It is a pelting November rain. No leaves are left upon the branches but
a few yellow flutterers on the tips of the willows and poplars, and the
bleached company that will be clinging to the beeches and the white oaks
for a month to come. All others are whipped away by the night-winds into
the angles of old walls, or are packed under low-limbed shrubberies,
there to swelter and keep warm the rootlets of the newly planted
weigelias and spruces, until the snows and February suns and April mists
and May heats shall have transmuted them into fat and unctuous mould. A
close, pelting, unceasing rain, trying all the leaks of the mossy roof,
testing all the newly laid drains, pressing the fountain at my door to
an exuberant gush,--a rain that makes outside work an impossibility; and
as I sit turning over the leaves of an old book of engravings, wondering
what drift my rainy-day's task shall take, I come upon a pleasant view
of Dovedale in Derbyshire, a little exaggerated, perhaps, in the
luxuriance of its trees and the depth of its shadows, but recalling
vividly the cloudy April morning on which, fifteen years agone, I left
the inn of the "Green Man and Black Head," in the pretty town of
Ashbourne, and strolled away by the same road on which Mr. Charles
Cotton opens his discourse of fishing with Master "Viator," and plunged
down the steep valley-side near to Thorpe, and wandered for three miles
and more, under towering crags, and on soft, spongy bits of meadow,
beside the blithe river where Walton had cast, in other days, a gray
palmer-fly, past the hospitable hall of the worshipful Mr. Cotton, and
the wreck of the old fishing-house, over whose lintel was graven in the
stone the interlaced initials of "Piscator, Junior," and his great
master of the rod. As the rain began to patter on the sedges and the
pools, I climbed out of the valley, on the northward or Derbyshire side,
and striding away through the heather, which belongs to the rolling
heights of this region, I presently found myself upon the great London
and Manchester highway. A broad and stately thoroughfare it had been in
the old days of coaching, but now a close, fine turf invested it all,
save one narrow strip of Macadam in the middle. The mile-stones, which
had been showy, painted affairs of iron, were now deeply bitten and
blotched with rust. Two of them I had passed, without sight of house, or
of other traveller, save one belated drover, who was hurrying to the
fair at Ashbourne; as I neared the third, a great hulk of building
appeared upon my left, with a crowd of aspiring chimneys, from which
only one timid little pennant of smoke coiled into the harsh sky.
The gray, inhospitable-looking pile proved to be one of the old
coach-inns, which, with its score of vacant chambers and huge
stable-court, was left stranded upon the deserted highway of travel. It
stood a little space back from the road, so that a coach and four, or,
indeed, a half-dozen together, might have come up to the door-way in
dashing style. But it must have been many years since such a demand had
been made upon the resources of bustling landlord and of attendant
grooms and waiters. The doors were tightly closed; even the sign-board
creaked uneasily in the wind, and a rampant growth of ivy that clambered
over the porch so covered it with leaves and berries that I could not at
all make out its burden. I gave a sharp ring to the bell, and heard the
echo repeated from the deserted stable-court; there was the yelp of a
hound somewhere within, and presently a slatternly-dressed woman
received me, and, conducting me down a bare hall, showed me into a great
dingy parlor, where a murky fire was struggling in the grate. A score of
roistering travellers might have made the stately parlor gay; and I dare
say they did, in years gone; but now I had only for company their heavy
old arm-chairs, a few prints of "fast coaches" upon the wall, and a
superannuated greyhound, who seemed to scent the little meal I had
ordered, and presently stalked in and laid his thin nose, with an
appealing look, in my hands. His days of coursing--if he ever had
them--were fairly over; and I took a charitable pride in bestowing upon
him certain tough morsels of the rump-steak, garnished with
horse-radish, with which I was favored for dinner.
I had intended to push on to Buxton the same afternoon; but the
deliberate sprinkling of the morning by two o'clock had quickened into a
swift, pelting rain, the very counterpart of that which is beating on my
windows to-day. There was nothing to be done but to make my home of the
old coach-inn for the night; and for my amusement--besides the
slumberous hound, who, after dinner, had taken up position upon the
faded rug lying before the grate--there was a "Bell's Messenger" of the
month past, and, as good luck would have it, a much-bethumbed copy of a
work on horticulture and kindred subjects, first printed somewhere about
the beginning of the eighteenth century, and entitled "The Clergyman's
Recreation, showing the Pleasure and Profit of the Art of Gardening," by
the Reverend John Laurence.
