Les Quatre-Vents and Maritain on Beauty
Within Quebec is found Les Quatre-Vents, a world-famous garden created by Frank Cabot on his twenty-acre property in La Malbaie. Cabot spent over thirty years designing and nurturing the many different areas and movements of his garden, which, beyond the diverse display of flora and fauna, trees and hedges, includes several small buildings, not to mention the stunning vistas of the St. Lawrence River beyond. The result of his labor is breathtaking.
Now, I believe full disclosure is necessary: I have not myself physically been to this garden. This must be forgiven me, however, since my plans to visit were mangled, like so many other things, by the coronavirus pandemic. My encounter with Les Quatre-Vents occurred through a documentary which was made about its creation and its creator, Frank Cabot, fittingly entitled, The Gardener. Indeed, the documentary itself is lovely, which reassures me that despite my less-than-direct contact with the garden, the encounter is nonetheless valid since it occurred through such a fittingly beautiful medium. Since the words of Jacques Maritain on the nature of Art and Beauty give a brilliant expression to my experience when watching the documentary, it will be through his language that I will explain my encounter with Les Quatre-Vents.
Analyzing the entire garden is too much for this blog post, and so I will focus on the French pigeonnier found in the garden. Coming across this little tower was perhaps my most striking moment in the garden. Seeing it, even on a screen, took my breath away — the near fairytale coloring of the structure, the pristine loveliness of the reflection pool before it, the steady channeling of your vision by the even green hedges, the sky spread above. It is enchanting.
The exterior of the pigeonnier alone does not call to you — the interior does as well. The first story, which one reaches via a hidden staircase, is designed to look like a Dutch tea room, complete with a tea set painted with sights from the garden. An additional secret stair carries you higher still, to a bedroom hidden at the top of the tower. There is an intentionality, a care, and a sense of childhood delight embedded throughout the design of the tower. Rather than pulling you out of the garden, it is an extension of the garden.
Jacques Maritain’s articulation of the nature of Art and Beauty gives expression to what it is that makes Les Quatre-Vents, and here specifically the pigeonnier, so enchanting. Art is something that is made with a purpose. You have to have knowledge to make art, but the knowledge is not so important as what is made using the knowledge (Maritain 10). In many ways, Les Quatre-Vents is an ideal example of this — it was cultivated and shaped over many years as Frank Cabot slowly took the inspirations and ideas he had gathered and used them to form his garden. If he had accumulated the knowledge, but did not create anything, there would be no art. Art requires enacting your vision.
More than simply being art (something that is made), Les Quatre-Vents is beautiful. Maritain says that something is beautiful if it “exalts and delights the soul by the bare fact of its being given to the intuition of the soul” (Maritain 24). When you see the garden, you are delighted with it. As you progress through the garden, you are charmed, surprised, delighted, moved. The moment when one turns and finds oneself gazing upwards at the pigeonnier, surrounded by the deep greens and backed by the great blue, one is pulled entirely outside of oneself. The experience of being in the garden is the experience of an invitation which you encounter through your sight, smell, touch — you are lifted up in delight (Maritain 25). Frank Cabot himself articulates something along these lines in the documentary, saying that there is a right way to visit the garden — alone or with one or two close people, or you will not be able to truly see the garden.
We really ought to talk a bit more now about Frank Cabot, the gardener himself, especially considering what Maritain writes about artists. He says that artists must possess an inner habitus, an inner disposition which will enable them to create well because of the kind of person they are — thus they are able to understand the matter they are working with. It is this disposition that gives them the vision of the art they create: “Through the presence in them of the virtue of Art, they are, in a way, their work before they create it: to be able to form it, they are conformed to it” (Maritain 13). When I began watching the documentary for the first time, I was only marginally interested in the gardener himself, but the documentary’s approach reflects the words of Maritain — they could not present the gardener without the garden nor the garden without the gardener. Frank Cabot read the landscape, let natural habitats inform his garden design — allowed the matter to inform the form of the garden. Were Frank Cabot not attuned in this way, if he did not possess this inner disposition, he could not have created what he did. The pigeonnier for example — if Frank Cabot lacked this habitus, it would not be so entirely lovely.
The final, culminating aspect of beauty was happened upon by one of the commentators in the documentary. After hurriedly assuring the audience of her atheism, she states that, nevertheless, the garden makes her feel that there must be something greater, that something is calling to her through the garden. She stumbled into the heart of beauty, despite her protestations. Beauty gives itself over to the one who beholds — it is being itself, given over to us. We see something beautiful, it cries out to us, it enters our hearts — there is a kind of unity that occurs. Why does this happen? Because beauty proceeds from God, who is the one calling out to us through the beautiful. The commentator was precisely right that she was being called to by something greater as she encountered Frank’s garden. Beauty does not only point us to the divine — it draws us nearer to Him. As a true work of art, Les Quatre-Vents is an encounter with the Divine Creator Himself. I hope to visit in person, myself one day, to be quietly filled by the result of Frank’s labor, and through it, to again encounter Beauty Himself.