From the foregoing half-dozen pages it is becoming pretty clear that a Garden of Peace may also be a Garden of Memories. But I am sure that one of the greatest attractions of garden life to a man who has stepped out of a busy world—itsstrepitumque virumque, is that itcompelshim to look forward, whilepermittinghim to look back. The very act of dropping a seed into the soil is prospective. To see things growing is stimulating, whether they are children or other flowers. One has no time to think how one would order one's career, avoiding the mistakes of the past, if one got a renewal of one's lease of life, for in a garden we are ever planning for the future; but these rustling leaves of memory are useful as a sort of mulch for the mind.
And the garden has certainly grown since I first entered it ten years ago. It was originally to be referred to in the singular, but now it must be thought of in the plural. It was a garden, now it is gardens; and whether I have succeeded or not my experience compels me to believe that to aim at the plural makes for success. Two gardens, each of thirty feet square, are infinitely better than one garden of sixty. I am sure of that to-day, but it took me some time to find it out. A garden to be distinctive must have distinct features, like every other thing of life.
I notice that most writers on garden-making begin by describing what a wilderness their place was when they first took it in hand. I cannot maintain that tradition. Mine had nothing of the wilderness about it. On the contrary, it was just too neat for my taste. The large lawn on to which some of the lower rooms of the house opened, had broad paths on each side and a broad flower border beyond. There was not a shrub on the lawn and only one tree—a majestic deodar spreading itself abroad at an angle of the nearest wing of the house; but on a knoll at the farther end of the lawn there were, we discovered next summer, pink and white mays, a wild cherry, and a couple of laburnums, backed by a towering group made up of sycamores and chestnuts. Such a plan of planting could not be improved upon, I felt certain, though I did not discuss it at the time; for I was not out to make an alteration, and my attention was wholly occupied with the appearance of the ancient walls, glorious with snapdragon up to the lilacs that made a coping of colour for the whole high range, while the lower brick boundary opposite was covered with pears and plums clasping hands in espalier form from end to end.
But I was not sure about the flower borders which contained alternate clumps of pink geraniums and white daisies. Perhaps they were too strongly reminiscent of the window-boxes of the Cromwell Road through which I had walked every day for nearly twenty years, and in time one grows weary even of the Cromwell Road!
But so well did the accident of one elbow of the wall of the bowling-green pushing itself out lend itself to the construction of the garden, that the first and most important element in garden-design was attained. This, I need hardly say, is illusion and surprise. One fancied that here the limits of the ground had been reached, for a fine deciduous oak seemed to block the way; but with investigation one found oneself at the entrance to a new range of grounds which, though only about three times as large as the first, seemed almost illimitable.
The greater part had at one time been an orchard, we could see; but the trees had been planted too close to one another, and after thirty or forty years of jostling, had ceased to be of any pictorial or commercial value, and I saw that these would have to go. Beyond there was a kitchen garden and a large glass-house, and on one side there was a long curve of grass terrace made out of the Saxon or Roman earthwork, against which, as I have already said, the Norman walls were built, showing only about twelve or fifteen feet above the terrace, while being forty or fifty down to the dry moat outside. This low mural line was a mass of antirrhinums, wallflowers, and such ferns as thrive in rock crevices.
There was obviously not much to improve in all this. We were quite satisfied with everything as it stood. There was nothing whatsoever of the wilderness that we could cause to blossom as the rose, only—not a rose was to be seen in any part of the garden!
We were conscious of the want, for our Kensington garden had been a mass of roses, and we were ready to join on to Victor Hugo's “Une maison sans enfants,” “un jardin sans roses?” But we were not troubled; roses are as easily to be obtained as brambles—in fact rather more easily— and we had only to make up our minds where to plant them and they would blush all over the place the next summer.
We had nothing to complain of but much to be thankful for, when, after being in the house for a month, I found the old gardener, whom we had taken over with the place, wheeling his barrow through a doorway which I knew led to a dilapidated potting-shed, and as I saw that the barrow was laden with rubbish I had the curiosity to follow him to see where he should dispose of it.
