The Picturesque Garden in Germany[See Garden History CD for further information in the landscape garden in Russia and on the landscape garden in Germany}] Somewhat later, Germany also experienced a change, no doubt under the influence of England, and it brought about her own characteristic flowering. In her attitude towards the new style she filled a far more important role than France. The circle of Swiss poets around Bodmer had eagerly seized upon Spence’s first principle, ut pictura poesis, but had also accepted Shaftesbury’s and Thomson’s gospel of the greatness and ennobling effect of untouched Nature, and had developed the idea at the same time as their compatriot at Geneva, if not perhaps so violently. And so we find in the poets of this school, Kleist and Gessner, the first expression of ill-will and actual revolt against the “ cleverly laid- out gardens with their green walls, and labyrinths, and obelisks of yew rising in stiff ranks, and gravel paths, so laid that no plant may annoy the foot of the stroller.” “ Too bold man,” Gessner cried, “ why strive to adorn Nature by using imitative arts? What I love is the country meadow and the wild hedgerow.” But in his pictures (which this poet-artist paints in the utmost sympathy with his idylis) he seems quite happy with lattices and bowers; and in the graceful idyll, My Wish, he depicts the garden behind the house, “where simple Art assists the lovely fantasies of Nature with helpful obedience, not endeavouring to make her the material for its own grotesque transformations “—though all the same this garden is enclosed by walls of nut-bushes, and in each corner stands a little bower of wild-currant. Kleist, who borrows from English sources the inimical feeling towards the old style, hails the tulip, afterwards so much despised as stiff and formal, as the “ Princess among Flowers.” This group, which is like the coterie around Gleim in North Germany, is still at the stage of the first plan of Stowe, the pre-Kent period. Gleim gave to his “ Hüttchen” with its little garden a touch of the antique, by arranging that he was to be buried there, surrounded by memorial stones put up to his friends, who had so often gathered round him in this garden. Thus in Germany too we see that poets started the movement; and there they reappear, though some decades later, as critics and theorists. Sulzer in his: Theory of the Fine Arts, dated at the beginning of his seventieth year, adheres closely to Home’s first principle, that Nature is the supreme gardener, but that horticulture, like every other art, is an imitation of Nature, to be classed with the arts of drawing and design. Mason, with his insistence on design, was immediately ahead of him. And then, as William Chambers had meanwhile come forward with his glorification of Chinese gardens, Sulzer cut himself adrift, especially from the Chinese style, which he disliked and opposed. A little later began the activity of a man who, because of the popularity of his style as a painter, was of immense importance in Germany, the Professor of Philosophy at Kiel, Christian Hirschfeld. As early as 1773 he wrote his first paper, Observations on Garden Art, which was followed two years later by a short Theory of Horticulture; and from 1770 his great work in five volumes. History and Theorv of Horticulture began to come out. Hirschfeld wrote at a favourable moment for Germany. Before him in England there was not only a great literature of gardening, but a goodly number of examples. He had steeped himself in the new ideas, and felt that he was the representative of good taste, and its champion in the fatherland. So, as Goethe says, he lighted with his own fire the emulation and enthusiasm of the rest. In his five volumes he embraces all the essentials of the garden: theoretical, æsthetic, and historical. He tries to inspire the artist, the amateur, the gardener, by giving many examples, by his treatment of individual cases, by criticism and instruction. His most valuable gifts are a series of pictures illustrative of English, French and German gardens. Walpole had in his high and mighty way indicated that he did not
believe the new style of garden would meet with much approval on
the Continent, and especially that “ the little German
princes, who set out their Palaces and Country-Houses so
extravagantly, will not be able to imitate us.” When Horace Walpole published his essay, this
prophecy had been put to the test of truth; and the German princes
who had been making their gardens with ever fresh and capricious
fancy in the French fashion, were prompt enough to procure for
themselves, one after another in quick succession, anything new
that came from England. In 1769—73 Duke Francis of Dessau built a
summer home close to his residence at Wörlitz (Fig. 593).
