Garden-Craft Old and New Part 14

We have discussed the theory of a garden; we have a.n.a.lysed the motives which prompt its making, the various treatments of which it is susceptible; we have made a kind of inventory of its effects, its enchantments, its spendthrift joys. Now we will hear the other side, and find out why the morbid, tired man, the modern Hamlet, likes it not, why the son of culture loathes it as a lack-l.u.s.tre thing, betokening to him the sedentary and respectable world in its most hostile form. Having made our picture now we will turn it round, and note why it is that the garden, with its full complement of approved ornament, its selected vegetation, its pretty turns for Nature, its many-sided beauty--

"Or gay, or grave, or sweet, or stern was there Not less than truth designed"

--shall never wholly satisfy.

Your garden will serve you in many ways. It will give a sense of household warmth to your home. It will smile, or look grave, or be dreamily fanciful almost at your bidding. If your bent be that way it will minister to your imaginative reverie, and almost surfeit you with its floods of lazy music. If you are hot, or weary, or dispirited, or touched with _ennui_, its calm atmosphere will lay the dust and lessen the fret of your life. Yet--let us not blink the fact--just because _all_ Nature is not represented here; because the girdle of the garden walls narrows our view of the world at large, and excludes more of Nature's physiognomy than it includes; because the garden is, as Sir Walter truly says, entirely "a child of Art"; the place, be it never so fair, falls short of man's imaginative craving, and, when put to the push, fails to supply the stimulus his varying moods require. Art's sounding-line will never fathom human nature's emotional depths.

Nay, one need not be that interesting product of civilisation, the over-civilised artist who writes books, and paints pictures, and murmurs rhyme that--

"Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the singer of an empty day."

There is the _ennuye_ of the clubs whom you are proud to meet in Pall Mall, not a hair of his hat turned, not a wrinkle marring the sit of his coat; meeting him thus and there you would not dream of supposing that this exquisite trophy of the times is a prey to reactionary desires! Yet deep down in the hidden roots of his being lies a layer of unscotched savagery--an unextinguished, inextinguishable strain of the wild man of the woods. Scratch him, and beneath his skin is Rousseau-Th.o.r.eau.

Scratch him again in the same place, and beneath his second skin see the brown hide of the aboriginal Briton, the dweller in wattled abodes, who knew an earlier England than this, that had swamps and forests, roadless wastes and unbridled winter floods, and strange beasts that no man could tame. Even he ("the sweetest lamb that ever loved a bear") will prate to you of the Bohemian delights of an ungardened country, where "the white man's poetry" has not defiled the landscape, and the Britisher shall be free to take his pleasure sadly.

Let us not be too hard, then, on that dislike of beauty, that worship of the barbaric which we are apt to condemn as distempered vagaries, for they denote maladies incident to the age, which are neither surprising nor ign.o.ble. This disdain for Art in a garden, this abhorrence of symmetry, this preference for the rude and s.h.a.ggy, what is it but a new turn given to old instincts, the new Don Quixote sighing for primaevalism! This ruthlessness of the followers of the "immortal Brown"

who would navvy away the residue of the old-fashioned English gardens; who live to reverse tradition and to scatter the lessons of the past to the winds; what is it but a new quest of the bygone, the knight-errantry of the civilized man, when turned inside out!

And for yet another reason is the garden unable to meet the moods of the age. In discussing the things it may rightly contain, we saw that the laws of artistic presentment, no less than the avowed purpose for which a garden is made, require that only such things shall be admitted, or such aspects be portrayed there, as conduce to gladness and poetic charm. And, so far as the garden is concerned, the restriction is necessary and desirable. As with other phases of Art, Sculpture, Painting, or Romance, the things and aspects portrayed must be idealistic, not realistic; its effects must be select, not indiscriminate. The garden is a deliberately contrived thing, a voluntary piece of handicraft, purpose-made; and for this reason it must not stereotype imperfections; it may toy with Nature, but must not wilfully exaggerate what is ordinary; only Nature may exaggerate herself--not Art. It must not imitate those items in Nature that are crude, ugly, abnormal, elementary; it may not reproduce the absolutely repellent; or at most, the artist may only touch them with a light hand, by way of imaginative hint, but not with intent to produce a finished picture out of them.

