It is difficult to understand why so admirable and simple an arrangement was abandoned, for anything more clumsy and unsatisfactory than the method adopted in our modern dining-room tables for accomplishing a similar result can hardly be imagined.[3] The only modern examples I have seen are some manufactured by a firm in Brussels (Wattier, Steenpoort).
I confess that I look back with regret to the old highly polished mahogany table for dessert. The modern system of covering the table with white, and strips of coloured silk, and setting it with sprigs of ferns and flowers is very pretty, but then for the sake of this prettiness we are letting the polish of our tables go down. Hardly anywhere now does the butler care to keep up the polish of the table; he used to take a pride in it, now he knows that it is never seen. Yet I know of two or three old country houses into which the Russian fashion has not penetrated, and where even to this day the mahogany is shown, and shines like a mirror.
"Hail, good comrades, every one,
Round the polished table;
Pass the bottle with the sun,
Drink, sirs! whilst ye're able.
Life is but a little span,
Full of painful thinking;
Let us live as fits a man,
No good liquors blinking!"
So sang our grandfathers; but the song has gone out with the polished table, and with the polished table the quiet enjoyable drinking of good port and sherry after the retirement of the ladies. The cigarette is lighted – and who can enjoy port with the air full of its perfumes? – and no sooner is the wine begun to be appreciated, than the tray of coffee is presented, dug into the side, as a reminder that now-a-days the pleasant hour with good wine and agreeable male companions is cut down to a quarter of an hour – has gone out of fashion, along with the polished table, and we must away into the drawing-room to talk empty nothingnesses, and listen to bad music.
But we must not spend too much time over tables and chairs. Marquetry became the fashion under William and Mary, when upright clocks, bureaux, and chairs were thus decorated. Under Louis XIV. a new style of decoration was introduced by one André Charles Buhl, who gave his name to it. He was chief upholsterer to the king, and his rich and brilliant marquetry of tortoise-shell and brass, so combined as to form figures and subjects, was extensively used in the furnishing of the new palace at Versailles.
The fashion extended to England, and where tortoise-shell was not employed, the ground was gilt, then painted over with black, leaving a pattern in gold uncovered, and the whole was washed over with a reddish-brown lacquer, which gave the effect of tortoise-shell. Spaces thus treated were relieved by raised work in wood carved and gilt in relief, in representation of Buhl's brass work. We find this chiefly in mirror and picture-frames.
Then followed the reign of Louis XV., the age of rococo, of shell-shaped curves set against each other back to back. It may have been barbarous, but it was rich and beautiful. Then walls were painted white and picked out with gold, the clearest, most brilliant, turquoise-blues and rose-carmines came in. Painters devoted themselves to the decoration of panels in the walls of rooms and to ceilings, the dessus-de-portes, over-doors, generally in chiaroscuro, shepherds and shepherdesses, nymphs, cherubs. There was a certain amount of sombreness in the old Elizabethan house, in the dark oak panelling, in the olive-greens of the tapestry, that was distasteful to the merry men of the epoch from Charles II. to the first Georges, and they set themselves to make their interiors as sparkling with gold and brilliant colour as possible on a white instead of a dark ground.
The discovery of Pompeii caused a return to a simpler style of decoration, to purer forms; and marquetry furniture was manufactured in exotic woods, enriched with ormolu mountings. Paintings were executed on copper and let into chimney-pieces, of great delicacy and charm.
Chippendale, Heppelwhite, and Sheraton are names associated with the mahogany furniture of the last century, with tables with pierced galleries, chairs with open strap work backs, cabinets of graceful curves, all of admirable workmanship. Indeed cabinet-making never attained a higher degree of delicacy and perfection than at this period. I would point to some of the bureaux of this date as real marvels of workmanship. And look at the backs of the chairs – a good Chippendale chair has the upright curled back at the top, in a manner remarkable for beauty, and right in principle, for it exposes no sharp angles to suffer from a blow. The satin-wood furniture, some of it with medallions painted on it, sideboards, work-tables, chiffoniers, sometimes only decorated with delicate garlands of laurel or bay painted or inlaid on the satin-wood, is not to be disregarded. The only furniture that cannot be loved is that of the first thirty years of this century, when it violated all true principles of construction, and manifested neither invention nor taste in design.