Goethe (in his Dichtung und Wahrheit) dates it farther back, to before Winckelmann's death in 1768; but that was because he wanted to extol the greatness of the prince, as shown in his friendship and admiration for Winckelmann as well as in his, park, which at that time was unique. But, however this may be, Wörlitz is one of the first remarkable examples of the new art. The prince found a beautiful lake of a good shape; he cut fresh creeks and inlets, and united these with small streams passing through canals, so that each island thus formed was a complete picture, with one or more buildings as accessories. In this way the prince attained the first essentials: variety and contrast. The Prince de Ligne, who composed one of his witty and eloquent descriptive pieces about Wörlitz, attempts to divide the whole place into five acts with seven scenes each. The first, which he calls Champs Elysées, is an island garden on the north-west of the castle, laid out as a private winter-garden, and enclosed by an evergreen hedge. In the middle of it there is a maze adorned with busts of Lavater and Gellert, which you approach by complicated paths, sometimes underground. On one side this garden opens on the wide lake with two islands in it, one of them copied from the Rousseau island at Ermenonville and bearing his name. On the other side of the broad basin of the lake is the garden of the Gothic house (Fig. 594), which is the most prominent feature of the view from the castle.
From a small gardener’s cottage this house
has been enlarged gradually, and is to-day the Art Museum. Very
wisely the prince had always provided a surrounding for his
numerous erections—generally a small straight-clipped
hedge—and in this way the houses, temples, and grottoes are
isolated and seem more important. The subterranean paths offered an
opportunity—welcome in that sentimental age—for an
awesome sense of solitude. But one cannot deny that an impression
of grandeur is given by the Louisa Rock at the east end of the
lake, rising as it does from an underground labyrinth of rocks in
steep, bold outline—the more so because of the calm smooth
surface of the lake, which adjoins this scene and most of the
others. The many bridges are considered to give the finest points
of view, and from them one can always get a new picture with some
building as its centre. Variety is still farther increased by the
inclusion, in the wider parts, of large meadows, even cornfields,
and so the park is gradually converted into a farm estate.
With still more surprise, in the so-called new part, one walks straight into the most marvellous building in the whole park, one that pays its tribute to the freakish spirit of the age, which only too easily degenerated into childish folly. This construction is the notorious fire-spitting mountain, called Vulcan by the Prince de Ligne: on the outside it is. uncommonly like a baker’s oven, but inside there is a Temple of Night with light-effects made by coloured glass, which to-day would not produce the desired illusion even for children. Men of that day, however, had a great fancy for such toys, and nothing in the garden was more popular with visitors. The prince describes a similar grotto in the castle of Schönau, with a waterfall tumbling over it, inside of which one could, with the aid of torches, decipher the profound meanings of inscriptions and emblems, until one arrived at the throne of the veiled Goddess of Night, seated on ,a chariot by a triangular table, on which the “ bird of Minerva” presents—the Visitor’s Book! The picture of this park, imposing even now, must not be prejudiced by these little tricks of the moment; and the happy use made of the lake contributed fresh beauty even to those new sites which were visited and studied by Goethe in his early years at Weimar. Goethe confesses that his interest in horticulture was due to Hirschfeld’s work and the Wörlitz park. The park at Weimar and the book, Elective Affinities, are the culled fruits that came to maturity in his all-embracing mind. In a charming little essay, Das Luisenfest, which was destined to find a place in the autobiography he had already planned, the poet describes the origin of the park. At an improvised fête on the princess’s name- day a hermitage had been set up beside an alder clump on the bank of the Ilm. Friends wearing monks’ cowls received the court, and prepared a successful surprise for the company. To this little idyll all the other parts of the park were adapted under the immediate supervision of the poet. It had before consisted of gardens in the old style, which at the beginning of the eighteenth century were not exactly poor, but rather broken up, and these adjoined the old castle, which still kept its mediaeval style. The pleasure- garden proper was in great part destroyed through the burning of the castle in 1774. There was no more talk in Goethe’s time of the park and the fertile canal gardens alongside; but in the park there was now the so-called “ Stern (star),” then a public walk, a well-known spot, a space full of trees and shrubs—ancient trees planted in straight lines, trees which rose high into the air; also many avenues and broad plots for meetings and entertainments. Besides all this, there was a high place, the Schneckenberg (Fig. 595)) with winding paths up to a castle—still standing even in the nineteenth century—in whose green- clad walls were windows and little turrets; this was always the special sign of an old park.
Quite near here Charles Augustus in 1776 had built a summer-house to give to his friend, with a terrace-garden adjoining. The fire at the castle and the destruction of the old gardens had not only made a bare space, but “ the lordliest persons, robbed of a home suited to their comfort and their station, betook themselves to the open.” Directly after Goethe had composed his little idyll about the Luisenkloster, as the hermitage (Fig. 596) was called, “ people loved to go back to the place.
