THE LESSON OF LANDSCAPE


The landscape, like our literature, is apt to grow and to get itself
formed under too luxurious ideals. This is the evil work of that
_little more_ which makes its insensible but persistent additions to
styles, to the arts, to the ornaments of life--to nature, when unluckily
man becomes too explicitly conscious of her beauty, and too deliberate in
his arrangement of it. The landscape has need of moderation, of that
fast-disappearing grace of unconsciousness, and, in short, of a return
towards the ascetic temper. The English way of landowning, above all,
has made for luxury. Naturally the country is fat. The trees are thick
and round--a world of leaves; the hills are round; the forms are all
blunt; and the grass is so deep as to have almost the effect of snow in
smoothing off all points and curving away all abruptness. England is
almost as blunt as a machine-made moulding or a piece of Early-Victorian
cast-iron work. And on all this we have, of set purpose, improved by our
invention of the country park. There all is curves and masses. A little
more is added to the greenness and the softness of the forest glade, and
for increase of ornament the fat land is devoted to idleness. Not a tree
that is not impenetrable, inarticulate. Thick soil below and thick
growth above cover up all the bones of the land, which in more delicate
countries show brows and hollows resembling those of a fine face after
mental experience. By a very intelligible paradox, it is only in a
landscape made up for beauty that beauty is so ill achieved. Much beauty
there must needs be where there are vegetation and the seasons. But even
the seasons, in park scenery, are marred by the _little too much_:
too complete a winter, too emphatic a spring, an ostentatious summer, an
autumn too demonstrative.