Part 6 (1/2)
The conditions of the country being so unfavourable to artistic handling, it needs a determined effort on man's part to lift things above the dead-level of the mean and commonplace. Yet see how Nature's defects may only prove Art's opportunity! Indeed, it is singular to note how, as it were, in a spirit of n.o.ble contrariness, the Dutch garden exhibits the opposite grace of each natural defect of the land. The great plains intersected with sullen watercourses yield up only slight strips of land, _therefore_ these n.i.g.g.ardly strips, s.n.a.t.c.hed from ”an amphibious world” (as Goldsmith terms it), shall be crammed with beauty.
The landscape outside gapes with uniform dulness, _therefore_ the garden within shall be spick and span. The flat treeless expanse outside offers no objects for measuring distance, _therefore_ the perspective of the garden shall be a marvel of adroit planning and conjured proportions.
The room is small, _therefore_ its every inch shall seem an ell. The garden is a mere patch, _therefore_ the patch shall be elaborately darned and pattern-st.i.tched all over. The eye may not travel far, or can get no joy in a distant view, _therefore_ it shall rest in pure content, focussed upon a scene where rich and orderly garniture can no farther go.
Thus have the ill-conditions of the land proved blessings in disguise.
Necessity, the mother of invention, has produced the Dutch garden out of the most untoward geography, and if we find in its qualities and features traces of the conditions which surrounded its birth and development it is no wonder. Who shall blame the prim shapes and economical culture where even gross deception shall pa.s.s for a virtue if it be successful! Or the regular strips of ground, the long straight ca.n.a.ls, the adroit vistas of gra.s.sy terraces long-drawn out, the trees ranged in pots, or planted in the ground at set intervals and carefully shorn to preserve the limit of their shade! Nay, one can be merciful to the garden's usual crowning touch, which you get at its far end--a painted landscape of hills and dales and clumps of trees to beguile the enamoured visitor into the fond belief that Holland is not Holland: and, in the foreground the usual smiling wooden boy, shooting arrows at nothing, happy in the deed, and tin hares squatting in likely nooks, whose shy hare eyes have worn the same startled gaze these sixty years or more, renewed with fresh paint from time to time as rust requires.
Yet the Earth is richer and mankind happier for the Dutch garden!
And, as though out of compa.s.sion for the Dutchman's difficulties, kind Nature has put into his hands the bulb, as a means whereby he may attain the maximum of gaudy colour within the minimum of s.p.a.ce. Given a few square yards of rescued earth and sufficient manure, and what cannot the neat-handed, frugal-minded, microscopic-eyed Dutchman do in the way of concentrated design with his bulbs, his clipt shrubs, his trim beds, his trickles of water, and strips of gra.s.s and gravel! And should all other resources fail he has still his pounded brick-dust, his yellow sand, his chips of ores and spars and green gla.s.s, which, though they may serve only remotely to suggest Nature, will at all events carry your mind off to the gay gardens of precious stones of fairyland literature!
Indeed, once embarked upon his style of piquancy-at-any-price, and it is hard to see where the Dutch gardener need stop! In this sophisticated trifling--this lapidary's mosaic--this pastry-cook's decoration--this child's puzzle of coloured earth, subst.i.tuted for coloured living flowers--he pushes Art farther than the plain Englishman approves. It is, however, only one step farther than ordinary with him. All his dealings with Nature are of this abstract sort: his details are clever, and he is ingenious, if not imaginative, in his wholes. Still, I repeat, the Earth is richer, and mankind happier for the Dutch garden. There is an obvious excuse for its over-fancifulness in George Meredith's remark that ”dulness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliance.” That the Dutchman should be thus able to compete with unfriendly Nature, and to reverse the brazen of the unkind land of his birth, is an achievement that reflects most creditably upon the artistic capacities of his nation.
But England--
”This other Eden, demi-paradise”--
suggests a garden of a less-constrained order than either of these. Not that the English garden is uniformly of the same type, at the same periods. The variety of the type is to be accounted for in two ways: firstly, by the ingrained eclecticism of the British mind; secondly, by the changeful character of the country--this district is flat and open, this is hilly--so that mere conformity to the lie of the land would produce gardens which belong now to the French type, now to the Italian.
It is the same with British Art of all kinds, of all times: in days long before the Norman visitation and ever since, the English Designer has leant more or less upon foreign initiative, which goes to prove either how inert is his own gift of origination, or how devious may be the tastes of a mixed race.
But if the English garden cannot boast of singular points of interest, if its art reflects foreign countries, it bears the mark of the English taste for landscape, which gives it distinction and is suggestive of very charming effects. The transcendent characteristic of the English garden is derived from and gets its impulse from the prevailing influence of Nature at home. It has the characteristics of the country.
