John Evelyn

By GRAHAM GREENE

IF it were necessary to play at the Shakespeare-Bacon game

with the seventeenth century, and having lost the sources of all its lyrics arbitrarily to choose the authors from those men whose careers are still remembered, The Garden might easily be assigned to John Evelyn, the author of Sylva, rather than to Marvell, the rough satirist., the bishop baiter, the M.P.

for Hull. For Evelyn lived very much the life to which Marvell's poetry is an escape.

" The Nectaren, and curious Peach, Into my hands themselves do reach "

well described his life at Sayes Court ; and Lord Ponsonby, with his unerring eye for the interesting detail speaks of Evelyn's long list in Kalendarium Hortense of apples unknown today, of peaches and nectarines. But a wider gulf than ambition separated the two men. Evelyn, the scholar of gardens, a man so modest that, while he had the entry to the King's presence and walked Whitehall familiarly with Charles, he petitioned for no office more important than the care of the trees in the Royal forests (and that he was not granted), differed from the poet above all in this : the garden was not his escape from life (an escape which very faintly tinges Marvell's poetry with sentimentality), but life itself.

" Fair quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence thy Sister dear,"

Marvell wrote, but to the owner of Sayes Court his garden meant a great deal more, or a great deal less, than quiet and

innocence. It meant study (he was the translator of The French Gardener in his youth, of The Complete Gardener in his

age). It meant labour :

" The hithermost Grove I planted about 1656; the other beyond it, 1660 ; the lower Grove 1662 ; the holly hedge even with the Mount hedge below 1670. I planted every hedge and tree not only in the gardens, groves, &c., but about all the fields and house since 1653, except those large, old and hollow elms in the stable court and next the sewer, for it was before, all one pasture field to the very garden of the house, which was but small.

It meant the arid grief of work wasted when Admiral Benbow, to whom Evelyn had let Sayes Court, relet it to Peter the Great, who spoilt the bowling green, demolished fruit trees, and had himself driven daily in a wheelbarrow through the great holly hedge that Evelyn loved. It seems to have been the image by which he could visualize immortality : at his birthplace, at Wotton, to which he returned to live in his old age, he began to labour again : " I am planting an evergreen grove here to an old house ready to drop." It was certainly his most enduring passion. " The late elegant and accom- plished Sir W. Temple, tho' he laid not his whole body in this garden, deposited the better part of it (the heart) there ; and if my executors will gratify me in what I have desired, I wish my corpse may be interred as I have bespoke them." But this man of few wants seldom had them gratified, and he was buried within the church. Lord Ponsonby speaks of " the darkness, the locked door, and the iron railings."

Evelyn had not Pepys's power of transmitting himself to posterity. He is himself the least character in his own diary ; and his knowledge of other men was no more penetrating than his knowledge of himself. He worked hard on a multiplicity of committees, but these were to him as much an escape from real life as the garden was to Marvell. One imagines him selfless, innocent, taken advantage of. He had no

John Evelyn. By Arthur Ponsonby. (Heinemann. 158.)

instinctive knowledge of psychology ; he believed implicity in the high moral worth of Lady Sunderland, because she kept her garden in good order ; he was puzzled by her husband's inconsistencies, rather than distressed by his treacheries. Though he was not deceived in the goodness of Margaret Godolphin, his life of her shows no perception of character. She is Virtue as the Court is Sin, she is Alabaster as it is Clay.

No man, indeed, could be less judged by his friendships, but in that strange company, which included Jeremy Taylor, as well as Lady Sunderland, I wish that Lord Ponsonby had found room for William Oughtred, the mathematician, who, according to Aubrey, came very near to discovering the philosopher's stone, and who died with joy at the Restoration. For Evelyn, who had successfully avoided the slaughterings of civil war, came near to killing his friend, when a grotto in the gardens lie had designed at Albury collapsed.

His lack of psychological penetration prevented Evelyn from being a good diarist. His merits as a writer showed themselves when he wrote as a specialist, and he was a specialist not only on gardens, but on salads, on coins, on sculpture, on Spinoza, on navigation. I confess that I have to take Lord Ponsonby's word for the value of his great work, Sylva. But the same meticulous detail (" Whenever you sow, if you prevent not the little field mouse, he will be sure to have the better share "), can be seen in Fumifugium with its plan for a green belt round London planted with sweet smelling flowers and herbs. His style is peppered with pedantries, but there is a kind of Baconian beauty in the accumulation of detail, and a touch all Evelyn's own in the sudden lyrical quickening, the sudden widening of his horizon, as a memory of his early travels comes back on him.

" I propose, . . . That these Palisade be elegantly planted, dili- gently kept and supply'd, with such Shrubs, as yield the most fragrant and odoriferous Flowers, and are aptest to tinge the Aer upon every gentle emission at a great distance : Such as are (for instance amongst many others) the Sweet-brier, all the Peridymenas and Woodbinds ; the Common white and yellow Jessamine, both the Syringes or ripe trees ; the Guelder-rose, the Musk, and all other Roses ; Genista Hispanica : To these may be added the Rubus odoratus, Hayes, Juniper, Lignum-vitae, Lavender : but above all,, Rosemary, the Flowers whereof are credibly reported to give their scent above thirty Leagues off at Sea, upon the coasts of Spain : and at some distance towards the Meadow side, Vines, yea, Hops."

The seventeenth century has been lucky lately in its biographers ; Lord Ponsonby's Evelyn has followed hard on the heels of Mr. Bryant's Pepys ; it is not Lord Ponsonby's fault that he cannot lay claim to finality in his study. Mr. Bryant had at his disposal the complete diary, and all the papers collected by Tanner and Wheatley. But Evelyn's diary remains today in great part unpublished, and Lord Ponsonby was denied access to the manuscripts at Wotton, and was even refused permission to see the house and grounds. All the more praise is due to him for a biography which certainly ranks as high as Mr. Bryant's. There is no nonsense about Lord Ponsonby's work, no trying flowers of fancy, and the character of Evelyn emerges the more clearly for his biographer's restraint in its slight conceit, its rather silly pedantry (" You will consult," Evelyn wrote to Pepys, when the latter was contemplating his history of the navy, " Fulvius Ursinus, Goltziusi Monsieur St. Amant, Otto, Dr. Spon, Valliant, Dr. Patin and the _most learned Spankemius "),"in its essential goodness.