0256
Dorothy and I were having a chat about some designs in Treillage when Friswell sauntered into the garden, bringing with him a tine book on the Influence of Cimabue on the later work of Andrea del Castagno. He had promised to lend it to me, when in a moment of abstraction I had professed an interest in the subject.
Dorothy showed him her sketches of the new scheme, explaining that it was to act as a screen for fig-tree corner, where the material for a bonfire had been collecting for some time in view of the Peace that we saw in our visions of a new heaven and a new earth long promised to the sons of men.
Friswell was good enough to approve of the designs. He said he thought that Treillage would come into its own again before long. He always liked it, because somehow it made him think of the Bible.
I did not like that. I shun topics that induce thoughts of the Bible in Friswell's brain. He is at his worst when thinking and expressing his thoughts on the Bible, and the worst of his worst is that it is just then he makes himself interesting.
But how on earth Treillage and the Bible should become connected in any man's mind would pass the wit of man to explain. But when the appearance of my Temple compelled Friswell to think of Oxford Street, London, W., when his errant memory was carrying him on to the Princess's Theatre, on whose stage a cardboard thing was built—about as like my Temple as the late Temple of the Archdiocese of Canterbury was like the late Dr. Parker of the City Temple.
“I don't recollect any direct or mystical reference to Treillage in the Book,” said I, with a leaning toward sarcasm in my tone of voice. “Perhaps you saw something of the kind on or near the premises of the Bible Society.”
“It couldn't be something in a theatre again,” suggested Dorothy.
“I believe it was on a garden wall in Damascus, but I'm not quite sure,” said he thoughtfully. “Damascus is a garden city in itself. Thank Heaven it is safe for some centuries more. That ex-All Highest who had designs on it would fain have made it Potsdamascus.”
“He would have done his devil best, pulling down the Treillage you saw there, because it was too French. Don't you think, Friswell, that you should try to achieve some sort of Treillage for your memory? You are constantly sending out shoots that come to nothing for want of something firm to cling to.”
“Not a bad notion, by any means,” said he. “But it has been tried by scores of experts on the science of—I forget the name of the science: I only know that its first two letters are mn.”
“Mnemonics,” said Dorothy kindly.
“What a memory you have!” cried Friswell. “A memory for the word that means memory. I think most of the artificial memories or helps to memory are ridiculous. They tell you that if you wish to remember one thing you must be prepared to recollect half a dozen other things—you are to be led to your destination by a range of sign-posts.”
“I shouldn't object to the sign-posts providing that the destination was worth arriving at,” said I. “But if it's only the front row of the dress circle at the Princess's Theatre, Oxford Street, London, West—”
“Or Damascus, Middle East,” he put in, when I paused to breathe. “Yes, I agree with you; but after all, it wasn't Damascus, but only the General's house at Gibraltar.”
“Have mercy on our frail systems, Friswell,” I cried. “'We are but men, are we!' as Swinburne lilts. Think of our poor heads. Another such abrupt memory-post and we are undone. How is it with you, my Dorothy?”
“I seek a guiding hand,” said she. “Come, Mr. Friswell; tell us how a General at Gib, suggested the Bible to you.”
“It doesn't seem obvious, does it?” said he. “But it so happened that the noblest traditions of the Corps of Sappers was maintained by the General at Gib, in my day. He was mad, married, and a Methodist. He had been an intimate friend and comrade of Gordon, and he invited subscriptions from all the garrison for the Palestine Exploration Fund. He gave monthly lectures on the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, and at every recurring Feast of Tabernacles he had the elaborate trellis that compassed about his house, hung with branches of Mosaic trees. That's the connection—as easily obvious as the origin of sin.”
0260
“Just about the same,” said I. “Your chain of sign-posts is complete: Treillage—General—Gibraltar—Gordon—Gospel. That is how you are irresistibly drawn to think of the Bible when you see a clematis climbing up a trellis.”
“My dear,” said Dorothy, “you know that I don't approve of any attempt at jesting on the subject of the Bible.”
“I wasn't jesting—only alliterative,” said I. “Surely alliteration is not jocular.”
“It's on the border,” she replied with a nod.
“The Bible is all right if you are only content not to take it too seriously, my dear lady,” said Friswell. “It does not discourage simple humour—on the contrary, it contains many examples of the Oriental idea of fun.”
“Oh, Mr. Friswell! You will be saying next that it is full of puns,” said Dorothy.
“I know of one, and it served as the foundation of the Christian Church,” said he.
“My dear Friswell, are you not going too far?”
“Not a step. The choosing of Peter is the foundation of your Church, and the authority assumed by its priests. Simon Barjonah, nicknamed Peter, is one of the most convincingly real characters to be found in any book, sacred or profane. How any one can read his record and doubt the inspiration of the Gospels is beyond me. I have been studying Simon Barjonah for many years—a conceited braggart and a coward—a blasphemer—maudlin! After he had been cursing and swearing in his denial of his Master, he went out and wept bitterly. Yes, but he wasn't man enough to stand by the Son of God—he was not even man enough to go to the nearest tree and hang himself. Judas Iscariot was a nobler character than Simon Barjonah, nicknamed Peter.”
