FORERUNNERS 21 



paved walks, fountains, and ' perspectives/ of which he saw and 

 described so many. 



The generation of Louis Quinze lived physically and morally 

 in an artificial world. Self-conscious, sentimental, engrossed in 

 their own social relations, full of personal emotions, which, whether 

 real or affected, they were at equal pains to cultivate, they had 

 no eyes for the storm that was already looming on the near 

 horizon. 



It was from England that one of the earliest indications of the 

 change of feeling that, if still inarticulate, 1 was already in the air, 

 was to come. Formal gardening was among the first formalities 

 to be called in question. Pope and Addison were active in the 

 attack on an art the main object of which seemed to be to thwart 

 and contradict nature at every turn. The founders of a new school, 

 calling themselves landscape gardeners, responded to their appeal. 

 Kent and ' Capability Brown,' followed by Repton, led the return 

 to rusticity. They endeavoured to restore or improve nature, 

 but on her own lines. They removed the marks of man's labour 

 by turning fields into parks, hedgerows into ornamental clumps, 

 boundary walls into sunk ha-has, and straight terraces into ser- 

 pentine walks. The new taste soon extended to the Continent ; 

 the grounds of the Trianon remain as one of its more conspicuous 

 examples. De Saussure, on the lake -shore at Genthod, imitated 

 on a small scale the parks and gardens he had admired in Holland 

 and Yorkshire, while a contemporary print shows that Bonnet's 

 demesne on the hill above remained a specimen of the old style. 

 Rousseau eagerly fell in with a change which fitted so well his 

 mental attitude, and his description of Julie's garden at Clarens 

 proves him a warm advocate of the English style as against French 

 and Italian formality. We recognise that we are on the way to 

 the mock ruins, artificial cascades, and shrubberies of the famous 

 garden at Ermenonville. 



Rousseau himself was doubtless a powerful agent in this 

 peaceable revolution, but he was far from being its originator. 

 Such changes are not the works of any one man. From age to age 

 tastes differ and fashion alters, whether in art, architecture, or 

 gardens. This absence of any permanent standard results partly 



1 See in Mr. Gosse's recent volume. Some Diversions of a Man of Letters, the 

 chapter on ' The Message of the Wartons.' 



