Part 5
These most probably constituted all those “elegancies of art,” with which a writer of the time gives her credit for improving the Gardens. Such, at any rate, was the case in the more public portions of them; and if the private ones enjoyed any others, we may guess what they were, from Pope’s banter of the horticultural fashions of the day, in a paper which he contributed to the _Guardian_, the year after the appearance of that of Addison’s in the _Spectator_. The following is a taste of them. The poet is giving a catalogue of plants that were to be disposed of by auction:
“Adam and Eve in yew; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the Tree of Knowledge in the great storm; Eve and the Serpent very flourishing.
“St. George in box; his arm scarce long enough, but will be in a condition to stick the Dragon by next April.
“An old Maid of Honour in wormwood.
“A topping Ben Jonson in laurel.
“A quick-set hog, shot up into a porcupine, by its being forgot a week in rainy weather.”
The Kensington Gardens were popular throughout the whole of the three Georges’ reign, but flourished most, as far as names and fashions are concerned, in those of the first and second. The space of time includes half a century; and Walpole, Lady Suffolk, Beau Nash, and Colley Cibber, lived through it all; the two last from a much earlier period, and Walpole into a much later one, down to the French Revolution. At the beginning of it, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, with the wits of the Kit-Cat club about her, may be considered as having been the reigning belle of the promenaders; to her, succeeded the Bellendens and Lepells, with the same wits grown older; then came Lady Townshend, with the new wits, Horace Walpole, Selwyn, Hanbury Williams, and others; and then crowds were alternately drawn by the “Chudleigh” and the Miss Gunnings.
With the decease of George the Second, glory departed from Kensington as far as Courts were concerned. No reigning sovereign has resided there since George the Third, who inheriting, perhaps, a dislike of the place from his father, the Prince of Wales, appears to have taken no notice of it, except in appointing the clever, but impudent quack, Sir John Hill, its gardener, at the recommendation of Sir John’s then omnipotent brother botanist, the Earl of Bute.
George the Fourth probably regarded the place as a homely concern, quite out of his line. It might suit well enough the book-collecting inclinations of his brother, the Duke of Sussex, with which he had no sympathy; was not amiss as a means of affording a lodging to his brother, the Duke of Kent, with whose habits of regularity, and pardonable amount of debt, his sympathies were as little; and lastly he was well content to think, that the staid-looking house and formal gardens rendered the spot a good out-of-the-way sort of place enough, for obscuring the growth and breeding of his niece, and probable heiress, the Princess Victoria, whose life, under the guidance of a wise mother, promised to furnish so estimable a contrast to his own. As to his brother, King William the Fourth, though he too was a brother, in most respects, very different from himself, we never heard his name mentioned in any way whatever in connection with Kensington.
Adieu then, for the present, and for we know not how long a time hereafter, to Court-holdings in the Palace; to Court splendours, and Court scandals. Adieu Kings listening in closets, and Queens calumniated by ungrateful biographers. Adieu even Maids of Honour. They departed their life with George the Second, and went to live a terribly dull one with his grandson’s Queen, Charlotte, who nearly tired Miss Burney into a consumption.
THE MIKADO’S PALACE
PIERRE LOTI
An enclosure of large walls. My _djin_ stop in front of a first gateway in the ancient severe and religious style: massive columns with bases of bronze; a narrow frieze sculptured with strange ornaments; and a heavy and enormous roof.
Then I walk into the vast deserted courtyards, planted with venerable trees, to the branches of which they have given props like crutches for old men. The immense buildings of the palace first appear to me in a kind of disorder wherein I can discern no plan of unity. Everywhere appear these high, monumental and heavy roofs, whose corners turn up in Chinese curves and bristle with black ornaments.
Not seeing anyone, I walk on at random.
Here is arrested absolutely the smile, inseparable from modern Japan. I have the impression of entering into the silence of an incomprehensible Past, into the dead splendour of a civilization, whose architecture, design, and æsthetic taste are to me strange and unknown.
A bonze guard who sees me, advances, and, making a bow, asks me for my name and passport.
It is satisfactory: he will take me himself to see the entire palace on condition that I will take off my shoes and remove my hat. He brings me even velvet sandals which are offered to visitors. Thanks, I prefer to walk with bare feet like himself and we begin our silent walk through an interminable series of halls all lacquered in gold and decorated with a rare and exquisite strangeness.
