ON ART IN A GARDEN.
"O world, as God has made it! All is beauty."
ROBERT BROWNING.
In dealing with our second point--the ornamental treatment that is fit
and right for a garden--we are naturally brought into contact with the
good and bad points of both the old and the new systems of gardening.
This being so, it may be well at once to notice the claims of the modern
"Landscape-gardener" to monopolise to himself all the right principles
of garden-craft: all other moods than his are low, all figures other
than his are symbols of error, all dealings with Nature other than his
are mere distortions.
If you have any acquaintance with books upon landscape-gardening written
by its professors or their admirers, you will have learnt that in the
first half of the eighteenth century, two heaven-directed geniuses--Kent
and Brown--all of a sudden stumbled upon the green world of old England,
and, perceiving its rural beauties, and the hitherto unexplored
opportunities for ornamental display that the country afforded, these
two put their heads together, and out of their combined cogitations
sprang the English garden.
This, in brief, is what the landscape-gardener and his adherents say,
and would have you believe; and, to prove their point, they lay stress
upon the style of garden in vogue at the time Kent and Brown began their
experiments, when, forsooth, traditional garden-craft was in its dotage
and had lost its way in the paths of pedantry.
Should you, however, chance to have some actual knowledge of old
gardens, and some insight into the principles which, consciously or
unconsciously governed their making, it may occur to you to ask the
precise points wherein the new methods claim to be different from the
old, what sources of inspiration were discovered by the new school of
gardeners that were not shared by English gardeners from time
immemorial. Are there, then, _two_ arts of gardening? or two sorts of
Englishmen to please? Is not modern garden-craft identical with the old,
so far, indeed, as it hath art enough to stand any comparison with the
other at all?
Let us here point to the fact, that any garden whatsoever is but Nature
idealised, pastoral scenery rendered in a fanciful manner. It matters
not what the date, size, or style of the garden, it represents an
idealisation of Nature. _Real_ nature exists outside the artist and
apart from him. The Ideal is that which the artist conceives to be an
interpretation of the outside objects, or that which he adds to the
objects. The garden gives imaginative form to emotions the natural
objects have awakened in man. The _raison d'etre_ of a garden is man's
feeling the _ensemble_.
One fine day you take your architect for a jaunt along a country-lane,
until stopping shyly in front of a five-barred gate, over which is
nailed an ominous notice-board, you introduce him to your small
property, the site of your new house. It is a field very much like the
neighbouring fields--at least, so think the moles, and the rooks, and
the rabbits; not you, for here is to be your "seat" for life; and before
you have done with it, the whole country far and near will be taught to
look as though it radiated round the site and the house you will build
upon it--an honour of which, truth compels me to say, the land betrays
not the remotest presentiment just now!
The field in question may be flat or undulating, it may be the lap of a
hillside, the edge of a moor, a treeless stretch of furrowed land with
traces of "rude mechanical's" usage, or suggestions of mutton or
mangels. The particular character of the place, or its precise
agricultural past, matters not, however; suffice it to say that it is a
bit of raw, and more or less ungroomed, Nature.
Upon this plain, unadorned field, you set your man of imagination to
work. He must absorb both it and its whole surroundings into his brain,
and seize upon all its capabilities. He must produce symmetry and
balance where now are ragged outlines of hillocks and ridges. He must
trim and cherish the trees here, abolish the tree there; enlarge this
slope, level that; open out a partial peep of blue distance here, or a
gleam of silver water there. He must terrace the slope, step by step,
towards the stream at the base, select the sunniest spots for the
flower-beds, and arrange how best the gardens at their varying levels
shall be approached or viewed from the house. In this way and that he
must so manoeuvre the perspective and the lights and shades, so
compose or continue the sectional lines and general bearings of the
ground as to enforce the good points that exist, and draw out the latent
possibilities of the place, and this with as easy a hand, and as fine
tact as the man can muster.
