Garden-Craft Old and New Part 6

The conditions of the country being so unfavourable to artistic handling, it needs a determined effort on man's part to lift things above the dead-level of the mean and commonplace. Yet see how Nature's defects may only prove Art's opportunity! Indeed, it is singular to note how, as it were, in a spirit of n.o.ble contrariness, the Dutch garden exhibits the opposite grace of each natural defect of the land. The great plains intersected with sullen watercourses yield up only slight strips of land, _therefore_ these n.i.g.g.ardly strips, s.n.a.t.c.hed from "an amphibious world" (as Goldsmith terms it), shall be crammed with beauty.

The landscape outside gapes with uniform dulness, _therefore_ the garden within shall be spick and span. The flat treeless expanse outside offers no objects for measuring distance, _therefore_ the perspective of the garden shall be a marvel of adroit planning and conjured proportions.

The room is small, _therefore_ its every inch shall seem an ell. The garden is a mere patch, _therefore_ the patch shall be elaborately darned and pattern-st.i.tched all over. The eye may not travel far, or can get no joy in a distant view, _therefore_ it shall rest in pure content, focussed upon a scene where rich and orderly garniture can no farther go.

Thus have the ill-conditions of the land proved blessings in disguise.

Necessity, the mother of invention, has produced the Dutch garden out of the most untoward geography, and if we find in its qualities and features traces of the conditions which surrounded its birth and development it is no wonder. Who shall blame the prim shapes and economical culture where even gross deception shall pa.s.s for a virtue if it be successful! Or the regular strips of ground, the long straight ca.n.a.ls, the adroit vistas of gra.s.sy terraces long-drawn out, the trees ranged in pots, or planted in the ground at set intervals and carefully shorn to preserve the limit of their shade! Nay, one can be merciful to the garden's usual crowning touch, which you get at its far end--a painted landscape of hills and dales and clumps of trees to beguile the enamoured visitor into the fond belief that Holland is not Holland: and, in the foreground the usual smiling wooden boy, shooting arrows at nothing, happy in the deed, and tin hares squatting in likely nooks, whose shy hare eyes have worn the same startled gaze these sixty years or more, renewed with fresh paint from time to time as rust requires.

Yet the Earth is richer and mankind happier for the Dutch garden!

And, as though out of compa.s.sion for the Dutchman's difficulties, kind Nature has put into his hands the bulb, as a means whereby he may attain the maximum of gaudy colour within the minimum of s.p.a.ce. Given a few square yards of rescued earth and sufficient manure, and what cannot the neat-handed, frugal-minded, microscopic-eyed Dutchman do in the way of concentrated design with his bulbs, his clipt shrubs, his trim beds, his trickles of water, and strips of gra.s.s and gravel! And should all other resources fail he has still his pounded brick-dust, his yellow sand, his chips of ores and spars and green gla.s.s, which, though they may serve only remotely to suggest Nature, will at all events carry your mind off to the gay gardens of precious stones of fairyland literature!

Indeed, once embarked upon his style of piquancy-at-any-price, and it is hard to see where the Dutch gardener need stop! In this sophisticated trifling--this lapidary's mosaic--this pastry-cook's decoration--this child's puzzle of coloured earth, subst.i.tuted for coloured living flowers--he pushes Art farther than the plain Englishman approves. It is, however, only one step farther than ordinary with him. All his dealings with Nature are of this abstract sort: his details are clever, and he is ingenious, if not imaginative, in his wholes. Still, I repeat, the Earth is richer, and mankind happier for the Dutch garden. There is an obvious excuse for its over-fancifulness in George Meredith's remark that "dulness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliance." That the Dutchman should be thus able to compete with unfriendly Nature, and to reverse the brazen of the unkind land of his birth, is an achievement that reflects most creditably upon the artistic capacities of his nation.

But England--

"This other Eden, demi-paradise"--

suggests a garden of a less-constrained order than either of these. Not that the English garden is uniformly of the same type, at the same periods. The variety of the type is to be accounted for in two ways: firstly, by the ingrained eclecticism of the British mind; secondly, by the changeful character of the country--this district is flat and open, this is hilly--so that mere conformity to the lie of the land would produce gardens which belong now to the French type, now to the Italian.

It is the same with British Art of all kinds, of all times: in days long before the Norman visitation and ever since, the English Designer has leant more or less upon foreign initiative, which goes to prove either how inert is his own gift of origination, or how devious may be the tastes of a mixed race.

