large flower-pots of what I might perhaps call the natural shape. These
never seem out of place and never in bad taste. Several that I have seen
have a little enrichment, and if you get your builder to make up a low
brick pedestal for each, using angle bricks and pier bricks, you will
be out of pocket to the amount of a few shillings and you will have
obtained an effect that will never pall on you. But you must remember
that the pedestal--I should call it the stand--should be no more than
a foot high. I do not advocate the employment of old terra-cotta
drain-pipes for anything in a garden. Nothing can be made out of
drain-pipes except a drain.
There is, of course, no need for any garden to depend on ornaments for
good effect; a garden is well furnished with its flowers, and you will
find great pleasure in realising your ideas and your ideals if you
devote yourself to growth and growth only; all that I do affirm is that
your pleasure will be greatly increased if you try by all the means in
your power to make your garden worthy of the flowers. The “love that
beauty should go beautifully,” will, I think, meet with its reward.
Of course, if you have a large piece of ground and take my advice in
making several gardens instead of one only, you may make a red garden of
some portion by using terra-cotta freely, and I am sure that the effect
would be pleasing. I have often thought of doing this; but somehow I was
never in possession of a piece of ground that would lend itself to such
a treatment, though I have made a free use of terracotta vases along the
rose border of my house garden, and I found that the placing of a large
well-weathered Italian oil-jar between the pillars of a colonnade,
inserting a pot of coloured daisies, was very effective, and intensely
stimulating to the pantomime erudition of our visitors, for never did
one catch a glimpse of these jars without crying, “Hallo! Ali Baba.” I
promised to forfeit a sum of money equivalent to the price of one of the
jars to a member of our family on the day when a friend walks round the
place failing to mention the name of that wily Oriental. It is quite
likely that behind my back they allude to the rose colonnade as “The Ali
Baba place.”
Before I leave the subject of the garden ornamental, I must say a word
as to the use of marble.
I have seen in many of those volumes of such good advice as will result,
if it is followed, in the creation of a thoroughly conventional garden,
that in England the use of marble out-of-doors cannot be tolerated. It
may pass muster in Italy, where there are quarries of varions marbles,
but it is quite unsuited to the English climate. The material is
condemned as cold, and that is the last thing we want to achieve in
these latitudes, and it is also “out of place”--so one book assures me,
but without explaining on what grounds it is so, an omission which turns
the assertion into a begging of the question.
But I am really at a loss to know why marble should be thought out of
place in England. As a matter of fact, it is not so considered, for in
most cemeteries five out of every six tombstones are of marble, and all
the more important pieces of statuary--the life-size angels--I do not
know exactly what is the life-size of an angel, or whether the angel has
been standardised, so I am compelled to assume the human dimensions--and
the groups of cherubs' heads supported on pigeon's wings are almost
invariably carved in marble. These are the objects which are supposed
to endure for centuries (the worst of it is that they do), so that
the material cannot be condemned on account of its being liable to
disintegrate under English climatic conditions: the mortality of marble
cannot cease the moment it is brought into a graveyard.
The fact of its being mainly white accounts for the complaint that it
conveys the impression of coldness; but it seems to me that this is just
the impression which people look to acquire in some part of a garden.
How many times has one not heard the exclamation from persons passing
out of the sunshine into the grateful shade,--
“How delightfully cool!”
The finest chimney-pieces in the world are of white marble, and a
chimney-piece should certainly not suggest cold.
That polished marble loses its gloss when it has been for some time in
the open air is undeniable. But I wonder if it is not improved by the
process, considering that in such a condition it assumes a delicate gray
hue in the course of its “weathering” and a texture of its own of a
much finer quality than can be found in ordinary Portland, Bath, or Caen
stones.
