HISTORICAL SKETCH--CONTINUED.
THE STIFF GARDEN.
"All is fine that is fit."
The English garden, as I have just tried to sketch it, was not born
yesterday, the bombastic child of a landscape-gardener's recipe. It
epitomises a nation's instincts in garden-craft; it is the slow result
of old affection for, old wonder at, beauty in forms, colours, tones;
old enthusiasm for green turf, wild flower, and forest tree. Take it at
its best, it records the matured taste of a people of Nature-readers,
Nature-lovers: it is that which experience has proved to be in most
accord with the character and climate of the country, and the genius of
the race.
Landscape has been from the first the central tradition of English art.
Life spent amidst pictorial scenery like ours that is striking in itself
and rendered more impressive and animated by the rapid atmospheric
changes, the shifting lights and shadows, the life and movement in the
sky, and the vivid intense colouring of our moist climate, has given our
tastes a decided bent this way, and fashioned our Arts of Poetry,
Painting, and Gardening. Out-of-door life among such scenery puts our
senses on the alert, and the impressions of natural phenomena supply our
device with all its images.
The English people had not to wait till the eighteenth century to know
to what they were inclined, or what would suit their country's
adornment. From first to last, we have said, the English garden deals
much with trees and shrubs and grass. The thought of them, and the
artistic opportunities they offer, is present in the minds of
accomplished garden-masters, travelled men, initiated spirits, like Sir
Thomas More, Bacon, Shaftesbury, Temple, and Evelyn, whose aim is to
give garden-craft all the method and distinctness of which it is
capable. However saturated with aristocratic ideas the courtier-gardener
may be, however learned in the circumspect style of the Italian, he
retains his native relish for the woodland world, and babbles of green
fields. A sixteenth-century English gardener (Gerarde) adjured his
countrymen to "Go forwarde in the name of God, graffe, set, plant, and
nourishe up trees in every corner of your grounde." A
seventeenth-century gardener (Evelyn) had ornamental landscape and shady
woods in his garden as well as pretty beds of choice flowers.
"There are, besides the temper of our climate," writes another
seventeenth-century garden-worthy (Temple), "two things particular to
us, that contribute to the beauty and elegance of our gardens, which are
the gravel of our walks and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness
of our turf; the first is not known anywhere else, which leaves all
their dry walks in other countries very unpleasant and uneasy; the other
cannot be found in France or in Holland as we have it, the soil not
admitting that fineness of blade in Holland, nor the sun that greenness
in France during most of the summer." And following upon this is a long
essay upon the ornamental disposition of the grounds in an English
garden and the culture of fruit trees. "I will not enter upon any
account of flowers," he says, "having only pleased myself with the care,
which is more the ladies' part than the men's,[23] but the success is
wholly in the gardener."
[Footnote 23: This remark of Temple's as to the small importance the
flower-beds had in the mind of the gardener of his day, is significant:
as indicating the different methods employed by the ancient and modern
gardener. It was not that he was not "pleased with the care" of flowers,
but that these were not his chiefest care; his prime idea was to get
broad, massive, well-defined effects in his garden generally. Hence the
monumental style of the old-fashioned garden, the carefully-disposed
ground, the formality, the well-considered poise and counter-poise, the
varying levels and well-defined parts. And only inwoven, as it were,
into the argument of the piece, are its pretty parts, used much as the
jewellery of a fair woman. I should be sorry to be so unjust to the
modern landscape gardener as to accuse him of caring over-much for
flowers, but of his garden-device generally one may fairly say it has no
monumental style, no ordered shape other than its carefully-schemed
_disorder_. It is not a masculine affair, but effeminate and niggling; a
little park-scenery, curved shrubberies, wriggling paths, emphasised
specimen plants, and flower-beds of more or less inane shape tumbled
down on the skirts of the lawn or drive, that do more harm than good to
the effect of the place, seen near or at a distance. How true it is that
to believe in Art one must be an artist!]
And Bacon is not so wholly enamoured of Arcadia and with the embodiment
of far-brought fancies in his "prince-like" garden as to be callous of
Nature's share therein. "The contents ought not well to be under thirty
acres of ground, and to be divided into three parts; a green in the
entrance, a heath or desert in the going forth, and the main garden in
the midst, besides alleys on both sides; and I like well that four acres
be assigned to the Green, six to the Heath, four and four to either
side, and twelve to the main Garden. The Green hath two pleasures: the
one, because nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept
finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the
midst, by which you may go in front upon a stately hedge, which is to
enclose the garden." "For the heath, which was the third part of our
plot, I wished it be framed as much as may be to a natural wildness,"
&c. Of which more anon.[24]
[Footnote 24: Nonsuch had its wilderness of ten acres.]