It was a queer book to be found in this pretentious old coach-inn, with
its silken bell-pulls and stately parlors; and I thought how the
roisterers who came thundering over the road years ago, and chucked the
bar-maids under the chin, must have turned up their noses, after their
pint of crusted Port, at the "Clergyman's Recreation." Yet, for all
that, the book had a rare interest for me, detailing, as it did, the
methods of fruit-culture in England a hundred and forty years ago, and
showing with nice particularity how the espaliers could be best trained,
and how a strong infusion of walnut-leaf tea will destroy all noxious
worms.
And now, when, upon this other wet day, and in the quietude of my own
library, I come to measure the claims of this ancient horticulturist to
consideration, I find that he was the author of some six or seven
distinct works on kindred subjects, showing good knowledge of the best
current practice; and although he incurred the sneers of Mr. Tull, who
hoped "he preached better than he ploughed," there is abundant evidence
that his books were held in esteem.
Contemporary with the Rev. Mr. Laurence were London and Wise, the famous
horticulturists of Brompton, (whose nursery, says Evelyn, "was the
greatest work of the kind ever seen or heard of, either in books or
travels,") also Switzer, a pupil of the latter, and Professor Richard
Bradley.
Mr. London was the director of the royal gardens under William and Mary,
and at one time had in his charge some three or four hundred of the most
considerable landed estates in England. He was in the habit of riding
some fifty miles a day to confer with his subordinate gardeners, and at
least two or three times in a season traversed the whole length and
breadth of England,--and this at a period, it must be remembered, when
travelling was no holiday-affair, as is evident from the mishaps which
befell those well-known contemporaneous travellers of Fielding, Joseph
Andrews and Parson Adams. Traces of the work of Mr. London are to be
seen even now in the older parts of the grounds of Blenheim and of
Castle Howard in Yorkshire.
Stephen Switzer was an accomplished gardener, well known by a great many
horticultural and agricultural works, which in his day were "on sale at
his seed-shop in Westminster Hall." Chiefest among these was the
"Ichnographia Rustica," which gave general directions for the
management of country-estates, while it indulged in some prefatory
magniloquence upon the dignity and antiquity of the art of gardening. It
is the first of all arts, he claims; for "tho' Chirurgery may plead
high, inasmuch as in the second chapter of Genesis that _operation_ is
recorded of taking the rib from Adam, wherewith woman was made, yet the
very current of the Scriptures determines in favor of Gardening." It
surprises us to find that so radical an investigator should entertain
the belief, as he clearly did, that certain plants were produced without
seed by the vegetative power of the sun acting upon the earth. He is
particularly severe upon those Scotch gardeners, "Northern lads," who,
with "a little learning and a great deal of impudence, know, or pretend
to know, more in one twelvemonth than a laborious, honest South-country
man does in seven years."
His agricultural observations are of no special value, nor do they
indicate any advance from the practice of Worlidge. He deprecates paring
and burning as exhaustive of the vegetable juices, advises winter
fallowing and marling, and affirms that "there is no superficies of
earth, how poor soever it may be, but has in its own bowels something or
other for its own improvement."
In gardening, he expresses great contempt for the clipped trees and
other excesses of the Dutch school, yet advises the construction of
terraces, lays out his ponds by geometric formulæ, and is so far devoted
to out-of-door sculpture as to urge the establishment of a royal
institution for the instruction of ingenious young men, who, on being
taken into the service of noblemen and gentlemen, would straightway
people their grounds with statues. And this notwithstanding Addison had
published his famous papers on the "Pleasures of the Imagination" three
years before.[5]
Richard Bradley was the Dr. Lardner of his day,--a man of general
scientific acquirement, an indefatigable worker, venturing hazardous
predictions, writing some fifteen or twenty volumes upon subjects
connected with agriculture, foisting himself into the chair of Botany at
Cambridge by noisy reclamation, selling his name to the booksellers for
attachment to other men's wares,[6] and, finally, only escaping the
indignity of a removal from his professor's chair by sudden death, in
1732. Yet this gentleman's botanical dictionary ("Historia Plantarum,"
etc.) was quoted respectfully by Linnæus, and his account of British
cattle, their races, proper treatment, etc., was, by all odds, the best
which had appeared up to his time. The same gentleman, in his "New
Improvements of Planting and Gardening," lays great stress upon a novel
"invention for the more speedy designing of garden-plats," which is
nothing more than an adaptation of the principle of the kaleidoscope.
