call it, had been reached. Years afterwards I found myself in a fit of
chuckling over Byron's
“Tell us ye husbands of wives intellectual,
Now tell us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?”
After another lapse I found among the carillon of Calverley,--
“No, mine own, though early forced to leave you,
Still my heart was there where first we met;
In those 'Lodgings with an ample sea-view,'
Which were, forty years ago, 'To Let.'”
The _Bab Ballads_ are full of whimsical rimes; but put all these that I
have named together and you will find that they are easily outjingled
by Sir Owen Seaman. The first “copy of verses” in _Punch_ any week is a
masterpiece in its way, and assuredly some of his brethren of Bouverie
Street are not very far behind him in the merry dance in which he sets
the _pas_.
A good many years ago--I think it was shortly after the capitulation
of Paris--there was a correspondence in _The Graphic_ about the English
words for which no rime could be found. One was “silver,” the other
“month.” It was, I think, Burnand who, contrived,--
“Argentum, we know, is the Latin for silver,
And the Latin for spring ever was and is still, ver.”
But then purists shook their heads and said that Latin was not English,
and the challenge was for English rimes.
As for “month,” Mr. Swinburne did not hesitate to write a whole volume
of exquisite poems to a child to bring in his rime for month: it was
millionth but the metre was so handled by the master that it would
have been impossible for even the most casual reader to make the word a
dissyllable. In the same volume he found a rime for babe in “astrolabe.”
(With regard to my spelling of the word “rime,” I may here remark that I
have done so for years. I was gratified to find my lead followed in the
_Cambridge History of English Literature._)
And all this weedy harvest of criticism and reminiscence has come
through my quoting Tennyson without an apology! All that I really had to
say was that there is no maker of verses in England to-day who has
the same mastery of metre as Tennyson had. It is indeed because of the
delicacy of his ear for words that so many readers are disposed to think
his verse artificial. But there are people who think that all art is
artificial. (This is a very imminent subject for consideration in a
garden, and it has been considered by great authorities in at least two
books, to which I may refer if I go so far as to write something about a
garden in these pages.) All that I will say about the art, the artifice,
the artfulness, or the artificiality of the pictures that Tennyson
brings before my eyes through his mastery of his medium, is that I have
always placed a higher value upon the meticulous than upon the slap-dash
in every form of art. It was said that the late Duke of Cambridge could
detect a speck of rust on a sabre quicker than any Commander-in-Chief
that ever lived; but I do not therefore hold that he was a greater
soldier than Marlborough. But if Marlborough could make the brightness
of his sabres do the things that he meant them to do, his victories were
all the more brilliant.
I dare say there are quite a number of people who think that Edmund
Yates's doggerel about a brand of Champagne--it commences something like
this, if my memory serves me:--
“Dining with Bulteen
Captain of Militia,
Ne'er was dinner seen
Soapier or fishyer------”
quite equal to the best that Calverley or Seaman ever wrote, because it
has that slap-dash element about it that disregards correct rimes; but
I am not among those critics. Tennyson does not usually paint an
impressionist picture, though he can do so when he pleases; he is rather
a pre-Raphaelite; but, however he works, he produces his picture and
it is a picture. Talk of Art and Nature--there never was a poet who
reproduced Nature with an art so consummate; there never was a poet who
used his art so graphically. Of course I am now talking of Tennyson
at his best, not of Tennyson of _The May Queen_, which is certainly
deficient enough in art to please---as it has pleased--the despisers of
the meticulous, but of Tennyson in his lyrical mood--of the garden-song
in _Maud_, of the echo-song in _The Princess_---both diamonds, not in
the rough, but cut into countless facets--Tennyson in _The Passing of
Arthur_, and countless pages of the _Idylls_, Tennyson of the pictorial
simplicity of _Enoch Arden_ and the full brush of _Ulysses, Tithonus,
Lucretius_, the battle glow of _The Ballad of the Revenge_, the muted
trumpet-notes of _The Defence of Lucknow._
And yet through all are those lowering lines which somehow he would
insist on introducing in the wrong places with infinite pains! It was
as if he took the trouble to help us up a high marble staircase to
the cupola of a tower, and to throw open before our eyes a splendid
landscape, only to trip us up when we are lost in wonder of it all, and
send us headlong to the dead earth below.