Before leaving the consideration of old country houses, one word must be said about their setting. We now-a-days, when we build a mansion, look out for the top of a hill, a good windy, exposed spot. It never occurs to us that half the charm of a house consists in the way in which it is framed. The mediæval Germans lived on the tops of rocks, but then their houses were castles, partly for defence, and partly because they knew what was fit to be done. Artistically, they made these castles eminently picturesque with towers and gables that cut the sky. We do not now build castles, but – well, the word is suitable – boxes; and a box looks like a box on the top of a hill against the sky, and nothing can make it look other. Our English forefathers, in their sense of security, and in their love of sun and shelter, sought out a hillside, and built their mansions so as to have rising ground behind it, to back it, and where they had not a hill, there they had a wood of tall trees. A house thus set is like a picture in a frame, a pretty face in a real bonnet. I do not think that ladies who, in pursuance of a vile fashion, wear hats, can be aware of the loss of charm to the face. Let them take an ancestral portrait out of its frame, and hang it thus naked against the wall. They will see at once that the frame insulates it, draws attention to its beauties and enhances them. It is the same with a house. It may be good architecturally, but unless it be backed up by a green hill covered with wood, tall Scotch pines, the haunt of rooks, umbrageous beech, in autumn trees of gold, it is nothing but an architectural study. How naked, how forlorn a dear old house looks that has lost its timber that surrounded it! I know one or two old mansions that have been converted into farm-houses, and their rear-guard of timber hewn down and sold. There is a broken-hearted look about them that reminds one of a carriage-horse degraded to go in a cart. It feels its degradation, loses flesh, gloss, and spirit.
I was one day walking with an old friend whom fate doomed to live abroad all his life, but whose heart was ever in his native land. We were strolling near an old mansion, in its park, when he stopped, looked at it, and said, "Ye gentlemen of England, that dwell at home at ease – and in what ease! in what peace and beauty! Indeed, I think that, as in all the world there is not a type of man nobler, better, more complete in every way than the true English gentleman, so do I think that nowhere – not approachably even, anywhere – is there to be found a house like the old English country house." And in my heart I responded, Amen – It is so.
CHAPTER IV
THE OLD GARDEN
JUST before the breaking forth of the French Revolution, the Abbé de Lille composed a poem in four cantos, entitled Les Jardins, in which he enthusiastically urged the abandonment of all formality in the laying out of a garden, and the adoption of the new English style of irregularity.
"Avant de planter, avant que du terrain
Votre béche imprudente entame le sein,
Pour donnez aux jardins une forme plus pure,
Observez, connoissez, imitez la nature."
An agreeable wildness – that was what was to be sought. The Revolution came in, and hacked the gardens about, and reduced them all to the state of wildness.
What the Abbé de Lille wrote against was the artificiality of the garden arrangement that had been in vogue till then. Horace Walpole had already written in the same strain. A rage had set in in England for remodelling the gardens, and the new fashion was called "English gardening."
Pliny the younger, in his delightful letters, speaks of his gardens. As his Laurentine villa was his winter retreat, it is not surprising that the gardens there take no prominent part of his account. All he says of them is, that the gestatio, or exercise ground, surrounded the garden, and was bounded by a box-hedge; where the box had perished, there were planted tufts of rosemary. He mentions his vine-walk and his trees, mostly mulberry and fig, as the soil was unsuited for other trees. On his Tuscan villa he is more diffuse; the garden takes up a good part of the description. He tells of the strange shapes into which his box-trees were clipped, his slopes, his terraces, shrubs methodically trimmed, a marble basin, fountain, a cascade, bay-trees alternating with plane-trees, a long straight walk, from which branched off others hedged by apple-trees in espalier, and by box, and ornamented with obelisks. Something like a rural view was, indeed, contrived amidst so much artificiality, but was speedily forgotten amidst the stiff lines of box and the trimmed cypresses.
