Part 2
“You scold me for writing too much. That is the least of my troubles! You must remember that debarred as I am from taking part in society, the Three R’s alone remain to me, and, indeed, of those only two—for owing to my having enjoyed an Eton education in days when arithmetic was deemed to be no part of the intellectual panoply of a gentleman, I can neither add, subtract, nor divide! I am a gluttonous reader, and only write from time to time.”
He was really composing more actively than he himself realized. About this time he wrote:
“Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford—not the Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible—but the unhappy hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte, who I believe has been most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony in Paris—all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even hinted at. The good British public has so long been used to look upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to be told that he had many admirable points.”
At the beginning of last year the aspect of Lord Redesdale was very remarkable. He had settled down into his life at Batsford, diversified by the frequent dashes to London. His years seemed to sit upon him more lightly than ever. His azure eyes, his curled white head thrown back, the almost jaunty carriage of his well-kept figure, were the external symbols of an inner man perpetually fresh, ready for adventure and delighted with the pageant of existence. He found no fault at all with life, save that it must leave him, and he had squared his shoulders not to give way to weakness. Perhaps the only sign of weakness was just that visible determination to be strong. But the features of his character had none of those mental wrinkles, those “rides de l’esprit,” which Montaigne describes as proper to old age. Lord Redesdale was guiltless of the old man’s self-absorption or exclusive interest in the past. His curiosity and sympathy were vividly exhibited to his friends, and so, in spite of his amusing violence in denouncing his own forgetfulness, was his memory of passing events. In the petulance of his optimism he was like a lad.
There was no change in the early part of last year, although it was manifest that the incessant journeying between Batsford and London was exhausting. The garden occupied him more and more, and he was distracted by the great storm of the end of March, which blew down and destroyed at the head of the bridge the wonderful group of cypresses, which he called “the pride of my old age.” But, after a gesture of despair, he set himself energetically to repair the damage. He was in his usual buoyant health when the very hot spell in May tempted him out on the 18th of May, with his agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swinbrook, a beautiful village on his Oxfordshire property, of which he was particularly fond. He was not successful, and in a splenetic mood he flung himself at full length upon a bank of wet grass. He was not allowed to remain there long, but the mischief was done, and in a few hours he was suffering from a bad cold. Even now, the result might not have been serious had it not been that in a few days’ time he was due to fulfil certain engagements in town. Nothing vexed Lord Redesdale more than not to keep a pledge. In all such matters he prided himself on being punctual and trustworthy, and he refused to change his plans by staying at home.
Accordingly, on the 23rd of May he came to London to transact some business, and to take the chair next day at a meeting of the Royal Society of Literature, of which he was a vice-president. This meeting took place in the afternoon, and he addressed a crowded assembly, which greeted him with great warmth. Those who were present, and saw his bright eyes and heard his ringing voice, could have no suspicion that they would see him again no more. His intimate friends alone perceived that he was making a superlative effort. There followed a very bad night, and he went down to Batsford next day, going straight to his bed, from which he never rose again. His condition, at first, gave rise to little alarm. The disease, which proved to be catarrhal jaundice, took its course; but for a long time his spirit and his unconsciousness of danger sustained him and filled those around him with hope. There was no disturbance of mind to the very last. In a shaky hand, with his stylograph, he continued to correspond with certain friends, about politics, and books, and even about _Veluvana_. In the beginning of August there seemed to be symptoms of improvement, but these were soon followed by a sudden and final relapse. Even after this, Lord Redesdale’s interest and curiosity were sustained. In his very last letter to myself, painfully scrawled only one week before his death, he wrote:
“Have you seen Ernest Daudet’s book just published, ‘Les auteurs de la guerre de 1914’? Bismarck is the subject of the first volume; the second will deal with the Kaiser and the Emperor Joseph; and the third with ‘leurs complices.’ I know E. D.; he is a brother of Alphonse, and is a competent historian. His book is most illuminating. Of course there are exaggerations, but he is always well _documenté_, and there is much in his work that is new. I don’t admire his style. The abuse of the historic present is bad enough, but what can be said in favour of the historic future with which we meet at every step? It sets my teeth on edge.”
But he grew physically weaker, and seven days later he passed into an unconscious state, dying peacefully at noon of the 17th of August, 1916. He was saved, as he had wished to be, from all consciousness of decrepitude.
EDMUND GOSSE.
