GARDENING
When Charles II returned to England in 1660 he brought with him a
knowledge of the new style of gardening in France, and an ambition
to reform English taste according to French models. He committed the
care of the royal gardens of Whitehall, St. James, and Hampton Court
to French gardeners, and he spent money lavishly in various attempts
to naturalize French flowers, fruits, and vines in English soil. With
memories of the glories of Versailles he summoned Le Nôtre, the famous
designer of French palatial gardens, and Grillet, noted for his skill
in hydraulics, to plan the parks of St. James and Greenwich.[534] It is
not certain that Le Nôtre actually came to England, but the royal parks
and some great estates were laid out according to the dominant ideas
of the French designer if not under his direct supervision. The French
traditions thus established were carried on by John Rose who was sent
to study the gardens at Versailles and who was appointed royal gardener
in England. Rose’s pupil and successor, George London, in about 1690
took Henry Wise as partner and the two were for nearly a quarter of
a century the recognized authorities on gardens in England. On the
accession of Queen Anne, Wise became royal gardener, and London then
confined himself to country work. He is said to have supervised most of
the notable English estates, riding sometimes fifty or sixty miles a
day in the course of his business.
London and Wise not only designed and developed gardens but they
were influential writers on garden topics. Among their best works
were “The Compleat Gard’ner,” 1699, and “The Retir’d Gardener,” 1706.
These books, though they contained much new and original material,
were in the main translations from French authors and contributed
to the predominance of French influence. Evelyn’s writings also did
much to establish French canons of taste in England. He had seen and
greatly admired the work of Le Nôtre in the gardens of the Tuileries,
Fountainebleau, and St. Germain, and in his “Dairy” he recorded fully
the impression made upon him by the grandeur, beauty, and especially by
the artificial marvels of these parks.
The French style was not, however, allowed all the honors. It met with
a powerful rival in the Dutch taste that came in with William and
Mary in 1688. This taste gradually prevailed over the French so that
even London and Wise were affected by the new ideas from Holland and
Flanders. Gardens laid out in the same decade were, the one French, the
other Dutch in tone, or French and Dutch characteristics were mingled
in the same garden. Melbourne Hall, Derbyshire, the gardens of which
were remodeled and enlarged by Henry Wise between 1704–11 is cited
by Blomfield and Thomas in “The Formal Garden in England” as “a very
valuable instance of a garden laid out when the French influence was
still dominant,” while the gardens at Levens in Westmoreland, laid
out soon after 1690, and remaining almost unaltered to the present
day, are referred to by Miss Amherst as “a most perfect example of
the Dutch type of garden of this period.”[535] But whether Dutch or
French in type, all the great gardens from 1660 to nearly the middle
of the eighteenth century come under the general designation of formal
gardens.
The most striking features of the Dutch style were topiary work, potted
plants and shrubs, dwarf trees, and water-works of “quaint forms and
surprise arrangements.” The gardens of Le Nôtre were especially marked
by long, broad, straight avenues radiating from a goose-foot; much use
of architecture in the way of temples, long and massive flights of
steps, balustrades, columns, and urns; much statuary; fountains with
many high and complicated jets, with magnificent marble basins, and
with elaborate carving in representations of men and animals; many
hedges both high and low; long and broad terraces; and parterres laid
out in intricate plant embroidery.[536]
[Illustration: LONG LEATE
_By L. Knyff and J. Kip_]
Our most accurate idea of the plans of these formal gardens comes from
such books as “Les dèlices de la Grande Bretagne et de l’Irlande,”
published in Leyden in 1707; “Britannia Illustrata” by Knyff and Kip,
1709; “Views of Kent” by Badeslade, 1722; and other early county
histories.[537] One of Kip’s plans of Longleat is here reproduced.
The grounds at Longleat were laid out between 1682 and 1690 under the
supervision of London.[538] Though of exceptional magnificence, their
characteristic features as shown in the plan are fairly typical of
other great gardens of the period. Bird’s-eye views such as Kip gives
are necessarily unfair representations since they crowd into startling
juxtaposition features that are in reality widely separated, and since
they do not even suggest charms of color, light and shade, fragrance,
movement, the change of the seasons. But such plans are, nevertheless,
of especial value in revealing the governing ideas of the garden
designers.