And now to come to our point. A dressed garden, I said, is Nature
idealised--pastoral scenery put fancifully, in man's way. A gardener is
a master of what the French writer calls "the charming art of touching
up the truth."
Emerson observes that all the Arts have their origin in some enthusiasm;
and the art of gardening has for its root, man's enthusiasm for the
woodland world. It indicates a taste for flowers and trees and
landscapes. It is admiration that has, so to speak, passed from the
stage of emotion to that of form. A garden is the result of the
emulation which the vision of beauty in the world at large is ever
provoking in man--
"Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
While the landskip round it measures."
What of Nature has affected man on various occasions, what has pleased
his eye in different moods, played upon his emotions, pricked his fancy,
suggested reverie, stirred vague yearnings, brought a sense of quickened
joy--pastoral scenery, the music of leaves and waters, the hues and
sweetness of country flowers, the gladness of colour, picturesque form
of tree or contour of land, spring's bright laugh, autumn's glow,
summer's bravery, winter's grey blanched face--each thing that has gone
home to him has, in its way, fostered in man the garden mania. Inspired
by their beauty and mystery, he has gathered them to himself about his
home, has made a microcosm out of the various detached details which sum
up the qualities, features, and aspects of the open country; and the art
of this little recreated world is measured by the happy union of
naturalness and of calculated effect.
What sources of inspiration were discovered by the new school of
gardeners, I asked a moment ago, which were not shared by English
gardeners from time immemorial? The art of gardening, I said, has its
root in man's enthusiasm for the woodland world. See how closely the
people of old days must have observed the sylvan sights of Nature, the
embroidery of the meadows, the livery of the woods at different seasons,
or they would not have been capable of building up that piece of hoarded
loveliness, the old-fashioned English garden!
The pleasaunce of old days has been mostly stubbed up by the modern
"landscape gardener," but if no traces of them were left we have still
here and there the well-schemed surroundings of our English
homes--park, avenue, wood, and water--the romantic scenery that hems in
Tintern, Fountains, Dunster, to testify to the inborn genius of the
English for planting. If the tree, shrub, and flower be gone from the
grounds outside the old Tudor mansion, there still remains the
blue-green world in the tapestries upon the walls, with their airy
landscapes of trees and hills, hanging-gardens, flower-beds, terraces,
and embowered nooks--a little fantastical it may be, but none the less
eloquent of appreciation of natural beauty not confined to the gardener,
but shared by the artist-maid, who
... "with her neeld composes
Nature's own shape, of bird, branch, or berry,
That even Art sisters the natural roses."
And should these relics be gone, we still have the books in the library,
rich in Nature-allusion. The simple ecstasies of the early ballad in the
opening stanzas of "Robin Hood and the Monk"--
"In somer when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and longe,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song;
To se the dere draw to the dale,
And leve the hilles hee,
And shadow hem in the leves grene,
Under the grene-wode tre";
or in a "Musical Dreame"--
"Now wend we home, stout Robin Hood,
Leave we the woods behind us.
Love passions must not be withstood,
Love everywhere will find us.
I livde in fielde and downe, and so did he;
I got me to the woods, love followed me."
or shall we hear tell from Chaucer how
"When that Aprille, with his showres swoot
The drought of March hath pierced to the root,
* * * * *
Then longen folk to gone on pilgrimages."
Or hear from Stowe how the cockney of olden days "In the month of May,
namely, on May-day in the morning, every man, except impediment, would
walk in the sweet meddowes and green woods, ther to rejoyce their
spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers and with the
harmonie of birds praysing God in their kinde."
Or shall we turn to Shakespeare's bright incidental touches of
nature-description as in Perdita's musical enumeration of the flowers of
the old stiff garden-borders "to make you garlands of," or the Queen's
bit in "Hamlet," beginning
"There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream."
Or to the old Herbals of Wyer, and Turner, and Gerard, whom Richard
Jefferies[14] pictures walking about our English lanes in old days?
