Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
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and ‘Boer’, which, while attempting to articulate a sympathetic history of the Boer – as potential co-labourer with the British, as possessing ‘natural dignity beyond praise’ and an ‘antique kindliness’ (Buchan 1903: 74) – succeeded in causing much offence in its descriptions of the Boer’s ‘mental sluggishness’, ‘blind faith’ and ‘meagre imagination’ (70). Part II, ‘Notes of Travel’, offers a series of brief ‘carnets de voyage’ or travelogues concerned with the ‘configuration of the land’. These travel narratives ‘are devoted almost entirely to descriptions of unimproved, sparsely inhabited rural districts’ and not urban centres (Foster 2008: 122). Part II conforms to the rules that govern Victorian travel writing as laid out by Pratt in Imperial Eyes (2007). The most explicitly ‘non-political’ of the three sections, ‘Notes of Travel’ deploys what Pratt has termed ‘strategies of innocence’ – that is to say, ‘strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony’ (2007: 9). Part III, ‘The Political Problem’, offers a ‘modest diagnosis’ or what Buchan calls a ‘highly controversial sketch’ (1903: xvi) of the issues to be faced in South Africa. In prefacing his ‘diffidence’ with regard to this task, he apologises to his ‘friends’ (xviii) for his ‘audacity’ and frames his role as outside observer in terms of a landscape trope: ‘A critic on a neighbouring hill-top will be a poor guide to the flora and fauna of the parish below; but he may be a good authority on its contours, on the height of its hills and the number of its rivers, and he may, perhaps, be a better judge of the magnitude of a thunderstorm coming out of the west than the parishioner in his garden’ (xiii).
The passages I examine are from two different travelogues in Part II. Both are instances where Buchan deploys the lawn trope and in both cases he makes explicit reference to the conventions of Englishness. A binary between the inside/outside, garden/wilds and journey/arrival is set up in both passages. In the first instance, the ‘contrast’ Buchan suggests is ‘between the common veld and [the] garden’ (126); and in the second, between two different greens: the ‘dull green’, which he wishes would ‘give place to tender green’ (129).
A garden on the edge of the wilderness
The passage below is from ‘The Wood Bush’ (Buchan 1903: 113), the record of a journey dated January 1903. It describes a mid-summer afternoon in the lowveld, an area of which Buchan was exceedingly fond, which he called the ‘true Hesperides’ and the ‘New Eden’ (117). Buchan is astride his horse on the plateau of the Haenartsburg and describes the prospect below. He is the man on the hilltop, or what Pratt has called the ‘seeing-man’ (2007: 9):
It is England, richer, softer, kindlier, a vast demesne laid out as no landscape gardener could ever contrive, waiting for a human life worthy of such an environment. But it is more – it is that most fascinating of all types of scenery, a garden on the edge of a wilderness. And such a wilderness! Over the brink of the meadow, four thousand feet down, stretch the steaming fever flats. From a cool fresh lawn you look clear over a hundred miles of nameless savagery. The first contrast which fascinates the traveller is between the common veld and this garden; but the deeper contrast, which is a perpetual delight to the dweller, is between his temperate home and the rude wilds beyond his park wall. (Buchan 1903: 126)
In the garden on the edge of the wilderness, Buchan is writing the lawn into being, providing a memory of a lawn which is not real, not yet. The ‘lawn’ Captain Harris wrote about was drawn from memories of British landscapes he had seen, as was Buchan’s lawn. But Harris was not a bureaucrat, officially charged with solving problems of land resettlement and immigration. Buchan was officially empowered to look, with the clear intent to find places that were suitable, habitable. So, moved by the landscape, his search shifts towards finding a life ‘worthy’ of the environment, rather than the other way around. Buchan sees a lawn that does not exist but that, in part as a result of the text he wrote, would actually become a lawn.
