Lord Bacon was perhaps the first Englishman who endeavored to reform the
old system of English gardening, and to show that it was contrary to
good taste and an insult to nature. "As for making knots or figures," he
says, "with divers colored earths, that may lie under the windows of the
house on that side on which the garden stands, they be but toys: you may
see as good sights many times in tarts." Bacon here alludes, I suppose,
to the old Dutch fashion of dividing flowerbeds into many compartments,
and instead of filling them with flowers, covering one with red brick
dust, another with charcoal, a third with yellow sand, a fourth with
chalk, a fifth with broken China, and others with green glass, or with
spars and ores. But Milton, in his exquisite description of the garden
of Eden, does not allude to the same absurd fashion when he speaks of
"curious knots,"
Which not nice art,
In beds and _curious knots_, but nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain.
By these _curious knots_ the poet seems to allude, not to figures of
"divers colored earth," but to the artificial and complicated
arrangements and divisions of flowers and flower-beds.
Though Bacon went not quite so freely to nature as our latest
landscape-gardeners have done, he made the _first step_ in the right
direction and deserves therefore the compliment which Mason has paid him
in his poem of _The English Garden_.
On thy realm
Philosophy his sovereign lustre spread;
Yet did he deign to light with casual glance
The wilds of Taste, Yes, sagest Verulam,
'Twas thine to banish from the royal groves
Each childish vanity of crisped knot[008]
And sculptured foliage; to the lawn restore
Its ample space, and bid it feast the sight
With verdure pure, unbroken, unabridged;
For verdure soothes the eye, as roseate sweets
The smell, or music's melting strains the ear.
Yes--"_verdure soothes the eye_:"--and the mind too. Bacon himself
observes, that "nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass
kept finely shorn." Mason slightly qualifies his commendation of "the
sage" by admitting that he had not quite completed his emancipation from
the bad taste of his day.
Witness his high arched hedge
In pillored state by carpentry upborn,
With colored mirrors decked and prisoned birds.
But, when our step has paced the proud parterre,
And reached the heath, then Nature glads our eye
Sporting in all her lovely carelessness,
There smiles in varied tufts the velvet rose,
There flaunts the gadding woodbine, swells the ground
In gentle hillocks, and around its sides
Through blossomed shades the secret pathway steals.
_The English Garden_.
In one of the notes to _The English Garden_ it is stated that "Bacon was
the prophet, Milton the herald of modern Gardening; and Addison, Pope,
and Kent the champions of true taste." Kent was by profession both a
Painter and a Landscape-Gardener. Addison who had a pretty little
retreat at Bilton, near Rugby, evinces in most of his occasional
allusions to gardens a correct judgment. He complains that even in _his_
time our British gardeners, instead of humouring nature, loved to
deviate from it as much as possible. The system of verdant sculpture had
not gone out of fashion. Our trees still rose in cones, globes, and
pyramids. The work of the scissors was on every plant and bush. It was
Pope, however, who did most to bring the topiary style into contempt and
to encourage a more natural taste, by his humorous paper in the
_Guardian_ and his poetical Epistle to the Earl of Burlington. Gray, the
poet, observes in one of his letters, that "our skill in gardening, or
rather laying out grounds, is the only taste we can call our own; the
only proof of original talent in matters of pleasure. This is no small
honor to us;" he continues, "since neither France nor Italy, has ever
had the least notion of it." "Whatever may have been reported, whether
truly or falsely" (says a contributor to _The World_) "of the Chinese
gardens, it is certain that we are the first of the Europeans who have
founded this taste; and we have been so fortunate in the genius of those
who have had the direction of some of the finest spots of ground, that
we may now boast a success equal to that profusion of expense which has
been destined to promote the rapid progress of this happy enthusiasm.
Our gardens are already the astonishment of foreigners, and, in
proportion as they accustom themselves to consider and understand them
will become their admiration." The periodical from which this is taken
was published exactly a century ago, and the writer's prophecy has been
long verified. Foreigners send to us for gardeners to help them to lay
out their grounds in the English fashion. And we are told by the writer
of an interesting article on gardens, in the _Quarterly Review_, that
"the lawns at Paris, to say nothing of Naples, are regularly irrigated
to keep up even the semblance of English verdure; and at the gardens of
Versailles, and Caserta, near Naples, the walks have been supplied from
the Kensington gravel-pits." "It is not probably known," adds the same
writer, "that among our exportations every year is a large quantity of
evergreens for the markets of France and Germany, and that there are
some nurserymen almost wholly engaged in this branch of trade."
Pomfret, a poet of small powers, if a poet at all, has yet contrived to
produce a popular composition in verse--_The Choice_--because he has
touched with great good fortune on some of the sweetest domestic hopes
and enjoyments of his countrymen.
