Garden-Craft Old and New Part 3

Here it may be objected that the ordinary garden is, after all, only a compromise between the common and the ideal: half may be for the l.u.s.t of the eye, yet half is for domestic drudgery; half is for beauty, half for use. The garden is contrived "a double debt to pay." Yonder ma.s.s of foliage that bounds the garden, with its winding intervals of turf and look of expansiveness, it serves to conceal villadom and the hulking paper-factory beyond; that rock-garden with its developed geological formation, dotted over with choice Alpine plants, that the stranger comes to see. It is nothing but the quarry from whence the stone was dug that built the house. Those banks of evergreens, full of choice specimens, what are they but on one side the screen to your kitchen stuff, and on the other side, the former tenant's contrivance to a.s.sist him in forgetting his neighbour? Even so, my friend, an it please you!

You are of those who, in Sainte-Beuve's phrase, would sever a bee in two, if you could!

The garden, you say, is a compromise between the common and the ideal.

Yet n.o.bility comes in low disguises. We have seen that the garden is wild Nature elevated and transformed by man's skill in selection and artistic concentration--wild things to which man's art has given dignity. The common flowers of the cottager's garden tell of centuries of collaboration. The flowers and shrubs and trees with which you have adorned your own grounds were won for you by the curiosity, the aspiration, the patient roaming and ceaseless research of a long list of old naturalists; the design of your garden, its picturesque divisions and beds, a result of the social sense, the faculty for refined enjoyment, the constructive genius of the picked minds of the civilised world in all ages. The methods of planting approved of to-day, carrying us back to the admirably-dressed grounds of the ancient castles and abbeys, to the love of woodland scenery, which is said to be a special characteristic of Teutonic people, which is evidenced in the early English ballads; to the slowly acquired traditions of garden-masters like Bacon, Temple, Evelyn, Gilpin, and Repton, as well as to the idealised landscapes of Constable, Gainsborough, Linnell, and Turner; it is, in fact, the issue of the practical insight, the wood-craft, and idealistic skill of untold generations.

In this matter of floral beauty and garden-craft man has ever declared himself a prey to the "malady of the ideal"; the j.a.panese will even combine upon his trees the tints of spring and autumn.[8] But everywhere, and in all ages of the civilised world, man spares no pains to acquire the choicest specimens, the rarest plants, and to give to each thing so acquired the ideally best expression of which it is capable. It is as though Eden-memories still haunted the race with the solicitude of an inward voice that refused to be silenced, and is satisfied with nothing short of the best.

[Footnote 8: "This strange combination of autumn and spring tints is a very usual sight in j.a.pan.... It is worth noting that in j.a.pan a tree is considered chiefly for its form and tint, not for use.... I heard the cherry-trees were now budding, so I hurried up to take advantage of them, and found them more beautiful than I had ever imagined. There are at least fifty varieties, from delicately tinted white and pink to the richest rose, almost crimson blossom."--Alfred East's "Trip to j.a.pan,"

_Universal Review_, March, 1890.]

And yet, as some may point out, this homage of beauty that you speak of is not done for nought; there enters into gardening the spirit of calculation. A garden is a kind of investment. The labour and forethought man expends upon it must bring adequate return. For every flower-bed he lays down, for every plant, or shrub, or tree put into the ground, his word is ever the same,

"Be its beauty Its sole duty."

It was not simply to gratify his curiosity, to serve as a pretext for adventure, that the gardener of old days reconnoitred the globe, culled specimens, and spent laborious days in studying earth's picturesque points; it was with a view to the pleasure the things would ultimately bring. And why not! Had man not served so long an apprenticeship to Nature on her freehold estate, the garden would not so directly appeal to our imaginations and command our spirits. A garden reveals man as master of Nature's lore; he has caught her accents, rifled her motives; he has transferred her bright moods about his own dwelling, has tricked out an ordered mosaic of the gleanings of her woodland carpet; has, as it were, stereotyped the spontaneous in Nature, has entrapped and rendered beautifully objective the natural magic of the outer world to gratify the inner world of his own spirit. The garden is, first and last, made "for delectation's sake."