It was when we were looking down a gorge of tropical splendour in
the island of Dominica in the West Indies opening a wide mouth to the
Caribbean, that the incomparable lines from _Enoch Arden_ came upon me
in the flash of the crimson-and-blue wings of a bird--one of the many
lories, I think it was--that fled about the wild masses of the brake
of hibiscus, and I said them to Dorothy. Under our eyes was a tropical
garden on each side of the valley--a riot of colour--a tropical sunset
laid at our feet in the tints of a thousand flowers down to where the
countless palms of the gorge began to mingle with the yuccas that swayed
over the sea-cliffs in the blue distance.
“The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail.
No sail from dav to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon, his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail.”
There was the most perfect picture of the tropical island.
Some months after we had returned to England I found the _Enoch Arden_
volume lying on the door at Dorothy's feet. She was roseate with
indignation as I entered the room. I paused for an explanation.
It came. She touched the book with her foot--it was a symbolic spurn--as
much as any one with a conscience could give to a royal-blue tooled
morocco binding.
“How could he do it?” she cried.
“Do what?”
“Those two lines at the end. Listen to this”--she picked up the book
with a sort of indignant snatch:--
“'There came so loud a calling of the sea
That all the houses in the haven rang.
He woke, he rose, he spread his arms abroad
Crying with a loud voice, “A sail! a sail!
I am saved,” and so fell back and spoke no more.
So past the strong, heroic soul away.
And when they buried him the little port
Had seldom, seen a costlier funeral.'
“Now tell me if I don't do well to be angary,” cried Dorothy. “Those two
lines--'a costlier funeral'! he should have given the items in the bill
and said what was the name of the undertaker. Oh, why didn't you warn
me off that awful conclusion? What should you say the bill came to? Oh,
Alfred, Lord Tennyson!”
I shook my head sadly, of course.
“He does that sort of thing now and then,” I said sadly. “You remember
the young lady whose 'light blue eyes' were 'tender over drowning dies'?
and the 'oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies.'”
“I do now, but they are not so bad as that about the costly funeral. Why
does he do it--tell me that--put me wise?”
“I suppose we must all have our bit of fun now and again. Kean, when in
the middle of his most rousing piece of declamation, used to turn
from his spellbound audience and put out his tongue at one of the
scene-shifters. If you want to be kept constantly at the highest level
you must stick to Milton.”
There was a pause before Dorothy said,--
“I suppose so; and yet was there ever anything funnier than his
description of the battle in heaven?”
“Funny? Majestic, you mean?” said I, deeply shocked.
“Well, majestically funny, if you wish. The idea of those 'ethereal
virtues' throwing big stones at one another, and knowing all the time
that it didn't matter whether they were hit or not--the gashes closed
like the gashes we loved making with our spades in the stranded
jelly-fish at low tide. But I suppose you will tell me that Milton must
have his joke with the rest of them. Oh, I wonder if all poetry is not a
fraud.”
That is how Tennyson did for himself by not knowing where to stop. I
expect that what really happened was that when he had written:--
“So past the strong, heroic soul away,”
he found that there was still room for a couple of lines on the page and
he could not bear to see the space wasted.
And it was not wasted either; for I remember talking to the late Dr.
John Todhunter, himself a most accomplished poet and a scholarly critic,
about the “costlier funeral” lines, and he defended them warmly.
And the satisfying of Dr. Todhunter must be regarded as counting for a
good deal more in the balance against my poor Dorothy's disapproval.