One of these ideas is admirably brought out by Sir William Temple in
his essay, “On the Gardens of Epicurus: or of Gardening in the Year
1685,” the most important article on gardening published in England in
the seventeenth century. It is mostly given up to exposures, soils,
scions, grafts, seeds, and the like, but here and there are significant
statements of theory. “Among us,” he says, “the beauty of building
and planting is placed chiefly in certain proportions, symmetries,
and uniformities, our walks and our trees ranged so as to answer one
another and at exact distances.” This defense of order in beauty is
illustrated by his description of Moor Park, Hertfordshire, according
to his taste the sweetest garden ever known. It was divided into
quarters by gravel walks, and adorned with two fountains and eight
statues in each quarter. The straight terrace walk had a summer-house
at each end. On each side of the parterre was a cloister, over each
cloister an airy walk, at the end of each airy walk a summer-house,
and so on.[539] “Certain proportions, symmetries, and uniformities” is
a phrase characteristic of classicism in thought and literary style
as well as in gardens and it shows how completely the ideal garden
represented the dominant thought of the age. Equally characteristic
and interesting is Temple’s reason for approving of this style of
gardening. In exact figures, with regular and definite intervals, it
is, he says, “hard to make any great or remarkable faults.” In this
sentence there is surely a suggestion of one reason for the love
of order, of limits clearly set, that marked the classical spirit.
Symmetries and proportions and uniformities were a specific against
great and remarkable faults such as had resulted from the undue license
of a romantic age. The beaten path had legitimate attractions for an
age that had lost its way among the pleasures of the pathless woods.
A second principle underlying the formal garden was the delight men
took in controlling Nature and in seeing evidences of such control.
Radiating straight avenues as against vagrant paths; water flowing
out of marble temples, down marble steps, and rising again in almost
unbelievable shapes, as against a natural winding stream; a tree cut
into difficult shapes as against a tree following the normal spread
of branch and leaf--all of these show an exceptional satisfaction in
the marks of human interference with Nature. Order in a garden, and
skilful management of Nature by art, are of course legitimate sources
of delight, but when these two principles are pushed to the exclusion
of other sources of delight, reaction becomes inevitable.
Indications of revolt against the formal garden began early in the
eighteenth century. Even so early as 1703 in James’s translation of
Le Blond’s[540] treatise on the theory and practice of gardening
there was a plea for simplification in the architectural details of a
garden, accompanied by a protest against fantastic verdant sculpture.
Plain hedges cut square with a regular succession of balls on top,
and with niches sunk for statues or seats, was all the elaboration Le
Blond could sanction. No new principles were inculcated by Le Blond.
His defense of “a plain regularity” was really a protest against
the cluttered and confused effect of gardens of the Dutch type. His
dictum that “Art should give place to Nature, Art being used only to
set off the beauties of Nature” sounds more revolutionary than it was
apparently meant to be, for the gardens he describes are purely of the
formal type, but his work shows a recognition of some of the whimsical
extravagances in the formal gardens of his day, and an effort to apply
the recognized rules with good sense and a certain degree of restraint.
The English essayists, notably Addison and Pope, were early exponents
of a freer style of gardening. In “The Tatler” (August 31, 1710)
Addison laughed the tulip mania out of court, and lightly set aside
“the best ordered parterres” as of less charm than “a spot of daisies
or banks of violets.” Slight as it is, this preference for the wild
flower over the garden rarity, for fields and hedgerows over the
choicest plant embroidery, strikes a new note in the garden literature
of the eighteenth century. Two years later, in “The Spectator” for
September 6, 1712, Addison gave an account of an imaginary garden
evidently made to his taste and far enough removed from the formal
garden. The irregularity and wildness of his flower-garden, the
wandering rill that runs “as it would do in an open Field,”[541] the
trees and shrubs growing freely, are what he prides himself upon.
The whole picture is a plea for the “beautiful Wildness of Nature”
as against “the nicer Elegancies of Art.” But Addison’s strongest
utterance, and the one in which the theoretical side is most fully
discussed is in “The Spectator” for June 25, 1712. In contrasting the
works of Nature and Art, Nature is throughout given the preference.
There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless
Strokes of Nature, than in the nice Touches and Embellishments
of Art. The Beauties of the most stately Garden or Palace lie
in a narrow Compass; the Imagination immediately runs them
over, and requires something else to gratify her, but in the
wide Fields of Nature the Sight wanders up and down without
Confinement, and is fed with an infinite variety of Images,
without any certain Stint or Number.... Our _British_
Gardeners, on the contrary, instead of humouring Nature, love to
deviate from it as much as possible. Our Trees rise in Cones,
Globes, and Pyramids. We see the Marks of the Scissors upon
every Plant and Bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my
Opinion, but, for my own part, I would rather look upon a Tree,
in all its Luxuriancy and Diffusion of Boughs and Branches than
when it is thus cut and trimmed into a Mathematical Figure; and
cannot but fancy that an Orchard in Flower looks infinitely more
delightful than all the little Labyrinths of the most finished
Parterre.
