The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/The Aesthetes in the Kitchen Garden

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

When, a week or two ago, I came down among the hills of Kent, the country looked ancient and innocent enough. Save for birds and old men lapping hedges the visitor seemed to be in solitude. But all this was a mask--a delusion. This green England of ours is really bursting with literary men. Short story writers leap from behind hedges, minor poets drop from the trees like ripe fruit; you cannot walk through deep grass without stumbling over Sociologists. On dark, windy nights wild voices mingle with the wind, and the words 'reactionary', `superman', `the Philistines', and `raise the drama' echo desolately from hill to hill. We see the vision of Fitz-James in `The Lady of the Lake' which Scott describes in words (which I quote from memory):

At once from copse and heath arose

Roundels and fugues and lyric prose,

From shingles grey their nocturnes start,

The bracken bush cries, `Art is Art',

And every tuft of broom is rife

With highly beastly views of life.

I have met in meadows here some of the most terrible and beautiful people of Fleet Street. I have seen a cottage, decent and quiet on the outside, inside which, as I hope for heaven, there were Burne-Jones's on the wall. In short, we are in the presence of a peculiar phenomenon. The people are not going `back to the land' but the cultivated classes are.

But there is something about these intellectual people in flannel shirts who come out and live in the country, where they play tennis and read Thoreau which gives me a haunting notion that they do not really belong to the country; they dwell rather than live in it.

Now this is very false. Go into the country for your health; go into the country for your children; go into the country because the police are after you; go into the country because you like painting in water-colours, or because you like keeping chickens, or because you like spearing otters, or because you want beauty or contentment or the continual presence of cows. But do not go into the country because you like liberty, for there is of necessity less liberty in the country than anywhere else. The pressure of society on the individual must be much greater in a village than in a city. Public opinion must be much stronger; personal eccentricity much more difficult. And if the aesthetic people in the flannel shirts do not feel this pressure it is because they are not really living in the life of the village-- that is to say, not really living in the life of the country. Liberty is a thing of the town; any Roman or Greek would have understood that. It is in the places where men live an intense and complicated life that they find the necessity for liberty, and that which is almost the same as liberty--loneliness. The routine of rural life, happy, dignified, sensible, but not inventive, and not free, has been going on almost unchanged from the beginning of the world.

Amid all these philosophers and artists who run like rabbits about the woods of Kent I met one who really loved the country. He was driving a sort of wagonette which was plastered all over with little bills and placards announcing that now for the first time people could go from Westerham or Limpsfield to various places that I have never heard of for some singularly small price which I did not read. He was trotting his coach up and down the country roads by way of a preliminary pageant or advertisement, giving free lifts to highly amused pedestrians, or proclaiming the nature and glories of the route to dazed stonebreakers or wild-eyed gypsies. Something led me to make the acquaintance of this individual, and I discovered that driving a coach was by no means the first of his adventures, nor the most amusing. He has written books; he has stood for Parliament; he has conducted, I believe, a kind of wild newspaper. His name is Stuart Gray, and will probably be familiar to many of my readers, especially if they are interested in the movement for the colonisation of England, the return of the people to the land. It was a single sentence of his that convinced me that he had that really poetic feeling which the minor poets in the neighbourhood tend to lack. Before us lay a roll of country like the back of an unbroken wave, spacious, silent, meeting the sky. He stretched out his whip towards it, and said in what I can only call an awestruck voice, `If this were all kitchen gardens! Then you'd have people--people--people.' Three times he said the sacred word of the republic. This article, you will perceive, is also written in a kitchen garden, and a witchery of onions is wafted with it.

While standing in this kitchen garden I perceived what many of my readers must have perceived long ago, that of all things on earth the one perfectly beautiful thing is a kitchen garden. It has a hundred kinds of beauty richly blent into a solemn harmony. It has the beauty of an embroidery, for all the colours are quiet and yet varied infinitely. It has the beauty of an army, for all the vegetable regiments are set in ranks as if they had been drilled by God for the great battle against Nonentity. It has the beauty of a sepulchre, because so many of the shapes and colours that are seen are but the coloured crests or monuments upon the more precious bodies underground. It has the beauty of a store-cupboard, the beauty of a fairy tale. Cabbages alone have all the colours of the sea. I am forced, I find, to conclude these reflections for the moment. But I trust that before I resume my reflections on kitchen gardens someone will have brought out a book of amatory poems in which all the similes shall have been drawn from this nobler and more fruitful Eden. I do not see why he should not say that in a lady's cheek the turnip and the carrot fought for supremacy. Such a description is far truer to the mellow and tawny quality in the human complexion than the violent similes of the rose and the lily. These latter, I may be fastidious, offend me as fantastic.