Whether the garden of Bacon's essay is the portrait of an actual thing,
whether the writer--to use a phrase of Wordsworth--"had his eye upon the
subject," or whether it was built in the man's brain like Tennyson's
"Palace of Art," we cannot tell. From the singular air of experience
that animates the description, the sure touch of the writer, we may
infer that Gorhambury had some such garden, the fruit of its master's
"Leisure with honour," or "Leisure without honour," as the case may be.
But what seems certain is, that the essay is only a sign of the ordinary
English gentleman's mind on the subject at that time; and in giving us
this masterpiece, Bacon had no more notion of posing as the founder of
the English garden (_pace_ Brown) than of getting himself labelled as
the founder of Modern Science for his distinguished labours in that
line. "I only sound the clarion," he says, "but I enter not into the
battle."
Moderns are pleased to smile at what they deem the over-subtilty of
Bacon's ideal garden. For my own part, I find nothing recommended there
that a "princely garden" should not fitly contain (especially as these
things are all of a-piece with the device of the period), even to those
imagination-stirring features which one thinks he may have described,
not from the life, but from the figures in "The Dream of Poliphilus" (a
book of woodcuts published in Venice, 1499), features of the Enchanted
Island, to wit the two fountains--the first to spout water, to be
adorned with ornaments of images, gilt or of marble; the "other, which
we may call a bathing-pool that admits of much curiosity and beauty
wherewith we will not trouble ourselves; as that the bottom be finely
paved with images, the sides likewise; and withal embellished with
coloured glass, and such things of lustre; encompassed also with fine
rails of low statues."[25]
[Footnote 25: _Nineteenth Century Magazine_, July, 1890.]
No artist is disposed to apologise for the presence of subtilty in Art,
nor I for the subtle device of Bacon's garden. All Art is cunning. Yet
we must not simply note the deep intent of the old master, but must
equally recognise the air of gravity that pervades his
recommendations--the sweet reasonableness of suggestions for design
that have as much regard for the veracities of Nature, and the dictates
of common-sense, as for the nice elegancies and well-calculated
audacities of consummate Art.
"I only sound the clarion, but I enter not into the battle." Even so,
Master! we will hold thy hand as far as thou wilt go; and the clarion
thou soundest right well, and most serviceably for all future gardeners!
I like the ring of stout challenge in the opening words, which command
respect for the subject, and, if rightly construed, should make the
heretic "landscape gardener,"--who dotes on meagre country-grass and
gipsy scenery--pause in his denunciation of Art in a garden. "God
almighty first planted a Garden; and indeed it is the purest of humane
pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the Spirits of man, without
which Buildings and Palaces are but gross Handyworks. And a man shall
ever see, that when ages grow to Civility and Elegancy, men come to
build stately sooner than to garden finely: as if Gardening were the
Greater Perfection."
This first paragraph has, for me, something of the stately tramp and
pregnant meaning of the opening phrase of "At a Solemn Music." The
praise of gardening can no further go. To say more were impossible. To
say less were to belittle your subject. I think of Ben Jonson's simile,
"They jump farthest who fetch their race largest." For Bacon "fetches"
his subject back to "In the beginning," and prophesies of all time.
Thus does he lift his theme to its full height at starting, and the
remainder holds to the same heroic measure.
If the ideal garden be fanciful, it is also grand and impressive. Nor
could it well be otherwise. For when the essay was written fine
gardening was in the air, and the master had special opportunities for
studying and enjoying great gardens. More than this, Bacon was an apt
craftsman in many fields, a born artist, gifted with an imagination at
once rich and curious, whose performances of every sort declare the
student's love of form, and the artist's nice discrimination of
expression. Then, too, his mind was set upon the conquest of Nature, of
which gardening is a province, for the service of man, for physical
enjoyment, and for the increase of social comfort. Yet was he an
Englishman first, and a fine gardener afterwards. Admit the author's
sense of the delights of art-magic in a garden, none esteemed them more,
yet own the discreet economy of his imaginative strokes, the homely
bluntness of his criticisms upon foreign vagaries, the English
sane-mindedness of his points, his feeling for broad effects and dislike
of niggling, the mingled shrewdness and benignity of his way of putting
things. It is just because Bacon thus treats of idealisms as though they
were realisms, because he so skilfully wraps up his fanciful figures in
matter-of-fact language that even the ordinary English reader
appreciates the art of Bacon's stiff garden, and entertains
art-aspirations unawares.
Every reader of Bacon will recognise what I wish to point out. Here,
however, are a few examples:--
"For the ordering of the Ground within the Great Hedge, I leave it to a
Variety of Device. Advising, nevertheless, that whatsoever form you cast
it into; first it be not too busie, or full of work; wherein I, for my
part, do not like Images cut out in Juniper, or other garden stuffs;
_they are for Children_. Little low Hedges, round like Welts, with some
pretty Pyramids, I like well; and in some places Fair Columns upon
Frames of Carpenters' work. I would also have the Alleys spacious and
fair."
