Sunday, February 19, 2012

to use his garden



When I said in my last post that Ruskin wouldn't let Carlyle have free run of his garden because he spat, I was thinking of a passage in Joan Abse's book, John Ruskin: the Passionate Moralist. It goes like this: "Later, in Praeterita, Ruskin was to express remorse that he had not in these years given Carlyle complete freedom to use his garden, whenever he wished, as a refuge from the heat and dust of Chelsea. But, in some unpublished passages of the manuscript, he disclosed his reasons for not doing so which subsequently he evidently thought better of making public. The 'insuperable obstacle' had been Carlyle's smoking and, even worse, his spitting! Ruskin confessed that he had liked to keep his garden in pristine condition so that he and sometimes Joan, could always lie down at any time to examine flowers or grass without fear of anything but a little dust on their clothes. With Carlyle in the garden, indulging his bad habit, this would clearly have become an impossibility. So he concluded wryly: 'I never was happy in listening to Carlyle, but when the end of his pipe was up his own chimney."

Ruskin, according to that paragraph, felt no desire for the pleasure Carlyle must have acquired by smoking and spitting, a fact interesting to me, who in his shoes might have felt jealous that I couldn't have that pleasure too, smoking and spitting, spitting and smoking, and tipping out my pipe ash on the lawn, as Carlyle might have done, or injecting samples of my own private liquid into the secretive soil of the planet, leaving my saliva behind to spin away from me into the night with the turn of the earth, leaving it to arrive one day perhaps at the top of a mountain, as Ruskin in Modern Painters imagines a grain of sand doing, elevated by heaving topography from the subterranean strata bed of a dead stream to the peak of a mountain where comets fly past with their arses on fire and clouds precipitate rain or snow, depending on the time of year. (I came across a webpage recently where someone was claiming that the word mystical came from the antique mist-hakel, or mist-hat, a common phrase about seven hundred years ago among English-speaking people who wanted to refer to the clouds that hover around the peaks of mountains or hills, but this is contradicted by every online dictionary I've been able to find. They all say it's plain mystic plus -al, and this is a disappointment to me, imagining, as I wanted to do, that every time anyone described something as mystical they were in fact subconsciously contemplating the qualities of clouds, specifically lingering ones, seen from below by people in valleys, or, another way of putting it, the word mystical would always have suggested looking upwards.)

When he was a boy, John Ruskin I mean, he wanted to play with the anthills in his parents' garden, but the gardener kept sweeping them away. "I had nothing animate to care for, in a childish way, but myself, some nests of ants, which the gardener would never leave undisturbed for me, and a sociable bird or two." If you put this fact next to the adult Ruskin's private dislike of Thomas Carlyle's spit, and let's say for the sake of argument that you knew nothing else about gardens, you might conclude that gardens exist so that people can keep certain things out of them, and that the definition of "garden" is "an area of land from which objects are excluded," with these objects being whatever the controller of that land wants them to be, anthills, body fluids, anything, or perhaps, taking these two examples, you could narrow it down to, "objects which are physical evidence produced by the activities of living creatures" (eg, ants, Thomas Carlyle) for we have seen no proof that any other kind of thing can be excluded, and perhaps nothing else can.


7 comments:

  1. i visited ruskin's garden and there was no fence round it. it's called brantwood and is in the lake district. it's very beautiful. i can't report anthills.

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  2. It looks fantastic in photographs. Trees and lawns in swaths. A tonne of green. But such long shots that it was impossible for me to see whether there were anthills or not. No anthills then? They should built a metal one, in honour of his childhood, and put it near the front step. You've prompted me to go back to Abse's book and find out where he was living when he decided not to let Carlyle roam free in his garden like a gobbing antelope and all this seems to have taken place a few years before he moved to Brantwood -- about 1866, and he bought the Lake District property in the early 1870s. I think he was living in Herne Hill, and the other man was in Cheyne Row.

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  3. (I like your blog, by the way. I've just been reading it.)

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  4. when i was there they were just doing it up. maybe one should just write to them and request the inclusion of an anthill, with your quote to prove it. or maybe the ants come all by themselves and build their own anthill. it's a pity that you can't go, because it is really nice and they have preserved also all the stuff he collected. he was buried somewhere there too and somewhere i have a foto of his grave stone. i think he bought brantwood even without looking at it, but it is a fine place. even with looking he couldn't have chosen any better.
    i like your blog too.

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  5. Or we get someone to lay a trail of sugar into Brantwood, ending near the step, and lure the ants there. Joan Abse says you're right about him buying Brantwood without looking at it: "A letter came from an acquaintance in America telling him he had a house for sale at Coniston in the Lake District. Soon after, Ruskin bought it, unseen -- though of course he knew the area very well -- for fifteen hundred pounds. He is said ... to have expressed a wish to 'lie down in Coniston Water.' So now this offer of a house seemed like a special sort of blessing."

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  6. i'm going there again, some time in april. i will assess the situation and if there are no anthills i will take appropriate steps to direct antimigration in the right spots.

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  7. I'm sure you'll get excellent results. If sugar doesn't work then shepherds might have to be brought in, with tiny whips.

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