On the floor there is always and everywhere that eternal spread of white matting, that one finds just as simple, as well kept, and as neat in the homes of the emperors, in the temples, and among the middle classes and the poor. No furniture anywhere, for this is something unknown in Japan, or slightly known at most; the palace is entirely empty. All the surprising magnificence is upon the walls and ceilings. The precious golden lacquer is displayed uniformly on all sides, and upon this background, Byzantine in effect, all the celebrated artists of the great Japanese century have painted inimitable objects. Each hall has been decorated by a different and illustrious painter, whose name the bonze cited to me with respect. In one there are all the known flowers; in another, all the birds of the air, and all the beasts of the earth; or perhaps hunting-scenes and combats, where you see warriors dressed in armour and terrifying helmets, on horseback pursuing monsters and chimæras. The most peculiar one, assuredly, is decorated entirely with fans,--fans of all forms and of all colours, open, shut, and half open, thrown with extreme grace upon the fine golden lacquer. The ceilings, also of golden lacquer are in compartments, painted with the same care and the same art. What is, perhaps, the most marvellous of all, is that series of high pierced friezes that extends around all the ceilings; you think of generations of patient workmen who have worn themselves out in chiselling such delicate, almost transparent, things, in such thicknesses of wood: sometimes there are rosebushes, sometimes entanglements of wistaria, or sheaves of rice; elsewhere flights of storks that seem to cleave the air with great velocity, forming with their thousands of claws, extended necks, and feathers, a crowd so beautifully combined that it is alive and scurrying away, nothing lags behind, nor falls into confusion.
[Illustration: THE MIKADO’S PALACE, KIOTO.]
In this palace, which is windowless, it is dusky,--a half-darkness favourable to enchantments. The greater number of these halls receive a shimmering light from the outside verandas composed only of lacquered columns, to which they are entirely open on one side; it is the subdued light of deep sheds, or of markets. The more mysterious interior apartments open on the first by other similar columns, and receive from it a still more attenuated light; they can be shut at will by bamboo curtains of an extreme delicacy, whose tissue in its transparency imitates that of a wave, and which are raised to the ceiling by enormous tassels of red silk. Communication is had by species of doorways the forms of which are unusual and unexpected: sometimes they are perfect circles and sometimes they are more complicated figures, such as hexagons or stars. And all these secondary openings have frame-works of black lacquer which stand out with an elegant distinction upon the general background of the gold, and which bear upon the corners ornaments of bronze marvellously chiselled by the metal-workers of the past.
The centuries have embellished this palace, veiling a little the glitter of the objects by blending all these harmonies of gold in a kind of very gentle shadow; in its silence and solitude one might call it the enchanted dwelling of some _Sleeping Beauty_, of a princess of an unknown world, or of a planet that could not be our own.
We pass before some little interior gardens, which are, according to the Japanese custom, miniature reductions of very wild places,--unlooked-for contrasts in the centre of this golden palace. Here also time has passed, throwing its emerald upon the little rocks, the tiny lakes, and the small abysses; sterilizing the little mountains, and giving an appearance of reality to all that is minute and artificial. The trees, dwarfed by I know not what Japanese process, have not grown larger; but they have taken on an air of extreme old age. The _cycas_ have acquired many branches, because of their hundreds of years; one would call the little palms of multiple trunks, antidiluvian plants; or rather massive black candelabra, whose every arm carries at its extremity a fresh bouquet of green plumes.
What also surprises us is the special apartment chosen by this Taïko-Sama, who was both a great conqueror and a great emperor. It is very small and very simple, and looks upon the tiniest and the most artificial of the little gardens.
The Reception Hall, which they showed me last of all, is the largest and the most magnificent. It is about fifty metres long, and, naturally, all in golden lacquer, with a high and marvellous frieze. Always no furniture; nothing but the stages of lacquer upon which the handsome lords on arriving placed their arms. At the back, behind a colonnade, is the platform, where Taïko-Sama held his audiences, at the period of our Henri IV. Then it is that one dreams of these receptions, of these entrances of brilliant noblemen, whose helmets are surmounted by horns, snouts and grotesque figures; and all the unheard-of ceremonial of this court. One may dream of all this, but he will not clearly see it revive. Not only is the period too remote, but it is too far away in grade among the races of the earth; it is too far outside of our conceptions and the notions that we have inherited regarding these things. It is the same in the old temples of this country; we look at them without understanding, the symbols escape us. Between Japan and ourselves the difference of origin has made a deep abyss.
“We shall cross another hall,” the bonze said to me, “and then a series of passages that will lead us to the temple of the palace.”
In this last hall there are some people, which is a surprise, as all the former ones were empty; but silence dwells there just the same. The men squatting all around the walls seem very busy writing; they are priests copying prayers with tiny pencils on rice-paper to sell to the people. Here, upon the golden background of the walls, all the paintings represent royal tigers, a little larger than their natural size, in all attitudes of fury; of watching, of the hunt, of prowling, or of sleep. Above these motionless bonzes they lift their great heads, so expressive and wicked, showing their sharp teeth.
