GARDEN-CRAFT. 



There are other savager, and more primeval aspects 

 of Nature than our poets have sung. It is only 

 white man's poetry." 



To sum up the whole matter, this unmitigated 

 hostility of the cultured man (with Jacob's smooth 

 hands and Esau's wild blood) to the amenities of 

 civilised life, brings us back to the point from 

 whence we started at the commencement of this 

 chapter. While men are what they are, Art is not 

 all. Man has Viking passions as well as Eden in- 

 stincts. Man is of mixed blood, whose sympathies 

 are not so much divided as double. And all of man 

 asks for all of Nature, and is not content with less. 

 To the over-civilised man who is under a cloud, the 

 old contentment with orthodox beauty must give 

 place to the subtler, scarcer instinct, to " the more 

 recently learnt emotion, than that which responds 

 to the sort of beauty called charming and fair." 

 Fair effects are only for fair times. The garden 

 represents to such an one a too careful abstract of 

 Nature's traits and features that had better not have 

 been epitomised. The place is to him a kind of 

 fraud — a forgery, so to speak, of Nature's auto- 

 graph. It is only the result of man's turning spy 

 or detective upon the beauties of the outer world. 

 Its perfection is too monotonous ; its grace is too 

 subtle ; its geography too bounded ; its interest too 

 full of intention — too much sharpened to a point ; 

 its growth is too uniformly temperate ; its imagery 

 too exacting of notice. These prim and trim 

 things remind him of captive princes of the wood, 