On this point there is a distinct a.n.a.logy between the guiding principles of Art and Religion. Art and Religion both signify effort to comply with an ideal standard--indeed, the height of the standard is the test of each--and what makes for innocence or for faultiness in the one, makes for innocence or faultiness in the other. Innocence is found in each, but to be without guile in Art or in Religion means that you must be either flawlessly obedient to a perfect standard, or be beyond the pale of law through pure ignorance of wrong. Where no law is, there can be no transgression. Between these two points is no middle-ground, either in the fields of Art or of Religion.

To apply this to a garden. Untaught, lawless Nature may present things indiscriminately, as they are, the casual, the accidental, the savage, in their native dress, or undress, in all their rugged reality, and not be ashamed. But the artist-gardener, knowing good and evil, exercising free-will in his garden-craft, must choose only what he may rightly have, and employ only what his trained judgment or the unwritten commandments of good taste will allow.

There you have the art of a garden. But because of its necessary exclusiveness, because all Nature is not there, the garden, though of the best, the most far-reaching in its application of art-resources, fails to satisfy all man's imaginative cravings.

Your garden, I said, will serve you many a good turn. Here one may come to play the truant from petty worries, to find quiet harbourage in the chopping sea of life's casual ups and downs; but when _real_ trouble comes, on occasions of spiritual tension, or mental conflict, or heavy depression, then the perfect beauty of the garden offends; the garden has no respect for sadness--then it almost mocks and flaunts you; it smiles the same, though your child die, and then instinct sends you away from the lap of Art to the bosom of Nature--

"Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her."

All of man, then, asks for all of Nature, and is not content with less.

Just as a stringed instrument, even when lying idle, is awake to sympathetic sound but refuses to vibrate to notes that are not kindred to its compa.s.s, so the garden, with all its wakeful magic, will voice only such of your moods as it is in touch with; and there are many chords missing in the cunningly encased music of a garden--many human notes find no answering pulsation there.

Let us not blink the fact, then; Art, whether of this sphere or of that, is not all. If you want beauty ready-made, obvious gladness of colour, heightened n.o.bleness of form, suggested romance, Nature idealised--all these things are yours in a garden; and yet the very "dressing" of the place which heightens its appeal to one side of man's being is the bar to its acceptance on another side. To have been baptised of Art is to have received gifts rich and strange, that enable the garden's contents to climb to ideal heights; and yet not all men care for perfectness; the most part prefer creatures not too bright or good for human nature's daily food. So, to tell truth, the wild things of field, forest, and sh.o.r.e have a gamut of life, a range of appeal wider than the gardens; the impunities of lawless Nature reach further than man's finished strokes. Nay, when man has done his best in a garden, some shall even regret, for sentimental reasons, that he brought Art upon the scene at all. "Even after the wild landscape, through which youth had strayed at will, has been laid out into fields and gardens, and enclosed with fences and hedges; after the footsteps, which had bounded over the flower-strewn gra.s.s have been circ.u.mscribed within firm gravel-walks, the vision of its former happiness will still at times float before the mind in its dreams." ("Guesses at Truth.")

Beauty, Romance, and Nature await an audience with you in the garden; but it is Beauty after she has been sent to school to learn the tricks of conscious grace; Beauty that has "the foreign aid of ornament," that walks with the supple gait of one who has been well drilled; but gone are the fine careless raptures, gone the bounding step, the blithe impulses of unschooled freedom and gipsy life out of doors.

Romance awaits you, holding in her hand a picture of things bright and jocund, full of tender colour and sweet suggestion; a picture designed to prove this world to be unruffled Arcadia, a sunlit pageant, a dream of delectation, a place for solace, a Herrick-land

"Of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers;"

and human life a jewelled tale with all the irony left out.

Nature awaits you, but only as a fair captive, ready to respond to your behests, to answer to the spring of your imaginings. To man's wooing, "I love you, love me back," she resigned herself, not perceiving the drift of homage that was paid, not so much to the beauty that she had, but to the beauty of a heightened sort that should ensue upon his cultivation, for the sake of which he sought her. So now her wildness is subdued.

The yew and the holly from the tangled brake shall feel the ignominy of the shears. The "common" thorn of the hedge shall be grafted with one of the twenty-seven rarer sorts; the oak and maple shall be headed down and converted into scarlet species; the single flowers, obedient to a beautiful disease, shall blow as doubles, and be propagated by scientific processes that defy Nature and accomplish centuries of evolution at a stride. The woodbine from the vernal wood must be nailed to the carpenter's trellis, the brook may no more brawl, nor violate its limits, the leaves of the hollybush and the box shall be variegated, the forest tree and woodland shrub shall have their frayed hedges shorn, and their wildness pressed out of them in Art's dissembling embrace.