Lest this chapter should appear aggressively digressive in a book that
may be fancied to have some-thing to do with gardens, I may say
that while Alfred, Lord Tennyson had a great love for observing the
peculiarities of flower and plant growths, he must have cared precious
little for the garden as the solace of one's declining years. He did
not pant for it as the hart pants for the water-brooks. He never came to
think of the hours spent out of a garden as wasted. He did not live
in his garden, nor did he live for it. That is what amazes us in these
days, nearly as much as the stories of the feats of Mr. Gladstone with
the axe of the woodcutter. Not many of us would have the heart to stand
by while a magnificent oak or sycamore is being cut down. We would
shrink from such an incident as we should from an execution. But forty
years ago the masses were ready to worship the executioner. They used to
be admitted in crowds to Hawarden to watch the heroic old gentleman
in his shirt-sleeves and with his braces hanging down, butchering a
venerable elm in his park, and when the trunk crashed to the ground they
cheered vociferously, and when he wiped the perspiration from his brow,
they rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the drops just as men
and women tried to damp their handkerchiefs in the drippings of the axe
of the headsman, who, in a stroke, slew a monarch and made a martyr,
outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall.
And when the excursionists were cheering the hero of Hawarden, Thomas
Hardy was writing _The Woodlanders_. Between Hardy and Hawarden there
was certainly a great gulf fixed. I do not think that any poet ever
wrote an elegy so affecting as the chapter on the slaying of the oak
outside the house of the old man who died of the shock. But the scent
of the woodland clings to the whole hook; I have read it once a year for
more than a quarter of a century.
Tennyson never showed that he loved his garden as Mr. Hardy showed he
loved his woodland. In the many beautiful lines suggesting his affection
for his lawns and borders Tennyson makes a reader feel that his joy was
purely Platonic--sometimes patronisingly Platonic. It is very far from
approaching the passion of a lover for his mistress. One feels that he
actually held that the garden was made for the poet not the poet for the
garden, which, I need hardly say, we all hold to be a heresy. The union
between the true garden-lover and the garden may be a mésalliance, but
that is better than _marriage de convenance_.
But to return to the subject of Poets' Gardens, we agreed that the
gardens of neither of the poet's dwelling-places were worth noticing;
but they were miracles of design compared with that at the red brick
villa where the white buses stopped at Putney--the house where the body
of Algernon Charles Swinburne lay carefully embalmed by his friend,
Theodore Watts-Dunton. Highly favoured visitors were occasionally
admitted to inspect the result of the process by which the poet had his
palpitations reduced to the discreet beats of the Putney metronome, and
visitors shook their heads and said it was a marvellous reformation.
So it was--a triumph of the science of embalming, not “with spices and
savour of song,” but with the savourless salt of True Friendship. The
reformed poet was now presentable, but he was no longer a live poet: the
work of reformation had changed the man into a mummy--a most presentable
mummy; and it was understood that the placid existence of a mummy is
esteemed much more than the passionate rapture of an early morning lark,
or of the nightingale that has a bad habit of staying out all night.
It is a most unhappy thing that the first operation of the professional
embalmer is to extract the brains of his subject, and this was done
through the medium of a quill--a very suitable implement in the case of
a writer: he has begun the process himself long before he is stretched
on the table of the operator. Almost equally important it is that the
subject should be thoroughly dried. Mr. Swinburne's true friend knew his
business: he kept him perpetually dry and with his brain atrophied.
The last time I saw the poet he was on view under the desiccating
influence of a biscuit factory. He looked very miserable, and I know
that I felt very miserable observing the triumph of the Watts-Dunton
treatment, and remembering the day when the glory and glow of _Songs
before Sunrise_ enwrapt me until I felt that the whole world would
awaken when such a poet set the trumpet to his lips to blow!
Mr. Watts-Dunton played the part of Vivien to that merle Merlin, and all
the forest echoed “Fool!”
But it was really a wonderful reformation that he brought about.
I looked into the garden at that Putney reformatory many times. It was
one of the genteelest places I ever saw and so handy for the buses. It
was called, by one of those flashes of inspiration not unknown in the
suburbs, “The Pines.” It might easily have been “The Cedars” or “The
Hollies,” or even “Laburnum Villa.”
The poet was carefully shielded by his true friend. Few visitors were
allowed to see him. The more pushing were, however, met half-way.