“And what does all this mean, Mr. Friswell?”
“It means that it's fortunate that Truth is not dependent upon the truth of its exponents or affected by their falseness,” said he, and so took his departure.
We went on with our consideration of our Treillage—after a considerable silence. But when a silence comes between Dorothy and me it does not take the form of an impenetrable wall, nor yet that of a yew hedge with gaps in it; but rather that of a grateful screen of sweet-scented honeysuckle. It is the silence within a bower of white clematis—the silence of “heaven's ebon vault studded with stars unutterably bright”—the silence of the stars which is an unheard melody to such as have ears to hear.
“Yes,” said I at last, “I am sure that you are right: an oval centre from which the laths radiate—that shall be our new trellis.”
And so it was.
Our life in the Garden of Peace is, you will perceive, something of what the catalogues term “of rampant growth.” It is as digressive as a wild convolvulus. I perceive this now that I have taken to writing about it. It is not literary, but discursive. It throws out, it may he, the slenderest of tendrils in one direction; but this “between the bud and blossom,” sometimes Hies off in another, and the effect of the whole is pleasantly unforeseen.
It is about time that we had a firm trellis for the truant tendrils.
And so I will discourse upon Treillage as a feature of the garden.
Its effect seems to have been lost sight of for a long time, but happily within recent years its value as an auxiliary to decoration is being recognised. I have seen lovely hits in France as well as in Italy. It is one of the oldest imitations of Nature to be found in connection with garden-making, and to me it represents exactly what place art should take in that modification of Nature which we call a garden. We want everything that grows to be seen to the greatest advantage. Nature grows rampant climbers, and if we allowed them to continue rampageous, we should have a jungle instead of a garden; so we agree to give her a helping band by offering her aspiring children something pleasant to cling to from the first hour of their sending forth grasping fingers in search of the right ladder for their ascent. A trellis is like a family living: it provides a decorative career for at least one member of the family.
The usual trellis-work, as it is familiarly called: has the merit of being cheap—just now it is more than twice the price that it was five years ago; but still it does not run into a great deal of money unless it is used riotously, and this, let me say, is the very worst way in which it could be adapted to its purpose. To fix it all along the face of a wall of perhaps forty feet in length is to force it to do more than it should be asked to do. The wall is capable of supporting a climbing plant without artificial aid. But if the wall is unsightly, it were best hidden, and the eye can bear a considerable length of simple trellis without becoming weary. In this connection, however, my experience forces me to believe that one should shun the “extending” form of lattice-shaped work, but choose the square-mesh pattern.
This, however, is only Treillage in its elementary form. If one wishes to have a truly effective screen offering a number of exquisite outlines for the entwining of some of the loveliest things that grow, one must go further in one's choice than the simple diagonals and rectagonals—the simple verticals and horizontals. The moment that curves are introduced one gets into a new field of charm, and I know of no means of gaining better effects than by elaborating this form of joinery as the French did two centuries ago, before the discovery was made that every form of art in a garden is inartistic. But possibly if the Frenchtreillageurs—for the art had many professors—had been a little more modest in their claims the landscapests would not have succeeded in their rebellion. But thetreillageursprotested against such beautiful designs as they turned out being obscured by plants clambering over them, and they offered in exchange repoussé metal foliage, affirming that this was incomparably superior to a natural growth. Ordinary people refused to admit so ridiculous a claim, and a cloud came over the prospects of these artists. Recently, however, with a truer rapprochement between the “schools” of garden design, I find several catalogues of eminent firms illustrating their reproductions of some beautiful French and Dutch work.
Personally, I have a furtive sympathy with the conceited Frenchmen. It seems to me that it would be a great shame to allow the growths upon a fine piece of Treillage to become so gross as to conceal all the design of the joinery. Therefore I hold that such ambitious climbers as Dorothy Perkins or Crimson Rambler should be provided with an unsightly wall and bade to make it sightly, and that to the more graceful and less distracting clematis should any first-class woodwork be assigned. This scheme will give both sides a chance in the summer, and in the winter there will be before our eyes a beautiful thing to look upon, even though it is no longer supporting a plant, and so fulfilling the ostensible object of its existence.
There should be no limit to the decorative possibilities of the Treillage lath. A whole building can be constructed on this basis. I have seen two or three very successful attempts in such a direction in Holland; and quite enchanting did they seem, overclambered by Dutch honeysuckle. I learned that all were copied from eighteenth century designs. I saw another Dutch design in an English garden in the North.
