How like a perfect lady, or a
perfect gentleman, is--however humble or exalted its rank--a garden with
courtly manners!
As to manners, our incipient American garden has already developed one
trait which distinguishes it from those beyond the Atlantic. It is a
habit which reminds one of what somebody has lately said about Americans
themselves: that, whoever they are and whatever their manners may be,
they have this to their credit, that they unfailingly desire and propose
to be polite. The thing we are hinting at is our American gardens'
excessive openness. Our people have, or until just now had, almost
abolished the fence and the hedge. A gard, yard, garth, garden, used to
mean an enclosure, a close, and implied a privacy to its owner superior
to any he enjoyed outside of it. But now that we no longer have any
military need of privacy we are tempted--are we not?--to overlook its
spiritual value. We seem to enjoy publicity better. In our American
eagerness to publish everything for everybody and to everybody, we have
published our gardens--published them in paper bindings; that is to say,
with their boundaries visible only on maps filed with the Registrar of
Deeds.
Foreigners who travel among us complain that we so overdo our
good-natured endurance of every public inconvenience that we have made
it a national misfortune and are losing our sense of our public rights.
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