They were permitted as a treat to handle the knob of Mr. Swinburne's
walking-stick.
Was it, I wonder, a Transatlantic visitor who picked up from the
linoleum of the hall beside the veneered mahogany hat-stand, and the
cast-iron umbrella-holder, a scrap of paper in the poet's handwriting
with the stanza of a projected lyric?--
“I am of dust and of dryness;
I am weary of dryness and dust!
But for my constitutional shyness
I'd go on a bust.”
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH
I came across an excellent piece of advice the other day in a
commonplace volume on planning a garden. It was in regard to the place
of statuary in a garden. But the writer is very timid in this matter. He
writes as if he hoped no one would overhear him when he says that he
has no rooted objection, although many people have, to a few bits of
statuary; but on no plea would he allow them the freedom of the garden;
their place should be close to the house, and they should be admitted
even to that restricted territory only with the greatest caution. On
no account should anything of that sort be allowed to put a foot beyond
where the real garden begins--the real clearly being the herbaceous
part, though the formal is never referred to as the ideal.
He gives advice regarding the figures as does a “friend of the family”
when consulted about the boys who are Inclined to be wild or the girls
who are a bit skittish. No, no; one should be very firm with Hermes;
from the stories that somehow get about regarding him, he is certainly
inclined to be fast; he must not be given a latch-key; and as for
Artemis--well, it is most likely only thoughtlessness on her part, but
she should not be allowed to hunt more than two days a week. Still, if
looked after, both Hermy and Arty will be all right; above all things,
however, the list of their associates should be carefully revised: the
fewer companions they have the better it will be for all concerned.
Now, I venture to agree with all this advice generally. Fond as I am of
statuary, whether stone or lead, I am sure that it is safest in or about
the House Garden; and no figure that I possess is in any other part of
my ground; but this is only because I do not possess a single Faun or
Dryad or Daphne. If I were lucky enough to have these, I should know
where to place them and it would not be in a place of formality, but
just the opposite. They have no business with formalities, and would
look as incongruous among the divinities who seem quite happy on
pedestals as would Pan in modern evening dress, or a Russian _danceuse_
in corsets, or a Polish in anything at all.
If I had a Pan I would not be afraid to locate him in the densest part
of a shrubbery, where only his ears and the grin between them could be
seen among the foliage and his goat's shank among the lower branches.
His effigy is shown n its legitimate place in Gabe's Picture, “Fête
Galante.” That is the correct habitat of Pan, and that is where he would
be shown in the hall of the Natural History Museum where every “exhibit”
has its natural _entourage_. If I had a Dryad and had not a pond with
reeds about its marge, I would make one for her accommodation, for,
except with such surroundings she should not be seen in a garden. I
have a Daphne, but she is an indoor one, being frailly made, and with
a year's work of undercutting, in Greek marble--a precious copy of
Bernini's masterpiece. But if I had an outdoor Daphne, I would not rest
easy unless I knew that she was within easy touch of her laurel.
That is why I do not think that any hard and fast rule should be laid
down in the matter of the disposal of statuary in a garden ground. But
on the general principle of “the proper place,” I certainly am of the
opinion expressed by the writer to whom I have referred--that this
element of interest and beauty should be found mainly in connection
with the stonework of the house. In any part of an Italian garden stone
figures seem properly placed; because so much of that form of garden
is made up of sculptured stone; but in the best examples of the art you
will find that the statuary is placed with due regard to the “feature”
it is meant to illustrate. It is, in fact, part of the design and
eminently decorative, as well as being stimulating to the memory and
suggestive to the imagination. In most of the English gardens that
were planned and carried out during the greater part of the nineteenth
century, the stone and lead figures that formed a portion of the
original design of the earlier days were thrown about without the least
reference to their fitness for the places they were forced to occupy;
and the consequence was that they never seemed right: they seemed to
have no business where they were; hence the creation of a prejudice
against such things. Happily, however, now that it is taken for granted
that garden design is the work of some one who is more of an architect
than a horticulturist, though capability in the one direction is
intolerable without its complement in the other, the garden ornamental
is coming into its own again; and the prices which even ordinary and by
no means unique examples fetch under the hammer show that they are being
properly appreciated.
