ON THE OTHER SIDE. A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 185 



scotched savagery an unextinguished, inextinguish- 

 able strain of the wild man of the woods. Scratch 

 him, and beneath his skin is Rousseau-Thoreau. 

 Scratch him again in the. same place, and beneath 

 his second skin see the brown hide of the aboriginal 

 Briton, the dweller in wattled abodes, who knew 

 an earlier England than this, that had swamps and 

 forests, roadless wastes and unbridled winter floods, 

 and strange beasts that no man could tame. Even 

 he (" the sweetest lamb that ever loved a bear ") will 

 prate to you of the Bohemian delights of an un- 

 gardened country, where " the white man's poetry " 

 has not defiled the landscape, and the Britisher shall 

 be free to take his pleasure sadly. 



Let us not be too hard, then, on that dislike of 

 beauty, that worship of the barbaric which we are 

 apt to condemn as distempered vagaries, for they 

 denote maladies incident to the age, which are neither 

 surprising nor ignoble. This disdain for Art in a 

 garden, this abhorrence of symmetry, this preference 

 for the rude and shaggy, what is it but a new turn 

 given to old instincts, the new Don Quixote sighing 

 for primaevalism ! This ruthlessness of the followers 

 of the "immortal Brown" who would navvy away 

 the residue of the old-fashioned English gardens ; 

 who live to reverse tradition and to scatter the 

 lessons of the past to the winds; what is it but a 

 new quest of the bygone, the knight-errantry of 

 the civilised man, when turned inside out ! 



And for yet another reason is the garden unable 

 to meet the moods of the age. In discussing the 



