3817684

Re-Reading the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape Garden
Author(s): Stephen Bending

Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3, Symposium: "An English Arcadia:
Landscape and Architecture in Britain and America" (Summer, 1992), pp. 379-399
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817684
Accessed: 19-02-2017 11:50 UTC
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Re-Reading the Eighteenth-Century
English Landscape Garden
by Stephen Bending
I certainly did not hesitate ... to speak of a decided superiority of

British taste in gardening, over that of other European countries, or
of former periods at home. That a majority of altered places had
been really improved by alteration was by no means asserted; but
quite the reverse. My estimate of national taste was taken upon
another ground. The preference given by the public to the designs
of true genius, in comparison with those of mechanical professors,
was what regulated my opinion. For I never doubted, but that this
discriminative approbation was pretty general with them, who
could be allowed to have any judgment at all in the matter. As to
the decisions of the mere vulgar, are they ever put into the scale to
weigh works of genius?
George Mason, An Essay on Design in Gardening1
Writing in 1795-and looking back to the views he had expressed nearly

thirty years earlier-George Mason claims the English landscape garden
as both a liberal and a national art. In so doing, he defines the "public"
to whom he speaks; enlists a distinction between the liberal and mechan-
ical arts and their audiences; and raises the question of how, and by
whom, gardens are to be interpreted. In this essay I will explore these
issues in the context of eighteenth-century attempts to define and regu-
late the meaning of the "English garden." I hope to demonstrate the con-
tinuing role of the later eighteenth-century landscape garden as a public
site for competing cultural interests.
379
380 T tH E H U N T I N ( ON N I A R Y Q U AR T E R LY
It is helpful to begin with a very brief summary of some ideas

in eighteenth-century garden history. In order to explain the ri
landscape garden, the shunning of regularity in design, and an
ing appeal to "Nature," the literary qualities of the new style ha
ly been stressed. Various studies have detailed the influence
writers as Addison, Pope, and Shenstone, and have illustra
importance of literary structures and allusion in the contem
design and interpretation of the garden. Notably, it is now custo
begin chronologies of the "English" style with Alexander Pope a
garden at Twickenham.2
In the last twenty years, influential garden historians h
described a change in the eighteenth century from an "emblem
an "expressive" construction of landscape. According to this vie
dens of learned inscriptions and iconographical unraveling b
shared knowledge are superseded by a space in which the visito
hampered by such coercive structuring and is left free to ex
emotions in a relatively untrammeled manner. To simplify the
distinction seeks to explain the difference in design between th
eighteenth-century gardens of Pope and William Kent (replete w
fully arranged statues, temples, inscriptions, and other architect
tures) and the seemingly more austere and architecturally barr
signs of "Capability" Brown after 1750 (figs. 2 & 3). Emphasis is
having shifted from what is there to be read to the reader's act
ing, from shared and stable interpretations to personal and the
subjective responses. Indeed, if "reading" is a felicitous term fo
munal audience's shared interpretation of the emblematic
structures and conventions, within the later expressive garden
readership is said to be replaced by the reactions of the individ
the act of "reading" is no longer appropriate. In this paper I wi
that such a narrative is misleading. The landscape garden doe
fact lose its ability to be read as a coherent program; however,
than being found in the overt emblematic structuring of earlier
the act of interpretation has been wrested from the owner of th
and relocated with its visitor, but a visitor now trained by litera
the "correct" art of reading. Thus I will argue that literature in t
od attempts to provide a mode of reading-a controlled way of u
standing-the landscape garden when its overt inscription (it
readable and coercive program of iconography) has faded. A
when the landscape garden appears to have lost its readable s
and public meaning-its demand to be comprehended in a single
manner-that structure is being reintroduced by equally coerciv
ary texts, texts that attempt to produce what we may call emb
readings of expressive landscapes.
RE-READING THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE GARDEN 381
kr~s: .I Sigi'- j*5.%i~,;?;';-~.LC:'>* F . ...~pr...<<,..*;ld '~t~~~3EZLSn~ ~ :*-' ' ' --: 1. - I . "r. I- - .1.
Fig. 2. The Vale of Venus, by William Kent, Ro

photograph).
Trnldram. ^.f?u r7ftff, J SO;a / O Jar. p

.,:,r/. -./4, ,,' ,/,: /.A . -.-. < X !, f ..r.....'., >/ .'/,/'. ,,/-. '.; ,,,. ....'./..,
Fig. 3. "Capability" Brown's landscaping at Tren

