I
There was something dark on the grass under an elm in the field by the
barn. It rose and fell; and we saw that it was a wing--a single black
wing, striking the ground instead of the air; indeed, it seemed to come
out of the earth itself, the body of the bird being hidden by the
grass. This black wing flapped and flapped, but could not lift
itself--a single wing of course could not fly. A rook had dropped out
of the elm and was lying helpless at the foot of the tree--it is a
favourite tree with rooks; they build in it, and at that moment there
were twenty or more perched aloft, cawing and conversing comfortably,
without the least thought of their dying comrade. Not one of all the
number descended to see what was the matter, nor even fluttered
half-way down. This elm is their clubhouse, where they meet every
afternoon as the sun gets low to discuss the scandals of the day,
before retiring to roost in the avenues and tree-groups of the park
adjacent. While we looked, a peacock came round the corner of the barn;
he had caught sight of the flapping wing, and approached with long
deliberate steps and outstretched neck. "Ee-aw! Ee-aw! What's this?
What's this?" he inquired in bird-language. "Ee-aw! Ee-aw! My friends,
see here!" Gravely, and step by step, he came nearer and nearer,
slowly, and not without some fear, till curiosity had brought him
within a yard. In a moment or two a peahen followed and also stretched
out her neck--the two long necks pointing at the black flapping wing. A
second peacock and peahen approached, and the four great birds
stretched out their necks towards the dying rook--a "crowner's quest"
upon the unfortunate creature.
If any one had been at hand to sketch it, the scene would have been
very grotesque, and not without a ludicrous sadness. There was the tall
elm tinted with yellow, the black rooks high above flying in and out,
yellow leaves twirling down, the blue peacocks with their crests, the
red barn behind, the golden sun afar shining low through the trees of
the park, the brown autumn sward, a grey horse, orange maple bushes.
There was the quiet tone of the coming evening--the early evening of
October--such an evening as the rook had seen many a time from the tops
of the trees. A man dies, and the crowd goes on passing under the
window along the street without a thought. The rook died, and his
friends, who had that day been with him in the oaks feasting on acorns,
who had been with him in the fresh-turned furrows, born perhaps in the
same nest, utterly forgot him before he was dead. With a great common
caw--a common shout--they suddenly left the tree in a bevy and flew
towards the park. The peacocks having brought in their verdict,
departed, and the dead bird was left alone.
In falling out of the elm, the rook had alighted partly on his side and
partly on his back, so that he could only flutter one wing, the other
being held down by his own weight. He had probably died from picking up
poisoned grain somewhere, or from a parasite. The weather had been
open, and he could not have been starved. At a distance, the rook's
plumage appears black; but close at hand it will be found a fine
blue-black, glossy, and handsome.
These peacocks are the best "rain-makers" in the place; whenever they
cry much, it is sure to rain; and if they persist day after day, the
rain is equally continuous. From the wall by the barn, or the
elm-branch above, their cry resounds like the wail of a gigantic cat,
and is audible half a mile or more. In the summer, I found one of them,
a peacock in the fall brilliance of his colours, on a rail in the hedge
under a spreading maple bush. His rich-hued neck, the bright light and
shadow, the tall green meadow grass, brought together the finest
colours. It is curious that a bird so distinctly foreign, plumed for
the Asiatic sun, should fit so well with English meads. His splendid
neck immediately pleases, pleases the first time it is seen, and on the
fiftieth occasion. I see these every day, and always stop to look at
them; the colour excites the sense of beauty in the eye, and the shape
satisfies the idea of form. The undulating curve of the neck is at once
approved by the intuitive judgment of the mind, and it is a pleasure to
the mind to reiterate that judgment frequently. It needs no teaching to
see its beauty--the feeling comes of itself.
How different with the turkey-cock which struts round the same barn! A
fine big bird he is, no doubt; but there is no intrinsic beauty about
him; on the contrary, there is something fantastic in his style and
plumage. He has a way of drooping his wings as if they were
armour-plates to shield him from a shot. The ornaments upon his head
and beak are in the most awkward position. He was put together in a
dream, of uneven and odd pieces that live and move, but do not fit.
Ponderously gawky, he steps as if the world was his, like a "motley"
crowned in sport. He is good eating, but he is not beautiful. After the
eye has been accustomed to him for some time--after you have fed him
every day and come to take an interest in him--after you have seen a
hundred turkey-cocks, then he may become passable, or, if you have the
fancier's taste, exquisite. Education is requisite first; you do not
fall in love at first sight. The same applies to fancy-pigeons, and
indeed many pet animals, as pugs, which come in time to be animated
with a soul in some people's eyes. Compare a pug with a greyhound
straining at the leash. Instantly he is slipped he is gone as a wave
let loose. His flexible back bends and undulates, arches and unarches,
rises and falls as a wave rises and rolls on. His pliant ribs open; his
whole frame "gives" and stretches, and closing again in a curve,
springs forward. Movement is as easy to him as to the wave, which
melting, is remoulded, and sways onward. The curve of the greyhound is
not only the line of beauty, but a line which suggests motion; and it
is the idea of motion, I think, which so strongly appeals to the mind.