My guide bows on entering. As I am among the most polite people in the world, I feel obliged to bow also. Then the reverence that is accorded to me passes all along the hall, and we go through.
Passages obstructed with manuscripts and bales of prayers are passed, and we are in the temple. It is, as I expected, of great magnificence. Walls, ceilings, columns, all is in golden lacquer, the high frieze representing leaves and bunches of enormous peonies very full-blown and sculptured with so much skill that they seem ready to drop their leaves at the least breath to fall in a golden shower upon the floor. Behind a colonnade, in the darkest place, are the idols and emblems, in the midst of all the rich collection of sacred vases, incense-burners, and torch-bearers.
Just now it is the hour of Buddhist service. In one of the courts, a gong, with the deep tones of a double-bass, begins to strike with extreme deliberation. Some bonzes in robes of black gauze with green surplices make a ritualistic entrance, the passes of which are very complicated, and then they go and kneel in the centre of the sanctuary. There are very few of the faithful; scarcely two or three groups, which seem lost in this great temple. There are some women lying on the matting, having brought their little smoking-boxes and their little pipes; they are talking in very low voices and smothering the desire to laugh.
However, the gong begins to sound more rapidly and the priests to make low bows to their gods. It sounds still faster, and the bows of the bonzes quicken, while the priests prostrate themselves upon their faces upon the earth.
Then, in the mystic regions something happens that reminds me very much of the elevation of the host in the Roman cult. Outside, the gong, as if exasperated, sounds with rapid strokes, uninterruptedly and frantically.
I believe that I have seen everything now in this palace; but I still do not understand the disposition of the halls, the plan of the whole. If alone, I should soon become lost in it, as if in a labyrinth.
Happily, my guide comes to take me out, after having put my shoes on me himself. Across new halls of silence, passing by an old and gigantic tree, which has miraculous properties, it seems, having for several centuries protected this palace from fire, he conducts me through the same gate by which I entered and where my _djin_ are waiting for me.
WARWICK CASTLE
LADY WARWICK
The character of ancient buildings, the various styles of architecture which they present to us, their beauties as well as their blemishes, enable any one whose darkness may be lightened by the diviner radiance of a happy power of imagination to recall the persons and the events with which these buildings have been associated. The gloomy feudal fortress carries the mind back to the Middle Ages; the abbey, with its cloisters and windows and all the surroundings of a dim religious light, reminds us of days when the Head of the Church was indeed Christ’s Vicar here upon earth; while the palace suggests, side by side with its stories of games played at that great game in which men are but as pawns, pictures of gallant gentlemen and fair ladies who, though being dead, yet live before us. England is not so rich in these varied combinations of palace, abbey, and tower as is France, for instance, and particularly Touraine. Many of our most famous mediæval castles have been suffered to fall into decay, or, worse still, have been improved into modern shape by the rash hand of idle innovators.
[Illustration: WARWICK CASTLE, ENGLAND.]
There is one among our castles, however, which neither Time’s defacing fingers nor man’s innovating hand has despoiled--Warwick Castle.
Possibly there is no place of this sort so well known to the whole English world over, situated as it is within that Shakespeare country from which proceeded those melodious sounds that yet fill the world. It has always been the Mecca of the best and noblest of literary pilgrims from America. Nearly half a century ago Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote for an American magazine a series of sketches, in one of which, entitled “About Warwick,” he tells us how “through the vista of willows that droop on either side into the water we behold the grey magnificence of Warwick Castle uplifting itself among stately trees and rearing its turrets above their loftiest branches. We can scarcely think the scene real, so completely do the machicolated towers, the long line of battlements, the massive buttresses, the high-windowed walls, shape out our indistinct ideas of the antique time.”
