function, as their placards showed, being to take pleasure-seekers to
the Jardin des Plantes; they were driven by soldiers, other soldiers
or gendarmes sitting on the top and acting as conductors. Inside an
evil-looking crew of scowling ruffians, some of them wounded, all dirty,
unshaven and truculent-looking—villains who knew that for them even hope
was dead. The omnibuses were followed by litters, in which other soldiers
were carrying men who had been seriously wounded, some of them terribly
mangled.
In one of the litters lay a dark, fierce-looking man, with a shock mass
of black hair. His head and face, pale and haggard, with a beard of three
or four days’ growth, were tied up with blood-stained linen bandages. His
eyes were closed, and he seemed hardly conscious, too feeble to move, too
tired to care. He was respectably, even well dressed in a frock coat.
Evidently a man in a superior position to that of those who had gone
before. As he came, and owing to some obstruction, his bearers paused for
a minute, the girl near me gave a piercing shriek, and crying out: “Papa!
Ah, Papa, c’est Papa!” fell sobbing into the arms of her nurse. She had
come on the chance of one last look, and had, as the bystanders said,
been waiting for hours.
The wounded man, hearing the cry and recognizing the dear young voice,
opened his eyes, and pulling himself together for a supreme effort,
tried limply to wave his hand. His lips moved, and during the short halt
tried to utter a few words, but voice would not come to his bidding; he
uttered no sound, his eyes closed again, and quickly his bearers turned
the corner and he was out of sight. That dumb farewell was the last of
him. The final act can have been but a small matter to him, for he was,
indeed, little more than a corpse already. The poor child stood there
shaking from head to foot and weeping on the bosom of her bonne, and the
crowd dispersed. It was a harrowing scene, it was a pathetic scene, the
pathos of which could hardly be forgotten by any who witnessed it. After
nearly half a century I can still see that grim procession of death, and
the young girl’s shriek of agony rings in my ears.
Those were days of horror. Retribution had come with no halting foot;
shrifts were short, and justice wasted no time over inquiries; it was
even said that a good many innocents perished with the guilty. Whether
that is true or not is hard to say, but it was an accusation which in the
circumstances was sure to be made. An outcry was raised against the four
generals of the Republican armies, Vinoy, Ladmisault, Cissey and Donay,
to whom the guardianship of Paris, divided into four parts, was entrusted.
But far more virulent than any of the attacks upon them were the charges
that were brought—most unfairly, since they only obeyed orders—against
the Marquis de Gallifet and his dragoons. Those charges came from the
white-livered party, set on by such Communists as had managed by hook
or by crook to escape observation and save their skins. These did not
hesitate to accuse Gallifet of wholesale murders of innocent men and
women when the executions took place outside the Arc de l’Etoile. From
inquiries which I made on the spot and at the time, I believe that he did
no more than his duty.
Gallifet was a most determined man, to whom duty was something sacred,
bound to be carried out to the letter at any cost. He was, moreover, a
born soldier, loving his men as they loved him, and cut to the quick by
the deaths of so many comrades. As a cavalry leader, all men recognized
his great worth. Brave as the steel of his own sword, utterly reckless
of his life, as he had shown in the disastrous Mexican campaign and in
the Great War, his courage was so infectious that his troopers would have
followed him had he ordered the charge to be sounded against all the
hosts of Satan. War was for him something very real, not to be treated
with half measures or milksop compromises. He was a fighter, and he
fought in deadly earnest.
We hear much in these days from peacefully-minded lawyers of the iniquity
of reprisals. It would be a good thing if some of these learned gentlemen
would remember the old adage, “Inter arma silent leges;” adding to it the
words, “et juris consulti.” It is good to see on this 3rd of February,
1916, that there is at least one great leader of thought left in this
country who takes a saner and more masculine view of reprisals than that
which is held by some bishops and semi-parsonic lawyers. Lord Rosebery’s
letter to the _Times_ of this day is inexorable in its logic and in its
justice.
