A NOTE UPON THE ILLUSTRATIONS
In one sense a beautiful poem can never be illustrated: being beautiful it is already perfect, and, to intelligent minds, illustrates itself. Everything that it says it says in the best possible way; within the limits of the medium chosen, it is absolute.
If, therefore, illustration is to be an attempt to say over again what the poet has already said perfectly, it is certain to prove itself superfluous, and to be nothing better than a labour of tautology. But there is a quality in all fine work which gives invitation into the charmed circle of its influence to whatever is freshly andsympathetically touched with the ideas it conveys. Great work tells so differently on different minds; not by contrary but by kindred ways it speaks freshly perhaps to each individual.
Thus, to express accurately in another medium an appreciation, an individual sense of delight or emotion in work of finished and constructive beauty is the only way of illustration which seems to me profitable. The appreciation may be faulty; but in so far as it states a personal view of its subject, it has legitimate standing ground.
I have endeavoured to make evident in my drawings the particular way in which this poem has appealed to me. The garden, fine and elaborate, full of artifice, opposing with an infinity of delicate labour the random overgrowth of the wilderness which seeks jealously to encroach on it, has perhaps this to hint concerning all forms of beauty of man’s devising,—that, in spite of the pains entailed in their cultivation, the fragile and conditional state of their constitution remains: over all such things at last comes the tread of Pan, effacing, and replacing with his own image andsuperscription, the parenthetic grace—so spiritual almost in some of its suggestions—of the garden deity.
The lady of the garden, the charming sentimentalist, whom I can only excuse for not killing the slugs and snails by believing that she wore a crinoline and was altogether ignorant of natural laws, harmonises exquisitely for a while with her high-clipped hedges and garden statuary. It is anensembleto gaze into as into a picture: but the shadows of ruin and decay cross it; it is too graceful to last. Pan is stronger than any form of beauty that springs out of modes and fashions.
So, when she dies, she is but the forerunner of the death of the whole garden: when she evaporates thepetite mortruns through all its bowers and alleys: its apparitions rise and follow her funeral with a sense that their own time of dissolution approaches; and the mode passes through a period of squalor and morbid abandonment back into the hands of the ultimate master of things earthly.
It is an unpopular thing, may be, to assert that man’s sense of beauty is so conditional to himself and the uses he makes of it.Yet here we are shown how, with war to the death, unsightly overthrow follows his abandonment of his stolen pleasure-ground, and wipes out his trespassing footprints.
Man’s sense of beauty is his own: it is not Nature’s. The aim of all art is to restrict Nature, and teach her that her place is not in the high places of men; and we only admire Nature because in the present strength of our civilisation we are strong enough to pet her. Hannibal was a better judge of the true unsightliness of Alpine scenery than we ourselves.
I should have preferred to add nothing to what I have drawn: but an explanation of my unkind view of the rival claims of Pan and the Garden-god has been wrung from me.
For the present the genius of civilisation, numerating duration into hours and years and centuries for man’s convenience, overrides the slow-crawling tortoise of Time: but it will not always be so; and earth will come at last to be altogether rid of us and that superfluous “sense of beauty” which has so long yoked her back, and hedged her wastes and furrowed her fields.
Laurence Housman.