Part 8

But the Reverend Hanbury was beset by aggressive and cold-hearted neighbors, among them two strange old "gentlewomen," Mistress Pickering and Mistress Byrd, who malevolently ordered their cattle to be turned loose into his first plantation of twenty thousand young and thrifty trees. And not content with this, they served twenty-seven different copies of writs upon him in one day, for trespass. Of all this he gives detailed account in his curious history of the "Charitable Foundations at Church-Langton." He tells us that the "venomous rage" of these old ladies (who died shortly after, worth a million of dollars) did not even spare his dogs; but that his pet spaniel and greyhound were cruelly killed by a table-fork thrust into their entrails. Nay, their game-keeper even buried two dogs alive, which belonged to his neighbor, Mr. Wade, a substantial grazier. His story of it is very Defoe-like and pitiful:--"I myself heard them," he says, "_ten days_ after they had been buried, and, seeing some people at a distance, inquired what dogs they were. '_They are some dogs that are lost, Sir_,' said they; '_they have been lost some time_.' I concluded only some poachers had been there early in the morning, and by a precipitate flight had left their dogs behind them. In short, the howling and barking of these dogs was heard for near three weeks, when it ceased. Mr. Wade's dogs were missing, but he could not suspect those dogs to be his; and the noise ceasing, the thoughts, wonder, and talking about them soon also ceased. Some time after, a person, being amongst the bushes where the howling was heard, discovered some disturbed earth, and the print of men's heels ramming it down again very close, and, seeing Mr. Wade's servant, told him he thought something had been buried there. '_Then_,' said the man, '_it is our dogs, and they have been buried alive. I will go and fetch a spade, and will find them, if I dig all Caudle over_.' He soon brought a spade, and, upon removing the top earth, came to the blackthorns, and then to the dogs, the biggest of which had eat the loins, and greatest share of the hind parts, of the little one."

The strange ladies who were guilty of this slaughter of innocents showed "a dying blaze of goodness" by bequeathing twelve thousand pounds to charitable societies; and "thus ended," says Hanbury, "these two poor, unhappy, uncharitable, charitable old gentlewomen."

The good old man describes the beauty of plants and trees with the same delightful particularity which he spent on his neighbors and the buried dogs.

I cannot anywhere learn whether or not the charity-plantation of Church-Langton is still thriving.

About this very time, Lancelot Brown, who was for a long period the kitchen-gardener at Stowe, came into sudden notoriety by his disposition of the waters in Blenheim Park, where, in the short period of one week, he created perhaps the finest artificial lake in the world. Its indentations of shore, its bordering declivities of wood, and the graceful swells of land dipping to its margin, remain now in very nearly the same condition in which Brown left them more than a hundred years ago. All over England the new man was sent for; all over England he rooted out the mossy avenues, and the sharp rectangularities, and laid down his flowing lines of walks, and of trees. He (wisely) never contracted to execute his own designs, and--from lack of facility, perhaps--he always employed assistants to draw his plans. But the quick eye which at first sight recognized the "capabilities" of a place, and which leaped to the recognition of its matured graces, was all his own. He was accused of sameness; but the man who at one time held a thousand lovely landscapes unfolding in his thought could hardly give a series of contrasts without startling affectations.

I mention the name of Lancelot Brown, however, not to discuss his merits, but as the principal and largest illustrator of that taste in landscape-gardening which just now grew up in England, out of a new reading of Milton, out of the admirable essays of Addison, out of the hints of Pope, out of the designs of Kent, and which was stimulated by Gilpin, by Horace Walpole, and, still more, by the delightful little landscapes of Gainsborough.

Enough will be found of Mr. Brown, and of his style, in the professional treatises, upon whose province I do not now infringe. I choose rather, for the entertainment of my readers, if they will kindly find it, to speak of that sad, exceptional man, William Shenstone, who, by the beauties which he made to appear on his paternal farm of Leasowes, fairly rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners,--and who, by the graces and the tenderness which he lavished on his verse, made no mean rank for himself at a time when people were reading the "Elegy" of Gray, the Homer of Pope, and the "Cato" of Addison.

I think there can hardly be any doubt, however, that poor Shenstone was a wretched farmer; yet the Leasowes was a capital grazing farm, when he took it in charge, within fair marketable distance of both Worcester and Birmingham. I suspect that he never put his fine hands to the plough-tail; and his plaintive elegy, that dates from an April day of 1743, tells, I am sure, only the unmitigated truth:--

"Again the laboring hind inverts the soil; Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave; Another spring renews the soldier's toil, _And finds me vacant in the rural cave_."