We must protect our women and children. This is an age of cruel
inventions, and if our enemies take advantage of them, so must we, unless
we would wish to be as the archers of Edward the Third and the Black
Prince would be if we sent them into the trenches to-day, forbidden for
chivalrous reasons to use aught but their bows against modern artillery
and high explosives. If Germany uses poison gas and liquid fire, so must
we. If she drops bombs from airships upon innocent civilians, women, and
children, we must follow suit. God forbid that it should be in the spirit
of revenge; but what other deterrent is possible? “Vous l’avez voulu,
Georges Dandin.” It is much that Lord Rosebery has lifted his voice in
this sense.
Gallifet did not hesitate to adopt reprisals, and nobody can say that
his methods failed. He knew that the crimes with which he had to deal
could not be prevented in the future by the sprinklings of rose-water and
soft-sawder. Reprisals in the sense of cruelty to prisoners and murders
such as that of Nurse Cavell and Captain Fryatt, are, of course, quite
another matter.
I could not help taking a great interest in Gallifet’s proceedings,
because, although I had only had the very slightest acquaintance with him
some ten years before, he was the intimate friend of many friends of my
own, both English and French. The Prince of Wales, as he then was, had
great regard for him, and never failed to send for him when he went to
Paris.
It must have been about the year 1859 or 1860 that he, with Madame de
Gallifet, the Sagans and the Pourtalès’s, came over to London for a
week or ten days in the height of the summer season, and I was asked by
Madame de Persigny, the French ambassadress, to do what I could to make
their stay pleasant. The three ladies, with Madame de Metternich as a
fourth, were at that time the recognized queens of Paris society, or, at
any rate, of that part of it which bowed the knee at the Imperial Court.
Madame de Gallifet was very good-looking, and the Princesse de Sagan
handsome and distinguished, but neither of them could compare with the
Comtesse de Pourtalès, who had all the subtle charm and teasing beauty of
which the eighteenth century portrait painters are the celebrants.
Madame de Metternich, who did not come to London with them, was not a
pretty woman; indeed, she spoke of herself as “le singe à la mode;” but
she was witty and very attractive, and so became the high priestess
of that religion of which Worth, the famous man-milliner, a former
apprentice of Swan and Edgar’s, who had raised his temple in the Rue
de la Paix, was the Pope, on the hierarchy of fashion. She was perhaps
one degree greater than the other three ladies, but above them all was
enthroned the Empress Eugénie, a divinity at whose altar all men and
women were fain to fall down and worship.
These are strangely frivolous recollections of pretty women and smart
dresses and coxcombry of men-milliners that came thrusting themselves
into the midst of one of the great tragedies of history. But these are
the tricks which memory plays us: the most grotesque ideas surging up in
the midst of acute sorrow, the dance of death serving to accentuate the
follies of a farce—so unstable are our minds. All this is conjured up by
the recollection of Gallifet, before he became a famous cavalry general,
when he was a brilliant young officer, the spoilt child of a court, the
favourite officer of an emperor, popular with men and women, idolized by
his soldiers, long before the cruel wounds of the Mexican campaign—when
he showed what the man about town was worth when brought face to face
with grim war—the last man in Europe of whom I should have thought that
one day he would have to experience those emotions which cause the most
callous judge’s voice to falter when he puts on the black cap.
Later in life, with his closely-cropped white hair and moustache dyed
black, he was a picturesque figure in Paris—still a beau sabreur, still
a soldier at every point—a name to conjure with had the opportunity
presented itself.
TREES AND THEIR LEGENDS
Solitude, surrounded by memories of which I have spoken, and by the
fanciful brood of thoughts to which they give birth, has a mystic power
of banishing all trammels of time and of place. The plants in the garden
begin to take strange forms: the bamboos are drawn up out of their puny
Western stature into gracefully-waving plumes of Brobdingnagian growth,
such as we see in the Peradeniya Gardens of Ceylon; the oak under which
the great Buddha sits, solemnly holding up a warning hand, changes into
a holy Bō-tree, its long-stalked, pointed leaves quivering in a gentle
breeze, laden with the heavy perfume of the sacred Champak flower; the
fleece of clouds sails away into space and the soft English sky hardens
into the metallic blue of the glaring East.
