IN PRAISE OF BOTH.
"In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be."—Ben Jonson.
"The Common all men have."—George Herbert.
What shall we say, then, to the two conflicting views of garden-craft referred to in my last chapter, wherein I take the modern position, namely, that the love of Art in a garden, and the love of wild things in Nature's large estate, cannot co-exist in the same breast? Is the position true or false?
To see the matter in its full bearings I must fetch back a little, and recall what was said in a former chapter (p. 85) upon the differing attitudes towards Nature taken by the earlier and later schools of gardening. There is, I said, no trace in the writings, or in the gardening, of the earlier traditional school, of that mawkish sentiment about Nature, that condescending tenderness for her primal shapes, that has nursed the scruples, and embarrassed the efforts of the "landscape-gardener" from Kent's and Brown's days to now.
The older gardener had no half-and-half methods; he made no pretence of Nature-worship, nursed no scruples that could hinder the expression of his own mind about Nature, or check him from fathoming all her possibilities. Yet with all his seeming unscrupulousness the old gardener does not close his eyes or his heart to Nature at large, but whether in the garden sanctuary or out of it, he maintains equally tender relations towards her.
But the scruples of the earlier phase of the landscape school, about tampering with Nature by way of attaining Art effects, are as water unto wine compared with what is taught by men of the same school now-a-days. We have now to reckon with an altogether deeper stratum of antipathy to garden-craft than was reached by the followers of Brown. We have not now to haggle with the quidnuncs over the less or more of Art permissible in a garden, but to fight out the question whether civilisation shall have any garden at all. Away with this "white man's poetry!" The wild Indian's "intercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest independence of each. If he is somewhat of a stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much of a familiar. There is something vulgar and foul in the latter's closeness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in the former's distance." "Alas!" says Newman, "what are we doing all through life, both as a necessity and a duty, but unlearning the world's poetry, and attaining to its prose?"
One does not fear, however, that the English people will part lightly with their land's old poetry, however seductive the emotion which we are told "prefers the oppression of surroundings over-sadly tinged, and solitudes that have a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities to the old-fashioned sort of beauty called charming and fair."
The lesson we have to learn is the falsehood of extremes. The point we have to master is, that in the prodigality of "God's Plenty" many sorts of beauty are ours, and nothing shall be scorned. God's creation has a broad gamut, a vast range, to meet our many moods. "There are, it may be, so many kinds of music in the world, and none of them is without signification."
"O world, as God has made it! All is beauty."
There is nothing contradictory in the variety and multiformity of Nature, whether loose and at large in Nature's unmapped geography, or garnered and assorted and heightened by man's artistry in the small proportions of a perfect garden. Man, we said, is of mixed blood, whose sympathies are not so much divided as double, and each sympathy shall have free play. My inborn Eden instincts draw me to the bloom and wonder of the world; my Viking blood drives me to the snap and enthusiasm of anarchic forms, the colossal images, the swarthy monotony, the sombre aspects of Nature in the wild. "Yet all is beauty."
Thus much by way of preamble. And now, after repeating that the gardener of the old formality, however sternly he discipline wild Nature for the purposes of beauty, is none the less capable of loving and of holding friendly commerce with the things that grew outside his garden hedge, let me bring upon my page a modern of moderns, who, by the wide range of his sympathies, recalls the giants of a healthier day, and redeems a generation of lopsided folk abnormally developed in one direction.
And the poet Wordsworth, self-drawn in his own works, or depicted by his friends, is one of the old stock of sane, sound-hearted Englishmen, who can be equally susceptible to the inward beauties of man's created brain-world, and the outward beauties of unkempt Nature. So the combination we plead for is not impossible! The two tastes are not irreconcilable! Blessed be both!
We may trust Wordsworth implicitly as an authority upon Nature. No one questions his knowledge of wild woodland lore. There is no one of ancient or of modern times who in his outward mien, his words, his habits, carries more indisputable proof of the prophet's ordination than the man who spent a long noviciate in his native mountain solitudes. There is no one so fully entitled, or so well able to speak of and for her, as he who knows her language to the faintest whisper, who spent his days at her feet, who pored over her lineaments under every change of expression, who in his writings drew upon the secret honey of the beauty and harmony of the world, telling, to use his own swinging phrases, of "the joy and happiness of loving creatures, of men and children, of birds and beasts, of hills and streams, and trees and flowers; with the changes of night and day, evening and morning, summer and winter; and all their unwearied actions and energies."