Following the notion that for Buchan the lawn originates linguistically – it is first of all written – it is worth analysing the things the lawn does in this passage: firstly, it provides a place, on which to stand, from which to look, from which to write; and secondly, the lawn (that is to say, the ‘lawn-contrast’) fascinates and delights. This place comes about through a set of oppositions or contrasts and is the appropriate place from which to appreciate them. Essentially the binary in operation is between lawn and wilderness, which is underpinned by a more fundamental binary between civilised and uncivilised. This binary is elaborated descriptively as the ‘inside’ (garden, richer, softer, kindlier, cool, fresh, temperate, home), in opposition to the ‘outside’ (common veld, rude, steaming, nameless savagery). Aside from the explicit articulation of the South African wilderness as ‘veld’, set up against the garden, and the expected colonial racial language (savagery) and class language (rude/kindly), I want to draw attention to the passage’s structuring of difference through temperature. While it may be sensible to claim that lawns actually do feel cooler than some other ground surfaces, especially in Africa, it is worth noting that the lawn’s coolness is generally collocated with terms like hygiene, ‘clean, cool’ (Waugh 1926: 83) and cultivation, ‘cool, green, cultivated’ (Eliovson 1968: 113). It can hardly be claimed that Buchan’s contrast between the ‘cool, fresh, temperate’ garden with ‘steaming fever flats’ is a description dealing with empirical notions of hot and cold. It is not that the ‘steaming fever flats’ are bad per se; their hotness is necessary. Without the heat the temperate garden would be rather boring. It is worth noting how often temperature is thought of as an appearance rather than a feeling; as both Sima Eliovson (1968: 113) and E. N. Anderson note, the lawn ‘looks cool’ (1972: 180; emphasis added). Without the nameless (unnameable), sensual, uncivilised flats, the accomplishment of the garden would only be ‘England’, not ‘richer, softer, kindlier’, for that requires the comparative logic, richer (than), softer (than), kindlier (than). This relational grammar sets up repetitive contrasts that move from a simple contrast to a ‘deeper’ contrast. The simple contrast is for the traveller, but the deeper contrast, which is delightful, is reserved for the dweller.
In order for this logic to function, a boundary concept is required to mark what is ‘in’ and ‘out’ and, therefore, who or what is civilised, uncivilised, civilisable. Buchan’s description demarcates and encloses the lawn with an ‘edge’, a ‘brink’, a ‘park wall’.
One is struck that there already is a ‘natural’ border: the brink of the meadow. Buchan shrinks and domesticates the panoramic view, ending with the ‘park wall’. Furthermore, the idea of garden and countryside forming an undivided whole differs from the physical and conceptual divisions that govern the Buchan passage. So, apart from the idea of a boundary between garden and wilderness, one also has the idea of the garden being united with the environment.
The notion that the lawn is bounded is both fundamental and implicit, just as it is mostly subtly articulated in the literature. That the lawn must end is a certainty; how it ends is a matter of taste. Price preferred ‘a just gradation from highly embellished to simple nature: just as the polished lawn … does afterwards to the wilder wood-walks and pastures’ (1810: 165). The ‘gradation’ Price advocated was made possible by the innovation of the ‘ha-ha’, which was a sunken barrier or a ditch that kept the grazing animals out of the garden without interrupting the vistas. It first appears in La théorie et la pratique du jardinage by A. J. Dezallier d’Argenville (published in 1709), translated into English as The Theory and Practice of Gardening (published in 1712) and then taken up by nobleman Horace Walpole in On Modern Gardening, where he called it the ‘Ha! Ha!’, the ‘capital stroke [in] the destruction of walls for boundaries’ (1780: 59). That the ability of the ha-ha to hide boundaries and to ‘create the illusion that the garden and the surrounding countryside was one and undivided’ (Thacker 1985: 183) should have become so fashionable at the very moment of accelerated enclosures gives pause for thought. Later writers sometimes preferred a more explicit border ‘of shrubbery [that] makes a lawn more beautiful, because it acts like the frame of a picture’ (Miller 1913: 91).
The question of how to define the