It took the form of a sheltered and canopied seat. It had a round tower at each side and a gracefully curved back. The “mesh” used in this little masterpiece was one of four inches. It was painted in a tint that looks best of all in garden word—the gray of theecheveria glauca, and the blooms of a beautiful Aglaia rose were playing hide-and-seek among the laths of the roof. I see no reason why hollow pillars for roses should not be made on the Treillage principle. I have seen such pillars supporting the canopied roof of more than one balcony in front of houses in Brighton and Hove. I fancy that at one time these were fashionable in such places. In his fine work entitledThe English Home from Charles I. to George IV., Mr. J. Alfred Gotch gives two illustrations of Treillage adapted to balconies.
But to my mind, its most effective adaptation is in association with a pergola, especially if near the house. To be sure, if the space to be filled is considerable, the work for both sides would be somewhat expensive; but then the cost of such things is very elastic; it is wholly dependent upon the degrees of elaboration in the design. But in certain situations a pergola built up in this way may be made to do duty as an anteroom or a loggia, and as such it gives a good return for an expenditure of money; and if constructed with substantial uprights—I should recommend the employment of an iron core an inch in diameter for these, covered, I need hardly say, with the laths—and painted every second year, the structure should last for half a century. Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema carried out a marvellous scheme of this type at his house in St. John's Wood. It was on a Dutch plan, but was not a copy of any existing arrangement of gardens. I happen to know that the design was elaborated by himself and his wife on their leaving his first St. John's Wood home: it was a model of what may be called “l'haut Treillage.”
Once again I would venture to point out the advantage of having a. handsome thing to look at during the winter months when an ordinary pergola looks its worst.
Regarding pergolas in general a good deal might be written. Their popularity in England just now is well deserved. There is scarcely a garden of any dimensions that is reckoned complete unless it encloses one within its walls. A more admirable means of dividing a ground space so as to make two gardens of different types, could scarcely be devised, in the absence of a yew or box growth of hedge; nor could one imagine a more interesting way of passing from the house to the garden than beneath such a roof of roses. In this case it should play the part of one of those “vistas” which were regarded as indispensable in the eighteenth century. It should have a legitimate entrance and it should not stop abruptly. If the exigencies of space make for such abruptness, not a moment's delay there should be in the planting of a large climbing shrub on each side of the exit so as to embower it, so to speak. A vase or a short pillar should compel the dividing of the path a little further on, and the grass verge—I am assuming the most awkward of exits—should he rounded off in every direction, so as to cause the ornament to become the feature up to which the pergola path is leading. I may mention incidentally at this moment that such an isolated ornament as I have suggested gives a legitimate excuse for dividing any garden walk that has a tendency to weary the eye by its persistent straightness. Some years ago no one ever thought it necessary to make an excuse for a curve in a garden walk. The gardener simply got out his iron and cut out whatever curve he pleased on each side, and the thing was done. But nowadays one must have a natural reason for every deflection in a path; and an obstacle is introduced only to be avoided.
I need hardly say that there are pergolas and pergolas. I saw one that cost between two and three thousand pounds in a garden beyond Beaulieu, between Mont Boron and Monte Carlo—an ideal site. It was made up of porphyry columns with Corinthian carved capitals and wrought-iron work of a beautiful design, largely, but not lavishly, gilt, as a sort of frieze running from pillar to pillar; a bronze vase stood between each of the panels, and the handles of these were also gilt. I have known of quite respectable persons creating quite presentable pergolas for less money. In that favoured part of the world, however, everything bizarre and extravagant seems to find a place and to look in keeping with its surroundings.
The antithesis to this gorgeous and thoroughly beautiful piece of work I have seen in many gardens in England. It is the “rustic” pergola, a thing that may be acquired for a couple of pounds and that may, with attention, last a couple of years. Anything is better than this—no pergola at all is better than this. In Italy one sees along the roadsides numbers of these structures overgrown with vines; but never yet did I see one that was not either in a broken-down condition or rapidly approaching such a condition; although the poles are usually made of chestnut which should last a long time—unlike our larch, the life of which when cut into poles and inserted in the cold earth does not as a rule go beyond the third year.
Rut there is something workable in this line between the three-thousand-pounder of the Riviera, and the three-pounder of Clapham. If people will only keep their eyes open for posts suitable for the pillars of a pergola, they will be able to collect a sufficient number to make a start with inside a year. The remainder of the woodwork I should recommend being brought already shaped and creosoted from some of those large sawmills where such work is made a speciality of. But there is no use getting anything that is not strong and durable, and every upright pillar should be embedded in concrete or cement. For one of my own pergolas—I do not call them pergolas but colonnades—I found a disused telegraph pole and sawed it into lengths of thirty inches each. These I sank eighteen inches in the ground at regular intervals and on each I doweled two oak poles six inches in diameter. They are standing well; for telegraph posts which have been properly treated are nearly as durable as iron. All the woodwork for this I got ready sawn and “dipped” from a well-known factory at Croydon. It is eighty feet long and paved throughout. One man was able to put it up inside a fine fortnight in the month of January.