So we arrive at these conclusions. A garden is made to express man's delight in beauty and to gratify his instincts for idealisation. But, lest the explanation savour too much of self-interest in the gardener, it may be well to say that the interest of man's investment of money and toil is not all for himself. What he captures of Nature's revenues he repays with usury, in coin that bears the mint-mark of inspired invention. This artistic handling of natural things has for result "the world's fresh ornament,"[9] and for plant, shrub, or tree subject to it, it is the crowning and completion of those hidden possibilities of perfection that have lain dormant in them since the world began.

An artist has been defined as one who reproduces the world in his own image and likeness. The definition is perhaps a little high-flown, and may confer an autobiographical value to an artist's performances that would astonish none more than himself. Yet if the thought can be truthfully applied anywhere, it is where it occurred to Andrew Marvell--in a garden.

[Footnote 9: "If you look into our gardens annexed to our houses" (says William Harrison in Holinshed's "Chronicles") "how wonderful is their beauty increased, not only with flowers, which Columella calleth _Terrena Sydera_, saying 'Pingit et in varias terrestria, sydera flores,' and variety of curious and costly workmanship, but also with rare and medicinable herbs.... How Art also helpeth Nature in the daily colouring, doubling and enlarging the proportions of our flowers it is incredible to report, for so curious and cunning are our gardeners now in these days that they presume to do, in a manner, what they list with Nature, and moderate her course in things as if they were her superiors.

It is a world also to see how many strange herbs, plants, and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americans, Taprobane, Canary Isles, and all parts of the world, the which, albeit that his respect of the const.i.tutions of our bodies, they do not grow for us (because G.o.d hath bestowed sufficient commodities upon every country for her own necessity) yet for delectation's sake unto the eye, and their odoriferous savours unto the nose, they are to be cherished, and G.o.d also glorified in them, because they are His good gifts, and created to do man help and service. There is not almost one n.o.bleman, gentleman, or merchant that hath not great store of these flowers, which now also begin to wax so well acquainted with our evils that we may almost account of them as parcel of our own commodities."--(From "Elizabethan England," pp. 26-7.)]

"The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds and other seas, Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade."

And where can we find a more promising sphere for artistic creation than a garden? Do we boast of fine ideas and perceptions of beauty and powers of design! Where can our faculties find a happier medium of expression or a pleasanter field for display than the garden affords? Nay, to have the ideas, the faculties, and the chance of their exercise and still to hold back were a sin! For a garden is, so to speak, the compliment a man of ideas owes to Nature, to his friends, and to himself.

Many are the inducements to gardening. Thus, if I make a garden, I need not print a line, nor conjure with the painter's tools, to prove myself an artist. Again, a garden is the only form of artistic creation that is bound by the nature of things to be more lovely in realisation than in the designer's conception. It is no mere hint of beauty--no mere tickling of the fancy--that we get here, such as all other arts (except music) are apt to give you. Here, on the contrary, we are led straight into a world of actual delights patent to all men, which our eyes can see, and our hands handle. More than this; whilst in other spheres of labour the greater part of our life's toil and moil will, of a surety, end as the wise man predicted, in vanity and vexation of spirit, here is instant physical refreshment in the work the garden entails, and, in the end, our labour will be crowned with flowers.

Nor have I yet exhausted the scene of a garden's pleasures. A man gets undoubted satisfaction in the very expression of his ideas--"the joy of the deed"--in the sense of Nature's happy response, the delight of creation,[10] the romance of possibility.

[Footnote 10: Here is Emerson writing to Carlyle of his "new plaything"--a piece of woodland of forty acres on the border of Walden Pond. "In these May mornings, when maples, poplars, walnut, and pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon and cut with my hatchet an Indian path thro' the thicket, all along the bold sh.o.r.e, and open the finest pictures." (John Morley's Essays, "Emerson," p. 304.) But, as Mr Morley points out, he finds the work too fascinating, eating up days and weeks; "nay, a brave scholar should shun it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these pernicious enchantments."]