All of a sudden a slight chilly gust chases away the whole illusion.
Kapilavastu, Rajagriha, the deer forest, the Veluvana, with its crowd of
yellow-robed monks carrying their begging bowls, fade away, and we are
sobered into the commonplace realities of life on a spur of the Cotswold
Hills. It is like the awakening after the intoxication of Hashish, or
after the short death dealt by laughing gas.
The dream may have been fascinating, but there are glorious compensations
in the awakening, for though our peaceful gardens are not so wildly
fantastic, not such an orgy of colour, as those of the gorgeous tropics,
our woodlands in their grave dignity are matchless: they touch the heart;
the others stir the senses.
It was a lovely day in early summer, and the show of the Royal
Horticultural Society was in full swing in the gardens of Chelsea
Hospital. All the world was there—all the world, and everybody else’s
wife. A few of us were standing looking at a grand display of orchids,
when a charming lady turned round to me and said: “Oh! how delicate, how
beautiful and how distinguished they are! Surely the very aristocracy of
plant life!” “No,” I answered, “they are only the nouveaux riches. It is
the old oaks of our parks and forests that are the aristocracy of plants.”
Surely there is nothing more proud, nothing more wonderful in nature,
than the noble old age of those patriarchs which centuries ago chequered
with their quivering shade the glades in which Robin Hood and Little
John drew the bow, and holy Friar Tuck made his quarter-staff spin round
his head like the sails of a windmill. Indeed, all our indigenous trees
are glorious. The beech, the ash, the wych-elm, and even the so-called
British elm, which, sooth to say, is only a naturalized alien that came
to us from Italy and has been so long among us, living in trusty alliance
with our natives, that we have come to treat him as our own—all these, in
company with the oak, truly make up what Wordsworth called “a brotherhood
of venerable trees.”
In Britain, and probably all over Europe, there is no tree which commands
so much veneration as the oak. We talk of hearts of oak, and of the
wooden walls of old England, and we endow our hoary, gnarled giants with
all the attributes of stateliness and royal honour. One squire of high
degree I once knew who, shortly before his death, thanking God for a long
life, boasted, not that his eighty years had been spent in the practice
of piety and virtue, as doubtless was the case, but that he had never
cut down an oak. With the oaks we connect the stories of old British
kings and the mysterious liturgies of the golden-sickled Druids, those
Brahmans of the Cassiterides—the Tin Islands—who, if we may believe Cæsar
and Pliny, who are our only authorities—for the priesthood, even if they
could do so, might write down nothing—exercised power greater than those
of popes. Woe to him who denied their authority or questioned their law!
For their excommunication was more terrible than that of Rome, making a
man an outcast, a pariah, a social leper, with whom no man might deal or
hold intercourse; for if he did, he, too, would fall under the awful ban.
After a lapse of two thousand years we have heard of something of the
same kind in our sister island.
And our beloved Scotch fir! What of that true Briton? Happily there are
still here and there in remote Highland glens a few of the old primeval
forests of that great tree left. Probably the most picturesque of these
is the King’s forest of Ballochbine, where you may see it in all the
fullness of its nature—veterans borne down with age, stalwarts in full
vigour, youngsters in their nonage, babies just born from the seed. Their
red stems, glowing in the evening sun, spring out of a carpet of heather,
blaeberries and ferns, among mossy rocks and lichen-starred stones. Close
to them are their graceful consorts, the birches, which Lowell called
“the most shy and ladylike of trees,” drooping their delicate plumes
over the pools and musical rills of brown peat-stained burns. What a
succession of pictures, hard to beat, does this old forest of Ballochbine
give! And that is as it should be, for is it not the King’s own?
The happy union between the pine and the birch has been sung by some
Scottish poet in a simple but touching Epithalamium:
“The Pine’s the King of Scottish glens:
The Queen, ah! who is she?
The fairest tree the forest kens.
The bonnie birken tree!”