A second colonnade that I have is under forty feet in length. I made one side of it against a screen of sweetbrier roses which had grown to a height of twenty feet in five years. The making of it was suggested to me by the chance I had of buying at housebreaker's price a number of little columns taken from a shop that was being pulled down to give place, as usual, to a new cinema palace.
An amusing sidelight upon the imperiousness of fashion was afforded us when the painter set to work upon these. They had once been treated in that form of decoration known as “oak grained”—that pale yellow colour touched with an implement technically called a comb, professing to give to ordinary deal the appearance of British oak, and possibly deceiving a person here and there who had never seen oak. But when my painter began to burn off this stuff he discovered that the column had actually been papered and then painted and grained. This made his work easy, for he was able to tear the paper away in strips. But when he had done this he made the further discovery that the wood underneath was good oak with a natural grain showing!
Could anything be more ridiculous than the fashion of sixty or seventy years ago, when the art of graining had reached its highest level? Here were beautiful oak columns which only required to be waxed to display to full advantage the graceful natural “feathering” of the wood, papered over and then put into the hands of the artist to make it by his process of “oak-graining” as unlike oak as the basilica of St. Mark is unlike Westminster Abbey!
But for a large garden where everything is on a heroic scale, the only suitable pergola is one made up of high brick or stone piers, with massive oak beams for the roof. Such a structure will last for a century or two, improving year by year. The only question to consider is the proper proportions that it should assume—the relations of the length to the breadth and to the height. On such points I dare not speak. The architect who has had experience of such structures must be consulted. I have seen some that have been carried out without reference to the profession, and to my mind their proportions were not right. One had the semblance of being stunted, another was certainly not sufficiently broad by at least two feet.
In this connection I may be pardoned if I give it as my opinion that most pergolas suffer from lack of breadth. Six feet is the narrowest breadth possible for one that is eight feet high to the cross beams. I think that a pergola in England should be paved, not in that contemptible fashion, properly termed “crazy,” but with either stone slabs or paving tiles; if one can afford to have the work done in panels, so much the better. In this way nothing looks better than small bricks set in herring-bone patterns. If one can afford a course of coloured bricks, so much the better. The riotous gaiety of colour overhead should be responded to in some measure underfoot.
There is no reason against, but many strong reasons for, interrupting the lines of a long pergola by making a dome of open woodwork between the four middle columns of support—assuming that all the rest of the woodwork is straight—-and creating a curved alcove with a seat between the two back supports, thus forming at very little extra expense, an additional bower to the others which will come into existence year by year in a garden that is properly looked after.
When I was a schoolboy I was brought by my desk-mate to his father's place, and escorted round the grounds by his sister, for whom I cherished a passion that I hoped was not hopeless. This was while my friend was busy looking after the nets for the lawn tennis. There were three summer-houses in various parts of the somewhat extensive grounds, and in every one of them we came quite too suddenly upon a pair of quite too obvious lovers.
The sister cicerone hurried past each with averted eyes—after the first glance—and looked at me and smiled.
We were turning into another avenue after passing the third of these love-birds, when she stopped abruptly.
“We had better not go on any farther,” said she.
“Oh, why not?” I cried.
“Well, there's another summer-house down there among the lilacs,” she replied.
We stood there while she looked around, plainly in search of a route that should be less distracting. It was at this moment of indecision that I gazed at her. I thought that I had never seen her look so lovely. 1 felt myself trembling. I know that my eyes were fixed upon the ground—I could not have spoken the words if I had looked up to her—she was a good head and shoulder taller than I was:—
“Look here, Miss Fanny, there may be no one in the last of the summer-houses. Let us go there and sit—sit—the same as the others.”
“Oh, no; I should be afraid,” said she.
“Oh, I swear to you that you shall have no cause, Miss Fanny; I know what is due to the one you love; you will be quite safe—sacred.”
“What do you know about the one I love?” she asked—and there was a smile in her voice.
“I know the one who loves you,” I said warmly.
“I'm so glad,” she cried. “I know that he is looking for me everywhere, and if he found us together in a summer-house he would be sure to kill you. Captain Tyson is a frightfully jealous man, and you are too nice a boy to be killed. Do you mind running round by the rhododendrons and telling Bob that he may wear my tennis shoes to-day? I got a new pair yesterday.”
I went slowly toward the rhododendrons. When I got beyond their shelter I looked back.
I did not see her, but I saw the sprightly figure of a naval man crossing the grass toward where I had left her, and I knew him to be Commander Tyson, R.N.
Their second son is Commander Tyson, R. N., today.
But from that hour I made up my mind that a properly designed garden should have at least five summer-houses.
I have just made my fifth.
Iam sure that the most peaceful part of our Garden of Peace is the Place of Roses. The place of roses in the time of roses is one bower. It grew out of the orchard ground which I had turned into a lawn in exchange for the grassy space which I had turned into the House Garden. The grass came very rapidly when I had grubbed up the roots of the old plums and cherries. But then we found that the stone-edged beds and the central fountain had not really taken possession, so to speak, of the House Garden. This had still the character of a lawn for all its bedding, and could not be mown in less than two hours.