"As for the making of Knots or Figures, with Divers Coloured earths,
that they may lie under the windows of the House, on that side which the
Garden stands, _they be but Toys, you may see as good sights many
times in Tarts_."
"For Fountains, they are a Great Beauty and Refreshment, _but Pools mar
all, and make the Garden unwholesome and full of flies and frogs_."
"For fine Devices, of arching water without spilling, and making it rise
in several forms (of Feathers, Drinking Glasses, Canopies, and the like)
(see "The Dream of Poliphilus") _they be pretty things to look on, but
nothing to Health and Sweetness_."
Thus throughout the Essay, with alternate rise and fall, do fancy and
judgment deliver themselves of charge and retort, making a kind of
logical see-saw. At the onset Fancy kicks the beam; at the middle,
Judgment is in the ascendant, and before the sentence is done the
balance rides easy. And this scrupulousness is not to be wholly
ascribed to the fastidious bent of a mind that lived in a labyrinth; it
speaks equally of the fineness of the man's ideal, which lifts his
standard sky-high and keeps him watchful to a fault in attaining desired
effects without running upon "trifles and jingles." The master-text of
the whole Essay seems to be the writer's own apothegm: "Nature is
commanded by obeying her."
That a true gardener should love Nature goes without saying. And Bacon
loved Nature passionately, and gardens only too well. He tells us these
were his favourite sins in the strange document--half prayer, half
Apologia--written after he had made his will, at the time of his fall,
when he presumably concluded that _anything_ might happen. "Thy
creatures have been my books, but Thy Scriptures much more. I have
sought Thee in the courts, fields, and gardens, but I have found Thee in
Thy temples."
Three more points about the essay I would like to comment upon. First,
That in spite of its lofty dreaming, it treats of the hard and dry side
of gardening as a science in so methodical a manner that but for what it
contains besides, and for its mint-mark of a great spirit, the thing
might pass as an extract from a more-than-ordinary practical gardener's
manual. Bacon does not write upon the subject like a man in another
planet, but like a man in a land of living men.
Secondly, As to the attitude of Bacon and his school towards external
Nature. In them is no trace of the mawkish sentimentality of the modern
"landscape-gardener," proud of his discoveries, bustling to show how
condescending he can be towards Nature, how susceptible to a pastoral
melancholy. There is nothing here of the maundering of Shenstone over
his ideal landscape-garden that reads as though it would be a superior
sort of pedants' Cremorne, where "the lover's walk may have assignation
seats, with proper mottoes, urns to faithful lovers, trophies, garlands,
etc., by means of Art"; and where due consideration is to be given to
"certain complexions of soul that will prefer an orange tree or a myrtle
to an oak or cedar." The older men thought first of the effects that
they wished to attain, and proceeded to realise them without more ado.
They had no "codes of taste" to appeal to, and no literary law-givers to
stand in dread of. They applied Nature's raw materials as their art
required. And yet, compared with the methods of the heavy-handed realist
of later times such unscrupulousness had a merit of its own. To suit
their purposes the old gardeners may have defied Nature's ways and wont;
but, even so, they act as fine gentlemen should: they never pet and
patronise her: they have no blunt and blundering methods such as mark
the Nature-maulers of the Brown or Batty-Langley school: if they cut,
they do not mince, nor hack, nor tear, they cut clean. In one's better
moments one can almost sympathise with the "landscape-gardener's"
feelings as he reads, if he ever does read, Evelyn's classic book
"Sylva; or, a Discourse of Forest-trees," how they trimmed the hedges
of hornbeam, "than which there is nothing more graceful," and the cradle
or close-walk with that perplext canopy which lately covered the seat in
his Majesty's garden at Hampton Court, and how the tonsile hedges,
fifteen or twenty feet high, are to be cut and kept in order "with a
scythe of four feet long, and very little falcated; this is fixed on a
long sneed or straight handle, and _does wonderfully expedite the
trimming of these and the like hedges_."
Thirdly, Bacon's essay tells us all that an English garden _can_ be, or
_may_ be. Bacon writes not for his age alone but for all time; nay, his
essay covers so much ground that the legion of after-writers have only
to pick up the crumbs that fall from this rich man's table, and to
amplify the two hundred and sixty lines of condensed wisdom that it
contains. Its category of effects reaches even the free-and-easy
planting of the skirts of our dressed grounds, with flowers and shrubs
set in the turf "framed as much as may be to a natural wildness"--a
pretty trick of compromise which the modern book-writers would have us
believe they invented themselves.
