254 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



genius. Be it remembered, that English gardening is the purposed 

 perfectioning of niggard Nature^ and that without it England is 

 but a hedge-and-ditch, double-post-and-rail, Hounslow-heath and 

 Clapham-common sort of a country, since the principal forests 

 have been felled. It is in general far from a picturesque country. 

 — Moore^s ' Notices of the Life of Lord Byro?i,^ 1821. 



ARTHUR V^ET how aesthetic is nature ! Every spot that is entirely 

 fPJ^^^K?^' uncultivated and wild, i.e., left free to himself, however 



(17S8-1860). small it may be, if only the hand of man remains absent, it 

 decorates at once in the most tasteful manner, clothes it with 

 plants, flowers and shrubs, whose unforced nature, natural grace, 

 and tasteful grouping, bear witness that they have not grown up 

 under the rod of correction of the great egoist, but that nature 

 has here moved freely. Every neglected plant at once becomes 

 beautiful. Upon this rests the principle of the English garden, 

 which is as much as possible to conceal art, so that it may appear 

 as if nature had here moved freely ; for only then is it perfectly 

 beautiful, i.e., shows in the greatest distinctness the objectivication 

 of the still unconscious will to live, which here unfolds itself with 

 the greatest naivete, because the forms are not, as in the animal 

 world, determined by external ends, but only immediately by the 

 soil, climate, and a mysterious third influence, on account of which 

 so many plants which have originally sprung up in the same soil 

 and climate yet show such different forms and characters. 



The great difference between the English, or more correctly 

 the Chinese, garden and the old French, which is now always 

 becoming more rare, yet still exists in a few magnificent examples, 

 ultimately rests upon the fact that the former is planned in an 

 objective spirit, the latter in a subjective. In the former the will 

 of nature, as it objectifies itself in tree and shrub, mountain and 

 waterfall, is brought to the purest possible expression of these its 

 Ideas, thus of its own inner being. In the French garden, on the 

 other hand, only the will of the possessor of it is mirrored, which 