Engraving from William Watts, The Seats of the
1779-86 (Huntington Library).
382 THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY
The idea of the emblematic garden is now we

a short introduction. In an important article, J
attention to the terms emblematic and express
den theory of Thomas Whately's Observations
Whately's work, published in 1770, provides, al
design, a somewhat scattered history of the En
the older style of English garden was "em
should be "expressive." Hunt, and later Ronald
terms into an explanation of the history of t
den.4 However, while a persuasive case can be
design of early eighteenth-century gardens, t
later eighteenth-century gardens-as I have alr
lematical, and begs questions as to chronology
the visitor within that design.
In order to explain the emblematic nature of
den, Paulson writes of the emblem, "the meani
an interplay of a title, a motto, and a visual i
been added a prose commentary or verbalizatio
uct is "a total image that is more than the sum
pendent, problematical, to be deciphered." Wi
textual element appears in the form of inscript
which direct the viewer's response to the land
set. It is important to Paulson's argument tha
be verbal but that they parallel verbal structur
poetry, for example, is often remarked) and th
therefore the appropriate response. It is the re
to meditate upon the work and provide it with
the case of the garden, that commentary co
argues, not only by the visitor but by such pr
to Pope's Twickenham, the Leasowes of Shenst
Of all eighteenth-century English gardens St
famous, and within it the most strikingly e
Elysian Fields. The complex iconography of
well known, and it will suffice here to remark
tecture, and inscriptions were combined in
emblem of Whig opposition. Juxtaposed with
of Ancient Virtue was a ruinous Temple of Mod
separated from the two by the river "Styx" w
Worthies containing busts of great figures from
stitutional liberty (fig. 5). Ancient ideals and
joined in conversation with the necessarily
contemporary Britain. Cobham and his circle c
Stowe what George Clarke has called "a politic
Fig. 4. The Temple of Modem Virtue, Stow

ue said to represent Robert Walpole can be
George Bickham, The Beauties of Stowe, Lon
t*SBr//2^2%&y
}Se m,* f7yf 0..
Fig. 5. The Temple of British Worthies, Sto

from George Bickham, The Beauties of Stow
ideals of government being contrasted with th

Walpole administration."5
Similarly complex emblematic programs have bee
gardens as Rousham and Stourhead, and texts suc
Queene and Virgil's Aeneid have been offered as ex
respective designs. I am not here concerned with m
the exact iconographic details of such gardens;6 rat
consider the role of interpretation in their design. T
of such gardens has led critics to introduce an im
between public and private meaning in landscape
that the emblematic represents a form of public m
when emphasis shifts to expressive design. In the e
meaning is stable and public in that, with a knowled
guage, a definitive meaning for the design can be
duction of meaning is part of an intellectual game,
rules and a predetermined outcome. The design
confidence in shared knowledge, yet, equally, th
deliberately exclusive and excluding nature.
Hunt has argued that the transition at mid-century
public meaning to the personal and subjective respo
the expressive garden can be found demonstrate
William Gilpin's Dialogue on the Gardens at Stowe (17
is deemed necessary in order to explain the apparen
features in later gardens, and their seeming emp
natural forms and spatial arrangement at the expen
tualized structuring. Emphasis falls on Gilpin's s
responses to the emblematic detail of Stowe's de
explicate the total meaning intended by the designe
the non-emblematic features of landscape-for e
response required by the sublime-is enlisted to sug
of a new, subjective, response to the garden at mid-
suggestion that responses to later eighteenth-centur
jective depends largely, I would argue, upon a see
kind of public meaning the emblematic garden req
work within one of the languages the emblematic
represented as the entire loss of shared, and so publ
And yet a failure to read in a required manner is
certainly was so in the early 1740s while Stowe was
tion. Oblivious to the political iconography at work
a visitor such as Mrs. Montagu, in 1744, was able to
Clarke has suggested-in the language of the sub
beyond description, it gives the best idea of Paradi
Milton's images and descriptions fall short of it, and
must be to every mind in a state of