In the paintings of Herculaneum we see the representations of gardens; they are square enclosures, formed by trellis-work and espaliers, and regularly ornamented with vases, fountains, and statues, elegantly symmetrical. Now this arrangement of a garden continued in Italy. It never changed, and the villa gardens in and about Rome to this day reproduce the plans and character of those that flourished there in the classic age.
The villa-gardens in and about Rome! I cannot write the words without an ache of heart, for I know that they are disappearing rapidly, inevitably. Along the Via Salaria I saw three in process of destruction during the late winter and spring of 1889. A great slice of the Borghese grounds is being devastated to make room for hideous streets and squares. The Wolkonski gardens have been curtailed; those of Villa Massimo Arsoli adjoining, almost destroyed and built over; the Rospigliosi gardens gone; others doomed; the glorious Ludovisi gardens, with their cypresses and ilexes towering above the closed Porta Pinciana and the ancient boundary wall, are in process of extermination. "The grounds, which were of an extent extraordinary when considered as being within the walls of a capital, were laid out by Le Nôtre, and were in the stiff French style of high-clipped hedges, and avenues adorned with vases and sarcophagi. With the fury against trees which characterizes Italians, all the magnificent ilexes and cypresses were cut down as soon as the land was secured, and the plots of building-land rendered altogether hideous and undesirable. In a few years not a trace will remain of the picturesque glories of this once noble villa, which, if acquired by the municipality, who refused to purchase it, might have been made into public gardens of beauty unrivalled in any European capital." [4]
The railway station, with its sheds and sidings, occupies the once matchless gardens of the Villa Massimo Negroni, celebrated for its exquisite cypress avenues and its stately terrace, lined with ancient orange-trees and noble sarcophagi. The ground was confiscated by the State, and the destruction of this fair scene broke the heart of the owner, Prince Massimo. The sweet gardens of the Villa Strozzi are gone, now built over with ugly houses. Outside the Porta Pia grand old gardens are being devastated also.
The Medici gardens remain; Hawthorn thus described them. "They are laid out in the old fashion of straight paths, with borders of box, which form hedges of great height and density, and are shorn and trimmed to the evenness of a wall of stone at the top and sides. There are green alleys, with long vistas, overshadowed by ilex-trees; and at each intersection of the paths the visitor finds seats of lichen-covered stone to repose on, and marble statues that look forlornly at him, regretful of their lost noses. In the more open portions of the gardens, before the sculptured front of the villa, you see fountains and flower-beds; and, in their season, a profusion of roses, from which the genial sun of Italy distils a fragrance to be scattered abroad by the no less genial breeze."
The Boboli gardens at Florence remain to testify to the ancient arrangement, with high walls of evergreens and long avenues hedged up ten or twelve feet, dense and impervious, above which rise the spires of cypress and the domes of the stone-pine.
Our English gardens were modelled on those of the Italian palaces, the same subdivision of squares into sections, with trimmed box enclosing them, and with a statue or a fountain, or a carved and shaped yew in the midst. The gardens were invariably enclosed within walls. Where the ground sloped, at great expense it was shaped into terraces, reached by flights of steps. The greatest exactness in the design was aimed at. As Pope observed —
"Each alley has a brother,
And half the garden just reflects the other."
When Pamela endured her persecution she was allowed to walk in the garden, but this was so walled round that escape from it was impossible. There were seats in it on which she might repose in the sun. There was a fish-pond in which she might angle, but there was only one garden-door by which egress could be obtained, and that was locked. It was the same with Clarissa Harlowe. The garden of her father's house was walled round.
The pleached alleys were constructed of lime or beech trees platted and trimmed so as to form walls of green. They were over-arched, and those walking in them were as in a green bower. I know an old château on the Moselle with such a berceau, it has in it windows commanding beautiful reaches of the river; otherwise it is completely enclosed by leaves, and fresh and sweet it is as a walk on a hot day. In England we required shade less than shelter, and the green funnels were not in such request as the long lines of lofty yew or box hedge.