If Heaven the grateful liberty would give
That I might choose my method how to live;
And all those hours propitious Fate should lend
In blissful ease and satisfaction spend;
Near some fair town I'd have a private seat
Built uniform; not little; nor too great:
Better if on a rising ground it stood,
On this side fields, on that a neighbouring wood.
_The Choice_.
Pomfret perhaps illustrates the general taste when he places his garden
"_near some fair town_." Our present laureate, though a truly inspired
poet, and a genuine lover of Nature even in her remotest retreats, has
the garden of his preference, "_not quite beyond the busy world_."
Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love,
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And sitting muffled in dark leaves you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies
A league of grass.
Even "sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh" are often pleasing
when mellowed by the space of air through which they pass.
'Tis distance lends enchantment to the _sound_.
Shelley, in one of his sweetest poems, speaking of a scene in the
neighbourhood of Naples, beautifully says:--
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
_The city's voice itself is soft_, like solitude's.
No doubt the feeling that we are _near_ the crowd but not _in_ it, may
deepen the sense of our own happy rural seclusion and doubly endear that
pensive leisure in which we can "think down hours to moments," and in
This our life, exempt from public haunt,
Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
_Shakespeare_.
Besides, to speak truly, few men, however studious or philosophical,
desire a total isolation from the world. It is pleasant to be able to
take a sort of side glance at humanity, even when we are most in love
with nature, and to feel that we can join our fellow creatures again
when the social feeling returns upon us. Man was not made to live alone.
Cowper, though he clearly loved retirement and a garden, did not desire
to have the pleasure entirely to himself. "Grant me," he says, "a friend
in my retreat."
To whom to whisper solitude is sweet.
Cowper lived and died a bachelor. In the case of a married man and a
father, garden delights are doubled by the presence of the family and
friends, if wife and children happen to be what they should be, and the
friends are genuine and genial.
All true poets delight in gardens. The truest that ever lived spent his
latter days at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. He had a spacious and
beautiful garden. Charles Knight tells us that "the Avon washed its
banks; and within its enclosures it had its sunny terraces and green
lawns, its pleached alleys and honeysuckle bowers," In this garden
Shakespeare planted with his own hands his celebrated Mulberry tree. It
was a noble specimen of the black Mulberry introduced into England in
1548[009]. In 1605, James I. issued a Royal edict recommending the
cultivation of silkworms and offering packets of mulberry seeds to those
amongst his subjects who were willing to sow them. Shakespeare's tree
was planted in 1609. Mr. Loudon, observes that the black Mulberry has
been known from the earliest records of antiquity and that it is twice
mentioned in the Bible: namely, in the second Book of Samuel and in the
Psalms. When New Place was in the possession of Sir Hough Clopton, who
was proud of its interesting association with the history of our great
poet, not only were Garrick and Macklin most hospitably entertained
under the Mulberry tree, but all strangers on a proper application were
admitted to a sight of it. But when Sir Hough Clopton was succeeded by
the Reverend Francis Gastrell, that gentleman, to save himself the
trouble of showing the tree to visitors, had "the gothic barbarity" to
cut down and root up that interesting--indeed _sacred_ memorial--of the
Pride of the British Isles. The people of Stratford were so enraged at
this sacrilege that they broke Mr. Gastrell's windows. That prosaic
personage at last found the place too hot for him, and took his
departure from a town whose inhabitants "doated on his very absence;"
but before he went he completed the fall sum of his sins against good
taste and good feeling by pulling to the ground the house in which
Shakespeare had lived and died. This was done, it is said, out of sheer
spite to the towns-people, with some of whom Mr. Gastrell had had a
dispute about the rate at which the house was taxed. His change of
residence was no great relief to him, for the whole British public felt
sorely aggrieved, and wherever he went he was peppered with all sorts of
squibs and satires. He "slid into verse," and "hitched in a rhyme."
Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,
And the sad burden of a merry song.
Thomas Sharp, a watchmaker, got possession of the fragments of
Shakespeare's Mulberry tree, and worked them into all sorts of elegant
ornaments and toys, and disposed of them at great prices. The
corporation of Stratford presented Garrick with the freedom of the town
in a box made of the wood of this famous tree, and the compliment seems
to have suggested to him his public festival or pageant in honor of the
poet. This Jubilee, which was got up with great zeal, and at great
expense and trouble, was attended by vast throngs of the admirers of
Shakespeare from all parts of the kingdom. It was repeated on the stage
and became so popular as a theatrical exhibition that it was represented
night after night for more than half a season to crowded audiences.
