THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



a season, owing to some one quality ; but it is soon found out, and 

 we have to return to the great masters of all ages, who are always 

 distinguished for truth to Nature, and who show their strength by 

 getting nearer to her. 



The actual beauty of a thing in all its fulness and subtlety is 

 almost the whole of the question, but the critics of the day will not 

 take the trouble to see this, and write essays on art in which many 

 long words occur, but in which we do not once meet with the word 

 truth. " Realism " and " idealism " are words freely used, and bad 

 pictures are shown us as examples of " realism," which leave out 

 all the refinement, subtlety, truth of tone, and perhaps even the very 

 light and shade in which all the real things we see are set. 



There are men so blind to the beauty of the things set before 

 their eyes in sky, sea, or earth, that they would seek to idealise 

 the eyes of a beautiful child or the clouds of heaven ; while all who 

 see natural beauty in landscape know that no imagining can come 

 near to the beauty of things seen, art being often powerless to 

 seize their full beauty, and the artist has often to let the brush fall in 

 despair. There are more pictures round the year in many a parish 

 in England than all the landscape painters of Europe could paint in 

 a century. Only a little, indeed, of the beauty that concerns us most — 

 that of the landscape — can be seized for us except by the very greatest 

 masters. Of things visible — flower, tree, landscape, sky, or sea — to 

 see the full and every varied beauty is to be saved for ever from 

 any will-o'-the-wisp of the imaginary. 



But many people do not judge pictures by Nature, but by pictures, 

 and therefore they miss her subtleties and delicate realities on which 

 all true work depends. Some sneer at those who "copy Nature," 

 but the answer to such critics is for ever there in the work of the 

 great men, be they Greeks, Dutchmen, Italians, French, or English. 



It is part of the work of the artist to select beautiful or memorable 

 things, not the first that come in his way. The Venus of Milo 

 is from a noble type of woman — not a mean Greek. The horses 

 of the Parthenon show the best of Eastern breed, full of life and 

 beauty. Great landscape painters like Crome, Corot, and Turner 

 seek not things only because they are natural, but also beautiful ; 

 selecting views and waiting for the light that suits the chosen subject 

 best, they give us pictures, working always from faithful study of 

 Nature and from stores of knowledge gathered from her, and that is 

 the only true path for the gardener, all true art being based on her 

 eternal laws. All deviation from the truth of Nature, whether it be 

 at the hands of Greek, Italian, or other artist, though it may pass for 

 a time, is in the end — it may be ages after the artist is dead — classed 

 as debased art. 



