GARDEN DESIGN— COMPARATIVE, HISTORICAL, AND ETHICAL. 379 



ancient Greece), all honour to those who spend their lives perfecting our 

 garden accessories, the various strains of fruit, grains, nuts, or flowers. 

 So did Phidias and their most celebrated sculptors in their own line. 

 Their perfected Apollos and Venuses were the proper proportioned 

 features and limbs of many, and were never portrait models of any one 

 man or woman. This selective department of the ideal garden — an essen- 

 tial one — like all scientific impulses is ever fraught with anxiety to be 

 pursued within its precincts, agreeing not with the restfulness which 

 should predominate everywhere, as becomes a place apart from the 

 toiling and struggling world around, with the restful spaces of refreshing 

 grass interspersed with trees, restful interludes of one family of one kind 

 of tree, and restful breaks of one kind of flower amidst the kaleidoscopic 

 gaiety of lavish purple and gold. Decency and order with discriminating 

 variety is the foe of confusion and riot, which is as much to be deprecated 

 as stiffness. If we concentrate upon a forced individualism I cannot see 

 how we can avoid stiffness, which to some extent may be allowable in 

 archaic or scholastic pursuits, such as architecture, languages, and con- 

 ventional ornamentation (where everyone admits the Greek types were 

 stiff), but it is horrid if paramount in a garden, where the order is in 

 variety and where some measure of intricacy is harmonious. 



In a building you can once and for ever fix the lines unalterably and 

 the height of everything, but " a garden changes from season to season, 

 and the growth and decay of its vegetation alike alter its pristine aspect." 

 No one must ever expect to count the flowers in a garden and apportion 

 them off in the ordered rhythm of conventional ornamentation as seen 

 within or without the building, or in the so-called Greek honeysuckle 

 ornamentation, which needs to be understood before it is condemned, 

 being primarily symbolic and executed as their standard test of firmness 

 of line and steadiness of hand, rather than for its merit as ornament. 

 The Greeks allowed no dabble and scrabble as we do when we tack 

 together our fearful and wonderful conventional friezes, which often have 

 this morally to commend them : that they resemble nothing in the 

 heavens above, nor on the earth beneath, nor yet in the waters under the 

 earth, and therefore do not come under the ban of the Mosaic law. 



I am aware that, in taking upon myself to say anything is stiff, or 

 to criticize the Greek presentation of beauty in arts and architecture, 

 I am doing so with an Englishman's green spectacles on, the focus 

 adjusted to our own picturesque green meadows studded with fat cattle, 

 flowing rivers and purling streams, neat scattered cottages and their own 

 company of healthy swains and happy children, the humble antique 

 church, set with umbrageous churchyard elms, together with all the other 

 accompanying sights and sounds with which we are so familiar. 



In all criticism we must not consider only the unbalpnced popular 

 view which contents itself with the mere observation of these material 

 objects and their combinations, but must also consider the deeper and 

 philosophic view which involves the inquiry into the prevalent moral, 

 spiritual, and general composition of races. To put the matter in a homely 

 way, consider how incongruous a robed Greek senator would look stalking 

 about our picturesque lanes such as I have described ; or, for your amuse- 

 ment, take a reversal, and transport one of our ruddy swains from his 



