Part 14 (1/2)
We have discussed the theory of a garden; we have a.n.a.lysed the motives which prompt its making, the various treatments of which it is susceptible; we have made a kind of inventory of its effects, its enchantments, its spendthrift joys. Now we will hear the other side, and find out why the morbid, tired man, the modern Hamlet, likes it not, why the son of culture loathes it as a lack-l.u.s.tre thing, betokening to him the sedentary and respectable world in its most hostile form. Having made our picture now we will turn it round, and note why it is that the garden, with its full complement of approved ornament, its selected vegetation, its pretty turns for Nature, its many-sided beauty--
”Or gay, or grave, or sweet, or stern was there Not less than truth designed”
--shall never wholly satisfy.
Your garden will serve you in many ways. It will give a sense of household warmth to your home. It will smile, or look grave, or be dreamily fanciful almost at your bidding. If your bent be that way it will minister to your imaginative reverie, and almost surfeit you with its floods of lazy music. If you are hot, or weary, or dispirited, or touched with _ennui_, its calm atmosphere will lay the dust and lessen the fret of your life. Yet--let us not blink the fact--just because _all_ Nature is not represented here; because the girdle of the garden walls narrows our view of the world at large, and excludes more of Nature's physiognomy than it includes; because the garden is, as Sir Walter truly says, entirely ”a child of Art”; the place, be it never so fair, falls short of man's imaginative craving, and, when put to the push, fails to supply the stimulus his varying moods require. Art's sounding-line will never fathom human nature's emotional depths.
Nay, one need not be that interesting product of civilisation, the over-civilised artist who writes books, and paints pictures, and murmurs rhyme that--
”Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the singer of an empty day.”
There is the _ennuye_ of the clubs whom you are proud to meet in Pall Mall, not a hair of his hat turned, not a wrinkle marring the sit of his coat; meeting him thus and there you would not dream of supposing that this exquisite trophy of the times is a prey to reactionary desires! Yet deep down in the hidden roots of his being lies a layer of unscotched savagery--an unextinguished, inextinguishable strain of the wild man of the woods. Scratch him, and beneath his skin is Rousseau-Th.o.r.eau.
Scratch him again in the same place, and beneath his second skin see the brown hide of the aboriginal Briton, the dweller in wattled abodes, who knew an earlier England than this, that had swamps and forests, roadless wastes and unbridled winter floods, and strange beasts that no man could tame. Even he (”the sweetest lamb that ever loved a bear”) will prate to you of the Bohemian delights of an ungardened country, where ”the white man's poetry” has not defiled the landscape, and the Britisher shall be free to take his pleasure sadly.
Let us not be too hard, then, on that dislike of beauty, that wors.h.i.+p of the barbaric which we are apt to condemn as distempered vagaries, for they denote maladies incident to the age, which are neither surprising nor ign.o.ble. This disdain for Art in a garden, this abhorrence of symmetry, this preference for the rude and s.h.a.ggy, what is it but a new turn given to old instincts, the new Don Quixote sighing for primaevalism! This ruthlessness of the followers of the ”immortal Brown”
who would navvy away the residue of the old-fas.h.i.+oned English gardens; who live to reverse tradition and to scatter the lessons of the past to the winds; what is it but a new quest of the bygone, the knight-errantry of the civilized man, when turned inside out!
And for yet another reason is the garden unable to meet the moods of the age. In discussing the things it may rightly contain, we saw that the laws of artistic presentment, no less than the avowed purpose for which a garden is made, require that only such things shall be admitted, or such aspects be portrayed there, as conduce to gladness and poetic charm. And, so far as the garden is concerned, the restriction is necessary and desirable. As with other phases of Art, Sculpture, Painting, or Romance, the things and aspects portrayed must be idealistic, not realistic; its effects must be select, not indiscriminate. The garden is a deliberately contrived thing, a voluntary piece of handicraft, purpose-made; and for this reason it must not stereotype imperfections; it may toy with Nature, but must not wilfully exaggerate what is ordinary; only Nature may exaggerate herself--not Art. It must not imitate those items in Nature that are crude, ugly, abnormal, elementary; it may not reproduce the absolutely repellent; or at most, the artist may only touch them with a light hand, by way of imaginative hint, but not with intent to produce a finished picture out of them.
On this point there is a distinct a.n.a.logy between the guiding principles of Art and Religion. Art and Religion both signify effort to comply with an ideal standard--indeed, the height of the standard is the test of each--and what makes for innocence or for faultiness in the one, makes for innocence or faultiness in the other. Innocence is found in each, but to be without guile in Art or in Religion means that you must be either flawlessly obedient to a perfect standard, or be beyond the pale of law through pure ignorance of wrong. Where no law is, there can be no transgression. Between these two points is no middle-ground, either in the fields of Art or of Religion.
To apply this to a garden. Untaught, lawless Nature may present things indiscriminately, as they are, the casual, the accidental, the savage, in their native dress, or undress, in all their rugged reality, and not be ashamed. But the artist-gardener, knowing good and evil, exercising free-will in his garden-craft, must choose only what he may rightly have, and employ only what his trained judgment or the unwritten commandments of good taste will allow.
There you have the art of a garden. But because of its necessary exclusiveness, because all Nature is not there, the garden, though of the best, the most far-reaching in its application of art-resources, fails to satisfy all man's imaginative cravings.