He went through a small iron gate in the wall alongside the concealed potting-house, and, following him, I found myself to my amazement in a small walled space, forty feet by thirty, containing rubbish, but giving every one with eyes to see such a picture of the Barbican, the Castle Gate with the Keep crowning the mound beyond, as made me shout—such a picture as was not to be found in the county!
If it had a fault at all it was to be found in its perfection. Every one has, I hope, seen the Sham Castle, the castellated gateway, built on Hampton Down, near Bath, to add picturesqueness to the prospect as seen from the other side. This is as perfectly made a ruin as ever was built up by stage carpenters. There was no reason why it should not be so, for it was easy to put a stone in here and there if an improvement were needed, or to dilapidate a bit of a tower until the whole would meet with the approval even of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who are, I am given to understand, the best informed authorities in England on the assessment of dilapidations. I must confess that the first glimpse I had of the picture that stood before my eyes above my newly-acquired rubbish-heaps suggested the perfection of a sham. Themise-en-scèneseemed too elaborate—too highly finished—no detail that could add to the effect being absent. But there it was, and I remained looking at it for the rest of the day.
The over-conscientious agents had said not a word in the inventory of the most valuable asset in connection with the property. They had scrupulously advertised the “unique and valuable old-fashioned residence,” and the fact that it was partially “covered by creepers”—a partiality to which I was not very partial—and that the “billiard saloon” had the same advantages—they had not failed to allude to the gardens as “old-world and quaint,” but not one word had they said about this view from the well-matured rubbish-heaps!
It was at this point that I began to think about improvements, and the first essay in this direction was obvious. I had the rubbish removed, the ground made straight, a stone sundial placed in the centre, and a Dutch pattern of flower-beds cut around it.
On the coping of the walls—they were only six feet high on our side, but forty on the culside—I placed lead and stone vases and a balustrade of wrought iron-work. I made an immense window in the wall of the potting-shed—a single sheet of plate-glass with four small casements of heraldic stained glass; and then the old potting-shed I panelled in coloured marbles, designed a sort of domed roof for it and laid down a floor in mosaics. I had in my mind a room in the Little Trianon in all this; and I meant to treat the view outside as a picture set in one wall. Of course I did not altogether succeed; but I have gone sufficiently far to deceive more than one visitor. Entering the room through a mahogany door set with a round panel of beautifully-clouded onyx—once a table-top in the gay George's pavilion' at Brighton—a visitor sees the brass frame of the large window enclosing the picture of the Barbican, the Gateway, and the Keep, and it takes some moments to understand it.
All this sounds dreadfully expensive; but through finding a really intelligent builder and men who were ready to do all that was asked of them, and, above all, through having abundance of material collected wherever it was going at shillings instead of pounds, I effected the transformation at less than a sixth of the lowest assessment of the cost made by professional friends. To relieve myself from any vain charge of extravagance, I may perhaps be permitted to mention that when the property was offered for sale in London a week before I bought it, not a single bid was made for it, owing to an apparent flaw in one of the title-deeds frightening every one off. Thus, without knowing it. I arrived on the scene at the exact psychological moment—for a purchaser; and when I got the place I found myself with a considerable sum in hand to spend upon it, and that sum has not yet been all spent. The bogey fault in the title was made good by the exchange of a few letters, and it is now absolutely unassailable.
It must also be remembered by such people as may be inclined to talk of extravagance, that it is very good business to spend a hundred pounds on one's property if the property is thereby increased in value by three hundred. I have the best of all reasons for resting in the assurance that for every pound I have spent I am three to the good. There is no economy like legitimate expenditure.
I wonder if real authorities in garden design would think I was right in treating after the Dutch fashion the little enclosed piece of ground on which I tried my prentice hand.
In order to arrive at a conclusion on this point I should like to be more fully informed as to what is congruous and what incongruous. What are the important elements to consider in the construction of a Dutch garden, and are these elements in sympathy with the foreground of such a picture as I had before me when I made up my mind on the subject?
