200 ' GARDEN-CRAFT. 



There are other savager, and more primeval aspects 

 of Nature than our poets have sung. It is only white 

 man's poetry." 



To sum up the whole matter, this unmitigated 

 hostility of the cultured man (with Jacob's smooth 

 hands and Esau's wild blood) to the amenities of civi- 

 lised life, brings us back to the point from whence we 

 started at the commencement of this chapter. While 

 men are what they are, Art is not all. Man has Viking 

 passions as well as Eden instincts. Man is of mixed 

 blood, whose sympathies are not so much divided as 

 double. And all of man asks for all of Nature, and 

 is not content with less. To the over-civilised man 

 who is under a cloud, the old contentment with ortho- 

 dox beauty must give place to the subtler, scarcer 

 instinct, to "the more recently learnt emotion, than 

 that which responds to the sort of beauty called 

 charming and fair." Fair effects are only for fair 

 times. The garden represents to such an one a too 

 careful abstract of Nature's traits and features that 

 had better not have been epitomised. The place is 

 to him a kind of fraud a forgery, so to speak, of 

 Nature's autograph. It is only the result of man's 

 turning spy or detective upon the beauties of the 

 outer world. Its perfection is too monotonous ; its 

 grace is too subtle ; its geography too bounded ; its 

 interest too full of intention too much sharpened to 

 a point ; its growth is too uniformly temperate ; its 

 imagery too exacting of notice. These prim and 

 trim things remind him of captive princes of the 

 wood, brightly attired only that they may give 



