Art Out-of-Doors 



natural scenes, but they are naturalistic, in 

 idea as well as in effect. Suggestions and 

 hints for them may be found in wild Nat- 

 ure, although no patterns. They speak to 

 the mind in Nature's language, although 

 more clearly and exquisitely than she ever 

 speaks herself. No study of architecture 

 could have taught a man how to conceive 

 them, and no degree of architectural taste 

 could have enabled him to perfect them. 

 Nature was this artist's school-master, and 

 not merely the store-keeper from whom he 

 bought raw materials to be treated after 

 methods of his own inventing. If no scenes 

 like this existed in ^Ir. Sedding's England, 

 nothing to show him a true original for his 

 charming verbal picture, the fault did not 

 lie, as he thought, at the door of landscape- 

 gardening ; it should be laid to the fact that 

 no real artist had practised landscape-gar- 

 dening in the regions he explored. 



But the kind of art which he did love 

 is also worthy of our love, and it is time 

 that we loved and understood it better. 

 It is not, as we are apt to think, a kind 

 which cramps an artist within narrow bor- 



164 