But if the English garden cannot boast of singular points of interest, if its art reflects foreign countries, it bears the mark of the English taste for landscape, which gives it distinction and is suggestive of very charming effects. The transcendent characteristic of the English garden is derived from and gets its impulse from the prevailing influence of Nature at home. It has the characteristics of the country.

It is, I know, commonly held now-a-days that the taste for landscape is wholly of modern growth. So far as England is concerned it came in, they say, with Thomson in poetry, and with Brown in gardens. So far as relates to the _conscious_ relish for Nature, so far as relates to the love of Nature as a mirror of the moods of the mind, or as a refuge from man, this a.s.sertion may be true enough. Yet, surely the _conscious_ delight in landscape must have been preceded by an _unconscious_ sympathy this way: it could not have sprung without generation. Artistic sight is based upon instinct, feeling, perceptions that reach one knows not how far back in time, it does not come by magic.

See also what a rude, slatternly affair this much-lauded landscape-garden of the "immortal Brown" was! Here are two sorts of gardens--the traditional garden according to Bacon, the garden according to Brown. Both are Nature, but the first is Nature in an ideal dress, the second is Nature with no dress at all. The first is a garden for a civilised man, the second is a garden for a gipsy. The first is a picture painted from a cherished model, the second is a photograph of the same model undressed. Brown's work, in fact, represents the garden's return to its original barbaric self--the reinauguration of the elemental. Let it not be said, then, that Brown discovered the model, for her fairness was an established fact or she would not have been so richly apparelled when he lighted upon her. In other words, the love of the Earth--"that green-tressed G.o.ddess," Coleridge calls her--was no new thing in Brown's day: the sympathy for the woodland world, the love of tree, flower, and gra.s.s is behind the manipulated stiff garden of the fifteenth and two succeeding centuries, and it is the abiding source of all enthusiasm in garden-craft.

How long this taste for landscape had existed in pre-Thomsonian days it does not fall to us to determine. Suffice it to say that so long as there has been an English school of gardening this sympathy for landscape has found expression in the English garden.[19] The high thick garden-walls of the old fighting-days shall have ample outlooks in the shape of "mounts," from whence views may be had of the open country. The ornamental value of forest trees is well-known and appreciated. Even in the thirteenth century the English gardener is on the alert for new specimens and "trees of curiosity," and he is a master of horticulture.

In Chaucer's day he revels in the greensward,

"Ful thikke of gras, ful softe and swete."

And the early ballads as I have already shown are full of allusion to scenery and woodland. In the days of fine gardens the Englishman must still have his four acres "to the green," his adjuncts of shrubbery, wilderness, and park. Nay, Henry VIII.'s garden at Nonsuch, had its wilderness of ten acres. "Chaucer opens his Clerke's Tale with a bit of landscape admirable for its large style," says Mr Lowell, "and as well composed as any Claude" ("My Study Windows," p. 22). "What an airy precision of touch is here, and what a sure eye for the points of character in landscape." So, too, can Milton rejoice in

"Nature boon Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain,"

and Herrick:

"Sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers."

[Footnote 19: "English scenery of that special type which we call homely, and of which we are proud as only to be found in England, is, indeed, the production of many centuries of that conservatism which has spared the picturesque timber, and of that affectionate regard for the future which has made men delight to spend their money in imprinting on the face of Nature their own taste in trees and shrubs." ("Vert and Venery," by VISCOUNT LYMINGTON; _Nineteenth Century_, January, 1891.)]

Nor is this taste for landscape surprising in a country where the natural scenery is so fair and full of meaning. There are the solemn woods, the n.o.ble trees of forest and park: the "fresh green lap" of the land, so vividly green that the American Hawthorne declares he found "a kind of l.u.s.tre in it." There is the rich vegetation, and "in France, and still less in Italy," Walpole reminds us, "they could with difficulty attain that verdure which the humidity of our climate bestows." There are the leafy forest ways gemmed with flowers; the vast hunting-grounds of old kings, the woodland net of hazel coppice, the hills and dales, sunned or shaded, the plains mapped out with hedgerows and enlivened with the glitter of running water: the heather-clad moors, the golden gorse covers, the rolling downs dotted over with thorns and yews and chalk cliffs, the upland hamlets with their rosy orchards, the farm homesteads nestling in green combes, the grace of standing corn, the girdle of sea with its yellow sh.o.r.e or white, red, or grey rocks, its wolds and tracts of rough uncultivated ground, with bluffs and bushes and wind-hara.s.sed trees--Nature's own "antickes"--driven like green flames, and carved into grotesque shapes by the biting gales. There are the

