HISTORY & DESCRIPTION OF STYLES 25 



Notre's style produced gardens which Pope de- 

 rided in his famous couplet 



" Grove nods at grove, each alley has his brother, 

 And half the platform just reflects the other." 



Later, when the landscape school had become 

 extravagant, Knight wrote 



" And scattered clumps, that nod at one another, 

 Each stiffly waving to its formal brother." 



In both cases it was not that the art was bad, 

 but that the exponents were incompetent. Of the 

 two styles formal and landscape the natural 

 is undoubtedly the most difficult to handle and the 

 easiest to criticize. Plans of a landscape garden, 

 to begin with, look meaningless. The curved 

 paths may give pleasant lines, but without the 

 undulations the real effect cannot possibly be 

 judged. In the same way the clumps of shrubs 

 look lumpish in plan, but their planting may be 

 very beautiful. A formal plan has more obvious 

 cohesion about it. The strong straight lines 

 link up the whole, and indeed, want of cohesion is 

 one of the gravest criticisms made on the landscape 

 style. Not that it is an unrecognized virtue for 

 Mr. Edouard Andre writes : " The first law of a 

 painting and of a picture on the soil is to be a 

 whole. . . . Without principles and without dis- 

 cernment one never attains true beauty." But 

 whereas cohesion is an almost unavoidable quality 