may not be produced from within the
creators, but it represents a public lan
sublime is present, but more prominen
upon the garden as a site for moral vir
moral discourse which I would now like to consider.
Despite the "public" quality of the emblematic gardens I have men-
tioned-their ability to provide the same meanings for different view
ers/readers-the meaning produced is only accessible to a highly sophi
ticated elite and could easily be misread or even ignored; the very elu
siveness was part of the design. A number of other emblematic garden
however, used the more accessible moral language within which M
Montagu frames her response. In 1734 Aaron Hill produced an unex
cuted plan for a "moral garden."8 The garden was to be constructed in
large area of woodland. Within it, grottos were consecrated to Despair
Solitude, Love, Independence; winding paths and tunnels denoted such
themes as Reason, Benevolence, Malice, and Ambition; and all around,
the garden was to be filled with emblematic decoration. The visito
aim would be to follow the path leading them to the Temple of Ha
piness, raised on a mound at the garden's center. Of all the paths, onl
that dedicated to Reason and Innocence, and passing through the grot
of Independence, led directly to the central temple (fig. 6). Hill's guidin
framework is eminently approachable and, while it may not be specif
cally Christian, it plays upon a tradition of moral thought commonly
available. It is the very communality of the language upon which Hill
design is predicated that I wish to emphasize. While Stowe's Elysi
Fields demanded an abstruse sophistication from its viewer, Hill's gar
den was to rely upon a traditional language of morality.
In the following decade, Jonathon Tyers, the proprietor of the famou
pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, succeeded in laying out a "moral garden"
at Denbies, his estate in Surrey.9 Unlike Aaron Hill's design, however,
that of Tyers was firmly Christian. The garden was again set in a wo
with paths on different levels, some twisting and rugged, others smoo
and flat. Near the entrance was a Temple of Death, replete with emblem
atic features, and deeper inside the garden a Valley of the Shadow
Death, the gateway of which was constructed from coffins and skulls
and inscribed with moral verses on the vanity of human wishes. Passin
on from the Temple and through the valley, the visitor finally reached
alcove containing a statue of Truth which pointed to Francis Hayman
paintings of "The Death of a Christian" and "The Death of an Unbeliev
er." What I would like to stress is that both in Tyers's garden and
Hill's plan for a moral garden, although the program is undoubted
personal, it relies upon-indeed is predicated upon-the ability of t
Hope and the Picturesque
o i.
cr .
'_ c x GROTTO S ' -

3 ^ *"0OF 0t .
U C Q Q. POWER 1 Q
. * ! t , y ; t
Violence --- --- - Grott - _ --' _ _Fame
, ( Munif- _c- ( oT , , I
Prinde_- . ,I --- - -Revenge
Security. - -- - -- - Victory
,Sink of' Fountain
Ingratitude of Folly i i
I t Hovel of i I
FEAncyIN. ft /Gi -"vertv/'~'
PH el,,enf c! o HTindustry
p endustry
Idleness.
rotto ot c\S
EnvS/(/;
Spleene s&i \ c( tinction
& C \
te'i1 Honesty
GROTTO 1 2 3 4 - T a -GROTTO
j Cavr of TetCple of iF I
rolittod Repentance 11Grot to
Spqeen , m \>^ S ence Reason

Co4tet I
Disappoint-. Ind'epe
Roc nd-
' Despairlnnocence
tent Deat ES
Cave Teple of I
t Repentance 4 " f '