I really see no reason why we should be told that marble--white
marble--is unsuited to an English garden. In Italy we know how beautiful
is its appearance, and I do not think that any one should be sarcastic
in referring to the façades of some of the mansions in Fifth Avenue, New
York City. At least three of these represent the best that can be
bought combined with the best that can be thought. They do not look
aggressively ostentatious, any more than does Milan Cathedral or
Westminster Abbey, or Lyons' restaurants. Marble enters largely into
the “frontages” of Fifth Avenue as well as those of other abodes of the
wealthy in some of the cities of the United States; but we are warned
off its use in the open air in England by writers who are not timid in
formulating canons of what they call “good taste.” In the façade of the
Cathedral at Pisa, there is a black column among the gray ones which are
so effectively introduced in the Romanesque “blind arcading.” I am sorry
that I forget what is the technical name for this treatment; but I have
always thought, when feasting upon the architectural masterpiece, that
the master-builder called each of these little columns by the name of
one of his supporters, but that there was one member of the Consistory
who was always nagging him, and he determined to set a black mark
opposite his name; and did so very effectively by introducing the
dark column, taking good care to let all his friends know the why
and wherefore for his freak. I can see very plainly the grins of the
townsfolk of the period when they saw what had been done, and hear the
whispers of “Signor Antonio della colonna nigra,” when the grumbler
walked by. The master-builders of those times were merry fellows, and
some of them carried their jests--a few of them of doubtful humour--into
the interior of a sacred building, as we may see when we inspect the
carving of the underneath woodwork of many a _miserere._
I should like to set down in black and white my protest against the
calumniator of marble for garden ornaments in England, when we have so
splendid an example of its employment in the Queen Victoria Memorial
opposite Buckingham Palace--the noblest work of this character in
England.
I should like also to write something scathing about the superior person
who sneers at what I have heard called “Gin Palace Art.” This person
is ready to condemn unreservedly the association of art with the
public-house, the hotel, and even the tea-room. Now, considering the
recent slump in real palaces--the bishops have begun calling their
palaces houses--I think that some gratitude should be shown to those
licensed persons who so amply recognise the fact that upon them devolves
the responsibility of carrying on the tradition of the Palace. Long ago,
in the days when there were real Emperors and Kings and Popes, it was
an understood thing that a Royal Residence should be a depository of all
the arts, and in every country except England, this assumption was nobly
acted upon. If it had not been for the magnificent patronage--that is
the right word, for it means protection--of many arts by the Church and
by the State of many countries, we should know very little about the
arts to-day. But when the men of many licences had the name “gin-palace”
given to their edifices--it was given to them in the same spirit of
obloquy as animated the scoffers of Antioch when they invented the name
“Christian”--they nobly resolved to act as the Christians did, by trying
to live up to their new name. We see how far success has crowned their
resolution. The representative hostelries of these days go beyond the
traditional king's house which was all glorious within--they are all
glorious--so far as is consistent with educated taste--as to their
exterior as well. A “tied house” really means nowadays one that is tied
down to the resolution that the best traditions of the palace shall be
maintained.
Let any one who can remember what the hotels and public-houses and
eating-houses of forty years ago were like, say if the change that has
been brought about is not an improvement that may be considered almost
miraculous. In the old days when a man left the zinc counters of one
of these places of refreshment, he was usually in a condition that was
alluded to euphemistically as “elevated but nowadays the man who pays a
visit to a properly equipped tavern is elevated in no euphemistic sense.
I remember the cockroaches of the old Albion--they were so tame that
they would eat out of your hand. But if they did, the _habitués_ of that
tavern had their revenge: some of these expert gastronomes professed
to be able to tell from the flavour of the soup whether it had been
seasoned with the cockroaches of the table or the black beetles of the
kitchen.
“What do you mean, sir?” cried an indignant diner to the waiter--“I
ordered portions for three, and yet there are only two cockroaches.”
I recollect in the old days of The Cock tavern in Fleet Street it was
said when the report was circulated that it was enlarging its borders,
that the name on the sign should be appropriately enlarged from the Cock
to the Cockroach.