The young prince liked to spend the night there, and for his pleasure they erected the ruin and a sham campanile.” What looked like a ruin was an old shooting-stand, built out of the stones of the burnt castle. And now that the paths were also transformed to suit a romantic necessity; “ they wound about (Fig. 597), now over rocks, now under arches, now passing out into the light; with their empty, wild aspect, and here and there a hollow place or a seat, they gave some idea of the famous rock-paths of Chinese gardens.” Here we find the first picture of the kind of garden which Goethe so happily called “æsthetic,” to indicate the sentiment of his time. Thus out of a romantic necessity came into existence one picture after another, mostly started as a setting for some merry fête: there was the house of the Knights Templars (originally a Gothic tea-house), the Roman house, another ruin, a temple, monuments with inscriptions, and so on. All the separate scenes were united into one by great field views ringed with trees and bushes, brooks with bridges, paths that lost themselves in the distance, vistas with far-away church towers. The complete want of connection with a house—to which men gave no thought because there was now no house near by—matches with the want of an original plan for the whole: they were led on by one single desire, “to beautify the landscape while winning from it its own peculiar charm” (Fig. 597).
Thus the park at Weimar taken as a whole gives perhaps better than any other a clear exposition of the feeling of the time on this subject, and is doubly important from the fact that Goethe clothed the fancy in a fair form. What he learned here, with all the limitations of practical execution, he gave out in a thoughtful tale in Elective Affinities. Human nature in this story is shown at its purest in the activity of a garden life, and a peculiar harmony in the book is brought out, especially when Charlotte and the Captain are working together: they are complementary to each other—on the one hand the clear-headed, careful woman, attending to details, on the other the man trained in a military school, and keeping in view only the things of final importance. Gradually, as at Weimar, the separate parts of Charlotte’s park appear; by uniting three ponds the great central feature of the lake is made. The pleasure-house on the hill overlooks it, narrow footpaths and steps in the rocks lead to imposing points of view. Goethe had zealously studied English engravings, and it is not unlikely that he had Repton’s work in his mind when he tells of opening the books, “ wherein one always found a picture of the ground-plan of the place and also a view of it as a landscape, and then on another page a picture of what had been made of it so as to use the good points it already had, and to enhance them.” Meanwhile, side by side with this creation of new landscape-gardens, the old castle-garden was still green with its lofty avenues of limes and its even plots, which were the work of the last generation, intact and unaltered; but all the time secretly waiting for a new, distant resurrection which Goethe possibly foresaw even then. And so this business of beautifying the land, which permeates the whole tale, combined with a constraint that limits it to what is objective, creates a happy state of equilibrium between the violence of passion and the peaceful back- ground that frames the tragic fate of its hero. We see what competition there was in Germany, from the middle of the eighteenth century, in this matter of laying out gardens according to the new fashion, if we look at the number of descriptions in the appendices to the different volumes of Hirschfeld’s work. As we have seen, it is often the same princes and sometimes the same artists who supplant the old style—though it is still beloved—with the new, In the early days strange mongrels appear; indeed it almost looks as though the childish complaints incidental to the new style had broken out with peculiar virulence in Germany. Charles Augustus had hardly given the last touch to his fine gate-house at Schwetzingen when Skell came home from England, and began to put the new belts round the old parks (Fig. 598).
From the very first he seemed unconvinced and
hesitant. In 1784—5 Hirschfeld came to Schwetzingen,
and he felt that bad taste ruled supreme. Work was going on at the
Turkish Mosque:
Look at the Mecca scene, for example . . . this Mecca is in the middle of the French part . . from the mosque one looks straight into the Egyptian part, where work is still going on, and this, like the Turkish, seems to have fallen from the skies. It is a hill on which a monument of King Sesostris is being put up. This monument ought not, if the illusion is to be preserved, to be very different from ruins that are nearly worn away by the hand of time; but here everything is new, perfect, ornate, and time has altered nothing. In the caves of this hill there are to be mummies and graves . . . round the hill the Lake Moeris is to be dug out. Hirschfeld came at an unpropitious moment, and Skell abandoned the whole Egyptian plan, contenting himself with the ruins on the hill, which was made of earth taken from the bed of the lake. Even to-day this corner of the English part does not look so harmonious as the illustration (Fig. 599) represents it, though the treatment of the great lake is much more successful. 
