H G Wells Omnibus, page 158
And among the many things I have learnt from this microcosm is the incredible fierceness, nastiness and brutality of the Vegetable Kingdom. It feeds greedily upon filth in any form, and its life is wholly given up to torture and murder. It is a common delusion that there is something mild and moral about all this green stuff in which our planet is clothed. It is really a question of the pace at which one sees it. We, the higher animals, scurry through life so fast that we do not note the more deliberate horrors of these plant lives. It is only now and then, in a jungle, or amidst the towering white menace of a burnt or burning Australian forest, that Nature strips the moral veils from vegetation and we apprehend its stark ferocity. I doubt if Voltaire ever came face to face with that garden of his without some intervening help; he wrote the end of CANDIDE and died before he realized the truth.
In this back garden of mine, this little Creation to which I play the Lord, I see seedling, bush and tree attacking each other pitilessly and relentlessly, and in particular I have watched a very delightful little almond-tree I loved, done to death before I could do anything to save it. Nearest of the murderers was a holly-tree which I have now sawn almost to the ground and would have destroyed altogether except that a curious albino sport springs from its root; certain rivals for my affection contributed to the outrage; but the chief of the slaughter gang, and still an ever increasing affliction of all I would keep gentle, healthy and beautiful, is a vast lumping Sycamore that grows in the deserted garden next door to me. Like most of my erstwhile neighbours in this Hanover Terrace, next-door has gone away, but he retains his lease; his abandoned garden is a centre of weed distribution, and before I can get anything done about it, all sorts of authorities have to be consulted, and after that I doubt if it will be possible to find the labour necessary to terminate the ever spreading aggressions of this hoggish arborial monster.
Every day when I go out to look at my garden I shake my fist at it and wish the gift of the evil eye. Every day it grows visibly larger, ignoring my hatred. It is not only my garden it devastates. It is destroying the gardens beyond, which also are now abandoned. There there are laburnums and acacias and many abandoned helpless flowering shrubs and plants, awaiting their doom.
These Sycamores are not even entitled to be called Sycamores; they have assumed the name of a better plant than themselves. Says my OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY; “It is commonly spoken of with a distinguishing adjective as the ‘bastard, base or vulgar’ sycamore.” The true sycamore, or sycomore, as the Bible has it, was a mulberry- or fig-tree (sycoon = Fig), and the people who bear the name in English are probably immigrants from more classical parts of the world who would have done better to call themselves Mulberries instead of mixing themselves up with this vile blob upon the English landscape. In all that follows, when I write “Sycamore”, I do not point at them. This tree of mud has stolen their name, and I invite them to share my hate and indignation.
I am trying to find out what scoundrel first brought these gawky trees to my England and my London. It was the work of a cheapener, a fundamentally dishonest spirit. They grow with great rapidity; they can stand the now diminishing London soot because they have a stolid will to live through anything, no matter what evil ensue. So that to the cheap and nasty building estate practitioner they were easy to pass off as even desirable trees. They were the perfect tree for the suburban jerry-builder. They seed pitilessly, and they disseminate minute irritant hairs very bad for the respiratory passages. In leaf they are as blowsy as tippling charwomen, and even when they are stripped they have as little allure. They are more like the compositions of Vaughan Williams or Eric Coates than anything else I know. They branch out with a stupid elimination of the unexpected. You never say to a sycamore as you do to all good music and all lovable trees; “Of course that sequence is exactly right, but who could have thought of it, before you did it!”
A Sycamore, if you told it that, would be disconcerted and wonder whether it had not made some sort of slip…
Men marry Sycamores and by all our laws they are blameless women. It is no plea for a divorce in this preposterous world of ours that a wife has an infinite want of variety.
Well, there is this dirty, ugly, witless, self-protective tree, blighting London; it is everywhere, and I hear no voice raised against it. The other day I went to see an exhibition of designs for the rebuilding of London, and there I saw Sycamores as men walking, and they were scheming as awful a London of squalid jobbery as it is possible to imagine. They just wanted to grow all over it abundantly, sycamore-fashion. They were too stupid to have an idea of the New World we poor sensitive men dream of extracting from our present disasters. They did not know and they did not care whether the world was to be a world at peace or a world at war, living underground in perpetual fear of blitzkriegs or towering up to the skies, a world of universal free trade or shabby competition. They did not know and they did not care. They had schemes for green belts—mostly of sycamore-trees—and rows and rows of nasty little building estate houses. They were out for jobs, they were unable to imagine any other jobs except squalid enlargements of their own, and the blight of their dullness fell upon me, so that I came home cursing and swearing, to the dismay of passers-by, and now, whenever I look over my garden wall at this vast dreary tree, waving its leaves at me, I see them also. Every morning that tree seems to come nearer to me and overhang me more and more.