Pope followed up this attack in a wittier fashion in “The Guardian”
(September 29, 1713). He, too, prefers “the amiable simplicity of
unadorned nature” to “the nicer scenes of art.” Only people of the
common level of understanding are, he thinks, “principally delighted
with the little niceties and fantastical operations of art,” while
“persons of genius .... are always most fond of nature.” His chief
attack is on sculptured greens, and he gives a sarcastic account of
a town gardener who was so skilful that he could cut “family pieces
of men, women, or children,” and who had for sale the most elaborate
greens. His catalogue was as follows:
Adam and Eve in yew; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the
tree of knowledge in the great storm; Eve and the serpent very
flourishing. The tower of Babel, not yet finished. St. George in
box; his arms scarce long enough, but will be in condition to
stick the dragon by next April. A green dragon of the same, with
a tail of ground-ivy for the present. N. B. These two not to be
sold separately.... An old maid of honour in wormwood.... Divers
eminent modern poets in bays somewhat blighted to be disposed
of, a pennyworth. A quickset hog, shot up into a porcupine by
its being forgot a week in rainy weather [and so on].
That the true principles of “gardening finely” were matters of common
discussion is indicated by a letter from Pope to Lord Bathurst,
September 23, 1719, on the subject of the gardens the prince of Wales
was about to construct at Richmond. One critic, said Pope, protested
against too much art for according to his notion gardening was little
more than “sweeping Nature.”
There were some who could not bear evergreens, and called them
never-greens; some who were angry at them only when cut into
shapes, and gave the modern gardeners the name of evergreen
tailors; ... and some who were in a passion against anything
in shape, even against clipped hedges, which they called green
walls.
In the midst of this literary discussion comes the work of another
practical gardener, Stephen Switzer, a pupil of London and Wise. His
“The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation” appeared in 1715
and was published again with additions as “Ichnographia Rustica”
in 1718. Switzer’s work shows several indications of new ideals.
He is the first of the writers on gardens to hold up Milton’s[542]
description of a garden as a model to be followed. He also protested
against the cutting-down of fine old trees at the command of so-called
“Improvers of Estates.” He said he knew not “whether to think with Pity
or Disdain” of a property owner who could thus sanction the wanton
destruction of “noble Oaks and other umbrageous Trees.” He likewise
urged the abandonment of box-work and “such like trifling ornaments,”
and said that “the largest walk in the most magnificent garden one can
think of” was to his taste inferior to “a level easy walk of gravel or
sand shaded over with Trees and running thro’ a cornfield or Pasture
ground.” More revolutionary still was his advice to abolish walls
and to embellish the whole estate. London and Wise had insisted upon
the boundary wall as necessary to give dignity to the gardens and to
unite them architecturally with the house, but Switzer said he would
“throw the Garden open to all View, to the unbounded Felicities of
distant Prospect, and the expansive Volumes of Nature herself.” This
substitution of the sunk fence for the boundary walls is generally
counted as “the beginning of the end of Formal Gardening.” Horace
Walpole credits Bridgeman with having first suggested this innovation,
but the new scheme almost certainly originated with Switzer.
In gardening theoretical exposition and discussion would, from the
nature of the case, antedate the actual construction of gardens
according to new principles. Pope was one of the first, if not the
first, to put the new ideas into practice. In 1718 he took a long lease
of a house and five acres of land at Twickenham, and he at once set
about the construction of a garden according to his own ideas. Said
Horace Walpole, “It was a little bit of ground of five acres, enclosed
with three lanes; and seeing nothing. Pope had twisted and twirled
and rhymed and harmonized this, till it appeared two or three sweet
little lawns opening and opening beyond one another, and the whole
surrounded by thick impenetrable woods.”[543] The plan of the garden
drawn by John Searle after Pope’s death shows that in the five acres
Pope had a shell temple, a large mount, two small mounts, a bowling
green, a vineyard, a quincunx, an obelisk in memory of his mother,
and hot-houses and gardeners’ sheds.[544] This garden could hardly be
called “natural” but it was an undoubted protest against the formal
school and was so regarded, and Pope was counted “the prophet of the
new school.” Blomfield and Thomas[545] in reviewing the decay of formal
gardening say, “It now became the fashion to rave about Nature, and
to condemn the straightforward work of the formal school as so much
brutal sacrilege. Pope and Addison led the way with about as much
love of Nature as the elegant Abbé Delille some three generations
later.” Mason calls Kent, the reputed father of landscape gardening,
“Pope’s bold associate.”[546] Walpole dwells on the assistance Kent
had from Pope and thinks that the ideas of some of Kent’s best works
were really borrowed from Pope’s garden at Twickenham.[547] Hazlitt
emphasizes the healthy and important influence in this direction
exercised by Pope.[548] In “The Quarterly” for 1816, in a review of
Humphrey Repton’s work, we find the influence of Pope commented on as
follows: “He so completely developed the principles of true gardening
that the theories of succeeding writers have been little more than
amplifications of his short general precepts.”
