeeping but forgotten reverence.
Everywhere I look, life is being rendered uniform—souls reduced to categories, colour and creed smoothed into proper boxes. Christianity, which once embraced mystery, now demands order; religion has become the clerk of empire. The multiplicity of the world—its marvellous unevenness—is treated as error. Our sermons speak of salvation, yet in practice we practise subtraction, killing off the wildness in man and nature alike. Even our gardens are ranked by symmetry; we forget that God Himself planted Eden, not Versailles.
I sometimes think the old Flood, dreadful as it was, at least retained a kind of grandeur. There was purpose and cleansing in that deluge; but our age, my dear, dissolves difference grain by grain rather than wave by wave. We no longer drown—we erode. I suppose that is civilisation. Yet part of me believes that when the next “ark” comes, it will not be of timber but of thought: a handful of minds who still refuse to be flattened, who keep alive some spark of variety and wonder against the monotony. Perhaps we, with our endless letters and arguments, are to serve as its frail crew—still perceiving diversity as sacred, still daring to question.
And yet, even Heaven seems these days a sort of business office. The angels no longer sing, they balance books. I almost pity the Almighty, condemned to accountancy of every soul—debit virtue, credit sin. Perhaps, when He wearies of our systems and ledgers, He will once again wash His books clean.
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