Garden-Craft Old and New

by John Dando Sedding

"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 ennuyé 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-Thoreau. 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 worship 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 ignoble. This disdain for Art in a garden, this abhorrence of symmetry, this preference for the rude and shaggy, what is it but a new turn given to old instincts, the new Don Quixote sighing for primævalism! This ruthlessness of the followers of the "immortal Brown" who would navvy away the residue of the old-fashioned 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 analogy 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.