0186
When we get rid of these clogs to industry known as Departments, we shall, I am sure, all work together to the common good, in making England a self-supporting country, and the men and women of England a self-respecting people, and in point of health an A 1 people instead of the C 3 into which we are settling down complacently. The statistics of the grades recently published appeared to me to be the greatest cause for alarm that England has known for years. And the worst of the matter is that when one asks if a more ample proof of decadence has ever been revealed, people smile and inquire if the result of the recent visits of the British to France and Italy and Palestine and Mesopotamia suggest any evidence of decadence. They forget that it was only the A classes that left England; only the A classes were killed or maimed; the lower grades remained at home with their wives in order that the decadent breed might be carried on with emphasised decadence.
If I were asked in what direction one should look for the salvation of the race from the rush into Avernus toward which we have been descending, I would certainly say,—
“The garden and the allotment only will arrest our feet on the downward path.”
If the people of England can throw off the yoke of the Cinema and take to the spade it may not yet be too late to rescue them from the abyss toward which they are sliding.
And it is not merely the sons who must be saved, the daughters must be taken into account in this direction; and when I meet daily the scores of trim and shapely girls with busts of Venus and buskins of Diana, walking—vera incessu patuit dea—as if the land belonged to them—which it does—I feel no uneasiness with regard to the women with whom England's future rests. If they belong to the land, assuredly the land belongs to them.
But the garden and not the field is the place for our girls. We know what the women are like in those countries where they work in the fields doing men's work. We have seen them in Jean François Millet's pictures, and we turn from them with tears.
“Women with labour-loosened knees
And gaunt backs bowed with servitude.”
We do not wish to see them in England. I have seen them in Italy, in Switzerland, and on the Boer farms in, South Africa. I do not want to see them in England.
Agriculture is for men, horticulture for women. A woman is in her right place in a garden. A garden looks lovelier for her presence. What an incongruous object a jobbing gardener in his shirt-sleeves and filthy cap seems when seen against a background of flowers! I have kept out of my garden for days in dread of coming upon the figure which I knew was lurking there, spending his time looking out for me and working feverishly when he thought I was coming.
But how pleasantly at home a girl in her garden garb appears, whether on the rungs of a ladder tying up the roses, or doing some thinning out on a too rampant border! There should be no work in a garden beyond her powers—that is, of course, in a one-gardener garden—a one-greenhouse garden. She has no business trying to carry a tub with a shrub weighing one hundred and fifty pounds from one place to another; but she can wheel a brewer's or a coalman's sack barrow with two nine-inch wheels with two hundredweight resting on it for half a mile without feeling weary. No garden should be without such a vehicle. One that I bought ten years ago from a general dealer has enabled me to superannuate the cumbersome wheelbarrow. You require to lift the tub into the wheelbarrow, but the other does the lifting when you push the iron guard four inches under the staves at the bottom. As for that supposed bugbear—the carting of manure, it should not exist in a modern garden. A five-shilling tin of fertiliser and a few sacks of Wakeley's hop mixture will be enough for the borders of a garden of an acre, unless you aim at growing everything to an abnormal size. But you must know what sort of fertilising every bed requires.
I mention these facts because we read constantly of the carting of manure being beyond the limits of a girl-gardener's strength, to say nothing of the distasteful character of the job. The time is coming when there will be none of the old-fashioned stable-sweepings either for the garden or the field, and I think we shall get on very well without it, unless we wish to grow mushrooms.
The only other really horrid job that I would not have my girl face is pot-washing. This is usually a winter job, because, we are told, summer is too busy a time in the garden to allow of its being done except when the ice has to be broken in the cistern and no other work is possible. But why should the pots be washed out of doors and in cold vater? If you have a girl-gardener, why should you not give her the freedom of the scullery sink where the hot water is laid on? There is no hardship in washing a couple of hundred pots in hot water andina warm scullery on the most inclement day in January.
The truth is that there exists a garden tradition, and it originated with men who had neither imagination nor brains, and people would have us believe that it must be maintained—that frogs and toads should be slain and that gardener is a proper noun of the masculine gender—that manure must be filthy and that a garden should never look otherwise than unfinished at any time of the year—that radiation is the same as frost, and that watering should be done regularly and without reference to the needs of the individual plants.