It is mainly in public parks that one finds the horticultural skill
overbalanced, not by the architectural, but by the “Parks Committee”
of the Town Council; consequently knowing, as every one must, the usual
type of the Town Council Committee-man, one can only look for a display
of ignorance, stupidity, and bad taste, the result of a combination of
the three being sheer vulgarity. The Town Council usually have a highly
competent horticulturist, and his part of the business is done well;
but I have known many cases of the professional man being overruled by a
vulgar, conceited member of the Committee even on a professional point,
such as the arrangement of colour in a bed of single dahlias.
“My missus abominates yaller,” was enough to veto a thoroughly artistic
scheme for a portion of a public garden.
I was in the studio of a distinguished portrait painter in London on
what was called “Show Sunday”--the Sunday previous to the sending of the
pictures to the Hanging Committee of the Royal Academy, and there I was
introduced by the artist, who wanted to throw the fellow at somebody's
head, not having anything handy that he could, without discourtesy,
throw at the fellow's head, to a gentleman representing the Committee
of Selection of a movement in one of the most important towns in the
Midlands, to present the outgoing Lord Mayor with a portrait of himself.
With so aggressively blatant a specimen of cast-iron conceit I had never
previously been brought in contact. At least three of the portraits on
the easels in the studio were superb. At the Academy Exhibition they
attracted a great deal of attention and the most laudatory criticism.
But the delegate from the Midlands shook his head at them and gave a
derisive snuffle.
“Not up to much,” he muttered to me. “I reckon I'll deal in another
shop. I ain't the sort as is carried away by the sound of a name. I may
not be one of your crickets; but I know what I like and I know what I
don't like, and these likenesses is them. Who's that old cock with the
heyglass--I somehow seem to feel that I've seen him before?”
I told him that the person whom he indicated was Lord Goschen.
“I guessed he was something in that line--wears the heyglass to make
people fancy he's something swagger. Well, so long.”
That was the last we saw of the delegate. He was not one of the
horny-handed, I found out; but he had some connection with these
art-arbiters; he was the owner of a restaurant that catered for artisans
of the lower grade.
I had the curiosity to inquire of a friend living in the town he
represented so efficiently, respecting the commission for the portrait,
and he gave me the name of a flashy meretricious painter whose work was
treated with derision from Chelsea to St. John's Wood. But my informant
added that the Committee of the Council were quite pleased with the
portrait, and had drunk the health of the painter on the day of its
presentation.
When a distinguished writer expressed the opinion that there is
safety in a multitude of councillors, he certainly did not mean Town
Councillors. If he did he was wrong.
When on the subject of the garden ornamental, I should like to venture
to express my opinion that it is a mistake to fancy that it is not
possible to furnish your grounds tastefully and in a way that will add
immensely to their interest unless with conventional objects--in the way
of sundials or bird baths or vases or seats. I know that the Venetian
well-heads which look so effective, cost a great deal of money, and so
does the wrought-iron work if it is at all good, and unless it is good
it is not worth possessing. But if you have an uncontrollable ambition
to possess a wellhead, why not get the local builder to construct one
for you, with rubble facing of hits of stone of varying colour, only
asking a mason to make a sandstone coping for the rim and carve the
edge? This could be done for three or four pounds, and if properly
designed would make a most interesting and suggestive ornament.
There is scarcely a stonemason's yard in any town that will not furnish
a person of some resource with many bits of spoilt carving that could be
used to advantage if the fault is not obtrusive. If you live in a brick
villa, you may consider yourself fortunate in some ways; for you need
not trouble about stonework--brick-coloured terra-cotta ornaments will
give a delightful sense of warmth to a garden, and these may be
bought for very little if you go to the right place for them; and your
builder's catalogue will enable you to see what an endless variety of
sizes and shapes there is available in the form of enrichments for shop
façades. Only a little imagination is required to allow of your seeing
how you can work in some of these to advantage.