And just as I was becoming impressed with this fact, a gentle general dealer came to me with the inquiry f a tall wooden pillar would be of any use to me. I could not tell him until I had seen it, and when I had seen it and bought it and had it conveyed home I could not tell him.
It was a fluted column of wood, nearly twenty feet high and two in diameter, with a base and a carved Corinthian capital—quite an imposing object, but, as usual, the people at the auction were so startled by having brought before them something to which they were unaccustomed, they would not make a bid for it, and my dealer, who has brought me many an embarrassing treasure, got it fur the ten shillings at which he had started it.
It lay on the grass where it had been left by the carters, giving to the landscape for a whole week the semblance of the place of the Parthenon or the Acropolis; but on the seventh day I clearly saw that one cannot possess a white elephant without making some sacrifices for that distinction, and I resolved to sacrifice the new lawn to my hasty purchase. There are few things in the world dearer than a bargain, and none more irresistible. Rut, as it turned out, this was altogether an exceptional thing—as a matter of fact, all my bargains are. I made it stand in the centre of the lawn and I saw the place transformed.
It occupied no more than a patch less than a yard 'n diameter; but it dominated the whole neighbourhood. On one side of the place there is a range of shrubs on a small mound, making people who stand by the new pend of water-lilies believe that they have come to the bottom of the garden; on another side is the old Saxon earthwork, now turned into an expanse of things herbaceous, with a long curved grass path under the ancient castle walls; down the full length of the third side runs a pergola, giving no one a glimpse of a great breadth of rose-beds or of the colonnade beyond, where the sweet-briers have their own way.
There was no reason that I could see (now that I had set my heart on the scheme) why I should not set up a gigantic rose pillar in the centre of the lawn and see what would happen.
0278
What actually did happen before another year had passed was the erecting of a tall pillar which looked so lonely in the midst of the grass—a lighthouse marking a shoal in a green sea—that I made four large round beds about it, at a distance of about twenty feet, and set up a nine-foot pillar in the centre of each, planting climbing roses of various sorts around it, hoping that in due time the whole should be incorporated and form a ring of roses about the towering centre column.
It really took no more than two years to bring to fruition my most sanguine hopes, and now there are four rose-tents with hundreds of prolific shoots above the apex of each, clinging with eager fingers to the wires which I have brought to them from the top of the central pillar, and threatening in time to form a complete canopy between forty and fifty feet in diameter.
In the shade of these ambitious things one sits in what I say is the most peaceful part of the whole place of peace. Even “winter and rough weather” may be regarded with complacency from the well-sheltered seats; and every year toward the end of November Rosamund brings into the house some big sprays of ramblers and asks her mother if there is any boracic lint handy. He jests at scars who never felt an Ards Rover scrape down his arm in resisting lawful arrest. But in July and August, looking down upon the growing canopy from the grass walk above the herbaceous terrace, is like realising Byron's awful longing for all the rosy lips of all the rosy girls in the world to “become one mouth” in order that he might “kiss them all at once from North to South.” There they are, thousands and tens of thousands of rosy mouths; but not for kisses, even separately. Heywood, who, being a painter, is a thoroughly trustworthy consultant on all artistic matters, assures me that Byron was a fool, and that his longing for a unification of a million moments of æsthetic delight was unworthy of his reputation. There may be something in this. I am content to look down upon our eager roses with no more of a longing than that September were as far off as Christmas.
It was our antiquarian neighbour who, walking on the terrace one day in mid-July, told us of a beautiful poem which he had just seen in the customary corner of theGazette—the full name of the paper isThe Yardley Gazette, East Longuorth Chronicle, and Nethershire Observer, but one would no more think of giving it all its titles in ordinary conversation than of giving the Duke of Wellington all his. It is with us as much theGazetteas if no other Gazette had ever been published. But it prints a copy of verses, ancient or modern, every week, and our friend had got hold of a gem. The roses reminded him of it He could only recollect the first two lines, but they were striking:—
“There's a bower of rose by Bendameer's stream
And the nightingale sings in it all the night long.”
Bendameer was some place in China, he thought, or perhaps Japan—but for the matter of that it might not be a real locality, but merely a place invented by the poet. Anyhow, he would in future call the terrace walk Bendameer, for could any one imagine a finer bower of roses than that beneath us? He did not believe that Bendameer could beat it.
If our friend had talked to Sir Foster Fraser—the only person I ever met who had been to Bendameer's stream—he might have expressed his belief much more enthusiastically. On returning from his bicycle tour round the world, and somewhat disillusioned by the East, ready to affirm that fifty years of Europe were better than a cycle in Cathay, he told me that Bendameer's stream was a complete fraud. It was nothing but a muddy puddle oozing its way through an uninteresting district.
