Chapter 5

These are exquisite lines, and have given delight to innumerable readers, but they gave no delight to Lady Mary. In writing to her sister, the Countess of Mar, then at Paris, she says in allusion to these "most musical, most melancholy" verses--"_I stifled them here; and I beg they may die the same death at Paris_." It is not, however, quite so easy a thing as Lady Mary seemed to think, to "stifle" such poetry as Pope's.

Pope's notions respecting the laying out of gardens are well expressed in the following extract from the fourth Epistle of his Moral Essays.[015] This fourth Epistle was addressed, as most readers will remember, to the accomplished Lord Burlington, who, as Walpole says, "had every quality of a genius and an artist, except envy. Though his own designs were more chaste and classic than Kent's, he entertained him in his house till his death, and was more studious to extend his friend's fame than his own."

Something there is more needful than expense, And something previous e'en to taste--'tis sense; Good sense, which only is the gift of Heaven, And though no science fairly worth the seven; A light, which in yourself you must perceive; Jones and Le Notre have it not to give. To build, or plant, whatever you intend, To rear the column or the arch to bend; To swell the terrace, or to sink the grot; In all let Nature never be forgot. But treat the goddess like a modest fair, Nor over dress nor leave her wholly bare; Let not each beauty every where be spied, Where half the skill is decently to hide. He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds, Surprizes, varies, and conceals the bounds. _Consult the genius of the place in all_;[016] That tells the waters or to rise or fall; Or helps the ambitious hill the heavens to scale, Or scoops in circling theatres the vale; Calls in the country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods and varies shades from shades; Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines; Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. Still follow sense, of every art the soul; Parts answering parts shall slide into a whole, Spontaneous beauties all around advance, Start e'en from difficulty, strike from chance; Nature shall join you; time shall make it grow A work to wonder at--perhaps a STOWE.[017] Without it proud Versailles![018] Thy glory falls; And Nero's terraces desert their walls. The vast parterres a thousand hands shall make, Lo! Cobham comes and floats them with a lake; Or cut wide views through mountains to the plain, You'll wish your hill or sheltered seat again.

Pope is in most instances singularly happy in his compliments, but the allusion to STOWE--as "_a work to wonder at_"--has rather an equivocal appearance, and so also has the mention of Lord Cobham, the proprietor of the place. In the first draught of the poem, the name of Bridgeman was inserted where Cobham's now stands, but as Bridgeman mistook the compliment for a sneer, the poet thought the landscape-gardener had proved himself undeserving of the intended honor, and presented the second-hand compliment to the peer. The grounds at Stowe, more praised by poets than any other private estate in England, extend to 400 acres. There are many other fine estates in our country of far greater extent, but of less celebrity. Some of them are much too extensive, perhaps, for true enjoyment. The Earl of Leicester, when he had completed his seat at Holkham, observed, that "It was a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country. I look round; not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the Giant of Giant-castle and have ate up all my neighbours." The Earl must have felt that the political economy of Goldsmith in his _Deserted Village_ was not wholly the work of imagination.

Sweet smiling village! Loveliest of the lawn, Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn; Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen And desolation saddens all the green,-- _One only master grasps thy whole domain_.

* * * * *

Where then, ah! where shall poverty reside, To scape the pressure of contiguous pride?

"Hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton," as Lamb calls him, describes Stowe as a Paradise.

ON LORD COBHAM'S GARDEN.

It puzzles much the sage's brains Where Eden stood of yore, Some place it in Arabia's plains, Some say it is no more.

But Cobham can these tales confute, As all the curious know; For he hath proved beyond dispute, That Paradise is STOWE.

Thomson also calls the place a paradise:

Ye Powers That o'er the garden and the rural seat Preside, which shining through the cheerful land In countless numbers blest Britannia sees; O, lead me to the wide-extended walks, _The fair majestic paradise of Stowe!_ Not Persian Cyrus on Ionia's shore E'er saw such sylvan scenes; such various art By genius fired, such ardent genius tamed By cool judicious art, that in the strife All-beauteous Nature fears to be out-done.

