_FURTHER MEMORIES_
11th LARGE EDITION.
MEMORIES
By the Right Hon. LORD REDESDALE G.C.V.O., K.C.B.
_In two handsome volumes, 32s. net._
_With numerous illustrations._
“A very charming book, written by a man who was born some months before
Queen Victoria came to the throne, yet it contains not a word of
‘twaddle’; its genuine modesty leaves no room for mock modesty, and it
is never for a moment dull. He has been everywhere and seen everything.
He has travelled far and wide, East and West: he has known many Courts
and Princes. It is useless to attempt analogies of this vast and varied
treasury, social, historical, political, personal.”—_Times._
“At length this much-talked-of book is in our possession and it will
cause no disappointment. It is a work of genuine and serious interest,
curiously varied in its point of view, and supremely graceful in tone and
form. It will be permanently studied as a contribution to literature and
history.”—Mr. Edmund Gosse in the _Fortnightly Review_.
“One of the best books of the last five years. Lord Redesdale’s
‘Memories’ are not merely interesting, they are indispensable.”—_Daily
Telegraph._
London: HUTCHINSON & CO.
[Illustration: _The Author._
_Photographed by Furley Lewis Esq._]
_Further Memories. By
Lord Redesdale, G.C.V.O., K.C.B._
_With an Introduction by Edmund Gosse, C.B._
_Illustrated with a portrait of the Author in photogravure and_
:: :: :: _16 other plates_ :: :: ::
_LONDON: HUTCHINSON & CO.
PATERNOSTER ROW ... 1917_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION. BY EDMUND GOSSE, C.B. ix
VELUVANA 1
BUDDHA AND ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND CASTE—THE ARYANS 46
THE COMMUNE 78
TREES AND THEIR LEGENDS 96
QUEEN VICTORIA AND MARIE THERESIA 129
THE WALLACE COLLECTION 155
A NOTE ON RUSSIAN STUDIES 203
VERBA COMPOSITA 209
RUSSIA 246
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE AUTHOR (_photogravure_) _Frontispiece_
_Photographed by Furley Lewis, Esq._
SCENE IN THE AUTHOR’S GARDEN _Facing p._ 6
REST-HOUSE IN THE AUTHOR’S GARDEN ” 10
FIGURE OF THE BUDDHA ” 24
PROFESSOR MAX MÜLLER ” 52
_From a photograph by Elliott & Fry, Ltd._
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI PREACHING TO THE BIRDS ” 58
_From a picture by Giotto_
GUSTAVE COURBET ” 82
_From a picture by himself in the Louvre_
THE EMPRESS MARIE THERESIA ” 130
_From an engraving after a painting by Mytens_
THE MARQUIS OF HERTFORD ” 158
_From a bust in the Wallace Collection_
SIR RICHARD WALLACE ” 192
_From a bust in the Wallace Collection_
IVAN TURGENIEV ” 204
_From an etching by E. Hedouin_
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ” 212
RICHARD WAGNER ” 218
THE EMPEROR PAUL ” 248
THE EMPEROR ALEXANDER I. ” 260
_From an engraving after a portrait by Wolkoff_
THE EMPEROR NICHOLAS II. ” 284
_From a lithograph_
PRINCE GORTCHAKOFF ” 296
INTRODUCTION
BY EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.
The publication of Lord Redesdale’s “Memories”—which was one of the
most successful autobiographies of recent times—familiarized thousands
of readers with the principal adventures of a very remarkable man, but,
when all was said and done, left an incomplete impression of his tastes
and occupations on the minds of those who were not familiar with his
earlier writings. His literary career had been a very irregular one.
He took up literature rather late, and produced a book that has become
a classic—“Tales of Old Japan.” He did not immediately pursue this
success, but became involved in public activities of many kinds, which
distracted his attention. In his sixtieth year he brought out “The Bamboo
Garden,” and from that time—until, in his eightieth year, he died in full
intellectual energy—he constantly devoted himself to the art of writing.
His zeal, his ambition, were wonderful; but it was impossible to overlook
the disadvantage from which that ambition and that zeal suffered in the
fact that for the first sixty years of his life the writer had cultivated
the art but casually and sporadically. He retained, in spite of all the
labour which he expended, a certain stiffness, an air of the amateur, of
which he himself was always acutely conscious.
This did not interfere with the direct and sincere appeal made to
general attention by the 1915 “Memories,” a book so full of geniality
and variety, so independent in its judgments and so winning in its
ingenuousness, that its wider popularity could be the object of no
surprise. But, to those who knew Lord Redesdale intimately, it must
always appear that his autobiography fails to explain him from what we
may call the subjective point of view. It tells us of his adventures and
his friendships, of the strange lands he visited and of the unexpected
confidences he received, but it does not reveal very distinctly
the character of the writer. There is far more of his intellectual
constitution, of his personal tastes and mental habits, in the volume of
essays of 1912, called “A Tragedy in Stone,” but even here much is left
unsaid and even unsuggested.
Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Lord Redesdale was the redundant
vitality of his character. His nature swarmed with life, like a drop
of pond-water under a microscope. There cannot be found room in any
one nature for all the qualities, and what he lacked in some degree
was concentration. But very few men who have lived in our complicated
age have done well in so many directions as he, or, aiming widely,
have failed in so few. He shrank from no labour and hesitated before
no difficulty, but pushed on with an extraordinary energy along many
various lines of activity. But the two lines in which he most desired
and most determined to excel, gardening and authorship, are scarcely
to be discerned, except below the surface, in his “Memories.” Next to
his books, what he regarded with most satisfaction was his wonderful
garden at Batsford, and of this there is scarcely a word of record in
the autobiography. He had always intended to celebrate this garden, and
when he was preparing to return to Batsford in 1915 he wrote to me that
he was going to write an “Apologia pro Horto meo,” as long before he
had composed one “pro Bambusis meis.” A book which should combine with
the freest fancies of his intellect a picture of the exotic groves of
Batsford was what was required to round off Lord Redesdale’s literary
adventures. It will be seen that he very nearly succeeded in thus setting
the top-stone on his literary edifice.
One reason, perhaps, why Batsford, which was ever present to his
thoughts, is so very slightly and vaguely mentioned in Lord Redesdale’s
“Memories,” may be the fact that from 1910 onwards he was not living
in it himself, and that it was irksome to him to magnify in print
horticultural beauties which were for the time being in the possession
of others. The outbreak of the war, in which all his five sons were
instantly engaged, was the earliest of a series of changes which
completely altered the surface of Lord Redesdale’s life. Batsford came
once more into his personal occupation, and at the same time it became
convenient to give up his London house in Kensington Court. Many things
combined to transform his life in the early summer of 1915. His eldest
son, Major the Hon. Clement Mitford, after brilliantly distinguishing
himself in battle, was received by the King and decorated, to the
rapturous exultation of his father. Major Mitford returned to the French
front, only to fall on the 13th of May, 1915.
At this time I was seeing Lord Redesdale very frequently, and I could
not but be struck by the effect of this blow upon his temperament. After
the first shock of sorrow, I observed in him the determination not to
allow himself to be crushed. His dominant vitality asserted itself almost
with violence, and he seemed to clench his teeth in defiance of the
blow to his individuality. It required on the part of so old a man no
little fortitude, for it is easier to bear a great and heroic bereavement
than to resist the wearing vexation of seeing one’s system of daily
occupation crumbling away. Lord Redesdale was pleased to be going again
to Batsford, which had supplied him in years past with so much sumptuous
and varied entertainment, but it was a matter of alarm with him to give
up all, or almost all, the various ties with London which had meant so
much to his vividly social nature.
Meanwhile, during the early months of 1915 in London, he had plenty of
employment in finishing and revising his “Memories,” which it had taken
him two years to write. This was an occupation which bridged over the
horrid chasm between his old active life in London, with its thousand
interests, and the uncertain and partly dreaded prospect of an exile
in the bamboo-gardens of a remote corner of Gloucestershire, where his
deafness must needs exclude him from the old activities of local life.
He finished revising the manuscript of his “Memories” in July, and then
went down, while the actual transference of his home took place, to the
Royal Yacht Squadron Castle, Cowes, where he had been accustomed to spend
some of the most enjoyable hours of his life. But this scene, habitually
thronged with people, and palpitating with gaiety, in the midst of which
Lord Redesdale found himself so singularly at home, was now, more than
perhaps any other haunt of the English sportsman, in complete eclipse.
The weather was lovely, but there were no yachts, no old chums, no
charming ladies. “It is very dull,” he wrote; “the sole inhabitant of
the Club besides myself was Lord Falkland, and now he is gone.” In these
conditions Lord Redesdale became suddenly conscious that the activity
of the last two or three years was over, that the aspect of his world
had changed, and that he was in danger of losing that hold upon life to
which he so resolutely clung. In conditions of this kind he always turned
to seek for something mentally “craggy,” as Byron said, and at Cowes he
wonderfully found the writings of Nietzsche. The result is described in
a remarkable letter to myself (July 28th, 1915), which I quote because it
marks the earliest stage in the composition of his last unfinished book:
“I have been trying to occupy myself with Nietzsche, on the
theory that there must be something great about a man who
exercised the immense influence that he did. But I confess I
am no convert to any of his various moods. Here and there I
find gems of thought, but one has to wade through a morass of
blue mud to get at them. Here is a capital saying of his which
may be new to you—in a letter to his friend Rohde he writes:
‘Eternally we need midwives in order to be delivered of our
thoughts.’ We cannot work in solitude. ‘Woe to us who lack the
sunlight of a friend’s presence.’
“How true that is! When I come down here, I think that with
so much time on my hands I shall be able to get through a
pile of work. Not a bit of it! I find it difficult even to
write a note. To me it is an imperative necessity to have the
sympathetic counsel of a friend.”
The letter continued with an impassioned appeal to his correspondent to
find some definite intellectual work for him to undertake. “You make me
dare, and that is much towards winning a game. You must sharpen my wits,
which are blunt enough just now.” In short, it was a cry from the island
of boredom to come over the water and administer first-aid.