And as with the green things of the earth, so with the creatures of the animal world that are admitted into the sanctuary of a garden. Here is no place for nonconformity of any kind. True, the spruce little squirrel asks no leave for his dashing raids upon the beech-mast and the sweet chestnuts that have escaped the range of the gardener's broom; true, the white and golden pheasant and the speckled goligny may moon about in their distraught fashion down the green alleys and in and out the shrubberies; the foreign duck may frisk in the lake; the white swan may hoist her sail, and "float double, swan and shadow;" the birds may sing in the trees; the peac.o.c.k may strut on the lawn, or preen his feathers upon the terrace walls; the fallow deer may browse among the bracken on the other side of the ha-ha--thus much of the animal creation shall be allowed here, and not the most fastidious son of Adam will protest a word. But note the terms of their admission. They are a select company, gathered with nice judgment from all quarters of the globe, that are bound over to respectable behaviour, pledged to the beautiful or picturesque; they are in chains, though the chains be aerial and not seen.

It is not that the gardener loves pheasants or peac.o.c.ks, ducks or swans or guinea-fowls for themselves, or for their contribution to the music of the place. Not this, but because these creatures a.s.sist the garden's magic, they support the illusion upon which the whole thing is based; as they flit about, and cross and recross the scene, and scream, and quack, and cackle, you get a touch of actuality that adds finish to the strangeness and piquancy that prevail around; they verify your doubting vision, and make valid the reality of its ideality; they accord with the well-swept lawn, the scented air, the flashing radiance of the fountain, the white statuary backed by dark yews or dim stone alcoves, with the clipt shrubs, the dreaming trees, the blare of bright colours, in the shapely beds, the fragrant odours and select beauties of the place.

These living creatures (for they _are_ alive), prowling about the grounds,[47] looking fairly comfortable in artificial surroundings from whence their clipped wings will not allow them to escape, incline you to believe that this world is a smooth, genteel, beneficent world after all, and its pastoral character is here so well sustained that no one would be a bit surprised if Pan with his pipe of reeds, or Corydon with his white-fleeced flock, should turn the corner at any moment.

[Footnote 47: Lord Beaconsfield adds macaws to the ornament of his ideal garden. "Sir Ferdinand, when he resided at Armine, was accustomed to fill these pleasure grounds with macaws and other birds of gorgeous plumage." But Lord Beaconsfield is Benjamin Disraeli--a master of the ornate, a bit of a dandy always. In Italy, too, they throw in porcupines and ferrets for picturesqueness. In Holland are our old friends the tin hare and guinea-pigs, and the happy shooting boy, in holiday attire, painted to the life.]

It is only upon man's terms, however, and to suit his scheme of scenic effects, that these tame things are allowed on the premises. They are not here because man loves them. Woe to the satin-coated mole that blindly burrows on the lawn! Woe to the rabbit that sneaks through the fence, or to the hare that leaps it! Woe to the red fox that litters in the pinetum, or to the birds that make nests in the shrubberies! Woe to the otter that takes license to fish in the ponds at the bottom of the pleasaunce! Woe to the blackbirds that strip the rowan-tree of its berries just when autumn visitors are expected! Woe to the finches that nip the buds off the fruit-trees in the hard spring frost, presuming upon David's plea for sacrilege! Death, instant or prolonged, or dear life purchased at the price of a torn limb, for the silly things that dare to stray where the woodland liberties are forbidden to either plant or animal!

So much for the results of man's manipulation of the universe in the way of making ornamental grounds! And the sketch here given applies equally to the new style or to the old, to the garden after Loudon or to the garden after Bacon; the destiny of things is equally interfered with to meet the requirements of the one or the other; the styles are equally artificial, equally remorseless to primal Nature.

But one may go farther, and ask: What wonder at the outcry of the modern Nature-lovers against a world so altered from its original self as that Hawthorne should say of England in general that here "the wildest things are more than half tame? The trees, for instance, whether in hedgerow, park, or what they call forest, have nothing wild about them. They are never ragged; there is a certain decorous restraint in the freest outspread of their branches!" Nay, so far does this mistaken man carry his diseased appet.i.te for English soil, marred as it is, that he shall write: "To us Americans there is a kind of sanct.i.ty even in an English turnip-field, when we think how long that small square of ground has been known and recognised as a possession, transmitted from father to son, trodden often by memorable feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery by old acquaintance with civilised eyes" ("Our Old Home," p. 75).