"Russet lawns, and fallows grey Where the nibbling flocks do stray, Mountains on whose barren breast The labouring clouds do often rest, Meadows prim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks and rivers wide"--

the land that Richard Jefferies says "wants no gardening, it _cannot_ be gardened; the least interference kills it"--English woodland whose beauty is in its detail. There is nothing empty and unclothed here. Says Jefferies, "If the clods are left a little while undisturbed in the fields, weeds spring up and wild flowers bloom upon them. Is the hedge cut and trimmed, lo! the bluebells flower the more, and a yet fresher green buds forth upon the twigs." "Never was there a garden like the meadow," cries this laureate of the open fields; "there is not an inch of the meadow in early summer without a flower."

And if the various parts and details of an English landscape are so beautiful in themselves, what shall we say of the scenery when Nature, turned artist, sweeps across it the translucent tints of dawn or sunset, or wind and cloud-fantasy; or veil of purple mist, or grey or red haze, or drift of rain-shower thrown athwart the hills, for the sunbeams to try their edge upon; or any of the numberless atmospheric changes, pure and tender, stern and imperious, that our humid climate has ever ready to hand!

Shut in, as we in England are, with our short breadths of view ("on a scale to embrace," remarks George Meredith), folded, as it were, in a field-sanctuary of Nature-life--girt about with scenery that is at once fair, compact, sweetly familiar and companionable, yet so changefully coloured, so full of surprises as the day jogs along to its evensong as to hold observation on the stretch, to force attention to Nature's last word, to fill the fallow-mind of lonely country folk with gentle wonder, and swell the "harvest of a quiet eye," is it strange that a land like ours should have bred an unrivalled school of Nature-readers among gardeners, painters, and poets? "As regards grandeur," says Hawthorne, "there are loftier scenes in many countries than the best that England can show; but, for the picturesqueness of the smallest object that lies under its gentle gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery like it anywhere." ("Our Old Home," p. 78.)

The _real_ world of England, then, is, in the Englishman's opinion, itself so fair "it wants no gardening." Our school of gardeners seem to have found this out; for the task of the gardener has been rather that of translator than of creator; he has not had to labour at an artificial world he himself had made, but only to adorn, to interpret the world as it is, in all its blithe freedom. "The earth is the garden of Nature, and each fruitful country a Paradise;" and in England, "the world's best garden," man has only had to focus the view and frame it. Flowers, odours, dews, glistening waters, soft airs and sounds, n.o.ble trees, woodland solitudes, moonlight bowers, have been always with us.

It might seem ungenerous to inst.i.tute a comparison between the French and English styles of gardening, and to put things in a light unfavourable to the foreigner, had not the task been already done for us by a Frenchman in a most outspoken manner. Speaking of the French gardens, Diderot, in his Encyclopaedia (_Jardin_) says: "We bring to bear upon the most beautiful situations a ridiculous and paltry taste. The long straight alleys appear to us insipid; the palisades cold and formless. We delight in devising twisted alleys, scroll-work parterres, and shrubs formed into tufts; the largest lots are divided into little lots. It is not so with a neighbouring nation, amongst whom gardens in good taste are as common as magnificent palaces are rare. In England, these kinds of walks, practicable in all weathers, seem made to be the sanctuary of a sweet and placid pleasure; the body is there relaxed, the mind diverted, the eyes are enchanted by the verdure of the turf and the bowling-greens; the variety of flowers offers pleasant flattery to the smell and sight, Nature alone, modestly arrayed, and never made up, there spreads out her ornaments and benefits. How the fountains beget the shrubs and beautify them! How the shadows of the woods put the streams to sleep in beds of herbage." This is poetry! but it is well that one French writer (and he so distinguished) should be found to depict an English garden, when architects like Jussieu and Antoine Richard signally failed to reproduce the thing, to order, upon French soil! And the _Pet.i.t Trianon_ was in itself an improvement upon, or rather a protest against, the sumptuous splendour of the _Orangerie_, the basins of Latona and of Neptune, and the superb _tapis vert_, with its bordering groves of clipt trees and shrubs. Yet here is Arthur Young's unflattering description of the Queen's _Jardin Anglois_ at Trianon: "It contains about 100 acres, disposed in the taste of what we read of in books of Chinese gardening, whence it is supposed the English style was taken. There is more of Sir William Chambers here than of Mr Brown,[20] more effort than Nature, and more expense than taste. It is not easy to conceive anything that Art can introduce in a garden that is not here; woods, rocks, lawns, lakes, rivers, islands, cascades, grottoes, walks, temples, and even villages." Truly a _Jardin Anglois_!