Lady Wolseley has done a great deal toward giving girls the freedom of the garden. She has a small training ground on the motor road between Lewes and Eastbourne. Of course it is not large enough to pay its way, and I am told that in order to realise something on the produce, the pony cart of a costermonger in charge of two of the young women goes into Lewes laden with vegetables for sale. I have no doubt that the vegetables are of the highest grade, but I am afraid that if it becomes understood that the pupils are to be trained in the arts of costermongery the prestige of her college, as it has very properly been called by Lady Wolseley, will suffer.
What I cannot understand is why, with so admirable a work being done at that place, it should not he subsidised by the State. It may be, however, that Lady Wolseley has had such experience of the way in which the State authorities mismanage almost everything they handle, as prevents her from moving in this direction. The waste, the incompetence, and the arrogance of all the Departments that sprang into existence with the war are inconceivable. I dare say that Lady Wolseley has seen enough during the past four years to convince her that if once the “State” had a chance of putting a controlling finger upon one of the reins of the college pony it would upset the whole apple-cart. The future of so valuable an institution should not be jeopardised by the intrusion of the fatal finger of a Government Department. The Glynde College should be the Norland Institution of the nursery of Flora.
It was when a gardener with whom I had never exchanged a cross word during the two years he was with me assured me that work was not work but slavery in my garden—he had one man under him and appealed to me for a second—that I made my apology to him and allowed him to take unlimited leave of me and his shackles. He had been with me for over two years, and during all this time the garden had been going from bad to worse. At the end of his bondage it was absolutely deplorable. At no time had we the courage to ask any visitor to walk round the grounds.
And yet the man knew the Latin name of every plant and every flower from the cedar on the lawn to the snapdragon—he called it antirrhinum—upon the wall; but if he had remained with me much longer there would have been nothing left for him to give a name to, Latin or English.
I took over the garden and got in a boy to do the pot-washing at six shillings a week, and a fortnight later I doubled his wages, so vast a change, or rather, a promise of change, as was shown by the place. Within a month I was paying him fifteen shillings, and within six months, eighteen. He was an excellent lad, and in due time his industry was rewarded by the hand of our cook. I parted with him reluctantly at the outbreak of the war, though owing to physical defects he was never called up.
It was when I was thrown on my own resources after the strain of leave-taking with my slave-driven professor that I acquired the secret of garden design which I have already revealed—namely, the multiplying of “features” within the garden space.
It took time for me to carry out my plans, for I was very far from seeing, as a proper garden designer would have done in a glance, how the ground lent itself to “features” in various directions; and it was only while I was working at one part that the possibilities of others suggested themselves to me. It was the incident of my picking up in a stonemason's yard for a few shillings a doorway with a shaped architrave, that made me think of shutting off the House Garden, which I had completed the previous year, from the rest. I got this work done quite satisfactorily by the aid of a simple balustrade on each side. Here there was an effective entrance to a new garden, where before nothing would grow owing to the overshadowing by the sycamores beyond my mound. My predecessor took refuge in a grove of euonyma, behind which he artfully concealed the stone steps leading to the Saxon terrace. This was one of the “features” of his day—the careful concealing of such drawbacks in the landscape as stone steps. Rut as I could not see that they were after all a fatal blot that should put an end to all hope to make anything of the place, I pulled away the masses of euonyma, and turned the steps boldly round, adding piers at the foot.
Here then was at my command a space of forty feet square, walled in, and in the summer-shade of the high sycamores, and the winter-shade of a beautifully-shaped and immense deciduous oak. And what was I to do with it?
Before I left the interrogatory ground I saw with great clearness the reflection of the graceful foliage in a piece of water. That was just what was needed at the place, I was convinced—a properly puddled Sussex dew-pond such as Gilbert White's swallows could hardly resist making their winter quarters as the alternative to that long and tedious trip to South Africa. The spot was clearly designed by Nature as a basin. On three sides it had boundaries of sloping mounds, and I felt myself equal to the business of completing the circle so that the basin would be in its natural place.
I consulted my builder as to whether or not my plan was a rightly puddled one—which was a way of asking if it would hold water in a scientific as well as a metaphorical sense. He advised concrete, and concrete I ordered, though I was quite well aware of the fact that in doing so I must abandon all hopes of the swallows, for I knew that with concrete there would be none of that mud in the pond which the great naturalists had agreed was indispensable for the hibernating of the birds.