Pain .....L--- t- --t-- -/- .........q ~- - --Ambition
pain.-- - e--. --'Grtt---W --s _ I .pure.
Grott.
Censureo- - - -t--- - Oft-t-- - -- 5
-- 2
- -----Hatred
o, ' l~. ,Love'
16(Ceremony.- - M-urray..--- l. --- .- --- ---.Jealou
U) c . S. GROTTO ~ >U ) >
:5r- OF M
-OF o, ' .
e Z HONOUR > =
U
u 0
o
0
* STATUES
.-... AVENUES
Fig. 6. Reconstruction of Aaron Hill's Moral Rock Garden of 1734, reproduced

from David Watkin, Thomas Hope, 1769-1831, and the Neo-Classical Ideal, London,
1968 (courtesy John Murray Publishers Ltd.).
viewer to recognize and respond with

guage. A common moral discourse is he
reading the garden, and so a vehicle for
If we return to Mrs. Montagu's apparen
Stowe, it becomes clear that, rather th
case of public or private response, differ
available. Mrs. Montagu's reaction to St
political language employed by its creat
ate, however, to the garden of Jonathon
dens, that is, emphasize, and rely upon
availability. If Mrs. Montagu fails to re
raphy, she responds quite correctly to
the garden employs, for the Paradise tr
moral virtue, remains a part of the t
Stowe engages.10 One should not theref
within the terms of the garden's creator
The visitor may ignore or reject the de
abandon the ability to respond in the
may be justified as the articulation of a
of this for our understanding of garden
lies in the fact that, increasingly, it w
text-that the meaning of the garden wa
What has been seen as a shift from pub
shift in the site of interpretation, of the c
the coercive structures of the emble
responses from within their own desig
insisted upon later in the century by eq
historian who sees the disappearance of
garden-inscriptions, temples, statues-n
public responses are no longer possible;
language in which they were written n
continue to inform the garden with m
course, and the construction of public
later eighteenth century, is the subject of
I would now like to return to Whately
distinction in order to consider the weaknesses in its modern use as an
historical explanation of responses to the garden. The disappearance of
emblematic features from the garden is equated with the rise of "expres-
sive" design, design which allows personal and subjective responses to
landscape. However, as I have already remarked, it is always possible to
ignore the intentions of the garden's designer and to respond in a seem-
ingly subjective fashion; such responses could be detailed in any number
for any style of garden in any period. Moreover, to argue that garden
design catered to such subjective responses is in a se

Joshua Reynolds's only comment on gardening in hi
is useful at this point:
Gardening, as far as Gardening is an Art, or entitle

lation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true
many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art,
the footsteps of man, it would then be no longer a G
Gardens are necessarily man-made and impose a set

conventions (Reynolds's "Art"); they are to be recogn
but as being about nature. Thus, to argue that a gard
promote wholly personal responses is to ignore the d
den itself, however minimal those directives may se
den one enters a set of conventions just as one does in
The mention of Reynolds is apposite for anoth
Whately's now famous appeal for expressive design i
larger context of his discussion, it becomes clear that
ject of a serious misreading. Whately's concern that th
den be "expressive," as opposed to "emblematic," is i
the argument that it must be expressive of "characte
himself was to use when discussing the nature of th
important at this point to place Whately's conception
this wider context of the arts, for it is in this cont
nature of his "expressive" style becomes apparent. T
courses-and in order to justify painting as a liber
which I shall return)-Reynolds stresses the value
the particular: "The general idea constitutes real exc
things, however perfect in their way, are to be sacri
to the greater" (58). In painting, this takes the form
"characteristick." Thus, in his eleventh Discourse, Rey
[T]here are in all considerable objects great charact

tions, which press strongly on the senses, and the
imagination. These are by no means, as some pe
aggregate of all the small discriminating particular
an accumulation of particulars ever express them..
The detail of particulars, which does not assist th
the main characteristick, is worse than useless, it is
it dissipates the attention, and draws it from the pr
express [the characteristic] in Painting, is to expres
nial and natural to the mind of man, and what give
tion his own mode of conceiving. The other pre
and research, which are only the busi

tive, and therefore does not speak to t
species; in which common, and, as I m
every thing grand and comprehensive
Reynolds's concern in this passage is

