Albion (51 page)

The contradictoriness, or the rapid changes of tone and perspective, is also a matter of authorial detachment; that detachment or diffidence is compounded in Sterne’s case by what his biographer calls “the difficulty of knowing exactly what one’s feelings are.”
⁶
The lack of “inwardness” in English writing has often been discussed; it may be ascribed to embarrassment or absence of passion, but it can also be associated with the love of surface and surface decoration which is so integral to English art. It is sometimes suggested that this absence of interior feeling leads to loss of profundity or seriousness, but we have already seen that the “profound” can be manifested in disparate ways. It is certain, however, that it leads to self-effacement.
TristramShandy
itself has been said to have “created a generic self-mockery” which “ostentatiously outfaced the parody of self-cherishing modernism in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub.”
⁷
Sterne captured an English trait, and gave it immortal shape; that is why Byron wrote of his own
Don Juan
that “I mean it for a poetical T Shandy.”

Yet at the time Tristram Shandy was received “evidently as a prose Dunciad,”
⁸
as exemplified in Sterne ’s own comment that he was satirising “the Weak part of the Sciences, in which the true point of Ridicule lies.” In that sense, of course, he was continuing an old tradition in the witty dismissal of pedantry and speculative thought. In the novel there are parodies of legal language, of theological argument, and of abstruse learning in general. “He had never in his whole life the least light or spark of subtlety struck in his mind, by one single lecture upon
Crackenthorpe
or
Burgersdicius
, or any
Dutch
logician or commentator.” Sterne acquired his own learning through volumes of “popularised” thought and through entries in the encyclopaedia; he was not a “serious” thinker and could thus brilliantly redeploy the arguments advanced by others. Like Browne and Burton before him, his was a triumph of the synthetic rather than the analytic imagination. He was a magpie, rather than an eagle soaring into the empyrean.

It is entirely appropriate that out of this parodic, unsystematic medley of a book should emerge one of the greatest of all English characters in Uncle Toby. This old soldier, who received a wound in his groin at the siege of Namur, has what Sterne describes as “a HOBBY-HORSE” in the science and practice of fortifications. With the help of his servant and ex-corporal Trim, Uncle Toby builds a model of French battlefields with their batteries, ditches, siege engines and pallisades. He is, in himself, a model of the eccentric in English fiction, close to Commander Trunnion in
Peregrine Pickle
and Mr. Wemmick with his Walworth fortifications in
Great Expectations
. Here are the martial virtues of the English, fortitude and practical engineering, in miniature; once more there is something both deeply comic and deeply reassuring about their transposition to a smaller scale. Uncle Toby is abashed in the presence of women, and only really himself in the company of his corporal, but somehow he becomes ensnared in the matrimonial plans of Widow Wadman. “These attacks of Mrs. Wadman, you will readily conceive to be of different kinds; varying from each other, like the attacks which history is full of, and from the same reasons.” Mrs. Wadman desires to wound Uncle Toby’s groin in another sense, and Sterne joins the line of English humorists who cannot resist the caricature of the voracious female. It is a part of the tradition. But Uncle Toby himself is a genuine and singular creation who combines common sense and eccentricity, embarrassed delicacy and assumed gruffness, conviviality and melancholy. As one historian of the English, Peter Vansittart, has remarked in this context, “contradiction, muddle, inconsistency and humour proved as necessary to the social psyche as fortitude, forbearance, decency.”
⁹
Indeed they help to define it. But then on a larger scale, as Hazlitt put it, Uncle Toby remains “one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature” and of course to the English imagination itself.

Green England

Sketch of Miss Gertrude Jekyll with sunflower. Doodle by Sir Edwin Lutyens

CHAPTER 50

The Secret Garden

Most houses in England
possess a small garden; it is part of their natural state or, even, of their national inheritance from the prehistoric inhabitants of England whose small plots of cultivated land “may be considered the first gardens of Britain”
¹
where henbane and the opium poppy flourished.

The reconstruction of medieval settlements reveals peasant cottages with small back-gardens as well as streets of thatched houses with strips of garden “all with private space fenced from their neighbours.”
²
The small Elizabethan garden is of the same lineage, and the study of local court records reveals many cases of trespass upon a neighbouring garden; it becomes the very image of defensive privacy which is so congenial to the English mind. The earliest maps of London reveal a city of gardens, each one carefully delineated. It has been remarked of the “small seventeenth-century garden,” also, that it exhibited “a sturdily independent glory.”
³
“Capability” Brown, that epitome of native ingenuity and practicality, was employed to create landscapes “of privacy and seclusion.”
⁴
The same pattern of enclosure is repeated on the large, as well as the small, scale. That is why the walled garden became the model of secrecy and enchantment; the English imagination can grow only in a confined space. In the words of one historian of gardening, Jane Brown, “the little garden becomes the key to a world of wonders and delights, of fabulous riches and wealth”
⁵
glimpsed in the pages of children’s literature no less than in the myths and legends of the English. Gardens are places of safety as well as of delight, of security and privacy as well as of pleasure. As one early gardener put it, “A garden is a sort of sanctuary, a chamber roofed by heaven . . . a little pleasaunce of the soil, by whose wicket the world can be shut.” This defines a native mood. The reclusive and unremarked spot of soil guards the
genius loci
. It is an image of self-sufficiency, and it is perhaps significant that “garden”—otherwise “garth,” “yerd” or “yard”—itself springs from a root-word suggesting enclosure and protection.