Accordingly, I started for Cowes, and was welcomed at the pier with all
my host’s habitual and vivacious hospitality. Scarcely were we seated in
our wicker-chairs in face of the Solent, not twinkling as usual with
pleasure-sails, but sinister with strange instruments of warfare, than
he began the attack. “What am I to do with myself?” was the instant
question; “what means can I find of occupying this dreadful void of
leisure?” To which the obvious reply was: “First of all, you must exhibit
to me the famous attractions of Cowes!” “There are none,” he replied
in comic despair, but we presently invented some, and my visit, which
extended over several radiant days of a perfect August, was diversified
with walks and excursions by land and water, in which my companion
was as active and as ardent as though he had been nineteen instead of
seventy-nine. In a suit picturesquely marine, with his beautiful silver
hair escaping from a jaunty yachting cap, he was the last expression of
vivacity and gaiety.
The question of his intellectual occupation in the future came, however,
incessantly to the front; and our long talks in the strange and uncanny
solitude of the Royal Yacht Squadron Castle always came back to this:
What task was he to take up next? His large autobiography was now coming
back to him from the printers in packets of proof, with which he was
closeted night and morning; and I suggested that while this was going on
there was no need for him to think about future enterprises. To tell the
truth, I had regarded the “Memories” as likely to be the final labour
of Lord Redesdale’s busy life. It seemed to me that at his advanced
age he might now well withdraw into dignified repose. I even hinted so
much in terms as delicate as I could make them, but the suggestion was
not well received. I became conscious that there was nothing he was so
little prepared to welcome as “repose”; that, in fact, the terror which
possessed him was precisely the dread of having to withdraw from the
stage of life. His deafness, which now began to be excessive, closed to
his eager spirit so many of the avenues of experience, that he was more
than ever anxious to keep clear those that remained to him, and of these,
literary expression came to be almost the only one left. In the absence
of a definite task his path in this direction led through darkness.
But it was not until after several suggestions and many conversations
that light was found. The friend so pressingly appealed to returned to
London, where he was stern in rejecting several projects, hotly flung
at his head and then coldly abandoned. A study of the Empress Maria
Theresa, suggested by a feverish perusal of Pechler, was the latest and
least attractive of these. Lord Redesdale then frankly demanded that a
subject should be found for him. “You have brought this upon yourself,”
he said, “by encouraging me to write.” What might prove the scheme of a
very pleasant book then occurred to us, and it was suggested to the fiery
and impatient author, who had by this time retired for good to Batsford,
that he should compose a volume of essays dealing with things in general,
but bound together by a constantly repeated reference to his wild garden
of bamboos and the Buddha in his secret grove. The author was to suppose
himself seated with a friend on the terrace at the top of the garden, and
to let the idea of the bamboo run through the whole tissue of reflections
and reminiscences like an emerald thread. Lord Redesdale was enchanted,
and the idea took fire at once. He replied:
“You are Orpheus, with his lute moving the rocks and stones!
I shall work all my conceits into your plan, and am now
proceeding to my garden shrine to meditate on it. I will try
to make a picture of the VELUVANA, the bamboo garden which was
the first Vikara or monastery of Buddha and his disciples.
There I will sit, and, looking on the great statue of Buddha
in meditation, I shall begin to arrange all sorts of wild
imaginings which may come into my crazy brain.”
In this way was started the book, of which, alas! only such fragments
were composed as form the earlier part of the present volume. It is,
however, right to point out that for the too-brief remainder of his life
Lord Redesdale was eagerly set on the scheme of which a hint has just
been given. The _Veluvana_ was to be the crowning production of his
literary life, and to sum up the wisdom of the East and the gaiety of the
West. He spoke of it incessantly, in letters and conversation. “That will
do to go into _Veluvana_,” was his cry when he met with anything rare or
strange. For instance, on the 15th of September, 1915, he wrote to me:
“To-day, all of a sudden I was struck by the idea that plants,
having many human qualities, may also in some degree have
human motives—that they are not altogether mere automata—and
as I thought, I began to imagine that I could detect something
resembling purpose in the movements of certain plants. I have
jotted down a few notes, and you will see when I expand them
that at any rate the idea calls attention to the movements
themselves, some of which seem never to have been noticed at
all, or certainly at best very inadequately. You will see that
this brings in the bamboo garden and Buddha, and so keeps to
the scheme of _Veluvana_.”
The monasteries of twelfth-century Japanese Buddhism, which he had
visited long before in the neighbourhood of Kiōto, now recurred to his
memory, and he proposed to describe in what a monk of Hiyeisan differed
from an Indian Buddhist monk. This was a theme of extraordinary
interest, and wholly germane to his purpose. It drove him back to his
Japanese books, and to his friend Sir Ernest Satow’s famous dictionary.
He wrote to me:
“No praise can be too high for the work which Satow did in the
early days of our intercourse with Japan. He was a valuable
asset to England, and to Sir Harry Parkes, who, with all his
energy and force of character, would never have succeeded as he
did without Satow. Aston was another very strong man.”