On one point the modern garden has the advantage and is bound to excel
the old, namely in its employment of foreign trees and shrubs. The
decorative use of "trees of curiosity," as the foreign trees were then
called, and the employment of variegated foliage, was not unknown to the
gardener of early days, but it was long before foreign plants were
introduced to any great extent. Loudon has taken the trouble to reckon
up the number of specimens that came to England century by century, and
we gather from this that the imports of modern times exceed those of
earlier times to an enormous extent. Thus, he computes that only 131 new
specimens of foreign trees were introduced into England in the
seventeenth century as against 445 in the following century.
Yet, to follow up this interesting point, we may observe that Heutzner,
writing of English gardens in 1598, specially notes "the great variety
of trees and plants at Theobalds."
Furthermore, to judge by Worlidge's "Systema Horticulturae" (1677) it
would seem that the practice of variegating, and of combining the
variegated foliage of plants and shrubs, was in existence at that time.
"Dr Uvedale, of Enfield, is a great lover of plants," says Gibson,
writing in 1691, "and is become master of the greatest and choicest
collection of exotic greens that is perhaps anywhere in this land....
His flowers are choice, his stock numerous, and his culture of them very
methodical and curious; but to speak of the garden in the whole, it does
not lie fine to please the eye, his delight and care lying more in the
ordering particular plants, than in the pleasing view and form of his
garden."
"_Darby_, at _Hoxton_, has but a little garden, but is master of several
curious greens.... His Fritalaria Crassa (a green) had a flower on it of
the breadth of half-a-crown, like an embroidered star of many
colours.... He raises many striped hollies by inoculation," &c.
("Gleanings in Old Garden Literature," Hazlitt, p. 240.)
And yet one last observation I would like to make, remembering Bacon's
subtilty, and how his every utterance is the sum of matured analytical
thought. This yearning for wild nature that makes itself felt all
through the Essay, this scheme for a "natural wildness" touching the hem
of artificiality; this provision for mounts of some pretty height "to
look abroad in the fields"; this care for the "Heath or Desart in the
going forth, planted not in any order;" the "little Heaps in the Nature
of Molehills (such as are in wild Heaths) to be set with pleasant herbs,
wild thyme, pinks, periwinkle, and the like Low Flowers being withall
sweet and sightly"--what does it imply? Primarily, it declares the
artist who knows the value of contrast, the interest of blended
contrariness; it is the cultured man's hankering after a many-faced
Nature readily accessible to him in his many moods; it tells, too, of
the drift of the Englishman towards familiar landscape effects, the
garden-mimicry which sets towards pastoral Nature; but above and beyond
all else, it is a true Baconian stroke. Is not the man's innermost self
here revealed, who in his eagerest moments struggled for detachment of
mind, held his will in leash according to his own astute maxim "not to
engage oneself too peremptorily in anything, but ever to have either a
window open to fly out of, or a secret way to retire by"? In a sense,
the garden's technique illustrates its author's personality. To change
Montaigne's reply to the king who admired his essays, Bacon might say,
"I am my garden."
Many references to old garden-craft might be given culled from the
writings of Sir Thomas More, John Lyly, Gawen Douglas, John Gerarde, Sir
Philip Sidney, and others; all of whom are quoted in Mr Sieveking's
charming volume, "The praise of Gardens." But none will serve our
purpose so well as the notes of Heutzner, the German traveller, who
visited England in the 16th century, and Sir William Temple's
description of the garden of Moor Park. According to Heutzner, the
gardens at Theobalds, Nonsuch, Whitehall, Hampton Court, and Oxford were
laid out with considerable taste and extensively ornamented with
architectural and other devices. The Palace at Nonsuch is encompassed
with parks full of deer, with delicious gardens, groves ornamented with
trellis-work, cabinets of verdure, and walks enclosed with trees. "In
the pleasure and artificial gardens are many columns and pyramids of
marble, two fountains that spout water one round the other like a
pyramid, upon which are perched small birds that stream water out of
their bills. In the grove of Diana is a very agreeable fountain, with
Actaeon turned into a stag, as he was sprinkled by the goddess and her
nymphs, with inscriptions." Theobalds, according to Heutzner's account,
has a "great variety of trees and plants," labyrinths, fountains of
white marble, a summerhouse, and statuary. The gardens had their
terraces, trellis-walks, and bowling-greens, the beds being laid out in
geometrical lines, and the hedges formed of yews, hollies, and limes,
clipped and shaped into cones, pyramids, and other devices. Among the
delights of Nonsuch was a wilderness of ten acres of extent. Of Hampton
Court, he says: "We saw rosemary so planted and nailed to the walls as
to cover them entirely, which is a method exceeding common in England."
