PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

XI

based on the eternal laws of nature." But what
do all these brave words mean ? In the first
place we have Mr. Robinson's favourite fallacy
that the landscape gardener is an artist in the
same sense and on the same footing as the land-
scape painter.1 Perhaps to his mind Mr.
Marnock, Mr. Olmstead, possibly Mr. W.
Robinson himself, are men of the same calibre
as Corot, Turner, or Troy on. Now the land-
scape painter studies the forms and colours of
nature, and selects and arranges them, for one of
two purposes, either to give a representation of
the phenomena as literally exact as possible, or
to give his own version of these phenomena as
they affect his own individuality and after they
have passed through the fire of his own imagin-
ation. Mr. Robinson must be gifted with
singular audacity if he can assert that the work
of the landscape gardener has anything to do
with either the one or the other of these most
difficult problems. There is, in fact, no more
analogy between landscape gardening and land-
scape painting than there is between landscape
painting and architecture ; any argument there-
fore based on such an analogy falls to the
ground. Stripped of clap-trap, " the stores of
knowledge gathered from nature study" by the

1 See passage quoted on p. 7, chap. i. Formal Garden.