Upon the subject of gardens, let us hear what has been said by the
self-styled "melancholy Cowley." When in the smoky city pent, amidst the
busy hum of men, he sighed unceasingly for some green retreat. As he paced
the crowded thorough-fares of London, he thought of the velvet turf and
the pure air of the country. His imagination carried him into secluded
groves or to the bank of a murmuring river, or into some trim and quiet
garden. "I never," he says, "had any other desire so strong and so like
to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be
master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate
conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life
only to the culture of them and the study of nature," The late Miss
Mitford, whose writings breathe so freshly of the nature that she loved
so dearly, realized for herself a similar desire. It is said that she
had the cottage of a peasant with the garden of a Duchess. Cowley is not
contented with expressing in plain prose his appreciation of garden
enjoyments. He repeatedly alludes to them in verse.
Thus, thus (and this deserved great Virgil's praise)
The old Corycian yeoman passed his days;
Thus his wise life Abdolonymus spent;
Th' ambassadors, which the great emperor sent
To offer him a crown, with wonder found
The reverend gardener, hoeing of his ground;
Unwillingly and slow and discontent
From his loved cottage to a throne he went;
And oft he stopped, on his triumphant way:
And oft looked back: and oft was heard to say
Not without sighs, Alas! I there forsake
A happier kingdom than I go to take.
_Lib. IV. Plantarum_.
Here is a similar allusion by the same poet to the delights which great
men amongst the ancients have taken in a rural retirement.
Methinks, I see great Dioclesian walk
In the Salonian garden's noble shade
Which by his own imperial hands was made,
I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk
With the ambassadors, who come in vain
To entice him to a throne again.
"If I, my friends," said he, "should to you show
All the delights which in these gardens grow,
'Tis likelier much that you should with me stay,
Than 'tis that you should carry me away:
And trust me not, my friends, if every day
I walk not here with more delight,
Than ever, after the most happy sight
In triumph to the Capitol I rode,
To thank the gods, and to be thought myself almost a god,"
_The Garden_.
Cowley does not omit the important moral which a garden furnishes.
Where does the wisdom and the power divine
In a more bright and sweet reflection shine?
Where do we finer strokes and colors see
Of the Creator's real poetry.
Than when we with attention look
Upon the third day's volume of the book?
If we could open and intend our eye
_We all, like Moses, might espy,
E'en in a bush, the radiant Deity_.
In Leigh Hunt's charming book entitled _The Town_, I find the following
notice of the partiality of poets for houses with gardens attached to
them:--
"It is not surprizing that _garden-houses_ as they were called; should
have formerly abounded in Holborn, in Bunhill Row, and other (at that
time) suburban places. We notice the fact, in order to observe _how fond
the poets were of occupying houses of this description. Milton seems to
have made a point of having one_. The only London residence of Chapman
which is known, was in Old Street Road; doubtless at that time a rural
suburb. Beaumont and Fletcher's house, on the Surrey side of the Thames,
(for they lived as well as wrote together,) most probably had a garden;
and Dryden's house in Gerard Street looked into the garden of the
mansion built by the Earls of Leicester. A tree, or even a flower, put
in a window in the streets of a great city, (and the London citizens, to
their credit, are fond of flowers,) affects the eye something in the
same way as the hand-organs, which bring unexpected music to the ear.
They refresh the common-places of life, shed a harmony through the busy
discord, and appeal to those first sources of emotion, which are
associated with the remembrance of all that is young and innocent."
Milton must have been a passionate lover of flowers and flower-gardens
or he could never have exhibited the exquisite taste and genial feeling
which characterize all the floral allusions and descriptions with which
so much of his poetry is embellished. He lived for some time in a house
in Westminster over-looking the Park. The same house was tenanted by
Jeremy Bentham for forty years. It would be difficult to meet with any
two individuals of more opposite temperaments than the author of
_Paradise Lost_ and the Utilitarian Philosopher. There is or was a stone
in the wall at the end of the garden inscribed TO THE PRINCE OF POETS.
Two beautiful cotton trees overarched the inscription, "and to show"
says Hazlitt, (who subsequently lived in the same house himself,) "how
little the refinements of taste or fancy entered Bentham's system, he
proposed at one time to cut down these beautiful trees, to convert the
garden, where he had breathed an air of truth and heaven for near half a
century, into a paltry Chreistomathic School, and to make Milton's house
(the cradle of _Paradise Lost_) a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled
stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and
forwards to it with their cloven hoofs!"
No poet, ancient or modern, has described a garden on a large scale in
so noble a style as Milton. He has anticipated the finest conceptions of
the latest landscape-gardeners, and infinitely surpassed all the
accounts we have met with of the gardens of the olden time before us.
His Paradise is a
Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned
Or of revived Adonis or renowned
Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son
Or that, not mystic, where the sapient King
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse[010]
The description is too long to quote entire, but I must make room for a
delightful extract. Familiar as it must be to all lovers of poetry, who
will object to read it again and again? Genuine poetry is like a
masterpiece of the painter's art:--we can gaze with admiration for the
hundredth time on a noble picture. The mind and the eye are never
satiated with the truly beautiful. "A thing of beauty is a joy for
ever."