Now I have seen many Dutch gardens in Holland, and in Cape Colony—relics of the old Dutch Colonial days—and every one knows how conservative is this splendid if somewhat over-hospitable race. Some of the gardens lying between Cape Town and Simon's Bay, and also on the higher ground above Mossel Bay are what old-furniture dealers term “in mint condition”—I disclaim any suggestion of a pun upon the herb, which in Dutch houses at the Cape is not used in sauce for lamb. They are as they were laid out by the Solomons, the Cloetes, the Van der Byls, and the other old Dutch Colonial families; so far from adapting, themselves to the tropical and subtropical conditions existing in the Colony, they brought their home traditions into their new surroundings with results that were both happy and profitable. There are certainly no finer or more various bulbs than those of Dutch growth at the Cape, and I have never seen anything more beautiful than the heaths on the Flats between Mowbray and Rondesbosch at the foot of the Devil's Peak of Table Mountain.
0096
A Dutch gentleman once said to me in Rotterdam, “If you want to see a real Dutch garden you must go to the Cape, or, better still, to England—for it.”
He meant that in both places greater pains are taken to maintain the original type than, generally speaking, in Holland.
I know that he spoke of what he knew, and with what chances of observation I have had, I long ago came to the conclusion that the elements of what is commonly called a Dutch garden do not differ so greatly from, those that went to the making of the oldest English herb and flower garden. This being so, when I asked myself how I should lay out a foreground that should be congenial with the picture seen through the window of the marble-panelled room, I knew that the garden should be as like as possible that which would be planted by the porter's wife when the Castle was at its best. The porter's lodge would join on to the gate, and one side of the gateway touches my ground, where the lodge would be; so that, with suggestions from the Chatelaine, who had seen the world, and the Chaplain, who may have been familiar with the earliest gardens in England—the monastery gardens—she would lay out the little bit of ground pretty much, I think, as I have done. In those days people had not get into the way of differentiating between gardens and gardens—there was no talk about “false notes” in design, men did not sleep uneasily o' nights lest they had made an irremediable mistake in giving hospitality to a crimson peony in a formal bed or in failing to dig up an annual that had somehow found a place in a herbaceous border. But a garden bounded by walls must be neat or nothing, and so the porter's wife made a Dutch garden without being aware of what she was doing, and I followed her example, after the lapse of a few hundred years, knowing quite well what I was doing in acting on the principle that the surroundings should suggest the garden. I know now, however, that because William the Conqueror had a fine growth of what we callDianthus Caryophyllaat his Castle of Falaise, we should have scrupulously followed his example. However, the elements of a Dutch garden are geometrical, and within four walls and with four right angles one cannot but be geometrical. One cannot have the charming disorderliness of a meadow bounded by two meandering streams. That is why I know I was right in refusing to allow any irregularity in my treatment of the ground. I put my sundial exactly in the middle and made it the centre for four small beds crossed by a narrow grass path; and except for the simple central design there is no attempt at colour effect. But every one of the little beds is brilliant with tulips or pansies or antirrhinum or wallflowers, as the season suggests. There is the scent of lavender from four clumps—one at each angle of the walls—and over the western coping a pink rose climbs. To be consistent I should confine the growth of this rose to an espalier against the wall. I mean to be consistent some day in this matter and others nearly as important, and I have been so meaning for the past ten years.
I picked up some time ago four tubs of box and placed one in each corner of the grass groundwork of the design; but I soon took them away; they were far too conspicuous. They suggested that I was dragging in Holland by the hair of the head, so to speak.
It is the easiest thing in the world to spoil a good effect by over-emphasis; and any one who fancies that the chief note in a Dutch garden is an overgrowth of box makes a great mistake. It is like putting up a board with “This way to the Dutch garden,” planted on its face.
I remember years ago a play produced at the Hay-market, when Tree had the theatre and Mr. J. Comyns Carr was his adviser. It was a successor to an adaptation ofCalled Back, the first of the “shilling shockers,” as they were styled. In one scene the curtain rose upon several of the characters sucking oranges, and they kept at it through the whole scene. That is what it is termed “local colour”; and it was hoped that every one who saw them so employed was convinced that the scene was laid in Seville. It might as well have been laid in the gallery of a theatre, where refreshment is taken in the same form.
M. Bizet achieved his “local colour” in Carmen in rather a more subtle way. He did not bother about oranges. The first five bars of the overture prepared us for Spain and we lived in it until the fall of the curtain, and we return to it when one of the children strums a few notes of “L'amour est un oiseau rebelle,” or the Toreador's braggadocio.