Some joy shall also come of the ident.i.ty of the gardener with his creation.[11] He is at home here. He is intimate with the various growths. He carries in his head an infinity of details touching the welfare of the garden's contents. He partic.i.p.ates in the life of his plants, and is familiar with all their humours; like a good host, he has his eye on all his company. He has fine schemes for the future of the place. The very success of the garden reflects upon its master, and advertises the perfect understanding that exists between the artist and his materials. The sense of ownership and responsibility brings him satisfaction, of a cheaper sort. His the hand that holds the wand to the garden's magic; his the initiating thought, the stamp of taste, the style that gives it circ.u.mstance. Let but his hand be withdrawn a s.p.a.ce, and, at this signal, the gipsy horde of weeds and briars--that even now peer over the fence, and cast clandestine seeds abroad with every favouring gust of wind--would at once take leave to pitch their tents within the garden's zone, would strip the place of art-conventions, and hurry it back to its primal state of unkempt wildness.

[Footnote 11: "I like your Essays," said Henry the Third to Montaigne.

"Then, sire, you will like me. I am my Essays."]

Someone has observed that when wonder is excited, and the sense of beauty gratified, there is instant recreation, and a stimulus that lifts one out of life's ordinary routine. This marks the function of a garden in a world where, but for its presence, the commonplace might preponderate; 'tis man's recreation ground, children's fairyland, bird's orchestra, b.u.t.terfly's banquet. Verse and romance have done well, then, to link it with pretty thoughts and soft musings, with summer reveries and moonlight ecstasies, with love's occasion, and youth's yearning. No fitter place could well be found than this for the softer transactions of life that awaken love, poesy, and pa.s.sion. Indeed, were its winsomeness not balanced by simple human enjoyments--were its charmed silences not broken by the healthy interests of common daily life--the romps of children, the clink of tea-cups, the clatter of croquet-mallets, the _melee_ of the tennis-courts, the fiddler's sc.r.a.pe, and the tune of moving feet, it might well seem too l.u.s.treful a place for this work-a-day world.

Apart from its other uses, there is no spot like a garden for cultivating the kindly social virtues. Its perfectness puts people upon their best behaviour. Its nice refinement secures the mood for politeness. Its heightened beauty produces the disposition that delights in what is beautiful in form and colour. Its queenly graciousness of mien inspires the reluctant loyalty of even the stoniest mind. Here, if anywhere, will the human hedgehog unroll himself and deign to be companionable. Here friend Smith, caught by its nameless charm, will drop his bra.s.sy gabble and dare to be idealistic; and Jones, forgetful of the main chance and "bulls" and "bears," will throw the rein to his sweeter self, and reveal that latent elevation of soul and tendency to romance known only to his wife!

"There be delights," says an ancient writer, "that will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream." This tells, in terse English, the pleasures of a garden and the instincts that are gratified in its making. For a garden is Arcady brought home. It is man's bit of gaudy make-believe--his well-disguised fiction of an unvexed Paradise--standing witness of his quest of the ideal--his artifice to escape the materialism of a world that is too actual and too much with him. A well-kept garden makes credible to modern eyes the antique fable of an unspoiled world--a world where gaiety knows no eclipse, and winter and rough weather are held at bay.

In this secluded spot the seasons slip by unawares. The year's pa.s.sing-bell is ignored. Decay is cheated of its prize. The invading loss of cold, or wind, or rain--the litter of battered Nature--the "petals from blown roses on the gra.s.s"--the pathos of dead boughs and mouldering leaves, the blighted bloom and broken promise of the spring, autumn's rust or winter's wreckage are, if gardeners be brisk sons of Adam, instantly huddled out of sight, so that, come when you may, the place wears a mask of steady brightness; each month has its new dress, its fresh counterfeit of permanence, its new display of flowers or foliage, as pleasing, if not so l.u.s.trous as the last, that serves in turn to prolong the illusion and to conceal the secret irony and fond a.s.sumption of the thing.

