But so pintado was the view, so under the notion of art, that these movements across its surface gave one an æsthetic shock such as one would experience before a mechanical device introduced into a painting, and, at the same time, thrilled the imagination, as if the door in a picture should suddenly open, or silver strains proceed from the painted shepherd’s pipe.
Teresa could hardly be said to take a pleasure in the view and its flowery foreground—indeed, like all lovely and complicated things, they teased her exceedingly; because the infinite variety which made up their whole defied expression. Until the invention of some machine, she was thinking, shows to literature what are its natural limits (as the camera and cinema have shown to painting) by expressing, in some unknown medium, say a spring wood in toto—appearance, smells, noises, associations—which will far outstrip in exact representation the combined qualities of Mozart, Spencer, Corot, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and yet remain dead and flat and vulgar,—so long shall we be teased by the importunities of detail and forget that such things as spring woods are best expressed lightly, delicately, in a little song, thus:
The grove are all a pale, frail mist,
The new year sucks the sun;
Of all the kisses that we kissed
Now which shall be the one?
As she murmured the lines below her breath, two children came running down the grass path that divided the herbaceous border—Anna and Jasper Sinclair, the grandchildren of the house.
Teresa watched their progress, critically, through half-closed lids. Yes, children are the right fauna for a garden—they turn it at once into a world that is miniature and Japanese. But perhaps a kitten prowling among flower-beds is better still—it is so amusing to watch man’s decorous arrangement of nature turning, under the gambols of the sinister little creature, into something primitive and tropical—bush, or jungle, or whatever they call it in Brazil and places; but Anna was getting too big.
Human beings too! Worse than the view, because more restless and more complicated, yet insisting on being dealt with; even Shelley could not keep out of his garden his somewhat Della Cruscan Lady.
The children came running up to her.