A round pond basin was made, about fifteen feet in diameter, and admirably made too. In the centre I created an island with the nozzle of a singlejet d'eau, carefully concealed, and by an extraordinary chance I discovered within an inch or two of the brim of the basin, the channel of an ancient scheme of drainage—it may have been a thousand years old—and this solved in a moment the problem of how to carry off the overflow. The water was easily available from the ordinary “Company's” pipe for the garden supply; so that all that remained for me to do was to tidy up the ground, which I did by getting six tons of soft reddish sandstone from a neighbouring quarry and piling it in irregular masses on two sectors of the circular space, taking care to arrange for a scheme of “pockets” for small plants at one part and for large ferns at another. The greatest elevation of this boundary was about fifteen feet, and here I put a noble cliff weighing a ton and a half, with several irregular steps at the base, the lowest being just above a series of stone rectangular basins, connected by irregular shallow channels in a descent to the big pond. Then I got a leaden pipe with an “elbow” attachment to the Company's water supply beneath, and contrived a sort of T-shaped spray which I concealed on the level of the top of my cliff, and within forty-eight hours I had a miniature cascade pouring over the cliff and splashing among the stone basins and the ir channels—“per averpace coi seguaci sui”—in the large pond below.
0197
Of course it took a summer and a winter to give this little scheme a chance of assimilating with Nature; but once it began to do so it did so thoroughly. The cliff and the rocky steps, which I had made in memory of the cascade at Platte Klip on the side of Table Mountain where I had often enjoyed a bath, became beautifully slimy, and primroses were blooming so as to hide the outlines of the rectangle, while Alpines and sedums and harts-tongue ferns found accommodation in the pockets among the stones. In the course of another year the place was covered with vegetation and the sandstones had become beautifully weathered, and sure enough, the boughs of the American oak had their Narcissus longings realised, but without the Narcissus sequel.
Here, then, was a second “feature” accomplished; and we walk out of the sunshine of the House Garden, and, passing through the carved stone doorway, find ourselves in complete shade with the sound of tinkling water in the air—when the taps are turned in the right direction; but in the matter of water we are economical, and the cascade ceased to flow while the war lasted.
I do not think that it is wrong to try to achieve such contrasts in designing a range of gardens. The effect is great and it will never appear to be cheap, provided that it is carried out naturally. I do not think that in a place of the character of that just described one should introduce such objects as shrubs in tubs, or clipped trees; nor should one tolerate the appearance for the sake, perhaps, of colour, of any plant or flower that might not be found in the natural scene on which it is founded. We all know that in a rocky glen we need not look for brilliant colour, therefore the introduction of anything striking in this way would be a jarring note. To be sure I have seen the irrepressible scarlet geranium blazing through some glens in the island of St. Helena; but St. Helena is in the tropics, and a tropical glen is not the sort to which we have become accustomed in England. If one has lived at St. Helena for years and, on coming to England, wishes to be constantly reminded of the little island of glens and gorges and that immense “combe” where James Town nestles, beyond a doubt that strange person could not do better than create a garden of gullies with the indigenous geranium blazing out of every cranny. But I cannot imagine any one being so anxious to perpetuate a stay among the picturesque loneliness of the place. I think it extremely unlikely that if Napoleon I. had lived to return to France, he would have assimilated any portion of the gardens of Versailles with those that were under his windows at Longwood. I could more easily fancy his making an honest attempt to transform the ridge above Geranium Valley on which Longwood stands—if there is anything of that queer residence left by the white ants—the natural owners of the island—into a memory of the Grand Trianon, only for the “maggior dolore” that would have come to him had such an enterprise been successful.
My opinion is that a garden should be such as to cause a visitor to exclaim,—
“How natural!” rather than, “How queer!”
A lake may be artificial; but it will only appear so if its location is artificial; and, therefore, in spite of the fact that there are countless mountain tarns in Scotland and Wales, it is safest for the lake to be made on the lowest part of your ground. I dare say that a scientific man without a conscience could, by an arrangement of forced draught apparatus, cause an artificial river to flow uphill instead of down; but though such a stream would be quite a pleasing incident of one of the soirees of the Royal Society at Burlington House, I am certain that it would look more curious than natural if carried out in an English garden ground. The artificial canals of the Dutch gardens and of those English gardens which were made to remind William III. of his native land, will look natural in proportion to their artificiality. This is not so hard a saying as it may seem; I mean to say that if the artificial canal apes a natural river, it will look unnatural. If it aims at being nothing but a Dutch canal, it will be a very interesting part of a garden—a Dutch garden—plan, and as such it will seem in the right and natural place. If a thing occupies a natural place—the place where you expect to find it—it must be criticised from the standpoint of its environment, so to speak, and not on the basis of the canons that have a general application.
