English Lawns and Literary Folk

IN the matter of ruined Norman castles, it is conceded that we cannot rival England; but during the last thirty years we have been cultivating our lawns hopefully, and not without success. Sixty years hence, if we keep on, we may have some fair specimens to show. But in England there are lawns — works of art and nature mingled — to which we can never approximate in this country. They have been perfected through centuries; they are a part of English history, and have enjoyed uninterrupted growth from the days of Chaucer until now. Cherished and protected age after age, they are the lovely product of feudal aristocracy; secluded within their mossy walls of ancient brick; bordered with dense hedges of box and holly; shadowed by trees ancient, sometimes, as themselves; overlooked by long, low façades of countryseats built of soft-hued gray stone, or mellow brick, or the cream-colored plaster and black oaken beams of the Tudors; flanked by beds of hollyhock, marigold, and rose, glowing and burgeoning in the still, soft air; diversified with antique sundials, crumbling altars to that shyest and most beautiful of the gods in England, — Apollo; lawns into which shadow and sunshine seem rather to sink than to rest, giving a depth and tenderness of tone never elsewhere seen. It is a wondrous green, which we would seek in vain in the splendid, hard heart of the emerald; a sweet, cool gloriousness of hue, melting in iridescent changes beneath the eye, wooing the senses with a fresh, dewy caress, soothing the very soul with quiet delight. Their tranquil silence and repose are a powerful protest against the gospel of democracy, change, progress, — against all the harsh, restless watchwords of to-day; their invitation and beguilement are to peace, to dreamful thoughts, to meditation on the storied past, to the mystic song of the lotus-eaters. Resting on such a couch, breathing the delicate fragrance of English flowers, gazing upward through boughs of cedar or of oak to the baby-blue of English skies with their clouds white and gray like the plumage of the sea-gull;—surrounded and shielded by these influences, the alarums of the New Day sound remote, shallow, and crude, an uncongenial and factitious blatancy, making no true appeal to the inner wisdom of the human heart, and therefore destined to pass away. Surely there are lawns like these in Paradise; and shall we not do better to rest here, with Disraeli, on the side of the angels, than to follow the rash footsteps of revolution and reform through the “desarts vast and antres idle ” of social and political speculation ? Into one scale of the balance throw all the theories of Rousseau, Fourier, Mill, Marx, and their posterity; and into the other an historic English lawn with its appurtenances; and make your choice between them! But it is, perhaps, fortunate (and perhaps not) that never, in saecula saeculorum., can we possess or create an English lawn with its appurtenances in America. It would be giving to the Tories and Conservatives an unfair advantage!

Within arm’s reach of London, however, such lawns are to be enjoyed; of an afternoon you may attend a garden-party on one of them, and that same evening dine in Belgravia. By dwelling during three or four years of the middle seventies in Twickenham, I managed even better. Horace Walpole had one, at his gingerbread palace estate of Strawberry Hill; Alexander Pope (or, in this age, Henry Labouchere, down by the river) another; the Orleans princes another; and so on. One of the most interesting belonged, at the time I write of, to one Doctor Diamond, an ancient and well-reputed physician of the insane; whom I often visited for no better reason, really, than to glut myself with the verdant intoxication of his lawn. The aspect of the old gentleman himself was sage and venerable in the extreme; he had a slow, sagacious manner; and in his speech a measured lilt which tempted to somnolence, especially after one of his excellent dinners, with their old-fashioned joints and puddings and silver covers and port and Madeira. Never have I devoured saddle-ofmutton in such perfection as at his table; it melted away in the mouth ere the teeth had a fair chance at it, and, dissolving, left behind it savors of incomparable joy and juicy satisfaction. Moreover, the host had a conundrum about it, which he never failed to propound to us as soon as the brown and appetizing viand was set smoking on the table in front of him. “Why is a flock of sheep like this joint, ladies and gentlemen?” he would inquire. Wewould maintain a respectful, interrogative silence. “Because it’s a saddle-of-mutton!” he would triumphantly answer himself. “D’ye see ? — a sad deal of mutton!” After which, with low chuckles, he would help us to bountiful supplies.