[Footnote 20: Miss Edwards (and I quote from her edition of Young's "Travels in France," p. 101) has a note to the effect that the Mr Brown here referred to is "Robert Brown, of Markle, contributor to the _Edinburgh Magazine_, 1757-1831." Yet, surely this is none other than Mr "Capability" Brown, discoverer of English scenery, reputed father of the English garden!]

We may well prefer Diderot's simile for the English garden as "the sanctuary of a sweet and placid pleasure" to the bustling crowd of miscellaneous elements that took its name in vain in the _Pet.i.t Trianon_!

For an English garden is at once stately and homely--homely before all things. Like all works of Art it is conventionally treated, and its design conscious and deliberate. But the convention is broad, dignified, quiet, h.o.m.ogeneous, suiting alike the characteristics of the country and of the people for whom it is made. Compared with this, the foreign garden must be allowed to be richer in provocation; there is distinctly more fancy in its conceits, and its style is more absolute and circ.u.mspect than the English. And yet, just as Browning says of imperfection, that it may sometimes mean "perfection hid," so, here our deficiencies may not mean defects.

In order that we may compare the English and foreign garden we must place them on common ground; and I will liken each to a pastoral romance. Nature is idealised, treated fancifully in each, yet how different the quality of the contents, the method of presentment, the style, the technique of this and that, even when the design is contemporaneous!

A garden is, I say, a sort of pastoral romance, woven upon a background of natural scenery. In the exercise of his pictorial genius, both the foreign and English artist shall run upon natural things, and transcribe Nature imaginatively yet realisably; each composition shall have a pastoral air, and be rustic after its fashion. But how different the platform, how different the mental complexion, the technique of the artists! How different the detail and the atmosphere of the garden. The rusticity of the foreign garden is dished up in a more delectable form than is the case in the English, but there is not the same open-air feeling about this as about that; it does not convey the same sense of unexhausted possibilities--not the same tokens of living enjoyment of Nature, of heart-to-heart fellowship with her. The foreign garden is over-wrought, too full: it is a pa.s.sionless thing--like the gaudy birds of India, finely plumed but songless; like the prize rose, without sweetness.

Of the garden of Italy, who shall dare to speak critically. Child of tradition: heir by unbroken descent, inheritor of the garden-craft of the whole civilised world. It stands on a pinnacle high above the others, peerless and alone: fit for the loveliest of lands--

... "Woman-country, wooed not wed, Loved all the more by Earth's male-lands, Laid to their hearts instead"--

and it may yet be seen upon its splendid scale, splendidly adorned, with straight terraces, marble statues, clipped ilex and box, walks bordered with azalea and camellia, surrounded with groves of pines and cypresses--so frankly artistic, yet so subtly blending itself into the natural surroundings--into the distant plain, the fringe of purple hills, the gorgeous panorama of the Alps with its background of glowing sky. With such a radiant country to conjure with, we may truly say "The richly provided, richly require."

If we may speak our mind of the French and Dutch gardens, they in no wise satisfy English taste as regards their relation to Nature. Diderot has said that it is the peculiarity of the French to judge everything with the mind. It is from this standpoint that the Frenchman treats Nature in a garden. He is ever seeking to unite the accessory portions with the _ensemble_. He overdoes design. He gives you the impression that he is far more in love with his own ideas about Nature than with Nature herself; that he uses her resources not to interpret them or perfect them along their own lines, but express his own interesting ideas. He must provide stimulus for his imagination; his nature demands food for reverie, point for ecstasy, for delicious self-abandonment, for bedazzlement with ideal beauty, and the garden shall supply him with these whatever the cost to the materials employed. Hence a certain unscrupulousness towards Nature in the French garden; hence the daring picturesqueness, its legerdemain. Nature edited thus, is to the Englishman but Nature in effigy, Nature used as a peg for fantastical attire, Nature with a false l.u.s.tre that tells of lead alloy--Nature that has forgotten what she is like.