We are often scornfully treated as a nation by people who write about
art, because they say we have no taste; we cannot make art jugs for the
mantelpiece, crockery for the bracket, screens for the fire; we cannot
even decorate the wall of a room as it should be done. If these are the
standards by which a sense of art is to be tried, their scorn is to a
certain degree just. But suppose we try another standard. Let us put
aside the altogether false opinion that art consists alone in something
actually made, or painted, or decorated, in carvings, colourings,
touches of brush or chisel. Let us look at our lives. I mean to say
that there is no nation so thoroughly and earnestly artistic as the
English in their lives, their joys, their thoughts, their hopes. Who
loves nature like an Englishman? Do Italians care for their pale skies?
I never heard so. We go all over the world in search of beauty--to the
keen north, to the cape whence the midnight sun is visible, to the
extreme south, to the interior of Africa, gazing at the vast expanse of
Tanganyika or the marvellous falls of the Zambesi. We admire the
temples and tombs and palaces of India; we speak of the Alhambra of
Spain almost in whispers, so deep is our reverent admiration; we visit
the Parthenon. There is not a picture or a statue in Europe we have not
sought. We climb the mountains for their views and the sense of
grandeur they inspire; we roam over the wide ocean to the coral islands
of the far Pacific; we go deep into the woods of the West; and we stand
dreamily under the Pyramids of the East. What part is there of the
English year which has not been sung by the poets? all of whom are full
of its loveliness; and our greatest of all, Shakespeare, carries, as it
were, armfuls of violets, and scatters roses and golden wheat across
his pages, which are simply fields written with human life.
This is art indeed--art in the mind and soul, infinitely deeper,
surely, than the construction of crockery, jugs for the mantelpiece,
dados, or even of paintings. The lover of nature has the highest art in
his soul. So, I think, the bluff English farmer who takes such pride
and delight in his dogs and horses, is a much greater man of art than
any Frenchman preparing with cynical dexterity of hand some coloured
presentment of flashy beauty for the _salon_. The English girl who
loves her horse--and English girls _do_ love their horses most
intensely--is infinitely more artistic in that fact than the cleverest
painter on enamel. They who love nature are the real artists; the
"artists" are copyists, St. John the naturalist, when exploring the
recesses of the Highlands, relates how he frequently came in contact
with men living in the rude Highland way--forty years since, no
education then--whom at first you would suppose to be morose,
unobservant, almost stupid. But when they found out that their visitor
would stay for hours gazing in admiration at their glens and mountains,
their demeanour changed. Then the truth appeared: they were fonder than
he was himself of the beauties of their hills and lakes; they could see
the art _there_, though perhaps they had never seen a picture in their
lives, certainly not any blue-and-white crockery. The Frenchman flings
his fingers dexterously over the canvas, but he has never had that in
his heart which the rude Highlander had.
The path across the arable field was covered with a design of bird's
feet. The reversed broad arrow of the fore-claws, and the straight line
of the hinder claw, trailed all over it in curving lines. In the dry
dust, their feet were marked as clearly as a seal on wax--their trails
wound this way and that, and crossed as their quick eyes had led them
to turn to find something. For fifty or sixty yards the path was worked
with an inextricable design; it was a pity to step on it and blot out
the traces of those little feet. Their hearts so happy, their eyes so
observant, the earth so bountiful to them with its supply of food, and
the late warmth of the autumn sun lighting up their life. They know and
feel the different loveliness of the seasons as much as we do. Every
one must have noticed their joyousness in spring; they are quiet, but
so very, very busy in the height of summer; as autumn comes on they
obviously delight in the occasional hours of warmth. The marks of their
little feet are almost sacred--a joyous life has been there--do not
obliterate it. It is so delightful to know that something is happy.
The hawthorn hedge that goes down the slope is more coloured than the
hedges in the sheltered plain. Yonder, a low bush on the brow is a deep
crimson; the hedge as it descends varies from brown to yellow, dotted
with red haws, and by the gateway has another spot of crimson. The lime
trees turn yellow from top to bottom, all the leaves together; the elms
by one or two branches at a time. A lime tree thus entirely coloured
stands side by side with an elm, their boughs intermingling; the elm is
green except a line at the outer extremity of its branches. A red light
as of fire plays in the beeches, so deep is their orange tint in which
the sunlight is caught. An oak is dotted with buff, while yet the main
body of the foliage is untouched. With these tints and sunlight, nature
gives us so much more than the tree gives. A tree is nothing but a tree
in itself: but with light and shadow, green leaves moving, a bird
singing, another moving to and fro--in autumn with colour--the boughs
are filled with imagination. There then seems so much more than the
mere tree; the timber of the trunk, the mere sticks of the branches,
the wooden framework is animated with a life. High above, a lark sings,
not for so long as in spring--the October song is shorter--but still he
sings. If you love colour, plant maple; maple bushes colour a whole
hedge. Upon the bank of a pond, the brown oak-leaves which have fallen
are reflected in the still deep water.
