ENGLISH IDEALS OF GARDENING 203 



of the French has been shown in Cathedral and cha- 

 teaux, and of the Italians in palaces. These inveterate 

 country tastes of ours are, no doubt, the chief reason 

 why our towns are so incoherent and ugly. Our hearts 

 are never in the town, even when we are forced to 

 live in it, and our idea of improving it is to make it 

 as much like the country as we can. Thus our town 

 architecture is always apt to be freakish and incon- 

 gruous, putting on airs of rustic simplicity or medieval 

 romance, trying to make us believe that we are any- 

 where rather than in a modern city; and thus the 

 gardens of our squares are desolate parodies of wood- 

 land and meadow. The foreigner, who has heard of 

 the English passion for gardening, must suppose that 

 passion to be extinct when he looks through the rail- 

 ings of a London square at the thickets of privet and 

 the grass worn bare with the drip from grimy and dis- 

 consolate trees. He cannot know that in these dread- 

 ful places the Englishman has attempted an impos- 

 sible task and given it up in despair; that having an 

 open space in the heart of a town he has tried to per- 

 suade himself that it is a still surviving piece of the 

 country which he loves. A Frenchman would treat 

 such a space as an annexe to the houses around it, 

 as a kind of outdoor parlour common to the inhabi- 

 tants of all those houses, and he would decorate it 

 like a parlour with ornaments, which, whether they 

 were shrubs or statuary or flowers, he would keep in 

 their proper place. Perfectly content with town life, 

 he would have no wish to make believe that he was 