"What wonderful scenes he must have viewed when they were all a tangle
of wild flowers, and plants that are now scarce were common, and the old
ploughs and the curious customs, and the wild red-deer--it would make a
good picture, it really would, Gerard studying English orchids!"
[Footnote 14: "Field and Hedgerow," p. 27.]
Or shall we take down the classic volumes of Bacon, Temple, Evelyn,
Cowley, Isaak Walton, Gilbert White, each in his day testifying to the
inborn love of the English for woodland scenery, their study of nature,
and their taste in trees, shrubs, and flowers. What a vindication is
here of the old-fashioned garden and gardener! What nonsense to set up
Kent and Brown as the discoverers of the green world of old England,
when, as Mr Hamerton remarks in "The Sylvan Year" (p. 173), Chaucer
hardly knows how or when to stop whenever he begins to talk about his
enjoyment of Nature. "Chaucer," he says, "in his passion for flowers,
and birds, and spring mornings in the woods, and by streams, is hard to
quote, for he leads you down to the bottom of the page, and over the
leaf, before you have time to pause."
The question now before us--"What ornament is fit and right for a
garden?"--of itself implies a tendency to err in the direction of
ornament. We see that on the face of it the transposition of the simple
of Nature into the subtle of Art has its dangers. Something may be put,
or something may be left, which were best absent. This may be taken as
an established fact. In making a garden you start with the assumption
that something must be sacrificed of wild Nature, and something must be
superadded, and that which is superadded is not properly of this real,
visible world, but of the world of man's brain.
The very enclosure of our garden-spaces signifies that Nature is held in
duress here. Nature of herself cannot rise above Nature, and man, seeing
perfections through her imperfections, capacities through her
incapacities, shuts her in for cultivation, binds her feet, as it were,
with the silken cord of art-constraint, and puts a gloss of intention
upon her every feature.
In a garden Nature is not to be her simple self, but is to be subject to
man's conditions, his choice, his rejection. Let us briefly see, now,
what conditions man may fairly impose upon Nature--what lengths he may
legitimately go in the way of mimicry of natural effects or of
conventionalism. Both books and our own observation tell us that where
the past generations of gardeners have erred it has been through a
misconception of the due proportions of realism and of idealism to be
admitted into a garden. At this time, in this phase, it was _Art_, in
that phase it was _Nature_, that was carried too far; here design was
given too much rein, there not rein enough, and people in their silly
revolt against Art have gone straight for the "veracities of Nature,"
copying her features, dead or alive, outright, without discrimination as
to their fitness for imitation, or their suitableness to the position
assigned to them. To what extent, we ask, may the forms of Nature be
copied or recast? What are the limits to which man may carry ideal
portraiture of Nature for the purposes of Art? Questions like these
would, of course, only occur to a curious, debating age like ours; but
put this way or that they keep alive the eternal problems of man's
standing to the world of Nature, the laws of idealism and realism, the
nice distinctions of "more and less."
Now, it is not everything in Nature that can, or that may be,
artificially expressed in a garden; nor are the things that it is
permissible to use, of equal application everywhere. It were a palpable
mistake, an artistic crime, so to speak, to follow the wild flights of
Salvator Rosa and Gaspar Poussin, and with them to attempt a little
amateur creation in the way of rent rocks, tumbled hillsides, and ruins
that suggest a recent geological catastrophe, or antique monsters, or
that imply by the scenery that we are living in the days of wattled
abodes and savages with flint hatchets. Much, of course, may be done in
this line in these days as in the past, if only one have sufficient
audacity and a volcanic mind; yet, when it is done, both the value and
the rightness of the art of the thing is questionable. "Canst thou catch
Leviathan with a hook?" The primaeval throes, the grand stupendous
imagery of Nature should be held in more reverence. It were almost as
fit to harness a polar bear to the gardener's mowing-machine as seek to
appropriate the eerie phenomena of Nature in her untamed moods for the
ornamental purposes of a garden. And as to the result of such work, the
ass draped in the lion's skin, roaring horribly, with peaked snout and
awkward shanks visible all the while, is not more ridiculous than the
thinly-veiled savagery of an Italian garden of the seventeenth century.