Pope’s paper in “The Guardian” was in 1713, and his garden was
practically completed by 1718[549] but his most influential utterance
on the theory of gardening did not come till 1731, and before that
time other significant writings had appeared.[550] One of these was
“Huetiana,” a translation in 1722 of the work of Pierre Daniel Huet
(1630–1721), bishop of Avranches. In the chapter on “Natural Beauties
preferable to Artistic ones” he comments thus on the bad taste of his
age:
Polite society ... requires palisades erected with the line and
at the point of the shears. The green shades of these tufted
birches and of those great oaks which were found at the birth
of time, are in bad taste and worthy of the grossness of our
fathers. Is not to think thus to prefer a painted face to the
natural colour of a beautiful countenance? But the depravity
of this judgment is discovered in our pictures and in our
tapestries. Paint on one side a fashionable garden, and on the
other one of those beautiful landscapes in which Nature spreads
her riches undisguised; one will present a very tedious object,
the other will charm you by its delight. You will be tired of
the one at the first glance. You will never weary of looking at
the other, such is the force of Nature to make itself beloved in
spite of the pilferings and deceits of art.[551]
There were doubtless many other evidences of a changing taste, but
the book that most distinctly marks a new era is Batty Langley’s
“New Principles of Gardening” in 1728. In his Introduction is the
iconoclastic statement, “Nor is there any Thing more _shocking_
than a _stiff, regular Garden_ where after we have seen one
quarter thereof, the very same is repeated in all the remaining Parts.”
His campaign against regularity is consistently carried out through
the book. He comments on some gardens that seem to him “forbidding”
because laid out with “that abominable Mathematical Regularity and
Stiffness, that nothing that’s bad could equal them.” And again, “Nor
is there any Thing more ridiculous ... than a Garden which is regular.”
Of straight walks and hedges he wrote, “To be condemned to pass along
the famous vista from Moscow to Petersburg, or that other from Agra to
Lahore in India, must be as disagreeable a sentence, as to be condemned
to labor at the gallies. I conceived some idea of the sensation ...
from walking but a few minutes, immured, betwixt Lord D----’s high
shorn yew hedges.” He regards cutting down fine old oaks in order to
make a regular garden as “a Crime of so high a Nature, as not to be
pardon’d.” In planning his grounds he allows “no three trees to range
together in a strait line.” He advises conducting the walks so that
they shall lead through “small Enclosures of Corn ... Hop-Gardens
... Melon-Grounds ... Paddocks of Deer, Sheep, Cows, ... with rural
Enrichments of Hay-Stacks, Wood-Piles, etc.” His final dictum is that
all gardens must be “grand, beautiful, and natural.” He is thoroughly
romantic in his idea of beauty, for not only is regularity debarred,
but “misshapen Rocks, strange precipices, Mountains, old Ruins,” are
counted as indispensable. If ruins cannot be actually found or built,
he would even have them “painted on Canvas.” Batty Langley’s book is of
especial importance since at so early a date it formulates many of the
principles on which the landscape gardeners worked.
Pope’s “Fourth Epistle” in 1731 marks an epoch in English garden
literature, not because he says anything new but because of the great
weight of his name and because of the high literary quality of the
poem. Pope’s scornful picture of the formal garden sums up most of the
characteristics objected to by earlier writers:
His gardens next your admiration call,
On every side you look, behold the wall!
No pleasing intricacies intervene,
No artful wildness to perplex the scene:
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
The suffering eye inverted Nature sees,
Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;
With here a fountain never to be played;
And there a summer-house, that knows no shade:
Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers;
There gladiators fight, or die, in flowers;
Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn,
And swallows roost in Nilus’ dusty urn.
Pope also gives explicit support to the theories of the landscape
gardeners. In the lines,
He gains all points who pleasingly confounds,
Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds,
are given, he said, in concise form the three heads to which all rules
of gardening are reducible, namely “the contrasts, the management of
surprises, and the concealment of bounds.” The fundamental distinction
between Pope’s conception of a garden and that of the formal school
rests in the fact that Pope would seek to conceal or obscure all
traces of man’s interference with Nature, while Nature’s ductility or
manageableness was frankly shown in the formal garden and constituted
one of its charms. Pope was also definitely in line with the landscape
gardeners in his belief that the garden should melt imperceptibly into
the surrounding park scenery. “Conceal art,” “destroy boundaries,”
“imitate Nature,” these were Pope’s maxims and they sum up the
doctrines of the new school.
