W THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL. HEN Idleness opened the

wicket-gate of the Rose- garden, " I weened," said the Romancer, " I was in the Earthly Paradise." The delights of that garden are described at length, and the description is common to all the gardens of the mediaeval poets. Full of blossomed boughs it is, upon a river, in a green mead, a paradise of "jolly birds

small," singing "with voice of angel in their harmony "; the well-streams are clear and cold, full of gold and silver fish; only "beasts of gentle form" are there, and never comes grievance of beat nor cold. Care is banished from that garden, only the lovely things of earth are within it, and it is always walled. That wall shows the two sides of the story, for there is no entrance but a small wicket, and Idleness is the portress. Within are Love and Mirth, Youth, Riches, and a beautiful crowd, carolling and gay ; but without, among other piteous and dreadful sights, Poverty is painted on the wall.

There is a certain aspect of mediaeval society which the Rose-garden of Guillaume de Lorris represents better than

any other illustration could, and that is the dreadful distinct- ness between riches and poverty. Not that the two estates were more widely parted than they are now, but the dividing line was of a deadlier rigidness. "For poor thing," says the poet of that garden,— " where soe'er it be

Is shame-faced and despised aye.

Accursed well may be the day That poor man conceived is.

For, God wot, all too sold, I wis Is any poor man well fed Or well arrayed or yclad Or well beloved, in such wise

In honour that he may arise."

The feeling of the Middle Ages could tolerate a harsh anti- thesis better than our own; it bore the spectacle of Dives and Lazarus with more equanimity than we can, partly because the mediaeval consciousness was always sensible of an ultimate adjustment close at hand behind the veil that was so wonder- fully thin in that age. For when any daring voyager might reach, east or west, the Blessed Isles of St. Brandan or the mouth of hell, or the steep cone of the Earthly Paradise rising sheer out of the waste of waters, the retributive- sense was able to reconcile these fearful divergences, since it was but a step to the dust wherein sceptre and crown should lie as low as "the poor crooked scythe and spade."

So they thrust away the intolerable pain of the world as far as could be, and fenced about the gardens with a wall, and cherished inside them all the loveliest images that an age intensely alive to decorative beauty could imagine. An image of perfect grace is the figure of Love clad all in flowers and flowerets, wreathed about with a crowd of little birds and a

"full great rout" of nightingales who scatter the leaves of his rose-garland as they flutter. But without the walls the images are-

" Neither joyous nor quaint, But they be full of sorrow and woe,"

whereof the bitterness touched the mediaeval conscience, and filled those lovely gardens with a haunting sense of melancholy, the sentiment of fair things fleeting and transitory, which is the keynote of Provençal poetry.

" Love is a foolish riot,

And to be loved is a burden,"

says a poet of the walled garden when at last his lute-music

cannot avail to clothe all that grief in joy. There was a walled garden in Florence, in the time of the plague, where a gay company went to tell tales and forget the terror without the walls ; but behind the clipped yew- hedges there was a deadly shadow lurking that no wall could shut out.

The churl's estate was a hard one from poverty of goods, but there was a more grievous poverty which lay in narrow- ness of soul. Whence arose prophets who had compassion on the multitude shut out of the walled gardens. But though conscience was strong, the love of joy in life was strong too, and the reformers who are the conscience of the world are not agreeable to the corporate body. In a province of Syria and in Utopia poverty was set forth as a blessed estate, but in few other places was its blessedness recognised. The world of the Renaissance planted gardens, gardens more glorious than the old ones, spacious and magnificent, with ordered alleys and trimmed hedges raised on great arches of carpenter's work, with ponds and fountains gay with marbles and mosaics, with rosaries where queens might walk, and with an artificial wilderness. The mediaeval gardeners had not thought of that; their wilderness was outside, and they tried to leave their conscience in it, though that was not always possible. But the gardener of the Renaissance age did without his conscience. " God Almighty first planted a garden," said Bacon, "and truly it is the purest of human pleasures." But it may fairly be questioned if a pleasure in the fairest works of the Creator was altogether pure when it appeared as an attribute, not of the Gospel of Love, but of the gospel of getting- on. The cultivated wilderness of those stately gardens was an exact parallel to the sophisticated pastoral of the age, the Arcadia which was only a Court in disguise, a temporary refuge for the over-civilised who yearned for peace. That Arcadia was not meant to live in, Audrey was too unattractive, and Phoebe, with all her graces, belonged to another world than that of open fields and March winds and the valiant daffodils. But for all that the imitation wilderness was an advance on the painted figures outside the garden-walls, since it meant that the poor estate of the churl was changing and Conscience was getting into the rose-gardens.

