THE FORMAL ENGLISH GARDEN.* MEssas. Blomfield and Thomas have done
a good work in putting this book together, for it may serve to give burial to certain tiresome fallacies. The mother-fallacy in this matter is neatly challenged by the title of their book, The " Formal" Garden. " Formal " is the question-begging word that the landscape gardeners have used as a reproach, and nothing clears the air more than to accept the word of abuse, and, as in this case, to say : " Formal ! Why, of course. What else should a garden be but formal ? " Then, while the adversary reflects, gaping, you soberly reason with him, remind him that a house is not a product of Nature like a tree, that its lines are a contravention of Nature's lines, and that, just as natural forms, when admitted to the decoration of a house, must put off half their nature at the bidding of architecture, so Nature itself, when admitted to the decoration of a garden, must still feel and confess that influence of the house, must play up to its design, and make a virtue of formality. For a house does not end where its walls touch the ground; as a statue has a pedestal, so has it a platform and a setting, and within the grounds of that setting, turf, and trees, and flowers become the stuff for floors and screens, so much green paint and coloured mosaic for the architect to handle.
The theory against which this book is directed was really based on a horror of the straight line, and its expounders, had they been logical, would have abolished architecture itself. Du Fresnoy, the Boileau of painting, was the prophet of those who might be called the Curly Masters, and his ideal in Nature and in Art was the dissimulation of geometry and the evasion
of symmetry— "When squares or angles join, When flows in tedious parallel the line, Acute, obtuse, whene'er the forms appear, Or take a formal geometric air,
This will displease, and the offended eye Nauseates the tame and irksome symmetry."
The translator of Da Fresnoy, the jobbing poet of Nuneham Mason (not referred to, we think, by Mr. Blomfield), applied these aesthetics to gardening in his poem, " The English Garden."
" Thy happy art shall learn To melt in fluent curves whate'er is straight, Acute, or parallel. For, these unchanged, Nature and she disdain the formal scene."
This line, carried out in the garden by the suppression of avenues and fences, and the wriggling about of paths, ought to have led on to the suppression of buildings,, but the author's way was to "dare with caution," as he puts it, and he compromised with architecture by culti- vating the ruin. Thus his model gardener, having to put up a dairy and an icehouse in his grounds, disguised the one as a ruined abbey, the other as a fortress with a portcullis.
The whole theory seems absurd enough, and yet behind every system of wrong aesthetics there is an artist whom it is an attempt to formulate. The artist in this case was Claude, and what the English landscape gardener really wanted to do was to reproduce in an English park Claude's dignified tran- scripts of the scenery of Rome and Tivoli. When Kent and Brown reduced this to an absurdity by constructing landscape pictures that would not reverse, and still more when the tiny plot of a London villa is handled on the assumption that it is a Campagna, the formula disproves itself. But if a landscape is to be handled, and not a garden, the Claudian can make out a good case for himself, and he can always make things uncomfortable for the architect-gardener at the point where the garden leaves off, and outside nature in park or landscape begins. The designer of big ideas will always be tormented by the desire to include and relate everything within the horizon ; and, viewed from a neighbouring height, his formal boundaries, however well they fit with the lines of his building, may cut a very awkward patch on the landscape. But, granted the garden (and it follows from the house), ,
London : Macmillan and Co. 1892.
* The Formal Garde. in England. By Reginald Blomfleld and F. Inigo Thomas.
certain obvious consequences may be drawn out from the conception of this outer court of the house. It is a garden, and not a field. Hence we shall have not the winding path and the irregular turf, but the formal walk, the terrace, the level lawn. More especially in England will this last feature, one of the most beautiful distortions of Nature man has achieved, be made predominant. As the authors point out, the game of tennis has happily done much to restore our lawns to us that were once worried and chopped up by flower-beds. What is wanted is to treat them architecturally, like the old bowling-greens. And if lawns ought to be simple and ample, so ought flower- beds. Geometry per se is not architecture ; and here, as in housebuilding, ornament and ingenuity of device should be held in check by a sense of scale and total effect.
Again, a garden is a garden, and therefore enclosed. The landscape gardener replaced the boundary wall by the " ha- ha," which enabled you to imagine that the sheep were nibbling the lawn. The modern heresy is the still more tire- some iron railing, a compromise ugly in itself, and ineffective for both those inside and those outside.
Nor is a garden a museum. To collect within a narrow compass specimens of exotic and freakish plants may please a scientific curiosity, but is death to effect and design ; and it is almost as bad to jumble native varieties. To look at an ordinary garden is to listen to a Dutch concert where each individual claims a hearing for a different song. How solemn and affecting a single motive may render a garden, those know who have seen the Giusti garden at Verona, where cypress upon cypress climbs the terraces like great obelisks built of night. And even to get an effect of variety and gaiety, reserve is as necessary, since variety is not the same thing as confusion and competition.
Our climate, that gives us so incomparable a green carpet, withholds some of the other elements of out-of-door architec- ture. What the fire is to the English room, that the fountain is to the foreign garden ; you lie about the coolness and the glancing spring of the one, as about the warmth and shooting tongues of the other. Here the chill water is seldom season- able, and the marble, too, is chill. But we may still have our fish-ponds, our planted walks and arbours, our " topiary work" and clipped hedges, vases and figures in gentle coloured lead, as our authors recommend and exemplify. No strip of London garden is too small for an effect of design in flowers, and grass, and garden wall, and nothing is more needed by our sediles than an artist to tell them what to do with our public garden-places. Think of the Embankment, for instance,—the walks of it, the beds, the cast-iron seats ; and the whole enjolive by the monstrous trousers of the founder of Sunday-schools and others of the inappropriate great and good ! A political economist, however much he may have added to the gaiety of nations, is no fit decoration for a garden ; and in the matter of company, the designer must be as strict as in all others. From the symbolic garden we are all shut out; and in such poor echoes of that primordial type as our fancy can frame for princes, it becomes us to be ruth- lessly select :—A few green gods and a poet or two, unpro- ductive scholars and retired diplomatists, lovers and children, peacocks and duchesses.
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