And to my mind the difference between what is right and what is wrong in a garden is not the difference between what is the fashion and what is not the fashion; but between the appropriate and the inappropriate. A rectangular canal is quite right in a copy of the Dutch garden; but it would be quite wrong within sight of the cascades of the Villa d'Este or any other Italian garden. Topiary work is quite right in a garden that is meant frankly to be a copy of one of the clipped shrubberies of the seventeenth and of the eighteenth century that preceded landscape treatment, but it is utterly out of place in a garden where flowers grow according to their own sweet will, as in a rosery or a herbaceous border. A large number of people dislike what Mr. Robinson calls “Vegetable Sculpture,” and would not allow any example to have a place on their property; but although I think I might trust myself to resist every temptation to admit such an element into a garden of mine, I should not hesitate to make a feature of it if I wanted to be constantly reminded of a certain period of history. It would be as unjust to blame me on this account as it would be to blame Mr. Hugh Thomson for introducing topiary into one of his exquisite illustrations to Sir Roger de Coverley. I would, I know, take great pleasure in sitting for hours among the peacocks and bears and cocked hats of the topiary sculptor, because I should feel myself in the company of Sir Roger and Will Wimble, and I consider that they would be very good company indeed; but I admit that I should prefer that that particular garden was on some one else's property. I should spend a very pleasant twenty minutes in. a neighbour's—a near neighbour's—reproduction of the grotto at Pope's Villa at Twickenham, not because I should be wanting in a legitimate abhorrence of the thing, but because I should be able to repeople it with several very pleasant people—say, Arbuthnot, Garth, and Mr. Henry Labouchere. But heaven forbid that I should spend years of my life in the construction of a second Pope's grotto as one of the features of my all-too-constricted garden space.
One could easily write a book on “Illustrating Gardens,” meaning not the art of reproducing illustrations of gardens, but the art of constructing gardens that would illustrate the lives of certain interesting people at certain interesting periods. The educational value of gardens formed with such an intent would be great, I am sure. I had occasion some time ago to act the part of their governess to my little girls, and to Dorothy's undisguised amazement I took the class into the garden, and not knowing how to begin—whether with an inquiry into the economic value of a thorough grounding in Conic Sections, or a consideration of the circumstances attending the death of Mary Queen of Scots—I have long believed that a modern coroner's jury would have found that the cause of death was blood poisoning, as there is no evidence that the fatal axe was aseptic, not having been boiled before using—I begged the girls to walk round with me.
“This is something quite new,” said Rosamund—“lessons in a garden.”
“Is it?” I asked. “Did Miss Pinkerton ever tell you about a man named Plato?”
It was generally admitted that if she had ever done so they would have remembered the name.
I saw at once that this was a chance that might not occur again for me to recover my position. The respect that I have for Miss Pinkerton is almost equal to that I have for Lemprière or Dr. Wilkam Smith.
I unfolded like a philaetery the stores of my knowledge on the subject of the garden of Academus, where Plato and his pupils were wont to meet and discover—
“How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed as some fools affirm,
But musical as is Apollo's lute,”
and the children learned for the first time the origin of the name Academy. They were struck powerfully with the idea, which they thought an excellent one, of the open-air class.
This was an honest attempt on my part to illustrate something through the medium of the garden; but Miss Pinkerton's methods differed from those of Plato: the blackboard was, in her opinion, the only medium of illustration for a properly organised class.
It was a daily delight to me when I lived in Kensington to believe that Addison must have walked through my garden when he had that cottage on the secluded Fulham Road, far away from the distracting noise and bustle of the town, and went to pay a visit to his wife at Holland Park. Some of the trees of that garden must have been planted even before Addison's day. There was a mighty mulberry-tree—a straggler from Melbury (once Mulbery) Road—and this was probably one of the thousands planted by King James when he became possessed of that admirable idea of silk culture in England. Now, strange to say, I could picture to myself much more vividly the presence of Addison in that garden than I can the bustle of the old Castle's people within the walls which dominate my present ground. These people occupied the Castle from century to century. When they first entered into possession they wore the costume of the Conquest, and no doubt they honoured the decrees of fashion as they changed from year to year; but they faded away without leaving a record of any personality to absorb the attention of the centuries, and without such an individuality I find it impossible to realise the scene, except for an occasional hour when the moonlight bathes the tower of the ruined keep, and I fancy that I hear the iron tread of the warder going his rounds—I cannot plunge myself into the spacious days of plate armour. It is the one Great Man or the one Great Woman that enables us nowadays to realise his or her period, and our Castle has unhappily no ghost with a name, and one ghost with a name is more than an armed host of nonentities. There is a tradition—there is just a scrap of evidence to support it—that Dr. Samuel Johnson once visited a house in the High Street and ate cherries in the garden. Every time I have visited that house I have seen the lumbering Hogarthian hero intent upon his feast, and every time that I am in that garden I hear the sound of his “Why, sir——”
I complained bitterly to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he was with us in the tilt-yard garden, that we had not even the shadow of a ghost—ghosts by the hundred, no doubt, but no real ghost of some one that did things.