But although I have eaten oranges in many parts of the world since I witnessed that play at the Haymarket, I have never been reminded of it, and to-day I forget what it was all about, and I cannot for the life of me recollect what was its name.
So much for the ineffectiveness of obvious effects.
It is a dreadful thing to live in the same town as an Atheist! I had no idea that a house in Yardley Parva would ever be occupied by such an one. I fancied that I was leaving them all behind me in London, where I could not avoid getting into touch with several; no one can unless one refuses to have anything to say to the intellectual or artistic classes. People in London are so callous that they do not seem to mind having atheists to dinner or talking with them without hostility at a club. That is all very well for London, but it doesn't do in Yardley Parva, thank God! Atheism is very properly regarded as a distinct social disqualification—almost as bad as being a Nonconformist.
Friswell is the name of our atheist. What brought him here I cannot guess. But he bought a house that had once been the rectory of a clergyman (when I mention the Clergy in this book it must be taken for granted that I mean a priest of the Church of England) and the predecessor of that clergyman had been a Rural Dean. How on earth the agent could sell him the house is a mystery that has not yet been solved, though many honest attempts in this direction have been made. The agent was blamed for not making such inquiries as would have led to the detection of the fellow. He was held responsible for Friswell's incorporation as a burgess, just as Graham the greengrocer was held responsible for the epidemic of mumps which it is known he brought into the town in a basket of apples from Baston.
But the agent's friends make excuses for him. While admitting that he may have been culpably careless in order to secure a purchaser for a house that nobody seemed to want in spite of its hallowed associations, they are ready to affirm that these atheists have all the guile of their Master so that even if the agent had been alert in making the essential inquiries, the man would not hesitate to give the most plausible answers in order to accomplish his object—the object of the wolf that has his eye on a sheepfold.
This may be so—I decline to express an opinion one way or another. All I know is that Friswell has written some books that are known in every part of the civilised world and in Germany as well, and that we find him when he comes here quite interesting and amusing. But needless to say we do not permit him to go too far. We do not allow ourselves to be interested in him to the jeopardising of our principles or our position in Yardley Parva. We do not allow ourselves to be amused at the reflection that he is going in the wrong direction; on the contrary, we shudder when it strikes us. But so insidious are his ways that—Heaven forgive me—I feel that he tells me much that I do not know about what is true and what is false, and that if he were to leave the neighbourhood I should miss him.
It is strange that he should be married to a charming woman, who is a daughter of probably the most orthodox vicarage in the Midlands—a home where every Sunday is given over to such accessories of orthodoxy as an Early Service, Morning Church, Sirloin of Beef with Yorkshire Pudding, Fruit Tart and Real Egg Custard, Sunday School, the Solution of Acrostics, Evening-song, and Cold Chicken with Salad.
And yet she could ally herself with a man who does not hesitate to express the opinion that if a child dies before it is baptized it should not be assumed that anything particular happens to it, and that it was a great pity that the Church was upheld by three murderers, the first being Moses, who promulgated the Ten Commandments, the second Paul, who promulgated the Christianity accepted by the Church, and the third Constantine, who promulgated the Nicene Creed. I have heard him say this, and much more, and yet beyond a doubt his wife still adores him. laughs at him, says he is the most religious man she ever knew, and goes to church regularly!
One cannot understand such a thing as this. In her own vicarage home every breath that Mrs. Fris-well breathed was an inspiration of the Orthodox—and yet she told me that her father, who was for twenty-seven years Vicar of the parish and the Bishop's Surrogate, thought very highly of Mr. Friswell and his scholarship!
That is another thing to puzzle over. Of course we know that scholarship has got nothing to do with Orthodoxy—it is the weak things of the world that have been chosen to confound the wise—-but for a vicar of the Church of England to remain on friendly terms with an atheist, and to approve of his daughter's marriage with such an one, is surely not to be understood by ordinary people.
I do not know whether or not I neglected my duty in refraining from forbidding Friswell my garden when I heard him say that the God worshipped by the Hebrews with bushels of incense must have been regarded by them as occupying a position something like that of the chairman of the smoking concert; and that the High Church parson here was like a revue artist, whose ambition is to have as many changes of costume as was possible in every performance; but though I was at the point of telling him that even my toleration had its limits, yet somehow I did not like to go to such a length without Dorothy's permission; and I know that Dorothy likes him.