I heard an explanation given of the toleration shown by some of the
frequenters of these places to the cockroach and the blackbeetle.
“They're afraid to complain,” said my informant, “lest it should be
thought that they were _seeing them, again_.”
I shall never forget the awful dewey stare of a man who was facing a
tumbler (his third) of hot punch in the Cheshire Cheese, at a mouse
which made its appearance only a yard or two from where we were sitting
shortly before closing time one night. He wiped his forehead and still
stared. The aspect of relief that he showed when I made a remark about
the tameness of the mouse, quite rewarded me for my interposition
between old acquaintances.
Having mentioned the Cheshire Cheese in connection with the transition
period from zinc to marble--marble is really my theme--I cannot resist
the temptation to refer to the well-preserved tradition of Dr. Johnson's
association with this place. Visitors were shown the place where Dr.
Johnson was wont to sit night after night with his friends--nay, the
very chair that he so fully occupied was on view; and among the most
cherished memories of seeing “Old London” which people from America
acquired, was that of being brought into such close touch with the
eighteenth century by taking lunch in this famous place.
“There it was just as it had been in good old Samuel's day,” said a man
who knew all about it. “Nothing in the dear old tavern had been changed
since his day--nothing whatever--not even the sand or the sawdust or the
smells.”
But it so happens that in the hundreds of volumes of contemporary
Johnsoniana, not excepting Boswell's biography, there is no mention of
the name of the Cheshire Cheese. There is not a shred of evidence to
support the belief that Johnson was ever within its doors. The furthest
that conjecture can reasonably go in this connection is that one has no
right to assume that from the list of the taverns frequented by Johnson
the name of the Cheshire Cheese should be excluded.
The fate of the Cheshire Cheese, however, proves that while tradition as
an asset may be of great value to such a place, yet it has its limits.
Just as soap and the “spellin' school” have done away with the romance
of the noble Red Man, so against the influence of the marble of
modernity, even the full flavoured aura of Dr. Johnson was unable to
hold its own.
Thus I am brought back--not too late, I hope--to my original theme, which
1 think took the form of a protest against the protestations of those
writers who believe that marble should not find its way into the
ornamentation of an English garden. I have had seats and tables and
vases and columns of various marbles in my House Garden--I have even
had a fountain basin and carved panels of flowers and birds of the same
material--but although some of them show signs of being affected by the
climate, yet nothing has suffered in this way--on the contrary, I find
that Sicilian and “dove” marbles have improved by “weathering.”
I have a large round table, the top of which is inlaid with a variety
of coloured marbles, and as I allow this to remain out-of-doors during
seven months of the year, I know what sorts best withstand the rigours
of an English South Coast June; and I am inclined to believe that the
ordinary “dove” shows the least sign of hardship at the end of the
season. Of course, the top has lost all its polish, but the cost of
repolishing such a table is not more than ten shillings--I had another
one done some years ago, and that is the sum I was charged for the work
by a well-known firm on the Fulham Road; so that if I should get tired
of seeing it weather-beaten, I can get it restored without impoverishing
the household.
And the mention of this leads me on to another point which should not be
lost sight of in considering any scheme of garden decoration.
My Garden of Peace has never been one of “peace at any price.” I have
happily been compelled to give the most inflexible attention to the
price of everything. I like those books on garden design which tell you
how easily you can get leaden figures and magnificent chased vases of
bronze if you wish, but perhaps you would prefer carved stone. You
have only to go to a well-known importer with a cheque-book and a
consciousness of a workable bank balance, and the thing is done. So you
will find in the pre-war cookery books the recipe beginning: “Take two
dozen new-laid eggs, a quart of cream, and a pint of old brandy,” etc.
These bits of advice make very good reading, and doubtless may be read
with composure by some people, but I am not among their number.