The poet somewhat mars the effect of this compliment to the charms of Stowe, by making it a matter of regret that the owner

His verdant files Of ordered trees should here inglorious range, Instead of squadrons flaming o'er the field, And long embattled hosts.

This representation of rural pursuits as inglorious, a sentiment so out of keeping with his subject, is soon after followed rather inconsistently, by a sort of paraphrase of Virgil's celebrated picture of rural felicity, and some of Thomson's own thoughts on the advantages of a retreat from active life.

Oh, knew he but his happiness, of men The happiest he! Who far from public rage Deep in the vale, with a choice few retired Drinks the pure pleasures of the rural life, &c.

Then again:--

Let others brave the flood in quest of gain And beat for joyless months, the gloomy wave. _Let such as deem it glory to destroy, Rush into blood, the sack of cities seek; Unpierced, exulting in the widow's wail, The virgin's shriek and infant's trembling cry._

* * * * *

While he, from all the stormy passions free That restless men involve, hears and _but_ hears, At distance safe, the human tempest roar, Wrapt close in conscious peace. The fall of kings, The rage of nations, and the crush of states, Move not the man, who from the world escaped, In still retreats and flowery solitudes, To nature's voice attends, from month to month, And day to day, through the revolving year; Admiring sees her in her every shape; Feels all her sweet emotions at his heart; Takes what she liberal gives, nor asks for more. He, when young Spring, protudes the bursting gems Marks the first bud, and sucks the healthful gale Into his freshened soul; her genial hour He full enjoys, and not a beauty blows And not an opening blossom breathes in vain.

Thomson in his description of Lord Townshend's seat of Rainham--another English estate once much celebrated and still much admired--exclaims:

Such are thy beauties, Rainham, such the haunts Of angels, in primeval guiltless days When man, imparadised, conversed with God.

And Broome after quoting the whole description in his dedication of his own poems to Lord Townshend, observes, in the old fashioned fulsome strain, "This, my lord, is but a faint picture of the place of your retirement which no one ever enjoyed more elegantly."[019] "A faint picture!" What more would the dedicator have wished Thomson to say? Broome, if not contented with his patron's seat being described as an earthly Paradise, must have desired it to be compared with Heaven itself, and thus have left his Lordship no hope of the enjoyment of a better place than he already possessed.

Samuel Boyse, who when without a shirt to his back sat up in his bed to write verses, with his arms through two holes in his blanket, and when he went into the streets wore paper collars to conceal the sad deficiency of linen, has a poem of considerable length entitled _The Triumphs of Nature_. It is wholly devoted to a description of this magnificent garden,[020] in which, amongst other architectural ornaments, was a temple dedicated to British worthies, where the busts of Pope and Congreve held conspicuous places. I may as well give a specimen of the lines of poor Boyse. Here is his description of that part of Lord Cobham's grounds in which is erected to the Goddess of Love, a Temple containing a statue of the Venus de Medicis.

Next to the fair ascent our steps we traced, Where shines afar the bold rotunda placed; The artful dome Ionic columns bear Light as the fabric swells in ambient air. Beneath enshrined the Tuscan Venus stands And beauty's queen the beauteous scene commands: The fond beholder sees with glad surprize, Streams glisten, lawns appear, and forests rise-- Here through thick shades alternate buildings break, There through the borders steals the silver lake, A soft variety delights the soul, And harmony resulting crowns the whole.

Congreve in his Letter in verse addressed to Lord Cobham asks him to

Tell how his pleasing Stowe employs his time.

It would seem that the proprietor of Stowe took particular interest in the disposition of the water on his grounds. Congreve enquires

Or dost thou give the winds afar to blow Each vexing thought, and heart-devouring woe, And fix thy mind alone on rural scenes, _To turn the level lawns to liquid plains_? To raise the creeping rills from humble beds And force the latent spring to lift their heads, On watery columns, capitals to rear, That mix their flowing curls with upper air?