_August, 1917._
FURTHER MEMORIES
VELUVANA
These chapters are simply an attempt to record the gist of some conversations and noonday thoughts, which have arisen from time to time in idle moments spent in a garden on the Cotswold Hills, where there are gathered together certain features unusual in Western pleasances. Our thoughts are largely the creations of our surroundings, and when at every step I am met by some work of art or a plant which has travelled perhaps twelve thousand miles to bring me a greeting from afar, then I, too, begin to travel and am carried away beyond the seas. If here and there I think and talk of things nearer home, my thoughts are still those of a wanderer—still those which are suggested by the mysterious thrilling of one of those chords for which there is nothing to account, but which never vibrate as they do in my Veluvana, the bamboo grove of Buddha, which thus becomes a temple dedicated to Mnemosyne.
One thing I wish to disclaim. I am often told that people believe that I have a Japanese garden. I have nothing of the kind. A Japanese garden is a mystery hard to be understood; it is a work of art depending upon certain fixed laws and canons prescribed, many centuries ago, by a school of Aesthetes, whose lives were spent in the punctilious observance of the rules prescribed for tea-drinking and incense-burning and the writing of sonnets, in grounds laid out upon principles, of which the slightest violation would be an outrage upon the decencies of culture. In such gardens flowers play but a small part, but the shapes, the position and the orientation of quaint rocks, the introduction of miniature lakes, and even of the similitude of rivers carried out in sand or gravel, with stepping stones by which they may be crossed without disturbing the smooth surface, these and many other whims are the important but sober and yet fantastic features upon which the Japanese landscape gardener insists.
Trees and flowering shrubs—such as cherries and plums—lianes like the Wistaria and the ornamental vines, are used with the utmost discretion, as they are with us. But the introduction of alien plants, the exhibition of bronze ornaments and lanterns, or the naturalistic arrangement of rockwork with a streamlet crossed by lacquered bridges, no more give a garden the claim to be called Japanese than the possession of a piece of old Greek sculpture would liken a house to the Acropolis of Athens, or than skill in the pretty and very difficult game of kicking shuttlecocks with the heel would entitle a Pekingese boy to claim kinship with a Rugby football player.
A Japanese garden has a certain poetry and secret charm of its own. To those who are adepts in its mysteries it is full of suggestion, but it is highly artificial; everything that you see in it is a contradiction of Nature, who, poor dear! is forced into obeying every craze and vagary of the artist, not being allowed to see a twig or a bud take the direction which she destined for it. In that it lacks the sweet simplicity and countrified untutored grace of our English Edens. It is not a place in which a young maiden would gather a posy bejewelled with May dew, or stoop to consult the ray-florets of a daisy as to the beating of her lover’s heart.
There are many crafts in which we English folk have much to learn from abroad; in gardening that is not so—there we are not unskilled, indeed rather copied than copiers. We have our own gardens and we may rest content with them, since they give us without stint the full joys of form and colour, beauty and fragrance. What more do we want? The gardens of the Japanese may suit the fairies of their own legends, but the great god Pan would surely rather see his Dryads and Wood-nymphs tread a measure on the velvet of a trim English lawn, than picking their way among cruel stones to the torture of their rosy feet.
But though we may not be minded to imitate in our own homes the eccentricities and fancies of Japanese garden experts—whims and fancies handicapped by the severities of austere tradition—there is no law to hinder us from taking a hint from some of the effects which they achieve, nor from introducing into our gardens some great masterpiece of one of those exquisitely imaginative artists whose smaller and daintier works are gems welcomed with such warmth elsewhere.
Some months after the above lines were written there appeared in the _Times_ of May 6th, 1916, one of those charming articles on gardening with which we are from time to time favoured, in which the writer expresses much the same view of the Japanese gardener’s art that I hold. Only in one point I differ from him. It is not “a close study of nature” which guides the Japanese landscape maker; on the contrary, he follows whims and symbols hard to be understood. Every distorted stone which he brings at great expense from a huge distance must be so placed as to be in harmony with some cryptic principle of æstheticism. Nature is not what he aims at.
The Japanese, who have an exquisite system of their own of natural gardening, though of gardening in which all is designed and nothing left to chance, are very sparing of flowers. They would rather have one blossom where it will tell as a delightful surprise than a thousand where they merely make a mass of colour. Placing is everything to them, but their principles of placing and grouping are got from the close study of nature, like an artist’s principles of composition. We must not imitate them, for if we do, we shall merely parody them. Bamboos and stones and lanterns will not make a Japanese garden.