The latter book is the sole representative of this author's voluminous
agricultural works in the Astor collection; and, strange to say, there
are only two in the library of the British Museum.
I take, on this dreary November day, (with my Catawbas blighted,) a
rather ill-natured pleasure in reading how the Duke of Rutland, in the
beginning of the last century, was compelled to "keep up fires from
Lady-day to Michaelmas behind his sloped walls," in order to insure the
ripening of his grapes; yet winter grapes he had, and it was a great
boast in that time. The quiet country squires--such as Sir Roger de
Coverley--had to content themselves with those old-fashioned fruits
which would struggle successfully with out-of-door fogs. Fielding tells
us that the garden of Mr. Wilson, where Parson Adams and the divine
Fanny were guests, showed nothing more rare than an alley bordered with
filbert-bushes.[7]
In London and its neighborhood the gourmands fared better. Cucumbers,
which in Charles's time never came in till the close of May, were ready
in the shops of Westminster (in the time of George I.) in early March.
Melons were on sale, for those who could pay roundly, at the end of
April; and the season of cauliflowers, which used to be limited to a
single month, now reached over a term of six months.
Mr. Pope, writing to Dr. Swift, somewhere about 1730, says,--"I have
more fruit-trees and kitchen-garden than you have any thought of; nay, I
have good melons and pine-apples of my own growth." Nor was this a small
boast; for Lady Wortley Montague, describing her entertainment at the
table of the Elector of Hanover, in 1716, speaks of "pines" as a fruit
she had never seen before.
Ornamental gardening, too, was now changing its complexion. Dutch
William was dead and buried. Addison had written in praise of the
natural disposition of the gardens of Fontainebleau, and, at his place
near Rugby, was carrying out, so far as a citizen might, the suggestions
of those papers to which I have already alluded. Milton was in better
odor than he had been, and people had begun to realize that an
arch-Puritan might have exquisite taste. Possibly, too, cultivated
landholders had seen that charming garden-picture where the luxurious
Tasso makes the pretty sorceress Armida spread her nets.
Pope affected a respect for the views of Addison; but his Twickenham
garden was a very stiff affair. Bridgman was the first practical
landscape-gardener who ventured to ignore old rules; and he was followed
closely by William Kent, a broken-down and unsuccessful
landscape-painter, who came into such vogue as a man of taste, that he
was employed to fashion the furniture of scores of country-villas; and
Walpole[8] tells us that he was even beset by certain fine ladies to
design Birthday gowns for them:--"The one he dressed in a petticoat
decorated with columns of the five orders; the other, like a bronze, in
a copper-colored satin, with ornaments of gold."
Clermont, the charming home of the exiled Orléans family, shows vestiges
of the taste of Kent, who always accredited very much of his love for
the picturesque to the reading of Spenser. It is not often that the poet
of the "Faerie Queene" is mentioned as an educator.
And now let us leave gardens for a while, to discuss Mr. Jethro Tull,
the great English cultivator of the early half of the eighteenth
century. I suspect that most of the gentry of his time, and cultivated
people, ignored Mr. Tull, he was so rash and so headstrong and so noisy.
It is certain, too, that the educated farmers, or, more strictly, the
writing farmers, opened battle upon him, and used all their art to ward
off his radical tilts upon their old methods of culture. And he fought
back bravely; I really do not think that an editor of a partisan paper
to-day could improve upon him,--in vigor, in personality, or in
coarseness.