The sycamore is a complete repudiation of any belief in an intelligent God. One may perhaps believe in a God who made good and evil, but the creation of these Sycamores, men, women and trees, was just damned stupidity.
I shall fight evil to my last breath because that is my nature, but it is the thought of these Sycamores that brings me nearest to despair.
So let me conclude by cursing Sycamores and all who favour and abet Sycamores and have sycamore elements in their nature, and let me avoid all vulgar and irreligious cursing, and curse strictly in the terms provided in Holy Writ, in the Twenty-eighth Chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy.
Listen all ye of the Sycamore tribe, and thank your lucky stars, Mr Mulberry Sycamore, that it does not apply to you!
I draw a deep breath and indicate the same by a white line.
“Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field.
“Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store.
“Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.
“Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.
“The Lord shall send upon thee cursing, vexation and rebuke, in all that thou settest thine hand unto for to do, until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the wickedness of thy doings…
“The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess it.
“The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.
“And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.
“The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed…
“And thy carcase shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall fray them away.
“The Lord will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.
“The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart:
“And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man will save thee.
“Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: thou shalt build a house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof.
“Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof: thine ass shall be violently taken away from thee before thy face, and shall not be restored to thee: thy sheep shall be given unto thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them.
“Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long: and there shall be no might in thine hand…
“The Lord shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore botch that cannot be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the top of thine head…
“Thou shalt carry much seed out into the field, and shalt gather but little in; for the locust shall consume it.
“Thou shalt plant vineyards, and dress them, but shalt neither drink of the wine, nor gather the grapes; for the worms shall eat them.
“Thou shalt have olive trees throughout all thy coasts, but thou shalt not anoint thyself with the oil; for thine olive shall cast his fruit.
“Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity.
“All thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locust consume.
“The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.
“He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him; he shall be the head and thou shalt be the tail.
“Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed.
“Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things;
“Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against theee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he shall have destroyed thee.
“And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee:
“So that the man that is tender among you, and very delicate, his eye shall be evil toward his brother, and toward the wife of his bosom, and towards the remnant of his children which he shall leave:
“So that he will not give any of them of the flesh of his children who he shall eat: because he hath nothing left him in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee in all thy gates…
“Then the Lord will make thy plagues wonderful, and the plagues of thy seed, even great plagues, and of long continuance, and sore sickness, and long continuance.
“Moreover he will bring upon thee all the diseases of Egypt, which thou wast afraid of; and they shall cleave unto thee.
“Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in the book of this law, them will the Lord bring upon thee, until thou be destroyed.”
That last clause is a magnificent piece of curse drafting. Not a loophole remains.
This, I think, is all that needs to be said about my neighbour’s Sycamore in particular and Sycamores and Sycamorism in general. I can imagine nothing more comprehensive. I can add nothing to it. Take it, Mr Sycamore, take it all and be damned to you! And thank the powers of earth and heaven, Mr Mulberry Sycamore, that it is not to you that these words are addressed.
This cursing, let us realize, is the sort of thing the Pope, his Cardinals, the Archbishops, Bishops, priests and deacons, the pious controllers of the B.B.C, and all the Sycamore Groves of canting Christendom, declare they find so good for the soul of man. This is the spirit of the Sacred Book they distribute about the world to teach men love and gentleness.
The plain, if inadvertent, evidence of Holy Writ is that from the beginning, God knew he had made a mess of things and set Himself to savage his Creation. Time after time, he repented that he had made man, and time after time he sent floods and judgments. He seems to have found Creation almost as obdurate and frustrating and exasperating as I do in my garden.
Here in the freedom of Dreamland I recognize and deal with these Christian teachers for the foolish weaklings they are. I refuse to accept this consecrated riff-raff as my moral and mental equals. Clearly they are either knaves or fools or a blend in various proportions of the two, and to treat them as though they were intelligent honest men in this world crisis, becomes a politeness treasonable to mankind.
I find this little outburst a great relief.
(Thank you, God! For if you serve no other purpose in Dreamland you are still admirable to swear by.)