But we can grasp the principles on which they express their love of nature in a garden; we can see clearly what is the difference between formal and natural gardening, and avoid the mistake of trying to combine the beauties of both. One is always uncomfortable in a garden when there are a thousand flowers where a hundred would be better. One may not be aware of the waste, but it wearies one all the same.
The fascination of the East never dies. But there comes a fatal time when, to the voice of the Siren, sing she never so tenderly, there is no response. Age and new duties have forged fetters, sweet and soft as rose-leaves, but so binding that not even the loadstone mountain of Sindbad the Sailor would avail to tear them away from us, and so we are fain to satisfy our travel-hunger as best we may, feeding upon memory. Then it is that the relics gathered together during the adventures of many years acquire a new and almost sacred value. They speed the flight of our thoughts like the wings of Pegasus. The man who has chaffered with the Jew merchants in the picturesque gloom of the bazaars of Stamboul; who has bathed in Jordan and Scamander, and slept in the black tents of the Bedouin; who has wandered through the mysterious portals of the Chĭen Mĕn, the frowning gate of the Tartar city, to sip tea with some art expert in the Liu Li Chăng, the Paternoster Row of Peking, listening to stories of the dilettanti in the reign of Chĭen Lung the magnificent—such a man, if now he can do no more than trim the silken sails of his imagination, bound for the lands of enchantment, must have about him many a treasure which, if he but shut his eyes and give himself up to the luxury of dreaming day-dreams, will bring back to the old wanderer a whiff from the birthplace of the Sun, a whiff sweeter in his nostrils than those cloying perfumes to which the æsthetes, according to their affected euphuist jargon, “listened” centuries ago in the lovely gardens of Ginkakuji, the Silver Pavilion of the sacred city of Kiōto.[1]
As for me, I have been all my life bitten by the collector’s mania, and so the wings of my Pegasus have many feathers; for my house, and even my gardens, are full of curious odds and ends, the spoil of many lands. On the terrace standing sentry at the entrance to the house are two huge bronze Kylins (in Pekingese, Chih Ling), representations of the mystic beast which was seen last at the birth of Confucius, and will not reappear until ten thousand years shall have elapsed from that date.
[Illustration: SCENE IN THE AUTHOR’S GARDEN.
[_To face p. 6._]
The male has a single horn and is very fierce, but not more so than his hornless mate, which, with her cruel tusks, grins defiance at the world. Just such another pair in the Imperial Park of the Ten Thousand Longevities at Yuen Ming Yuen used to raise my wonder fifty years ago. Built into the wall of one of the two little gazebos which are at the east and west ends of my terrace are two bricks—the one rough and rugged, sun-dried and splashed with the mortar of more than two thousand years since, from the Great Wall of China at Ku Pei Kŏu; the other white, smooth and richly glazed from the famous Porcelain Tower of Nanking, which was destroyed by the Tai Ping rebels some sixty years ago, before they were overtaken by the Vengeance of Gordon and “the Ever-Victorious Army.”
Shall I ever forget the tramp of a couple of miles under an August sun in 1865 with that huge brick from the Great Wall seeming to bite into my aching shoulder? Over against the little summer-house, guarding the entrance to the garden from the attacks of evil spirits, are small statues of the Ni-ō, the two kings whose ugliness is enough to scare away any inauspicious demons who might be about. They must miss the ritual of their own country where the pious pilgrim, having written his prayer on to a scrap of paper, chews it into a pellet, and spits it at the sacred figure. If it sticks, all is well, and the prayer will be heard; if it falls to earth, the fates will be unkind—so outside a fashionable temple the two gods are bespattered all over with an eruption of moist pellets. Here from that holy rite they are immune.
High up in the wildest part of the wild garden, under the shade of a spreading oak, there stands, or rather sits, turned towards the East, as is fitting, a bronze statue of Buddha of heroic size. His hand is raised in the attitude of preaching; his features are expressive of the holy calm and noble abstraction which are traditional in the effigies of the great reformer; the centre of the skull is slightly raised, and between the brows is a curl, representing the wind, the mystic white lock. These two are among the many secret birth-signs by which the soothsayers and diviners recognize in a newly-born babe the advent of Bodhisatva, or future Buddha. Surrounding the figure are planted chusan palms from China and bamboos from the Himalaya mountains, among which a stag and a hind, life-sized bronze representations of the small Japanese deer, watch over the loneliness of the thinker. Facing the statue is a rest-house, flanked by two huge bronze lanterns bearing the chrysanthemum and the Pawlonia flower, the two crests of the Mikado, and on either side of the door are two small white granite elephants, brought from Ceylon, Buddhistic symbols, full of significance. A little higher up the hill a pergola leads to a tiny spring, with a dolphin spout, from which fitfully, for it is often dry, a runlet of pure water trickles into a stone basin.