Shenstone, like many another of the lesser poets, was unfortunate in having Dr. Johnson for his biographer. It is hard to conceive of a man who would show less of tenderness for an elaborate parterre of flowers, or for a poet who affectedly parted his gray locks on one side of his head, wore a crimson waistcoat, and warbled in anapæstics about kids and shepherds' crooks. Only fancy the great, snuffy, wheezing Doctor, with his hair-powder whitening half his shoulders, led up before some charming little extravaganza of Boucher, wherein all the nymphs are simpering marchionesses, with rosettes on their high-heeled slippers that out-color the sky! With what a "Faugh!" the great gerund-grinder would thump his cane upon the floor, and go lumbering away! And Shenstone, or rather his memory, caught the besom of just such a sneer.

But other critics were more kindly and appreciative; among them, Dodsley the bookselling author, who wrote "The Economy of Human Life," (the "Proverbial Philosophy" of its day,) and Whately, who gave to the public the most elegant and tasteful discussion of artificial scenery that was perhaps ever written.

Shenstone studied, as much as so indolent a man ever could, at Pembroke College, Oxford. His parents died when he was young, leaving to him a very considerable estate, which fortunately some relative administered for him, until, owing to this supervisor's death, it lapsed into the poet's improvident hands. Even then a sensible tenant of his own name, and a distant relative, managed very snugly the farm of Leasowes; but when Shenstone came to live with him, neither house nor grounds were large enough for the joint occupancy of the poet, who was trailing his walks through the middle of the mowing, and of the tenant, who had his beeves to fatten and his rental to pay.

So Shenstone became a farmer on his own account; and, according to all reports, a very sorry account he made of it. The good soul had none of Mr. Tull's petulance and audacity with his servants; if the ploughman broke his gear, I suspect the kind ballad-master allowed him a holiday for the mending. The herdsman stared in astonishment to find the "beasts" ordered away from their accustomed grazing-fields. A new thicket had been planted, which must not be disturbed; the orchard was uprooted to give place to some parterre; a fine bit of meadow was flowed with a miniature lake; hedges were shorn away without mercy; arbors, grottos, rustic seats, Arcadian temples, sprang up in all outlying nooks; so that the annual product of the land came presently to be limited, almost entirely, to the beauty of its disposition.

I think that the poet, unlike most, was never very thoroughly satisfied with his poems, and that, therefore, the vanity possessed him to vest the sense of beauty which he felt tingling in his blood in something more palpable than language. Hence came the charming walks and woods and waters of Leasowes. With this ambition holding him and mastering him, what mattered a mouldy grain-crop, or a debt? If he had only an ardent admirer of his walks, his wilderness, his grottos,--this was his customer. He longed for such, in troops,--as a poet longs for readers, and as a farmer longs for sun and rain.

And he had them. I fancy there was hardly a cultivated person in England, but, before the death of Shenstone, had heard of the rare beauty of his home of Leasowes. Lord Lyttleton, who lived near by, at the elegant seat of Hagley, brought over his guests to see what miracles the hare-brained, sensitive poet had wrought upon his farm. And I can fancy the proud, shy creature watching from his lattice the company of distinguished guests,--maddened, if they look at his alcove from the wrong direction,--wondering if that shout that comes booming to his sensitive ear means admiration, or only an unappreciative surprise,--dwelling on the memory of the visit, as a poet dwells on the first public mention of his poem. In his "Egotisms," (well named,) he writes,--"Why repine? I have seen mansions on the verge of Wales that convert my farm-house into a Hampton Court, and where they speak of a glazed window as a great piece of magnificence. All things figure by comparison."

And this reflection, with its flavor of philosophy, was, I dare say, a sweet morsel to him. He saw very little of the world in his later years, save that part of it which at odd intervals found its way to the delights of Leasowes; indeed, he was not of a temper to meet the world upon fair terms. "The generality of mankind," he cynically says, "are seldom in good humor but whilst they are imposing upon you in some shape or other."[12]

Our farmer of Leasowes published a pastoral that was no way equal to the pastoral he wrote with trees, walks, and water upon his land; yet there are few cultivated readers who have not some day met with it, and been beguiled by its mellifluous seesaw. How its jingling resonance comes back to me to-day from the "Reader" book of the High School!

