Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/158

148 to the love of beauty, to culture, to the arts that make home beautiful. Henry IV said, he wished that every French peasant might have a fowl in his pot. Downing, though no king, wished a better wish, and followed it with a deed. He planted a flower in every poor man's garden. Perhaps, after all, we must take back something of what we have said against Nature. It may be, if she had made Downing finer, trained him choicer, given him wiser teachers he might have failed to do his peculiar task. For that task was not to teach the taught, to set wealth at new ways of spending money, to widen the domain of luxury. It was a much higher work than this. It was to infuse into the whole mass of the people a love of flowers and trees, a love of home, and a desire to make home lovable, a desire for a better practical way of living, so as to get the substantial way of living; and no doubt he saw, as well as we, that until the whole people came to be of this mind, and to desire these things, the higher teacher, the artist, must work in vain.

It may well be that had Downing been asked, when young, whether he thought more would be gained by teaching the rich and educated than by teaching the poor and the untaught, he would have given the answer that his life did not give. It would be wrong to say, out of mere compliment, that, in the beginning, his sympathies were with the poor and the ignorant, or even with "the working class," as we must call them, for lack of a better name. The glimpses that he caught of the possible refinements and elegance of life in the houses of a few rich people of real education and culture intoxicated him for a time; not less, the aroma that breathed from the pages of certain books, suggesting a refinement higher still. But this intoxication was necessary to him. He needed to look very far beyond his actual surroundings; to know that there was another kind of life, that something better than bread and water is in God's storehouse, that the earth has better crops than beets and turnips, that beauty is a common possession, and not the exclusive property of the rich and wise.

Certain noses will involuntarily turn up in these later days if a man venture to allude approvingly to Downing's books on architecture and landscape gardening; worse still, if he happen to speak of the houses he built. But there is nothing surprising if we have outgrown th6 actual performance of the teacher. Architecture in England owes an immeasurable debt to Welby Pugin: he had a flaming zeal that outran his own capacity, and worked by the hands of every young architect in the kingdom to lay the corner stone of the revived art of building. Yet Welby Pugin has left nothing really good in architecture behind him. Downing was not Pugin, nor, as an artist, to be named in the same day; but he had all Pugin's zeal in his own world, and did, every day, the best he could. He set an immense number of Americans thinking, and so