In King's Views of the Seats of our Nobility and Gentry, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, we see the utmost formality. Every house is approached by two or three gardens, consisting perhaps of a gravel-walk and two grass-plats, or borders of flowers. Each rises above the other by two or three steps, and as many walls and terraces, and so many iron gates.
Sir William Temple gives us his view of what constituted a perfect garden in his day. "The perfectest figure of a garden I ever saw, either at home or abroad, was that of Moor Park, in Hertfordshire. I will describe it for a model to those that meet with such a situation, and are above the regards of common expense. It lies on the side of a hill, upon which the house stands, but not very steep. The length of the house, where the best rooms and of most use or pleasure are, lies upon the breadth of the garden; the great parlour opens into the midst of a terrace gravel-walk that lies even with it, and which may lie about three hundred paces long, and broad in proportion; the border set with standard laurels and at large distances, which have the beauty of orange-trees out of flower and fruit. From this walk are three descents by many stone steps, in the middle and at each end, into a very large parterre. This is divided into quarters by gravel-walks, and adorned with two fountains and eight statues, at the several quarters. At the end of the terrace-walk are two summer-houses, and the sides of the parterre are ranged with two large cloisters open to the garden; over these two cloisters are two terraces covered with lead and fenced with balusters; and the passage into these airy walks is out of the two summer-houses at the end of the first terrace-walk. The cloister facing the south is covered with vines. From the middle of the parterre is a descent by many steps into the lower garden, which is all fruit-trees, ranged about the several quarters of a wilderness, which is very shady; the walks here are all green, and there is a grotto embellished with figures of shell rock-work, fountains, and water-works."
Nothing could be more formal, and nothing, I think, could be more charming. Why should we imitate wild nature? The garden is a product of civilization. Why any more make of our gardens imitation wild nature, than paint our children with woad, and make them run about naked in an effort to imitate nature unadorned? The very charm of a garden is that it is taken out of savagery, trimmed, clothed, and disciplined. The wall and hedge are almost necessaries with us, to cut off the wind. See how flowers of all kinds luxuriate, if given the screen from the biting blast! If they like it, why should not we?
I allow that the hacking of trees into fantastical shapes deserved the scourge administered in the one hundred and seventy-third number of The Guardian, Sept. 29th, 1713. The writer there says – "How contrary to simplicity is the modern practice of gardening; we seem to make it our study to recede from nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most regular and formal shapes, but even in monstrous attempts beyond the reach of the art itself; we run into sculpture, and are yet better pleased to have our trees in the most awkward figures of men and animals, than in the most regular of their own. A citizen is no sooner proprietor of a couple of yews, but he entertains thoughts of erecting them into giants, like those of Guildhall. I know an eminent cook, who beautified his country-seat with a coronation dinner in greens, where you see the champion flourishing on horseback at one end of the table, and the queen in perpetual youth at the other.
"For the benefit of all my loving countrymen of this curious taste, I shall here publish a catalogue of greens to be disposed of by an eminent town gardener, who has lately applied to me upon this head. My correspondent is arrived at such perfection, that he cuts family pieces of men, women, or children. Any ladies that please may have their own effigies in myrtle, or their husbands in horn-beam. I shall proceed to his catalogue, as he sent it for my recommendation.
"'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.
"'The Tower of Babel, not yet finished.
"'St. George in box; his arm scarce long enough, but will be in condition to strike the dragon by next April.
"'A Queen Elizabeth in phylyræa, a little inclining to the green-sickness, but of full growth.
"'An old maid-of-honour in worm-wood.
"'Divers eminent poets in bays, somewhat blighted, to be disposed of a pennyworth.
"'A quickset hog shot up into a porcupine, by its being forgot a week in rainy weather,' &c."