FIG, 599. SCHWETZINGEN—THE MOSQUE In the English Garden [Englischergarten] at Munich, which is Skell’s chief work, he has been almost too sparing of his buildings, and Uvedale Price would certainly have reckoned it among the wearisome creations of which he talks. Like nearly all the theorists of the new style, Hirschfeld fought to the utmost against the overcrowding of buildings and especially the mixing up of different styles; but so long as the same theorists clamoured after variety and contrast, the worried practical people had to catch at the help that garden-buildings gave. It was unbridled licence in taste, and the extravagant desire to bring every fancy to completion, that brought to birth such a monstrosity as the garden of Rosswald near Troppau in Silesia, which was laid out by that queer being, Count Hoditz, who in his last days of poverty had to be supported by his friend and patron, Frederick the Great. Everything was heaped up there that people had thought of for hundreds of years. Beside a Chinese garden and temple there was the Holy Grave; after Christian hermitages came Indian pagodas; here a picturesque hill, there a little town for dwarfs, with a royal palace, church, etc. And from want of dwarfs the count for a time had children to live there. Next came Druid caves, with altars; then an antique mausoleum, to which sacrifices for the dead were brought. It was a great joy to the count to have fêtes corresponding to all the various parts of his garden—to suit the Chinese garden, or the wilds of America. He introduced the gambols of naiads and mermen in the lake, but best of all he loved his Arcadian fêtes, when he dressed his peasants as shepherds. None the less, people took him seriously. Frederick the Great was inspired to write him an admiring letter in verse. The fancy of the time for masquerading both in outward and inward ways—which we must always remember had nothing whatever to do with the new style of horticulture or its real principles—seemed at times to tend to such an exuberant growth that one could not recognise its original intention. While Count Hoditz sinned in his senseless conglomeration of disconnected scenes, a famous garden at Hohenheim, a couple of hours from Stuttgart, was going astray in quite another fashion. Here one idea only dominated the whole place. The designer’s intention was to represent a colony settling on the ruins of a Roman town (Fig. 600) and the effect was hailed with admiration by his contemporaries.
We take a lively interest in these dwelling-places,
and believe them inhabited; we are astonished at the remains of
temples and strong walls, which stand exactly as though they had
been rescued from destruction hundreds of years ago. . . Anyone
just passing through the garden and looking at it can get no clear
impression, because of the number of buildings; but it is quite
different for a person who enjoys choosing some particular part,
and staying awhile where he finds the right nourishment for his
mood . . . he soon comes to a spot for the dolce far niente,
then to another which, because it bears the stamp of simple
benevolence, has the power of pouring blessed peace into his soul.
But even now we have not had enough deception! We go into an apparently simple hut, and meet the last surprise; for inside it are wonderful rooms furnished in princely fashion, bath-rooms, silk tapestries, paintings, and so forth, The Prince de Ligne counts sixty different views in the comparatively small space of sixty to seventy acres, which can be strolled round in four or five hours. It is not surprising perhaps that the lively, fashion-loving prince—a man for whom the dernier cri was the topmost peak of civilisation—took delight in this garden. In the park of his family place at Hennegau in Belgium, he laid out a Tartar village, where all the aboriginal character of the shepherd’s life was staged, with young bulls as well as young students at the dairy. When work was over, the shepherds played on instruments which the prince had brought away from the Alps with his cows, and wore a uniform worthy of the beauty and simplicity of Nature, whose high priests they were. In this Tartar village the dairies are concealed in the mosque, whose minarets serve well as dovecots. And other men of more weight than the Prince de Ligne yielded to the charm of the ‚4 idea of uniformity “ as shown at the Hohenheim Park farm, It even finds favour in the eyes of Schiller, who gives his opinions on the garden in the Pocket Calendar for 1795. Though he severely condemns the overcrowding of scenes into the gardens of the day, “where the whole number of her [Nature’s] charms are displayed as in a book of patterns,” and though he considers it a mistake when horticulture takes painting as a model, because it has “ no reduced scale,” he still hails with joy the idea of this kind of garden. Although he thinks it an affected sentimentality to hang little tablets with mottoes on the trees, he gains a point by urging that the Nature which we find in the English garden is no longer the same Nature as the one we have left outside. It is a Nature enlivened with a soul, a Nature exalted by art, which delights not only the simple man, but the man of education and culture: the one she teaches to think, the other to feel. Schiller had always had a certain local interest in the garden of his own father’s house; but all this talk points