* * * * *

Or slowly walk along the mazy wood To meditate on all that's wise and good.

The line:--

To turn the level lawn to liquid plains--

Will remind the reader of Pope's

Lo! Cobham comes and floats them with a lake--

And it might be thought that Congreve had taken the hint from the bard of Twickenham if Congreve's poem had not preceded that of Pope. The one was published in 1729, the other in 1731.

Cowper is in the list of poets who have alluded to "Cobham's groves" and Pope's commemoration of them.

And _Cobham's groves_ and Windsor's green retreats When Pope describes them have a thousand sweets.

"Magnificence and splendour," says Mr. Whately, the author of _Observations on Modern Gardening_, "are the characteristics of Stowe. It is like one of those places celebrated in antiquity which were devoted to the purposes of religion, and filled with sacred groves, hallowed fountains, and temples dedicated to several deities; the resort of distant nations and the object of veneration to half the heathen world: the pomp is, at Stowe, blended with beauty; and the place is equally distinguished by its amenity and grandeur." Horace Walpole speaks of its "visionary enchantment." "I have been strolling about in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, from garden to garden," says Pope in one of his letters, "but still returning to Lord Cobham's with fresh satisfaction."[021]

The grounds at Stowe, until the year 1714, were laid out in the old formal style. Bridgeman then commenced the improvements and Kent subsequently completed them.

Stowe is now, I believe, in the possession of the Marquis of Chandos, son of the Duke of Buckingham. It is melancholy to state that the library, the statues, the furniture, and even some of the timber on the estate, were sold in 1848 to satisfy the creditors of the Duke.

Pope was never tired of improving his own grounds. "I pity you, Sir," said a friend to him, "because you have now completed every thing belonging to your gardens."[022] "Why," replied Pope, "I really shall be at a loss for the diversion I used to take in carrying out and finishing things: I have now nothing left me to do but to add a little ornament or two along the line of the Thames." I dare say Pope was by no means so near the end of his improvements as he and his friend imagined. One little change in a garden is sure to suggest or be followed by another. Garden-improvements are "never ending, still beginning." The late Dr. Arnold, the famous schoolmaster, writing to a friend, says--"The garden is a constant source of amusement to us both (self and wife); there are always some little alterations to be made, some few spots where an additional shrub or two would be ornamental, something coming into blossom; so that I can always delight to go round and see how things are going on." A garden is indeed a scene of continual change. Nature, even without the aid of the gardener, has "infinite variety," and supplies "a perpetual feast of nectared sweets where no crude surfeit reigns."

Spence reports Pope to have said: "I have sometimes had an idea of planting an old gothic cathedral in trees. Good large poplars, with their white stems, cleared of boughs to a proper height would serve very well for the columns, and might form the different aisles or peristilliums, by their different distances and heights. These would look very well near, and the dome rising all in a proper tuft in the middle would look well at a distance." This sort of verdant architecture would perhaps have a pleasing effect, but it is rather too much in the artificial style, to be quite consistent with Pope's own idea of landscape-gardening. And there are other trees that would form a nobler natural cathedral than the formal poplar. Cowper did not think of the poplar, when he described a green temple-roof.

How airy and how light the graceful arch, Yet awful as the consecrated roof Re-echoing pious anthems.

Almost the only traces of Pope's garden that now remain are the splendid Spanish chesnut-trees and some elms and cedars planted by the poet himself. A space once laid out in winding walks and beautiful shrubberies is now a potatoe field! The present proprietor, Mr. Young, is a wholesale tea-dealer. Even the bones of the poet, it is said, have been disturbed. The skull of Pope, according to William Howitt, is now in the private collection of a phrenologist! The manner in which it was obtained, he says, is this:--On some occasion of alteration in the church at Twickenham, or burial of some one in the same spot, the coffin of Pope was disinterred, and opened to see the state of the remains. By a bribe of L50 to the Sexton, possession of the skull was obtained for one night; another skull was then returned instead of the poet's.