Another historian of the garden has remarked in this context that the medieval garden, with its alleys and hedges, “reflected in no small measure the sense of security of a walled town.”
⁶
It has always been considered an aspect of national sensibility that “an Englishman’s home is his castle” but the truism can be applied to the adjacent property. Jane Brown has suggested that “the British taste for gardening has a great deal to do with a warlike past”
⁷
and that “so many garden terms come from the art of warfare”; thus we have trenches and pallisades, cordons and covered ways. These are the insular gardens of an island race, complete with defensive fortifications, walls and outer ditches. We do not need the example of Uncle Toby in
Tristram Shandy
, with the fortified towns of France laid out on his bowling green, or of Mr. Wemmick in
Great Expectations
with the battlements of his Walworth garden. Kensington Gardens itself was designed to resemble “the lines, angles, bastions, scarps and counter-scarps of regular fortifications.”
⁸
Many plants have been granted military names, such as “Blue Ensign” and “Old Bloody Warrior”; the ubiquitous allotments of England, where vegetables are grown, are preserved in “miniature parade-ground proportions, everything in impeccable rows.”
⁹
Several forces are at work here. The love of the small scale, of the miniature, is aligned with the need for seclusion and for privacy; but this may become a fierce protectiveness, with the English love of warfare somehow domesticated or displaced. But is there not also a trace of irony, a suggestion of self-mockery, in this mimicry of battle conditions among the lawns and flowers?

In the late eighteenth century Gilbert White remarked that “every decent labourer also has his garden,” and the brick cottages of the early nineteenth century were built with plots 45 feet wide and 225 feet long. In the same period there emerged the “villa garden” as well as the “cottage garden,” the harbingers of the ubiquitous suburban garden. In
News from Nowhere
William Morris celebrates a future state enjoying a “delicate superabundance of small well-tended gardens” just as Thomas More, in
Utopia
, reports that the inhabitants of his idealised community “attached the greatest importance to their gardens” with “keen competition between streets as to which has the best kept garden.” It is also worth observing that More’s dialogue is set within a well-kept garden. It is a charmed space of the English imagination.

In indirect homage to
Utopia
the “garden city” movement was essentially English in inspiration and, under the tutelage of Ebenezer Howard, developed an ethos in which “the small garden, now so exceedingly worthy and desirable as almost to be sacred, reaches its apotheosis.”
¹⁰
One commentator of 1913 remarked that “however various our occupations and tastes, however conflicting our opinions, in the garden we are united.” The popularity of gardening itself was markedly increased by the development of the “semi-detached” house, within whose relatively secluded bounds emerged the English “happy medium”
¹¹
of a small front-garden and a large back-garden. The suburban phenomenon has been described as evincing “the native urge to return to the land,”
¹²
further imbued with an atavistic remembrance of the Tudor cottage garden. The resurgence of interest in allotments may owe something to the “green” movement, but it is also part of a larger awakening. Bede possessed a copy of Pliny’s
Historiae Naturalis
.

There are other specific examples from this long tradition. The contemporary revival of herb gardening has its “roots” in the
Laecboc
or “Leech-book” of Bald, composed in the tenth century, and in the Old English translation of the
Herbarium Apuleii
where 132 different plants are described. One of the earliest gardening legends concerns St. Maurilius, who in the fourth century worked the garden of an English prince. The knights who came to murder Thomas Becket in the cathedral of Canterbury “threw off their cloaks and gowns under a large sycamore tree in the garden.” And then there are the flowers. In the first century Pliny was unsure whether England had acquired the name of Albion “from the white roses with which it abounds.” A fifteenth-century poem celebrates “the white rose of England that is freshe and wol not fade.” A prose text of the early seventeenth century, entitled
Paradisus
, extols roses white and red as “the most ancient and knowne Roses to our Countrey.” Ancient, too, are the tools of the trade. They have changed very little from the rakes and spades employed by Celtic settlers to the shovels and lattices of the seventeenth-century gardener. In medieval illuminations Cain and Abel are shown with spades, picks and hoes, digging and delving after the Fall; a misericord in Lincoln Cathedral has the carving of a gardener carrying an unmistakeable spade.