Your garden, I said, will serve you many a good turn. Here one may come to play the truant from petty worries, to find quiet harbourage in the chopping sea of life's casual ups and downs; but when _real_ trouble comes, on occasions of spiritual tension, or mental conflict, or heavy depression, then the perfect beauty of the garden offends; the garden has no respect for sadness--then it almost mocks and flaunts you; it smiles the same, though your child die, and then instinct sends you away from the lap of Art to the bosom of Nature--
”Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her.”
All of man, then, asks for all of Nature, and is not content with less.
Just as a stringed instrument, even when lying idle, is awake to sympathetic sound but refuses to vibrate to notes that are not kindred to its compa.s.s, so the garden, with all its wakeful magic, will voice only such of your moods as it is in touch with; and there are many chords missing in the cunningly encased music of a garden--many human notes find no answering pulsation there.
Let us not blink the fact, then; Art, whether of this sphere or of that, is not all. If you want beauty ready-made, obvious gladness of colour, heightened n.o.bleness of form, suggested romance, Nature idealised--all these things are yours in a garden; and yet the very ”dressing” of the place which heightens its appeal to one side of man's being is the bar to its acceptance on another side. To have been baptised of Art is to have received gifts rich and strange, that enable the garden's contents to climb to ideal heights; and yet not all men care for perfectness; the most part prefer creatures not too bright or good for human nature's daily food. So, to tell truth, the wild things of field, forest, and sh.o.r.e have a gamut of life, a range of appeal wider than the gardens; the impunities of lawless Nature reach further than man's finished strokes. Nay, when man has done his best in a garden, some shall even regret, for sentimental reasons, that he brought Art upon the scene at all. ”Even after the wild landscape, through which youth had strayed at will, has been laid out into fields and gardens, and enclosed with fences and hedges; after the footsteps, which had bounded over the flower-strewn gra.s.s have been circ.u.mscribed within firm gravel-walks, the vision of its former happiness will still at times float before the mind in its dreams.” (”Guesses at Truth.”)
Beauty, Romance, and Nature await an audience with you in the garden; but it is Beauty after she has been sent to school to learn the tricks of conscious grace; Beauty that has ”the foreign aid of ornament,” that walks with the supple gait of one who has been well drilled; but gone are the fine careless raptures, gone the bounding step, the blithe impulses of unschooled freedom and gipsy life out of doors.
Romance awaits you, holding in her hand a picture of things bright and jocund, full of tender colour and sweet suggestion; a picture designed to prove this world to be unruffled Arcadia, a sunlit pageant, a dream of delectation, a place for solace, a Herrick-land
”Of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers;”
and human life a jewelled tale with all the irony left out.
Nature awaits you, but only as a fair captive, ready to respond to your behests, to answer to the spring of your imaginings. To man's wooing, ”I love you, love me back,” she resigned herself, not perceiving the drift of homage that was paid, not so much to the beauty that she had, but to the beauty of a heightened sort that should ensue upon his cultivation, for the sake of which he sought her. So now her wildness is subdued.
The yew and the holly from the tangled brake shall feel the ignominy of the shears. The ”common” thorn of the hedge shall be grafted with one of the twenty-seven rarer sorts; the oak and maple shall be headed down and converted into scarlet species; the single flowers, obedient to a beautiful disease, shall blow as doubles, and be propagated by scientific processes that defy Nature and accomplish centuries of evolution at a stride. The woodbine from the vernal wood must be nailed to the carpenter's trellis, the brook may no more brawl, nor violate its limits, the leaves of the hollybush and the box shall be variegated, the forest tree and woodland shrub shall have their frayed hedges shorn, and their wildness pressed out of them in Art's dissembling embrace.
And as with the green things of the earth, so with the creatures of the animal world that are admitted into the sanctuary of a garden. Here is no place for nonconformity of any kind. True, the spruce little squirrel asks no leave for his das.h.i.+ng raids upon the beech-mast and the sweet chestnuts that have escaped the range of the gardener's broom; true, the white and golden pheasant and the speckled goligny may moon about in their distraught fas.h.i.+on down the green alleys and in and out the shrubberies; the foreign duck may frisk in the lake; the white swan may hoist her sail, and ”float double, swan and shadow;” the birds may sing in the trees; the peac.o.c.k may strut on the lawn, or preen his feathers upon the terrace walls; the fallow deer may browse among the bracken on the other side of the ha-ha--thus much of the animal creation shall be allowed here, and not the most fastidious son of Adam will protest a word. But note the terms of their admission. They are a select company, gathered with nice judgment from all quarters of the globe, that are bound over to respectable behaviour, pledged to the beautiful or picturesque; they are in chains, though the chains be aerial and not seen.
It is not that the gardener loves pheasants or peac.o.c.ks, ducks or swans or guinea-fowls for themselves, or for their contribution to the music of the place. Not this, but because these creatures a.s.sist the garden's magic, they support the illusion upon which the whole thing is based; as they flit about, and cross and recross the scene, and scream, and quack, and cackle, you get a touch of actuality that adds finish to the strangeness and piquancy that prevail around; they verify your doubting vision, and make valid the reality of its ideality; they accord with the well-swept lawn, the scented air, the flas.h.i.+ng radiance of the fountain, the white statuary backed by dark yews or dim stone alcoves, with the clipt shrubs, the dreaming trees, the blare of bright colours, in the shapely beds, the fragrant odours and select beauties of the place.
These living creatures (for they _are_ alive), prowling about the grounds,[47] looking fairly comfortable in artificial surroundings from whence their clipped wings will not allow them to escape, incline you to believe that this world is a smooth, genteel, beneficent world after all, and its pastoral character is here so well sustained that no one would be a bit surprised if Pan with his pipe of reeds, or Corydon with his white-fleeced flock, should turn the corner at any moment.