In accordance with our rule, neither Dorothy nor I went further than to confess that the lines were very sweet.
“I'll get you a copy with pleasure,” he cried. “I knew you would like them, you are both so literary; and you know how literary I am myself—I cut out all the poems that appear in theGazette. It's a hobby, and elevating. I suppose you don't think it possible to combine antiquarian tastes and poetical.” Dorothy assured him that she could see a distinct connection between the two; and he went on: “There was another about roses the week before. The editor is clearly a man of taste, and he puts in only things that are appropriate to the season. The other one was about a garden—quite pretty, only perhaps a little vague. I could not quite make out what it meant at places; but I intend to get it off by heart, so I wrote it down in iny pocket-book. Here it is:—
“Rosy is the north,
Rosy is the south,
Rosy are her cheeks
And a rose her mouth.”
Now what do you think of it? I call it very pretty—not so good, on the whole, as the bower of roses by Bendameer's stream, but still quite nice. You would not be afraid to let one of your little girls read it—yes, every line.”
Dorothy said that she would not; but then Dorothy is afraid of nothing—not even an antiquarian.
He returned to us the next day with the full text—only embellished with half a dozen of theGazette'smisprints—of theLalla Rookhsong, and read it out to us in full, but failing now and again to get into the lilt of Moore's melodious anapaests—a marvellous feat, considering how they sing and swing themselves along from line to line. But that was not enough, He had another story for us—fresh, quite fresh, from the stock of a brother antiquarian who recollected it, he said, when watching the players on the bowling-green.
“I thought I should not lose a minute in coming to you with it,” he said. “You are so close to the bowling-green here, it should have additional interest in your eyes. The story is that Nelson was playing bowls when some one rushed in to say that the Spanish Armada was in sight. But the news did not put him off his game. 'We'll have plenty of time to finish our game and beat the Spaniards afterwards,' he cried; and sure enough he went on with the game to the end. There was a man for you!”
“And who won?” asked Dorothy innocently.
“That's just the question I put to my friend,” he cried. “The story is plainly unfinished. He did not say whether Nelson and his partner won his game against the other players; but you may be sure that he did.”
“He didn't say who was Nelson's partner?” said Dorothy.
“No, I have told you all that he told me,” he replied.
“I shouldn't be surprised to hear that his partner was a man named Drake,” said I. “A senior partner too in that transaction and others. But the story is a capital one and show's the Englishman as he is to-day. Why, it was only the year before the war that there was a verse going about,—
'I was playing golf one day
When the Germans landed;
All our men had run away,
All our ships were stranded.
And the thought of England's shame
Almost put me off my game.'”
Our antiquarian friend looked puzzled for some time; then he shook his head gravely, saying:—
“I don't like that. It's a gross libel upon our brave men—and on our noble sailors too: I heard some one say in a speech the other day that there are no better seamen in the world than are in the British Navy. Our soldiers did not run away, and all our ships were not stranded. It was one of the German lies to say so. And what I say is that it was very lucky for the man who wrote that verse that there was a British fleet to prevent the Germans landing. They never did succeed in landing, I'm sure, though I was talking to a man who had it on good authority that there were five U-boats beginning to disembark some crack regiments of Hun cavalry when a British man-o'-war—one, mind you—a single ship—came 'n sight, and they all bundled back to their blessed U-boats hi double quick time.”
“I think you told me about that before,” said I—and he had. “It was the same person who brought the first news of the Russian troops going through England—he had seen them on the platform of Crewe stamping off the snow they had brought on their boots from Archangel; and afterwards he had been talking with a soldier who had seen the angels at Mons, and had been ordered home to be one of the shooting party at the Tower of London, when Prince Louis was court-martialled and sentenced.”
“Quite true,” he cried. “My God! what an experience for any one man to go through. But we are living in extraordinary times—that's what I've never shrunk from saying, no matter who was present—extraordinary times.”
I could not but agree with him I did not say that what I thought the most extraordinary feature of the times was the extraordinary credulity of so many people. The story of the Mons angels was perhaps the most remarkable of all the series. A journalist sitting in his office in London simply introduced in a newspaper article the metaphor of a host of angels holding up the advancing Germans, and within a week scores of people in England had talked with soldiers who had seen those imaginary angels and were ready to give a poulterer's description of them, as Sheridan said some one would do if he introduced the Phoenix into his Drury Lane Address.
It was no use the journalist explaining that his angels were purely imaginary ones; people said, when you pointed this out to them:—
“That may be so; but these were the angels he imagined.”
Clergymen preached beautiful sermons on the angel host; and I heard of a man who sold for half a crown a feather which had dropped from the wing of one of the angels who had come on duty before he had quite got over his moult.
When Dorothy heard this she said she was sure that it was no British soldier who had shown the white feather in France during that awful time.
“If they were imaginary angels, the white feather must have been imaginary too,” said Olive, the practical one.
