Jardin d’Essai—A lost opportunity—Some suggestions—The villas of Mustapha—A model museum—Arab art—Its origins—Its limitations—Its significance.

The amateur gardener, especially if he has any knowledge of tropical or sub-tropical horticulture, will probably not be long in Algiers without visiting the Jardin d’Essai. This modest title is given to an extremely successful attempt at acclimatization, chiefly of tropical trees, on a large scale. It was established by the Government eighty years ago, and is now the property of the Compagnie Générale Algérienne, which grows vast quantities of young palms and other trees for export to Paris and London.

The garden in itself will be a disappointment to the garden-lover. It is a rectangular piece of ground, intersected by straight alleys, and with the exception of a pool of water at the southern corner, containing a small island, there is little attempt at what is called landscape gardening. And the possibilities of a water-garden are neglected. One wonders what an Algerian Wisley would be like. The whole aspect of the place suggests a not very well kept nursery garden, which in effect it is. But the wealth of its contents completely atones for its poverty in design.

Perhaps the most striking feature is an avenue of india-rubber trees, which have attained a gigantic size,—a height in some cases of sixty feet and a girth of twenty feet. It is a wonder that this garden was not “floated” on the London market during the recent “boom.” At any rate, it does contain rubber trees, which it is understood some of the areas offered to the public did not. Another species of ficus covers a large space of ground, throwing down fresh roots from its lateral branches, and apparently prepared to travel in this way in every direction. It is unfortunate that the trees and shrubs are very insufficiently labelled; occasional fragments of labels more or less indecipherable, and in some cases, I think, incorrect, may be discovered; but there is no systematic attempt to afford information. This ought not to be so in a garden for which the State is partially responsible.

The palms are very fine, and of many different species, including some great rarities which I am unable to name. All the commoner bamboos are in profusion, but being for the most part planted as hedges rather than as clumps they lose their natural effect. Various Yuccas vie with the india-rubber trees in their splendid growth. At the southern end of the garden, where the formality of the avenues gives place to a little wilderness, are some magnificent clumps of Strelitzia augusta,—finer in size and growth than I have seen elsewhere,—and towering above them are some lofty specimens of Chorisia speciosa from Brazil. In the drier spots are various species of aloe; and in the wetter papyrus flourishes exceedingly. The fantastic Monstrera deliciosa is quite at home, and imbeds its constricting coils in the palm-trunks, in a way which must be very painful to them.

Not much colour is to be expected in the early months of the year, but two or three Bougainvilleas make a moderate show, and both Bignonia venusta and B. Smithii are in flower. The exquisite Plumbago Capensis is coming into bloom; also the single red Hibiscus and its less attractive double variety. A little trouble spent on this garden would soon make it one of the finest in the world, without in any way impairing its commercial uses. The material is there, and a little skill in rearrangement of walks and in grouping of specimens is all that is wanted.

Perhaps a friendly critic may venture to be also an adviser. It is to be presumed that Algiers welcomes the advent of strangers. And I find that the local press records with satisfaction that hotels are full, and also that great steamers with hundreds of tourists constantly arrive. These strangers do good to trade, and it may therefore be worth while to pay a little attention to their tastes, and to increase rather than diminish the attractions which draw them hither. Even if the inhabitants of Algiers care little about the beauty of the surroundings of their city, they are part of its essential charm, and should be preserved from the destruction which is everywhere threatening them. The ruthless felling of ancient trees, the obstruction of points of view, the vulgarization of pleasant places,—these may seem little things individually, but in the mass they tell. There are, I believe, full powers to deal with such matters, and the Minister of the Interior has recently addressed to the préfets of France a circular calling attention to the necessity of safeguarding sites of artistic and natural beauty. Let Algiers lead the way, and she will not repent it. But she may some day bitterly repent inaction now.

Another suggestion. It would not be a great matter for the town to purchase a block of buildings in the old streets below the Kasbeh, to clean them out and to preserve them without undue restoration. Strangers wish to see what the old town was like, and are not all able to battle with the squalor and turmoil of the old streets as they are. Such a little natural museum would more than pay for its cost. And—this is a smaller matter still—it would be for the convenience of foreigners if notices were affixed to public buildings, stating at what times they are opened to inspection. It is annoying, for instance, to arrive at the Bibliothèque in the morning and to find it closed, with nothing to indicate when it will be open.

I could extend these suggestions. But perhaps it would be too much to expect in a town largely peopled by Mohammedans that strangers visiting the mosques, or even passing in their neighbourhood, should be relieved from the importunities of irresponsible and worrying touts. The town is generally so well policed; the importunity of beggars is so trifling with what one suffers in Egypt, for example; that, like Oliver Twist, one asks for more.