applied equally to garden design. What
-of character-has been taken as a cha
the subjective. With Reynolds's word
apparent that the characteristic is not v
sentation of the ideal or the abstract. In the fourth Discourse-almost
contemporary with Whately's publication-Reynolds had written o
painting, "The great end of the art is to strike the imagination. T
Painter is therefore to make no ostentation of the means by which this
done; the spectator is only to feel the result in his bosom" (59). Similarl
emblematic detail is to be eschewed in the garden, the common languag
of abstraction is not. Reynolds's comment upon a "mother tongue" pe
haps emphasizes this most strongly: character is the institution of a mor
not a less, public language, a language common to mankind and so one
which is able to speak most directly to the viewer. Character places th
visitor's response firmly within the public domain: it is precisely the
directness of representation within this domain with which Whately
concerned. His aim is to remove the clutter of emblematic detail (the
"ostentation of the means"), but not therefore the ability of the garden to
convey abstract meaning.
Another president of the Royal Academy, Henry Fuseli, was to addres
the same issue, rather more directly than Reynolds, in his distinction
between topographical "map-work" and the "characteristic" in lan
scape painting.12 The former is merely decorative and reflects only up
the owner's private identity; in the latter-found in the work of such
painters as Claude, Salvator Rosa, Poussin, and Wilson-the viewer rec-
ognizes not "features without meaning" (or rather, such private meanin
as is unavailable to them) but representations of the ideal in nature itsel
The one panders to the private man, the other upholds the public fun
tion of art. It is this public function which allows painting to claim th
status of a liberal art and it is this same public function to which much
literature of the landscape garden would have it aspire. The well-know
debate between Sir William Chambers and William Mason in the 1770s
for example, can be set within just these terms.
In 1773 William Mason published An Heroic Epistle to Sir William Cham
bers; it was one of many replies to Chambers's own Dissertation o
Oriental Gardening of 1772. Chambers attracted the enmity of Mason an
Horace Walpole by attacking "Capability" Brown and championin
instead an apparently foreign style of garden d

their ire for his own political position as a Tory
General of His Majesty's Works. It is upon th
landscape design that Mason's satire is predicated
meaning that can be put into the space-both
the landscape garden. The opposing positions
themselves underline the range of possible re
garden, and this very range in itself denies any
emblem to expression, from public to private. B
were possible throughout the century and di
employed to produce and articulate those res
signs for "Chinese" gardens were characterized
tion of the very kind of private identity of whic
Mason, Chambers's gardens of sensual excitemen
status of the garden as a liberal art, while h
"Capability" Brown's work was based upon a con
produce public meaning. In Mason's case, "public
a very particular cast, and I shall return to this s
I discuss his influential poem, The English G
attack, however, Chambers's riposte to the supp
came from within the discourse of the liberal arts. His attack on Brown
was based primarily upon the belief that his rival was merely a mechan-
ic, an earth mover, incapable of works of the liberal mind; Brown's work
was represented as the imposition of a false standard of sameness and
not the recognition and re-creation of nature's ideal forms.
Indeed, the designs of "Capability" Brown are the most frequent butt
of that historical rhetoric which claims a disappearance of public mean-
ing from the landscape garden. Ronald Paulson, like many others, ar-
gues that Brown "was removing all that was mythic and literary from
the garden, as he removed its statues and temples" (20). This is conve-
nient for his argument but it is also proving to be inaccurate, for that
mythic quality could remain despite the loss of overt emblematic pro-
grams within the garden. It is also becoming increasingly apparent that
large numbers of architectural features were indeed employed by
Brown.13 Paulson concludes his journey around the emblematic features
of Stowe with Brown's Grecian valley, which he characterizes as a space
free from pictorial allusion. It is, Paulson argues, a place where there is
nothing to focus the mind, a precursor of the fully formed expressive
garden: "the leafy or grassy space that can be filled in by the viewer's
mood. Into this space you are asked to project your own imagination,
and meaning is determined by your own state of mind. .." (27). Robert
Williams has suggested a chronology with a similar conclusion, and
argues that, although inscriptions and other forms of readable design
were inappropriate to the new layouts

