RENAISSANCE GARDENS. 



337 



find out — namely, how to express by suggestions the essentials of their 

 thoughts, and to eliminate, or at the best merely suggest the non-essential, 

 or else to touch it in with a faint suggestiveness that would heighten the 

 human or religious sentiment upon which they wished to rivet the spec- 

 tators' attention. We moderns miss the essential mostly by enshrouding 

 it in a wealth of painfully correct detail, and later, finding out our in- 

 abilities, we try to reach it by a series of flukes, or impressionism, which 

 hit it on an average about once in ten times, but the majority of its prac- 

 titioners do not know what they are aiming at. Euskin remarks some- 

 where concerning the impossibility of getting draughtsmen to portray the 

 expressions of the Egyptian deities for his book, " The Ethics of the 

 Dust," that they give you a lot of dabble and scrabble detail of cracks 

 and textures, but the expression, which is only caught after years of 

 practice and unerring sweep of line and which is conveyed by a few 

 strokes of a master hand, they miss altogether. 



No amount of detail will ever make a garden. It is one of the marks 

 of the feminine mind that you get a lot of talk about colours and the 

 pattern of the garden gate and about the birds and other little things 

 without which I grant you cannot have a garden replete, but often they 

 ignore the design proper. I do not put any slight upon detail, but you 

 must have the grand conception whereupon to build and embellish, and 

 this is the attitude I beg you will adopt when you see ancient examples 

 of the Renaissance gardens. I want you to grasp the way these scholarly 

 draughtsmen convey the characteristic features which they wish to 

 pronounce. These old designers, whatever object they set their inventive 

 or artistic powers to work upon, conceived their designs whole in perspec- 

 tive, not piecemeal as we do. Back and front, end and side, were all 

 conceived in oneness and entirety. 



In the elder days of Art, 



Builders wrought with greatest care 

 Each minute and unseen part, 



For the Gods see everywhere. 



We must ever remember that in art it is impossible to do justice to 

 the whole of any subject, or to present to the full our conceptions by any 

 or all the media which we use to convey thought ; either by books, or by 

 lectures, or by illustrations, separate or combined. The great masters 

 recognized this from the outset, and applied themselves to the essentials 

 only, therefore in place of literal transcriptions and bard-drawn facts they 

 give us an infinite suggestiveness, which serves to call the mind of their 

 readers or beholders into play. Oliver Wendell Holmes hit the nail on 

 the head when he declared words to be only algebraic signs for thoughts, 

 and Eobert Browning summed up the case when he made Andrea del 

 Sarto exclaim : " A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a 

 heaven for? " The great men of the glorious Renaissance were idealists. 

 They had an inward vision of beauty that found expression in the 

 cathedrals, gardens, and mansions, in their literature, their poems and 

 their music. Their work was eloquent with a subdued modesty, refine- 

 ment, and nobility of mind. Their whole lives were lived in an atmo- 

 sphere of intense idealism, and from such their whole surroundings vibrate 



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