"I have found out a gift for my fair; I have found where the wood-pigeons breed: But let me that plunder forbear; She will say 'twas a barbarous deed. For he ne'er could be true, she averred, Who could rob a poor bird of its young: And I loved her the more, when I heard Such tenderness fall from her tongue."

And what a killing look over at the girl in the corner, in check gingham, with blue bows in her hair, as I read (always on the old school-benches),--

"I have heard her with sweetness unfold How that pity was due to--a dove: That it ever attended the bold; And she called it _the sister of love_. But her words such a pleasure convey, So much I her accents adore, Let her speak, and whatever she say, Methinks I should love her the more."

There is a rhythmic prettiness in this; but it is the prettiness of a lover in his teens, and not the kind we look for from a man who stood five feet eleven in his stockings, and wore his own gray hair. Strangely enough, Shenstone had the _physique_ of a ploughman or a prize-fighter, and with it the fine, sensitive brain of a woman; a Greek in his refinements, and a Greek in indolence. I hope he gets on better in the other world than he ever did in this.

ON THE RELATION OF ART TO NATURE.

IN TWO PARTS.

PART II.

The repulsive ugliness of the early Christian paintings was not the consequence of any break in the tradition. There was no reason why the graceful drawing of the human figure should not have been transmitted, as well as the technical procedures and the pigments. Nor was effort wanting: these pictures were often very elaborate and splendid in execution. But it is clear that grace and resemblance to anything existing, so far from being aimed at, were intentionally avoided. Even as late as the thirteenth century we find figures with blue legs and red bodies,--the horses in a procession blue, red, and yellow. Any whim of association, or fanciful color-pattern, was preferred to beauty or correctness. Likeness to actual things seemed to be regarded, indeed, as an unavoidable evil, to be restricted as far as possible. The problem was, to show God's omnipresence in the world, especially His appearance on the earth as man, and His abiding presence in holy men and women as an inspiration obliterating their humanity. But so long as the divine and the human are looked upon as essentially opposed, their union can be by miracle only, and the first thought must be to keep prominent this miraculousness, and guard against confusion of this angelic existence with every-day reality. The result is this realm of ghosts, at home neither in heaven nor on earth, neither presuming to be spirit nor condescending to be body, but hovering intermediate. But the more strongly the antithesis is felt, the nearer the thought to end this remaining tenderness for the gross and unspiritual,--to drop this ballast of earth, and rise into the region of heavenly realities. Upon a window of Canterbury Cathedral, beneath a representation of the miracle of Cana, is the legend,--_"Lympha dat historiam, vinum notat allegoriam."_ But if the earthly is there only for the sake of this heavenly transmutation,--if the miracle, and the miracle alone, shows God's purpose accomplished,--then all things must be miraculous, for all else may be safely ignored. Henceforth, nothing is of itself profane, for the profane is only that wherein the higher and truer sense has not yet been recognized. What is demanded is not an exceptional transmutation, but a translation,--that all Nature should be interpreted of the spirit.

The result is, on the one hand, a greater license in dealing with actual forms, since Art sees all things on one level of dignity,--respects one no more than another, but only its own purpose,--is careless of material qualities, and of moral qualities, too, as far as they are bound to particular shapes. Why dwell tediously upon one particle, when the value of it consists not in its particularity, but in its harmony with the rest of the universe? Giotto seems to make short work with the human form divine by wrapping all his figures from head to foot in flowing draperies. But these figures have more humanity in them, stand closer to us, because the meaning is no longer petrified in the shape, but speaks to us freely and directly, in a look, a gesture, a sweep of the garment. The Greek said,--"With these superhuman lineaments you are to conceive the presence of Jove; these are the appropriate forms of the immortals." Giotto said,--"See what divine meanings in every-day faces and actions; with these eyes you are to look upon the people in the street." The one is a remote and incredible perfection,--the other, the intimate reality of the actual and present. It is, in truth, therefore, a closer approach to Nature than was before possible. The artist no longer shuns full actuality for his conception, for he fears no confusion with the actual. For instance, from the earliest times the celestial nature of angels had been naïvely intimated by appending wings to them. There was no attempt to carry out the suggestion, or to show the mechanical possibility of it, for that would be only to make winged men. The painters of the sixteenth century, on the other hand, from a nervous dread lest wings should prove insufficient, establish a sure basis of clouds for their angels, with more and more emphasis of buoyancy and extent, until at last, no longer trusting their own statement, they settle the question by showing them from below, already risen, and so choke off the doubt whether they can rise. But Orcagna's angels float without assistance or effort, by their own inherent lightness, as naturally as we walk. They are not out of their element, but bring their element with them. These are not men caught up into the skies, and do not need to be sustained there. The world they inhabit is not earth in heaven, but heaven on earth,--the earth seen in accordance with the purpose of its existence.

