GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
crimson variety, dear to the ordinary gardener’s heart. Behind 
them lay a stretch of meadow-land, yellow with buttercups, shut 
in by a belt of trees, barely in leaf, and empurpled by distance. 
It was all so crude in colour that, except in the early morning, 
when the newly risen sun behind them, merely catching the edges 
of the crimson May, threw its masses into broad, purplish shadow, 
I had little pleasure in looking out, for the violent contrast jarred. 
But towards evening, when the sun having travelled round to the 
back of the house, poured a flood of all-embracing amber light 
over the entire scene, fusing and harmonizing the fiery elements 
that were before at war, changing the fierce crimson of the May- 
flower into orange, and warming into “old gold” the yellow of 
the meadow in which the hay grass was beginning to turn colour— 
the effect was superb, though singular and unconventional. 
It is the painter’s mission to reveal facts in their environment 
that the majority of people do not see them for themselves. Their 
senses are not keenly alive to pleasure or pain, and they pass by 
half the loveliest things in Nature, and would resent, or at best not 
heed, a verbal demonstration. I once remarked to a friend upon 
some unfortunate arrangement in a garden, due to insensitiveness 
to colour-discords. He shrugged his shoulders, regarded me 
compassionately, and said: ‘‘ How thankful I am I am not an 
artist!’ The obvious answer to this, though I did not give it, 
was: “ If we suffer much that you do not suffer, we enjoy more! ”’ 
On the other hand, there are people who may feel, but who are 
inarticulate ; unable to convey in words what they see, or to 
make others see it too; and it is our business as painters, to explain 
and interpret Nature for them, because : 
“We love first, first when we see them painted 
Things we have seen a hundred times— 
Nor cared to see... ..... 
Art was given for that—God uses us to help each other so 
Sending our minds out.” 
I would that the first and greatest of all Impressionist painters, 
Turner, could return to life and reconstruct for us, the vision of the 
Lake of Lucerne as he must have seen it, and as once I, too, saw it, 
many, many years ago; when, opening my hotel window the 
morning after my arrival, I looked forth, and beheld for the first 
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