Part 8

These are strangely frivolous recollections of pretty women and smart dresses and coxcombry of men-milliners that came thrusting themselves into the midst of one of the great tragedies of history. But these are the tricks which memory plays us: the most grotesque ideas surging up in the midst of acute sorrow, the dance of death serving to accentuate the follies of a farce—so unstable are our minds. All this is conjured up by the recollection of Gallifet, before he became a famous cavalry general, when he was a brilliant young officer, the spoilt child of a court, the favourite officer of an emperor, popular with men and women, idolized by his soldiers, long before the cruel wounds of the Mexican campaign—when he showed what the man about town was worth when brought face to face with grim war—the last man in Europe of whom I should have thought that one day he would have to experience those emotions which cause the most callous judge’s voice to falter when he puts on the black cap.

Later in life, with his closely-cropped white hair and moustache dyed black, he was a picturesque figure in Paris—still a beau sabreur, still a soldier at every point—a name to conjure with had the opportunity presented itself.

TREES AND THEIR LEGENDS

Solitude, surrounded by memories of which I have spoken, and by the fanciful brood of thoughts to which they give birth, has a mystic power of banishing all trammels of time and of place. The plants in the garden begin to take strange forms: the bamboos are drawn up out of their puny Western stature into gracefully-waving plumes of Brobdingnagian growth, such as we see in the Peradeniya Gardens of Ceylon; the oak under which the great Buddha sits, solemnly holding up a warning hand, changes into a holy Bō-tree, its long-stalked, pointed leaves quivering in a gentle breeze, laden with the heavy perfume of the sacred Champak flower; the fleece of clouds sails away into space and the soft English sky hardens into the metallic blue of the glaring East.

All of a sudden a slight chilly gust chases away the whole illusion. Kapilavastu, Rajagriha, the deer forest, the Veluvana, with its crowd of yellow-robed monks carrying their begging bowls, fade away, and we are sobered into the commonplace realities of life on a spur of the Cotswold Hills. It is like the awakening after the intoxication of Hashish, or after the short death dealt by laughing gas.

The dream may have been fascinating, but there are glorious compensations in the awakening, for though our peaceful gardens are not so wildly fantastic, not such an orgy of colour, as those of the gorgeous tropics, our woodlands in their grave dignity are matchless: they touch the heart; the others stir the senses.

It was a lovely day in early summer, and the show of the Royal Horticultural Society was in full swing in the gardens of Chelsea Hospital. All the world was there—all the world, and everybody else’s wife. A few of us were standing looking at a grand display of orchids, when a charming lady turned round to me and said: “Oh! how delicate, how beautiful and how distinguished they are! Surely the very aristocracy of plant life!” “No,” I answered, “they are only the nouveaux riches. It is the old oaks of our parks and forests that are the aristocracy of plants.”

Surely there is nothing more proud, nothing more wonderful in nature, than the noble old age of those patriarchs which centuries ago chequered with their quivering shade the glades in which Robin Hood and Little John drew the bow, and holy Friar Tuck made his quarter-staff spin round his head like the sails of a windmill. Indeed, all our indigenous trees are glorious. The beech, the ash, the wych-elm, and even the so-called British elm, which, sooth to say, is only a naturalized alien that came to us from Italy and has been so long among us, living in trusty alliance with our natives, that we have come to treat him as our own—all these, in company with the oak, truly make up what Wordsworth called “a brotherhood of venerable trees.”

In Britain, and probably all over Europe, there is no tree which commands so much veneration as the oak. We talk of hearts of oak, and of the wooden walls of old England, and we endow our hoary, gnarled giants with all the attributes of stateliness and royal honour. One squire of high degree I once knew who, shortly before his death, thanking God for a long life, boasted, not that his eighty years had been spent in the practice of piety and virtue, as doubtless was the case, but that he had never cut down an oak. With the oaks we connect the stories of old British kings and the mysterious liturgies of the golden-sickled Druids, those Brahmans of the Cassiterides—the Tin Islands—who, if we may believe Cæsar and Pliny, who are our only authorities—for the priesthood, even if they could do so, might write down nothing—exercised power greater than those of popes. Woe to him who denied their authority or questioned their law! For their excommunication was more terrible than that of Rome, making a man an outcast, a pariah, a social leper, with whom no man might deal or hold intercourse; for if he did, he, too, would fall under the awful ban. After a lapse of two thousand years we have heard of something of the same kind in our sister island.