In an English garden, as Diderot notes, Nature is handled with more reverence, her rights are more respected. I am willing to allow that something of the reserve traceable in English art is begotten of the phlegmatic temper of the race that rarely gets beyond a quiescent fervour; and this temper, exhibited in a garden would incline us always to let well alone and not press things too hard. If the qualities of an English garden that I speak of are to be attributed to this temper, then, to judge by results, _laissez faire_ is not a bad motto for the gardener! Certain it is that the dominance of man is more hinted at here than proclaimed. Compared with foreign examples we sooner read through its quaintnesses and braveries their sweet originals in Nature: nay, even when we have idealised things to our hearts' full bent, they shall yet retain the very note and rhythm of the woodland world from whence they sprang--"English in all, of genius blithely free."[21]

[Footnote 21: Lowell's "Ode to Fielding."]

And this is true even in that extreme case, the Jacobean garden, where we have much the same quips and cranks, the same quaint power of metrical changes and playful fancy of the poetry of Herbert, Vaughan, Herrick, and Donne; even the little clean-cut pedantries of this artfullest of all phases of English garden-craft make for a kind of bland stateliness and high-flown serenity, that bases its appeal upon placid beauty rather than upon mere ingenuity or specious extravagance.

The conventionalities of its borders, its terraces and steps and images in lead or marble, its ornamental water, its trim geometrical patterns, its quincunx, clipped hedges, high hedges, and architectural adornments shall be balanced by great sweeps of lawn and n.o.ble trees that are not constrained to take hands, as in France, across the road and to look proper, but are left to grow large and thick and wide and free. True that there is about the Jacobean garden an air of scholarliness and courtliness; a flavour of dreamland, Arcadia, and Italy--a touch of the archaic and cla.s.sical--yet the thing is saved from utter affectation by our English out-of-door life which has bred in us an innate love of the unconstrained, a sympathy that keeps its hold on reality, and these give an undefinable quality of freshness to the composition as a whole.[22]

[Footnote 22: "Mr _Evelyn_ has a pleasant villa at _Deptford_," writes Gibson, "a fine garden for walks and hedges (especially his holly one which he writes of in his 'Sylva') ... In his garden he has four large round philareas, smooth-clipped, raised on a single stalk from the ground, a fashion now much used. _Part of his garden is very woody and shady for walking_; but his garden not being walled, has little of the best fruits."]

To sum up. The main difference in the character of the English and the foreign schools of gardening lies in this, that the design of the foreign leans ever in the direction of artificiality, that of England towards natural freedom. And a true garden should have an equal regard for Nature and Art; it should represent a marriage of contraries, should combine finesse and audacity, subtilty and simplicity, the regular and the unexpected, the ideal and the real "bound fast in one with golden ease." In a French or Dutch garden the "yes" and "no" of Art and Nature are always unequally yoked. Nature is treated with spa.r.s.e courtesy by Art, its individuality is ignored, it sweats like a drudge under its load of false sentiment. "Sike fancies weren foolerie."

But in England, though we hold Nature in duress, we leave her unbound; if we mew her up for cultivation, we leave her inviolate, with a chance of vagrant liberty and a way of escape. Thus, you will note how the English garden stops, as it were, without ending. Around or near the house will be the ordered garden with terraces and architectural accessories, all trim and fit and nice. Then comes the smooth-shaven lawn, studded and belted round with fine trees, arranged as it seems with a divine carelessness; and beyond the lawn, the ferny heather-turf of the park, where the dappled deer browse and the rabbits run wild, and the sun-chequered glades go out to meet, and lose themselves "by green degrees" in the approaching woodland,--past the river glen, the steep fields of gra.s.s and corn, the cottages and stackyards and grey church tower of the village; past the ridge of fir-land and the dark sweep of heath-country into the dim waving lines of blue distance.

So that however self-contained, however self-centred the stiff old garden may seem to be, it never loses touch with the picturesque commonplaces of our land; never loses sympathy with the green world at large, but, in a sense, embraces and locks in its arms the whole country-side as far as eye can see.

CHAPTER IV.

HISTORICAL SKETCH--CONTINUED.

THE STIFF GARDEN.

"All is fine that is fit."