Gardening, then, is a national pursuit with truly native characteristics. Thus Jane Brown celebrates “our national preference for homelike rather than princely gardens”
¹³
and notes the fact that wherever the English go “they establish gardens and always gardens of the type they left in the old country.”
¹⁴
The world itself is sometimes understood in this context. John Winthrop recorded in his diary, before he set foot upon the soil of Massachussets, that “there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden.” The Indians of that region named plantain “Englishman’s foot” as if the race had an inalienable link with horticulture. In that sense “the English garden was a nationalist icon,”
¹⁵
with its disinclination for magnificence and its almost homely presence. The English have eschewed “the frigid grandeur of Versailles”
¹⁶
and have avoided “any hint of Mediterranean drama or French extravagance.”
¹⁷
The country has produced enthusiastic amateurs rather than botanical theorists. Practical men and women, such as “Capability” Brown, Joseph Paxton and Gertrude Jekyll, are the epitome of the English gardener. “Capability” Brown was self-made, and rose from gardening boy to companion of princes and statesmen. Joseph Paxton modelled his celebrated design for the glass hall of the Great Exhibition from the glass-houses that he had constructed for the Duke of Devonshire’s tender plants. Gertrude Jekyll trained to be an artist but fading eyesight sent her into the nurture of gardens, where she delighted in broad sweeps and banks of colour—particularly in the wild gardens which she rendered fashionable.

The garden displays all the fruits of the English imagination, including the passion for intricacy and the love of the miniature. So it will not be wonderful to learn that the gardens of England have been described as “jewelled miniatures.”
¹⁸
One history of gardening has concluded that the cottage garden of many centuries “has much in common with hand needlework, for there is always the individual touch and lack of regularity”;
¹⁹
here is an interesting confluence of taste. Anglo-Saxon embroidery, renowned for its intricate variety, was also recognised for its pattern of interlace, a native tendency which may help to explain the “knot gardens” of the sixteenth century so curiously varied and with so many “enknotted” flowers “that the place will seem like a piece of tapestry of many various colours to encrease every one’s delight.” Various plants “were interlaced so that they were seen to weave in and out of each other,” and these gardens were copied in sweetmeats to produce the “marzipan knot.”
²⁰
It is also worth noting here that the “knot garden” displayed “abstract and geometric designs”
²¹
and may in that respect also claim Anglo-Saxon ancestry. The English affection for “medley” and heterogeneity is also evident in the range of gardens which proffer intricacy and variety in an enclosed or intimate space. John Aubrey described an English garden as “full of variety and unevenness.”
The Theory and Practice of
Gardening
, published in 1712, declared that “the greatest beauty of gardens consists in variety.” In
Humphry Clinker
a garden is described as “exhibiting a wonderful assemblage of the most picturesque and striking objects, pavilions, lodges, groves, grottoes, lawns, temples and cascades”; to use a phrase of Pope’s, all is “harmoniously confus’d.” In Stourhead, Wiltshire, we may admire “the eclecticism of the English landscape school: the classic style side by side with English cottage ‘Gothick.’ ”
²²
It may also be remarked that many fine English gardens “grew piecemeal”
²³
by that process of organic accretion which has been noticed elsewhere in this study.

The curved or serpentine line has also been a feature of this enquiry, and in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” there is a vision of “gardens bright with sinuous rills.” In
The Pursuit of Paradise
Jane Brown suggests that English landscape gardening was “obsessed with the serpentine line,” in a manner of which Hogarth would have approved; Horace Walpole remarked of William Kent’s landscapes that “the gentle stream was taught to serpentine at its leisure.” Capability Brown’s “curves and serpentines were smooth and suave.”
²⁴
The Georgian landscape garden has been described as “enshrining the spirit of England” with “the avoidance of straight lines and their invariable replacement by the amorphous serpentine” in lawns and paths and lakes.
²⁵
It suggests a distaste for regimentation and a love of “English liberty—that liberty of which the new [eighteenth-century] gardens themselves were a sort of symbol.”
²⁶
Horace Walpole considered the art of the garden to be “totally new, original and undisputably English,” a development which he associated with “English political liberties.”
²⁷
Across the Channel “the compressing geometry and regularity of the French avenues and bosquets had held down the pressure till France exploded.”
²⁸
In 1753 Francis Coventry, writing in
The World
, asks whether “a modern gardener would consent to enter heaven if any path there is not serpentine”;
²⁹
thirteen years later, in Garrick and Colman’s
The Clandestine Marriage
a character revels in the fact that “here’s none of your straight lines here—but all taste—zigzag—crinkum crankum—in and out—right and left—to and again—twisting and turning like a worm, my lord.”

The pursuit of gardening fosters a native individualism; it is pre-eminently a solitary pleasure. It has been well said that “in England we have always preferred high hedges, which make for privacy.”
³⁰
A French aristocrat of the early nineteenth century observed that “the English detest being seen and will gladly forgo any prospect beyond their own limited boundaries.” That is why, in coffee-houses of the same period, there were wooden partitions between each “box.” It has been remarked, too, that “secret gardens gain much fascination as remnants of old Catholic England and Scotland, lingering in intangible ways,”
³¹
as if the enclosed and scented air were imbued with time past. The lawn and the gravel path are also ancient features, and gardening does in a real sense touch the
genius loci
; the gardener makes contact with the soil, which is the ground of our being and becoming.