And our beloved Scotch fir! What of that true Briton? Happily there are still here and there in remote Highland glens a few of the old primeval forests of that great tree left. Probably the most picturesque of these is the King’s forest of Ballochbine, where you may see it in all the fullness of its nature—veterans borne down with age, stalwarts in full vigour, youngsters in their nonage, babies just born from the seed. Their red stems, glowing in the evening sun, spring out of a carpet of heather, blaeberries and ferns, among mossy rocks and lichen-starred stones. Close to them are their graceful consorts, the birches, which Lowell called “the most shy and ladylike of trees,” drooping their delicate plumes over the pools and musical rills of brown peat-stained burns. What a succession of pictures, hard to beat, does this old forest of Ballochbine give! And that is as it should be, for is it not the King’s own?

The happy union between the pine and the birch has been sung by some Scottish poet in a simple but touching Epithalamium:

“The Pine’s the King of Scottish glens: The Queen, ah! who is she? The fairest tree the forest kens. The bonnie birken tree!”

We may be asked, since we have so grand a pine of our own, why import from abroad so many aliens, many of which are certainly not its superiors in beauty? I suppose that the answer must be that of the daily partridge which the domestically faithless French king brought in argument against the remonstrances of his father-confessor. Besides, it can hardly be denied that many of them are exquisitely beautiful. One of the lovely blue spruces from Pike’s Peak in Colorado, looking as if it had been dyed in the mystic waters of the Grotto Azzurra of Capri,[9] strikes an altogether new note in our garden landscape; the steeple of a tapering cypress will give that perpendicular line which is so valuable to the painter, as we may see in Italian gardens, in the picturesque cemeteries of Constantinople, and all over the Levant. A blue cedar from the Atlas range in North Africa, its branches feathering down to the ground in graceful profusion, catches the slanting rays of the sun and sends them back to you as if its leaves were sprinkled with hoar-frost or wrought in some luminous metal. But it is idle to compile lists and catalogues. They make dull writing and duller reading. Suffice it to say that the intrinsic beauties of the many trees, shrubs, lianes and vines, which have been added to our own lovely flora, furnish an ample justification for their admission into our homes.

But apart from this there is the collector’s mania to be reckoned with. Most men take a pride in showing their friends some gem, some treasured rarity, and the gardener is as proud of his collection of unique plants as the Hertfords, the Rothschilds and the Pierpont Morgans have been of their pictures and miniatures, their Sèvres porcelain, or the masterpieces of Riesener, Gouthière and Caffieri. The plant collector has this advantage over those famous lovers of the living works of dead artists that he can gratify his whims and vanity so much more cheaply.

“What brought Sir Visto’s ill-got wealth to waste? Some Demon whispered—Visto, have a taste.”

Even orchids are cheap in comparison with Rembrandts, Vandycks, Sir Joshuas and Gainsboroughs. It stands to reason that the gathering together of such treasures as may be seen at Westonbirt, at Aldenham, at Frensham, and in one or two other collectors’ gardens, cannot be achieved without a considerable expenditure of money, guided by consummate knowledge; but, even so, the cost is relatively small. And the owners of lesser pleasaunces with small outlay can profit by the experience and public spirit of those gardening magnates, both professional and amateur, who combine to send out costly expeditions to new fields of adventure and discovery in order to add to the treasure stores of horticulture.

If there be any who are so jealous of the honour of our British forests and woods that they resent any competition with their beauty, and look upon all new-comers from over the sea as undesirable aliens, they should, at any rate, allow that, though they would be out of tune in a wild forest, they bring lovely harmonies of colour and form into the more artificial scenes with which we adorn the immediate surroundings of our country houses. They are no more foreign than the numberless flowers with which our predecessors used to furnish their beds and borders, and they have two great advantages over these, as I hope to show presently.

As to the question of fitness or unfitness, that is a matter of conditions and arrangement. I know a vast park in which the old oaks and beeches used to make up a sylvan scene of incomparable grandeur. Some years ago the owner, fired with a new and wholly uneducated enthusiasm, studded the stately forest with lovely little Japanese maples, but without any intervening masses of cultivation to make the garden blend with the primeval trees. The effect was deplorably ludicrous—nay, it was worse than ludicrous: it was an act of desecration. Had my friend been more judicious, what charming effects he might have conjured up in a suitable place with those same little crimson bushes which he condemned to play so silly a part in among his glorious secular oaks! What magical scenes have been called up with their help at Westonbirt! But those pictures were produced by knowledge.

There was a time when in spring and summer I used to look forward to the autumn, hailing its advent as the season of sport, when every day brought some new joy. Now that I have left the autumn of life far behind me and am deep in its winter, I have no love left for the shortening days, the rustle of falling leaves, and the cold patter of the rain on the dimmed panes of glass. And yet when the sun shines, how beautiful is the Indian summer! How lovely the dismissal of the haze floating away across the valley! Yes! Autumn has its consolations.