That table, with the twelve panels and a heavy pedestal set on castors,
cost me exactly half a crown at an auction. When new it was probably
bought for twelve or fourteen pounds: it is by no means a piece of work
of the highest class; for a first-class inlaid table one would have to
pay something like forty or fifty pounds: I have seen one fetch £150 at
an auction. But my specimen happened to be the Lot 1 in the catalogue,
and people had not begun to warm to their bidding, marble, as I have
already said, is regarded as cold. Another accident that told against
its chances of inspiring a buyer was the fact that the pedestal wanted
a screw, without which the top would not be in its place, and this made
people think it imperfect and incapable of being put right except at
great expense. The chief reason for its not getting beyond the initial
bid was, however, that no one wanted it. The mothers, particularly those
of “the better class,” in Yardley, are lacking in imagination. If they
want a deal table for a kitchen, they will pay fifteen shillings for
one, and ten shillings for a slab of marble to make their pastry on; but
they would not give half a crown for a marble table which would serve
for kitchen purposes a great deal better than a wooden one, and make a
baking slab--it usually gets broken within a month--unnecessary.
[Illustration: 0242]
Why I make so free a use of marble and advise others to do so, is not
merely because I admire it in every form and colour, but because it
can be bought so very cheaply upon occasions--infinitely more so than
Portland or Bath stone. These two rarely come into the second-hand
market, and in the mason's yard a slab is worth so much a square foot or
a cubic foot. But people are now constantly turning out their shapeless
marble mantelpieces and getting wooden ones instead, and the only person
who will buy the former is the general dealer, and the most that he will
give for one that cost £10 or £12 fifty years ago is 10s. or 12s. I
have bought from dealers or builders possibly two dozen of these, never
paying more than 10s. each for the best--actually for the one which I
know was beyond question the best, I paid 6s., the price at which it was
offered to me. An exceptionally fine one of statuary marble with fluted
columns and beautifully carved Corinthian capitals and panels cost me
10s. This mantelpiece was discarded through one of those funny blunders
which enable one to get a bargain. The owner of the house fancied that
it was a production of 1860, when it really was a hundred years earlier.
There are marble mantelpieces and marble mantelpieces. Some fetch 10s.
and others £175. I knew a dealer who bought a large house solely to
acquire the five Bossi mantelpieces which it contained. Occasionally
one may pick up an eighteenth century crystal chandelier which has been
discarded on the supposition that it was one of those shapeless and
tasteless gasaliers which delighted our grandmothers in the days of rep
and Berlin wool.
But from these confessions I hope no one will be so ungenerous as to
fancy that my prediction for marble is to be accounted for only because
of the chances of buying it cheaply. While I admit that I prefer buying
a beautiful thing for a tenth of its value, I would certainly refuse
to have anything to do with an ugly thing if it were offered to me
for nothing. But the beauty of marble is unassailable. It has been
recognised in every quarter of the world for thousands of years.
The only question upon which opinion is divided is in regard to its
suitability to the English climate. In this connection I beg leave
to record my experience. I take it for granted that when I allude
to marble, it will not be supposed that I include that soft
gypsum--sulphate of lime--which masquerades under the name of alabaster,
and is carved with the tools of a woodcarver, supplemented by a drill
and a file, in many forms by Italian craftsmen. This material will last
in the open air very little longer than the plaster of Paris, by which
its numerous component parts are held together. It is worth nothing.
True alabaster is quite a different substance. It is carbonate of lime
and disintegrates very slowly. The tomb of Machiavelli in the Santa
Croce in Florence is of the true alabaster, as are all the fifteenth and
sixteenth century sarcophagi in the same quarter of the church; but none
can be said to have suffered materially. It was widely used in memorial
tablets three hundred or four hundred years ago. Shakespeare makes
Othello refer to the sleeping Desdemona,--
“That whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.”
