THE HOUSE AND THE GARDEN 231 



in different directions against those ideals. Most of 

 these revolts, before the great revolt of the romantic 

 movement came, took the form of some kind of make- 

 believe. Landscape gardening was one of those re- 

 volts, and pastoral poetry was another. But, whereas 

 pastoral poetry was almost killed by the revival of 

 the real poetry of nature, landscape gardening per- 

 sisted, because the continual decline of the art of 

 house-building made a revival of the true art of gar- 

 den design impossible. You cannot design a beautiful 

 garden to suit an ugly house; and therefore, since 

 houses grew uglier and uglier, few efforts were made 

 to design gardens to suit them. Thus gardens did 

 not advance beyond the pastoral poetry stage of re- 

 volt against ugliness and dulness. They expressed 

 no beautiful realities in human life, but only a dis- 

 like of ugly realities. So far they were a sign of grace; 

 but it was a negative and impotent kind of grace. 

 Men, despairing of expressing in these gardens their 

 own minds in terms of beauty, requested nature to 

 express herself, and did all they could to get out of 

 her way. Mr. Mawson, in his book on "The Art and 

 Craft of Garden Making," calls this helpless fall- 

 ing back upon nature realism; but in seeking to con- 

 demn it with a word he does it too much honour. It 

 is a kind of realism that will not face realities, the 

 realism of conscientious make-believe. The reality 

 was this, that men could no longer build houses in 

 which they could take any rational kind of pleasure, 

 or which expressed any pleasant facts about their 