Doctor Diamond’s house looked as old and substantial as himself, as well it might, for it had been in existence five hundred years and more, and is (I devoutly hope and believe) still existing; a two-storied structure of brick overlaid with plaster of a date nearly as remote, with ivy massed thick and secure over its southern exposure, and tall hollyhock plants leaning up against it. Adjoining it on the east was a more recent addition, where were housed the Doctor’s brood of maniacs; they were understood to be of strictly good families, and their conduct was — all things considered — subdued and decorous. Their proprietor never exploited them to his unprofessional guests; and I never saw but one of them, — a lady of middle age, with hollow cheeks and wandering eyes, who stood at one of the unobtrusivelybarred windows, slowly wringing her bony hands, and saying with monotonous rapidity, like a Parsee repeating his orisons to the rising sun at Bombay, “Oh, dear — oh, dear —oh, dear! ” We were not encouraged to make inquiries concerning them; and once, when I tried to penetrate to the interior mysteries of insanity by asking the doctor what, in its essence, insanity really was, he foiled me by replying, after some consideration, “Well, you know, there are various kinds of insanity, ” — and beyond this pregnant point his elucidation of the matter never proceeded.

The saddle-of-mutton and its accompaniments having reached their delightful close,—and, in my experience of them, this occurred always of a Sunday, — Doctor Diamond would distribute cigars, and conduct us to the garden. The company were always few in number, and, while seldom of conspicuous social eminence, yet invested with a certain flavor of lavendered gentility. Of them, the only one whom I can at this moment picture to myself with any vividness is Mr. William Carew Hazlitt, grandson of Hazlitt the Great, and the latter’s biographer. By profession he was a lawyer; but his natural tastes were for literature and cognate subjects; he was an eccentric and a humorist, and he seemed to me especially created to appear at Doctor Diamond’s Sunday dinners. Through him, we seemed to be placed in direct communication with the literary eighteenth century; so that, although he could not have been as much as fifty years of age, he gave the impression of being a contemporary of Lamb, at least, if not also of Johnson and Goldsmith. He wore an air of being always archly amused about something; so that, whatever he might say carried with it the reminiscence of a laugh that had just passed away, or the promise of one that was hard upon us. He was rich in anecdote and comment; acute, original, or comical on any topic that appealed to him; and, as we sat on rustic benches on the famous lawn, beneath the shade of a cedar of Lebanon (a species of tree for which Twickenham is renowned, and which, for aught I know, may have been planted by the Crusaders), with the blue spirit of the good tobacco incensing the air and mingling with the scent of the roses which stood erect on tall stalks as if to lift their fragrance to one’s very nostrils, I felt myself immersed centuries deep in the very heart of Old England. There was glamour enough in the Madeira to obliterate so trifling a chronological discrepancy as a mere hundred years or two; and I should not have been surprised, or more than agreeably interested, to behold crooked little Alexander come tripping in from his neighboring villa, to smoke his pipe with us and regale us with a few of his latest epigrams and couplets; or the aristocratic, manof-the-worldly Horace, to orient and refresh us with his arid humor and cold common sense; or beloved Charles, stuttering forth his precious frivolities; or the original William, with his penetrating apothegms and sad-hued wit. Their ghostly feet would have trod that enchanted lawn, leaving no impress on its yielding surface; their voices would have entered our ears without disturbing the still air; and, as evening drew on, they would have faded softly away in the increasing shadows, and we should have fancied that we did but dream of their presence. Perhaps they did come, without our being fully aware of it.

One feature of Doctor Diamond’s lawn there was, however, material and yet romantic, which I have not yet mentioned, and which was probably unique in England. This was a sort of fence of rusty iron pickets, dividing one part of the garden from the other, — in which grew, I think, an assortment of vegetables, rich and succulent enough to honor the worthy physician’s dinner-table in companionship with the saddle-of-mutton. So peculiar was the aspect of the fence that, after in vain exercising my ingenuity for many weeks to divine what it was made of, I finally besought the doctor to unveil the mystery. “Why,” quoth he, laying his hand upon one of the pickets, “ these are claymores, — claymores picked up on the Field of Culloden! ” So there sat we, within arm’s reach of the weapons which had drunk hot blood on that tremendous day, one hundred and thirty years before, sprouting up, along with the peaceful roses and cabbages, out of the mould of the garden, as though the dead warriors were upstretching them from their graves. Meanwhile, in the east, the moon rose over invisible London ; the English dew fell; the odors of the garden became rank; and the wraiths of Royalist and Highlander thronged about us, shouting their battle-cries, flourishing their weapons, and hurtling together in deadly combat, — and yet not a rosepetal was disturbed, not a hollyhock quivered, and the silences between our words were so profound that we might almost have heard the dip of the oars of a belated Thames waterman rowing up to Teddington.