The three professional gardeners who established the landscape school
were Bridgeman, Kent, and Brown. To the first of these Horace Walpole
gives much credit. After commenting on the gardens of London and Wise
he says,
Absurdity could go no further and the tide turned. Bridgeman,
the next fashionable designer of gardens, was far more chaste,
and whether from good sense, or that the nation had been struck
and reformed by the admirable paper in “The Guardian,” No. 173,
he banished verdant sculpture, and did not even revert to the
square precision of the foregoing age. He enlarged his plans,
disdained to make every division tally to its opposite; and,
though he still adhered much to straight walks with high clipped
hedges, they were only his great lines, the rest he diversified
by wilderness, and with loose groves of oak.... As his
reformation gained footing he ventured further, and in the royal
garden at Richmond dared to introduce cultivated fields, and
even morsels of a forest appearance.... But the capital stroke,
the leading step to all that has followed, was (I believe the
first thought was Bridgeman’s) the destruction of walls for
boundaries, and the invention of fossés--an attempt then deemed
so astonishing that the common people called them Ha! Ha’s! to
express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check
to their walk.
Though Switzer gave early expression to the ideas praised by Walpole,
Bridgeman was apparently the first to put these ideas into practice
in any notable way. His work at Stow was complete some years before
1724, for in that year Lord Percival wrote, “Bridgeman laid out the
ground and plan’d the whole, which can not fail of recommending him
to business. What adds to the bewty of this garden is, that it is
not bounded by walls, but by a Ha Ha, which leaves you the sight of
a bewtifull woody country, and makes you ignorant how far the high
planted walks extend.”
William Kent (1685–1748) was Bridgeman’s successor at Stow, and here
and in other great gardens, he made bold experiments along the lines
rather timidly marked out by Bridgeman. Walpole says of Kent, “At that
moment appeared Kent, painter enough to taste the charms of landscape,
bold and opinionative enough to dare and to dictate, and born with a
genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect
essays. He leaped the fence and saw that all Nature was a garden.”
Kent’s dominating principle, “Study Nature and follow her laws,”
marked the completeness of his break with the formal schools, and was
the basis of his best work, but it led also to absurdities. Since
Nature apparently abhors a straight line, all paths and avenues and
streams were sent serpentining around in the most tedious and unmeaning
fashion. Francis Coventry said that no follower of Kent would be
willing to go to heaven on a straight line. Kent even went so far, at
one time, in his desire to follow Nature, as to plant dead trees in
his parks. But, on the whole, his work was marked by a genuine love
of Nature, and he at least succeeded, as Walpole says, in “routing
_professed art_.”[552]
[Illustration: HAGLEY PARK
_By Thomas Smith_]
Kent’s most important gardens come between 1730 and 1748. One of the
first of those incited by the beauty of his “Elysian scenes” to make
over their own domains was Lord Lyttleton. His estate, Hagley, was
a _ferme ornée_ much admired in its own day, and an excellent
illustration of the new style. The accompanying print shows that the
forest trees come close to the house and grow unfettered. There are
open glades ornamented by temples and seats, and enlivened by the
presence of animals, which, according to the new scheme of beauty, had
at last come into their own as ornamental elements of a landscape.
Philip Southcote’s “Wooburn Farm” is another early _ferme ornée_.
Charles Hamilton’s “Pain’s Hill,” in Surrey, shows a somewhat different
type, which Walpole calls “the forest or savage garden.” In this
garden, continues Walpole, “all is great and foreign and rude; the
walks seem not designed, but cut through the wood of pines; and the
style of the whole is so grand and conducted with so serious an air
of wild and uncultivated extent, that when you look down on this
seeming forest you are amazed to find it contain a very few acres.” The
approximate date of “Wooburn Farm” and “Pain’s Hill” is determined by
the fact that in 1761, in Dodsley’s “London and its Environs,” they are
spoken of as “but lately laid out,” and so not very much advanced in
growth, but yet “very beautiful and extremely well worth seeing.”[553]
The most famous eighteenth-century “ferme ornée” was Shenstone’s
estate, known as “Leasowes,” and this is also somewhat earlier in
date, for a poetical tribute dated 1754 calls it “that new-form’d
Arcadia.” Eight other poetical eulogies show the place of Leasowes in
popular esteem. Dodsley published a map of the place with thirty pages
of minute description of the arrangement of the grounds.[554] There
was a prescribed order in viewing the estate, the path leading from
surprise to surprise, a gay, lively scene being immediately succeeded
by one “cool, gloomy, solemn, and sequestered.” Various scenes were
sentimentally suited to particular persons, or to especial trains of
thought. One glade was devoted to lovers, another to fairies; one spot
was set apart for reflections on death, another for communion with the
spirit of Virgil. Each separate portion had its rocks, waters, trees,
and shrubs, arranged according to a ruling idea, the idea being brought
into prominence by a suggestive inscription, and further emphasized
by a seat so placed that from it the idea could present itself
with cumulative effect. Shenstone paid great attention to artistic
combinations. In his “Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening,”[555] 1764],
he said concerning the art of “distancing and approximating,”
A straight-lined avenue that is widened in front, and planted
there with ewe trees, then firs, then with trees more and more
fady, till they end in the almond-willow, or silver osier,
will produce a very remarkable deception of the former kind;
which deception will be encreased, if the nearer dark trees are
proportionable and truly larger than those at the end of the
avenue that are more fady.