She says the children are fond of him, and she herself is fond of Mrs. Friswell.
“Yes,” I told her, “you would not have me kill a viper because Rosamund had taken a fancy to its markings and its graceful action before darting on its prey.”
“Don't be a goose,” said she. “Do you suggest that Mr. Friswell is a viper?'
“Well, if a viper may be looked on as a type of all——”
“Well, if he is a viper, didn't St. Paul shake one off his hand into the fire before any harm was done? I think we would do well to leave Mr. Friswell to be dealt with by St. Paul.”
“Meaning that——”
“That if the exponent of the Christianity of the Churches cannot be so interpreted in the pulpits that Mr. Friswell's sayings are rendered harmless, well, so much the worse for che Churches.”
“There's such a thing as being too liberal-minded, Dorothy,” said I solemnly.
“I suppose there is,” said she; “but you will never suffer from it, my beloved, except in regard to the clematis which you will spare every autumn until we shall shortly have no blooms on it at all.”
That was all very well; but I was uncertain about Rosamund. She is quite old enough to understand the difference between what Mr. Friswell says in the garden and what the Reverend Thomas Brown-Browne says in the pulpit. I asked her what she had been talking about to Mr. Friswell when he was here last week.
“I believe it was about Elisha,” she replied. “Oh, yes; I remember I asked him if he did not think Elisha a horrid vain old man.”
“You asked him that?”
“Yes; it was in the first lesson last Sunday—that about the bears he brought out of the wood to eat the poor children who had made fun of him—horrid old man!”
“Rosamund, he was a great prophet—one of the greatest,” said I.
“All the same he was horrid! He must have been the vainest as well as the most spiteful old man that ever lived. What a shame to curse the poor children because they acted like children! You know that if that story were told in any other book than the Bible you would be the first to be down on Elisha. If I were to say to you, Daddy, 'Go up, thou bald head!'—you know there's a little bald place on the top there that you try to brush your hair over—if I were to say that to you, what would you do?”
“I suppose I should go at you bald-headed, my dear,” said I incautiously.
“I don't like the Bible made fun of,” said Dorothy, who overheard what I did not mean for any but the sympathetic ears of her eldest daughter.
“I'm not making fun of it, Mammy,” said the daughter. “Just the opposite. Just think of it—forty-two children—only it sounds much more when put the other way, and that makes it all the worse—forty and two poor children cruelly killed because a nasty old prophet was vain and ill-tempered!”
“It doesn't say that he had any hand in it, does it?” I suggested in defence of the Man of God.
“Well, not—directly,” replied Rosamund. “But it was meant to make out that he had a hand in it. It says that he cursed them in the name of the Lord.”
“And what did Mr. Friswell say about the story?” inquired Dorothy.
“Oh, he said that, being a prophet, Elisha wasn't thinking about the present, but the future—the time we're living in—the Russian Bear or the Bolsheviks or some of the—the—what's the thing that they kill Jews with in Russia, Mammy?”
“I don't know—anything that's handy, I fancy, and not too expensive,” replied the mother.
“He gave it a name—was it programme?” asked the child.
“Oh, a pogrom—a pogrom; though I fancy a programme of Russian music would have been equally effective,” I put in. “Well, Mr. Friswell may be right about the bears. I suppose it's the business of a prophet to prophesy. But I should rather fancy, looking at the transaction from the standpoint of a flutter in futures, and also that the prophet had the instincts of Israel, that his bears had something to do with the Stock Exchange.”
“Mr. Friswell said nothing about that,” said Rosamund. “But he explained about Naaman and his leprosy and how he was cured.”
“It tells us that in the Bible, my dear,” said Dorothy, “so of course it is true. He washed seven times in the Jordan.”
“Yes, Mr. Friswell says that it is now known that half a dozen of the complaints translated leprosy in the Bible were not the real leprosy, and it was from one of these that Naaman was suffering, and what Elisha did was simply to prescribe for him a course of seven baths in the Jordan which he knew contained sulphur or something that is good for people with that complaint. He believes in all the miracles. He says that what was looked on as a miracle a few years ago is an everyday thing now.”
