To sum up the whole matter, this unmitigated hostility of the cultured man (with Jacob's smooth hands and Esau's wild blood) to the amenities of civilised life, brings us back to the point from whence we started at the commencement of this chapter. While men are what they are, Art is not all. Man has Viking passions as well as Eden instincts. Man is of mixed blood, whose sympathies are not so much divided as double. And all of man asks for all of Nature, and is not content with less. To the over-civilised man who is under a cloud, the old contentment with orthodox beauty must give place to the subtler, scarcer instinct, to "the more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair." Fair effects are only for fair times. The garden represents to such an one a too careful abstract of Nature's traits and features that had better not have been epitomised. The place is to him a kind of fraud—a forgery, so to speak, of Nature's autograph. It is only the result of man's turning spy or detective upon the beauties of the outer world. Its perfection is too monotonous; its grace is too subtle; its geography too bounded; its interest too full of intention—too much sharpened to a point; its growth is too uniformly temperate; its imagery too exacting of notice. These prim and trim things remind him of captive princes of the wood, brightly attired only that they may give romantic interest to the garden—these tame birds with clipped wings, of distraught aspect and dreamy tread—these docile animals with their limp legs and vacant stare, may contribute to the scenic pomp of the place, but it is at the expense of their native instincts and the joyous abandon of woodland life. If this be the outcome of your boasted editing of Nature, give us dead Nature untranslated. If this be what comes of your idealisation of the raw materials of Nature—of the transference of your own emotions to the simple, unsophisticated things of the common earth, let us rather have Nature's unspoilt self—"God's Art," as Plato calls Nature—where
"Visions, as prophetic eyes avow,
Hang on each leaf, and cling to each bough."
"But stay, here come the gardeners!"
(Enter a gardener and two servants!)—King Richard II.
CHAPTER IX.
IN PRAISE OF BOTH.
"In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be."—Ben Jonson.