“You will have to create one for yourself,” he said.
“One must have bones and flesh and blood—plenty of blood, before one can create a ghost, as you well know,” said I. “I have searched every available spot for a name associated with the place, but I have found nothing.”
“Don't be in a hurry; he'll turn up some day when you're not expecting him,” said my friend.
0208
But I am still awaiting an entity connected with the Castle, and I swear, as did the young Lord Hamlet:—
“By Heaven! I'll make a ghost of him that lets me.”
Our Garden of Peace is a Garden of Freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of converse. In it one may cultivate all the flora of illiteracy without rebuke, as well as the more delicate, but possibly less fragrant growths of literature, including those hybrids which I suppose must give great satisfaction to the cultivators. We assert our claim to talk about whatever we please: we will not submit to be told that anything is out of our reach as a subject: if we cannot reach the things that are so defined we can at least make an attempt to knock them down with a bamboo. Eventually we may even discourse of flowers; but if we do we certainly will not adopt the horticultural standard of worth, which is “of no/some commercial value.” A good many things well worthy of a strict avoidance in conversation possess great commercial value, and others that we hold very close to our hearts are of no more intrinsic value than a Victoria Cross. We have done and shall do our best, however, not to make use of the word culture, unless it be in connection with a disease. The lecturers on tropical diseases talk of their “cholera cultures” and their “yellow fever cultures” and their “malaria cultures but we know that there is a more malignant growth than any of these: it is spelt by its cultivators with the phonetic “K” and it has banished the word that begins with a “c” from the English language, unless, as I say, in referring to the development of a malady. That is where victory may be claimed by the vanquished: the beautiful word is banished for ever from the English literature in which it once occupied an exalted place.
It is because of the Freedom which we enjoy in this Garden of Peace of ours that I did not hesitate for a moment to quote Tennyson to Dorothy a few' days ago, when we were chatting about Poets' Gardens, from the “garden inclosed” of the Song of Solomon—the most beautiful ever depicted—to that ofMaud. It requires some courage to quote Tennyson beyond the limits of our own fireside in these days. The days when he was constantly quoted now seem as the days of Noë, before the Flood—the flood of the formless which we are assured is poetry nowadays. It is called “The New School.” Some twenty-five or thirty years ago something straddled across our way through the world labelled “New Art.” Its lines were founded upon those of the crushed cockroach, and it may have contributed to the advance of the temperance movement; for its tendency was certainly to cause any inebriate who found a specimen watching him wickedly from the mouth of a vase of imitation pewter on the mantel-shelf in a drawingroom, or in the form of a pendant in sealing-wax enamel on the neck of a young woman, to pull himself together and sign anything in reason in the direction of abstaining.
The new poetry is the illiterary equivalent of the old “New Art.” It is flung in our faces with the effect of a promiscuous handful from the bargain counter of a draper's cheap sale—it is a whiz of odd lengths and queer colours, and has no form but plenty of flutter. Poetry may not be as a great critic said it was—form and form and nothing but form; but it certainly is not that amorphous stuff which is jerked into many pages just now. I have read pages of it in which the writers seem to have taken as a model of design one of the long dedications of the eighteenth century, or perhaps the “lettering” on the tombstone of the squire in a country church, or, most likely of all, the half column of “scare headings” in a Sunday newspaper in one of the Western States of America.
It may begin with a monosyllable, and be followed by an Alexandrine; then come a stuttering halfdozen unequal ribbon lengths, rather shop-soiled, and none of them riming; but suddenly we find the tenth line in rime with the initial monosyllable which you have forgotten. Then there may come three or four rimes and as many half-rimes—f-sharp instead of f—and then comes a bundle of prosaic lines with the mark of the scissors on their ragged endings: the ravellings are assumed to adorn the close as the fringes of long ago were supposed to give a high-class “finish” to the green rep upholstering of the drawing-room centre ottoman.