Of all Nature's consecrated children, he is the prince of the apostolate; he is, so to speak, the beloved disciple of them all, whose exalted personal love admits him to the right to lean upon her breast, to hear her heart-beats, to catch knowledge there that had been kept secret since the world began. None so familiar with pastoral life in its varied time-fulness, sweet or stern, glad or grim, pathetic or sublime, as he who carries in his mind the echoes of the passion of the storm, the moan of the passing wind with its beat upon the bald mountain-crag, the sighing of the dry sedge, the lunge of mighty waters, the tones of waterfalls, the inland sounds of caves and trees, the plaintive spirit of the solitude. There are none who have pondered so deeply over "the blended holiness of earth and sky," the gesture of the wind and cloud, the silence of the hills; none so free to fraternise with things bold or obscure, great or small, as he who told alike of the love and infinite longings of Margaret, of the fresh joy of
"The blooming girl whose hair was wet
With points of morning dew,"
of the lonely star, the solitary raven, the pliant hare-bell, swinging in the breeze, the meadows and the lower ground, and all the sweetness of a common dawn.
Thus did Wordsworth enter into the soul of things and sing of them
"In a music sweeter than their own."
Nay, says Arnold, "It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter of his poem, but wrote his poem for him" ("Essays in Criticism," p. 155).
So much for Wordsworth upon Nature out of doors; now let us hear him upon Art in a garden, of which he was fully entitled to speak, and we shall see that the man is no less the poet of idealism upon his own ground, than the poet of actuality in the woodland world.
Writing to his friend Sir Geo. Beaumont,[49] with all the outspokenness of friendship and the simplicity of a candid mind, he thus delivers himself upon the Art of Gardening: "Laying out grounds, as it is called, may be considered as a Liberal Art, in some sort like poetry and painting, and its object is, or ought to be, to move the affections under the control of good sense; that is, those of the best and wisest; but, speaking with more precision, it is to assist Nature in moving the affections of those who have the deepest perception of the beauties of Nature, who have the most valuable feelings, that is, the most permanent, the most independent, the most ennobling with Nature and human life."
Hearken to Nature's own high priest, turned laureate of the garden! How can this thing be? Here is the man whose days had been spent at Nature's feet, whose life's business seemed to be this only, that he should extol her, interpret her, sing of her, lift her as high in man's esteem as fine utterance can affect the human soul. Yet when he has done all, said all that inspired imagination can say in her praise, in what seems an outburst of disloyalty to his old mistress, he deliberately takes the crown himself had woven from off the head of Nature and places it on the brows of Art in a garden!
Not Bacon himself could write with more discernment or with more fervour of garden-craft than this, and the pronouncement gains further significance as being the deliberately expressed opinion of a great poet, and him the leader of the modern School of Naturalists. And that these two men, separated not merely by two centuries of time, but by the revolutionary influences which coloured them, should find common ground and shake hands in a garden, is strange indeed! Both men loved Nature. Bacon, as Dean Church remarks,[50] had a "keen delight in Nature, in the beauty and scents of flowers, in the charm of open-air life;" but his regard for Nature's beauties was not so ardent, his knowledge of her works and ways not so intimate or so scientifically verified, his senses not so sympathetically allured as Wordsworth's; he had not the same prophet's vision that could see into the life of things, and find thoughts there "that do often lie too deep for tears." That special sense Wordsworth himself fathered.
Points like these add weight to Wordsworth's testimony of the high rank of gardening, and we do well to note that the wreath that the modern man brings for Art in a garden is not only greener and fresher than the garland of the other, but it was gathered on loftier heights; it means more, it implies a more emphatic homage.
And Wordsworth had not that superficial knowledge of gardening which no gentleman's head should be without. He knew it as a craftsman knows the niceties of his craft. "More than one seat in the lake-country," says Mr Myres ("Wordsworth," p. 68), "among them one home of pre-eminent beauty, have owed to Wordsworth no small part of their ordered charm."
