As if visitors were not enough, in such numbers as are hers, Mrs. Burnett is always “neighborizing.” To children who live near by her she read chapters of _The Secret Garden_ as they were finished. Now, she is a most skillful reader. A very little girl of the lot sat listening for hours on end. Impressions which flowered in _The Secret Garden_ came from Maytham Hall where the rose gardens are surrounded by walls about 900 years old. Peasemarsh, Smallhive, Benenden are the names of towns not far from Maytham Hall and all over the countryside you may encounter, or could not many years back, children wearing red cloaks given them by the Earl of Cranbrook. And what is the secret of _The Secret Garden_? What does all this delightful picturesqueness enclose? Why, an idea, namely, that if a healthful thought be planted in the mind it pushes out unhealthful thoughts; and that if the body be unwell it adjusts itself to the healthful thought and grows well. The secret garden which, with its roses, surrounds the characters of the story, plants in their minds all sorts of healthful thoughts. Mrs. Burnett is not metaphysical, however. “Her roses, she declares, are always sincere and endlessly instructive.”
She has suffered much from people who have interviewed her and have not understood her, departing to write what they wanted her to say. She has a philosophy but it is written in her books, definitely and decidedly. It has no other existence and it cannot be separated from the tales which are its embodiment. It is a peculiar characteristic of hers that the moment an idea--a “concept” philosophically speaking--formulates itself in her mind _it does so as some part of a story_. Her pleasant persons and places have as definite ideas and theories and beliefs as the most serious thesis but since they never presented themselves abstractly to Mrs. Burnett they are not so conveyed by her. It is really presumptuous, under the circumstances, to endeavor to express them abstractly as we have just done in the case of _The Secret Garden_.
This will seem a hard saying to most of us, who are trained to try to get at the kernel of everything. All modern education is designed to teach men and women to think and express themselves abstractly with ease and freedom and surety. Why? Because since the Greeks certain abstractions and abstract thought and expression generally have been prized as the best and safest and handiest medium of intellectual exchanges. They are the intellectual coinage--a kind of verbal money that obviates the clumsy old methods of barter. But while we are all used to money and would not do without it we have to remember that the majority of mankind still carries on a vast amount of intellectual exchange by barter. You tell me an actual incident or a story you have heard and I tell you what I have experienced or heard. We “swap” experiences and knowledge and each benefits by what he gets from the other without so much as drawing a single abstract conclusion or generalization. The method has its disadvantages but lack of interest is not one of them!