We know that it was the musical word “alabaster” that found favour with
Shakespeare, just as it was, according to Miss Ethel Smyth, Mus. Doc.,
the musical word “Tipperary,” that helped to make a song containing
that word a favourite with Shakespeare's countrymen, who have never been
found lacking in appreciation of a musical word or a rag-time inanity.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH
Again may I beg leave to express the opinion that there is no need for
any one to depend upon conventional ornaments with a view to make the
garden interesting as well as ornamental. With a little imagination,
one can introduce quite a number of details that are absolutely unique.
There is nothing that looks better than an arch made out of an old stone
doorway. It may be surmounted by a properly supported shield carved with
a crest or a monogram. A rose pillar of stone has a charming appearance
at the end of a vista. The most effective I have seen were made of
artificial stone, and they cost very little. Many of the finest garden
figures of the eighteenth century were made of this kind of cement,
only inferior in many respects to the modern “artificial stone.” It is
unnecessary to say that any material that resists frost will survive
that comparatively soft stone work which goes from bad to worse year by
year in the open.
But I do not think that, while great freedom and independence should be
shown in the introduction of ornamental work, one should ever go so far
as to construct in cold blood a ruin of any sort, nor is there any need,
I think, to try to make a new piece look antique.
But I have actually known of a figure being deprived of one of its
arms in order to increase its resemblance to the Venus of the island
of Milos! Such mutilation is unwarrantable. I have known of Doctors of
Medicine taking pains to make their heads bald, in compliance with the
decrepit notion that knowledge was inseparable from a venerable age.
There may be an excuse for such a proceeding, though to my mind this
posturing lacks only two letters to be imposturing; but no excuse can
be found for breaking the corner off a piece of moulding or for treating
a stone figure with chemicals in order to suggest antiquity. Such
dealers as possess a clientele worth maintaining, know that a thing “in
mint condition,” as they describe it, is worth more than a similar
thing that is deficient in any way. That old story about the artificial
worm-eating will not be credited by any one who is aware of the fact
that a piece of woodwork showing signs of the ravages of the wood moth
is practically worthless. There would be some sense in a story of a man
coming to a dealer with a composition to prevent worm-holes, as they are
called, being recognised. Ten thousand pounds would not be too much to
pay for a discovery that would prevent woodwork from being devoured by
this abominable thing. Surely some of the Pasteur professors should be
equal to the task of producing a serum by which living timber might be
inoculated so as to make it immune to such attacks, or liable only to
the disease in a mild form.
But there are dealers in antiques whose dealings are as doubtful as
their Pentateuch (according to Bishop Colenso's researches). Heywood
tells me that he came across such an one in a popular seaside town which
became a modern Hebrew City of Refuge, mentioned in one of the Mosaic
books, during the air raids. This person had for sale a Highland
claidh-earnh-mdr--that is, I can assure you, the proper way to spell
claymore--which he affirmed had once belonged to the Young Pretender.
There it was, with his initials “Y. P.,” damascened upon the blade, to
show that there could be no doubt about it.
And Friswell remembered hearing of another enterprising trader in
antiquities who had bought from a poor old captain of an American whaler
a sailor's jack-knife--Thackeray called the weapon a snickersnee--which
bore on the handle in plain letters the name “Jonah,” very creditably
carved. Everybody knows that whales live to a very great age; and it
has never been suggested that there was at any time a clearing-house for
whales.
I repeat that there is no need for garden ornaments to be ancient; but
if one must have such things, one should have no difficulty in finding
them, even without spending enormous sums to acquire them. But say
that one has set one's heart upon having a stone bench, which always
furnishes a garden, no matter what its character may be. Well, I have
bought a big stone slab--it had once been a step--for five shillings.
I kept it until I chanced to see a damaged Portland truss that
had supported a heavy joist in some building. This I had sawn into
two--there was a well-cut scroll on each side--and by placing these bits
in position and laying my slab upon them, I concocted a very imposing
garden bench for thirteen shillings. If I had bought the same already
made up in the ordinary course of business, it would have cost me at
least £5. If I had seen the thing in a mason's yard, I would have bought
it at this price.