58 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF RURAL TASTE. 



and that the Greeks and Romans, richly 

 gifted as they were with the artistic endow- 

 ments, were inferior to other nations in a 

 profound feeling of the beauty of nature. 



Humboldt also shows that our enjoy- 

 ment of natural landscape gardening, which 

 many suppose to have originated in the 

 cultivated and refined taste of a later age, 

 is, on the contrary, purely a matter of na- 

 tional organization. The parks of the Per- 

 sian monarchs, and the pleasure-gardens of 

 the Chinese, were characterized by the 

 same spirit of natural beauty which we see 

 tn the English landscape gardens, and 

 which is widely distinct from that elegant 

 formality of the geometric gardens of the 

 Greeks and Romans of several centuries 

 later. To prove how sound were the prin- 

 ciples of Chinese taste, ages ago, he gives 

 us a quotation from an ancient Chinese 

 writer, Lieu-tscheit, which might well be 

 the text of the most tasteful improver of the 

 present day, and which we copy for the 

 study of our own readers : 



41 What is it," says Lieu-tscheu, " that 

 we seek in the pleasures of a garden ? It 

 has always been agreed that these planta- 

 tions should make men amends for living at 

 a distance from what would be their more 

 congenial and agreeable dwelling place- — in 

 the midst of nature, free and unconstrained. 

 The art of laying out gardens consists, 

 therefore, in combining cheerfulness of 

 prospect, luxuriance of growth, shade, re- 

 tirement and repose ; so that the rural as- 

 pect may produce an illusion. Variety, 

 which is the chief merit in the natural 

 landscape, must be sought by the choice of 

 ground, with alternation of hill and dale, 

 flowing streams and lakes, covered with 

 aquatic plants. Symmetry is wearisome; 

 and a garden tohere everything betrays con- 

 straint and art, becomes tedious and dis- 

 tasteful:' 



We shall seek in vain, in the treatises of 

 modern writers, for a theory of rural taste 

 more concise and satisfactory than this of 

 the Chinese landscape garden. 



Looking at this instinctive love of na- 

 ture as a national characteristic, which be- 

 longs almost exclusively to distinct races, 

 Humboldt asserts, that while the " pro- 

 foundest feeling of nature speaks forth in 

 the earliest poetry of the Hebrews, the In- 

 dians, and the Semitic and Indo Germanic 

 nations, it is comparatively wanting in the 

 works of the Greeks and Romans." 



"In Grecian art," says he, "all is made 

 to concentre within the sphere of human 

 life and feeling. The description of nature, 

 in her manifold diversity, as a distinct 

 branch of poetic literature, was altogether 

 foreign to the ideas of the Greeks. With 

 them, the landscape is always the mere 

 background of a picture, in the foreground 

 of which human figures are moving. Pas- 

 sion, breaking forth in action, invited their 

 attention almost exclusively ; the agitation 

 of politics, and a life passed chiefly in pub- 

 lic, withdrew men's minds from enthusias- 

 tic absorption in the tranquil pursuit of na- 

 ture." 



On the other hand, the poetry of Britain, 

 from a very early period, has been espe- 

 cially remarkable for the deep and instinc- 

 tive love of natural beauty which it exhi- 

 bits. And here lies the explanation of the 

 riddle of the superiority of English taste in 

 rural embellishment ; that people enjoying 

 their gardens the more as they embodied 

 the spirit of nature, while the Italians, like 

 the Greeks, enjoyed them the more as they 

 embodied the spirit of art. 



The Romans, tried in the alembic of the 

 great German savan, are found still colder 

 in their love of nature's charms than the 

 Greeks. " A nation which manifested a 

 marked predilection for agriculture and 



