Matthew Arnold, The Scholar-Gipsy.
Pen- and brush-craft pale their ineffectual fires before the beauty of Alpine grass-lands, and flawful and halting has been the manner of presenting my subject; but I hope a sufficient glimpse of its fascination and importance will have been caught to raise enthusiasm to the point of making amends for a neglectful past. Whatever may be the verdict upon the question of introducing Swiss floral wealth to our meadows generally, perhaps enough has been said to make it plain that very many of the mountain field-flowers cry aloud to be treated as field-flowers in every Alpine garden where there is scope for, and pretensions to, completeness. And I believe that the cry will be answered. I believe that the value of the fields, in the economy of Alpine plant-life, has only to be placed earnestly before conscientious gardeners and lovers of flowers for it to meet with immediate and becoming diligence. I believe it will be seen that a rockwork is not the first, last, and only home we may make for Alpines in England, and that it is as unlovely as it is unjust to tar all of them with one and the same brush and think that, because they are called Alpines, they must necessarily be given a perch dominating the rest of the garden. I therefore believe that one more of our cherished conventionalities will soon be relegated to the “Valhalla of bad taste.”
We “are still looking through a kaleidoscope at ever-changing views,” and “the eternal verities” have as yet by no means been sounded to their bases. If “Badsworth” can find sufficient sanction to talk like this of auction bridge, with how much more reason may it not be said of gardening and the cult of Nature? It is doubtful if we have reached much that is final in anything; certainly not in gardening. Gardening—or flower-gardening, since that is the department with which we are here dealing—flower-gardening is something more than the mere growing of blossoms to please, something more than the mere forming of a living herbarium, something more than the mere creation or collecting of “novelties” for the sole sake of novelty; there is something deeper and more difficult to talk about than that—something none the less real because largely indefinable. As earnest, thinking gardeners, our views and sentiments are not limited to a mere toying with the soil and with attractive vegetation. We are not children—though we ought to be, and are. I mean, we do not garden—we do not build Alpine rockworks and plant them with gay flowers quite so irresponsibly as children build mud-castles and stick them over with coloured oddments. There is a significant profundity in the meanest of our efforts—even in the building of mud-castles; and in the maturer effort of gardening it is only natural that this should be of richer meaning.
Gardening is a saving grace in any nation. It would be invidious to name examples; enough to say that nations with marked propensities for gardening figure prominently in past and present history. Such nations, though “insurgent sons,” are necessarily less so than they would otherwise be; for they live nearer to the truth of things, nearer to Nature. Gardening touches well-springs of being, and helps materially towards the moral advancement of a race. It is affected by the same fundamental “psychic” influence as is painting, or, indeed, any other of our kindred enthusiasms. In it we are striving, not so much to express Nature, as to express ourselves through Nature; not so much to transcribe Nature line for line, as to translate—as creatures who consider ourselves so much apart from, so much above, Nature—what we think we feel, perhaps see, and almost certainly dream in her. And far be it from me to aver that we are not striving even to supplant Nature—seemingly a mad ambition, for in the end, do as we will, Nature, and nothing but Nature, has found expression. Yet it is not quite as mad an ambition as a first inspection would lead us to suppose. Indeed, it is good, if not actually great; for it is the biggest of the many bunches of carrots dangling in front of the human animal’s nose, inducing him to keep “pegging away.”
The WILLOW GENTIAN (G. asclepiadea) and the Alpine Cotton Grass (Eriophorum Scheuchzeri).
Independent and original as we may consider ourselves, we yet from time to time have to turn and take our cue from Nature. She, after all, is the source at which we must refresh our jaded imaginations; she is the storehouse from which we must draw new blood, new energy, new ideas; she instigates our ideals and holds the cause and means for inspiration; without her promptings, in fact, we should go bankrupt. In the Buddhist “Sankhya-Karika” we read how, “like a danseuse who retires from the dance after she has shown herself to the crowd, Nature retires after she has shown herself in all her splendour to the soul”—after she has shown herself to the soul. The aim of the best art is not slavishly to copy Nature, but to catch and translate the dreams she suggests.
“Stoop to earth’s service, and behold
All heaven shall blossom into gold.”