Flower gardening and garden design 1 7 



the sake of making it ' original ' is often a way to popu- 

 larity, but in the end it means bad work. It may be the 

 fashion for a season, owing to some one quality, but it 

 is soon found out; and we have again to turn to the 

 great masters of all ages, who are always distinguished 

 for truth to nature, and show their strength by getting 

 nearer to it. 



Realism and idealism. Beauty in its fulness and 

 subtlety, which is the justification of ' art ', writers of 

 the day will not take the trouble to see ; they 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 misused, 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 actual things that they seek to 

 idealize the eyes of a beautiful child or the clouds of 

 heaven ; yet we know that no imagining can come near 

 to the beauty of some things as they are, art itself being 

 often powerless to seize their full beauty. 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, land- 

 scape, sky, or sea — to see the full and ever- 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 miss the subtleties 

 and delicate realities on which all true art depends. 

 Some sneer at those who ' copy nature ', but the answer 

 to such critics is in the work of the great men, be they 

 Greeks, Dutchmen, Italians, French, or English. 