“He's quite right, darling,” said Dorothy approvingly. Then turning to me, “You see, Mr. Friswell has really been doing his best to keep the children right, though you were afraid that he would have a bad effect upon them.”
“I see,” said I. “I was too hasty in my judgment. He is a man of uncompromising orthodoxy. We shall see him holding a class in Sunday-school next, or solving acrostics instead of sleeping after the Sunday Sirloin. Did he explain the Gehazi business, Rosamund?”
“He said that he was at first staggered when he heard that Elisha had refused the suits of clothes; but if Elisha did so, he is sure that his descendants have been making up for his self-denial ever since.”
“But about Gehazi catching the leprosy or whatever it was?”
“I said I thought it was too awful a punishment for so small a thing, though, of course, it was dreadfully mean of Gehazi. But Mr. Friswell laughed and said that I had forgotten that all Gehazi had to do to make himself all right again was to fellow the prescription given to Naamun; so he wasn't so hard on the man after all.”
“There, you see!” cried Dorothy triumphantly. “You talk to me about the bad influence Mr. Friswell may have upon the children, and now you find that he has been doing his best to make the difficult parts of the Bible credible! For my own part, I feel that a flood of new light has been shed by him over some incidents with which I was not in sympathy before.”
“All right, have it your own way,” said I.
“You old goose!” said she. “Don't I know that why you have your knife in poor Friswell is simply because he thought your scheme of treillage was too elaborate.”
“Anyhow I'm going to carry it out 'according to plan,' to make use of a classic phrase,” said I.
And then I hurried off to the tool-house; and it was only when I had been there for some time that I remembered that the phrase which I had fancied I was quoting very aptly, was the explanation of a retreat.
I hoped that it would not strike Dorothy in that way, and induce her to remind me that it was much apter than I had desired it to be.
But there is no doubt that Friswell was right about Gehazi carrying out the prescription given to Naaman, for he remained in the service of the prophet, and he would not have been allowed to do that if he had been a leper.
Ihave devoted the foregoing chapter to Friswell without, I trust, any unnecessary acrimony, but simply to show the sort of man he was who took exception to the scheme of Formal Garden that I disclosed to him long ago. He actually objected to the Formal Garden which I had in my mind.
But an atheist, like the prophet Habakkuk of the witty Frenchman, is “capable de tout”
I have long ago forgiven Friswell for his vexatious objection, but I admit that I am only human, and that now and again I awake in the still hours of darkness from a nightmare in which I am tramping over formal beds of three sorts of echiverias, pursued by Friswell, flinging at me every now and again Mr. W. Robinson's volume onGarden Design, which, as every one knows, is an unbridled denunciation of Sir Reginald Blomfield's and Mr. Inigo Triggs's plea forThe Formal Garden. But I soon fall asleep again with, I trust, a smile struggling to the surface of the perspiration on my brow, as I reflect upon my success in spite of Friswell and the antiformalists.
More than twenty-five years have passed since the battle of the books on the Formal Garden took place, adding another instance to the many brought forward by Dorothy of a garden being a battlefield instead of a place of peace. I shall refer to the fight in another chapter; for surely a stimulating spectacle was that of the distinguished horticulturalist attacking the distinguished architect with mighty billets of yews which, like Samson before his fall, had never known shears or secateur, while the distinguished architect responded with bricks pulled hastily out from his builders' wall. In the meantime I shall try to account for my treatment of my predecessor's lawn, which, as I have already mentioned, occupied all the flat space between the house and the mound with the cherries and mays and laburnums towered over by the sycamores and chestnuts.
It was all suggested to me by the offer which 1 had at breaking-up price of what I might call a “garden suite,” consisting of a fountain, with a wide basin, and the carved stone edging for eight beds—sufficient to transform the whole area of the lawn “into something rich and strange,”—as I thought.
I had to make up my mind in a hurry, and I did so, though not without misgiving. I had never had a chance of high gardening before, and I had not so much confidence in myself as I have acquired since, misplaced though it may be, in spite of my experience, I see now what a bold step it was for me to take, and I think it is quite likely that I would have rejected it if I had had any time to consider all that it meant. I had, however, no more than twenty-four hours, and before a fourth of that time had passed I received some encouragement in the form of my publisher's half-yearly statement.