No book on English gardens can afford to dispense with Temple's
description of the garden of Moor Park, which is given with considerable
relish, as though it satisfied the ideal of the writer.
"The perfectest figure of a Garden I ever saw, either at Home or
Abroad."--"It lies on the side of a Hill (upon which the House
stands), but not very steep. The length of the House, where the
best Rooms and of most Use or Pleasure are, lies upon the Breadth
of the Garden, the Great Parlour opens into the Middle of a Terras
Gravel-Walk that lies even with it, and which may be, as I
remember, about 300 Paces long, and broad in Proportion, the Border
set with Standard Laurels, and at large Distances, which have the
beauty of Orange-Trees, out of Flower and Fruit: From this Walk are
Three Descents by many Stone Steps, in the Middle and at each End,
into a very large Parterre. This is divided into Quarters by
Gravel-Walks, and adorned with Two Fountains and Eight Statues in
the several Quarters; at the End of the Terras-Walk are Two
Summer-Houses, and the Sides of the Parterre are ranged with two
large Cloisters, open to the Garden, upon Arches of Stone, and
ending with two other Summer-Houses even with the Cloisters, which
are paved with Stone, and designed for Walks of Shade, there are
none other in the whole Parterre. Over these two Cloisters are two
Terrasses covered with Lead and fenced with Balusters; and the
Passage into these Airy Walks, is out of the two Summer-Houses, at
the End of the first Terras-Walk. The Cloister facing the _South_
is covered with Vines, and would have been proper for an
Orange-House, and the other for Myrtles, or other more common
Greens; and had, I doubt not, been cast for that Purpose, if this
Piece of Gardening had been then in as much Vogue as it is now.
"From the middle of this Parterre is a Descent by many Steps flying
on each Side of a Grotto, that lies between them (covered with
Lead, and flat) into the lower Garden, which is all Fruit-Trees
ranged about the several Quarters of a Wilderness, which is very
Shady; the Walks here are all Green, the Grotto embellished with
Figures of Shell-Rock work, Fountains, and Water-works. If the Hill
had not ended with the lower Garden, and the Wall were not bounded
by a Common Way that goes through the Park, they might have added a
Third Quarter of all Greens; but this Want is supplied by a Garden
on the other Side of the House, which is all of that Sort, very
Wild, Shady, and adorned with rough Rock-work and Fountains."
("Upon the Garden of Epicurus, or of Gardening.")
The "Systema Horticulturae" of John Worlidge (1677) was, says Mr Hazlitt
("Gleanings in old Garden Literature," p. 40), apparently the earliest
manual for the guidance of gardeners. It deals with technical matters,
such as the treatment and virtue of different soils, the form of the
ground, the structure of walls and fences, the erection of arbours,
summer-houses, fountains, grottoes, obelisks, dials, &c.
"The Scots Gardener," by John Reid (1683) follows this, and is, says Mr
Hazlitt, the parent-production in this class of literature. It is
divided into two portions, of which the first is occupied by technical
instructions for the choice of a site for a garden, the arrangement of
beds and walks, &c.
Crispin de Passe's "Book of Beasts, Birds, Flowers, Fruits, &c.,"
published in London (1630), heralds the changes which set in with the
introduction of the Dutch school of design.
To speak generally of the subject, it is with the art of Gardening as
with Architecture, Literature, and Music--there is the Mediaeval, the
Elizabethan, the Jacobean, the Georgian types. Each and all are
English, but English with a difference--with a declared tendency this
way or that, which justifies classification, and illustrates the march
of things in this changeful modern world.
The various types include the mediaeval garden, the square garden, the
knots and figures of Elizabethan times, with their occasional use of
coloured earths and gravels; the pleach-work and intricate borders of
James I.; the painted Dutch statues as at Ham House; the quaint canals,
the winding gravel-walks, the formal geometrical figures; the quincunx
and _etoile_ of William and Mary; later on, the smooth, bare, and bald
grounds of Kent, the photographic copyism of Nature by Brown, the
garden-farm of Shenstone, and other phases of the "Landscape style"
which served for the green grave of the old-fashioned English garden.
In the early years of George III. a reaction against tradition set in
with so strong a current, that there remains scarcely any private garden
in the United Kingdom which presents in all its parts a sample of the
original design.
Levens, near Kendal, of which I give two illustrations, is probably the
least spoiled of any remaining examples; and this was, it would seem,
planned by a Frenchman, but worked out under the restraining influences
of English taste. A picture on the staircase of the house, apparently
Dutch, bears the inscription, "M. Beaumont, gardener to King James II.
and Colonel James Grahme. He laid out the gardens at Hampton Court and
at Levens." The gardener's house at the place is still called "Beaumont
Hall." (See an admirable monograph upon "Col. James Grahme, of Levens,"
by Mr Joscelin Bagot, Kendal.)