“One of the earliest of angel observers was an ass, and the tradition has been carefully adhered to ever since,” said Friswell, and after that there was, of course, no use talking further.
But when we were still laughing over our antiquarian and his novelties in the form of verse and anecdote, Friswell himself appeared with a newspaper in his hand, and he too was laughing.
It was over the touching letter of an actress to her errant husband, entreating him to return and all would be forgiven. I had read it and smiled; so had Dorothy, and wept.
But it really was a beautiful letter, and I said so to Friswell.
“It is the most beautiful of the four actresses' letters to errant spouses for Divorce Court purposes that I have read within the past few months,” said he. “But they are all beautiful—all touching. It makes one almost ready to condone the sin that results in such an addition to the literature of the Law Courts. I wonder who is the best person to go to for such a letter—some men must make a speciality of that sort of work to meet the demands of the time. But wouldn't it be dreadful if the errant husband became so convicted of his trespass through reading the wife's appeal to return, that he burst into tears, called a taxi and drove home! But these Divorce Court pleading letters are of great value professionally they have quite blanketed the old lost jewel-case stunt as a draw. I was present and assisted in the reception given by the audience to the lady whose beautiful letter had appeared in the paper in the morning. She was overwhelmed. She had made up pale in view of that reception; and there was something in her throat that prevented her from going on with her words for some time. The 'poor things!' that one heard on all sides showed how truly sympathetic is a British audience.”
“I refuse to listen to your cynicism,” cried Dorothy; “I prefer to believe that people are good rather than bad.”
“And so do I, my dear lady,” said he, laughing. “But don't you see that if you prefer to think good of all people, you cannot exclude the poor husband of the complete letter-writer, and if you believe good of him and not bad, you must believe that his charming wife is behaving badly in trying to get a divorce.”
“She doesn't want a divorce: she wants him to come back to her and writes to him begging him to do so,” said she.
“And such a touching letter too,” I added.
“I have always found 'the profession,' as they call themselves, more touchy than touching,” said he. “But I admit that I never was so touched as when, at the funeral of a brother artist, the leading actor of that day walked behind the coffin with the brokenhearted widow of the deceased on his right arm and the broken-hearted mistress on the left. Talk of stage pathos!”
“For my part, I shall do nothing of the sort,” said I sharply. “I think, Friswell, that you sometimes forget that it was you who gave this place the name of A Garden of Peace. You introduce controversial topics—The Actor is the title of one of these, The Actress is the title of the other. Let us have done with them, and talk poetry instead.”
“Lord of the Garden of Peace! as if poetry was the antithesis of polemics—verses of controversies!” cried he. “Never mind! give us a poem—of The Peace.”
“I wish I could,” said I. “The two copies of verses which, as you know, without having read them, I contributed to the literature—I mean the writings—in connection with the war could scarcely be called pacific.”
“They were quite an effective medium for getting rid of his superfluous steam,” said Dorothy to him. “I made no attempt to prevent his writing them.”
“It would have been like sitting on the safety-valve, wouldn't it?” said he. “I think that literature would not have suffered materially if a good number of safety-valves had been sat upon by stouter wives of metre-engineers than you will ever be, O guardian lady of the Garden of Peace! The poets of the present hour have got much to recommend them to the kindly notice of readers of taste, but they have all fallen short of the true war note on their bugles. Perhaps when they begin to pipe of peace they will show themselves better masters of the reed than of the conch.”
“Whatever some of them may be——” I began, when he broke in.
“Say some ofus, my friend: you can't dissociate yourself from your pals in the dock: you will be sentenceden bloc, believe me.”
“Well, whateverwemay be we make a better show than the Marlborough Muses or the Wellington or the Nelson Muses did. What would be thought ofThe Campaignif it were to appear to-morrow, I wonder. But it did more in advancing the interests of Addison than the completeSpectator.”
“Yes, although some feeble folk did consider that one hit of it was verging on the blasphemous—that about riding on the whirlwind and directing the storm,” remarked Friswell; he had a good memory for things verging on the blasphemous.
“The best war poem is the one that puts into literary form the man in the street yelling 'hurrah!'” said I. “If the shout is not spontaneous, it sounds stilted and it is worthless.”
“I believe you,” said Friswell. “If your verse does not find an echo in the heart of the rabble that run after a soldiers' band, it is but as the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals that crash on the empty air. But touching the poets of past campaigns——”
“I was thinking of Scott'sWaterloo,” said I; “yes, and Byron's stanzas inChilde Harold, and somebody's 'Twas in Trafalgar's Bay, We saw the Frenchmen lay—'the Frenchmen lav,' mind you—that's the most popular of all the lays, thanks to Braham's music and Braham's tenor that gave it a start. I think we have done better than any of those.”
“But have you done better thanScot's what hae act Wallace hied? or of Nelson and the North, Sing the glorious day's renown? or Ye Mariners of England, That guard our native seas? or not a drum was heard or a funeral note?—I doubt it. And to come down to a later period, what about the lilt of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, by one Tennyson? Will any of the poems of 1914 show the same vitality as these?”