"Nature with Brown had fully absorbed
ensure that Nature spoke good English
not for the reasons Williams supplies
their purpose, but had done so by esta
garden, a mode which insisted upon th
upon certain ways of responding to it.
garden only to reappear in the expand
state of mind-which Paulson takes t
itself to be influenced by those more p
ied. Brown's gardens not only retain m
posts of earlier gardens-temples, st
provided by literature with an emblema
The willingness to characterize the
drained of meaning has resulted, in pa
the work of the late eighteenth-centur
work of Uvedale Price, for example, is f
tifying such a position; the complexity
the seemingly vapid designs of Brown.
"a 'good landscape' in nature is like a 'g
parts must contribute to the energy an
the threat to the traditional social land
to direct the landowner away from ex
with 'despotism' and dullness, toward
focusing on particular objects."'4 Howe
in a moment, large landscapes were
despotism or dullness; and indeed, a
already been stated some years earlier
such as William Mason, and not with an
pose. Thus, while the political implicat
ognized,'5 equally politicized readings o
sition to Price's stylistic strictures) rem
and yet polemical, view of the "expres
cy, in some degree, of such writers
neutral relating of unproblematical fa
Brown, and it is to his defense that I now
In 1771 William Mason published th
English Garden.16 Mason, the biograph
extensive circle of friends Horace Walp
olds, Anna Seward, and William Gilp
musician, a painter, a gardener, a scien
georgic poem, The English Garden, was
years, a complete edition of the four b
/ .
.>''-
'
, .1,I% .1
fi e '.
i" .. ._l
1. I .", 10 ._
W . . . ..
. . ..
5'
s^ vta#z'
^-.^
^y * rA-
"^ - " *<;''":
iBy*L.: *l.*r
c I g^.~~.
"' ''- .- S-T ^ * *j ^f -T- *s
,;,_ PI~P- ~-~ sI
r t;,Ir*
l '^fe -1 J -^ -. -
|' ir5C:
~r ., (
~ti~-'ttrr~L
'srr^K^'S
Is
Rt
.
,
Fig. 7. Brown's Gothic Bathhouse at Corsham Court, Wiltshire, reproduced

David Jarrett, The English Landscape Garden, London, 1978 (courtesy Academ
Editions, London).
friend William Burgh, appearing in 178

all later commentators upon the landsc
alluded to by Brown (himself an acqua
ton and Gilpin, praised by Walpole, di
George Mason, attacked by Uvedale P
and repudiated by the Abbe Delille.17
The poem sets out to provide precepts
the English landscape garden but for t
that construction. In conjunction wi
Chambers in the 1770s, and the notes p
English Garden demands that the new
haps surprisingly, as an emblem. Far fr
of responses to landscape design, Mason
ate the garden within, a public discour
The garden is to be recognized as a lib
themselves to be recognized as poss
framework of English constitutional p
ernment early in the century. The lan
and the representation of that success
the garden is the dual nature of land as
erty: ownership of land means ownersh
comitantly, therefore, Mason's poem-l
of the English garden-stresses the p
landscape. The central conceit asserts
estate reflect, indeed are inseparable f
estate and vice versa. When joined wit
scape garden becomes part of an emble
state of Britain. Thus, not only could
with moral meaning but that moral me
the kind of political commentary foun
dens as Stowe.
Mason's poem sets about creating, and defining the signification of,
publicly accepted or acceptable icons; drawing upon the history o
English garden design and the vocabulary it embodied, The English Gar-
den attempts to provide a partisan discourse of Whig history and politi
cal organization with a normative public status. This itself relied in par
upon a continuing willingness to read the structures of the landscape
garden in emblematic terms and consequently to retain the iconic signif
cance those features had attained within earlier emblematic garden
Quite apart from the intricate games of Stowe's Elysian Fields, the early
landscape garden drew into its programs of emblematic significance t
political associations of Greek and gothic architectural styles; the relation
ship between the spatial arrangements of variety and prospect and idea
of liberty and the English constitution; the spatial a

cance of the ha-ha; and the patriotic associations of th
few examples. What I would stress is that the public
made such signification possible were still available a
the "emblematic" garden. Thus, despite the apparent
controlling program exerting its influence from with
discourses-discourses from which such programs con
atic significance-could continue to inform the gar
Rather than allow the free play of such discourses, h
erature such as Mason's poem assumed was to wield t
the orderly reconstruction of a particular kind of p
Mason's poem attempts to define the significance of
train the viewer/reader in the correct art of readin
serpentine paths, architectural styles, ruins, and spa
could all be read in emblematic terms. The garden as
picture of English liberty with its emblems (variety,
the gothic) set about it; Mason's poem provided the t
which completed the larger emblem. Thus, just as wit
the century, a garden designed by "Capability" Brow
nized and interpreted as an emblem if one knew the
it was written. The crucial difference was that the l
trolled not by a coercive program within the garden
didactic texts.
For William Mason and Horace Walpole the garden is an emblem of