And yet alongside this sort of thing we pick up many thin volumes of verse crowded with beauty of thought, of imagination, of passion.
And then what do we find given to us every week inPunchand several of the illustrated papers? Poem after poem of the most perfect form in rhythm and rimes—faultless double rimes and triple and quadruple syllables all ringing far more true than any inHudibrasor theIngoldsby Legends. Sir Owen Seaman's verses surpass anything in the English language for originality both in phrase and thought, and Adrian Ross has shown himself the equal of Gilbert in construction. The editor ofPunchhas been especially happy in his curry-combing of the German ex-Kaiser; we do not forget that it was his poem on the same personage, which appeared inThe Worldafter the celebrated telegram to Kruger, that gave him his sure footing among theéliteof satirical humour.
“The Pots—
Dam silly,”
was surely the most finished sting that ever came from the tail of what I venture to call “vespa-verse.”
I remember how, when I came upon Barham's rime,—
“Because Mephistopheles
Had thrown in her face a whole cup of hot coffee-lees,”
I thought that the limits of the “triple-bob,” as I should like to call it, had been reached. Years afterwards I found myself in a fit of chuckling over Byron's
“Tell us ye husbands of wives intellectual,
Now tell us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?”
After another lapse I found among the carillon of Calverley,—
“No, mine own, though early forced to leave you,
Still my heart was there where first we met;
In those 'Lodgings with an ample sea-view,'
Which were, forty years ago, 'To Let.'”
TheBab Balladsare full of whimsical rimes; but put all these that I have named together and you will find that they are easily outjingled by Sir Owen Seaman. The first “copy of verses” inPunchany week is a masterpiece in its way, and assuredly some of his brethren of Bouverie Street are not very far behind him in the merry dance in which he sets thepas.
A good many years ago—I think it was shortly after the capitulation of Paris—there was a correspondence inThe Graphicabout the English words for which no rime could be found. One was “silver,” the other “month.” It was, I think, Burnand who, contrived,—
“Argentum, we know, is the Latin for silver,
And the Latin for spring ever was and is still, ver.”
But then purists shook their heads and said that Latin was not English, and the challenge was for English rimes.
As for “month,” Mr. Swinburne did not hesitate to write a whole volume of exquisite poems to a child to bring in his rime for month: it was millionth but the metre was so handled by the master that it would have been impossible for even the most casual reader to make the word a dissyllable. In the same volume he found a rime for babe in “astrolabe.”
(With regard to my spelling of the word “rime,” I may here remark that I have done so for years. I was gratified to find my lead followed in theCambridge History of English Literature.)
And all this weedy harvest of criticism and reminiscence has come through my quoting Tennyson without an apology! All that I really had to say was that there is no maker of verses in England to-day who has the same mastery of metre as Tennyson had. It is indeed because of the delicacy of his ear for words that so many readers are disposed to think his verse artificial. But there are people who think that all art is artificial. (This is a very imminent subject for consideration in a garden, and it has been considered by great authorities in at least two books, to which I may refer if I go so far as to write something about a garden in these pages.) All that I will say about the art, the artifice, the artfulness, or the artificiality of the pictures that Tennyson brings before my eyes through his mastery of his medium, is that I have always placed a higher value upon the meticulous than upon the slap-dash in every form of art. It was said that the late Duke of Cambridge could detect a speck of rust on a sabre quicker than any Commander-in-Chief that ever lived; but I do not therefore hold that he was a greater soldier than Marlborough. But if Marlborough could make the brightness of his sabres do the things that he meant them to do, his victories were all the more brilliant.
I dare say there are quite a number of people who think that Edmund Yates's doggerel about a brand of Champagne—it commences something like this, if my memory serves me:—
“Dining with Bulteen
Captain of Militia,
Ne'er was dinner seen
Soapier or fishyer———”
quite equal to the best that Calverley or Seaman ever wrote, because it has that slap-dash element about it that disregards correct rimes; but I am not among those critics. Tennyson does not usually paint an impressionist picture, though he can do so when he pleases; he is rather a pre-Raphaelite; but, however he works, he produces his picture and it is a picture. Talk of Art and Nature—there never was a poet who reproduced Nature with an art so consummate; there never was a poet who used his art so graphically. Of course I am now talking of Tennyson at his best, not of Tennyson ofThe May Queen, which is certainly deficient enough in art to please—-as it has pleased—the despisers of the meticulous, but of Tennyson in his lyrical mood—of the garden-song inMaud, of the echo-song inThe Princess—-both diamonds, not in the rough, but cut into countless facets—Tennyson inThe Passing of Arthur, and countless pages of theIdylls, Tennyson of the pictorial simplicity ofEnoch Ardenand the full brush ofUlysses, Tithonus, Lucretius, the battle glow ofThe Ballad of the Revenge, the muted trumpet-notes ofThe Defence of Lucknow.