The suburb of Mustapha takes its name from the last Dey but three who erected the palace now used as the official summer residence of the Governor. The vast sums he expended on it excited the anger of the janissaries, and led to his disgrace and death. There are many other Arab villas now modernized; they are well described by the artist Fromentin, a painter in words as on canvas: “To-day without exception they belong to Europeans. So the deep mystery which veiled them has vanished, and much of their charm has disappeared. The architecture of these houses has no great meaning when applied to European uses. We must therefore accept them for the pleasure of their exterior aspect, and study them as the graceful monuments of an exiled civilization. Inhabited by the people who built—I might say, dreamed—them, these dwellings were a creation both of poetry and genius. This people knew how to make prisons which were places of delight, and to cloister its women in convents where they were unseen yet seeing. For the day, a multitude of little apertures through stretching gardens of jasmine and vines; for the night, the terraces;—what more malicious, and at the same time more full of care for the distraction of the prisoners? The gardens resemble those playthings which are designed for the amusement of the Arab woman, that singular being whose life, long or short, is never anything but childhood. You see there only little gravelled walks, little rivulets in marble channels, where the water meanders in moving arabesque designs. The baths, too, suggest the invention of a husband at once a poet and a jealous lover. Imagine vast cisterns where the water is not more than three feet in depth, flagged with the finest white marble, and open through vaulted arches to a wide horizon. Not a tree reaches this height; when you are seated in these aerial bathing-places you see only sky and sea, and are seen only by the passing birds. We have no understanding of the mysteries of such an existence. We walk through the country to enjoy it; when we return it is to be indoors. This secluded life near to an open window, this motionless existence before so vast a space, this household luxury, this enervating climate and radiant country, the infinite perspective of the sea—all this must give birth to strange dreams, must throw the vital forces into disorder, and mingle a sentiment beyond the power of words to describe with the sorrows of captivity. But,” concludes our author, “ne me trompe-je pas en prêtant des sensations très littéraires à des êtres qui assurément ne les ont jamais eues?”

Those who are fortunate enough to have access to some of these villas will find their original features of house and garden carefully preserved; the gardens improved and extended in accordance with more intelligent views of horticulture. Others may see in the spacious and well-ordered gardens of the Hôtel St. George, the largest of the hotels frequented by English visitors, what in the way of vernal loveliness the soil and climate of Algiers are capable of producing. In the grounds of the Hôtel Continental, another large house with a sunny situation and a magnificent view, are some curious and interesting trees, a dragon tree which is considered to be six hundred years old.

There is an excellent Algerian museum at Mustapha Supérieur in a pleasant garden, close to the Governor’s Summer Palace, built with a court-yard, in the Moorish manner, an admirable form for a museum. It is laudably confined to Algerian antiquities and Arab art; there are no irrelevant South Sea Island curios; it has not been used as a receptacle for the rubbish of the local collector, a dumping-ground of the perplexed widow and the embarrassed executor. Algerian history is thoroughly represented; there are the flint implements of primitive man, a collection of Punic pottery from Gouraya, Roman antiquities of every kind, and numerous examples of Arab and Berber handicrafts. These treasures are exhibited with the taste which distinguishes the French in such matters, as is evidenced in their dressing of shop-windows. Of the Roman antiquities perhaps the gem is a bronze figure of a boy with an eagle, two feet high, and of fine style. It was found at Lambessa. From Lambessa come numerous other exhibits, including some gold coins of the period of Septimius Severus, an emperor of African origin, of Julia his wife (with filigree mounting), and Caracalla and his son, of Macrinus and Severus Alexander. These are in mint condition. And there is a very fine gold medallion of Postumus. There are numerous mosaics,—in Roman Africa mosaic pavements were very popular and well executed,—marbles of all kinds from Cherchel, and a very interesting stone tablet recording the rules for the distribution of water from an aqueduct to Roman colonists. The Arab portion includes arms, jewellery, the elaborately embroidered saddlery of Arab cavaliers, pottery, carpets, woven stuffs,—a fine assortment of Arab and Berber handiwork. Altogether a most creditable museum,—a very model of what a local museum should be. In a neighbouring building is a “Forestry” collection;—stuffed examples of Algerian wild animals, and fine specimens of Algerian woods, and so on. Some magnificent examples of slabs of the native Thuja are worth notice.

As with other public buildings in Algeria, the usefulness of this museum is somewhat curtailed by the short time it is open,—only in the afternoon and not every day,—and, what is worse, by the absence of any notice of the hours during which it may be visited. In my ignorance I tried to enter on two or three occasions. Goaded to desperation one morning I rang the bell, and found the amiable custodian at leisure to admit me, but only by favour. Such a collection is worthy of a notice-board in French, Arabic, English, German, Spanish, and Italian, setting forth the hours it is open, and to a foreigner (I make the suggestion with diffidence) it appears that the morning hours should not be forgotten. This is too good a museum to be circumscribed by such antiquated and provincial arrangements as prevail at present. The object of a museum should be to get people to come in, not to keep them out. I was informed that it was closed on Monday afternoon because there were too many people about! The British workman’s Monday is evidently not the insular institution I had supposed. But a museum is not a fortress.