It is, I know, commonly held now-a-days that the taste for landscape is wholly of modern growth. So far as England is concerned it came in, they say, with Thomson in poetry, and with Brown in gardens. So far as relates to the _conscious_ relish for Nature, so far as relates to the love of Nature as a mirror of the moods of the mind, or as a refuge from man, this a.s.sertion may be true enough. Yet, surely the _conscious_ delight in landscape must have been preceded by an _unconscious_ sympathy this way: it could not have sprung without generation. Artistic sight is based upon instinct, feeling, perceptions that reach one knows not how far back in time, it does not come by magic.
See also what a rude, slatternly affair this much-lauded landscape-garden of the ”immortal Brown” was! Here are two sorts of gardens--the traditional garden according to Bacon, the garden according to Brown. Both are Nature, but the first is Nature in an ideal dress, the second is Nature with no dress at all. The first is a garden for a civilised man, the second is a garden for a gipsy. The first is a picture painted from a cherished model, the second is a photograph of the same model undressed. Brown's work, in fact, represents the garden's return to its original barbaric self--the reinauguration of the elemental. Let it not be said, then, that Brown discovered the model, for her fairness was an established fact or she would not have been so richly apparelled when he lighted upon her. In other words, the love of the Earth--”that green-tressed G.o.ddess,” Coleridge calls her--was no new thing in Brown's day: the sympathy for the woodland world, the love of tree, flower, and gra.s.s is behind the manipulated stiff garden of the fifteenth and two succeeding centuries, and it is the abiding source of all enthusiasm in garden-craft.
How long this taste for landscape had existed in pre-Thomsonian days it does not fall to us to determine. Suffice it to say that so long as there has been an English school of gardening this sympathy for landscape has found expression in the English garden.[19] The high thick garden-walls of the old fighting-days shall have ample outlooks in the shape of ”mounts,” from whence views may be had of the open country. The ornamental value of forest trees is well-known and appreciated. Even in the thirteenth century the English gardener is on the alert for new specimens and ”trees of curiosity,” and he is a master of horticulture.
In Chaucer's day he revels in the greensward,
”Ful thikke of gras, ful softe and swete.”
And the early ballads as I have already shown are full of allusion to scenery and woodland. In the days of fine gardens the Englishman must still have his four acres ”to the green,” his adjuncts of shrubbery, wilderness, and park. Nay, Henry VIII.'s garden at Nonsuch, had its wilderness of ten acres. ”Chaucer opens his Clerke's Tale with a bit of landscape admirable for its large style,” says Mr Lowell, ”and as well composed as any Claude” (”My Study Windows,” p. 22). ”What an airy precision of touch is here, and what a sure eye for the points of character in landscape.” So, too, can Milton rejoice in
”Nature boon Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain,”
and Herrick:
”Sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.”
[Footnote 19: ”English scenery of that special type which we call homely, and of which we are proud as only to be found in England, is, indeed, the production of many centuries of that conservatism which has spared the picturesque timber, and of that affectionate regard for the future which has made men delight to spend their money in imprinting on the face of Nature their own taste in trees and shrubs.” (”Vert and Venery,” by VISCOUNT LYMINGTON; _Nineteenth Century_, January, 1891.)]
Nor is this taste for landscape surprising in a country where the natural scenery is so fair and full of meaning. There are the solemn woods, the n.o.ble trees of forest and park: the ”fresh green lap” of the land, so vividly green that the American Hawthorne declares he found ”a kind of l.u.s.tre in it.” There is the rich vegetation, and ”in France, and still less in Italy,” Walpole reminds us, ”they could with difficulty attain that verdure which the humidity of our climate bestows.” There are the leafy forest ways gemmed with flowers; the vast hunting-grounds of old kings, the woodland net of hazel coppice, the hills and dales, sunned or shaded, the plains mapped out with hedgerows and enlivened with the glitter of running water: the heather-clad moors, the golden gorse covers, the rolling downs dotted over with thorns and yews and chalk cliffs, the upland hamlets with their rosy orchards, the farm homesteads nestling in green combes, the grace of standing corn, the girdle of sea with its yellow sh.o.r.e or white, red, or grey rocks, its wolds and tracts of rough uncultivated ground, with bluffs and bushes and wind-hara.s.sed trees--Nature's own ”antickes”--driven like green flames, and carved into grotesque shapes by the biting gales. There are the
”Russet lawns, and fallows grey Where the nibbling flocks do stray, Mountains on whose barren breast The labouring clouds do often rest, Meadows prim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks and rivers wide”--
the land that Richard Jefferies says ”wants no gardening, it _cannot_ be gardened; the least interference kills it”--English woodland whose beauty is in its detail. There is nothing empty and unclothed here. Says Jefferies, ”If the clods are left a little while undisturbed in the fields, weeds spring up and wild flowers bloom upon them. Is the hedge cut and trimmed, lo! the bluebells flower the more, and a yet fresher green buds forth upon the twigs.” ”Never was there a garden like the meadow,” cries this laureate of the open fields; ”there is not an inch of the meadow in early summer without a flower.”