Of Wordsworth's own garden, one writes: "I know that thirty years ago that which struck me most at Rydal Mount, and which appeared to me its greatest charm, was the union of the garden and the wilderness. You passed almost imperceptibly from the trim parterre to the noble wood, and from the narrow, green vista to that wide sweep of lake and mountain which made up one of the finest landscapes in England. Nor could you doubt that this unusual combination was largely the result of the poet's own care and arrangement. He had the faculty for such work."
Here one may well leave the matter without further labouring, content to have proved by the example of a four-square, sane genius, that those instincts of ours which seem to pull contrary ways—Art-wards or Nature-wards—and to drive our lopsided selves to the falsehood of extremes, are, after all, not incompatible. The field, the waste, the moor, the mountain, the trim garden with its parterres and terraces, are one Nature. These things breathe one breath, they sing one music, they share one heart between them; the difference between the dressed and the undressed is only superficial. The art of gardening is not intended to supersede Nature, but only "to assist Nature in moving the affections of those who have the deepest perceptions of the beauties of Nature, who have the most valuable feelings, ... the most ennobling with Nature and human life."
One need not, if Wordsworth's example prove anything, be less the child of the present (but rather the more) because one can both appreciate the realities of rude Nature, and that deliberately-contrived, purpose-made, piece of human handicraft, a well-equipped garden. One need not be less susceptible to the black forebodings of this contention-tost, modern world, nor need one's ear be less alert to Nature's correspondence to
"The still, sad music of humanity,"
because one experiences, with old Mountaine, "a jucunditie of minde" in a fair garden. There is an unerring rightness both in rude Nature and in garden grace, in the chartered liberty of the one, and the unchartered freedom of unadjusted things in the other. Blessed be both!
It is worth something to have mastered truth, which, however simple and elementary it seem, is really vital to the proper understanding of the relation of Art to Nature. It helps one to appraise at their proper value the denunciations of the disciples of Kent and Brown against Art in a garden, and to see, on the other hand, why Bacon and the Early School of gardeners loved Nature in the wild state no less than in a garden. It dispels any lingering hesitation we may have as to the amount of Art a garden may receive in defiance of Dryasdust "codes of taste." It explains what your artist-gardener friend meant when he said that he had as much sympathy with, and felt as much interest in, the moving drama of Nature going on on this as on that side of his garden-hedge, and how he could pass from the rough theme outside to the ordered music inside, from the uncertain windings in the coppice-glade to the pleached alley of the garden, without sense of disparagement to the one or the other. It explains why it is that nothing in Nature goes unobserved of him; how you shall call to see him and hunt the garden over, and at last find him idling along the bridle-path in the plantation, his fist full of flowers, his mind set on Nature's affairs, his ear in such unison with local sounds that he shall tell you the dominant tone of the wind in the tree-tops. Or he is in the covert's tangle enjoying
"Simple Nature's breathing life,"
surprising the thorn veiled in blossom, revelling in the wealth of boundless life there, in the variety of plant-form, the palpitating lights, the melody of nesting birds, the common joy and sweet assurance of things.
"Society is all but rude
To this delicious solitude."
Or it may be he is on the breezy waste, lying full length among the heather, watching the rabbits' gambols, or the floating thistle-down with its hint of unseen life in the air, or sauntering by the stream in the lower meadows, learning afresh the glory of weed life in the lush magnificence of the great docks, the red sorrel, the willow-herb, the purple thistles, and the gay battalions of fox-gloves thrown out in skirmishing order, that swarm on each eminence and hedgerow. Or you may meet him hastening home for the evening view from the orchard-terrace, to see the solemn close of day, and the last gleam of sunshine fading over the hill.
It is worth something, I say, to win clear hold of the fact that Nature in a garden and Nature in the wild are at unity; that they have each their place in the economy of human life, and that each should have its share in man's affections. The true gardener is in touch with both. He knows where this excels or falls behind the other, and because he knows the range of each, he fears no comparison between them. He can be eloquent upon the charms of a garden, its stimulus for the tired eye and mind, the harmony that resides in the proportions of its lines and masses, the gladness of its colour, the delight of its frankly decorative arrangement, the sense of rest that comes of its symmetry and repeated patterns. He will tell you that for halcyon days, when life's wheels run smooth, and the sun shines, even for life's average days, there is nothing so cheery, nothing so blithely companionable, nothing that can give such a sense of household warmth to your home as a pleasant garden. And yet none will be more ready to warn you of the limits of a garden's charms, of its sheer impotence to yield satisfaction at either end of the scale of human joy or sorrow.