to a general mistrust of the new art. There was a strong feeling that in this particular department, where Nature must and ought to provide the material to be copied, it was impossible to attain an artistic style from a simple imitation of her. Certainly Goethe found himself very uncomfortable on his visit to this garden during the tour in Switzerland in 1797. What he said was, “Many little things put together do not, alas, make one great thing.” He wanted to take notes of this garden with a view to a later treatise on the subject, for which he had already collected material. Without any consistency the critics wavered this way and that. They could not apparently make up their minds to give to horticulture a definite place among the arts, as Lafontaine had done, and yet no art critic ventured to ignore it, so strong was its position in the foreground of their interest. “ To separate harmony and discord, to know and to make use of the individual character of each locality, to cherish an active desire to exalt the beauties of nature—to collect them, if this is not a fine art, then there is none.” Thus Herder speaks in the second part of his Kalligone. He wishes Horticulture to be joined with her twin sister Architecture, but not to be subject to her laws. It will be seen that he is in opposition to Sulzer, Hirschfeld, and others, who would rank her with painting. Immanuel Kant and his school also see in horticulture a branch of painting; and if this is only an outside opinion, it arose from the need of fixing the direction for future developments. Schiller with his phrase, “ Nature exalted by Art,” had involuntarily provided a very effective watchword for the phase of horticulture described above. Only such an exalted Nature could serve as a changing background for transitory moods. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century Germany stood at the head of the new fashion of chivalry with its romantic, sentimental love of ruins. When the Landgrave William of Hesse, immediately after his return to power in 1785, took up the task of completing the mighty work of his forefather, Weissenstein, the plan for building the castle at the foot of the hill, so long delayed, had to be carried out. So entirely must this castle correspond with the new sentimental parks, that the. landgrave decided to add a wing to it in the form of a ruin; but this grotesque plan was fortunately never carried out, and only one of the series of view-plans has been kept, which the prince commissioned the elder Tischbein to paint for him. But the landgrave did not give up his idea about ruins, and some years later had them erected in a better place in the corner of the great park: they were called the ruins of a knightly castle, Felsenburg, afterwards Löwenburg, and their foundations were laid in 1793 (Fig. 601).
The prince was in deadly earnest about these
freaks, and the place had drawbridges, bulwarks, entrance-towers,
moats, all in the proper style. It did not matter if the bulwark
reached no higher than a man’s knees! Many churches in the
district had to give up their ancient glass to adorn the chapel
windows at the castle. Every kind of ornament was lavished on the
other parts of the estate. The landgrave gave orders for a laurel
or box hedge to be set round one of the gardens, clipped in the
Dutch manner, but the gardeners of that time had forgotten how it
was done, and he had to content himself with red-fir hedges, which
grew up quicker. In the castle was installed a bailiff, and also a
garrison, who wore a very choice uniform with bearskin caps. Later,
when after seven years of exile the old lord came back to his
estate, where King Jerome had been living, as the Elector William
I., the time of absence was by his command counted as nothing: he
strode across the drawbridge at Löwenburg, and the castle
warder stepped forward and announced, “ Nothing new has
happened.”
Knightly castles of this sort (Fig. 602), where in all solemnity chivalric scenes were acted, now appeared in the larger parks.
Close to the Löwenburg was a tilting-ground with wooden barriers, but this was soon replanted, for nobody would make use of it. But at Laxenburg, near Vienna, where the Emperor Francis had a lovely park, a tilting-ground still exists near the castle (which itself stands in the middle of the lake as the chef-d’oeuvre among many fine views), and shows the old arrangements with the proper approaches and lists, “ There,” says a guide-book, earnestly and naïvely, “ in 1810 a wonderfully brilliant tournament took place on the name-day of the Kaiser’s third wife, when he and all the archdukes took part in it. . . .