It is from the hedges that taste must be learned. A garden abuts on
these fields, and being on slightly rising ground, the maple bushes,
the brown and yellow and crimson hawthorn, the limes and elms, are all
visible from it; yet it is surrounded by stiff, straight iron railings,
unconcealed even by the grasses, which are carefully cut down with the
docks and nettles, that do their best, three or four times in the
summer, to hide the blank iron. Within these iron railings stands a row
of _arbor vitae_, upright, and stiff likewise, and among them a few
other evergreens; and that is all the shelter the lawn and flower-beds
have from the east wind, blowing for miles over open country, or from
the glowing sun of August. This garden belongs to a gentleman who would
certainly spare no moderate expense to improve it, and yet there it
remains, the blankest, barest, most miserable-looking square of ground
the eye can find; the only piece of ground from which the eye turns
away; for even the potato-field close by, the common potato-field, had
its colour in bright poppies, and there were partridges in it, and at
the edges, fine growths of mallow and its mauve flowers. Wild parsley,
still green in the shelter of the hazel stoles, is there now on the
bank, a thousand times sweeter to the eye than bare iron and cold
evergreens. Along that hedge, the white bryony wound itself in the most
beautiful manner, completely covering the upper part of the thick
brambles, a robe thrown over the bushes; its deep cut leaves, its
countless tendrils, its flowers, and presently the berries, giving
pleasure every time one passed it. Indeed, you could not pass without
stopping to look at it, and wondering if any one ever so skilful, even
those sure-handed Florentines Mr. Ruskin thinks so much of, could ever
draw that intertangled mass of lines. Nor could you easily draw the
leaves and head of the great parsley--commonest of hedge-plants--the
deep indented leaves, and the shadow by which to express them. There
was work enough in that short piece of hedge by the potato-field for a
good pencil every day the whole summer. And when done, you would not
have been satisfied with it, but only have learned how complex and how
thoughtful and far reaching Nature is in the simplest of things. But
with a straight-edge or ruler, any one could draw the iron railings in
half an hour, and a surveyor's pupil could make them look as well as
Millais himself. Stupidity to stupidity, genius to genius; any hard
fist can manage iron railings; a hedge is a task for the greatest.
Those, therefore, who really wish their gardens or grounds, or any
place, beautiful, must get that greatest of geniuses, Nature, to help
them, and give their artist freedom to paint to fancy, for it is
Nature's imagination which delights us--as I tried to explain about the
tree, the imagination, and not the fact of the timber and sticks. For
those white bryony leaves and slender spirals and exquisitely defined
flowers are full of imagination, products of a sunny dream, and tinted
so tastefully, that although they are green, and all about them is
green too, yet the plant is quite distinct, and in no degree confused
or lost in the mass of leaves under and by it. It stands out, and yet
without violent contrast. All these beauties of form and colour
surround the place, and try, as it were, to march in and take
possession, but are shut out by straight iron railings. Wonderful it is
that education should make folk tasteless! Such, certainly, seems to be
the case in a great measure, and not in our own country only, for those
who know Italy tell us that the fine old gardens there, dating back to
the days of the Medici, are being despoiled of ilex and made formal and
straight. Is all the world to be Versaillised?
Scarcely two hundred yards from these cold iron railings, which even
nettles and docks would hide if they could, and thistles strive to
conceal, but are not permitted, there is an old cottage by the
roadside. The roof is of old tile, once red, now dull from weather; the
walls some tone of yellow; the folk are poor. Against it there grows a
vigorous plant of jessamine, a still finer rose, a vine covers the
lean-to at one end, and tea-plant the corner of the wall; beside these,
there is a yellow-flowering plant, the name of which I forget at the
moment, also trained to the walls; and ivy. Altogether, six plants grow
up the walls of the cottage; and over the wicket-gate there is a rude
arch--a framework of tall sticks--from which droop thick bunches of
hops. It is a very commonplace sort of cottage; nothing artistically
picturesque about it, no effect of gable or timber-work; it stands by
the roadside in the most commonplace way, and yet it pleases. They have
called in Nature, that great genius, and let the artist have his own
way. In Italy, the art-country, they cut down the ilex trees, and get
the surveyor's pupil with straight-edge and ruler to put it right and
square for them. Our over-educated and well-to-do people set iron
railings round about their blank pleasure-grounds, which the
potato-field laughs at in bright poppies; and actually one who has some
fine park-grounds has lifted up on high a mast and weather-vane! a
thing useful on the sea-board at coastguard stations for signalling,
but oh! how repellent and straight and stupid among clumps of graceful
elms!