Giotto's fellow-citizens were struck with the new interest which the language of attitude and gesture and all the familiar details of life acquired in his representation of them. Looking around them, they saw what they had been taught to see, and concluded it was only an unexampled closeness of copying. No doubt Giotto thought so, too,--but had that been all, we should not have heard of it. It is this new interest that has to be accounted for. The charm did not lie in the fact, nor in the reproduction of it in the picture, but in a sudden sense of its value as expression, resting on a still obscurer feeling that herein lay its whole value,--that the actual _is_ not what it seems, still less a pure delusion, but that it is pure _seeming_, so that its phenomenal character is no reproach, but the bond that connects it with reality. Just because it is only "the outward show," and does not pretend to be anything more, what it shows is not "the things that only seem," but the things that are. The attractiveness of beauty is due to the sense of higher affinities in the object; it is finality felt, but not comprehended, so that the form shines with the splendor of a purpose that belongs not to it, but to the whole whereof it is a part. Aristotle makes wonder the forerunner of science. So our admiration of beauty is a tribute paid in advance to the fresh insight it promises. Whether it be called miracle or inspiration, the artist must see his theme as something excellent and singular. This is perhaps that "strangeness" which Lord Bacon requires in all "excellent beauty," the new significance coming direct, and not through reflection, and therefore ineffable and incomparable. That Giotto and his successors went on for two hundred years painting saints and miracles was not because the Church so ordained, nor from any extraordinary devoutness of the artists, but because they still needed an outward assurance that what they did was not the petty triviality it seemed. There must always remain the sense of an ulterior, undeveloped meaning; when that is laid bare, Art has become superfluous, and makes haste to withdraw into obscure regions. For it is only as language that the picture or the statue avails anything, and this circumstantiality of expression is tolerable only so long as it is the only expression. Beauty is an honor to matter; but spirit, the source of beauty, is impatient of such measure of it as Art can give. As, in the legend, Eurydice, the dawn, sinks back into night at the look of the arisen sun, so this lovely flush of the dawning intelligence wanes before the eye of the intellect. The picture is a help so long as it transcends previous conception; but when the mind comes up with these sallies, and the picture is compared with the idea, it sinks back into a thing. Thenceforth it takes rank with Nature, and falls victim to the natural laws. It is only an aspect and an instant,--not eternal, but a petty persistence,--not God, but an idol,--not the saint, but his flesh and integuments.

Shall we say, then, that beauty is an illusion? Certainly it is no falsity; we may call it provisional truth,--truth at a certain stage, as appearance, not yet as idea. It is _appearance_ seen as final, as the highest the mind has reached. Hence its miraculousness. It is in advance of consciousness; we cannot account for it any more than the savage could account for his fetich,--why this bunch of rags and feathers should be more venerable to him than other rags and feathers. But to deny that the impressiveness it adds to matter comes from a deeper sense of the truth would be as unwise as for him to deny his fetich. The fetich is false, not as compared with other rags and feathers, but as compared with a higher conception of God. The falsity is not that he sees God in this rubbish, but that he does not see Him elsewhere. Coleridge said that a picture is something between a thought and a thing. It must keep the mean; either extreme is fatal. Plato makes Eros intermediate between wisdom and ignorance, born of unequal parentage, neither mortal nor immortal, forever needy, forever seeking the Psyche whom he can never meet face to face.

The history of Art has a certain analogy to the growth of the corals. Like them, it seeks the light which it cannot endure. A certain depth beneath the surface is most favorable to it,--a dim, midway region of twilight and calm, remote alike from the stagnant obscurity of mere sensation and from the agitated surface of day, the dry light of the intellect. When it is laid bare, it dies,--its substance, indeed, enduring as the basis of new continents, but the life gone, and only the traces of its action left in the stony relics of the past. Greek Art perished when its secret was translated into clearer language by Plato and Aristotle; and Duccio and Cimabue and Giotto must go the same way as soon as St. Francis of Assisi or Luther or Calvin puts into words what they meant. It is its own success that is fatal to Art; for just in proportion as the expressiveness it insists upon is shown to be pervading, universal, and not the property of this or that shape, the particular manifestation is degraded. Color and form are due to partial opacity; the light must penetrate to a certain depth, but not throughout.