And so it is. Let but the mist of melancholy descend upon you, let but the pessimistic distress to which we moderns are all prone penetrate your mind, let you be the prey of undermining sorrow, or lie under the shadow of bereavement, and it is not to the garden that you will go for Nature's comfort. The chalices of its flowers store not the dew that shall cool your brow. Nay, at times like these the garden poses as a kind of lovely foe, to mock you with its polite reticence, its look of unwavering complacency, its gentle ecstasy. Then the ear refuses the soft and intimate garden-melodies, and asks instead for the rough unrehearsed music of Nature in the wild, the jar and jangle of winds and tides, the challenge of discords,
"The conflict and the sounds that live in darkness,"
the wild rhetoric of the night upon some "haggard Egdon," or along the steep wild cliffs when the storm is up, and the deeps are troubled, and the earth throbs and throbs again with the violence of the waves that break and bellow in the caves beneath your feet; and then it perhaps shall cross your mind to set this brief moment of your despair against the unavailing passion of tides that for ten thousand years and more have hurled themselves against this heedless shore. Or you shall find some sequestered corner of the land that keeps its scars of old-world turmoil, the symptoms of the hustle of primeval days, the shock of grim shapes, long ago put to sleep beneath a coverlet of sweet-scented turf; and the unspoiled grandeur of the scene will prick and arouse your dulled senses, while its peaceful face will assure you that, as it was with the troubled masonry of the hills in the morning of the world, even so shall it be with you—time shall tranquillise and at length cancel all your woes. Or again,
"Should life be dull, and spirits low
'Twill soothe us in our sorrow
That earth has something yet to show,
The bonny holms of Yarrow."
Better tonic, one thinks, for the over-wrought brain than the soft glamour of the well-swept lawn, the clipt shrubs, the focussed beauty of dotted specimens, the ordered disorder of wriggling paths and sprawling flower-beds of strange device, the ransacked wardrobe of the gardener's stock of gay bedding-plants, or other of the permitted charms of a modern garden; better than these is the stir and enthusiasm of Nature's broad estate, the boulder-tossed moor, where the hare runs races in her mirth, and the lark has a special song for your ear; or the high transport of hours of indolence spent basking in the bed of purple heather, your nostrils filled with gladsome air and the scent of thyme, your eyes following the course of the milk-white clouds that ride with folded sails in the blue heavens overhead and cast flying shadows on the uplands, where nothing breaks the silence of the hills but the song in the air, the tinkle of the sheep-bells, and the murmur of the moorland bee.
And the upshot of the matter is this. The master-things for the enjoyment of life are: health, a balanced mind that will not churlishly refuse "God's plenty," an eye quick to discern the marvel of beautiful things, a heart in sympathy with man and beast. Possessing these we may defy Fortune—
"I care not, Fortune, what you me deny:
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace,
You cannot shut the windows of the sky
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve:
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave;
Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave."
[1] It is much to be wished that these Lectures and Addresses should be collected and published.
[2] Philosophie de l'art en Italie (p. 162).—H. Taine.
[3] In Thornhill Church.
[4] Qu'est-ce l'expérience? Une pauvre petite cabane construite avec les débris de ces palais d'or et de marbre appelés nos illusions.—Joseph Roux.
[5] The words "'Tis fit one flesh one house should have," &c., form part of the epitaph of Richard Bartholomew and his wife in the parish church of Burford.
Lo Hudled up, Together lye
Gray Age, Greene Youth, White Infancy.
If Death doth Nature's law dispence,
And reconciles all difference,
'Tis fit One Flesh One House should have,
One Tombe, One Epitaph, One Grave;
And they that lived and loved either
Should dye and Lye and sleep together.
Goe Reader, whether goe or stay,
Thou must not hence be long away.
[6] Think of "a paradise not like this of ours with so much pains and curiosity made with hands"—says Evelyn, in the middle of a rhapsody on flowers—"eternal in the heavens, where all the trees are trees of life, the flowers all amaranths; all the plants perennial, ever verdant, ever pregnant, and where those who desire knowledge may taste freely of the fruit of that tree which cost the first gardener and posterity so dear." (Sylva, "Of Forest-trees," p. 148.)
