Garden Anthology
Gardens. By Sir William Beach Thomas. (Burke. 21s.) IT is safe to prophesy popularity for this book. Sir William's name alone commands the adherence of many faithful, and both the text and the illustrations supply an agreeable bran-pie for holiday dipping. Some people are said, in our slick Americanised way, to be " easy on the eye." This book may similarly be defined as " easy on the mind." it demands no effort. You can drift through it, as you could drift in a punt down a slow river, shoving your boat into a backwater from time to time, with the willows languishing above you and the fingers of your left hand trailing in the coolness of the stream. Little water-weeds, and even little fish, may brush against your fingers as you trail them ; it is all very calm and reassuring in a frightening world. Your right hand, of course, will be supporting the book ; unless, as I should advise, you have provided yourself with a cushion to prop it on. It is a cushiony book ; a soft book ; a safe book ; a soothing book ; nothing disquieting to be found in its pages. No thorns in Sir William's gardens.
It is not an easy book to review, because it is really little more than an anthology culled from what I suspect Sir William's friends would call " gleanings " in his readings, laced with comments in paragraphs of his own prose. The best way to give a general impres- sion, perhaps, is to recapitulate the chapter-headings, which speak for themselves : Edens ; Gardeners, where I note with pleasure a tribute to dear Mr. Middleton but regret the omission of H. E. Bates' immortal Mr. Pimpkin ; Nature's Garden ; Great Gardens ; Small Gardens ; Flowers ; Pleasure Gardens ; Garden Philosophy ; Denizens, meaning anything from tortoises to birds, insects and fish ; Ornaments ; Garden Romances ; Academies, comprising physic gardens, herb-gardens, college gardens, and-botanic gardens ; and-finally a calendar of quotations for the year.
That, theta is a summary of the book ; but if an honest reviewer Must drip a drop of acetic vinegar into a distillation of attar of roses, it should here be stated that very few discoveries, if any, will be made amongst the quotations. Well-known passages are faithfully reproduced, but the discerning reader will look in vain for du Bartas, or Richard Payne Knight, " Curse on the shrubbery's insipid scenes Of tawdry fringe encircling vapid greens," or even the Rev. William Mason or Erasmus Darwin with whom Sir William might surely have allowed himself -a little fun. Since, however, the kindlier function of literary criticism is to praise a book for what it is, rather than to condemn it for what it is not, let us be grateful that Sir William has read his Tennyson and his Matthew Arnold, even if he refrains from drawing our attention to the pleasantries of Joshua Sylvester or Nehemiah Grew.
V. SACKVILLE-WEST.
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