Shenstone’s work was certainly based on the most elaborate art but
his whole purpose was so to use art as to conceal it. “Art,” he said,
“should never be allowed to set a foot in the province of nature,
otherwise than clandestinely and by night.” “Whatever thwarts nature
is treason.” Whenever art is allowed to appear, “night, gothicism,
confusion and absolute chaos are come again.”
One of the earliest poetical champions of the picturesque development
of landscape gardening is William Mason, author of “The English
Garden,” a long didactic poem, begun in 1767 but not published till
1772, and then in an incomplete form. The purpose of the book is to
apply “the rules of imitative art to real nature.” Folly and Wealth
are called “the cruel pair” who, “borrowing aid from geometric skill,”
strive by line, plummet, and unfeeling shears, to deform the fair
surface of mother earth. Claude Lorraine, Salvator Rosa, Ruysdael,
are called upon as the true law-givers in gardening. Much credit for
the banishment of false taste is accorded to Addison and Pope. Of the
latter he says,
With bolder rage
Pope next advances; his indignant arm
Waves the poetic brand o’er Timon’s shades,
And lights them to destruction; the fierce blaze
Sweeps thro’ each kindred vista; groves to groves
Nod their fraternal farewell and expire.
Mason claims both Bacon and Milton as progenitors, the former “because
in developing the constituent properties of a princely garden, he
had largely expatiated upon the unadorned natural wildness which we
now deem the essence of the art;” the latter “because of his having
made this natural wildness the leading idea in his description of
Paradise.”[556] Another element of interest in Mason’s Preface is his
reason for writing his poem in blank verse. He confessed that the
didactic nature of the theme seemed to call for the heroic couplet, but
since every charm in gardens springs from variety, since the gardens
he praised represented Nature scorning control, he felt that he must
get a verse form as unfettered as Nature herself.[557] During the
slow publication of Mason’s “English Garden” there appeared in 1770
Thomas Whateley’s “Observations on Modern Gardening,” which summed up
in admirable fashion the achievements of the landscape school. It is
of especial importance as being “the very first treatise professedly
on landscape art.”[558] Walpole’s “The History of the Modern Taste in
Gardening,” was written in 1770, but was not printed till 1785 when
it came from the Strawberry Hill press with a French translation on
the opposite pages by the Duc de Nivernois. The essays by Walpole and
Whateley cover about the same ground and advocate the principles of the
same school, but Walpole’s fame and his brilliant style have combined
to give his work pre-eminence, and his essay ranks in the garden
literature of the eighteenth century as Sir William Temple’s essay does
in the seventeenth century.
William Kent’s successor in gardening was Lancelot Brown (1715–83) who
was kitchen-gardener at Stow when Kent was there as designer. Brown’s
original work does not begin till about the middle of the century when
he became royal gardener and was employed at Blenheim. After that he
was concerned in laying out or in altering “half the gardens in the
country.” In 1767 Viscount Irwin thus eulogized him:
Born to grace Nature and her works complete
With all that’s beautiful, sublime and great,
For him each Muse enwreathes the laurel crown,
And consecrates to fame immortal Brown.[559]
But immortal Brown, while enjoying to the full the favor of owners of
great estates, had sturdy and loud-spoken critics. The ruthlessness
with which he destroyed fine old grounds, and especially fine avenues
of great trees, the unhomelike effect of his stretches of bare,
undulating lawn, his serpentining walks and streams, aroused active
hostility. Cowper in “The Task,” 1785, said,
Improvement, too, the idol of the age,
Is fed with many a victim. Lo, he comes!
The omnipotent magician, Brown appears!
Down falls the venerable pile, the abode
Of our forefathers.
* * * * *
He speaks. The lake in front becomes a lawn;
Woods vanish, hills subside, and valleys rise:
And streams, as if created for his use,
Pursue the track of his directing wand,
Sinuous or straight, now rapid and now slow,
Now murmuring soft, now roaring in cascades--
E’en as he bids.[560]
Late in the century Richard Payne Knight was so extreme in his attack
on Brown’s unpicturesque smoothness and finish as to express a
preference even for the formality of the old school. He thus describes
the designers of the school of Brown:
See yon fantastic band,
With charts, pedometers, and rules in hand,
Advance triumphant, and alike lay waste
The forms of nature and the works of taste!