[7] "My Epitaph."
"Below lies one whose name was traced in sand—
He died, not knowing what it was to live;
Died while the first sweet consciousness of manhood
And maiden thought electrified his soul:
Faint beatings in the calyx of the rose.
Bewildered reader, pass without a sigh
In a proud sorrow! There is life with God,
In other Kingdom of a sweeter air;
In Eden every flower is blown. Amen."
David Gray ("A Poet's Sketch-book," R. Buchanan, p. 81.)
[8] "This strange combination of autumn and spring tints is a very usual sight in Japan.... It is worth noting that in Japan a tree is considered chiefly for its form and tint, not for use.... I heard the cherry-trees were now budding, so I hurried up to take advantage of them, and found them more beautiful than I had ever imagined. There are at least fifty varieties, from delicately tinted white and pink to the richest rose, almost crimson blossom."—Alfred East's "Trip to Japan," Universal Review, March, 1890.
[9] "If you look into our gardens annexed to our houses" (says William Harrison in Holinshed's "Chronicles") "how wonderful is their beauty increased, not only with flowers, which Columella calleth Terrena Sydera, saying 'Pingit et in varias terrestria, sydera flores,' and variety of curious and costly workmanship, but also with rare and medicinable herbs.... How Art also helpeth Nature in the daily colouring, doubling and enlarging the proportions of our flowers it is incredible to report, for so curious and cunning are our gardeners now in these days that they presume to do, in a manner, what they list with Nature, and moderate her course in things as if they were her superiors. It is a world also to see how many strange herbs, plants, and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americans, Taprobane, Canary Isles, and all parts of the world, the which, albeit that his respect of the constitutions of our bodies, they do not grow for us (because God hath bestowed sufficient commodities upon every country for her own necessity) yet for delectation's sake unto the eye, and their odoriferous savours unto the nose, they are to be cherished, and God also glorified in them, because they are His good gifts, and created to do man help and service. There is not almost one nobleman, gentleman, or merchant that hath not great store of these flowers, which now also begin to wax so well acquainted with our evils that we may almost account of them as parcel of our own commodities."—(From "Elizabethan England," pp. 26-7.)
[10] Here is Emerson writing to Carlyle of his "new plaything"—a piece of woodland of forty acres on the border of Walden Pond. "In these May mornings, when maples, poplars, walnut, and pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon and cut with my hatchet an Indian path thro' the thicket, all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures." (John Morley's Essays, "Emerson," p. 304.) But, as Mr Morley points out, he finds the work too fascinating, eating up days and weeks; "nay, a brave scholar should shun it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these pernicious enchantments."
[11] "I like your Essays," said Henry the Third to Montaigne. "Then, sire, you will like me. I am my Essays."
[12] Time does much for a garden. There is a story of an American plutocrat's visit to Oxford. On his tour of the Colleges nothing struck him so much as the velvety turf of some of the quadrangles. He asked for the gardener, and made minute enquiries as to the method of laying down and maintaining the grass. "That's all, is it?" he exclaimed, when the process had been carefully described. "Yes, sir," replied the gardener with a twinkle in his eye, "That's all, but we generally leave it three or four centuries to settle down!"
[13] "There is no garden well contrived, but that which hath an Enoch's walk in it."—Sir W. Waller.
[14] "Field and Hedgerow," p. 27.
[15] See "The Praise of Gardens."
[16] "Archæological Journal," vol. v. p. 295.
[17] "Early Drawings and Illuminations." Birch and Jenner. (Bagster, 1879, p. 134.)
"Gardens.
19 D. i. ff. I. etc.
20 A. xvii. f. 7b.
20 B. ii. f. 57.
14 803 f. 63.
18 851 f. 182.
18 852 f. 3. b.
26667 f. i.
Harl. 4425. f. 12. b.
Kings 7. f. 57.
6 E. ix. f. 15. b.
14 E. vi. f. 146.
15 E. iii. f. 122.
15 E. vi. f. 146.
16 G. v. f. 5.
17 F. i. f. 149 b.
19 A. vi. f. 2. 109.
19 C. vii. f. i.
20 C. v. ff. 7. etc.
Eg. 2022. f. 36. b.