Unfortunately, the biographers and encyclopædists who followed upon his
period have treated his name with a neglect that leaves but scanty
gleanings for his personal history. His father owned landed property in
Oxfordshire, and Jethro was a University-man; he studied for the law,
(which will account for his address in a wordy quarrel,) made the tour
of Europe, returned to Oxfordshire, married, took the paternal
homestead, and proceeded to carry out the new notions which he had
gained in his Southern travels. Ill health drove him to France a second
time, from which he returned once more, to occupy the famous "Prosperous
Farm" in Berkshire; and here he opened his batteries afresh upon the
existing methods of farming. The gist of his proposed reform is
expressed in the title of his book, "The Horse-hoeing Husbandry." He
believed in the thorough tillage, at frequent intervals, of all
field-crops, from wheat to turnips. To make this feasible, drilling was,
of course, essential; and to make it economical, horse labor was
requisite: the drill and the horse-hoe were only subsidiary to the main
end of THOROUGH TILLAGE.
Sir Hugh Platt, as we have seen, had before suggested dibbling, and
Worlidge had contrived a drill; but Tull gave force and point and
practical efficacy to their suggestions. He gives no credit, indeed, to
these old gentlemen; and it is quite possible that his theory may have
been worked out from his own observations. He certainly gives a clear
account of the growth of his belief, and sustains it by a great many
droll notions about the physiology of plants, which would hardly be
admissible in the botanies of to-day.
Shall I give a sample?
"Leaves," he says, "are the parts, or bowels of a plant, which perform
the same office to sap as the lungs of an animal do to blood; that is,
they purify or cleanse it of the recrements, or fuliginous steams,
received in the circulation, being the unfit parts of the food, and
perhaps some decayed particles which fly off the vessels through which
blood and sap do pass respectively."
It does not appear that the success of Tull upon "Prosperous Farm" was
such as to give a large warrant for its name. His enemies, indeed,
alleged that he came near to sinking two estates on his system; this,
however, he stoutly denies, and says, "I propose no more than to keep
out of debt, and leave my estate behind me better than I found it. Yet,
owned it must be, that, had I, when I first began to make trials, known
as much of the system as I do now, the practice of it would have been
more profitable to me." Farmers in other parts of England, with lands
better adapted to the new husbandry, certainly availed themselves of it,
very much to their advantage. Tull, like a great many earnest reformers,
was almost always in difficulty with those immediately dependent on him;
over and over he insists upon the "inconveniency and slavery attending
the exorbitant power of husbandry servants and laborers over their
masters." He quarrels with their wages, and with the short period of
their labor. Pray, what would Mr. Tull have thought, if he had dealt
with the Drogheda gentlemen in black satin waistcoats, who are to be
conciliated by the farmers of to-day?
I think I can fancy such an encounter for the querulous old reformer.
"Mike! blast you, you booby, you've broken my drill!" And Mike, (putting
his thumb deliberately in the armlet of his waistcoat,) "Meester Tull,
it's not the loikes o' me'll be leestening to insoolting worrds. I'll
take me money, if ye plase." And with what a fury "Meester" Tull would
have slashed away, after this, at "Equivocus," and all his
newspaper-antagonists!
I wish I could believe that Tull always told the exact truth; but he
gives some accounts of the perfection to which he had brought his drill
to which I can lend only a most meagre trust; and it is unquestionable
that his theory so fevered his brain at last as to make him utterly
contemptuous of all old-fashioned methods of procedure. In this respect
he was not alone among reformers. He stoutly affirmed that tillage would
supply the lack of manure, and his neighbors currently reported that he
was in the habit of dumping his manure carts in the river. This charge
Mr. Tull firmly denied, and I dare say justly. But I can readily believe
that the rumors were current; country-neighborhoods offer good
starting-points for such lively scandal. The writer of this paper has
heard, on the best possible authority, that he is in the habit of
planting shrubs with their roots in the air.
In his loose, disputative way, and to magnify the importance of his own
special doctrine, Tull affirms that the ancients, and Virgil
particularly, urged tillage for the simple purpose of destroying
weeds.[9] In this it seems to me that he does great injustice to our old
friend Maro. Will the reader excuse a moment's dalliance with the
Georgics again?
"Multum adeo, rastris glebas qui frangit _inertes_,
Vimineasque trahit crates, juvat arva;...
Et qui proscisso quæ suscitat æquore terga
Rursus in obliquum verso perrumpit aratro,
Exercetque frequens tellurem, atque imperat arvis."
That "_imperat_" looks like something more than weed-killing; it looks
like subjugation; it looks like pulverization at the hands of an
imperious master.