It was a long way from the Garden of Eden to the gardens of the Renaissance, since the new world was self-contained in a degree impossible to the old. The discoveries in learning, in astronomy, in navigation, all united to throw it on its own resources, as if the earth had literally been torn out of her ninefold protecting spheres and flung out to spin self-poised in the midst of a universal whirl. The religious th'ought of the world had been trained in the early school of symbolism, and, that outgrown, for a time old lessons were forgotten in a profound preoccupation with realities. But soon the mere weight of material splendour in that " most curious " age to which nothing was forbidden forced out a new ideal of simplicity and reverence. The Northern races are essentially religious, and all true religion contains the germ of democracy. Moreover, they inherit some of the indomitable courage of their Viking forefathers, who always went seeking, and feared neither pain nor peril. The sickly pastoral of the eighteenth century was pushed aside by a strong and conscientious interest in the real estate of the poor. The agreeable stiffness of an age which mistrusted "enthusiasm" covered a new religions ideal, the foundation of which was a passionate pity for the poor. The Puritan conscience had been at work in the world, insisting that Poverty should not be left outside the Rose-garden. Not that all the prophets preached from the same text, but they all meant the same thing. The eighteenth century had a profound respect for decorum, and the Gothic style of thought had to be sponsored by a person of repute before it might become modish. The love for wild gardens is a cultivated taste based on principle. It was the gentle courage of a truly religious mind that introduced the cult of Nature again. And with the return to Nature, that showed the world at last the beauties even of the "poor estate" of winter, came back that deeper interest in the poor of nations which roused the humani- tarian movement of the eighteenth century. The blessedness of the estate of poverty was on the way to rediscovery when Addison found that a sight which had terrified the imagination of the world for centuries contained not only instruction but pleasure. The sight of the sea and waves roaring filled him, he protested, " with an agreeable horror!" The present age has gone further than a return to Nature. The Puritan instinct of the Northern races that reformed Renaissance Europe has gone on working ever since. Re- formation has become a fashion in our day, and social life is beset by amateur reformers, great and small, wise and foolish, fierce and gentle, who are perpetually shaking the sleepy world out of its dreams, and the world not unreasonably complains that their manners lack repose. It must be admitted that their strenuous ways are less gracious than the carols in the Rose-garden; but they exhibit certain fighting virtues for the existence of which we have to thank the hard religion of a hard people in a hard age,—the Puritan conscience, in fact, that is always calling us out of the rose-gardens into the dust where Poverty goes halting.

The garden of the early romancer was artificial ; there was nothing grievous within its walls ; but the flowers sprang everlasting, and there were no frogs in the wells. Fashions of thought change, but the enduring motive-force remains. Dives and Lazarus are still within and without the walls, and the sense of retribution that was at the back of the mediaeval poet's mind crops up again, severer yet in the uncomfortable character of the latter-day reformer, a person of an uncom- promising and eminently practical austerity, dealing in the hardest of facts, like Mrs. Be-done-by-as-you-did. He cannot be kept out of the fenced garden of dreams, because he says with Manse Headrigg "By the help o the Lord I has luppen ower the wa'." And when he is once inside there is no more peace, for he is always girt up and active, and always preach- ing, and generally right, so that let the dreamer bury himself never so deep among the roses, over the wall comes the Puritan conscience, thrusting up an aggressive head, and telling him to come out of it.

There is no grass so green as English grass, and no roses more beautiful than those that grow in English gardens. But for all his Teutonic pride of race, the Englishman has a long-descended instinct for fair play to the weaker side, and he cannot forget Poverty painted on the wall of the garden. Perhaps the rigours of the Northern climate have bred in Northerners an inborn sympathy for the hardships of poverty, for the reformer of to-day is descended from the far-off ancestor of a bard-fighting and hard-faring race, the Wanderer, who bartered one of his eyes for knowledge. The instinct for fighting and seeking is strong in Northern razes ; it stirred the gentle and decorous Addison to find himself edified by the sight of the sea and the waves roaring. And yet, in spite of these strenuous ways, a garden remains a perdurable ideal to wayfaring humanity, a haven and a shelter of peace and greenness and beauty in the middle of life's dusty ways, where his soul shall be " as a watered garden, it shall not sorrow any more at all." And even the reformer desires a garland ; but not like Love's rose chaplet, fluttered by the nightingales. For his is the laborious crown of toil, twined in no green dream-garden whereof Idleness keeps the keys ; but "an immortal garland" that is "to be run for, not without dust and heat."