Here, then, I think we have some guidance as to the principles which
should regulate the choice of the "properties" that are fit for the
scenic show of a garden. We should follow the dictates of good taste
and of common sense. Of things applied direct from Nature the line
should be drawn at the gigantesque, the elemental, the sad, the
gruesome, the crude. True, that in art of another kind--in Architecture
or in Music--the artistic equivalents of these qualities may find place,
but as garden effects they are eminently unsuitable, except, indeed,
where it is desired to perpetrate a grim joke.
Beyond these limitations, however, all is open ground for the
imaginative handling of the true gardener; and what a noble residue
remains! Nature in her health and wealth--green, opulent, lusty Nature
is at his feet. Of things gay, debonair, subtle, and refined--things
that stir poetic feelings or that give joy--he may take to himself and
conjure with to the top of his bent. It is for him as for the poet in
Sir Philip's Sidney's words--"So as he goeth hand in hand with Nature,
not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging
within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so
rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant
rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may
make the too-much loved earth more lovely: her world is brazen, _the
poets only deliver a golden_."
Animated with corresponding desire, the gardener resorts to lovely
places in this "too-much loved earth," there to find his stock-in-trade
and learn his craft. We watch him as he hies to the bravery of the
spring-flowers in sunny forest-glades; to meadow-flats where lie the
golden host of daffodils, the lady-smocks, and snake-spotted
fritillaries; we see him bend his way to the field of bluebells, the
hill of primroses that with
"their infinitie
Make a terrestrial gallaxie
As the smal starres do the skie;"
we follow him to the tangled thicket with its meandering walks carpeted
with anemones and hung over with sweet-scented climbers; to the sombre
boskage of the wood, where the shadows leap from their ambush in
unexpected places and the brown bird's song floats upon the wings of
silence: to the green dell with its sequestered pool edged round with
alders, and willow-herb, and king-fern, and mountain-ash afire with
golden fruit: to the corn-field "a-flutter with poppies": to the
broad-terraced downs--its short, springy turf dotted over with white
sheets of thorn-blossom: to the leaping, shining mountain-tarn that
comes foaming out of the wood: to the pine-grove with its columned
blackness and dense thatch of boughs that lisp the message of the wind,
and "teach light to counterfeit a gloom"; to the widespread landscape
with its undulating forest, its clumps of foliage, its gleams of
white-beam, silver-birch, or golden yew, amid the dark blue of firs and
hollies; its emerald meadows, yellow gorse-covers and purple heather;
the many tones of leafage in the spring and fall of the year.
And here I give but a few random sketches of Nature, taken almost at
random from the portfolio of her painted delights--a dozen or more
vignettes, shall we say?--ready-made for garden-distribution in bed,
bank, wilderness, and park; things which the old gardener freely
employed; features and images which he transferred to his dressed
grounds, not copying them minutely but in an ideal manner; mixing his
fancy with their fact, his compulsion with their consent; flavouring the
simple with a dash of the strange and marvellous, combining dreams and
actualities, things seen, with things born "within the zodiac of his own
wit"; frankly throwing into the compacted glamour of the place all that
will give _eclat_ to Nature and teach men to apprehend new joy.
So, then, after separating the brazen from the golden in Nature--after
excluding "properties" of the woodland world which are demonstrably
unfit for the scenic show of a garden, how ample the scope for artistic
creation in the things that remain! And, given an acre or two of land
that has some natural capabilities, some charm of environment--given a
generous client, a bevy of workmen, horses and carts, and, prime
necessity of all, a pleasant homestead in the foreground to prompt its
own adornment and be the centre of your efforts, and, upon the basis of
these old tracks of Nature and old themes of Art, what may not one hope
to achieve of pretty garden-effects that shall please the eye, flatter
the taste, and captivate the imagination of such as love Beauty!