The English Garden.
In one of the notes to The English Garden it is stated that "Bacon was
the prophet, Milton the herald of modern Gardening; and Addison, Pope,
and Kent the champions of true taste." Kent was by profession both a
Painter and a Landscape-Gardener. Addison who had a pretty little
retreat at Bilton, near Rugby, evinces in most of his occasional
allusions to gardens a correct judgment. He complains that even in his
time our British gardeners, instead of humouring nature, loved to
deviate from it as much as possible. The system of verdant sculpture had
not gone out of fashion. Our trees still rose in cones, globes, and
pyramids. The work of the scissors was on every plant and bush. It was
Pope, however, who did most to bring the topiary style into contempt and
to encourage a more natural taste, by his humorous paper in the
Guardian and his poetical Epistle to the Earl of Burlington. Gray, the
poet, observes in one of his letters, that "our skill in gardening, or
rather laying out grounds, is the only taste we can call our own; the
only proof of original talent in matters of pleasure. This is no small
honor to us;" he continues, "since neither France nor Italy, has ever
had the least notion of it." "Whatever may have been reported, whether
truly or falsely" (says a contributor to The World) "of the Chinese
gardens, it is certain that we are the first of the Europeans who have
founded this taste; and we have been so fortunate in the genius of those
who have had the direction of some of the finest spots of ground, that
we may now boast a success equal to that profusion of expense which has
been destined to promote the rapid progress of this happy enthusiasm.
Our gardens are already the astonishment of foreigners, and, in
proportion as they accustom themselves to consider and understand them
will become their admiration." The periodical from which this is taken
was published exactly a century ago, and the writer's prophecy has been
long verified. Foreigners send to us for gardeners to help them to lay
out their grounds in the English fashion. And we are told by the writer
of an interesting article on gardens, in the Quarterly Review, that
"the lawns at Paris, to say nothing of Naples, are regularly irrigated
to keep up even the semblance of English verdure; and at the gardens of
Versailles, and Caserta, near Naples, the walks have been supplied from
the Kensington gravel-pits." "It is not probably known," adds the same
writer, "that among our exportations every year is a large quantity of
evergreens for the markets of France and Germany, and that there are
some nurserymen almost wholly engaged in this branch of trade."
Pomfret, a poet of small powers, if a poet at all, has yet contrived to
produce a popular composition in verse--The Choice--because he has
touched with great good fortune on some of the sweetest domestic hopes
and enjoyments of his countrymen.
If Heaven the grateful liberty would give
That I might choose my method how to live;
And all those hours propitious Fate should lend
In blissful ease and satisfaction spend;
Near some fair town I'd have a private seat
Built uniform; not little; nor too great:
Better if on a rising ground it stood,
On this side fields, on that a neighbouring wood.
The Choice.
Pomfret perhaps illustrates the general taste when he places his garden
"near some fair town." Our present laureate, though a truly inspired
poet, and a genuine lover of Nature even in her remotest retreats, has
the garden of his preference, "not quite beyond the busy world."
Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love,
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And sitting muffled in dark leaves you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies
A league of grass.
Even "sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh" are often pleasing
when mellowed by the space of air through which they pass.
'Tis distance lends enchantment to the sound.
Shelley, in one of his sweetest poems, speaking of a scene in the
neighbourhood of Naples, beautifully says:--
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The city's voice itself is soft, like solitude's.
No doubt the feeling that we are near the crowd but not in it, may
deepen the sense of our own happy rural seclusion and doubly endear that
pensive leisure in which we can "think down hours to moments," and in
This our life, exempt from public haunt,
Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
Shakespeare.
Besides, to speak truly, few men, however studious or philosophical,
desire a total isolation from the world. It is pleasant to be able to
take a sort of side glance at humanity, even when we are most in love
with nature, and to feel that we can join our fellow creatures again
when the social feeling returns upon us. Man was not made to live alone.
Cowper, though he clearly loved retirement and a garden, did not desire
to have the pleasure entirely to himself. "Grant me," he says, "a friend
in my retreat."
To whom to whisper solitude is sweet.