After all a castle, even so famous a one as Warwick, is not so interesting in itself as the scenes it has witnessed and the people who have lived in it or have visited it. The history of Warwick Castle, for the last three hundred and fifty years at least, has been no small part of the history of England. Personal and local history in England does not so much begin with the Reformation as it does in other countries; but this one thing is certain, that between the pre-Reformation world and ourselves there is a great gulf fixed which the historian has tried in vain to bridge. Not that the place before that could have been devoid of interest: no castle in the stormy times of the Wars of the Roses could have enjoyed the happiness of having no history; and, surely, if any did, Warwick was not one of them. Its very position, situated in the heart of England, must, from the time when the Great Alfred’s daughter built the keep (“the monument of the wisdom and energy of the mighty Ethelfleda”), have been such that, in all the numerous brawls and butcheries dignified by the name of civil war, the possession of it must have been a matter of supreme importance. And so it was nearly four centuries before the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses that William the Conqueror had made Warwick the base of his operations for his campaign in the North. The fortress he built there has gone--not one stone left upon another, and so utterly perished that the very site of it is pure guess-work. The legendary Guy and all his feats may be dismissed from any account which makes any pretence to be historical. There is a curious account of the garrison of Warwick Castle in the time of Henry II., when all his legitimate sons were in arms against him, and the two illegitimate sons of Fair Rosamond alone remained faithful. It was occupied for the King; and the sheriff’s account rendered for the victualling of the place was this: “xi. _li._ xiii. _d._ for 20 quarters of Bread Corn; xx. _s._ for 20 quarters of Malt; c. _s._ for 50 Biefs salted up; xxx. _s._ for 90 cheeses; and xx. _s._ for salt then laid in for the victualling thereof.”
Of the importance of Warwick Castle in the Middle Ages we can well form an idea from Dugdale’s statement:--
“Of what regard it was in those times may be discerned by the King’s precept to the Archbishop of York, for requiring good security of Margery, sister and heir to Thomas, then Earl of Warwick, that she should not take to husband any person whatsoever in whom the said King could not repose trust as in his own self: the chief reason being given in these words, ‘Because she has a Castle of immense strength, and situated towards the Marshes.’”
No mention of Warwick Castle would be complete if it left out the famous Earl--“the King-Maker,” and the “Last of the Barons.” Never was the “Bear and Ragged Staff” held in such high esteem as between 1455 and 1470. And when, a few years after the King-Maker’s death, the avaricious Henry VII. annexed his various manors to the Crown, he got possession of over a hundred of them, to say nothing of the whole of the Channel Islands. A contemporary tells us that “at the Earl’s house in London six oxen were usually eaten at breakfast, and every tavern was full of his meat, for he that had any acquaintance in his family should have as much sodden--_i. e._, boiled--as he could carry on a long dagger.”
The Castle had remained for a very considerable period in the possession of the successive earls. It next passed to the ill-starred George, Duke of Clarence, and upon his death, “being seized into the King’s hands, it continued in the Crown a great while.”
When the famous John Dudley became Earl of Warwick, the Castle was granted to him, as well as divers lands which had belonged to former earls. Of his fate in connection with the unhappy Lady Jane Grey there is no need to speak here. The Castle and all his estates, upon his attainder, escheated to the Crown. Thanks to the favour with which Robert Dudley, better known as the Earl of Leicester, was regarded by Queen Elizabeth, his brother Ambrose received from that queen a grant of Warwick Castle, together with the dignities of Earl of Warwick and Baron de l’Isle, in 1561. Three years later his brother Robert became Earl of Leicester.
There were other subjects beside Lord Burghley who groaned inwardly under “the extraordinary chardg in Enterteynment of the Queen.” Elizabeth had more than the ordinary passion of the time for “rich shews, pleasant devices and all manner of sports that could be devised.” Notwithstanding the extent of her various progresses east and west and north and south, there seemed to be always something freshly arranged for her entertainment. In 1572 on her way to Kenilworth, she stayed at Warwick, and visited the Earl of Warwick at the Castle she had granted him eleven years before. She came to Warwick “on the 12th day of August, after dinner, about three of the clock, with the Countess in the same coach.”
Evelyn, as the author of _Silva_ well might do, did not think much of the gardens in 1654. To bring them to perfection was reserved for that luckless of the heads of the Grevilles, George, the second Baron, who “planned the park by his taste and planted the trees with his hand.” The second son, Robert, who became the fourth Lord Brooke, was one of the six lords sent by the House of Peers, together with twelve of the members of the House of Commons, to present to Charles II. at the Hague, “the humble invitation and supplication of the Parliament: That His Majesty would be pleased to return and take the government of the Kingdom into his own hands.” He was made Recorder of Warwick, and being a great traveller added much to the embellishment of the Castle. It was to him that the fitting up of the state apartments is due, and he worthily continued to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors in the title. His successors from one generation to another took pride above everything else in the adornment and beautification of their castle. In 1746 the eighth Baron was created Earl Brooke, and in the last year of the reign of George II. the Earldom of Warwick, which had been conferred in 1618 on the family of Rich, becoming extinct, devolved upon Lord Brooke. The son of this first Earl of Warwick was one of the most reckless of all connoisseurs, and Warwick Castle is indebted to him for many valuable gems which his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, collected. Many of the finest specimens of artistic work at Warwick bear testimony to his taste, but the enlargement and improvement of the grounds about the Castle are his special work, and he expended over £100,000 in beautifying the interior of his home.