It would perhaps be extravagant to pretend, in this embarrassed age,
that Merry England is still intact; but it would be strange if the
words “happy England” should not rise to the lips of the observer of Mr.
Alfred Parsons’ numerous and delightful studies of the gardens, great
and small, of his country. They surely have a representative value in
more than the literal sense, and might easily minister to the quietest
complacency of patriotism. People whose criticism is imaginative will
see in them a kind of compendium of what, in home things, is at once
most typical and most enviable; and, going further, they will almost
wish that such a collection might be carried by slow stages round the
globe, to kindle pangs in the absent and passions in the alien. As
it happens to be a globe the English race has largely peopled, we can
measure the amount of homesickness that would be engendered on the
way. In fact, one doubts whether the sufferer would even need to be of
English strain to attach the vision of home to the essentially lovable
places that Mr. Parsons depicts. They seem to generalize and typify
the idea, so that every one may feel, in every case, that he has a
sentimental property in the scene. The very sweetness of its reality
only helps to give it that story-book quality which persuades us we have
known it in youth.
And yet such scenes may well have been constructed for the despair of
the Colonial; for they remind us, at every glance, of that perfection to
which there is no short cut--not even “unexampled prosperity “--and
to which time is the only guide. Mr. Parsons’ pictures speak of many
complicated things, but (in what they tell us of his subjects) they
speak most of duration. Such happy nooks have grown slowly, such
fortunate corners have had a history; and their fortune has been
precisely that they have had time to have it comfortably, have not been
obliged to try for character without it.
Character is their strong point and the most expensive of all
ingredients. Mr. Parsons’ portraiture seizes every shade of it, seizes
it with unfailing sympathy. He is doubtless clever enough to paint
rawness when he must, but he has an irrepressible sense of ripeness.
Half the ripeness of England--half the religion, one might almost
say--is in its gardens; they are truly pious foundations. It is
doubtless because there are so many of them that the country seems so
finished, and the sort of care they demand is an intenser deliberation,
which passes into the national temper. One must have lived in other
lands to observe fully how large a proportion of this one is walled in
for growing flowers. The English love of flowers is inveterate; it
is the most, unanimous protest against the grayness of some of the
conditions, and it should receive justice from those who accuse the race
of taking its pleasure too sadly. A good garden is an organized revel,
and there is no country in which there are so many.
Mr. Parsons had therefore only to choose, at his leisure, and one might
heartily have envied him the process, scarcely knowing which to prefer
of all the pleasant pilgrimages that would make up such a quest. He had.
fortunately, the knowledge which could easily lead to more, and a career
of discovery behind him. He knew the right times for the right things,
and the right things for the right places. He had innumerable memories
and associations; he had painted up and down the land and looked over
many walls. He had followed the bounty of the year from month to month
and from one profusion to another. To follow it with him, in this
admirable series, is to see that he is master of the subject. There
will be no lack of confidence on the part of those who have already
perceived, in much of Mr. Parsons’ work, a supreme illustration of all
that is widely nature-loving in the English interest in the flower.
No sweeter submission to mastery can be imagined than the way the
daffodils, under his brush (to begin at the beginning), break out
into early April in the lovely drawings of Stourhead. One of the most
charming of these--a corner of an old tumbled-up place in Wiltshire,
where many things have come and gone--represents that moment of
transition in which contrast is so vivid as to make it more dramatic
than many plays--the very youngest throb of spring, with the brown slope
of the foreground coming back to consciousness in pale lemon-colored
patches and, on the top of the hill, against the still cold sky, the
equally delicate forms of the wintry trees. By the time these forms
have thickened, the expanses of daffodil will have become a mass
of bluebells. All the daffodil pictures have a rare loveliness, but
especially those that deal also with the earlier fruit-blossom, the
young plum-trees in Berkshire orchards. Here the air is faintly pink,
and the painter makes us feel the little _blow_ in the thin blue sky.
The spring, fortunately, is everybody’s property and, in the language of
all the arts, the easiest word to conjure with. It is therefore partly
Mr. Parsons’ good-luck that we enjoy so his rendering of these phases;
but on the other hand we look twice when it’s a case of meddling with
the exquisite, and if he inspires us with respect it is because we feel
that he has been deeply initiated. No one knows better the friendly
reasons for our stopping, when chatting natives pronounce the weather
“foine,” at charming casual corners of old villages, where grassy ways
cross each other and timbered houses bulge irregularly and there are
fresh things behind crooked palings; witness the little vision of
Blewbury, in Berkshire, reputedly of ancient British origin, with a
road all round it and only footways within. No one, in the Herefordshire
orchards, masses the white cow-parsley in such profusion under the
apple blossoms; or makes the whitewashed little damson-trees look so
innocently responsible and charming on the edge of the brook over which
the planks are laid for the hens. Delightful, in this picture, is the
sense of the clean spring day, after rain, with the blue of the sky
washed faint. Delightful is the biggish view (one of the less numerous
oil-pictures) of the Somersetshire garden, where that peculiarly English
look of the open-air room is produced by the stretched carpet of the
turf and the firm cushions of the hedges, and a pair of proprietors,
perhaps happier than they know, are putting in an afternoon among their
tulips, under the flushed apple-trees whose stems are so thin and whose
brims so heavy. Are the absorbed couple, at any rate, aware of the
surprising degree to which the clustered ruddy roofs of the next small
town, over the hedge, off at the left, may remind the fanciful
spectator of the way he has seen little dim Italian cities look on their
hill-tops? The whole thing, in this subject, has the particular English
note to which Mr. Parsons repeatedly testifies, the nook quality, the
air of a land and a life so infinitely subdivided that they produce
a thousand pleasant privacies. The painter moves with the months and
finds, after the earliest things, the great bed of pansies in the angle
of the old garden at Sutton, in which, for felicity of position and
perfect pictorial service rendered--to say nothing of its polygonal,
pyramidal roof--the ancient tool-house, or tea-house, is especially to
be commended. Very far descended is such a corner as this, very full of
reference to vanished combinations and uses; and the artist communicates
to us a feeling for it that makes us wish disinterstedly it may be still
as long preserved.