We may be asked, since we have so grand a pine of our own, why import
from abroad so many aliens, many of which are certainly not its superiors
in beauty? I suppose that the answer must be that of the daily partridge
which the domestically faithless French king brought in argument against
the remonstrances of his father-confessor. Besides, it can hardly be
denied that many of them are exquisitely beautiful. One of the lovely
blue spruces from Pike’s Peak in Colorado, looking as if it had been
dyed in the mystic waters of the Grotto Azzurra of Capri,[9] strikes an
altogether new note in our garden landscape; the steeple of a tapering
cypress will give that perpendicular line which is so valuable to the
painter, as we may see in Italian gardens, in the picturesque cemeteries
of Constantinople, and all over the Levant. A blue cedar from the Atlas
range in North Africa, its branches feathering down to the ground in
graceful profusion, catches the slanting rays of the sun and sends them
back to you as if its leaves were sprinkled with hoar-frost or wrought
in some luminous metal. But it is idle to compile lists and catalogues.
They make dull writing and duller reading. Suffice it to say that the
intrinsic beauties of the many trees, shrubs, lianes and vines, which
have been added to our own lovely flora, furnish an ample justification
for their admission into our homes.
But apart from this there is the collector’s mania to be reckoned with.
Most men take a pride in showing their friends some gem, some treasured
rarity, and the gardener is as proud of his collection of unique
plants as the Hertfords, the Rothschilds and the Pierpont Morgans have
been of their pictures and miniatures, their Sèvres porcelain, or the
masterpieces of Riesener, Gouthière and Caffieri. The plant collector
has this advantage over those famous lovers of the living works of dead
artists that he can gratify his whims and vanity so much more cheaply.
“What brought Sir Visto’s ill-got wealth to waste?
Some Demon whispered—Visto, have a taste.”
Even orchids are cheap in comparison with Rembrandts, Vandycks, Sir
Joshuas and Gainsboroughs. It stands to reason that the gathering
together of such treasures as may be seen at Westonbirt, at Aldenham, at
Frensham, and in one or two other collectors’ gardens, cannot be achieved
without a considerable expenditure of money, guided by consummate
knowledge; but, even so, the cost is relatively small. And the owners of
lesser pleasaunces with small outlay can profit by the experience and
public spirit of those gardening magnates, both professional and amateur,
who combine to send out costly expeditions to new fields of adventure
and discovery in order to add to the treasure stores of horticulture.
If there be any who are so jealous of the honour of our British forests
and woods that they resent any competition with their beauty, and look
upon all new-comers from over the sea as undesirable aliens, they should,
at any rate, allow that, though they would be out of tune in a wild
forest, they bring lovely harmonies of colour and form into the more
artificial scenes with which we adorn the immediate surroundings of our
country houses. They are no more foreign than the numberless flowers with
which our predecessors used to furnish their beds and borders, and they
have two great advantages over these, as I hope to show presently.
As to the question of fitness or unfitness, that is a matter of
conditions and arrangement. I know a vast park in which the old oaks and
beeches used to make up a sylvan scene of incomparable grandeur. Some
years ago the owner, fired with a new and wholly uneducated enthusiasm,
studded the stately forest with lovely little Japanese maples, but
without any intervening masses of cultivation to make the garden blend
with the primeval trees. The effect was deplorably ludicrous—nay, it was
worse than ludicrous: it was an act of desecration. Had my friend been
more judicious, what charming effects he might have conjured up in a
suitable place with those same little crimson bushes which he condemned
to play so silly a part in among his glorious secular oaks! What magical
scenes have been called up with their help at Westonbirt! But those
pictures were produced by knowledge.
There was a time when in spring and summer I used to look forward to the
autumn, hailing its advent as the season of sport, when every day brought
some new joy. Now that I have left the autumn of life far behind me and
am deep in its winter, I have no love left for the shortening days, the
rustle of falling leaves, and the cold patter of the rain on the dimmed
panes of glass. And yet when the sun shines, how beautiful is the Indian
summer! How lovely the dismissal of the haze floating away across the
valley! Yes! Autumn has its consolations.
