When one is in a contemplative humour a garden is full of object-lessons interesting to study. By dint of watching leaf replace leaf, insects come into life and die, blossoms change into fruit, fruit ripen and fall, the swallows come with the daffodils and depart when the hunter's moon frightens them away--by watching these things methodically and silently accomplishing their allotted tasks, I have come to think about myself with brave resolution and resigned conformity to natural laws. I grieve less over myself when I regard the change which is universal; the setting sun and the dying summer help me also to decline gently. Life is a splendid heritage to hold in fee, but we quit and deliver up possession when our lease expires. The light must be kept burning if our own little taper flickers into darkness.
A young girl visited us in Florence one spring-time. She lived in the garden among the flowers, caressed them, talked to them, and gathered them by the handful, the armful, the basketful. She decorated the rooms with flowers, filled glass bowls and bronze vases with flowers, and her art touched its zenith in glorifying the dinner-table every evening with the choicest of them all. She chatted, smiled, and sang whilst doing it, for she dearly loved the flowers that she fondled.
We took her to the Uffizi to see the world-renowned Old Masters there; but she yawned in front of masterpieces of art, and her eyes wandered round searching the smart costumes of the ladies in the room. We took her to Rome and showed her the sights of the Eternal City, but Bond Street and Regent Street interested her more than St. Peter's and the Coliseum. We visited the Forum with its ruined temples and triumphal arches, and trod the Via Sacra; but the place was only an old stoneyard to her, devoid of interest, so we left her to herself, and she wandered over the Forum on other pleasure bent, and we found her afterwards picking violets amongst the ruins.
When at home again a friend asked how she enjoyed her visit to Rome, and had she seen the Forum? In blank despair she appealed to me to help her out of it. "Yes," I replied, "you saw the Forum; that is where you picked the violets." The Forum to her was deadly dull and forgotten even by name, but a bunch of wild violets lived vividly in her memory as the crown and flower of her heart's desire, more excellent than all the ruins of Rome.
Dulness comes to us in uncongenial company and occupation. You may be surrounded by objects of interest and beauty which amuse other people, but if these worthy objects do not fit your taste, for you they contain no element of delight, and you are bored utterly with them whoever may sing their praise. It is a question of temperament. The heart is not dull if the head is triste. Every eye makes its own beauty and every heart forms its own kinships. Put me in front of a post-impressionist picture and dulness covers me like a funeral pall. The beauties of the glowing picture composed of significant form and bunkum are lost on me completely. Here is something tremendously original that makes demands on my intelligence that I cannot meet. I am mentally bankrupt in front of this maddening art.
Looking at a post-impressionist picture, you see only shapes and forms tangled together within the limited area of a gilt frame; you see relations and quantities of colour splashed on canvas meaning anything you choose to label it, but in the likeness of nothing God made or man ever saw. It distorts nature and scoffs at portraiture. "Creating a work of art," trumpets the evangelist of post-impressionism, "is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching a likeness." "You look at a landscape, and you are not to see it as fields and cottages; instead you are to see it as lines and colours." Yet up against this lucid statement I observe no reason why the portrait of a man should be drawn like a peculiarly shaped market-garden divided into plots for growing vegetables. Nor can I explain why the picture of a village street should look like a fortnight's wash suspended in a cherry orchard, and the policeman standing in front of the village inn at the corner should look like a laundry-maid hanging out the clothes. It requires uncommon genius to work the illusion successfully, and to start an indolent British public frivolling with the captivating puzzle. But it leaves me cold and passionless, for I am slow of understanding these things. They say an impressionist picture of top-note character is a painfully exciting object for the spectator to worship. To do it justice, he must squirm in front of it, for it is a picture that creates a thunderstorm of rhapsody, a deluge of delight, a roaring cataract of æsthetic emotion in the soul of the man who understands its cryptic language. The artist who limned the picture suffers agonies whilst working up significant form, being pricked with pins and needles of excitement, and is continually dancing on the hot-plate of rapture. The spectator's duty when viewing a work of art is to come into touch with the mind of the artist. To do this no wonder the spectator has a bad time when digesting a whole gallery of post-impressionist pictures.
Their religion is as bewildering as their art. For their moral vision is out of kilter, as their eyesight is out of focus. The aforesaid evangelist of the cult says: "I doubt whether the good artist bothers much more about the future than about the past. Why should artists bother about the fate of humanity? If art does not justify itself, æsthetic rapture does.... Rapture suffices. The artist has no more call to look forward than the lover in the arms of his mistress. There are moments in life that are ends to which the whole history of humanity would not be an extravagant means; of such are the moments of æsthetic ecstasy."
We return to the garden, for the lure of a garden relaxes not. The joy of it entangles you in its toils. Each successive season of the year unfolds new developments which lead you on to the next season. So you are handed on from one month to another throughout the gardener's calendar by endless enticements which keep the interest gently simmering. The procession of gay flowers that promenade the sheltered borders and disport themselves with flagrant pride on open beds during spring and summer days, tricked in rainbow colours, dazzle the eye with splendour, win the heart's endearment, and pay in noblest coin full recompense for the chill, dull toil given in grey winter hours.
A lady friend who lived to a ripe old age said to me jocosely, "To be a good gardener you need a wooden back with an iron hinge to it, for you are bending and stooping all day long in the garden." Only by constant labour spent on the good brown earth can you become candidate for possession of this useful garden requisite, a wooden back with an iron hinge to it, or the neatest imitation offered on the market. In the garden you get in touch with Nature, breathe fresh air, cultivate a contented mind, and never stagnate in idleness or degenerate into ennui. Your body, inured to all weathers, escapes many little ills of the flesh, and gradually you harden into an iron constitution, which is the nearest earthly substitute to a wooden back hung on iron hinges.
You never need remain indoors to smoke or sew or yawn because there is nothing doing in the garden: you can weed there the livelong day in the open. This lowly service offers immediate reward; it begets a healthy appetite at meal-times, and develops a night's sound sleep, which is some pleasure no millionaire can buy with his millions. Weeding puzzles my blind gardener Emilio.