But behind all of Tull's exaggerated pretension, and unaffected by the
noisy exacerbation of his speech, there lay a sterling good sense, and a
clear comprehension of the existing shortcomings in agriculture, which
gave to his teachings prodigious force, and an influence measured only
by half a century of years. There were few, indeed, who adopted
literally and fully his plans, or who had the hardihood to acknowledge
the irate Jethro as a teacher; yet his hints and his example gave a
stimulus to root-culture, and an attention to the benefits arising from
thorough and repeated tillage, that added vastly to the annual harvests
of England. Bating the exaggerations I have alluded to, his views are
still reckoned sound; and though a hoed crop of wheat is somewhat
exceptional, the drill is now almost universal in the best cultivated
districts; and a large share of the forage-crops owe their extraordinary
burden to horse-hoeing husbandry.
Even the exaggerated claims of Tull have had their advocates in these
last days; and the energetic farmer of Lois-Weedon, in Northamptonshire,
is reported to be growing heavy crops of wheat for a succession of
years, without any supply of outside fertilizers, and relying wholly
upon repeated and perfect pulverization of the soil.[10] And Mr. Way,
the distinguished chemist of the Royal Society, in a paper on "The Power
of Soils to absorb Manure,"[11] propounds the question as follows:--"Is
it likely, on theoretical considerations, that the air and the soil
together can by any means be made to yield, without the application of
manure, and year after year continuously, a crop of wheat of from thirty
to thirty-five bushels per acre?" And his reply is this:--"I confess I
do not see why they should not do so." A practical farmer, however, (who
spends only his wet days in-doors,) would be very apt to suggest here,
that the validity of this _dictum_ must depend very much on the original
constituents of the soil.
Under the lee of the Coombe Hills, on the extreme southern edge of
Berkshire, and not far removed from the great highway leading from Bath
to London, lies the farmery where this restless, petulant, suffering,
earnest, clear-sighted Tull put down the burden of life, a hundred and
twenty years ago. The house is unfortunately largely modernized, but
many of the out-buildings remain unchanged; and not a man thereabout, or
in any other quarter, could tell me where the former occupant, who
fought so bravely his fierce battle of the drill, lies buried.
About the middle of the last century, there lived in the south of
Leicestershire, in the parish of Church-Langton, an eccentric and
benevolent clergyman by the name of William Hanbury, who conceived the
idea of establishing a great charity which was to be supported by a vast
plantation of trees. To this end, he imported a great variety of seeds
and plants from the Continent and America, established a nursery of
fifty acres in extent, and published "An Essay on Planting, and a Scheme
to make it Conducive to the Glory of God and the Advantage of Society."
But the Reverend Hanbury was beset by aggressive and cold-hearted
neighbors, among them two strange old "gentlewomen," Mistress Pickering
and Mistress Byrd, who malevolently ordered their cattle to be turned
loose into his first plantation of twenty thousand young and thrifty
trees. And not content with this, they served twenty-seven different
copies of writs upon him in one day, for trespass. Of all this he gives
detailed account in his curious history of the "Charitable Foundations
at Church-Langton." He tells us that the "venomous rage" of these old
ladies (who died shortly after, worth a million of dollars) did not even
spare his dogs; but that his pet spaniel and greyhound were cruelly
killed by a table-fork thrust into their entrails. Nay, their
game-keeper even buried two dogs alive, which belonged to his neighbor,
Mr. Wade, a substantial grazier. His story of it is very Defoe-like and
pitiful:--"I myself heard them," he says, "_ten days_ after they had
been buried, and, seeing some people at a distance, inquired what dogs
they were. '_They are some dogs that are lost, Sir_,' said they; '_they
have been lost some time_.' I concluded only some poachers had been
there early in the morning, and by a precipitate flight had left their
dogs behind them. In short, the howling and barking of these dogs was
heard for near three weeks, when it ceased. Mr. Wade's dogs were
missing, but he could not suspect those dogs to be his; and the noise
ceasing, the thoughts, wonder, and talking about them soon also ceased.
Some time after, a person, being amongst the bushes where the howling
was heard, discovered some disturbed earth, and the print of men's heels
ramming it down again very close, and, seeing Mr. Wade's servant, told
him he thought something had been buried there. '_Then_,' said the man,
'_it is our dogs, and they have been buried alive. I will go and fetch a
spade, and will find them, if I dig all Caudle over_.' He soon brought a
spade, and, upon removing the top earth, came to the blackthorns, and
then to the dogs, the biggest of which had eat the loins, and greatest
share of the hind parts, of the little one."