Foreigners who have never been in this country generally think that we
live like newts and frogs in a land of marshes and dismal morasses,
curtained by fogs through which the sun’s rays never pierce, a land
sadly breeding a mysterious disease which they call “Le spleen.” In the
fifties, as Disraeli once put it, they looked upon us as “an insular
people subject to fogs, and possessing a powerful middle class,” both,
in their eyes, equally objectionable. All the greater was their surprise
and admiration when they came to realize the soft loveliness of our
landscapes. Sixty years ago and more I was sent home from Eton for a few
days’ change after some trifling ailment, and my father took me, and a
French friend of his who was staying with him, to Richmond. Never shall I
forget that man’s astonished enthusiasm when the view from Richmond Hill
burst upon his sight.
It was, as good luck would have it, a rarely beautiful afternoon in
October. The trees in the park were clothed in the golden russets
of autumn. The sunlight was dancing upon the river running like a
broad silver ribbon through the valley—a delicate blue mist threw an
exquisitely diaphanous veil over the distance. Our friend, brought up in
the fallacies of the French novelists of those days, lifted his hands in
amazement and stood silent.
It was my first sight of Richmond. I have travelled far and wide since
then, and have seen many more startling scenes, but the haunting beauty
of that autumn evening remains one of my happiest dreams. There is a
mysterious charm in that landscape, with the oaks which were veterans
when Henry the Eighth hunted the deer under their boughs, the lush grass,
and the Thames, that sacred river, for an Eton boy without its peer in
the world. It is a scene which neither Alps nor Rockies, neither the
Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, nor the Great Wall of China, nor the
wonders of the tropical jungle, can efface. And—it is home.
Some thirty years ago when, as I have said, autumn was still the welcome
herald of sport, I, happily inspired, laid the foundation of what to-day
robs it of some of its sadness. Now that the stalls in my stable are
empty and the guns lie idle in the racks of the gun-room, I reap the
reward. I sent to America for acorns, I bought seed of the giant Japanese
vine (_Vini coignettia_) in Tokio. From Veitch (alas! for the death of
a noble firm!) I procured specimens of all the species and varieties of
Japanese maples: Thunberg’s berberis, the Persian parrottia—these, with
the various forms of rhus and other choice plants, make up a palette of
colours to cheer the dool of the dying year. In October one after another
the maples begin to send up tongues of fire, setting the hill-side in
flames.
It is a rare treat to see the sun shining through the leaves of some
trees red as the pigeon’s-blood ruby; rare to see the fretted lace-work
of others clothing them in a gorgeous panoply of old gold. Their
neighbours are gleaming like the jewels in Oriental fable. The hollies
and thorns and taller trees are draped with flamboyant curtains sent
down by the huge vines—red, yellow, tawny orange, festoons falling in a
riotous feast of colour.
Among all these proud foreigners the more modest yet no less beautiful
native spindle-tree suffers no eclipse. A little later the American
oaks begin to assert themselves. These, a little while before they turn
crimson, assume all the quality of an old Chinese bronze which the patina
of time has painted with the many hues of Joseph’s coat mysteriously
blended together in an exquisite harmony. When we watch all these, we
understand the poetry of the Japanese when they talk of their mountains
and forests clothed in the brocade of the maples.
It must be obvious that gardening, the object of which is the production
of a succession of varied pictures which, being inspired by the
observation of Nature in her many moods, might appeal to the artistic
taste of a painter or stir the emotion of a poet, presents difficulties
undreamt of by the flower-bed manufacturers of fifty or sixty years ago.
Their gardening was all done with compasses and straight-edge, and the
geometrical result, the eccentric “knottes” worked out in alternantheras,
ecneverias, golden feather and the like, savoured of nothing nearer to
nature than the Tottenham Court Road.
Those were the days in which the garden, like the kitchen, was the
special province of the mistress of the house. Of the latter she might
know something, of the former generally nothing; and the consequence was
that it was handed over to men, who, though they might be most admirable
cultivators, had had no artistic training, had not had the opportunity of
learning by travel, and were content to carry on certain rule-of-thumb
traditions, which turned out every man’s garden in the likeness of that
of every other man. In the uniformly unrelieved brilliancy of geraniums,
verbenas and calceolarias, of imagination or poetry there was not a
trace—not even the merit of invention.