Foreigners who have never been in this country generally think that we live like newts and frogs in a land of marshes and dismal morasses, curtained by fogs through which the sun’s rays never pierce, a land sadly breeding a mysterious disease which they call “Le spleen.” In the fifties, as Disraeli once put it, they looked upon us as “an insular people subject to fogs, and possessing a powerful middle class,” both, in their eyes, equally objectionable. All the greater was their surprise and admiration when they came to realize the soft loveliness of our landscapes. Sixty years ago and more I was sent home from Eton for a few days’ change after some trifling ailment, and my father took me, and a French friend of his who was staying with him, to Richmond. Never shall I forget that man’s astonished enthusiasm when the view from Richmond Hill burst upon his sight.

It was, as good luck would have it, a rarely beautiful afternoon in October. The trees in the park were clothed in the golden russets of autumn. The sunlight was dancing upon the river running like a broad silver ribbon through the valley—a delicate blue mist threw an exquisitely diaphanous veil over the distance. Our friend, brought up in the fallacies of the French novelists of those days, lifted his hands in amazement and stood silent.

It was my first sight of Richmond. I have travelled far and wide since then, and have seen many more startling scenes, but the haunting beauty of that autumn evening remains one of my happiest dreams. There is a mysterious charm in that landscape, with the oaks which were veterans when Henry the Eighth hunted the deer under their boughs, the lush grass, and the Thames, that sacred river, for an Eton boy without its peer in the world. It is a scene which neither Alps nor Rockies, neither the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, nor the Great Wall of China, nor the wonders of the tropical jungle, can efface. And—it is home.

Some thirty years ago when, as I have said, autumn was still the welcome herald of sport, I, happily inspired, laid the foundation of what to-day robs it of some of its sadness. Now that the stalls in my stable are empty and the guns lie idle in the racks of the gun-room, I reap the reward. I sent to America for acorns, I bought seed of the giant Japanese vine (_Vini coignettia_) in Tokio. From Veitch (alas! for the death of a noble firm!) I procured specimens of all the species and varieties of Japanese maples: Thunberg’s berberis, the Persian parrottia—these, with the various forms of rhus and other choice plants, make up a palette of colours to cheer the dool of the dying year. In October one after another the maples begin to send up tongues of fire, setting the hill-side in flames.

It is a rare treat to see the sun shining through the leaves of some trees red as the pigeon’s-blood ruby; rare to see the fretted lace-work of others clothing them in a gorgeous panoply of old gold. Their neighbours are gleaming like the jewels in Oriental fable. The hollies and thorns and taller trees are draped with flamboyant curtains sent down by the huge vines—red, yellow, tawny orange, festoons falling in a riotous feast of colour.

Among all these proud foreigners the more modest yet no less beautiful native spindle-tree suffers no eclipse. A little later the American oaks begin to assert themselves. These, a little while before they turn crimson, assume all the quality of an old Chinese bronze which the patina of time has painted with the many hues of Joseph’s coat mysteriously blended together in an exquisite harmony. When we watch all these, we understand the poetry of the Japanese when they talk of their mountains and forests clothed in the brocade of the maples.

It must be obvious that gardening, the object of which is the production of a succession of varied pictures which, being inspired by the observation of Nature in her many moods, might appeal to the artistic taste of a painter or stir the emotion of a poet, presents difficulties undreamt of by the flower-bed manufacturers of fifty or sixty years ago. Their gardening was all done with compasses and straight-edge, and the geometrical result, the eccentric “knottes” worked out in alternantheras, ecneverias, golden feather and the like, savoured of nothing nearer to nature than the Tottenham Court Road.

Those were the days in which the garden, like the kitchen, was the special province of the mistress of the house. Of the latter she might know something, of the former generally nothing; and the consequence was that it was handed over to men, who, though they might be most admirable cultivators, had had no artistic training, had not had the opportunity of learning by travel, and were content to carry on certain rule-of-thumb traditions, which turned out every man’s garden in the likeness of that of every other man. In the uniformly unrelieved brilliancy of geraniums, verbenas and calceolarias, of imagination or poetry there was not a trace—not even the merit of invention.

In his brilliant book, “Form and Colour,” Mr. March Phillips divides the human mind into two great categories—the intellectual and the emotional. The intellectual faculty is characteristic of the West, the emotional faculty prevails in the East. Next comes the question of Form and Colour in Art. “Form,” he says, “has dominated Art whenever and wherever the intellectual faculty was dominant in life; colour has dominated Art whenever and wherever the emotional faculty has dominated life.” Later in the book, when speaking of the contrast between the Art of the West and the Art of the East, he proceeds: “Form, as we were saying, is chiefly a matter of the intellect. The arts which deal with form convey ideas. Their appeal is to the mind. _Colour, on the other hand, conveys no ideas._ [My italics.] It is emotional and appeals to the senses rather than to the intellect. And this being so, it seems natural that the Western temperament, intellectual rather than sensuous, should excel in form rather than in colour; while the Eastern, sensuous rather than intellectual, should excel in colour rather than in form.”