He finds in June, at Blackdown, the blaze of the yellow azalea-bush, or
in another spot the strong pink of the rhododendron, beneath the silver
firs that deepen the blue of the sky. He finds the Vicarage Walk, at
King’s Langley, a smother of old-fashioned flowers--a midsummer vista
for the figures of a happy lady and a lucky dog. He finds the delicious
huddle of the gabled, pigeon-haunted roof of a certain brown old
building at Frame, with poppies and gladiolus and hollyhock crowding the
beautiful foreground. He finds--apparently in the same place--the tangle
of the hardy flowers that come while the roses are still in bloom, with
the tall blue larkspurs standing high among them. He finds the lilies,
white and red, at Broadway, and the poppies, which have dropped most of
their petals--apparently to let the roses, which are just coming out,
give _their_ grand party. Their humility is rewarded by the artist’s
admirable touch in the little bare poppy-heads that nod on their
flexible pins.
But I cannot go on to say everything that such a seeker, such a
discoverer, as Mr. Parsons finds--the less that the purpose of these
limited remarks is to hint at our own _trouvailles_. A view of the
field, at any rate, would be incomplete without such specimens as the
three charming oil-pictures which commemorate Holme Lacey. There are
gardens and gardens, and these represent the sort that are always spoken
of in the plural and most arrogate the title. They form, in England, a
magnificent collection, and if they abound in a quiet assumption of the
grand style it must be owned that they frequently achieve it. There are
people to be found who enjoy them, and it is not, at any rate, when Mr.
Parsons deals with them that we have an opening for strictures. As
we look at the blaze of full summer in the brilliantly conventional
parterres we easily credit the tale of the 40,000 plants it takes to
fill the beds. More than this, we like the long paths of turf that
stretch between splendid borders, recalling the frescoed galleries of a
palace; we like the immense hedges, whose tops are high against the sky.
While we are liking, we like perhaps still better, since they deal with
a very different order, the two water-colors from the dear little garden
at Winchelsea--especially the one in which the lady takes he ease in her
hammock (on a sociable, shady terrace, from which the ground drops),
and looks at red Rye, across the marshes. Another garden where a
contemplative hammock would be in order is the lovely canonical plot
at Salisbury, with the everlasting spire above it tinted in the summer
sky--unless, in the same place, you should choose to hook yourself up by
the grassy bank of the Avon, at the end of the lawn, with the meadows,
the cattle, the distant willows across the river, to look at.
Three admirable water-colors are devoted by Mr. Parsons to the
perceptible dignity of Gravetye, in Sussex, the dignity of very serious
gardens, entitled to ceremonious consideration, Few things in England
can show a greater wealth of bloom than the wide flowery terrace
immediately beneath the gray, gabled house, where tens of thousands of
tea-roses, in predominant possession, have, in one direction, a mass
of high yews for a background. They divide their province with the
carnations and pansies: a wilder ness of tender petals ignorant of
anything rougher than the neighborhood of the big unchanged medley of
tall yuccas and saxifrage, with miscellaneous filling-in, in the picture
which presents the charming house in profile. The artist shows us later,
in September, at Gravetye, the pale violet multitude of the Michaelmas
daisies; another I great bunch, or bank, of which half masks and greatly
beautifies the rather bare yellow cottage at Broadway. This brings us on
to the autumn, if I count as autumnal the admirable large water-color of
a part of a garden at Shiplake, with the second bloom of the roses and
a glimpse of a turn of the Thames. This exquisite picture expresses to
perfection the beginning of the languor of the completed season--with
its look of warm rest, of doing nothing, in the cloudless sky. To the
same or a later moment belongs the straight walk at Fladbury--the old
rectory garden by the Avon, with its Irish yews and the red lady in her
chair; also the charming water-color of young, slim apple-trees, full of
fruit (this must be October), beneath an admirable blue and white sky.
Still later comes the big pear-tree that has turned, among barer boughs,
to flame-color, and, in another picture, the very pale russet of
the thinned cherry-trees, standing, beneath a grayish sky, above a
foreshortened slope. Last of all we have, in oils, December and a hard
frost in a bare apple-orchard, indented with a deep gully which makes
the place somehow a subject and which, in fact, three or four years
ago, made it one for a larger picture by Mr. Parsons, full of truth and
style.
This completes his charming story of the life of the English year, told
in a way that convinces us of his intimate acquaintance with it. Half
the interest of Mr. Parsons’ work is in the fact that he paints from a
full mind and from a store of assimilated knowledge. In every touch of
nature that he communicates to us we feel something of the thrill of the
whole--we feel the innumerable relations, the possible variations of the
particular objects. This makes his manner serious and masculine--rescues
it from the thinness of tricks and the coquetries of _chic_. We walk
with him on a firm earth, we taste the tone of the air and seem to take
nature and the climate and all the complicated conditions by their big
general hand. The painter’s manner, in short, is one with the study of
things--his talent is a part of their truth. In this happy series
we seem to see still more how that talent was formed, how his rich
motherland has been, from the earliest observation, its nurse and
inspirer. He gives back to her all the good she has done him.