One who is perhaps hardly in sympathy with the quaintness of the
gardens, thus writes: "There along a wide extent of terraced walks and
walls, eagles of holly and peacocks of yew still find with each
returning summer their wings clipt and their talons; there a stately
remnant of the old promenoirs such as the Frenchman taught our
fathers,[26] rather I would say to _build_ than plant--along which in
days of old stalked the gentlemen with periwigs and swords, the ladies
in hoops and furbelows--may still to this day be seen."
[Footnote 26: With regard to this remark, we have to note a certain
amount of French influence throughout the reigns of the Jameses and
Charleses. Here is Beaumont, "gardener to James II.;" and we hear also
of Andre Mollet, gardener to James I.; also that Charles II. borrowed Le
Notre to lay out the gardens of Greenwich and St James' Park.]
With the pictures of the gardens at Levens before us, with memories of
Arley, of Brympton, of Wilton,[27] of Montacute, Rockingham, Penshurst,
Severn End, Berkeley,[28] and Haddon, we may here pause a moment to
count up and bewail our losses. Wolsey's garden at Hampton Court is now
effaced, for the design of the existing grounds dates from William III.
Nonsuch in Surrey, near Epsom race-course, is a mere memory. In old days
this was a favourite resort of Queen Elizabeth; the garden was designed
by her father, but the greater part carried out by the last of the
Fitzalans. Evelyn, writing of Nonsuch, says: "There stand in the garden
two handsome stone pyramids and the avenue planted with rows of fair
elms, but the rest of these goodly trees, both of this and of Worcester
adjoining, were felled by those destructive and avaricious rebels in the
late war."
[Footnote 27: The gardens at Wilton are exceedingly beautiful, and
contain noble trees, among which are a group of fine cedars and an ilex
beneath which Sir Philip Sidney is supposed to have reclined when he
wrote his "Arcadia" here. The Italian garden is one of the most
beautiful in England.]
[Footnote 28: Of Berkeley, Evelyn writes: "For the rest the forecourt is
noble, so are the stables; and, above all, the gardens, which are
incomparable by reason of the inequality of the ground, and a pretty
_piscina_. The holly-hedges on the terrace I advised the planting of."]
Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, had a noble garden; it was bought in 1564
by Cecil, and became the favourite haunt of the Stuarts, but the house
was finally destroyed during the Commonwealth.
My Lord _Fauconbergh's_ garden at _Sutton Court_ is gone too. As
described by Gibson in 1691, it had many charms. "The maze, or
wilderness, there is very pretty, being set all with greens, with a
cypress arbour in the middle," &c.
Sir _Henry Capell's_ garden at Kew, described by the same writer, "has
as curious greens, and is as well kept as any about London.... His
orange trees and other choice greens stand out in summer in two walks
about fourteen feet wide, enclosed with a timber frame about seven feet
high, and set with silver firs hedge-wise.... His terrace walk, bare in
the middle and grass on either side, with a hedge of rue on one side
next a low wall, and a row of dwarf trees on the other, shews very
fine; and so do from thence his yew hedges with trees of the same at
equal distance, kept in pretty shapes with tonsure. His flowers and
fruits are of the best, for the advantage of which two parallel walls,
about fourteen feet high, were now raised and almost finished," &c.
Sir _Stephen Fox's_ garden at _Chiswick_, "excels for a fair gravel walk
betwixt two yew hedges, with rounds and spires of the same, all under
smooth tonsure. At the far end of this garden are two myrtle hedges that
cross the garden. The other gardens are full of flowers and salleting,
and the walls well clad."
Wimbledon House, which was rebuilt by Sir Thomas Cecil in 1588, and
surveyed by order of Parliament in 1649, was celebrated for its trees,
gardens, and shrubs. In the several gardens, which consisted of mazes,
wildernesses, knots, alleys, &c., are mentioned a great variety of fruit
trees and shrubs, particularly a "faire bay tree," valued at L1; and
"one very faire tree called the Irish arbutis, very lovely to look upon
and worth L1, 10s." (Lysons, I., 397.)
The gardens at Sherborne Castle were laid out by Sir Walter Raleigh.
Coker, in his "Survey of Dorsetshire," written in the time of James I.,
says that Sir Walter built in the park adjoining the old Castle, "a most
fine house which hee beautified with orchardes, gardens, and groves of
much varietie and great delight; soe that whether that you consider the
pleasantness of the seate, the goodnesse of the soyle, or the other
delicacies belonging unto it, it rests unparalleled by anie in those
partes" (p. 124). This same park, magnificently embellished with woods
and gardens, was "improved" away by the "landscape-gardener" Brown, who
altered the grounds.