Cowper lived and died a bachelor. In the case of a married man and a
father, garden delights are doubled by the presence of the family and
friends, if wife and children happen to be what they should be, and the
friends are genuine and genial.
All true poets delight in gardens. The truest that ever lived spent his
latter days at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. He had a spacious and
beautiful garden. Charles Knight tells us that "the Avon washed its
banks; and within its enclosures it had its sunny terraces and green
lawns, its pleached alleys and honeysuckle bowers," In this garden
Shakespeare planted with his own hands his celebrated Mulberry tree. It
was a noble specimen of the black Mulberry introduced into England in
1548[009]. In 1605, James I. issued a Royal edict recommending the
cultivation of silkworms and offering packets of mulberry seeds to those
amongst his subjects who were willing to sow them. Shakespeare's tree
was planted in 1609. Mr. Loudon, observes that the black Mulberry has
been known from the earliest records of antiquity and that it is twice
mentioned in the Bible: namely, in the second Book of Samuel and in the
Psalms. When New Place was in the possession of Sir Hough Clopton, who
was proud of its interesting association with the history of our great
poet, not only were Garrick and Macklin most hospitably entertained
under the Mulberry tree, but all strangers on a proper application were
admitted to a sight of it. But when Sir Hough Clopton was succeeded by
the Reverend Francis Gastrell, that gentleman, to save himself the
trouble of showing the tree to visitors, had "the gothic barbarity" to
cut down and root up that interesting--indeed sacred memorial--of the
Pride of the British Isles. The people of Stratford were so enraged at
this sacrilege that they broke Mr. Gastrell's windows. That prosaic
personage at last found the place too hot for him, and took his
departure from a town whose inhabitants "doated on his very absence;"
but before he went he completed the fall sum of his sins against good
taste and good feeling by pulling to the ground the house in which
Shakespeare had lived and died. This was done, it is said, out of sheer
spite to the towns-people, with some of whom Mr. Gastrell had had a
dispute about the rate at which the house was taxed. His change of
residence was no great relief to him, for the whole British public felt
sorely aggrieved, and wherever he went he was peppered with all sorts of
squibs and satires. He "slid into verse," and "hitched in a rhyme."
Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,
And the sad burden of a merry song.
Thomas Sharp, a watchmaker, got possession of the fragments of
Shakespeare's Mulberry tree, and worked them into all sorts of elegant
ornaments and toys, and disposed of them at great prices. The
corporation of Stratford presented Garrick with the freedom of the town
in a box made of the wood of this famous tree, and the compliment seems
to have suggested to him his public festival or pageant in honor of the
poet. This Jubilee, which was got up with great zeal, and at great
expense and trouble, was attended by vast throngs of the admirers of
Shakespeare from all parts of the kingdom. It was repeated on the stage
and became so popular as a theatrical exhibition that it was represented
night after night for more than half a season to crowded audiences.
Upon the subject of gardens, let us hear what has been said by the self-
styled "melancholy Cowley." When in the smoky city pent, amidst the busy
hum of men, he sighed unceasingly for some green retreat. As he paced
the crowded thorough-fares of London, he thought of the velvet turf and
the pure air of the country. His imagination carried him into secluded
groves or to the bank of a murmuring river, or into some trim and quiet
garden. "I never," he says, "had any other desire so strong and so like
to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be
master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate
conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life
only to the culture of them and the study of nature," The late Miss
Mitford, whose writings breathe so freshly of the nature that she loved
so dearly, realized for herself a similar desire. It is said that she
had the cottage of a peasant with the garden of a Duchess. Cowley is not
contented with expressing in plain prose his appreciation of garden
enjoyments. He repeatedly alludes to them in verse.
Thus, thus (and this deserved great Virgil's praise)
The old Corycian yeoman passed his days;
Thus his wise life Abdolonymus spent;
Th' ambassadors, which the great emperor sent
To offer him a crown, with wonder found
The reverend gardener, hoeing of his ground;
Unwillingly and slow and discontent
From his loved cottage to a throne he went;
And oft he stopped, on his triumphant way:
And oft looked back: and oft was heard to say
Not without sighs, Alas! I there forsake
A happier kingdom than I go to take.
Lib. IV. Plantarum.
|