“The vital test of poetry is not its vitality,” said I, “any more than being a best-seller is a test of a good novel. But I think that when a winnowing of the recent harvest takes place in a year or two, when we become more critical than is possible for a people just emerging from the flames that make us all see red, you will find that the harvest of sound poetry will be a record one. We have still the roar of the thunderstorm in our cars; when an earthquake is just over is not the time for one to be asked to say whether thePathétiqueor theMoonlightSonata is the more exquisite.”
“Perhaps,” said Friswell doubtfully. “But I allow that you have 'jined your flats' better than Tennyson did. The unutterable vulgarity of that 'gallant six hunderd,' because it happened that 'some one had blundered,' instead of 'blundred,' will not be found in the Armageddon band of buglers. But I don't believe that anything so finished as Wolfe'sBurial of Sir John Moorewill come to the surface of the melting-pot—I think that the melting-pot suggests more than your harvest. Your harvest hints at the swords being turned into ploughshares; my melting-pot at the bugles being thrown into the crucible. What have you to say about 'Not a drum was heard'?”
“That poem is the finest elegy ever written,” said I definitely. “The author, James Wolfe, occupies the place among elegists that single-speech Hamilton does among orators, or Liddell and Scott in a library of humour. From the first line to the last, no false note is sounded in that magnificent funeral march. It is one grand monotone throughout. It cannot be spoken except in a low monotone. It never rises and it never falls until the last line is reached, 'We left him alone in his glory.'”
“And the strangest thing about it is that it appeared first in the poets' corner of a wretched little Irish newspaper—theNewry Telegraph, I believe it was called,” said Dorothy—it was Dorothy's reading of the poem that first impressed me with its beauty.
“The more obscure the crypt in which its body was burned, the more—the more—I can't just express the idea that I'm groping after,” said Friswell.
“I should like to help you,” said Dorothy. “Strike a match for me, and I'll try to follow you out of the gloom.”
“It's something like this: the poem itself seems to lead you into the gloom of a tomb, so that there is nothing incongruous in its disappearing into the obscurity of a corner of a wretched rag of a newspaper—queer impression for any one to have about such a thing, isn't it?”
“Queer, but—well, it was but the body that was buried, the soul of the poetry could not be consigned to the sepulchre, even though 'Resurgam' was cut upon the stone.”
“You have strolled away from me, said I. All that I was thinking about Wolfe and that blessedNewry Telegraph, was expressed quite adequately by the writer of another Elegy:—
“Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
That was a trite reflection; and as apposite as yours, Friswell; unless you go on to assume that through the desert air there buzzed a bee to carry off the soul of the blushing flower and cause it to fertilise a whole garden, so that the desert was made to blossom like the rose.”
“Who was the bee that rescued the poem from the desert sheet that enshrouded it?” asked Dorothy.
“I have never heard,” I said, nor had Friswell.
There was a long pause before he gave a laugh, saying—
“I wonder if you will kick me out of your garden when I tell you the funny analogy to all this that the mention of the word desert forced upon me.”
“Try us,” said 1. “We know you.”
“The thought that I had was that there are more busy bees at work than one would suppose; and the mention of the desert recalled to my mind what I read somewhere of the remarkable optimism of a flea which a man found on his foot after crossing the desert of the Sahara. It had lived on in the sand, goodness knows how long, on the chance of some animal passing within the radius of a leap and so carrying it back to a congenial and not too rasorial a civilisation. How many thousand million chances to one there were that it should not be rescued; yet its chance came at last.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, my flea is your bee, and where there are no bees there may be plenty of fleas.”
“Yes; only my bee comes with healing in its wings, and your flea is the bearer of disease,” said I; and I knew that I had got the better of him there, though I was not so sure that he knew it.
Friswell is a queer mixture.
After another pause, he said,—
“By the way, the mention of Campbell and his group brought back to me one of the most popular of the poems of the period—Lord Ullin's Daughter.—You recollect it, of course.”
“A line or two.”
“Well, it begins, you know:—
“A chieftain to the Highlands bound,
Cries, 'Boatman, do not tarry,
And I'll give thee a silver pound,
To row us o'er the ferry.'
Now, for long I felt that it was too great a strain upon our credulity to ask us to accept the statement that a Scotsman would offer a ferryman a pound for a job of the market value of a bawbee; but all at once the truth flashed upon me: the pound was a pound Scots, or one shilling and eightpence of our money. You see?”
“Yes, I see,” said Dorothy; “but still it sounds extravagant. A Highland Chief—one and eight-pence! The ferryman never would have got it.”
I fancied that we had exhausted some of the most vital questions bearing upon the questionable poetry of the present and the unquestionable poetry of the past; but I was mistaken; for after dinner I had a visit from Mr. Gilbert.
But I must give Mr. Gilbert a little chapter to himself.