These reveries were strictly in accordance with the spirit of _Veluvana_,
but unfortunately what Lord Redesdale wrote in this direction proves
to be too slight for publication. He met with some expressions of
extremely modern Japanese opinion which annoyed him, and to which he
was tempted to give more attention than they deserve. It began to be
obvious that the enterprise was one for which great concentration of
effort, and a certain serenity of purpose which was not to be secured at
will, were imperatively needed. In leaving London, he was not content,
and no one could have wished him to be willing, to break abruptly all
the cords of his past life. He was still a Trustee of the National
Gallery, still chairman of the Marlborough Club, still occupied with
the administration of the Wallace Collection, and he did not abate his
interest in these directions. They made it necessary that he should
come up to town every other week. This made up in some measure for the
inevitable disappointment of finding that in Gloucestershire his deafness
now completely cut him off from all the neighbourly duties which had in
earlier years diversified and entertained his country life. He had been
a great figure among the squires and farmers of the Cotswolds, but all
this was now at an end, paralysed by the hopeless decay of his hearing.
It grieved him, too, that he was unable to do any useful war-work in the
county, and he was forced to depend upon his pen and his flying visits
to London for refreshment. He was a remarkably good letter-writer,
and he now demanded almost pathetically to be fed with the apples of
correspondence. He wrote (November 26th, 1915):
“Your letters are a consolation for being deprived of taking a
part any longer in the doings of the great world. The Country
Mouse—even if the creature were able to scuttle back into the
cellars of the great—would still be out of all communion with
the mighty, owing to physical infirmity. And now comes the kind
Town Mouse and tells him all that he most cares to know.”
He had books and his garden to enjoy, and he made the most of both. “I
hate the autumn,” he said, “for it means the death of the year, but I
try to make the death of the garden as beautiful as possible.” Among
his plants, and up and down the high places of his bamboo-feathered
rockeries, where little cascades fell with a music which he could no
longer hear into small dark pools full of many-coloured water-lilies, his
activity was like that of a boy. He had the appearance, the tastes, the
instincts of vigorous manhood prolonged far beyond the usual limit of
such gifts, and yet all were marred and rendered bankrupt for him by the
one intolerable defect, the deafness which had by this time become almost
impenetrable to sound.
Yet it seemed as though this disability actually quickened his mental
force. With the arrival of his eightieth year, his activity and curiosity
of intellect were certainly rather increased than abated. He wrote to me
from Batsford (December 28th, 1915):
“I have been busy for the last two months making a close
study of Dante. I have read all the _Inferno_ and half of
the _Purgatorio_. It is hard work, but the ‘readings’ of my
old schoolfellow, W. W. Vernon, are an incalculable help,
and now within the last week or two has appeared Hoare’s
Italian Dictionary, published by the Cambridge University
Press. A much-needed book, for the previous dictionaries were
practically useless except for courier’s work. How splendid
Dante is! But how sickening are the Commentators, Benvenuto
da Imola, Schartazzini and the rest of them? They won’t let
the poet say that the sun shone or the night was dark without
seeing some hidden and mystic meaning in it. They always
seem to _chercher midi à quatorze heures_, and irritate me
beyond measure. There is invention enough in Dante without all
their embroidery. But this grubbing and grouting seems to be
infectious among Dante scholars—they all catch the disease.”
He flung himself into these Italian studies with all his accustomed
ardour. He corresponded with the eminent veteran of Dante scholarship,
the Honourable W. W. Vernon, whom he mentions in the passage just quoted,
and Mr. Vernon’s letters gave him great delight. He wrote to me again:
“This new object in life gives me huge pleasure. Of course,
I knew the catch quotations in Dante, but I never before
attempted to read him. The difficulty scared me.”
Now, on the contrary, the difficulty was an attraction. He worked away
for hours at a time, braving the monotonies of the _Purgatorio_ without
flagging, but he broke down early in the _Paradiso_. He had no sympathy
whatever with what is mystic and spiritual, and he was extremely bored
by the Beatific Vision and the Rose of the Empyrean. I confess I took
advantage of this to recall his attention to _Veluvana_, for which it was
no longer possible to hope that the author would collect any material out
of Dante.
An invitation from Cambridge to lecture there on Russian history during
the Long Vacation of 1916 was a compliment to the value of the Russian
chapters of his “Memories,” but it was another distraction. It took his
thoughts away from _Veluvana_, although he protested to me that he could
prepare his Cambridge address, and yet continue to marshal his fancies
for the book. Perhaps I doubted it, and dared to disapprove, for he wrote
(March 17th, 1916):
“You scold me for writing too much. That is the least of my
troubles! You must remember that debarred as I am from taking
part in society, the Three R’s alone remain to me, and, indeed,
of those only two—for owing to my having enjoyed an Eton
education in days when arithmetic was deemed to be no part of
the intellectual panoply of a gentleman, I can neither add,
subtract, nor divide! I am a gluttonous reader, and only write
from time to time.”
He was really composing more actively than he himself realized. About
this time he wrote:
“Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford—not the
Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible—but the unhappy
hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte, who I believe has
been most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony
in Paris—all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities
even hinted at. The good British public has so long been used
to look upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and
amuse it to be told that he had many admirable points.”