At length, — and always at the right psychological moment, though it always seemed too soon, — the white-haired doctor would toss away the butt of his cigar, and say, in his low guttural, “Well, gentlemen, it’s getting a bit damp, — bad for rheumatism, — better come in; and we ’ll have a glass of B. and S. before you go! ” And as we filed in along the narrow, box-bordered path, past that mysterious wing, I would catch my glimpse, through the barred window, of the dim figure with its haggard countenance, whitened still more by the moonlight, which wrung its feeble hands, and muttered hurriedly, “Oh, dear — oh, dear — oh, dear!” Yes, doubtless there were ghosts at Doctor Diamond’s!

But there was in Twickenham a lawn more marvelous, even, than the old doctor’s. To whom, during the thousand years or so before our epoch, it may have belonged, I cannot tell; but I am open to believe that it had been already in good condition when ancient Britons still painted themselves blue, and Boadicea and her Druids performed incantations or called down curses upon the invading Romans. Time, however, brings into juxtaposition things the most incompatible; and he had brought this matchless lawn into the possession of a publisher, — and such a publisher! I am aware that there have been good publishers; but, of all of that tribe that I have known, this individual was the least sympathetic. Hard he was, loud, pragmatical, self-satisfied; more than any other Englishman of my acquaintance did he fill the conception that rises to the mind of the “blasted Briton.” In his single person he supplied a justification of whatever abuse, since the dawn of book-making, authors have heaped upon their natural enemies; and yet, for some reason for which I cannot reasonably account, I liked him; and though, long since, he has gone to his everlasting place, — be it where it may, — there still remains in my memory a kindness for him. A creature he was so jovial, so complacent, so unrepentant, so preposterous, that one’s very midriff was tickled at him. He had a prodigious, almost an indecent vitality; he lived to be near ninety years of age; and during that interminable existence, not for one moment, I am convinced, did he entertain the least suspicion that he was not one of the most delightful fellows that ever lived, as well as one of the most useful and meritorious. His name was Henry G. Bohn, and he owned the finest lawn in Middlesex.

Possibly, in a way, he was useful, after all. How it may be now, I know not; but forty years ago there were persons in my class at Harvard who were said to find Bohn’s Classical Library of intimate service to them. Doubtless the nature of this service was base; but a man with his neck under the guillotine knife of a college examination is not always fastidious as to the nature or moral character of the thing that gets him safe out again. Now Bohn, through his translations, did afford such help; indeed, in those early days, I used to believe that the translations existed for no other purpose than the unmentionable one above indicated. Nor can I, to-day, conceive of any sane sinner employing them for any more legitimate end, in spite of the rumor I have heard that Emerson had confessed a partiality for them. Be that as it may, they are assuredly the worst translations ever made; and were poor Bohn, during his peregrinations in the Shades down yonder, to stumble upon any of the classic authors whom he caused to be thus misrepresented, they would lynch him on sight. The eyes of even the gentlemanly and amiable Xenophon would kindle with a homicidal glare, should they alight upon this brazen traducer. Nor were his foes restricted to the classical era; he had published modern books as well; and some of them were pirated; for I remember that his first remark to me was, “Oh, I know all about you; your father was the man that wrote that thing — what was it? — ‘The Red Letter;’ horrid book, sir; worst thing I ever read; and I published it, too!” Such were his comfortable words; and from that moment was it that I conceived my abnormal fondness for him. Such a character is genuine and primitive; I prefer my criminals cheerful and insulting. If Bohn could but be put into a novel, readers would find him irresistible.

Not of Bohn, however, nor of his Classical Library, was it my cue to speak; but of the incomparable lawn. Bohn gave a lawn-party, to which I was bidden. His place was about a mile east of Twickenham church, and not far from the hogbacked bridge at Richmond. The estate was bounded on the south by the road to Richmond, with a hedge of tall trees protecting it on that side; the house was to the west of the lawn, which, if my memory serve me, may have been a hundred and fifty paces in length, and half as wide. But its area was not its most remarkable feature.