What wonder, I say, that a land that is so hopelessly gardened as this--a land so sentimentalised and humanised that its very clods, to the American, are "poesy all ramm'd with life"--shall grate the nerves of the Hamlets of to-day, who live too much in the sun, whom man delights not, nor woman neither!

What a land to live in! when its best landscape painters--men like Gainsborough or Constable--are so carried away by the influence of agriculture upon landscape, so lost to the superiority of wild solitude, that they will plainly tell you that they like the fields the farmers work in, and the work they do in them; preferring Nature that was modified by man, painting a well-cultivated country with villages and mills and church-steeples seen over hedges and between trees![48]

[Footnote 48: See P. G. Hamerton's "Sylvan Year," p. 112.]

What a land to live in! when even Nature's wild children of field and forest hug their chains--preserve their old ways and habits up to the very frontier-line of civilisation. For here is Jefferies (who ought to know) writing thus: "Modern progress, except where it has exterminated them, has scarcely touched the habits of bird or animal; so almost up to the very houses of the metropolis the nightingale yearly returns to her old haunts. If we go a few hours' journey only, and then step just beyond the highway, where the steam ploughing-engine has left the mark of its wide wheels on the dust, and glance into the hedgerow, the copse, or stream, there are Nature's children as unrestrained in their wild, free life as they were in the veritable backwoods of primitive England."

What wonder that a land where Nature has thus succ.u.mbed wholesale to culture, should exasperate the man who has earned a right to be morbid, or that he should cry aloud in his despair, "I am tired of civilised Europe, and I want to see a _wild_ country if I can." Too many are our spots renowned for beauty, our smiling champaigns of flower and fruit.

For "Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but, alas, if times be not fair!" Hence the comfort of oppressive surroundings over-sadly tinged, to men who suffer from the mockery of a place that is too smiling! Hence the glory of a waste like Egdon to Mr Hardy! ("The Return of the Native," pp. 4, 5). For Egdon Heath, "Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of Nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking of mankind. And ultimately, to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle-gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden be pa.s.sed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand-dunes of Scheveningen."

I admit that it is strange that time should hold in reserve such revenges as this ascetic writing denotes--strange that man should find beauty irksome, and that he should feel blasted with the very ecstasy himself has built up in a garden! strange this sudden recoil of the smooth son of culture from the extreme of Art, to the extreme of Nature!

Stranger still that the "Yes" and "No" of the _Ideal_ Hyde and the _Real_ Jekyll should consist in the same bosom, and that a man shall be, as it were, a prey to contrary maladies at one and the same time! Yet we have found this in Bacon--prince of fine gardeners, who with all his seeming content with the heroic pleasaunce that he has made, shall still betray a sneaking fondness for the maiden charms of Bohemia outside.

Earthly Paradise is fine and fit, but there must needs be "mounts of some pretty height, leaving the wall of the enclosure breast high to look abroad in the fields"--there must be "a window open, to fly out at, a secret way to retire by." Nay, after all, what are to him the charms that inspire his rhapsody of words--the things that princes add for state and magnificence! They are Delilah's charms, and "but nothing to the true pleasure of a garden!"

"Our gardens in Paris," says Joubert, "smell musty; I do not like these ever-green trees. There is something of blackness in their greenery, of coldness in their shade. Besides, since they neither lose anything, nor have anything to fear, they seem to me unfeeling, and hence have little interest for me.... Those irregular gardens, which we call English gardens, require a labyrinth for a dwelling."

"I hate those trees that never lose their foliage" (says Landor); "they seem to have no sympathy with Nature; winter and summer are alike to them." Says Thomson,

... "For loveliness Needs not the foreign aid of ornament, But it is when unadorned adorn'd the most."

Or Cowley's

"My garden painted o'er With Nature's hand, not Art's; and pleasures yield, Horace might envy in his Sabine field."