"I think for to touche also The world which neweth everie daie, So far as I can, so as I maie."

This s.n.a.t.c.h of Gower's rhyme expresses in old phrase the gardener's desire, or clothed in modern prose by Mr Robinson ("English Flower-Garden," Murray), it is "to make each place at various seasons, and in every available situation, an epitome of the great flower-garden of the world."

We hinted a moment ago of the interest that a garden gathers from the mark of man's regard and tendence; and if this be true of a modern garden, how much more true of an old one! Indeed, this is undeniable in the latter case, for Time is ever friendly to gardens. Ordinarily his att.i.tude towards all that concerns the memories of man is that of a jealous churl. Look at history. What is history but one long record of men who, in this sphere or that, have toiled, striven, sold their souls even, to perpetuate a name and have their deeds written upon the tablets of eternity, not reckoning upon the "all oblivious enmity" of Time, who, with heedless hand, cuts their past into fragments, blots out their name, confuses their story, and frets with gnawing tooth each vestige of their handiwork. How, then, we ask--

"How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower?"

Yet so it is. He who has no respect for antique glories, who snaps his fingers at earth's heroes, who overturns the statues of the laurelled Caesars, encrusts the hieroglyphics of the Pharaohs, and commits their storied masonry to the mercies of the modern Philistine, will make exception in a garden. "Time's pencil" helps a garden. In a garden not only are the solemn shapes and pa.s.sing conceits of grey epochs treasured up, even to their minutest particulars, but the drift of the years, elsewhere so disastrous, serves only to heighten their fascination and power of appeal.

Thus it comes to pa.s.s, that it were scarcely possible to name a more pathetic symbol of the past than an old garden,[12] nor a spot which, by its tell-tale shapes, sooner lends itself to our historic sense if we would recall the forms and reconstruct the life of our ancestors. For we have here the very setting of old life--the dressed stage of old drama, the scenery of old gallantry. Upon this terrace, in front of these flower-beds with these trees looking on, was fought out the old battle of right and wrong--here was enacted the heroic or the shameful deeds, the stirring or the humdrum pa.s.sages in the lives of so many generations of masters, mistresses, children, and servants, who in far-off times have lived, loved, and died in the grey homestead hard by. "Now they are dead," as Victor Hugo says--"they are dead, but the flowers last always."

[Footnote 12: Time does much for a garden. There is a story of an American plutocrat's visit to Oxford. On his tour of the Colleges nothing struck him so much as the velvety turf of some of the quadrangles. He asked for the gardener, and made minute enquiries as to the method of laying down and maintaining the gra.s.s. "That's all, is it?" he exclaimed, when the process had been carefully described. "Yes, sir," replied the gardener with a twinkle in his eye, "That's all, but we generally leave it three or four centuries to settle down!"]

Admit, then, that for their secret quality, no less than for their obvious beauty, these old gardens should be treasured. For they are far more than they seem to the casual observer. Like any other piece of historic art, the old garden is only truly intelligible through a clear apprehension of the circ.u.mstances which attended its creation. Granted that we possess the ordinary smattering of historical knowledge, and the garden will serve to interpret the past and make it live again before our eyes. For the old place is (to use the journalist's phrase) an "object lesson" of old manners; it is a proof of ancient genius, a clue to old romance, a legacy of vague desire. The many items of the place--the beds and walks with their special trick of "style" the parterre, the promenoir, the maze, the quincunx, the terraces, the extravagances in ever-green sculptures of which Pope spoke--what are they but the mould and figure of old-world thought, down to its most characteristic caprice! The a.s.sertive air of these things--their prominence in the garden-scenery--bespeak their importance in the scenery of old life. It was _thus_ that our forefathers made the world about them picturesque, _thus_ that they coloured their life-dreams and fitted an adjunct pleasure to every humour, _thus_ that they climbed by flower-strewn stairs to the realm of the ideal and stimulated their sense of beauty.