Broad and open it lay to the sunshine and the showers. That hedge of trees, as afternoon advanced, cast a breadth of shade along its western verge; but the matchless green of its main expanse was rendered by the contrast only more softly brilliant. The human soul is so made that green is one of its most delectable aesthetic experiences. The color is not exciting, like red, nor stimulating like yellow, nor exalting and inspiring like blue; it is simply soothing, satisfying, reviving, delicious. It is the human color; if there be planets on whose surface green is a color as rare as is blue on ours, our race would speedily languish and die out there. But I speak, of course, of the perfect green, — the green of English lawns. Other greens there are, cold, or trivial, or muddy, or crude, which do but irritate or depress us; and there are blue-greens and gray-greens, well enough in their places; and, in the caves of icebergs, spiritual greens that exercise a weird enchantment. But for the garment of the mighty, round earth no other green is worthy than this of England; none other touches so inwardly the heart of man. No wonder that Falstaff, on his deathbed, babbled o’ green fields; for my dying eyes I could desire no happier vision than the gracious levels of an English lawn steeped in the gentle sunshine of a summer afternoon.

Mankind has not maintained itself at the level of this natural beauty. Turf such as this should be trod only by nymphs with white limbs and demigods goldentanned; Adam and Eve, before their fall, would have made a harmonious picture on this immortal couch; or, at least, the ivory-bosomed maids of Hellas and the yellow-haired, broad-shouldered Achæan youths might here enact fittingly their Homeric romances. But to behold ’Arry and his ’Arriet disporting themselves on so divine a stage is the sorriest of discordances; and, although Britain’s “upper classes ” afford types far superior to these, yet do the best of them fall short of the requirements. George du Maurier’s slackkneed æsthetes aspired to five up to their blue china; but there have appeared no adventurers so rash as to undertake the enterprise of lifting themselves into harmony with these green lawns. So, while the company assembled, on the day I write of, to partake of Mr. Bohn’s hospitality comprised persons and personages of no small masculine and feminine attractiveness, and though their garments were often of pleasing hue and fashionable design, yet did the green grass vulgarize the best of them, and make their splendor tawdry.

Now I will relate an astonishing fact. Early in the afternoon came workmen with a great marquee of striped canvas, and began setting it up at one end of the lawn. The grass was kept continually cropped short; so that over the entire expanse there was not a blade more than one third of an inch in length. Yet when, in order to provide supports for the stayropes of the tent, stakes three feet in length were driven into the turf, — and it made one shudder to see it done: it was like stabbing a tender woman in the breast , — these three-foot stakes, I say, were not long enough for their points to reach the solid earth; their whole length was embedded in the fibrous mattress of tiny, interwoven grass-roots underlying the green, elastic surface, — a mattress, therefore, more than two feet thick, at least. When, afterward, the stakes were pulled up, not a scar remained to show where they had penetrated; the wonderful web closed over the wound like water. Its resilience was just the right medium between soft and firm; yielding luxuriously to the foot, yet bearing it up again with an exhilarating lift. But, as I have intimated, it was better suited to the barefoot, springing gait of the early gods and goddesses than to the heavy-heeled, stiffkneed shuffle of contemporary deities; and the spectacle of a classical publisher hastening to and fro across it, in the exercise of his social privileges, was one to make his enemies rejoice, and to arouse the compassion of the charitable. But the lawn was his, and we could not help it.

Everybody was there: George Otto Trevelyan, nephew of Macaulay, homely but brilliant; he had just published his biography of the historian, and he was eminent in the councils of the LiberalUnionists. Mrs. Tennant sat on a campstool, tilting a parasol, with her two beautiful little daughters standing beside her; one of them afterwards was to become the wife, and is to-day the widow, of Stanley the explorer. Baron Trübner, the Anglo-German publisher, tall and amiable, combining within himself all the charms and none of the faults of both nationalities, was present, as if to show how nature can compensate for the creation of a Bohn; and Leslie Stephen, elongated, meagre, dry, and gravely humorous, — you could see in him the successor in the editorial chair of the Cornhill Magazine of his father-in-law, Thackeray; but you would hardly suspect so studious an ascetic of being president of the Alpine Club and one of its most active members. Mrs. Duncan Stewart was there, — one of the wonderful old ladies of London, whose house, in Sloane Street, was a meetingplace of the elect; and George Lewis, the matchless little solicitor of London society, who knew secrets enough to explode the whole aristocratic community, had he chosen to betray them; but who looked as if he spent his life listening to sweet music and perusing the Beatitudes. And Hubert Herkomer, with his lank, black hair, magnetic eyes and hollow cheeks, — a man of strange powers and qualities, who had just achieved fame by his picture of the Chelsea Pensioners. And good-humored Lady Hardy, with her slim, pale daughter Iza,— novelists both of them; and Iza’s name was romantically associated with that of Joaquin Miller, who figured as the hero of her latest novel, Glencairne: but Joaquin was not beside her on the green lawn to-day. And brown-bearded Comyns Carr, with his æsthetic wife, creators of the Kate-Greenaway suburb known as Bedford Park. And Mrs. Pender Cudlip, the demure author of novels of intrigue once known in two continents as the productions of “ Annie Thomas;” she was a little, homely, appealing, pleasant woman; and — well, and scores more. There they all were, grouped and scattered about the lovely lawn. The English turf is as fresh and green now as it was then; but during the thirty years that have passed, many of them have vanished beneath it.