At the beginning of last year the aspect of Lord Redesdale was very
remarkable. He had settled down into his life at Batsford, diversified
by the frequent dashes to London. His years seemed to sit upon him more
lightly than ever. His azure eyes, his curled white head thrown back, the
almost jaunty carriage of his well-kept figure, were the external symbols
of an inner man perpetually fresh, ready for adventure and delighted
with the pageant of existence. He found no fault at all with life, save
that it must leave him, and he had squared his shoulders not to give way
to weakness. Perhaps the only sign of weakness was just that visible
determination to be strong. But the features of his character had none
of those mental wrinkles, those “rides de l’esprit,” which Montaigne
describes as proper to old age. Lord Redesdale was guiltless of the old
man’s self-absorption or exclusive interest in the past. His curiosity
and sympathy were vividly exhibited to his friends, and so, in spite of
his amusing violence in denouncing his own forgetfulness, was his memory
of passing events. In the petulance of his optimism he was like a lad.
There was no change in the early part of last year, although it was
manifest that the incessant journeying between Batsford and London was
exhausting. The garden occupied him more and more, and he was distracted
by the great storm of the end of March, which blew down and destroyed
at the head of the bridge the wonderful group of cypresses, which he
called “the pride of my old age.” But, after a gesture of despair, he set
himself energetically to repair the damage. He was in his usual buoyant
health when the very hot spell in May tempted him out on the 18th of May,
with his agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swinbrook, a beautiful village
on his Oxfordshire property, of which he was particularly fond. He was
not successful, and in a splenetic mood he flung himself at full length
upon a bank of wet grass. He was not allowed to remain there long, but
the mischief was done, and in a few hours he was suffering from a bad
cold. Even now, the result might not have been serious had it not been
that in a few days’ time he was due to fulfil certain engagements in
town. Nothing vexed Lord Redesdale more than not to keep a pledge. In all
such matters he prided himself on being punctual and trustworthy, and he
refused to change his plans by staying at home.
Accordingly, on the 23rd of May he came to London to transact some
business, and to take the chair next day at a meeting of the Royal
Society of Literature, of which he was a vice-president. This meeting
took place in the afternoon, and he addressed a crowded assembly, which
greeted him with great warmth. Those who were present, and saw his bright
eyes and heard his ringing voice, could have no suspicion that they would
see him again no more. His intimate friends alone perceived that he was
making a superlative effort. There followed a very bad night, and he
went down to Batsford next day, going straight to his bed, from which he
never rose again. His condition, at first, gave rise to little alarm. The
disease, which proved to be catarrhal jaundice, took its course; but for
a long time his spirit and his unconsciousness of danger sustained him
and filled those around him with hope. There was no disturbance of mind
to the very last. In a shaky hand, with his stylograph, he continued
to correspond with certain friends, about politics, and books, and even
about _Veluvana_. In the beginning of August there seemed to be symptoms
of improvement, but these were soon followed by a sudden and final
relapse. Even after this, Lord Redesdale’s interest and curiosity were
sustained. In his very last letter to myself, painfully scrawled only one
week before his death, he wrote:
“Have you seen Ernest Daudet’s book just published, ‘Les
auteurs de la guerre de 1914’? Bismarck is the subject of
the first volume; the second will deal with the Kaiser and
the Emperor Joseph; and the third with ‘leurs complices.’ I
know E. D.; he is a brother of Alphonse, and is a competent
historian. His book is most illuminating. Of course there are
exaggerations, but he is always well _documenté_, and there is
much in his work that is new. I don’t admire his style. The
abuse of the historic present is bad enough, but what can be
said in favour of the historic future with which we meet at
every step? It sets my teeth on edge.”
But he grew physically weaker, and seven days later he passed into an
unconscious state, dying peacefully at noon of the 17th of August,
1916. He was saved, as he had wished to be, from all consciousness of
decrepitude.
EDMUND GOSSE.
_August, 1917._
FURTHER MEMORIES
VELUVANA
These chapters are simply an attempt to record the gist of some
conversations and noonday thoughts, which have arisen from time to time
in idle moments spent in a garden on the Cotswold Hills, where there are
gathered together certain features unusual in Western pleasances. Our
thoughts are largely the creations of our surroundings, and when at every
step I am met by some work of art or a plant which has travelled perhaps
twelve thousand miles to bring me a greeting from afar, then I, too,
begin to travel and am carried away beyond the seas. If here and there
I think and talk of things nearer home, my thoughts are still those of
a wanderer—still those which are suggested by the mysterious thrilling
of one of those chords for which there is nothing to account, but which
never vibrate as they do in my Veluvana, the bamboo grove of Buddha,
which thus becomes a temple dedicated to Mnemosyne.
One thing I wish to disclaim. I am often told that people believe that
I have a Japanese garden. I have nothing of the kind. A Japanese garden
is a mystery hard to be understood; it is a work of art depending upon
certain fixed laws and canons prescribed, many centuries ago, by a school
of Aesthetes, whose lives were spent in the punctilious observance of the
rules prescribed for tea-drinking and incense-burning and the writing
of sonnets, in grounds laid out upon principles, of which the slightest
violation would be an outrage upon the decencies of culture. In such
gardens flowers play but a small part, but the shapes, the position and
the orientation of quaint rocks, the introduction of miniature lakes,
and even of the similitude of rivers carried out in sand or gravel, with
stepping stones by which they may be crossed without disturbing the
smooth surface, these and many other whims are the important but sober
and yet fantastic features upon which the Japanese landscape gardener
insists.
