Chapter 4 No.4

There was something dark on the grass under an elm in the field by the barn. It rose and fell; and we saw that it was a wing-a single black wing, striking the ground instead of the air; indeed, it seemed to come out of the earth itself, the body of the bird being hidden by the grass. This black wing flapped and flapped, but could not lift itself-a single wing of course could not fly.

A rook had dropped out of the elm and was lying helpless at the foot of the tree-it is a favourite tree with rooks; they build in it, and at that moment there were twenty or more perched aloft, cawing and conversing comfortably, without the least thought of their dying comrade. Not one of all the number descended to see what was the matter, nor even fluttered half-way down. This elm is their clubhouse, where they meet every afternoon as the sun gets low to discuss the scandals of the day, before retiring to roost in the avenues and tree-groups of the park adjacent. While we looked, a peacock came round the corner of the barn; he had caught sight of the flapping wing, and approached with long deliberate steps and outstretched neck. "Ee-aw! Ee-aw! What's this? What's this?" he inquired in bird-language. "Ee-aw! Ee-aw! My friends, see here!" Gravely, and step by step, he came nearer and nearer, slowly, and not without some fear, till curiosity had brought him within a yard. In a moment or two a peahen followed and also stretched out her neck-the two long necks pointing at the black flapping wing. A second peacock and peahen approached, and the four great birds stretched out their necks towards the dying rook-a "crowner's quest" upon the unfortunate creature.

If any one had been at hand to sketch it, the scene would have been very grotesque, and not without a ludicrous sadness. There was the tall elm tinted with yellow, the black rooks high above flying in and out, yellow leaves twirling down, the blue peacocks with their crests, the red barn behind, the golden sun afar shining low through the trees of the park, the brown autumn sward, a grey horse, orange maple bushes. There was the quiet tone of the coming evening-the early evening of October-such an evening as the rook had seen many a time from the tops of the trees. A man dies, and the crowd goes on passing under the window along the street without a thought. The rook died, and his friends, who had that day been with him in the oaks feasting on acorns, who had been with him in the fresh-turned furrows, born perhaps in the same nest, utterly forgot him before he was dead. With a great common caw-a common shout-they suddenly left the tree in a bevy and flew towards the park. The peacocks having brought in their verdict, departed, and the dead bird was left alone.

In falling out of the elm, the rook had alighted partly on his side and partly on his back, so that he could only flutter one wing, the other being held down by his own weight. He had probably died from picking up poisoned grain somewhere, or from a parasite. The weather had been open, and he could not have been starved. At a distance, the rook's plumage appears black; but close at hand it will be found a fine blue-black, glossy, and handsome.

These peacocks are the best "rain-makers" in the place; whenever they cry much, it is sure to rain; and if they persist day after day, the rain is equally continuous. From the wall by the barn, or the elm-branch above, their cry resounds like the wail of a gigantic cat, and is audible half a mile or more. In the summer, I found one of them, a peacock in the fall brilliance of his colours, on a rail in the hedge under a spreading maple bush. His rich-hued neck, the bright light and shadow, the tall green meadow grass, brought together the finest colours. It is curious that a bird so distinctly foreign, plumed for the Asiatic sun, should fit so well with English meads. His splendid neck immediately pleases, pleases the first time it is seen, and on the fiftieth occasion. I see these every day, and always stop to look at them; the colour excites the sense of beauty in the eye, and the shape satisfies the idea of form. The undulating curve of the neck is at once approved by the intuitive judgment of the mind, and it is a pleasure to the mind to reiterate that judgment frequently. It needs no teaching to see its beauty-the feeling comes of itself.

How different with the turkey-cock which struts round the same barn! A fine big bird he is, no doubt; but there is no intrinsic beauty about him; on the contrary, there is something fantastic in his style and plumage. He has a way of drooping his wings as if they were armour-plates to shield him from a shot. The ornaments upon his head and beak are in the most awkward position. He was put together in a dream, of uneven and odd pieces that live and move, but do not fit. Ponderously gawky, he steps as if the world was his, like a "motley" crowned in sport. He is good eating, but he is not beautiful. After the eye has been accustomed to him for some time-after you have fed him every day and come to take an interest in him-after you have seen a hundred turkey-cocks, then he may become passable, or, if you have the fancier's taste, exquisite. Education is requisite first; you do not fall in love at first sight. The same applies to fancy-pigeons, and indeed many pet animals, as pugs, which come in time to be animated with a soul in some people's eyes. Compare a pug with a greyhound straining at the leash. Instantly he is slipped he is gone as a wave let loose. His flexible back bends and undulates, arches and unarches, rises and falls as a wave rises and rolls on. His pliant ribs open; his whole frame "gives" and stretches, and closing again in a curve, springs forward. Movement is as easy to him as to the wave, which melting, is remoulded, and sways onward. The curve of the greyhound is not only the line of beauty, but a line which suggests motion; and it is the idea of motion, I think, which so strongly appeals to the mind.