And yet through all are those lowering lines which somehow he would insist on introducing in the wrong places with infinite pains! It was as if he took the trouble to help us up a high marble staircase to the cupola of a tower, and to throw open before our eyes a splendid landscape, only to trip us up when we are lost in wonder of it all, and send us headlong to the dead earth below.
It was when we were looking down a gorge of tropical splendour in the island of Dominica in the West Indies opening a wide mouth to the Caribbean, that the incomparable lines fromEnoch Ardencame upon me in the flash of the crimson-and-blue wings of a bird—one of the many lories, I think it was—that fled about the wild masses of the brake of hibiscus, and I said them to Dorothy. Under our eyes was a tropical garden on each side of the valley—a riot of colour—a tropical sunset laid at our feet in the tints of a thousand flowers down to where the countless palms of the gorge began to mingle with the yuccas that swayed over the sea-cliffs in the blue distance.
“The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail.
No sail from dav to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon, his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise—but no sail.”
There was the most perfect picture of the tropical island.
Some months after we had returned to England I found theEnoch Ardenvolume lying on the door at Dorothy's feet. She was roseate with indignation as I entered the room. I paused for an explanation.
It came. She touched the book with her foot—it was a symbolic spurn—as much as any one with a conscience could give to a royal-blue tooled morocco binding.
“How could he do it?” she cried.
“Do what?”
“Those two lines at the end. Listen to this”—she picked up the book with a sort of indignant snatch:—
“'There came so loud a calling of the sea
That all the houses in the haven rang.
He woke, he rose, he spread his arms abroad
Crying with a loud voice, “A sail! a sail!
I am saved,” and so fell back and spoke no more.
So past the strong, heroic soul away.
And when they buried him the little port
Had seldom, seen a costlier funeral.'
“Now tell me if I don't do well to be angary,” cried Dorothy. “Those two lines—'a costlier funeral'! he should have given the items in the bill and said what was the name of the undertaker. Oh, why didn't you warn me off that awful conclusion? What should you say the bill came to? Oh, Alfred, Lord Tennyson!”
I shook my head sadly, of course.
“He does that sort of thing now and then,” I said sadly. “You remember the young lady whose 'light blue eyes' were 'tender over drowning dies'? and the 'oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies.'”
“I do now, but they are not so bad as that about the costly funeral. Why does he do it—tell me that—put me wise?”
“I suppose we must all have our bit of fun now and again. Kean, when in the middle of his most rousing piece of declamation, used to turn from his spellbound audience and put out his tongue at one of the scene-shifters. If you want to be kept constantly at the highest level you must stick to Milton.”
There was a pause before Dorothy said,—
“I suppose so; and yet was there ever anything funnier than his description of the battle in heaven?”
“Funny? Majestic, you mean?” said I, deeply shocked.
“Well, majestically funny, if you wish. The idea of those 'ethereal virtues' throwing big stones at one another, and knowing all the time that it didn't matter whether they were hit or not—the gashes closed like the gashes we loved making with our spades in the stranded jelly-fish at low tide. But I suppose you will tell me that Milton must have his joke with the rest of them. Oh, I wonder if all poetry is not a fraud.”
That is how Tennyson did for himself by not knowing where to stop. I expect that what really happened was that when he had written:—
“So past the strong, heroic soul away,”
he found that there was still room for a couple of lines on the page and he could not bear to see the space wasted.
And it was not wasted either; for I remember talking to the late Dr. John Todhunter, himself a most accomplished poet and a scholarly critic, about the “costlier funeral” lines, and he defended them warmly.
And the satisfying of Dr. Todhunter must be regarded as counting for a good deal more in the balance against my poor Dorothy's disapproval.