Cobham, near Gravesend, still famous in horticultural annals as Nonsuch
is for its apples, was the seat of the Brookes. The extent to which
fruit was cultivated in old time is seen by the magnitude of the
orangery at Beddington House, Surrey, which was two hundred feet long;
the trees mostly measured thirteen feet high, and in 1690 some ten
thousand oranges were gathered.
Ham is described with much gusto by Evelyn: "After dinner I walked to
Ham to see the house and garden of the Duke of Lauderdale, which is
indeed inferior to few of the best villas in Italy itself; the house
furnished like a great Prince's, the parterres, flower-gardens,
orangeries, groves, avenues, courts, statues, perspectives, fountains,
aviaries, and all this at the banks of the sweetest river in the world,
must needs be admirable."
Bowyer House, Surrey, is described also by Evelyn as having a very
pretty grove of oaks and hedges of yew in the garden, and a handsome row
of tall elms before the court. This garden has, however, made way for
rows of mean houses.
At Oxford, where you would have expected more respect for antiquity, the
walks and alleys, along which Laud had conducted Charles and Henrietta,
the bowling-green at Christ Church of Cranmer's time--all are gone.
The ruthless clearance of these gardens of renown is sad to relate: "For
what sin has the plough passed over your pleasant places?" may be
demanded of numberless cases besides Blakesmoor. Southey, writing upon
this very point, adds that "feeling is a better thing than taste,"--for
"taste" did it at the bidding of critics who had no "feeling," and who
veered round with the first sign of change in the public mind about
gardening. Not content with watching the heroic gardens swept away, he
must goad the Vandals on to their sorry work by flattering them for
their good taste. For what Horace Walpole did to expose the
poverty-stricken design and all the poor bankrupt whimsies of the garden
of his day, we owe him thanks; but not for including in his condemnation
the noble work of older days. In touching upon Lord Burleigh's garden,
and that at Nonsuch, he says: "We find the _magnificent though false
taste_ was known here as early as the reigns of Henry VIII. and his
daughter." This is not bad, coming from the man who built a cockney
Gothic house adorned with piecrust battlements and lath-and-plaster
pinnacles; who spent much of his life in concocting a maze of walks in
five acres of ground, and was so far carried away by mock-rustic
sentiment as to have rakes and hay-forks painted as leaning against the
walls of his paddocks! But then Walpole, in his polished way, sneered
at everybody and everything; he "spelt every man backward," as Macaulay
observes; with himself he lived in eminent self-content.
So too, after quoting Temple's description of the garden at Moor Park
with the master's little rhapsody--"the sweetest place I think that I
have seen in my life, either before or since, at home or
abroad"--Walpole has this icy sneer: "Any man might design and _build_
as sweet a garden who had been born in and never stirred out of Holborn.
It was not peculiar in Sir William Temple to think in that manner."
It is not wise, however, to lay too much stress upon criticisms of this
sort. After all, any phase of Art does but express the mind of its day,
and it cannot do duty for the mind of another time. "The old order
changeth, yielding place to new," and to take a critical attitude
towards the forms of an older day is almost a necessity of the case;
they soon become curiosities. Yet we may fairly regret the want of
tenderness in dealing with these gardens of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
eras, for, by all the laws of human expression, they should be
masterpieces. The ground-chord of the garden-enterprise of those days
was struck by Bacon, who rates buildings and palaces, be they never so
princely, as "but gross handiworks" where no garden is: "Men come to
build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the
Greater Perfection"--the truth of which saying is only too glaringly
apparent in the relative conditions of the arts of architecture and of
gardening in the present day!
By all the laws of human expression, I say, these old gardens should be
masterpieces. The sixteenth century, which saw the English garden
formulated, was a time for grand enterprises; indeed, to this period is
ascribed the making of England. These gardens, then, are the handiwork
of the makers of England, and should bear the marks of heroes. They are
relics of the men and women who made our land both fine and famous in
the days of the Tudors; they represent the mellow fruit of the leisure,
the poetic reverie, the patient craft of men versed in great
affairs--big men, who thought and did big things--men of splendid genius
and stately notions--past-masters of the art of life who would drink
life to the lees.
As gardeners, these old statesmen were no dabblers. They had the good
fortune to live in a current of ideas of formal device that touched art
at all points and was well calculated to assist the creative faculty in
design of all kinds. They lived before the art of bad gardening had been
invented; before pretty thoughts had palled the taste, before gardening
had learnt routine; while Nature smiled a virgin smile and had a sense
of unsolved mystery. More than this, garden-craft was then no mere craze
or passing freak of fashion, but a serious item in the round of
home-life; --gardening was a thing to be done as well as it could be
done. Design was fresh and open to individual treatment--men needed an
outlet for their love of, their elation at, the sight of beautiful
things, and behind them lay the background of far-reaching traditions to
encourage, inspire, protect experiment with the friendly shadow of
authority.
