232 STUDIES IN GARDENING 



lives. They were content with such houses as they 

 could build, but not with gardens to suit them. Now, 

 instead of seeing that the true remedy was to build 

 better houses, they called upon nature to help them 

 to forget their own ugliness. But, in matters of art, 

 as in other things, nature helps those who help them- 

 selves. Landscape gardening has had its successes, 

 where there is space enough to make a landscape. It 

 has brought nothing but chaotic ugliness into those 

 gardens which are so small that they must be all fore- 

 ground, and must bear signs, open or disguised, of 

 the occupation of man. But now we are once again 

 beginning to build houses in which we can take a ra- 

 tional pleasure, and which do express some pleasant 

 facts about our lives; and it is significant that with 

 these houses the taste for formal gardens is reviving. 

 But in these days every revival of art is imme- 

 diately endangered by fashion. Fashion is essentially 

 brainless; it understands nothing about principles, but 

 seizes upon some external feature of a reviving art, 

 reduces it to an absurdity by blind exaggeration, and 

 so quickly gives us a disgust of the art itself. The re- 

 vival of formal gardening, like the revival of house- 

 building, is in some danger from this cause. The 

 best houses that are built now must be a little con- 

 scious of their goodness. There are so many things 

 which an architect must learn to avoid that even 

 when he manages to avoid them he still leaves us 

 aware of their absence. In the same way a good 

 modern formal garden, planned to suit a good modern 