This theory of colour and form gives us much food for thought, and it is impossible not to be struck by the aptness with which it may be applied to the gardener’s craft. The gorgeous colour of the one school of gardening appeals directly to the senses, and, like other similar appeals where there is no relief from monotony, it soon satiates and wearies.

The kaleidoscopic beds which remind us of Pallas Athene springing fully armed from the brain of Zeus, are at the outset the same as they will be four months later, when their glory will be ignominiously wheeled away to the rubbish heap. Day after day you look out from your window and there is no change—nothing but an eternal Oriental glare of scarlet and yellow. How can such a garden create ideas? Compare with this the garden of form. Here there is plenty to excite ideas and fire the imagination, for here you have life with all its changes and accidents, from the tender birth of the bud to the vigour of the mature plant, the loves of the flowers, and the happy ripening of the fruit, which is the mystery of maternity.

No two days are alike; as they follow one another, each brings with it something new, some fresh beauty, some intimate revelation of Nature’s secrets. And when the year has nearly run its course, when the autumn leaves fall to the ground in a shower of gold such as that which broke through Danaë’s prison, there is no death or decay of the plant, no carting off to the _fosse commune_, but just a long, happy winter’s sleep, enviable as that of a dormouse resting in the sure hope of a glorious new birth when the first kiss of spring shall awaken the sleeping beauty in the wood.

Colour, then, is of the East sensuous; form is of the West intellectual. It is, of course, a mere coincidence, and not a rule capable of being laid down; but as I was walking to-day in a garden of form with Mr. Phillips’ theory seething in my brain, I could not but be struck by noting that, besides our own native trees, by far the greater number of those that have been naturalized here for the sake of their shape are of Western origin; while, with the exception of the American oaks, those that we value for their gorgeous colouring—such, for instance, as the Japanese maples and vines—come to us from the East.

It is hardly worth noticing, but it was certainly curious that, wherever I looked, there I saw form transported from the West. The caravans which crossed the Rocky Mountains in search of gold, not without leaving many skeletons by the way; the orchid hunters of the Amazon, braving sickness, fevers and poisoned arrows, have enriched our pleasaunces with treasures, not to speak of the brilliantly-coloured gems of which they were primarily in search, which, could our grandfathers, and even our fathers, come to life again, would make them open their eyes wide with astonishment, wondering whether some magician could have waved his wand over their cherished grounds, changing them into fairyland.

The diplomatists, who opened up Japan in 1858, the pioneers of trade, who have penetrated into the secret places of Western China, carrying their lives in their hands, have all added to our wealth of plants, both in form and colour, but chiefly in colour. When we see the glorious velvety shafts of Lawson’s Cypress, or _Libocedrous decurrens_, shooting up heavenward like church spires, when we look upon the great American conifers, so rich and so various, or among the lowlier plants, are startled by the huge leaves of the Chilian Gunneras, we cannot but admit that for form we have to thank the West.

In a later chapter, in the course of a fascinating disquisition on Byzantine architecture, Mr. Phillips goes on to say: “We must recognize that between these ideas of colour and softness there is something more than an accidental connection ... softness and colour go together as naturally as hardness and form.”

These are words which might be applied with special fitness to the garden. But although form is of its very essence hard, so far as outlines are concerned, we are not without one corrective which softens and subdues it. That corrective is atmosphere.

I hold, and I think that most fellow-craftsmen, if I may dare to reckon myself among gardeners, will agree with me, that background is absolutely essential to success; yet if you place a statue, or plant a specimen tree, immediately against the finest background that imagination could desire, it will remain hard and shorn of much of its charm, because it will lack the softening influence of atmosphere.

I know no better illustration of this than the way in which the Venus of Milo is shown at the Louvre. It is so skilfully placed that the air plays all round it, and the outlines of the marble melt, as it were, into the surrounding atmosphere. Were it pressed, as statues so often are, close against a curtain or a dead wall, the supreme beauty of the goddess would be cruelly sacrificed. The form, the inspiration of the sculptor, would be there, but the hardness of the material would be unredeemed; it would represent death instead of life. That is why so many photographic portraits fail to render beauty. The model is placed immediately in front of a screen—all sense of aerial perspective is lost—and the result is, from an artistic point of view, a deadly failure, even should the photograph be technically perfect, so far as optics and chemistry are concerned. No composition is good, or even tolerable, where aerial perspective is neglected, and that is as true in gardening as it is in the plastic arts.