Now, Dorothy and I had simply been garden-lovers—I mean lovers of gardens, though I don't take back the original phrase. We had never been garden enthusiasts. We had gone through the Borghese, the Villa d'Este, the Vatican, the bowers behind the Pitti and the Uffizi, and all the rest of the show-places of Italy and the French Riviera—we had spent delightful days at every garden-island of the Caribbean, and had gone on to the plateaus of South America, where every prospect pleases and there is a blaze of flowers beneath the giant yuccas—we had even explored Kew together, and we had lived within a stone's throw of Holland House and the painters' pleasaunces of Melbury Road, but with all we had remained content to think of gardens without making them any important part of our life. And this being so, I now see how arrogant was that act of mine in binding myself down to a transaction with as far-reaching consequences to me as that of Dr. Faustus entailed to him.
Now I acknowledge that when I looked out over the green lawn and thought of all that I had let myself in for, I felt anything but arrogant. The destruction of a lawn is, like the state of matrimony in the Church Service, an act not to be lightly entered into; and I think I might have laid away all that stone-work which had come to me, until I should become more certain of myself—that is how a good many people think within a week or two of marriage—if I had not, with those doubts hanging over me, wandered away from the lawn and within sight of the straggling orchard with its rows of ill-planted plums and apples that had plainly borne nothing but leaves for many years. They were becoming an eye-sore to me, and the thought came in a flash:—
“This is the place for a lawn. Why not root up these unprofitable and uninteresting things and lay down the space in grass?”
Why not, indeed? The more I thought over the matter the more reconciled I became to the transformation of the house lawn. I felt as I fancy the father of a well-beloved daughter must feel when she tells him that she has promised to marry the son of the house at the other side of his paddock. He is reconciled to the idea of parting with her by the reflection that she will still be living beyond the fence, and that he will enjoy communion with her under altered conditions. That is the difference between partingwitha person and partingfroma person.
And now, when I looked at the house lawn, I saw that it had no business to be there. It was an element of incongruity. It made the house look as if it were built in the middle of a field. A field is all very well in its place, and a house is all very well in its place, but the place of the house is not in the middle of a field. It looks its worst there and the field looks its worst when the house is overlooking it.
I think that it is this impression of incongruity that has made what is called The Formal Garden a necessity of these days. We want a treatment that will take away from the abruptness of the mass of bricks and mortar rising straight up from the simplest of Nature's elements. We want a hyphenated House-and-Garden which we can look on as one and indivisible, like the First French Republic.
In short, I think that the making of the Formal Garden is the marriage ceremony that unites the house to its site, “and the twain shall be one flesh.”
That is really the relative position of the two. I hold that there are scores of forms of garden that may be espoused to a house; and I am not sure that such a term as Formal is not misleading to a large number of people who think that Nature should begin the moment that one steps out of one's house, and that nothing in Nature is formal. I am not going to take on me any definition of the constituent elements of what is termed the Formal Garden, but I will take it on me to stand up against such people as would have us believe that the moment you enter a house you leave Nature outside. A house is as much a product of Nature as a woodland or a rabbit warren or a lawn. The original house of that product of Nature known as man was that product of Nature known as a cave. For thousands of years before he got into his cave he had made his abode in the woodland. It was when he found he could do better than hang on to his bough and, with his toes, take the eggs out of whatever nests he could get at, that he made the cave his dwelling; and thousands of years later he found that it was more convenient to build up the clay into the shape of a cave than to scoop out the hillside when he wanted an addition to the dwelling provided for him in the hollows made by that natural incident known as a landslide. But the dwelling-house of to-day is nothing more than a cave built up instead of scooped out. Whether made of brick, stone, or clay—all products of Nature—it is fundamentally the same as the primeval cave dwelling; just as a Corinthian column is fundamentally identical with the palm-tree which primeval man brought into his service when he wished to construct a dwelling dependent of the forest of his pendulous ancestors. The rabbit is at present in the stage of development of the men who scooped out their dwellings; the beaver is in the stage of development of the men who gave up scooping and took to building; and will any one suggest that a rabbit warren or a beaver village is not Nature?