We are often scornfully treated as a nation by people who write about art, because they say we have no taste; we cannot make art jugs for the mantelpiece, crockery for the bracket, screens for the fire; we cannot even decorate the wall of a room as it should be done. If these are the standards by which a sense of art is to be tried, their scorn is to a certain degree just. But suppose we try another standard. Let us put aside the altogether false opinion that art consists alone in something actually made, or painted, or decorated, in carvings, colourings, touches of brush or chisel. Let us look at our lives. I mean to say that there is no nation so thoroughly and earnestly artistic as the English in their lives, their joys, their thoughts, their hopes. Who loves nature like an Englishman? Do Italians care for their pale skies? I never heard so. We go all over the world in search of beauty-to the keen north, to the cape whence the midnight sun is visible, to the extreme south, to the interior of Africa, gazing at the vast expanse of Tanganyika or the marvellous falls of the Zambesi. We admire the temples and tombs and palaces of India; we speak of the Alhambra of Spain almost in whispers, so deep is our reverent admiration; we visit the Parthenon. There is not a picture or a statue in Europe we have not sought. We climb the mountains for their views and the sense of grandeur they inspire; we roam over the wide ocean to the coral islands of the far Pacific; we go deep into the woods of the West; and we stand dreamily under the Pyramids of the East. What part is there of the English year which has not been sung by the poets? all of whom are full of its loveliness; and our greatest of all, Shakespeare, carries, as it were, armfuls of violets, and scatters roses and golden wheat across his pages, which are simply fields written with human life.

This is art indeed-art in the mind and soul, infinitely deeper, surely, than the construction of crockery, jugs for the mantelpiece, dados, or even of paintings. The lover of nature has the highest art in his soul. So, I think, the bluff English farmer who takes such pride and delight in his dogs and horses, is a much greater man of art than any Frenchman preparing with cynical dexterity of hand some coloured presentment of flashy beauty for the salon. The English girl who loves her horse-and English girls do love their horses most intensely-is infinitely more artistic in that fact than the cleverest painter on enamel. They who love nature are the real artists; the "artists" are copyists, St. John the naturalist, when exploring the recesses of the Highlands, relates how he frequently came in contact with men living in the rude Highland way-forty years since, no education then-whom at first you would suppose to be morose, unobservant, almost stupid. But when they found out that their visitor would stay for hours gazing in admiration at their glens and mountains, their demeanour changed. Then the truth appeared: they were fonder than he was himself of the beauties of their hills and lakes; they could see the art there, though perhaps they had never seen a picture in their lives, certainly not any blue-and-white crockery. The Frenchman flings his fingers dexterously over the canvas, but he has never had that in his heart which the rude Highlander had.

The path across the arable field was covered with a design of bird's feet. The reversed broad arrow of the fore-claws, and the straight line of the hinder claw, trailed all over it in curving lines. In the dry dust, their feet were marked as clearly as a seal on wax-their trails wound this way and that, and crossed as their quick eyes had led them to turn to find something. For fifty or sixty yards the path was worked with an inextricable design; it was a pity to step on it and blot out the traces of those little feet. Their hearts so happy, their eyes so observant, the earth so bountiful to them with its supply of food, and the late warmth of the autumn sun lighting up their life. They know and feel the different loveliness of the seasons as much as we do. Every one must have noticed their joyousness in spring; they are quiet, but so very, very busy in the height of summer; as autumn comes on they obviously delight in the occasional hours of warmth. The marks of their little feet are almost sacred-a joyous life has been there-do not obliterate it. It is so delightful to know that something is happy.

The hawthorn hedge that goes down the slope is more coloured than the hedges in the sheltered plain. Yonder, a low bush on the brow is a deep crimson; the hedge as it descends varies from brown to yellow, dotted with red haws, and by the gateway has another spot of crimson. The lime trees turn yellow from top to bottom, all the leaves together; the elms by one or two branches at a time. A lime tree thus entirely coloured stands side by side with an elm, their boughs intermingling; the elm is green except a line at the outer extremity of its branches. A red light as of fire plays in the beeches, so deep is their orange tint in which the sunlight is caught. An oak is dotted with buff, while yet the main body of the foliage is untouched. With these tints and sunlight, nature gives us so much more than the tree gives. A tree is nothing but a tree in itself: but with light and shadow, green leaves moving, a bird singing, another moving to and fro-in autumn with colour-the boughs are filled with imagination. There then seems so much more than the mere tree; the timber of the trunk, the mere sticks of the branches, the wooden framework is animated with a life. High above, a lark sings, not for so long as in spring-the October song is shorter-but still he sings. If you love colour, plant maple; maple bushes colour a whole hedge. Upon the bank of a pond, the brown oak-leaves which have fallen are reflected in the still deep water.