Trees and flowering shrubs—such as cherries and plums—lianes like the
Wistaria and the ornamental vines, are used with the utmost discretion,
as they are with us. But the introduction of alien plants, the exhibition
of bronze ornaments and lanterns, or the naturalistic arrangement of
rockwork with a streamlet crossed by lacquered bridges, no more give a
garden the claim to be called Japanese than the possession of a piece of
old Greek sculpture would liken a house to the Acropolis of Athens, or
than skill in the pretty and very difficult game of kicking shuttlecocks
with the heel would entitle a Pekingese boy to claim kinship with a Rugby
football player.
A Japanese garden has a certain poetry and secret charm of its own. To
those who are adepts in its mysteries it is full of suggestion, but it is
highly artificial; everything that you see in it is a contradiction of
Nature, who, poor dear! is forced into obeying every craze and vagary of
the artist, not being allowed to see a twig or a bud take the direction
which she destined for it. In that it lacks the sweet simplicity and
countrified untutored grace of our English Edens. It is not a place in
which a young maiden would gather a posy bejewelled with May dew, or
stoop to consult the ray-florets of a daisy as to the beating of her
lover’s heart.
There are many crafts in which we English folk have much to learn from
abroad; in gardening that is not so—there we are not unskilled, indeed
rather copied than copiers. We have our own gardens and we may rest
content with them, since they give us without stint the full joys of
form and colour, beauty and fragrance. What more do we want? The gardens
of the Japanese may suit the fairies of their own legends, but the
great god Pan would surely rather see his Dryads and Wood-nymphs tread
a measure on the velvet of a trim English lawn, than picking their way
among cruel stones to the torture of their rosy feet.
But though we may not be minded to imitate in our own homes the
eccentricities and fancies of Japanese garden experts—whims and fancies
handicapped by the severities of austere tradition—there is no law to
hinder us from taking a hint from some of the effects which they achieve,
nor from introducing into our gardens some great masterpiece of one of
those exquisitely imaginative artists whose smaller and daintier works
are gems welcomed with such warmth elsewhere.
Some months after the above lines were written there appeared in the
_Times_ of May 6th, 1916, one of those charming articles on gardening
with which we are from time to time favoured, in which the writer
expresses much the same view of the Japanese gardener’s art that I hold.
Only in one point I differ from him. It is not “a close study of nature”
which guides the Japanese landscape maker; on the contrary, he follows
whims and symbols hard to be understood. Every distorted stone which he
brings at great expense from a huge distance must be so placed as to be
in harmony with some cryptic principle of æstheticism. Nature is not what
he aims at.
The Japanese, who have an exquisite system of their own of natural
gardening, though of gardening in which all is designed and nothing
left to chance, are very sparing of flowers. They would rather have one
blossom where it will tell as a delightful surprise than a thousand where
they merely make a mass of colour. Placing is everything to them, but
their principles of placing and grouping are got from the close study of
nature, like an artist’s principles of composition. We must not imitate
them, for if we do, we shall merely parody them. Bamboos and stones and
lanterns will not make a Japanese garden.
But we can grasp the principles on which they express their love of
nature in a garden; we can see clearly what is the difference between
formal and natural gardening, and avoid the mistake of trying to combine
the beauties of both. One is always uncomfortable in a garden when there
are a thousand flowers where a hundred would be better. One may not be
aware of the waste, but it wearies one all the same.
The fascination of the East never dies. But there comes a fatal time
when, to the voice of the Siren, sing she never so tenderly, there is
no response. Age and new duties have forged fetters, sweet and soft as
rose-leaves, but so binding that not even the loadstone mountain of
Sindbad the Sailor would avail to tear them away from us, and so we are
fain to satisfy our travel-hunger as best we may, feeding upon memory.
Then it is that the relics gathered together during the adventures of
many years acquire a new and almost sacred value. They speed the flight
of our thoughts like the wings of Pegasus. The man who has chaffered with
the Jew merchants in the picturesque gloom of the bazaars of Stamboul;
who has bathed in Jordan and Scamander, and slept in the black tents
of the Bedouin; who has wandered through the mysterious portals of the
Chĭen Mĕn, the frowning gate of the Tartar city, to sip tea with some art
expert in the Liu Li Chăng, the Paternoster Row of Peking, listening to
stories of the dilettanti in the reign of Chĭen Lung the magnificent—such
a man, if now he can do no more than trim the silken sails of his
imagination, bound for the lands of enchantment, must have about him
many a treasure which, if he but shut his eyes and give himself up to
the luxury of dreaming day-dreams, will bring back to the old wanderer
a whiff from the birthplace of the Sun, a whiff sweeter in his nostrils
than those cloying perfumes to which the æsthetes, according to their
affected euphuist jargon, “listened” centuries ago in the lovely gardens
of Ginkakuji, the Silver Pavilion of the sacred city of Kiōto.[1]
As for me, I have been all my life bitten by the collector’s mania,
and so the wings of my Pegasus have many feathers; for my house, and
even my gardens, are full of curious odds and ends, the spoil of many
lands. On the terrace standing sentry at the entrance to the house are
two huge bronze Kylins (in Pekingese, Chih Ling), representations of the
mystic beast which was seen last at the birth of Confucius, and will not
reappear until ten thousand years shall have elapsed from that date.
