The garden is taken in hand and cultivated, not by a mechanical ignorant gardener, but by someone who understands the capacities of the soil, and knows what will do well and repay his care. See the transformation in time to come! There is everything by turn that is beautiful in its season; the lovely herbaceous border, the standard rose-trees, the sheltered bed of lilies of the valley, the peaches on the warm southern wall, the ferns waving in feathery profusion in the cool corner near the well—all that the garden can produce for delight to the eye or for food is there. The ground is not given over exclusively to one flower, one vegetable; it is not stocked mechanically for the summer with geraniums and calceolarias; but it is, as we say in homely parlance, “made the most of” in every particular, and is a delight to behold.
This may seem a simple illustration, and we are writing not for the erudite, but for the simple reader. The man or woman of culture is the man or woman whose nature has been cultivated in such a way as to develop all its capabilities in the best possible direction; whose education has been adapted skilfully to taste and capacity, and who has been taught the art of self-instruction.
It is hardly necessary to urge the value of this “cultivation.” “Cultivation is as necessary to the mind as food to the body,” said a wise man, and this is gradually coming to be believed. Culture is something more by far than mere instruction, though instruction is a means by which it may be attained. Bearing in mind our simile of the garden, we are led on from one thought to another.
It was a very wise man indeed who pointed out that, even as ground will produce something, “herbs or weeds,” the mind will not remain empty if it is not cultivated; it tends to become full of silly or ignorant thoughts like “an unweeded garden.”
Again, in a well-ordered, cultivated plot of ground we have what is useful as well as what is lovely. In culture, not only the acquirement of “useful knowledge” plays a part, but the storing of the mind with what is beautiful, the development of taste in all directions.
In brief, a woman of real culture is the woman who makes you instinctively feel, when in her company, that she is just what she was meant to be; harmoniously developed in accordance with her natural capacity. There is nothing startling about her paraded attainments. The extreme simplicity of a person of true culture is one of the most marked traits, and the chief point that distinguishes spurious from real culture is that the former is inclined to “tall talk” and the latter is not.
Charles Dickens can still make us smile at his caricature of an American L. L. (literary lady) and her remarks on her introduction to some great personage. She immediately begins—
“Mind and matter glide swift into the vortex of Immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal in the whispering chambers of Imagination. To hear it, sweet it is. But then outlaughs the stern philosopher and saith to the Grotesque: ‘What ho; arrest for me that Agency! Go, bring it here!’ And so the vision fadeth.”
The woman of culture does not attempt fine talking, and it is only gradually that her power and charm dawn upon her companion. “It is proof of a high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.”
In the same manner simplicity is a proof of high breeding. The people who are “somebody” are, as a rule, easy to “get on” with. It is the rich “parvenue” who is disconcerting, and who tries to drag into her conversation the names of great people or great doings that will impress her companion.