Harl. 4425. f. 160 b.
19720.
19 A. vi. f. 109."
[18] "The Garden."—Walther Howe.
[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.)
[20] Miss Edwards (and I quote from her edition of Young's "Travels in France," p. 101) has a note to the effect that the Mr Brown here referred to is "Robert Brown, of Markle, contributor to the Edinburgh Magazine, 1757-1831." Yet, surely this is none other than Mr "Capability" Brown, discoverer of English scenery, reputed father of the English garden!
[21] Lowell's "Ode to Fielding."
[22] "Mr Evelyn has a pleasant villa at Deptford," writes Gibson, "a fine garden for walks and hedges (especially his holly one which he writes of in his 'Sylva') ... In his garden he has four large round philareas, smooth-clipped, raised on a single stalk from the ground, a fashion now much used. Part of his garden is very woody and shady for walking; but his garden not being walled, has little of the best fruits."
[23] This remark of Temple's as to the small importance the flower-beds had in the mind of the gardener of his day, is significant: as indicating the different methods employed by the ancient and modern gardener. It was not that he was not "pleased with the care" of flowers, but that these were not his chiefest care; his prime idea was to get broad, massive, well-defined effects in his garden generally. Hence the monumental style of the old-fashioned garden, the carefully-disposed ground, the formality, the well-considered poise and counter-poise, the varying levels and well-defined parts. And only inwoven, as it were, into the argument of the piece, are its pretty parts, used much as the jewellery of a fair woman. I should be sorry to be so unjust to the modern landscape gardener as to accuse him of caring over-much for flowers, but of his garden-device generally one may fairly say it has no monumental style, no ordered shape other than its carefully-schemed disorder. It is not a masculine affair, but effeminate and niggling; a little park-scenery, curved shrubberies, wriggling paths, emphasised specimen plants, and flower-beds of more or less inane shape tumbled down on the skirts of the lawn or drive, that do more harm than good to the effect of the place, seen near or at a distance. How true it is that to believe in Art one must be an artist!
[24] Nonsuch had its wilderness of ten acres.
[25] Nineteenth Century Magazine, July, 1890.
[26] With regard to this remark, we have to note a certain amount of French influence throughout the reigns of the Jameses and Charleses. Here is Beaumont, "gardener to James II.;" and we hear also of André Mollet, gardener to James I.; also that Charles II. borrowed Le Nôtre to lay out the gardens of Greenwich and St James' Park.
[27] The gardens at Wilton are exceedingly beautiful, and contain noble trees, among which are a group of fine cedars and an ilex beneath which Sir Philip Sidney is supposed to have reclined when he wrote his "Arcadia" here. The Italian garden is one of the most beautiful in England.
[28] Of Berkeley, Evelyn writes: "For the rest the forecourt is noble, so are the stables; and, above all, the gardens, which are incomparable by reason of the inequality of the ground, and a pretty piscina. The holly-hedges on the terrace I advised the planting of."
[29] Houghton was built by Sir R. Walpole, between 1722 and 1738. The garden was laid out in the stiff, formal manner by Eyre, "an imitator of Bridgman," and contained 23 acres. The park contains some fine old beeches. More than 1000 cedars were blown down here in February 1860.
[30] Thomas Whately's "Observations on Modern Gardening," was published in 1770, fifteen years before Walpole's "Essay on Modern Gardening." Gilpin's book "On Picturesque Beauty," though published in part in 1782, belongs really to the second phase of the Landscape School. Shenstone's "Unconnected Thoughts on the Garden" was published in 1764, and is written pretty much from the standpoint of Kent. "An Essay on Design in Gardening," by G. Mason, was published in 1795.
[31] Loudon calls this School "Repton's," the "Gardenesque" School, its characteristic feature being "the display of the beauty of trees and other plants individually."
[32] A candid friend thus writes to Repton: "You may have perceived that I am rather too much inclined to the Price and Knight party, and yet I own to you that I have been often so much disgusted by the affected and technical language of connoisseurship, that I have been sick of pictures for a month, and almost of Nature, when the same jargon was applied to her." (Repton, p. 232.)
[33] "The Praise of Gardens," pp. 185-6.
[34] Ibid., p. 296.