[Illustration: SCENE IN THE AUTHOR’S GARDEN.
[_To face p. 6._]
The male has a single horn and is very fierce, but not more so than
his hornless mate, which, with her cruel tusks, grins defiance at the
world. Just such another pair in the Imperial Park of the Ten Thousand
Longevities at Yuen Ming Yuen used to raise my wonder fifty years ago.
Built into the wall of one of the two little gazebos which are at the
east and west ends of my terrace are two bricks—the one rough and rugged,
sun-dried and splashed with the mortar of more than two thousand years
since, from the Great Wall of China at Ku Pei Kŏu; the other white,
smooth and richly glazed from the famous Porcelain Tower of Nanking,
which was destroyed by the Tai Ping rebels some sixty years ago, before
they were overtaken by the Vengeance of Gordon and “the Ever-Victorious
Army.”
Shall I ever forget the tramp of a couple of miles under an August sun
in 1865 with that huge brick from the Great Wall seeming to bite into
my aching shoulder? Over against the little summer-house, guarding the
entrance to the garden from the attacks of evil spirits, are small
statues of the Ni-ō, the two kings whose ugliness is enough to scare away
any inauspicious demons who might be about. They must miss the ritual of
their own country where the pious pilgrim, having written his prayer on
to a scrap of paper, chews it into a pellet, and spits it at the sacred
figure. If it sticks, all is well, and the prayer will be heard; if it
falls to earth, the fates will be unkind—so outside a fashionable temple
the two gods are bespattered all over with an eruption of moist pellets.
Here from that holy rite they are immune.
High up in the wildest part of the wild garden, under the shade of a
spreading oak, there stands, or rather sits, turned towards the East,
as is fitting, a bronze statue of Buddha of heroic size. His hand is
raised in the attitude of preaching; his features are expressive of the
holy calm and noble abstraction which are traditional in the effigies
of the great reformer; the centre of the skull is slightly raised, and
between the brows is a curl, representing the wind, the mystic white
lock. These two are among the many secret birth-signs by which the
soothsayers and diviners recognize in a newly-born babe the advent of
Bodhisatva, or future Buddha. Surrounding the figure are planted chusan
palms from China and bamboos from the Himalaya mountains, among which a
stag and a hind, life-sized bronze representations of the small Japanese
deer, watch over the loneliness of the thinker. Facing the statue is a
rest-house, flanked by two huge bronze lanterns bearing the chrysanthemum
and the Pawlonia flower, the two crests of the Mikado, and on either
side of the door are two small white granite elephants, brought from
Ceylon, Buddhistic symbols, full of significance. A little higher up the
hill a pergola leads to a tiny spring, with a dolphin spout, from which
fitfully, for it is often dry, a runlet of pure water trickles into a
stone basin.
Immediately opposite is an ishi-dori, one of those granite lanterns
which you will see in every Japanese temple. Lower down the hill is
a grand bronze lion, with his paws resting upon a ball of cloisonné
enamel, symbolical of the strength of Buddha, and in the middle of the
walled garden is a dragon fountain, spouting water into a tiny pond full
of pink water-lilies and gold-fish. We Westerns are wont to talk of
fiery dragons; not so the Orientals. With them the dragon is a creature
of the water, and so is used in art for fountains just as we use the
lion’s head, taking the idea from the Egyptian, who imagined that the
rising of the Nile took place when the Sun was in Leo. In China the
dragon represents the principle of good, the tiger that of evil; the
thunderstorm is a fight between the two.
All these things have their meaning, and here, as you sit in the broad
verandah of the rest-house, represent two scenes in the life of the
Buddha; firstly, the preaching of the first sermon in the Mrighadeva, the
deer forest near Benares, where the stags and hinds come to listen to
the Holy One, and, secondly, the Veluvana, or Bamboo grove, which King
Bimbisara presented to the Buddha and which became the first Vihara,
monastery or meeting-place, of the new sect’s adherents and monks. The
story of the Veluvana is that of Ahab and Naboth the Jezreelite over
again. Some six hundred years more or less before our era—how much more
or how much less is a matter of small moment, though the learned must
needs break their heads in the vain attempt to fix the exact dates of
these events—there reigned in Maghada King Bimbisara, a monarch not a
little feared.
Before he mounted the throne he greatly had set his heart upon a certain
grove, or garden belonging to a householder who would not part with it.
So he determined to bide his time until he should become king, and then
to kill the man and take his land. This he did, and the lawful owner,
who after death was born again in the shape of a poisonous snake, sought
an occasion to fix his deadly fangs in the king. One day the king had
gone into the garden with his wives, and fell asleep while only one of
the women was by him. Then the snake, crawling close to him, was about
to strike, when some Kalantaka birds seized it and began to scream. This
woke the woman, who jumped up and killed the snake.
[Illustration: REST HOUSE IN THE AUTHORS GARDEN.