An accomplished French writer has remarked that even the modest work of
Art may contain occasion for long processes of analysis. "Very great
laws," he says, "may be illustrated in a very small compass." And so one
thinks it is with the ancient garden. Looked at as a piece of design, it
is the blossom of English genius at one of its sunniest moments. It is a
bit of the history of our land. It embodies the characteristics of the
mediaeval, the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages just as faithfully as do
other phases of contemporary art. It contains the same principle of
beauty, the same sense of form, that animated these; it has the same
curious turns of expression, the same mixture of pedantry and subtle
sweetness; the same wistful daring and humorous sadness; the same
embroidery of nice fancy--half jocund, half grave, as--shall we
say--Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, Spenser's "Faerie Queene,"
Milton's "Comus," More's "Utopia," Bacon's Essays, Purcell's Madrigals,
John Thorpe's architecture at Longleat. The same spirit, the same wit
and fancy resides in each; they differ only in the medium of expression.
To condemn old English gardening, root and branch, for its "false taste"
(and it was not peculiar to Walpole to think in that manner), was, in
truth, to indict our nation on a line of device wherein we excelled,
and to condemn device that represents the inspired dreams of some of
England's elect sons.
To our sorry groundling minds the old pleasaunce may seem too rich and
fantastic, too spectacular, too much idealised. And if to be English one
must needs be _bourgeois_, the objection must stand. Here is developed
garden-craft, and development almost invariably means multiplicity of
forms and a marked departure from primaeval simplicity. Grant, if you
will, that Art is carried too far, and Nature not carried far enough in
the old garden, yet did it deserve better treatment. Judged both from
its human and its artistic side, the place is as loveable as it is
pathetic. It has the pathos of all art that survives its creators, the
pathos of all abandoned human idols, of all high human endeavour that is
blown upon. What is more, it holds, as it were, the spent passion of men
of Utopian dreams, the ideal (in one kind) of the spoiled children of
culture, the knight-errantry of the Renascence--whose imagination soared
after illimitable satisfaction, who were avowedly bent upon transforming
the brazen of this world into the golden, to whom desire was but the
first step to attainment, and failure an unknown experience.
But even yet some may demur that the interest of the antique garden, as
we see it, is due to Nature direct, and not to art-agencies. It is
Nature who gives it its artistic qualities of gradation, contrast, play
of form and colour, the flicker of sunshine through the foliage, the
shadows on the grass--not the master who begot the thing, for has he
not been dead, and his vacant orbits choked with clay these two hundred
years and more! To him, of course, may be ascribed the primal thought of
the place, and, say, some fifty years of active participation in its
ordering and culture, but for the rest--for its poetic excitement, for
its yearly accesses of beauty--are they not to be credited in full to
the lenience of Time and the generous operations of Nature?
Grant all that should rightly be granted to the disaffected grumbler,
and yet, in Mr Lowell's words for another, yet a parallel case, I plead
that "Poets are always entitled to a royalty on whatever we find in
their works; for these fine creations as truly build themselves up in
the brain as they are built up with deliberate thought." If a garden
owed none of its characteristics to its maker, if it had not expressed
the mind of its designer, why the essential differences of the garden of
this style and of that! Properly speaking, the music of all gardens is
framed out of the same simple gamut of Nature's notes--it is but one
music poured from myriad lips--yet out of the use of the same raw
elements what a variety of tunes can be made, each tune complete in
itself! And it is because we may identify the maker in his work;
because, like the unfinished air, abruptly brought to a close at the
master's death, the place is much as it was first schemed, one is
jealous for the honour of the man whose eye prophesied its ultimate
magic even as he initiated its plan, and drafted its lines.
Many an English house has been hopelessly vulgarised and beggared by
the banishment of the old pleasaunces of the days of Elizabeth, or of
the Jameses and Charleses, and their wholesale demolition there and then
struck a blow at English gardening from which it has not yet recovered.
It may be admitted that, in the case of an individual garden here and
there, the violation of these relics may be condoned on the heathen
principle of tit for tat, because Art had, in the first instance, so to
speak, turned her back on some fair landscape that Providence had
provided upon the site, preferring to focus man's eye _within_ rather
than _without_ the garden's bounds, therefore the vengeance is merited.
Yet, where change was desirable, it had been better to modify than to
destroy.
"Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough."
Certain it is that along with the girdle of high hedge or wall has gone
that air of inviting mystery and homely reserve that our forefathers
loved, and which is to me one of the pleasantest traits of an old
English garden, best described as
"A haunt of ancient peace."