Part 32 (1/2)

Peering through the leaves with joy We notice, as we see the leaves Lighted from one side only, That we can almost see the sun Mixing gold with the tender green, etc.

and so on for another twenty lines.

Yet this rich Burgomaster of Hamburg, for all that he dealt chiefly in rhymed prose, had his moments of rare elevation of thought and mystical rapture about Nature; for instance, in the introduction to _Ueber das Firmament_:

As lately in the sapphire depths, Not bound by earth nor water, aim nor end, In the unplumbed aerial sea I gazed, And my absorbed glance, now here, now there, But ever deeper sank--horror came over me, My eye grew dizzy and my soul aghast.

That infinite vast vault, True picture of Eternity, Since without birth or end From G.o.d alone it comes....

It overwhelmed my soul.

The mighty dome of deep dark light, Bright darkness without birth or bound, Swallowed the very world--burying thought.

My being dwindled to an atom, to a nought; I lost myself, So suddenly it beat me down, And threatened with despair.

But in that salutary nothingness, that blessed loss, All present G.o.d! in Thee--I found myself again.

While English poetry and its German imitations were shewing these signs of reaction from the artificiality of the time, and science and philosophy often lauded Nature to the skies, as, for instance, Shaftesbury[8] (1671-1713), a return to Nature became the principle of English garden-craft in the first half of the eighteenth century.[9] The line of progress here, as in taste generally, did not run straightforward, but fluctuated. From the geometric gardens of Lenotre, England pa.s.sed to the opposite extreme; in the full tide of periwig and hoop petticoat, minuets, beauty-patches and rouge, Addison and Pope were banis.h.i.+ng everything that was not strictly natural from the garden. Addison would even have everything grow wild in its own way, and Pope wrote:

To build, to plant, whatever you intend, To rear the column, or the arch to bend, To swell the terrace or to sink the grot, In all let Nature never be forgot.

William Kent made allowance for this idea; but, as a painter, and looking at his native scenery with a painter's eye, he noted its characteristic features--the gentle undulations, the freshness of the green, the wealth of trees--and based his garden-craft on these.

The straight line was banished; in its place came wide s.p.a.ces of lawn and scattered groups of trees of different sorts--dark fir and alder here, silver birch and grey poplar there; and flowery fields with streams running through them stood out in relief against dark woodland.

Stiff walls, bal.u.s.trades, terraces, statues, and so forth, disappeared; the garden was not to contrast with the surrounding landscape, but to merge into it--to be not Art, but a bit of Nature.

It was, in fact, to be a number of such bits, each distinct from the rest--waterfall, sheltered sunny nook, dark wood, light glade. Kent himself soon began to vary this mosaic of separate scenes by adding ruins and pavilions; but it was Chambers the architect who developed the idea of variety by his writings on the dwellings and manners of the Chinese.[10]

The fundamental idea that the garden ought to be a sample of the landscape was common both to Kent and the Chinese; but, as China is far richer than England in varieties of scenery, her gardens included mountains, rocks, swamps, and deserts, as well as sunny fields and plains, while English gardens were comparatively monotonous. When the fas.h.i.+on for the Chinese style came in, as unluckily it did just when we were trying to oust the Rococo, so that one pigtail superseded the other, variety was achieved by groups of buildings in all sorts of styles. Stables, ice-houses, gardeners' cottages took the form of pavilions, paG.o.das, kiosks, and temples.

Meanwhile, as a reaction against the Rococo, enthusiasm for Nature increased, and feeling was set free from restraint by the growing sentimentality. Richardson's novels fed the taste for the pleasures of weeping sensibility, and garden-craft fell under its sway. In all periods the insignificant and non-essential is unable to resist the general stamp, if that only shews a little originality.

These gardens, with temples to friends.h.i.+p and love, melancholy, virtue, re-union, and death, and so forth, were suitable backgrounds for the sentimental scenes described in the English novels, and for the idyllic poets and moons.h.i.+ne singers of Germany. Here it was the fas.h.i.+on to wander, tenderly intertwined, shedding floods of tears and exchanging kisses, and pausing at various places to read the inscriptions which directed them what to feel. At one spot they were to laugh, at another to weep, at a third to be fired with devotion.

Hermitages sprang up everywhere, with hermits, real or dummy. Any good house near a wood, or in a shady position, was called a hermitage, and dedicated to arcadian life, free from care and ceremony. Cla.s.sic and romantic styles competed for favour in architecture; at one moment everything must needs be purely cla.s.sic, each temple Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric; at another Gothic, with the ruins and fortresses of mediaeval romance. And not only English gardens, but those of Europe generally, though to a less degree, pa.s.sed through these stages of development, for no disease is so infectious as fas.h.i.+on.

It was not till the end of the eighteenth century that a healthy reaction set in in England, when Repton turned back to Kent's fundamental principle and freed it from its unnatural excrescences, with the formula: the garden should be an artistic representation of the landscape, a work of art whose materials are provided by Nature herself, whether gra.s.s, flowers, bushes, trees, water, or whatever it may be that she has to offer. Thus began our modern landscape gardening.

In another region too, a change was brought about from the Rococo to a more natural style. It is true that Nature plays no direct _role_ in _Robinson Crusoe_, and wins as little notice there as in its numberless imitations; yet the book roused a longing for healthier, more natural conditions in thousands of minds. It led the idyllic tendency of the day back to its source, and by shewing all the stages, from the raw state of Nature up to the culture of the community, in the life of one man, it brought out the contrast between the far-off age of innocence and the perverted present.

The German _Simplicissimus_ closed with a Robinsonade, in which the hero, after long wandering, found rest and peace on an island in the ocean of the world, alone with himself and Nature. The readers of _Robinson Crusoe_ were in much the same position. Defoe was not only a true artist, but a man of n.o.ble, patient character, and his romance proved a healing medicine to many sick minds, pointing the way back to Nature and a natural fife, and creating a longing for the lost innocence of man.

Rousseau, who was also a zealous advocate of the English gardens, and disgusted by the French Pigtail style, was more impressed by _Robinson Crusoe_ than by any other book. It was the first book his Emilia gave him, as a gospel of Nature and unspoilt taste.

CHAPTER X

THE SENSITIVENESS AND EXAGGERATION OF THE ELEGIAC IDYLLIC FEELING

This longing to return to the lost paradise of Nature gradually produced a state of melancholy hyper-sensitiveness, an epidemic of world pain, quite as unnatural as the Rococo.

The heart came into its rights again and laid claim to absolute dominion in its kingdom, and regret that it had lain so long deprived of its own, gave rise to a tearful pensiveness, which added zest to rest.i.tution. It was convalescence, but followed at once by another complaint. Feeling swung from one extreme to the other.

German feeling in the first half of the eighteenth century was chiefly influenced, on the one hand, by Richardson's novels, which left no room for Nature, and by the poetry of Young and Thomson; on the other, by the pastoral idylls interspersed with anacreontic love-pa.s.sages, affected by the French. At first description and moralizing preponderated.

In 1729 Haller's _Alps_ appeared. It had the merit of drawing the eyes of Europe to Alpine beauty and the moral worth of the Swiss, but shewed little eye for romantic scenery. It is full of descriptive painting, but not of a kind that appeals: scene follows scene with considerable pathos, especially in dealing with the people; but landscape is looked at almost entirely from the moralizing or utilitarian standpoint.