And if further proof be needed of the large hold the garden and its contents had of the affections of past generations, we have but to turn to the old poets, and to note how the texture of the speech, the groundwork of the thought, of men like Milton, Herrick, Vaughan, Herbert, Donne (not to mention prose-writers) is saturated through and through with garden-imagery.

In the case of an old garden, mellowed by time, we have, I say, to note something that goes beyond mere surface-beauty. Here we may expect to find a certain superadded quality of pensive interest, which, so far as it can be reduced to words, tells of the blent influences of past and present, of things seen and unseen, of the joint effects of Nature and Man. The old ground embodies bygone conceptions of ideal beauty; it has absorbed human thought and memories; it registers the bequests of old time. Dead men's traits are exemplified here. The dead hand still holds sway, the pictures it conjured still endure, its cunning is not forgotten, its strokes still make the garden's magic, in shapes and hues that are unchanged save for the slow moulding of the centuries.

_Really_, not less than metaphorically, the garden-growths do keep green the memories of the men and women who placed them there, as the flower that is dead still holds its perfume. And few will say that the chronicles of the dead do not

"Shine more bright in these contents Than unwept stone besmeared with s.l.u.ttish time."

There is a wealth of quiet interest in an old garden. We feel instinctively that the place has been warmed by the sunshine of humanity; watered from the secret spring of human joy and sorrow.

Sleeping echoes float about its glades; its leafy nooks can tell of felicities sweeter than the bee-haunted cups of flowers; of glooms graver than the midnight blackness of the immemorial yews. It is their suggestion of antique experiences that endues the objective elements in an old garden like Haddon, or Berkeley, or Levens, or Rockingham, with a strange eloquence. The recollections of many a child have centred round these objects: the one touch of romance in a narrow, simple life is linked with them. Hearts danced or hearts drooped in this vicinity. Eyes that brimmed over with laughter or that were veiled with tears looked on these things as we look on them now--drank in the shifting lights and shadows on the gra.s.s--watched the waving of the cedar's dark layers of shade against an angry sky, "stern as the unlashed eye of G.o.d," and all the birds were silent--once took in the sylvan vistas of trees, lawn, fir-ridge, the broad-water where the coots and moor-hens now play (as then) among the green lily-pads and floating weeds, regardless of Regulas in lead standing in their midst; once dwelt upon the l.u.s.trous flower-beds, on the sundial on the terrace--noonday rendezvous of fantails--on the "Alley of Sighs," with its clipped beeches, its grey-stone seat half-way down, its rustle of dying leaves, and traditions of intrigue; on the lime avenue full of perfume in the sweet-o'-the-year, on the foot-bridge across the moat, on the streak of blue autumn mist that tracks the stream in yonder meadows where the landrail is croaking, and that brings magically near the beat of hoofs, the jingle of horses' bells, the rumble of homeward wagons on the road, and whiffs of the reapers' songs; on the brief brilliance of the garden-panorama as the wintry-moon gives the black clouds the slip and suddenly discloses a white world of snow-m.u.f.fled forms, that gleams with the eerie pallor of a ghost, and is as suddenly dissolved into darkness.

Simple sights, you will say, and familiar! and yet, when connected with some unique occasion, some epoch of a life, when seen on such a day, at such a supreme, all-absorbing moment from window, open door, terrace, arbour; in the stillness or in the wild rhetoric of the night, the familiar scene, momentarily flashed upon the brain's retina, may have subtly and unconsciously influenced the act, or coloured the thought of some human being, and the brand of that moment's impress may have accompanied that soul to the edge of doom.

