The kind of
countryside admired by the early eighteenth century was not that of the Lake
District or the Peak District, but a gentler, pastoral kind, where nymphs and
shepherds and their elegant eighteenth-century counterparts could feel
comfortably at home. Windsor Forest was an adequate subject for Alexander Pope in 1713,
written to celebrate the Treaty of Utrecht:
Here hills and
vales, the woodland and the plain,
Here earth and
water seem to strive again,
Not Chaos-like
together crushed and bruised,
But as the world,
harmoniously confused:
Where order in
variety we see,
And where, though
all things differ, all agree.
The poem is a
patriotic celebration of Britain and its countryside, just as Virgil had `sung' in honour of
ancient Rome. Soon Pope invokes the classical gods and goddesses of flocks and
herds, of fruit, flowers and corn, and in this he emphasizes the productiveness
and usefulness of the landscape:
Here Ceres' gifts
in waving prospect stand
And nodding tempt
the joyful reaper's hand,
Rich Industry sits
smiling on the plains
And Peace and
Plenty tell a Stuart reigns.
If this is England in
Virgilian guise, it is also the counterpart in poetry of Poussin's splendid
painting entitled Summer.
The nymphs and
shepherds, the gods and the heroes, and all the paraphernalia of classical
Arcadia became the stock-in-trade of the poets of the eighteenth century, and
the countryside was portrayed mostly in these
terms.
Another poet, William Shenstone,
created his own small-scale landscape garden at The Leasowes, near Halesowen,
which he called a ferme ornee. Shenstone had only a modest income and expensive
garden buildings were beyond his reach. Instead he placed memorial urns and
seats with mottoes and inscriptions at various strategic points, as if to ensure
that the landscape would be rightly appreciated by the observer. In the same
way, the landscapes described in early eighteenth-century poetry contained
literary allusions which could be shared by the educated and travelled
aristocracy, and along with this went instructive moral ideas of social value.
The contemplation of nature was expected to produce such ideas as were described
by the philosopher David
Hume as being 'entitled to the general goodwill and approbation of mankind',
such as 'beneficence and humanity, friendship and gratitude, natural affection,
and public spirit and a generous concern
for our kind and species.' Such generalizations were often drawn out by poets,
and also in man-made landscapes. Thus, the buildings in the famous gardens at
Stowe, where Lancelot
(Capability) Brown became head gardener, were called the Temple of
Friendship, the Temple of British Worthies, the Temple of Ancient Virtue; and of
course the Temple of Modern Virtue was in ruins.
But from the
mid-century onwards a change became apparent, both in landscape poetry and in
designed landscapes. To some extent it is evident in James Thomson's The
Seasons, a poem of epic dimensions completed in 1746, which contains many
landscape pictures. Sometimes they prompt reflections of a philosophical or
sentimental nature, but more often Thomson is content with plain description.
There is no overall narrative or argument to the poem, only the description of
scenery during the seasons of the year and as many sundry incidental subjects as
occur to him in passing. The important thing was to show the English countryside
to advantage. And this, it could be argued, is all a Capability Brown landscape
is. Lancelot Brown abandoned the idea of a landscape with literary or moral
associations, and explored instead the expressive possibilities of the purely
'natural' landscape. His parks contain little in the way of architectural or
literary content, of temples, urns and other trappings of Arcadia. Instead he presented an
ideal picture of Nature. Not wild, uncivilized Nature, but tastefully improved
Nature; in Alexander Pope's words, 'Nature to advantage
dress'd'.
But it is more even
than that. Not only is Nature improved and made pleasing to the eye, it is also
used expressively, to generate feelings and sensations. in the observer. The
same attitude towards Nature can be seen in the poetry of Edward Young (1683-1765)
and Thomas Gray, Lancelot
Brown's exact contemporary. For Gray, A Distant Prospect of Eton College, where
'the hoary Thames' wanders 'his silver-winding way', did not suggest a classical
Arcadian scene but instead it yielded sentiments of
nostalgia:
Ah, happy hills,
ah pleasing shade,
Ah fields beloved
in vain,
Where once my
careless childhood strayed.
A stranger yet to
pain!
I feel the gales
that from ye blow,
A momentary bliss
bestow,
As waving fresh
their gladsome wing
My weary soul they
seem to soothe And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breath a second
spring.
Here we find the
landscape producing an emotional response in the individual, and this was
something new, the discovery, in Thomas Whately's words,
that 'scenes of nature have a power to affect our imagination and our
sensibility', whereas previously they had been regarded a useful commodity for
society in general.
The landscapes of
Lancelot Brown also have this capacity to create, in Whately's
words:
Scenes which may
be adapted to every kind of expression; ... their consequences [are] infinite:
the mind is elevated, depressed or composed as gaiety, gloom or tranquility
prevail in the scene.
So in spite of the
classicism which is implied in the creation of an idealized landscape raised in
its significance beyond the particular, there is also an element of romanticism
latent in Brown's landscapes. The ability to heighten the individual character
of a landscape, effects which are dramatic in quality, the element of mystery,
and the subtlety of something which eludes the immediate grasp of the mind:
these are all romantic concepts. But they are always fused with the search for
the Ideal, the same kind of search for a moment of perfection which we see
portrayed in the paintings of Claude Lorraine.
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