[_To face p. 10._]
In gratitude to the birds who had saved his life, the king caused the
garden to be planted with bamboos, which they love, and the place
became known as the Kalantakanivasa Veluvana, or the Bamboo grove of
the Kalantaka birds. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, following the story of the
Chinese pilgrim Hsüan Chwang (of whom I hope to speak later), gives a
less romantic derivation to the name Kalantakanivasa. Kalanta, as he
tells the tale, was a rich merchant, who had originally given his garden
to the Brahmans, but having received the sublime Law, he took it away
from them and transferred it to the Buddha. I hope that this may not be
the true story, for in that case the name would simply mean the Bamboo
grove, or garden of Kalanta, and so the birds and the snake must fade
into the clouds of fancy.
According to the more legendary version of the story, it is written that
when the Blessed One, having attained the supreme wisdom, entered upon
his ministry, after six years of meditation, and an asceticism which had
almost starved his very life, he came with his disciples to Rajagriha,
where he was visited by Bimbisara, King of Maghada. This king had had
five wishes: (1) That a Buddha might appear during his reign; (2) that he
might himself see him; (3) that he might learn the truth from him; (4)
that he might understand it; (5) that he might follow his commandments.
When the king saw the Buddha and listened to his preaching, he was
converted with many of his people, and invited the Blessed One to come to
his city, where he set a great feast before him. When the feast was over,
the king solemnly poured water over the hands of the Blessed One, saying,
“I give the Kalantakanivasa Veluvana to the Blessed One to dispose of as
may please him.” And that is how it came to pass that a grove of bamboos
was the first Vihara, or meeting-place of Buddha and his saints.
Full of poetry and Indian mysticism are the legends and fairy tales
which monkish superstition has woven round the life of the Buddha, doing
him and his memory no good service thereby; for when truth is overgrown
with fables, like some fair flower choked by weeds, it becomes lost to
sight and strangled, and men begin to doubt whether, indeed, it had any
existence. In this way some doctors have been led to deny that such a
man as the Buddha ever lived upon earth; men of learning have spent much
profound scholarship on proving that he was merely a sun-myth; others
have explained him away as being in some sort an astronomical allegory.
It would be as easy to explain away Napoleon Buonaparte—indeed, did not
that cunning logician, Archbishop Whately, making fun out of his own
science, prove irrefutably by rule of syllogism that no such man as
Napoleon ever did or ever could have existed?
That Buddha was a very real man, inspired by the highest ideals, is a
fact which all advance in knowledge proves more and more conclusively.
Facts cannot be swept away like cobwebs; indeed, cobwebs are facts, as
every housewife knows, and though a besom may annihilate them, their
rebirth remains a demonstrable truth. So it is with the Buddha. The
travels of Fa Hsien and Hsüan Chwang, Chinese pilgrims, who in the fifth
and seventh centuries of our era went to India to collect Buddhist books
and study the dogmas and history of the religion, have been recorded with
all the scrupulous care and minuteness peculiar to their nation, and show
the veneration in which the sites and monuments sacred to the Buddhist
story were still held in their day. Nor is that all.
Within the last twenty years, under the authority of the Indian
Government, researches have been carried on by a learned Babu named
Chandra Mukherji, under the direction of Mr. Vincent A. Smith, and
those researches, which are of the highest interest, corroborate the
statements of the two Chinese monks, in whose accounts the differences
are no more than what would be expected in the work of men separated by
an interval of two hundred years.
If we must remember that Prince Siddartha claimed no divinity—nor even
divine inspiration or revelation—then stripped of the husk of fable
and vain tales with which monkish folly has overlaid and obscured it,
there is no more touching story in man’s record than that of the great
renunciation with which Buddha entered upon the work to which he felt
himself called. Brought up in the soul-stealing languor of an Oriental
court, he left everything in order to face the hardships of a solitude
and asceticism in which he was to find that peace which the world could
not give to him, but which, if only he could attain the supreme wisdom,
he might give to the world.
Prince Siddartha, the Buddha that was to be, was the son of Suddhōdana,
King of Kapilavastu in the Tarai of Nepal, under the shadow of the giant
Himalaya mountains. Suddhōdana was the chief of the Shakya, a proud clan,
descended from the solar race of the Gautama. It puzzles the uninstructed
reader to find the Buddha often referred to as Shakya Muni, or Gautama
Buddha. The first of these titles means the hermit or recluse of the
Shakya clan, and Barthélemy St. Hilaire connects the word _muni_ with
the Greek μόνος, the French _moine_, etc. Gautama Buddha simply means
the Buddha of the Gautama race, in contradistinction to the many Buddhas
that preceded him during the countless æons in which the Indians believe,
and to those Buddhas that are yet to be, the next of whom is the Maitriya
Buddha, the Buddha of brotherly love, for whom we have to wait many
thousand years, and who is often represented as lying down and laughing—a
favourite subject with Chinese sculptors and artists. The Queen of King
Suddhōdana was the daughter of King Suprabuddha, a neighbouring monarch,
a princess of such surpassing loveliness, wisdom and virtue, that she was
called Maya the Illusion, for men could not believe that so wondrous a
being could be aught but a dream, a vision, an unreal phantasy.