Sir R. Blomfield, in his book to which I have alluded, will not have this at all. “The building,” he says, “cannot resemble anything in Nature, unless you are content with a mud hut and cover it with grass.” That may be true enough; but great architect that he is, he would have shown himself more faithful to his profession if he had been more careful about his foundations. If he goes a little deeper into the matter he will find that man has not yet been civilised or “architected” out of the impressions left upon him by his thousands of years of cave-dwelling, any more than he has been out of his arboreal experiences of as many thousand years. While, as a boy, he retains vividly those impressions of his ancestors which gradually wear off—though never so completely as to leave no trace behind them—he cannot be restrained from climbing trees and enjoying the motion of a swing; and his chief employment when left to his own devices is scooping out a cave in a sand-bank. For the first ten or fifteen years of his life a man is in his instincts many thousand years nearer to his prehistoric relations than he is when he is twenty; after that the inherited impressions become blurred, but never wholly wiped out. He is still stirred to the deepest depths of his nature by the long tresses of a woman, just as was his early parent, who knew that he had to depend on such long tresses to drag the female on whom he had set his heart to his cave.
Scores of examples could be given of the retention of these inherited instincts; but many of them are in more than one sense of the phrase, “far-fetched.” When, however, we know that the architectural design which finds almost universal favour is that of the column or the pilaster—which is little more than the palm-tree of the Oriental forest of many thousand years ago—I chink we are justified in assuming that we have not yet quite lost sight of the fact that our dwellings are most acceptable when they retain such elements as are congenial with their ancient homes, which homes were undoubtedly incidents in the natural landscape.
That is why I think that the right way to claim its appropriateness for what is called the Formal Garden is, not that a house has no place in Nature, and therefore its immediate surrounding should be more or less artificial, but that the house is an incident in Nature modified by what is termed Art, and therefore the surround should be of the same character.
At the same time, I beg leave to say in this place that I am not so besotted upon my own opinion as to be incapable of acknowledging that Sir R. Blomfield's belief that a house can never be regarded as otherwise than wholly artificial, may commend itself to a much larger clientèle than I can hope for.
In any case the appropriateness of the Formal Garden has been proved (literally) down to the ground. As a matter of fact, no one ever thought of questioning it in England until some remarkable innovators, who called themselves Landscape Gardeners, thought they saw their way to work on a new system, and in doing so contrived to destroy many interesting features of the landscape.
But really, landscape gardening has never been consistently defined. Its exponents have always been slovenly and inconsistent in stating their aims; so that while they claim to be all for giving what they call Nature the supreme place in their designs, it must appear to most people that the achievement of these designs entails treating Nature most unnaturally. The landscape gardeners of the early years of the cult seem to me to be in the position of the boy of whom the parents said, “Charlie is so very fond of animals that we are going to make a butcher of him.” To read their enunciation of the principles by which they professed to be inspired is to make one feel that they thought the butchery of a landscape the only way to beautify it.
But, I repeat, the examples of their work with which we are acquainted show but a small amount of consistency with their professions of faith. When we read the satires that were written upon their work in the eighteenth century, we really feel that the lampooners have got hold of the wrong brief, and that they are ridiculing the upholders of the Formal Garden.
So far as I was concerned in dealing with my insignificant garden home, I did not concern myself with principles or theories or schools or consistency or inconsistency; I went ahead as I pleased, and though Friswell shook his head—I have not finished with him yet on account of that mute expression of disagreement with my aims—I enjoyed myself thoroughly, if now and again with qualms of uneasiness, in laying out what I feel I must call the House Garden rather than the Formal Garden, where the lawn had spread itself abroad, causing the wing of the house to have something of the appearance of a lighthouse springing straight up from a green sea. As it is now, that green expanse suggests a tropical sea with many brilliant islands breaking up its placid surface.
That satisfies me. If the lighthouse remains, I have given it araison d'etreby strewing the sea with islands.
I made my appeal to Olive, the practical one.
“Yes,” she said, after one of her thoughtful intervals. “Yes, I think it does look naturaler.”
And I do believe it does.