T’ improve, adorn, and polish, they profess;
But shave the goddess whom they come to dress;
Level each broken bank and shaggy mound,
And fashion all to one unvaried round;
One even round, that ever gently flows,
Nor forms abrupt, nor broken colours knows;
But wrapt all o’er in everlasting green,
Makes one dull, vapid, smooth, and tranquil scene.
* * * * *
Hence, hence! thou haggard fiend, however call’d,
Thin, meagre genius of the bare and bald;
Thy spade and mattock here at length lay down,
And follow to the tomb thy fav’rite Brown;
Thy fav’rite Brown, whose innovating hand
First dealt thy curses o’er this fertile land;
First taught the walks in formal spires to move,
And from their haunts the secret Dryads drove:
With clumps bespotted o’er the mountain’s side,
And bade the stream ’twixt banks close shaven glide.
* * * * *
Oft when I’ve seen some lonely mansion stand
Fresh from th’ improver’s devastating hand,
’Midst shaven lawns, that far around it creep
In one eternal undulating sweep;
* * * * *
Tir’d with th’ extensive scene so dull and bare,
To Heav’n devoutly I’ve addressed my pray’r,--
Again the moss-grown terraces to raise,
And spread the labyrinth’s perplexing maze;
Replace in even lines the ductile yew,
And plant again the ancient avenue.
Some features, then, at least, we should obtain,
To mark this flat, insipid, waving plain.[561]
To his mind statues, urns, terraces, mounds, parterres, topiary work,
though all “against Nature,” were preferable to a whole estate “shorn
and shaved” after the manner of Brown. Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829) to
whom Knight dedicated his poem also opposed Brown, saying in prose with
almost equal heat what his friend had put into verse.[562] The points
made against the works of Brown, and likewise of his master, Kent, were
the tameness and monotony, the over-cultivated appearance, of their
grounds. The central thought of Knight and Price, as of Gilpin,[563]
their contemporary, and, earlier, of Mason in “The English Garden,” was
that a garden should be “picturesque,” that is, should be “composed”
as a picture is. Landscape painting secured its best effects from
rough, natural, varied scenes, hence gardens should, if possible, show
similar combinations. The essential difference between Brown and the
advocates of the picturesque is brought out by two plates published by
Knight. The first of these shows the truly picturesque. The elements
of the landscape are: a stream flowing at its own will between natural
and uneven banks; groups of spreading trees and shaggy shrubs in
natural union; fern-covered knolls; intricate thickets; mossy stones;
“cherished weeds;” a prostrate tree, rough and gnarled; “native stumps
and roots” overgrown with wild vines; and a rude bridge. The second
plate shows the same scene as “dressed by an improver,” evidently of
the Brown school. We now see the stream flowing between close-shaven
banks; over it a frail Chinese bridge; clumps of trees in the most
orderly and trim fashion; the grounds smoothed and cleaned like a
drawing-room; unmeaning curves in stream and walk; and a vast expanse
of lawn stretching in monotonous undulations to the bare-looking modern
house.
The controversy was carried over from Brown to his disciple and
imitator, Sir Humphrey Repton (1752–1818). Repton in a courteous
“Letter to Uvedale Price,” 1794, and again in his “Sketches and Hints
on Landscape Gardening” (chap. vii and Appendix), 1795, defended
the principles of landscape gardening adopted by Kent and Brown and
followed in his own work. Price answered in “A Letter to Humphrey
Repton,” 1795. In opposition to the claims of the devotees of the
picturesque Repton put forward the beauty to be found “in the milder
scenes that have charms for common observers,” and he protested
against the rigid application of the laws governing landscape painting
to an art so different in its views and possibilities as gardening.
But Repton, though he had entered upon his work as the disciple and
imitator of Brown, gradually changed, discarding the formalities of
Brown and adopting a more varied and natural style of ornamentation.
He made use of some of the ideas of the “artistical” or picturesque
school, but so modified them according to the dictates of good sense
and good taste, as to establish the beautiful and natural parks and
gardens in which England led the world.
The picturesque garden had two offshoots that cannot be passed over.
The idea of imitating a picture, when carried to an excess, led to
frantic effort to put cliffs, precipices, gnarled oaks, ruined,
moss-grown fortresses, ivy-hung abbeys, into every landscape.