It has been stated that the French term _Ferme Ornee_ was first used in England by Shenstone. It exactly expressed the character of his grounds. Mr. Repton said that he never strolled over the scenery of the Leasowes without lamenting the constant disappointment to which Shenstone exposed himself by a vain attempt to unite the incompatible objects of ornament and profit. "Thus," continued Mr. Repton, "the poet lived under the continual mortification of disappointed hope, and with a mind exquisitely sensible, he felt equally the sneer of the great man at the magnificence of his attempt and the ridicule of the farmer at the misapplication of his paternal acres." The "sneer of the great man." is perhaps an allusion to what Dr. Johnson says of Lord Lyttelton:--that he "looked with disdain" on "the petty State" of his neighbour. "For a while," says Dr. Johnson, "the inhabitants of Hagley affected to tell their acquaintance of the little fellow that was trying to make himself admired; but when by degrees the Leasowes forced themselves into notice, they took care to defeat the curiosity which they could not suppress, by conducting their visitants perversely to inconvenient points of view, and introducing them at the wrong end of a walk to detect a deception; injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain." Mr. Graves, the zealous friend of Shenstone, indignantly denies that any of the Lyttelton family had evinced so ungenerous a feeling towards the proprietor of the Leasowes who though his "empire" was less "spacious and opulent" had probably a larger share of true taste than even the proprietor of Hagley, the Lyttelton domain--though Hagley has been much, and I doubt not, deservedly, admired.[023]

Dr. Johnson states that Shenstone's expenses were beyond his means,-- that he spent his estate in adorning it--that at last the clamours of creditors "overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and that his groves were haunted by beings very different from fauns and fairies." But this is gross exaggeration. Shenstone was occasionally, indeed, in slight pecuniary difficulties, but he could always have protected himself from the intrusion of the myrmidons of the law by raising money on his estate; for it appears that after the payment of all his debts, he left legacies to his friends and annuities to his servants.

Johnson himself is the most scornful of the critics upon Shenstone's rural pursuits. "The pleasure of Shenstone," says the Doctor, "was all in his eye: he valued what he valued merely for its looks. Nothing raised his indignation more than to ask if there were any fishes in his water." Dr. Johnson would have seen no use in the loveliest piece of running water in the world if it had contained nothing that he could masticate! Mrs. Piozzi says of him, "The truth is, he hated to hear about prospects and views, and laying out grounds and taste in gardening." "That was the best garden," he said, "which produced most roots and fruits; and that water was most to be prized which contained most fish." On this principle of the valuelessness of those pleasures which enter the mind through the eye, Dr. Johnson should have blamed the lovers of painting for dwelling with such fond admiration on the canvas of his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds. In point of fact, Dr. Johnson had no more sympathy with the genius of the painter or the musician than with that of the Landscape gardener, for he had neither an eye nor an ear for Art. He wondered how any man could be such a fool as to be moved to tears by music, and observed, that, "one could not fill one's belly with hearing soft murmurs or looking at rough cascades." No; the loveliness of nature does not satisfy the thirst and hunger of the body, but it _does_ satisfy the thirst and hunger of the soul. No one can find wheaten bread or wine or venison or beef or plum-pudding or turtle-soup in mere sounds and sights, however exquisite--neither can any one find such substantial diet within the boards of a book--no not even on the pages of Shakespeare, or even those of the Bible itself,--but men can find in sweet music and lovely scenery and good books something infinitely more precious than all the wine, venison, beef, or plum-pudding, or turtle-soup that could be swallowed during a long life by the most craving and capacious alderman of London! Man is of a dual nature: he is not all body. He has other and far higher wants and enjoyments than the purely physical--and these nobler appetites are gratified by the charms of nature and the creations of inspired genius.