For my own part, I presently stumbled upon an odd manikin of a creature, with thin, active legs and a long, queer visage adorned with sparse whiskers of faded yellow; under his black frock coat he wore a yellow vest, and light, striped pantaloons covered his shrunken shanks. I had never before seen the actual man, and my acquaintance with his portraits had prepared me for a tall and portly gentleman, — these likenesses having been heads merely, which are apt to prove misleading in this respect. Nevertheless, no sooner had I set eyes on him than I recognized him; for he had drawn his own effigy at full length a myriad times, and there was no mistaking that big-headed, slim-bodied, elfin type, with its touch of the grotesque, and its preternatural nimbleness. If you have ever studied a certain ancient edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, you have seen this remarkable individual masquerading in scores of disguises from one illustration to another. In short, he could have been none other than George Cruikshank; and George Cruikshank, accordingly, he proved to be.

And what a man he was, to be sure! He was born just before the storming of the Tuileries, in 1792; at this time he had been actively at work for full threescore years and ten, and was still as industrious as ever. The social, literary, artistic, political, and reform history of the nineteenth century covered the area of his own career. He had caricatured Napoleon; he had pictured the passions of the Corn-Law agitation; he had dealt tremendous blows at the drink evil; he had brought to the familiar knowledge of innumerable English and American children the fairy tales of the Middle Ages; he had illustrated Dickens and a dozen other authors; he had written books of his own, and had started and edited periodicals; — and behold! here he was, lively and enterprising as ever, skipping to and fro on Mr. Bohn’s lawn; and now pausing for a few moments to give me good advice.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, in his brisk, incisive manner, “smoking cigarettes, I see! Ought to stop it; never should touch tobacco; I used to smoke, but I stopped it! Nobody ought to smoke!”

“Is it long since you stopped smoking, Mr. Cruikshank?” I inquired.

“Oh, forty years ago!” was his reply.

“Then,” said I, after a rapid mental calculation, “I have still more than ten years before I need throw my cigarette away.”

But it was characteristic of the admirable George to admonish me as he had done; and perhaps also characteristic of him that my inertia gave him not the slightest disappointment or annoyance. He knew that the world was all wrong; he had the instinct of remonstrance; but having remonstrated, he accepted things as they were, with perfect good-humor and enjoyment. He cared for the abstract ; but for concrete illustrations thereof he cared little, if at all. He lived to be near ninety-three years old; and when he died, some curious facts concerning his private career were unearthed, which I shall not here recount. Never have I met any other man with a personal equation so intense and peculiar as his. The mark he made on one’s memory was distinct; and yet he possessed neither weight nor dignity; and, in spite of the ground he covered, and the reputation he earned, his function was a narrow one. He gave his whole force to art; and art, having affiliations with all kinds of life, led him into regions of activity for which, apart from art, he would, perhaps, have cared nothing. He was, in other words, a mere vehicle of art-expression, of a marvelously fertile and fascinating kind, wherein his heart was less concerned than was his brain. The personal impression he made was, as I have said, elf-like and fantastic, — that of a phenomenon rather than of a man. And yet, being an artist, — and his especial kind of an artist, — he became one of the memorable figures of his epoch. He was a Hogarth, with the deep, underlying seriousness of Hogarth left out. After our conversation, the rest of which I have forgotten, he skipped away on his nimble little nankeen legs, and I saw him no more.

But Bohn’s lawn was a trying background for any man; and it may have led me into doing less than justice to George Cruiksliank. He was an extraordinary genius; and almost all the countless products of his genius were directly aimed to do good. He merited the honor he received; indeed, had he received less, there might have been more warmth in our memory of the man. As it is, we feel that he was paid his fair wages; and we half forget him in our preoccupation with what he expressed in his art.