Frequent sage advice is given as to the best ways to secure these
effects. Richard Jago, a friend of Shenstone, urges the importance of
appropriate sites--a cliff for a ruined castle, a well-water’d vale
for “the mouldering abbey’s fretted windows.”[564] In 1772 Gilpin
criticized Shuckburgh because the ruins were not “happily fabricated,”
but he adds in exculpation, “It is not every man, who can build a
house, that can execute a ruin.” There follows a long list of the
mechanical difficulties, with the following conclusion, “When it is
well done, we allow, that nothing can be more beautiful: but we see
everywhere so many absurd attempts of this kind, that when we walk
through a piece of improved ground, and hear of being carried next to
_see the ruins_, if the master of the scene be with us, we dread
the encounter.” In “The Spiritual Quixote,” 1773, is an amusing account
of a visit of Sir Geoffry Wildgoose to a noted estate. The ignorant
keeper in showing off various objects of interest calls attention to
the “_turpentine_ walks,” and then leads the way to the ruins
explaining that it was built “but a few years ago; and his Lordship
used to say, he could have _built_ it as _old_ again, if he
had had a mind.” An antiquary present exclaims,
I don’t at all approve of these deceptions.... I don’t wonder
that any gentleman should wish to have his woods or gardens
adorned with these venerable Gothic structures; as they strike
the imagination with vast pleasure, both by the greatness of
the object, and also by giving us a melancholy idea of their
past grandeur and magnificence. But for a man to _build a
ruin_, or to erect a modern house in the style of our Gothic
ancestors--appears to me the same absurdity ... as that which
many people have of late run into, of having their pictures
drawn in the habits of Vandyke or Sir Peter Lely.
Mr. Mason, in “The English Garden” deprecates building ruins, but
thinks a man to be congratulated if on his grounds
one superior rock
Bear on its brow the shivered fragment huge
Of some old Norman fortress; happier far,
Oh, then most happy, if thy vale below
Wash, with the crystal coolness of its rills,
Some mouldering abbey’s ivy-vested wall.
This search after ruins was a morbid and exaggerated development of the
new love of the old, the wild, the picturesque, just as the sentimental
melancholy in poetry was a morbid and exaggerated development of the
new poetic turning to emotional introspection, to solitude, to thoughts
of death and the grave. In the extreme form both phases were ephemeral,
and, it is interesting to note, were nearly contemporaneous. Batty
Langley was advocating “ruins” in gardens in 1728 but it is not till
after the middle of the century that they seem to have been accepted
as a necessary part of an estate, and this is just the period when the
spirit of sentimental melancholy in poetry, a spirit that had found
early expression in the night-piece of Parnell and Lady Winchilsea,
reached its culmination.
The subject of oriental gardens was also much discussed in prose
and verse. In 1752 appeared “An Account of the Emperor of China’s
Gardens at Pekin” by Père Attiret, translated by Sir H. Beaumont
(i.e., Joseph Spence).[565] In 1760 came Goldsmith’s “Description
of a Chinese Garden.” Most influential of all was “A Dissertation
on Oriental Gardens” by Sir William Chambers in 1772. The practical
influence of the discussion of Chinese gardens went little beyond the
building of summer-houses and bridges in the Chinese style. But the
naturalistic school in England was strengthened by an appeal to the
Chinese method of copying Nature “in all her beautiful irregularities,”
while the sentimentality of gardens such as Leasowes seemed to receive
sanction from the efforts of Chinese gardeners to construct scenes
with the express purpose of arousing certain emotions. The “fancies
and surprises” of Chinese effects were pleasing to those who, as Sir
William Chambers, thought Kent’s English gardens “no better than so
many fields.” The popularity of writings on oriental gardening is
furthermore significant of the enlarged horizons, the prevailing
interest in the new and the remote, characteristic of one phase of
romanticism, and it is to be classed as a sign of the times along with
the interest in oriental eclogues in the realm of poetry.
Incomplete and cursory as so short a study of so great a subject must
be, the facts here presented seem to warrant the following statements:
The feeling toward Nature in the period studied shows in gardening the
same order of development, nearly the same dates, and the same phases
as in poetry. There was first in both a pleased recognition of the
supremacy of man, a rigid exclusiveness, a love of order, of symmetry,
and of definite limits. Then came, in the early eighteenth century, a
tentative turning from art to Nature; then an epoch-making statement in
each art, Thomson’s “Seasons” from 1726 to 1730, and Pope’s “Epistle”
in 1731. From this point on the development was in mass and variety
rather than in the enunciation of new principles. The growing love
for wild Nature in the poetry, and the passion for the picturesque in
gardening proceed side by side. At the end of the century all is ready
in both arts for the splendid work of the new era. Throughout the
century both have had curiously correspondent offshoots or temporary
fads--sentimental melancholy in poetry, and the ruins, artificial and
real, in gardening; foreign eclogues and studies of distant countries
in the one art, and Chinese gardens in the other.