Immediately opposite is an ishi-dori, one of those granite lanterns which you will see in every Japanese temple. Lower down the hill is a grand bronze lion, with his paws resting upon a ball of cloisonné enamel, symbolical of the strength of Buddha, and in the middle of the walled garden is a dragon fountain, spouting water into a tiny pond full of pink water-lilies and gold-fish. We Westerns are wont to talk of fiery dragons; not so the Orientals. With them the dragon is a creature of the water, and so is used in art for fountains just as we use the lion’s head, taking the idea from the Egyptian, who imagined that the rising of the Nile took place when the Sun was in Leo. In China the dragon represents the principle of good, the tiger that of evil; the thunderstorm is a fight between the two.
All these things have their meaning, and here, as you sit in the broad verandah of the rest-house, represent two scenes in the life of the Buddha; firstly, the preaching of the first sermon in the Mrighadeva, the deer forest near Benares, where the stags and hinds come to listen to the Holy One, and, secondly, the Veluvana, or Bamboo grove, which King Bimbisara presented to the Buddha and which became the first Vihara, monastery or meeting-place, of the new sect’s adherents and monks. The story of the Veluvana is that of Ahab and Naboth the Jezreelite over again. Some six hundred years more or less before our era—how much more or how much less is a matter of small moment, though the learned must needs break their heads in the vain attempt to fix the exact dates of these events—there reigned in Maghada King Bimbisara, a monarch not a little feared.
Before he mounted the throne he greatly had set his heart upon a certain grove, or garden belonging to a householder who would not part with it. So he determined to bide his time until he should become king, and then to kill the man and take his land. This he did, and the lawful owner, who after death was born again in the shape of a poisonous snake, sought an occasion to fix his deadly fangs in the king. One day the king had gone into the garden with his wives, and fell asleep while only one of the women was by him. Then the snake, crawling close to him, was about to strike, when some Kalantaka birds seized it and began to scream. This woke the woman, who jumped up and killed the snake.
[Illustration: REST HOUSE IN THE AUTHORS GARDEN.
[_To face p. 10._]
In gratitude to the birds who had saved his life, the king caused the garden to be planted with bamboos, which they love, and the place became known as the Kalantakanivasa Veluvana, or the Bamboo grove of the Kalantaka birds. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, following the story of the Chinese pilgrim Hsüan Chwang (of whom I hope to speak later), gives a less romantic derivation to the name Kalantakanivasa. Kalanta, as he tells the tale, was a rich merchant, who had originally given his garden to the Brahmans, but having received the sublime Law, he took it away from them and transferred it to the Buddha. I hope that this may not be the true story, for in that case the name would simply mean the Bamboo grove, or garden of Kalanta, and so the birds and the snake must fade into the clouds of fancy.
According to the more legendary version of the story, it is written that when the Blessed One, having attained the supreme wisdom, entered upon his ministry, after six years of meditation, and an asceticism which had almost starved his very life, he came with his disciples to Rajagriha, where he was visited by Bimbisara, King of Maghada. This king had had five wishes: (1) That a Buddha might appear during his reign; (2) that he might himself see him; (3) that he might learn the truth from him; (4) that he might understand it; (5) that he might follow his commandments. When the king saw the Buddha and listened to his preaching, he was converted with many of his people, and invited the Blessed One to come to his city, where he set a great feast before him. When the feast was over, the king solemnly poured water over the hands of the Blessed One, saying, “I give the Kalantakanivasa Veluvana to the Blessed One to dispose of as may please him.” And that is how it came to pass that a grove of bamboos was the first Vihara, or meeting-place of Buddha and his saints.
Full of poetry and Indian mysticism are the legends and fairy tales which monkish superstition has woven round the life of the Buddha, doing him and his memory no good service thereby; for when truth is overgrown with fables, like some fair flower choked by weeds, it becomes lost to sight and strangled, and men begin to doubt whether, indeed, it had any existence. In this way some doctors have been led to deny that such a man as the Buddha ever lived upon earth; men of learning have spent much profound scholarship on proving that he was merely a sun-myth; others have explained him away as being in some sort an astronomical allegory. It would be as easy to explain away Napoleon Buonaparte—indeed, did not that cunning logician, Archbishop Whately, making fun out of his own science, prove irrefutably by rule of syllogism that no such man as Napoleon ever did or ever could have existed?