house, standing free from trees, and visible from every point.  Farther off, radiating avenues led the eye in the same direction, and every little intersecting alley, true to the same principle, ran to a definite object—­obelisk, temple, or what not.  There was no lack of bowers, giant shrubberies, and water-courses running canal-wise through the park, but they all fell into straight lines; every path was ruled by a ruler, the eye could follow it to its very end.  Artifice was the governing spirit.  As Falke says:  ’Nature dared not speak but only supply material; she had to sacrifice her own inventive power to this taste and this art.  Hills and woods were only hindrances; the straight lines of trees and hedges, with their medley of statues and “cabinets de verdure,” demanded level ground, and the landscape eye of the period only tolerated woods as a finish to its cut and clipt artificialities.’[13]

Trees and branches were not allowed to grow at their own sweet will; they were cut into cubes, balls, pyramids, even into shapes of animals, as the gardener’s fancy or his principles decreed; cypresses were made into pillars or hearts with the apex above or below; and the art of topiary even achieved complete hunting scenes, with hunters, stags, dogs, and hares in full chase on a hedge.  Of such a garden one could say with honest Claudius, ’’Tis but a tailor’s joke, and shews the traces of the scissors; it has nothing of the great heart of Nature.’

It was Nature in bondage:  ‘green architecture,’ with all its parts, walls, windows, roofs, galleries cut out of leafage, and theatres with stage and wings in which silk and velvet marquises with full-bottomed wigs and lace jabots, and ladies in hooped petticoats and hair in towers, played at private theatricals.

Where water was available, water devices were added.  And in the midst of all this unnaturalness Greek mythology was introduced:  the story of Daphne and Apollo appeared in one alley, Meleager and Atalanta in another, all Olympus was set in motion to fill up the walls and niches.  And the people were like their gardens both in dress and manners; imposing style was everything.

Then came the Rococo period of Louis XV.  The great periwig shrivelled to a pigtail, and petty flourish took the place of Lenotre’s grandezza.

’The unnatural remained, the imposing disappeared and caprice took its place,’ says Falke.  Coquetry too.  All the artistic output of the time bears this stamp, painting included.  Watteau’s scenery and people were unnatural and affected—­mere inventions to suit the gallant fetes.  But he knew and loved Nature, though he saw her with the intoxicated eye of a lover who forgets the individual but keeps a glorified impression of her beauty, whereas Boucher’s rosy-blue landscapes look as if he had never seen their originals.  His world had nothing in common with Nature, and with reality only this, that its sensuousness, gaiety, falsity, and coquetry were true to the period.  But in both Watteau and Boucher there was a faint glimmer of the idyllic—­witness the dash of melancholy in Watteau’s brightest pictures.  Feeling for Nature was seeking its lost path—­the path it was to follow with such increased fervour.