We are wont to speak of “Arab Art,” but the term, if consecrated by usage, is incorrect and misleading. There is, in fact, no such thing. The Arab has never been an artist. The nomad had of necessity no architecture, and architecture is the mother of the arts. Artistic incapacity and an effort to break away from anthropomorphism in religion went hand in hand among the Semitic races;—“Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.” And when Solomon builded his temple he turned for assistance to the King of Tyre; and one Hiram, a brassworker of Tyre, “wrought all his work.” To this day the Jews, who have excelled in finance and statecraft, in literature and in music, have made little mark in art.

The rise of Islam is an extraordinary phenomenon. In one generation the Arab is a wanderer, half patriarch, half brigand, pasturing his flocks on the verge of the cultivated lands of more civilized peoples, and snatching such prey as hazard brought within his grasp; in the next he is a conqueror ruling from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and threatening to extinguish Christendom. On the vanquished he imposed his religion and his social code; he had no art to impose. Having become by force of conquest and the exigencies of government a dweller in cities, he showed his incapacity to understand the work of his predecessors in such eccentricities as re-erecting their fallen buildings with the columns inverted, using the capital as base, and the base in the capital’s place. As architects he employed the natives of the countries he had overrun, in Egypt Copts and Greeks, who reproduced Byzantine forms and fixed the typical lines on which the development of “Arab art” was to take place. In this deference to local tendencies is to be found the origin of the wide divergencies of art in the Mohammedan world,—of Persian art in the east, and Moorish art in the west. The conquered and converted peoples continued to build, as far as the main plan was concerned, in the same way as they had built before their conversion, adapting their previous methods to present needs, and to the requirements of their conquerors.

In Barbary the development of art followed closely that of Spain. The Moorish art of Spain was chiefly Roman or Byzantine in origin; the first mosque built, that of Cordoba, is said to have been designed by architects from Byzantium. Columns used in its construction were brought from the ruins of Merida and other Roman towns, and even from distant parts of the Mediterranean. From this commencement sprang the later glories of Moorish art, exhibited in their most splendid developments at Granada in Spain, and Tlemçen in Algeria.

If in the scheme of its buildings Moorish architecture followed earlier examples, the Byzantine basilica and the Roman house, in its decorative features it was more distinctively Mohammedan. Yet if the Semite nourished his traditional aversion from the graven image, if the Prophet forbade idolatry and his disciples extended the prohibition to the portrayal of the human body, and enjoined that only trees, flowers and inanimate objects should be depicted; it is nevertheless necessary to seek some deeper cause for the objection of the western Mohammedans to any artistic representation of animal forms. This objection was by no means universal in the Mohammedan world. The Persian rejoiced in his pictures and statues. The explanation may be found perhaps in the zeal of the iconoclasts which had rent North Africa before the Arab invasion. Fathers of the Church had thundered against images; humbler Christians, such as the Copts in Egypt, had striven to dissociate their art from materialistic suggestions, and to find in geometric designs some expression of their aspirations for the infinite. But Hellenism, with its delight in nature, and especially the human form, was still dominant in Christian art. It disappeared before the onslaught from Arabia. The Coptic builder saw his opportunity. His abstract ideas fitted exactly with those of his new master. In his rhythmical representations of foliage, his polygonal figures and intersecting angles, may perhaps be found the germ of the characteristic motives of Mohammedan decoration.

Its elements may be divided into three groups;—inscriptions in writing, and interlacements, rectilinear and curvilinear. It will be found that almost all Moorish decoration falls under one of these three heads. The inscriptions as a rule are not historic, but ornamental, verses of the Koran, pious sentences and so forth. The style is at first sober and monumental, more stately than the cursive hand in ordinary use. As we should expect, it became in time more elaborate and fantastic, harmonizing well with the decorative interlacements which commonly surround the lettering. The inscriptions themselves are often in geometrical form, so as to give at first sight the impression of a pattern; for instance, a sentence may be repeated four times around a central letter.

To the variety of geometrical and curvilinear interlacements there is obviously no limit. Angles, straight lines and curves are frequently combined in the style we denominate arabesque, a style which has prevailed far beyond the limits of Arab conquest, and is particularly a feature of Venetian art. Late examples show great development, especially on floral lines. Leaves of particular trees, notably the palm, are represented. But a mathematical suggestion does not cease to prevail. The passion for interlacement and for excessive decoration of surface gives rise to curious vagaries,—such are the intricate intersection of arches, the breaking up of the arch itself into subsidiary arches, and the “stalactites” which commonly adorn the roof of the mihrab, the Holy of Holies. It is not without interest when visiting a mosque to note these developments and to strive to trace them to their original elements.

Our insight into the Arab mind is so limited, we have ourselves so slight an inclination to the symbolic and the mystic, so strong a preference for directness in art and speech, for “straight-flung words and few,” that we may well hesitate to dogmatize in such a matter as Moorish decoration. In the light of our own tame submission to a superabundance of ecclesiastical and domestic ornament which is without significance we should regard it as merely a habit of clothing blank spaces with conventional markings. Yet it may be that the spiritual dreamer, ever intent on the conception of an abstract deity, rejecting with scorn the idea of a God made flesh and dwelling among men, finds in the geometrical expressions of unending line and angle, in the interminable intricacies of the interlacing curve, some harmony with his own longings, and some suggestion of the Infinite.