IX
THE DIVINE TIMELESSNESS OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS
THE OTHER DAY the Happy Turning took me to the sunlit sweetness of the Elysian fields, and sometimes, after the manner of Dreamland, it seemed to me I was talking to a great number of poets, painters, artists, makers of every sort, and sometimes that I was just talking to myself, and the talk was all about the beautiful things that man has got out of this unrighteous world, and whether there can ever be another happy harvest of Beauty, and, if so, what sort of harvest it may be.
A point we found we were all agreed upon was that Beauty is eternal and final, a joy for ever. There is no progress in it and no decline. You cannot go beyond it. You may make replicas of it; you may record and imitate it, you can destroy it for yourself and others, obliterate it and blaspheme it, but you cannot do away with its invincible divinity. Even when it is a lost God, a Beauty is still God, a being in itself, serene, untroubled, above all the accidents of space and time.
But what we had most in mind was this, that there is a definite limit set to the abundance of any particular Beauty. It is discovered, it is revealed, and that is its end. That God has smiled and passed and returns no more. Other Gods may smile in their turn, and they too will pass away.
We cited instances of these immortal visitations.
There was, said a classical scholar, that gracious beauty which was distilled by Hellenic poets and sculptors out of the vast confusion of antique mythology. It has lit this dull world for all its lovers with an inalienable charm. Pan and the dryads haunt the woodlands, the naiads bathe in the stream, Diana steals down the beams of misty silver to Endymion, and eternally amidst the glittering waters, Triton blows his wreathed horn.
“But one thing goes on,” said a man who called himself an anthologist, “and that is the creative magic in English poetic creation.” Which threw us all into an intricate disputation that carried us over the whole field of English literature and drama and was shot with a flashing multitude of interests and surprises. “There is not one single Goddess here,” we agreed, “but a varied sisterhood, and most of these sisters are wantons and have led lives that make the Olympians seem by comparison calm and consistent and at least superficially decorous.” Gradually we begin to disentangle the preoccupations of these lively Beauties.
There is that lost Goddess of beautiful English who, with little Latin and less Greek, played with it so delightfully in Shakespearian days and was finally murdered by her Latin lover in a fit of jealousy because she flirted with the far more lively colloquial scullion downstairs. She came to her tragic end before the Stuarts were done for. For a while she lay calm and rigid in death before her ultimate decay. All that Swift and Sterne, Addison and Gray and Gay, albeit they loved her greatly, could achieve was an unexciting pellucid flow. The DUNCIAD is the dirge of a happy lovely language lying dead under a black pall of Hanoverian gut-terals.
Dear heart! she left one bastard by philosophy, not a Goddess indeed but a demi-Goddess, the Wordsworthian discovery of the mystical loveliness beneath reality, but for the rest, we Dreamland anthologists asked, what later Beauty of English is worth our keeping? Newdigate prizewinners, pompous and pretentious verse-makers, the massive uninspired industrious professionalism of Tennyson, head expert of the industry, Longfellow doing his level best, and never succeeding, to make Laughing-Water Hiawatha laugh, the fumed oak stuff from the Morris antique shop, the vanity, crudity and unimaginative topicality of that overrated etcher, Blake, the jingling vulgarities of Byron, Martin Tupper, Alfred Noyes, T. S. Eliot, Bridges and the rest of them—as void of the mysterious exaltation of Beauty as a crew of disinherited mourners at a bankrupt’s funeral on a wet day. Who in the great world we dream about will delight in any of this later stuff? Have we any use for it at all?
The anthologist did his best. “There are bits,” he pleaded, digging nervously in the addled egg, that curate’s egg, of later English poetry. “A rose-red city half as old as time,” he quoted, but he could not recall the name of the man who produced that one happy line, and then he bethought himself suddenly of Shelley.
He dredged up a few quotable lines, “The earth doth like a snake renew its winter skin outworn.” And a fragment of QUEEN MAB.
“Well?” he said.
“You shall have that,” I conceded, “though much of Shelley is copious, intellectualized and tedious stuff, last bubbles from the drifting body of the drowned Goddess, and, such as they were, they rose to the surface and broke and vanished a century and a quarter ago. But all the rest was just trying to go on with something that indeed was finished for ever.”
It was my Dream, entirely mine for a while; no one said anything more; and thus, having left English poesy for dead, these fluctuating dream Elysians fell to discussing one of the most radiant smiles of another of these—wanton English Beauties—who lived so fast and gaily in those days of literary loveliness, the divine imagination of the MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.