Or Addison: "I have often looked upon it as a piece of happiness that I have never fallen into any of these fantastical tastes, nor esteemed anything the more for its being uncommon and hard to be met with. For this reason I look upon the whole country in spring-time as a s.p.a.cious garden, and make as many visits to a spot of daisies, or a bank of violets, as a florist does to his borders or parterres. There is not a bush in blossom within a mile of me which I am not acquainted with, nor scarce a daffodil or cowslip that withers away in my neighbourhood without my missing it." Or Rousseau: "I can imagine, said I to them, a rich man from Paris or London, who should be master of this house, bringing with him an expensive architect to spoil Nature. With what disdain would he enter this simple and mean place! With what contempt would he have all these tatters uprooted! What fine avenues he would open out! What beautiful alleys he would have pierced! What fine goose-feet, what fine trees like parasols and fans! What finely fretted trellises! What beautifully-drawn yew hedges, finely squared and rounded! What fine bowling-greens of fine English turf, rounded, squared, sloped, ovaled; what fine yews carved into dragons, paG.o.das, marmosets, every kind of monster! With what fine bronze vases, what fine stone-founts he would adorn his garden! When all that is carried out, said M. De Wolmar, he will have made a very fine place, which one will scarcely enter, and will always be anxious to leave to seek the country."

Or Gautier, upon Nature's wild growths: "You will find in her domain a thousand exquisitely pretty little corners into which man seldom or never penetrates. There, from every constraint, she gives herself up to that delightful extravagance of dishevelled plants, of glowing flowers and wild vegetation--everything that germinates, flowers, and casts its seeds, instinct with an eager vitality, to the wind, whose mission it is to disperse them broadcast with an unsparing hand.... And over the rain-washed gate, bare of paint, and having no trace of that green colour beloved by Rousseau, we should have written this inscription in black letters, stonelike in shape, and threatening in aspect:

'GARDENERS ARE PROHIBITED FROM ENTERING HERE.'

"Such a whim--very difficult for one to realise who is so deeply incrusted with civilisation, where the least originality is taxed as folly--is continually indulged in by Nature, who laughs at the judgment of fools."

Or Th.o.r.eau--hero of the Walden shanty, with his open-air gospel--all Nature for the asking--to whom a garden is but Nature debauched, and all Art a sin: "There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning towards wildness.... We are apt enough to be pleased with such books as Evelyn's 'Sylva,' 'Acetarium,' and 'Kalendarium Hortense,' but they imply a relaxed nerve in the reader. Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigour and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.... It is true there are the innocent pleasures of country-life, and it is sometimes pleasant to make the earth yield her increase, and gather the fruits in their season, but the heroic spirit will not fail to dream of remoter retirements and more rugged paths. It will have its garden-plots and its _parterres_ elsewhere than on the earth, and gather nuts and berries by the way for its subsistence, or orchard fruits with such heedlessness as berries. We should not be always soothing and training Nature.... The Indian's intercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest independence of each. If he is somewhat of a stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much of a familiar. There is something vulgar and foul in the latter's closeness to his mistress, something n.o.ble and cleanly in the former's distance.... There are other savager, and more primeval aspects of Nature than our poets have sung. It is only white man's poetry."

To sum up the whole matter, this unmitigated hostility of the cultured man (with Jacob's smooth hands and Esau's wild blood) to the amenities of civilised life, brings us back to the point from whence we started at the commencement of this chapter. While men are what they are, Art is not all. Man has Viking pa.s.sions as well as Eden instincts. Man is of mixed blood, whose sympathies are not so much divided as double. And all of man asks for all of Nature, and is not content with less. To the over-civilised man who is under a cloud, the old contentment with orthodox beauty must give place to the subtler, scarcer instinct, to "the more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair." Fair effects are only for fair times. The garden represents to such an one a too careful abstract of Nature's traits and features that had better not have been epitomised.

The place is to him a kind of fraud--a forgery, so to speak, of Nature's autograph. It is only the result of man's turning spy or detective upon the beauties of the outer world. Its perfection is too monotonous; its grace is too subtle; its geography too bounded; its interest too full of intention--too much sharpened to a point; its growth is too uniformly temperate; its imagery too exacting of notice. These prim and trim things remind him of captive princes of the wood, brightly attired only that they may give romantic interest to the garden--these tame birds with clipped wings, of distraught aspect and dreamy tread--these docile animals with their limp legs and vacant stare, may contribute to the scenic pomp of the place, but it is at the expense of their native instincts and the joyous _abandon_ of woodland life. If this be the outcome of your boasted editing of Nature, give us dead Nature untranslated. If this be what comes of your idealisation of the raw materials of Nature--of the transference of your own emotions to the simple, unsophisticated things of the common earth, let us rather have Nature's unspoilt self--"G.o.d's Art," as Plato calls Nature--where