“ “ In 1841,” the book goes on, “ there was another lively occasion at the tilting-ground . . . a company of equestrian performers gave an exhibition of their skill in the presence of the Kaiser and his court.” We see how seriously this knightly business was taken when we consider the Rosicrucian League (Brothers of the Rosy Cross), who lived as a sort of mystical, masonic sect at the Prussian court of Frederick William II. The new garden of the marble palace in Potsdam was their proper theatre, There they held their meetings in the small grove of conifers, where stood a statue of Cybele with many breasts as the Mother of Nature. This garden, which for a time supplanted the interest in Sans-Souci so entirely that the ornaments of the latter were actually removed, must be regarded as a masterpiece of the masquerade craze, For a long time no building in a park was allowed to appear what it really was. Near the castle, which was built with the marble pillars taken from the Rotunda at Sans-Souci, one noticed a half-buried temple highly decorated with columns, capitals, and the like; but when one looked closer, a kitchen was revealed. An Egyptian structure with sphinxes on guard is an orangery. Under a pyramid an ice-cellar hides. Far away in the park one comes upon a hermitage: one steps in, and there is a luxuriously appointed bath, Farther on there is another kitchen disguised as a little house made of bark, with an iron tree-trunk for a chimney. In England too there were some extravagances of this kind, but they never went so far, In Windsor Park there was a hay-wagon. with a room inside it—an idea which proved attractive, especially in South Germany. In the now non-existent park of Ludwigsburg at Saarbrücken a hay-cart stood in the middle of a meadow, and concealed in its interior a dining-room. The servants must have had to be content with queer housing, seeing that the court marshal, for whom there was no room in the somewhat small pavilion of the princes, lived in a place in the park which was disguised as a pile of wood; and similar crazy tricks were to be seen in the park of Klärlich at Trierschen. It was not the slightest good that theorists and artists, whatever point of view they had once taken, were continually abusing these extravagances, or that poets poured their scorn upon them. Although in the early days at Weimar Wörlitz had attracted Goethe to the point of imitation, he now, in his Triumph of Sentiment, rebukes these follies sharply. In the park in Hell Ascalaphus is made to give his orders thus: 'The home for Cerberus’ dogs,” he says, “ is to be turned into a chapel, for, mark well, in a park everything must be of an ideal nature, and—saving your grace—each bit of rubbish we must wrap round with some lovely covering; for example, behind a temple we will put a pig-sty, and instantly that pig-sty will turn into a Pantheon.” Goethe’s Triumph of Sentiment was the gauntlet which he threw down as a challenge to that epoch of sentimentality which he had outgrown; but just as the despised gardens continued to flourish, so did the offshoots of sentimentality. In 1784 Jung Stilling describes a scene where he and Selma are walking in the garden: of Herr Schmerz. He wonders how its creator “ could have made every little hill, dale, tree, bush, individually beautiful.” He finds first strength, then terrible beauty, then dreamy melancholy, then again riotous luxuriance. Many inscriptions draw the two friends into the mood they desire. They turn into a rock chamber for refreshment. When it was dark Schmerz says, “ Come, friends, it is very lovely outside.” I took Selma with one hand and another lady with the other, and Schmerz walked quietly beside us. We wandered on: forward in the path. . . . Good God ! a bright green light shone on the wood, and a hundred lamps lighted up the urn ! Ah ! what a sight ! . . . The skies shed mild lightnings above us, and now this spectacle ! . .elma sobbed and swooned. . . . I tore myself away. . . . Tears rolled down my cheeks . . . a soft-sounding music was heard, behind the urn a clear green light . . . there floated towards us an Adagio Out of Zemire and Azore, and I cried, “ Schmerz, illuminate Christina’s urn, for the lightnings pour their wealth on me and Selma, and the wood breathes out a gentle peace.” . . . Then Selma and I swore eternal love, but we also swore to love God and mankind, to the utmost limit of human power. Before Goethe, Justus Möser had poured scorn upon the new fashion in his Phantasien, which Goethe greatly admired. It seems almost incredible that the little satire, English Gardens, was written as early as 1773. And yet it is significant that before the English style had entrenched itself in its greater works, the frivolous fashion of Anglo-Chinese taste had made an appearance, and probably was at its height in the Hanoverian states, which felt English influence first, Möser loved what was old and native to Germany; he was pained by foreign taste, by the childish and transitory. In one of his works a girl tells her grandmother in a letter how the grandmother’s bleaching-ground, fruit-garden and cabbage-patch have been converted by the writer’s husband into an English garden with little hills and dales: “ but now it is called a shrubbery, or as other people say, an English bosket.” On the hill, she says, they sit under a Chinese canopy, which is a sun-shade with gilt metal lining. Of course there are Chinese bridges, and a Gothic dome as a summer-house. Still more plainly than in the Triumph does Goethe follow the lead of Möser in his House Park, written in 1797. The daughter is complaining to her mother that her playmates laugh at her 'I ought to feel what Nature does in the open . . . and they cannot bear stiff green walls, for they can see right through them from one end to the other. Our leaves are cut down by shears, and the flowers too; what a shame! Our dear cousin Asmus calls it just a tailor’s game.” (Asmus—Mathias Claudius—in the Serenata in Wandsbecker Boten scoffed at the old park-gardens, in which “ nothing can be seen any longer of the great full heart of harmonious Nature,” as a mere “ tailor’s game.”) |