The strange ladies who were guilty of this slaughter of innocents showed
"a dying blaze of goodness" by bequeathing twelve thousand pounds to
charitable societies; and "thus ended," says Hanbury, "these two poor,
unhappy, uncharitable, charitable old gentlewomen."
The good old man describes the beauty of plants and trees with the same
delightful particularity which he spent on his neighbors and the buried
dogs.
I cannot anywhere learn whether or not the charity-plantation of
Church-Langton is still thriving.
About this very time, Lancelot Brown, who was for a long period the
kitchen-gardener at Stowe, came into sudden notoriety by his disposition
of the waters in Blenheim Park, where, in the short period of one week,
he created perhaps the finest artificial lake in the world. Its
indentations of shore, its bordering declivities of wood, and the
graceful swells of land dipping to its margin, remain now in very nearly
the same condition in which Brown left them more than a hundred years
ago. All over England the new man was sent for; all over England he
rooted out the mossy avenues, and the sharp rectangularities, and laid
down his flowing lines of walks, and of trees. He (wisely) never
contracted to execute his own designs, and--from lack of facility,
perhaps--he always employed assistants to draw his plans. But the quick
eye which at first sight recognized the "capabilities" of a place, and
which leaped to the recognition of its matured graces, was all his own.
He was accused of sameness; but the man who at one time held a thousand
lovely landscapes unfolding in his thought could hardly give a series of
contrasts without startling affectations.
I mention the name of Lancelot Brown, however, not to discuss his
merits, but as the principal and largest illustrator of that taste in
landscape-gardening which just now grew up in England, out of a new
reading of Milton, out of the admirable essays of Addison, out of the
hints of Pope, out of the designs of Kent, and which was stimulated by
Gilpin, by Horace Walpole, and, still more, by the delightful little
landscapes of Gainsborough.
Enough will be found of Mr. Brown, and of his style, in the professional
treatises, upon whose province I do not now infringe. I choose rather,
for the entertainment of my readers, if they will kindly find it, to
speak of that sad, exceptional man, William Shenstone, who, by the
beauties which he made to appear on his paternal farm of Leasowes,
fairly rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners,--and who, by the
graces and the tenderness which he lavished on his verse, made no mean
rank for himself at a time when people were reading the "Elegy" of Gray,
the Homer of Pope, and the "Cato" of Addison.
I think there can hardly be any doubt, however, that poor Shenstone was
a wretched farmer; yet the Leasowes was a capital grazing farm, when he
took it in charge, within fair marketable distance of both Worcester and
Birmingham. I suspect that he never put his fine hands to the
plough-tail; and his plaintive elegy, that dates from an April day of
1743, tells, I am sure, only the unmitigated truth:--
"Again the laboring hind inverts the soil;
Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave;
Another spring renews the soldier's toil,
_And finds me vacant in the rural cave_."
Shenstone, like many another of the lesser poets, was unfortunate in
having Dr. Johnson for his biographer. It is hard to conceive of a man
who would show less of tenderness for an elaborate parterre of flowers,
or for a poet who affectedly parted his gray locks on one side of his
head, wore a crimson waistcoat, and warbled in anapæstics about kids and
shepherds' crooks. Only fancy the great, snuffy, wheezing Doctor, with
his hair-powder whitening half his shoulders, led up before some
charming little extravaganza of Boucher, wherein all the nymphs are
simpering marchionesses, with rosettes on their high-heeled slippers
that out-color the sky! With what a "Faugh!" the great gerund-grinder
would thump his cane upon the floor, and go lumbering away! And
Shenstone, or rather his memory, caught the besom of just such a sneer.
But other critics were more kindly and appreciative; among them, Dodsley
the bookselling author, who wrote "The Economy of Human Life," (the
"Proverbial Philosophy" of its day,) and Whately, who gave to the public
the most elegant and tasteful discussion of artificial scenery that was
perhaps ever written.