Lest this chapter should appear aggressively digressive in a book that may be fancied to have some-thing to do with gardens, I may say that while Alfred, Lord Tennyson had a great love for observing the peculiarities of flower and plant growths, he must have cared precious little for the garden as the solace of one's declining years. He did not pant for it as the hart pants for the water-brooks. He never came to think of the hours spent out of a garden as wasted. He did not live in his garden, nor did he live for it. That is what amazes us in these days, nearly as much as the stories of the feats of Mr. Gladstone with the axe of the woodcutter. Not many of us would have the heart to stand by while a magnificent oak or sycamore is being cut down. We would shrink from such an incident as we should from an execution. But forty years ago the masses were ready to worship the executioner. They used to be admitted in crowds to Hawarden to watch the heroic old gentleman in his shirt-sleeves and with his braces hanging down, butchering a venerable elm in his park, and when the trunk crashed to the ground they cheered vociferously, and when he wiped the perspiration from his brow, they rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the drops just as men and women tried to damp their handkerchiefs in the drippings of the axe of the headsman, who, in a stroke, slew a monarch and made a martyr, outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall.
And when the excursionists were cheering the hero of Hawarden, Thomas Hardy was writingThe Woodlanders. Between Hardy and Hawarden there was certainly a great gulf fixed. I do not think that any poet ever wrote an elegy so affecting as the chapter on the slaying of the oak outside the house of the old man who died of the shock. But the scent of the woodland clings to the whole hook; I have read it once a year for more than a quarter of a century.
Tennyson never showed that he loved his garden as Mr. Hardy showed he loved his woodland. In the many beautiful lines suggesting his affection for his lawns and borders Tennyson makes a reader feel that his joy was purely Platonic—sometimes patronisingly Platonic. It is very far from approaching the passion of a lover for his mistress. One feels that he actually held that the garden was made for the poet not the poet for the garden, which, I need hardly say, we all hold to be a heresy. The union between the true garden-lover and the garden may be a mésalliance, but that is better thanmarriage de convenance.
But to return to the subject of Poets' Gardens, we agreed that the gardens of neither of the poet's dwelling-places were worth noticing; but they were miracles of design compared with that at the red brick villa where the white buses stopped at Putney—the house where the body of Algernon Charles Swinburne lay carefully embalmed by his friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton. Highly favoured visitors were occasionally admitted to inspect the result of the process by which the poet had his palpitations reduced to the discreet beats of the Putney metronome, and visitors shook their heads and said it was a marvellous reformation. So it was—a triumph of the science of embalming, not “with spices and savour of song,” but with the savourless salt of True Friendship. The reformed poet was now presentable, but he was no longer a live poet: the work of reformation had changed the man into a mummy—a most presentable mummy; and it was understood that the placid existence of a mummy is esteemed much more than the passionate rapture of an early morning lark, or of the nightingale that has a bad habit of staying out all night.
It is a most unhappy thing that the first operation of the professional embalmer is to extract the brains of his subject, and this was done through the medium of a quill—a very suitable implement in the case of a writer: he has begun the process himself long before he is stretched on the table of the operator. Almost equally important it is that the subject should be thoroughly dried. Mr. Swinburne's true friend knew his business: he kept him perpetually dry and with his brain atrophied.
The last time I saw the poet he was on view under the desiccating influence of a biscuit factory. He looked very miserable, and I know that I felt very miserable observing the triumph of the Watts-Dunton treatment, and remembering the day when the glory and glow ofSongs before Sunriseenwrapt me until I felt that the whole world would awaken when such a poet set the trumpet to his lips to blow!
Mr. Watts-Dunton played the part of Vivien to that merle Merlin, and all the forest echoed “Fool!”
But it was really a wonderful reformation that he brought about.
I looked into the garden at that Putney reformatory many times. It was one of the genteelest places I ever saw and so handy for the buses. It was called, by one of those flashes of inspiration not unknown in the suburbs, “The Pines.” It might easily have been “The Cedars” or “The Hollies,” or even “Laburnum Villa.”
The poet was carefully shielded by his true friend. Few visitors were allowed to see him. The more pushing were, however, met half-way. They were permitted as a treat to handle the knob of Mr. Swinburne's walking-stick.
Was it, I wonder, a Transatlantic visitor who picked up from the linoleum of the hall beside the veneered mahogany hat-stand, and the cast-iron umbrella-holder, a scrap of paper in the poet's handwriting with the stanza of a projected lyric?—
“I am of dust and of dryness;
I am weary of dryness and dust!
But for my constitutional shyness
I'd go on a bust.”