But these absurdities do not affect the question of hedges. I know a hedge of clay and stone built up eight feet, and above that crowned with holly and thorn, running from east to west, but with a point or two of west in its face. I remember an old man, a rector, chronically affected with bronchitis for fifteen years, who felt the solace of this charming hedge through the whole time. He could crawl out there when the sun shone, and disregard the north and east winds. In that hedge the primrose and the foxglove were out prematurely. The rabbits loved it dearly, and made it untidy with their burrowings in the warm dry clay under the roots of the bushes.
If a ruthless craving for vistas had not prevailed in and after Horace Walpole's time, every one of our country houses and parsonages would have had these sweet sheltered walks, where invalids could creep along and bask in the sun. We have had them demolished, and so must away to the Riviera. Evelyn had a great holly hedge in his garden at Sayes Court, four hundred feet in length, five feet in diameter, and nine feet high; and when the Court was let to the Czar Peter, during his visit to the Deptford dockyard, that barbarian drove his wheel-barrow through it, and so injured the hedge that Evelyn claimed damages, and received one hundred and fifty pounds in compensation.
Another charming feature of the old garden – and one that was costly to execute – was the terrace. The slope of the hillside was taken in hand and was cut away, so as to produce a level lawn with a level, horizontal terrace-walk above it, and perhaps, where the slope admitted of it, a second and superior terrace. These terrace walls gave shelter, and as walks were always dry, the drainage from them being rapid. Trees, shrubs, flowers planted on them throve; there was no stagnation of water about their roots, and the sun, striking against the wall that enclosed the earth for their roots, made it warm, cherishing to the plants, as a hot bottle is a comfort to you who suffer from cold feet in your bed.
Nowhere have I seen roses so revel, go mad with delight and gratitude as in these terrace gardens. The rose is peculiarly averse to wet feet. See how the wild rose thrives in the clay-banked-up hedge! – a hedge that seems to have no moisture in it, the earth of which crumbles between the finger and thumb like snuff.
Then, again, the rose hates wind, and the terrace wall serves as a screen to it against its enemy. And – for human roses!
Last summer I attended a garden-party at an ancient country house with an old-fashioned garden. From the lawn in front of the porch a flight of granite steps led to a terrace nine feet above the lawn. This terrace was planted with venerable yew-trees, under which were little tables spread with fruit and cool drinks, and cakes. A second flight of steps gave access to a second terrace some twelve or fourteen feet higher, planted with flowers, and backed to the north by a lofty garden wall.
I do not think that, off the stage, I have seen any effect more beautiful than that of the young girls in their bright and many-tinted summer dresses, flitting about; some under the shade of the yews on terrace number one, some looking at the flowers a stage higher, on terrace number two, and some ascending and others descending the broad flight of steps that led to these terraces, like the angels in Jacob's vision.
The walls supporting the terraces served another purpose than that of sustaining the roots of trees and flowers on the stages; as rain fell on the terraces, it exuded between the joints of the stones and nourished a fairy world of lichen, moss, and ferns. This was the wall shaded by the yews. The other was hugged and laughed over by roses, honeysuckle, and wisteria.
We have got almost no gardens left in England in their primitive condition, only the wreckage of their beauty. But, as the old woman said who sniffed the empty amphora of old Falernian wine, "If what remains be so good, what must you have been when full!"
Now let us see what Horace Walpole tells us of the devastation of these beautiful old gardens. "No succeeding generation," he says, "in an opulent and luxurious country contents itself with the perfection established by its ancestors; more perfect perfection was still sought, and improvements had gone on, till London and Wise had stocked all our gardens with giants, animals, monsters, coats of arms and mottoes, in yew, box, and holly. Bridgman, the next fashionable designer of gardens, was far more chaste – he banished verdant sculpture, and did not even revert to the square precision of the foregoing age. He enlarged his plans, disdained to make every division tally to its opposite, and though he still adhered much to straight walks with high-clipped hedges, they were only his great lines; the rest he diversified by wilderness, and with loose groves of oak, though still within surrounding hedges. As his reformation gained footing, he ventured to introduce cultivated fields and even morsels of forest appearance, by the sides of those endless and tiresome walks.