Shenstone studied, as much as so indolent a man ever could, at Pembroke
College, Oxford. His parents died when he was young, leaving to him a
very considerable estate, which fortunately some relative administered
for him, until, owing to this supervisor's death, it lapsed into the
poet's improvident hands. Even then a sensible tenant of his own name,
and a distant relative, managed very snugly the farm of Leasowes; but
when Shenstone came to live with him, neither house nor grounds were
large enough for the joint occupancy of the poet, who was trailing his
walks through the middle of the mowing, and of the tenant, who had his
beeves to fatten and his rental to pay.
So Shenstone became a farmer on his own account; and, according to all
reports, a very sorry account he made of it. The good soul had none of
Mr. Tull's petulance and audacity with his servants; if the ploughman
broke his gear, I suspect the kind ballad-master allowed him a holiday
for the mending. The herdsman stared in astonishment to find the
"beasts" ordered away from their accustomed grazing-fields. A new
thicket had been planted, which must not be disturbed; the orchard was
uprooted to give place to some parterre; a fine bit of meadow was flowed
with a miniature lake; hedges were shorn away without mercy; arbors,
grottos, rustic seats, Arcadian temples, sprang up in all outlying
nooks; so that the annual product of the land came presently to be
limited, almost entirely, to the beauty of its disposition.
I think that the poet, unlike most, was never very thoroughly satisfied
with his poems, and that, therefore, the vanity possessed him to vest
the sense of beauty which he felt tingling in his blood in something
more palpable than language. Hence came the charming walks and woods and
waters of Leasowes. With this ambition holding him and mastering him,
what mattered a mouldy grain-crop, or a debt? If he had only an ardent
admirer of his walks, his wilderness, his grottos,--this was his
customer. He longed for such, in troops,--as a poet longs for readers,
and as a farmer longs for sun and rain.
And he had them. I fancy there was hardly a cultivated person in
England, but, before the death of Shenstone, had heard of the rare
beauty of his home of Leasowes. Lord Lyttleton, who lived near by, at
the elegant seat of Hagley, brought over his guests to see what miracles
the hare-brained, sensitive poet had wrought upon his farm. And I can
fancy the proud, shy creature watching from his lattice the company of
distinguished guests,--maddened, if they look at his alcove from the
wrong direction,--wondering if that shout that comes booming to his
sensitive ear means admiration, or only an unappreciative
surprise,--dwelling on the memory of the visit, as a poet dwells on the
first public mention of his poem. In his "Egotisms," (well named,) he
writes,--"Why repine? I have seen mansions on the verge of Wales that
convert my farm-house into a Hampton Court, and where they speak of a
glazed window as a great piece of magnificence. All things figure by
comparison."
And this reflection, with its flavor of philosophy, was, I dare say, a
sweet morsel to him. He saw very little of the world in his later years,
save that part of it which at odd intervals found its way to the
delights of Leasowes; indeed, he was not of a temper to meet the world
upon fair terms. "The generality of mankind," he cynically says, "are
seldom in good humor but whilst they are imposing upon you in some shape
or other."[12]
Our farmer of Leasowes published a pastoral that was no way equal to the
pastoral he wrote with trees, walks, and water upon his land; yet there
are few cultivated readers who have not some day met with it, and been
beguiled by its mellifluous seesaw. How its jingling resonance comes
back to me to-day from the "Reader" book of the High School!
"I have found out a gift for my fair;
I have found where the wood-pigeons breed:
But let me that plunder forbear;
She will say 'twas a barbarous deed.
For he ne'er could be true, she averred,
Who could rob a poor bird of its young:
And I loved her the more, when I heard
Such tenderness fall from her tongue."
And what a killing look over at the girl in the corner, in check
gingham, with blue bows in her hair, as I read (always on the old
school-benches),--
"I have heard her with sweetness unfold
How that pity was due to--a dove:
That it ever attended the bold;
And she called it _the sister of love_.
But her words such a pleasure convey,
So much I her accents adore,
Let her speak, and whatever she say,
Methinks I should love her the more."
There is a rhythmic prettiness in this; but it is the prettiness of a
lover in his teens, and not the kind we look for from a man who stood
five feet eleven in his stockings, and wore his own gray hair. Strangely
enough, Shenstone had the _physique_ of a ploughman or a prize-fighter,
and with it the fine, sensitive brain of a woman; a Greek in his
refinements, and a Greek in indolence. I hope he gets on better in the
other world than he ever did in this.