[35] This is a little unpatriotic of Loudon to imply that the English had no garden-style till the 18th century, but one can stand a great deal from Loudon.
[36] For which reason, I suppose, Mr Robinson, in his model "Non-geometrical Gardens" (p. 5), humbly skirts his ground with a path which as nearly represents a tortured horse-shoe as Nature would permit; and his trees he puts in a happy-go-lucky way, and allows them to nearly obliterate his path at their own sweet will! No wonder he does not fear Nature's revenge, where is so little Art to destroy!
[37] These notes make no pretence either at originality or completeness. They represent gleanings from various sources, combined with personal observations on garden-craft from the architect's point of view.—J. D. S.
[38] "All rational improvement of grounds is necessarily founded on a due attention to the character and situation of the place to be improved; the former teaches what is advisable, the latter what is possible to be done. The situation of a place always depends on Nature, which can only be assisted, but cannot be entirely changed, or greatly controlled by Art; but the character of a place is wholly dependent on Art; thus the house, the buildings, the gardens, the roads, the bridges, and every circumstance which marks the habitation of man must be artificial; and although in the works of art we may imitate the forms and graces of Nature, yet, to make them truly natural, always leads to absurdity" (Repton, p. 341).
[39] Not so thinks the author of "The English Flower Garden":—"Imagine the effect of a well-built and fine old house, seen from the extremity of a wide lawn, with plenty of trees and shrubs on its outer parts, and nothing to impede the view of the house or its windows but a refreshing carpet of grass. If owners of parks were to consider this point fully, and, as they travel about, watch the effect of such lawns as remain to us, and compare them with what has been done by certain landscape-gardeners, there would shortly be, at many a country-seat, a rapid carting away of the terrace and all its adjuncts." Marry, this is sweeping! But Repton has some equally strong words condemning the very plan our Author recommends: "In the execution of my profession I have often experienced great difficulty and opposition in attempting to correct the false and mistaken taste for placing a large house in a naked grass field, without any apparent line of separation between the ground exposed to cattle and the ground annexed to the house, which I consider as peculiarly under the management of art.
"This line of separation being admitted, advantage may be easily taken to ornament the lawn with flowers and shrubs, and to attach to the mansion that scene of 'embellished neatness' usually called a pleasure-ground" (Repton, p. 213. See also No. 2 of Repton's "Objections," given on p. 116).
[40] As an instance of how much dignity a noble house may lose by a meanly-planned drive, I would mention Hatfield.
[41] Milner's "Art and Practice of Landscape-Gardening," pp. 13, 14.
[42] "One deep recess, one bold prominence, has more effect than twenty little irregularities." "Every variety in the outline of a wood must be a prominence or a recess" (Repton, p. 182).
[43] See accompanying plans.
[44] One of the finest and weirdest cedar-walks that I have ever met with is that at Marwell, near Owslebury in Hampshire. Here you realise the wizardry of green gloom and sense of perfect seclusion. It was here that Henry VIII. courted one of his too willing wives.
[45] As the walls afford valuable space for the growth of the choicer kinds of hardy fruits, the direction in which they are built is of considerable importance. "In the warmer parts of the country, the wall on the north side of the garden should be so placed as to face the sun at about an hour before noon, or a little to east of south; in less favoured localities it should be made to face direct south, and in the still more unfavourable districts it should face the sun an hour after noon, or a little west of south. The east and west walls should run parallel to each other, and at right angles to that on the north side."
[46] "Embower a cottage thickly and completely with nothing but roses, and nobody would desire the interference of another plant."—Leigh Hunt.
[47] Lord Beaconsfield adds macaws to the ornament of his ideal garden. "Sir Ferdinand, when he resided at Armine, was accustomed to fill these pleasure grounds with macaws and other birds of gorgeous plumage." But Lord Beaconsfield is Benjamin Disraeli—a master of the ornate, a bit of a dandy always. In Italy, too, they throw in porcupines and ferrets for picturesqueness. In Holland are our old friends the tin hare and guinea-pigs, and the happy shooting boy, in holiday attire, painted to the life.
[48] See P. G. Hamerton's "Sylvan Year," p. 112.
[49] See Myres' "Wordsworth," English Men of Letters Series, p. 67.
[50] "Bacon," English Men of Letters Series, R. W. Church.
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