It is from the hedges that taste must be learned. A garden abuts on these fields, and being on slightly rising ground, the maple bushes, the brown and yellow and crimson hawthorn, the limes and elms, are all visible from it; yet it is surrounded by stiff, straight iron railings, unconcealed even by the grasses, which are carefully cut down with the docks and nettles, that do their best, three or four times in the summer, to hide the blank iron. Within these iron railings stands a row of arbor vit?, upright, and stiff likewise, and among them a few other evergreens; and that is all the shelter the lawn and flower-beds have from the east wind, blowing for miles over open country, or from the glowing sun of August. This garden belongs to a gentleman who would certainly spare no moderate expense to improve it, and yet there it remains, the blankest, barest, most miserable-looking square of ground the eye can find; the only piece of ground from which the eye turns away; for even the potato-field close by, the common potato-field, had its colour in bright poppies, and there were partridges in it, and at the edges, fine growths of mallow and its mauve flowers. Wild parsley, still green in the shelter of the hazel stoles, is there now on the bank, a thousand times sweeter to the eye than bare iron and cold evergreens. Along that hedge, the white bryony wound itself in the most beautiful manner, completely covering the upper part of the thick brambles, a robe thrown over the bushes; its deep cut leaves, its countless tendrils, its flowers, and presently the berries, giving pleasure every time one passed it. Indeed, you could not pass without stopping to look at it, and wondering if any one ever so skilful, even those sure-handed Florentines Mr. Ruskin thinks so much of, could ever draw that intertangled mass of lines. Nor could you easily draw the leaves and head of the great parsley-commonest of hedge-plants-the deep indented leaves, and the shadow by which to express them. There was work enough in that short piece of hedge by the potato-field for a good pencil every day the whole summer. And when done, you would not have been satisfied with it, but only have learned how complex and how thoughtful and far reaching Nature is in the simplest of things. But with a straight-edge or ruler, any one could draw the iron railings in half an hour, and a surveyor's pupil could make them look as well as Millais himself. Stupidity to stupidity, genius to genius; any hard fist can manage iron railings; a hedge is a task for the greatest.

Those, therefore, who really wish their gardens or grounds, or any place, beautiful, must get that greatest of geniuses, Nature, to help them, and give their artist freedom to paint to fancy, for it is Nature's imagination which delights us-as I tried to explain about the tree, the imagination, and not the fact of the timber and sticks. For those white bryony leaves and slender spirals and exquisitely defined flowers are full of imagination, products of a sunny dream, and tinted so tastefully, that although they are green, and all about them is green too, yet the plant is quite distinct, and in no degree confused or lost in the mass of leaves under and by it. It stands out, and yet without violent contrast. All these beauties of form and colour surround the place, and try, as it were, to march in and take possession, but are shut out by straight iron railings. Wonderful it is that education should make folk tasteless! Such, certainly, seems to be the case in a great measure, and not in our own country only, for those who know Italy tell us that the fine old gardens there, dating back to the days of the Medici, are being despoiled of ilex and made formal and straight. Is all the world to be Versaillised?

Scarcely two hundred yards from these cold iron railings, which even nettles and docks would hide if they could, and thistles strive to conceal, but are not permitted, there is an old cottage by the roadside. The roof is of old tile, once red, now dull from weather; the walls some tone of yellow; the folk are poor. Against it there grows a vigorous plant of jessamine, a still finer rose, a vine covers the lean-to at one end, and tea-plant the corner of the wall; beside these, there is a yellow-flowering plant, the name of which I forget at the moment, also trained to the walls; and ivy. Altogether, six plants grow up the walls of the cottage; and over the wicket-gate there is a rude arch-a framework of tall sticks-from which droop thick bunches of hops. It is a very commonplace sort of cottage; nothing artistically picturesque about it, no effect of gable or timber-work; it stands by the roadside in the most commonplace way, and yet it pleases. They have called in Nature, that great genius, and let the artist have his own way. In Italy, the art-country, they cut down the ilex trees, and get the surveyor's pupil with straight-edge and ruler to put it right and square for them. Our over-educated and well-to-do people set iron railings round about their blank pleasure-grounds, which the potato-field laughs at in bright poppies; and actually one who has some fine park-grounds has lifted up on high a mast and weather-vane! a thing useful on the sea-board at coastguard stations for signalling, but oh! how repellent and straight and stupid among clumps of graceful elms!