Dr. Johnson's gastronomic allusions to nature recal the old story of a poet pointing out to a utilitarian friend some white lambs frolicking in a meadow. "Aye," said, the other, "only think of a quarter of one of them with asparagus and mint sauce!" The story is by some supposed to have had a Scottish origin, and a prosaic North Briton is made to say that the pretty little lambs, sporting amidst the daisies and buttercups, would "_mak braw pies_."

A profound feeling for the beautiful is generally held to be an essential quality in the poet. It is a curious fact, however, that there are some who aspire to the rank of poet, and have their claims allowed, who yet cannot be said to be poetical in their nature--for how can that nature be, strictly speaking, _poetical_ which denies the sentiment of Keats, that

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever?

Both Scott and Byron very earnestly admired Dr. Johnson's "_London_" and "_The Vanity of Human Wishes_." Yet the sentiments just quoted from the author of those productions are far more characteristic of a utilitarian philosopher than of one who has been endowed by nature with

The vision and the faculty divine,

and made capable, like some mysterious enchanter, of

Clothing the palpable and the familiar With golden exhalations of the dawn.

Crabbe, also a prime favorite with the authors of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and _Childe Harold_, is recorded by his biographer--his own son--to have exhibited "a remarkable indifference to all the proper objects of taste;" to have had "no real love for painting, or music, or architecture or for what a painter's eye considers as the beauties of landscape." "In botany, grasses, the most _useful_ but the least ornamental, were his favorites." "He never seemed to be captivated with the mere beauty of natural objects or even to catch any taste for the arrangement of his specimens. Within, the house was a kind of scientific confusion; in the garden the usual showy foreigners gave place to the most scarce flowers, especially to the rarer weeds, of Britain; and were scattered here and there only for preservation. In fact he neither loved order for its own sake nor had any very high opinion of that passion in others."[024] Lord Byron described Crabbe to be

Though nature's sternest painter, yet _the best_.

What! was he a better painter of nature than Shakespeare? The truth is that Byron was a wretched critic, though a powerful poet. His praises and his censures were alike unmeasured.

His generous ardor no cold medium knew.

He seemed to recognize no great general principles of criticism, but to found all his judgments on mere prejudice and passion. He thought Cowper "no poet," pronounced Spenser "a dull fellow," and placed Pope above Shakespeare. Byron's line on Crabbe is inscribed on the poet's tombstone at Trowbridge. Perhaps some foreign visitor on reading the inscription may be surprized at his own ignorance when he learns that it is not the author of _Macbeth_ and _Othello_ that he is to regard as the best painter of nature that England has produced, but the author of the _Parish Register_ and the _Tales of the Hall_. Absurd and indiscriminate laudations of this kind confound all intellectual distinctions and make criticism ridiculous. Crabbe is unquestionably a vigorous and truthful writer, but he is not the _best_ we have, in any sense of the word.

Though Dr. Johnson speaks so contemptuously of Shenstone's rural pursuits, he could not help acknowledging that when the poet began "to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks and to wind his waters," he did all this with such judgment and fancy as "made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers, and copied by designers."

Mason, in his _English Garden_, a poem once greatly admired, but now rarely read, and never perhaps with much delight, does justice to the taste of the Poet of the Leasowes.

Nor, Shenstone, thou Shalt pass without thy meed, thou son of peace! Who knew'st, perchance, to harmonize thy shades Still softer than thy song; yet was that song Nor rude nor inharmonious when attuned To pastoral plaint, or tale of slighted love.

English pleasure-gardens have been much imitated by the French. Viscomte Girardin, at his estate of Ermenonville, dedicated an inscription in amusing French-English to the proprietor of the Leasowes--

THIS PLAIN STONE TO WILLIAM SHENSTONE; IN HIS WRITINGS HE DISPLAYED A MIND NATURAL; AT LEASOWES HE LAID ARCADIAN GREENS RURAL.