"But the capital stroke, the leading step to all that has followed," – I shiver as I write these words, – "was the destruction of walls for boundaries, and the invention of fosses – an attempt then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha's! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk. No sooner was this simple enchantment made, than levelling, mowing, and rolling followed. The contiguous ground of the park without the sunk fence was to be harmonized with the lawn within; and the garden in its turn was to be set free from its prim regularity, that it might assort with the wilder country without. At that moment appeared Kent, painter enough to taste the charms of landscape, bold and opinionative enough to dare and to dictate, and born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays."
The man Kent deserved the gallows much more than many who have been hung. No one who pretended to be in fashion dared to maintain a hedge or a wall. Down went the walls, and the beautiful roses bent their heads and died; the great yew hedges were stubbed up, and the delicate children and feeble old gentlemen who had basked under the lea, also, like the roses, stooped to earth and died. All the shelter, sweetness, sun, restfulness went away. These hedges had taken a century and more to grow, they were levelled without compunction, never perhaps again to reappear.[5]
No doubt there was folly in our forefathers in trimming yews into fantastical shapes; but Kent and his followers were as extravagant in their way. Kent actually planted dead trees in lawns and parks, to give a greater air of reality to the scene. Where he was allowed he cut down, or mutilated avenues, because unnatural; but just as unnatural were his absurd vistas, dug through woods so that the eye might reach a pagoda, an obelisk, or a temple at the end.
A traveller in France in 1788, on the eve of the Revolution, gives an account of the garden of Ermenonville, laid out by M. de Girardin on the English system. "He has succeeded better in closely imitating the steps of nature than any spot I have ever seen; nothing seems laboured, nothing artificial. The ground is irregular, and the ornaments rude, though the latter approach to too great an excess. I can see no reason, if ornaments are to be made use of in such places as these (which in itself is a deviation from nature), why they should not be handsome. To see a miserable obelisk built of brick, and resembling more a chimney than a monument, is carrying the refinement of wildness to too high a pitch. If they are designed to be rude and natural, they may at the same time be grotesque and elegant. Winding along a lovely walk, through the bosom of a young wood, a gentle stream meandering by its side, we reached a charming and retired spot. A large space here opens, shaded by the thick branches of the trees, which just leave room for a softened light to insinuate itself, and for the zephyrs to breathe through; over interrupting rocks and heaps of pebbles, the water dashes along with a noise grateful and composing. Here an altar is erected, sacred to Reverie; on a rock that overhangs the stream are inscribed some pleasing lines. Hence through a varied and highly pleasing path we continued our route along the grove, meeting with different inscriptions. From thence we ascended the forest, and traversing a path rugged and grotesque, were presented with many interesting and pleasing views. Arriving on the plain, in the bosom of a wood, we reached an extended area, in the midst of which stood a large oak, and at the end an edifice."[6]
I had written thus far, when last night there came to see me an old village singer of nigh on eighty years, always to me a welcome guest. I seated him by the fireside on a settle, and we fell to talking about gardens, when he said, "I reckon, your honour, I know a rare old-fashioned song about flowers and gardings, and them like. If your honour 'ud plase to hear me, I'll zing 'n."
Then he struck up the following quaint ballad, to an air certainly two hundred years old —
"IN A GARDEN SWEET." Arranged by F. W. Bussell, Esq., M.A
[Listen] [PDF] [MusicXML]
Two lovers in a garden sweet
Were walking side by side,
I heard how he the maid addressed,
I heard how she replied.
The garden it was very great,
With box trees in a row;
And up and down the gravell'd walk
These lovers fond did go.
"Said he, 'I prithee fix the day
Whereon we shall be wed.'
Said she, 'Thou hast a wanton mind,
I like thee not,' she said.
'For now you look at brown Nancy,
And dark eyes pleasure you;
But next declare you like the fair
Julian with eyes of blue.'
"'O pretty maid, in garden sweet,
Are flowers in each parterre,
I turn and gaze with fond amaze
At all – for all are fair.
But one I find – best to my mind,
Of all I choose but one;
I stoop and gather that choice flower,
And wear that flower alone.'"