Because of its h.o.a.rded memories we come to look upon an old garden as a sort of repository of old secrets; wrapped within its confines, as within the covers of a sacred book, repose so many pages of the sad and glad legend of humanity. We have before us the scenery of old home idylls, of old household reverences and customs, of old life's give and take--its light comedy or solemn farce, its dark tragedy, its summer masque, its stately dance or midnight frolic, its happy wedlock or its open sorrow, its endured wrong. The place is identified with the fortunes of old families: for so many generations has the old place been found favourable for lovers' tales, for youths' golden dreams, for girls' chime of fancy, for the cut and thrust of friendly wrangles, for the "leisures of the spirit" of student-recluse, for children's gambols and babies' lullabies. Seated upon this mossy bank, children have spelt out fairy tales, while birds, trees, brooks, and flowers listened together. The marvel of its cloistered grace has been G.o.d-reminder to the saint; its green recesses have served for Enoch's walk,[13] for poet's retreat; as refuge for the hapless victim of broken endeavour; as enisled shelter for the tobacco-loving sailor-uncle with a wrecked fame; as invalid's Elysium; as haunt of the loafing, jesting, unambitioned man ("Alas, poor Yorick!"); as Death's sweet ante-room for slow-footed age.

[Footnote 13: "There is no garden well contrived, but that which hath an Enoch's walk in it."--SIR W. WALLER.]

What wonder that Sir William Temple devised that his heart should rest where its memories were so deep-intrenched--in his garden; or that Waterton should ask to be buried between the two great oaks at the end of the lake! (Norman Moore's Introduction to "Wanderings in South America.")

And if human affections be, as the poets declare, immortal, we have the reason why an old garden, in the only sense in which it ever is old, by the almanack, has that whisper and waving of secrecy, that air of watchful intentness, that far-reaching, mythological, unearthly look, that effect of being a kind of twilighted s.p.a.ce common to the two worlds of past and present. Who will not agree with me in this? It matters not when you go there--at dawn, at noonday, no less than when the sky is murky and night-winds are sighing--and although you shall be the only visible human being present, it is not alone that you feel. A thrill comes over you, a mysterious sense warns you that this is none other than the sanctuary of "the dead," as we call them; the place where, amid the hush of pa.s.sionless existence, the wide leisure of uncounted time, the shades of once familiar presences keep their "tongueless vigil."

They fly not at the "dully sound" of human footsteps; they ask no sympathy for regret which dare not tell the secret of its sorrow; but, with the gentle gait of old-world courtesy, they move aside, and when you depart resume occupation of ground which, for the sake of despairing wishes and memories of an uneffaced past, they may not quit. After life's fitful fever these waifs of a vanished world sleep not well; here are some consumed with covetousness, who are learning not to resent the word "mine" applied by the living owner of hall and garden, field and store; some that prey on withered bliss--the "bitter sweet of days that were"--this, the miser whose buried treasure lies undiscovered here, and who has nothing in G.o.d's bank in the other world; this, the author of the evil book; and this loveless, unlovely pair, the ruined and ruiner, yoked for aye; a motley band, forsooth, with "Satan's sergeants" keeping guard!

It is ever the indirect that is most eloquent. Someone says: Hence these tokens of a dead past open out vistas for one's imagination and drop hints of romance that would make thrilling reading in many volumes, but which shall never reach Mudie's.

Even Nature is not proof against the spell of an old garden. The very trees have an "ancient melody of an inward agony":

"The place is silent and aware It has had its scenes, its joys, and crimes, But that is its own affair"--

even Nature forgets to be her cold, impa.s.sive self, and puts on a sympathetic-waiting look in a spot so intricately strewn and meshed over with the fibres of human experience. Long and close intimacy with mankind under various aspects--witness of things that happened to squires, dames, priests, courtiers, servitors, page, or country-maid, in the roundabout of that "curious, restless, clamorous being which we call life"--has somehow tinged the place with a sensibility (one had almost said a _wizardry_) not properly its own. And this superadded quality reaches to the several parts of the garden and is not confined to the scene as a whole. Each inanimate item of the place, each spot, seems invested with a gift of attraction--to have a hidden tongue that could syllable forgotten names--to possess a power of fixing your attention, of fastening itself upon your mind, as though it had become, in a sense, humanised, and claimed kindred with you as related to that secret group with whose fortunes it was allied, with whose pa.s.sions it had held correspondence, and were letting you know it could speak an if it would of

"All the ways of men, so vain and melancholy."

CHAPTER II.

ON ART IN A GARDEN.