Whig political power; more frequently, those qualities recognized as
emblematic assert a less factionally politicized national greatness. In
each case, however, the ability to read the landscape garden denotes also
the recognition of that garden as a liberal art. Thus, for George Mason
(who is politically at variance with William Mason) the creations of a
mere mechanic are of no consequence precisely because they fail to cre-
ate the readable structures of abstraction and are simply acts of unthink-
ing reproduction. Here, it is worthwhile returning to Reynolds's discus-
sion of liberal and mechanical arts in more detail, for the political impli-
cations of garden design, upon which both George and William Mason
insist, are stated in a more general context. Reynolds draws the distinc-
tion from the discourse of civic humanism;18 it is a distinction between
the mind and the hand, between principle and mere practice. According
to this discourse, a liberal art is predicated upon the process of abstrac-
tion and so demands an ability to perceive the general and not simply
the particular; this ability raises the man of taste above the vulgar, but
also provides him with a claim to membership of the political republic.
For it is the ability to perceive the wider interests of the state, rather than
merely those of one's own profession or position, which entitles a man
RE READING THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE GARDEN 395
to citizenship. Thus formulated, the v

in its ability to define-indeed, to crea
the same time a political public.
It is a distinction we may characterize
for history painting and landscape pai
scape garden to be a liberal art it must
history painting, which in turn attem
human action portrayed by epic litera
to be at several removes, they are neve
of the human figure which both literat
sent directly, the landscape garden mu
implied by its moral meaning, by the h
gion, politics) to which it alludes and u
scape garden seeks only to reproduce
form-employing, say, Claudean motifs
bling rock and broken trees of Rosa, b
human action-then it fails as a creation of the liberal arts. As a neces-
sary consequence, it is said to speak only to a private rather than a pub
lic audience and so is deemed to be of little value in the public sphere.
For this reason, the need to recognize the abstraction represented by
structure and the ability to bring public discourses to bear upon the ele
ments of landscape design in an orderly fashion become paramoun
While George Mason refused to recognize Brown's work within th
terms of a liberal art, and maintained that his designs were merel
mechanical (at best, an equivalent of landscape painting), William Maso
-also seeking to provide the landscape garden with the status of histor
painting-attempts to define Brown's designs as a space in which th
liberal mind can operate. The point at issue is not whether the landscap
garden can produce public meaning-something on which both writers
agree-but from whence such meaning arises and the manner in which
it can be controlled.
Indeed, the landscape garden presented a particularly attractive means
by which the landowner could represent himself as part of a civic hu-
manist elite. The ability both to recognize and to create the landscape
garden within the terms of the liberal arts denoted a worthiness to own
land and a concomitant worthiness to the political rights it bestowed.
The creation of such a garden by a landowner-rather than by the mere
professional of whom George Mason speaks-itself asserted and demon-
strated such worthiness. Ronald Paulson has argued that what distin-
guishes the tradition of civic humanist aesthetics is the absence of a
material art object; what mattered was the idea or ideal.20 In this light,
the landscape garden was a particularly appropriate form, for the idea-
the framing of the design-was firmly separated from the mechanical
act of earth-moving or tree-planting. However, in t

-and arguably in that of other art forms-Paulso
partial truth. Civic humanism, in England at least, w
from the concept of property,21 and if gardens wer
possessions. The material nature of the art object, w
den or a statue, could not be avoided; it was someth
something to be owned. Indeed, the status of the l
political site, as I have already remarked in the wor
pole, resulted precisely from the dual nature of land
the right to political representation, the landscape
representing the justness of that right.
The ideological implications of the landscape garden
fore hardly be avoided when writing of its design. E
tic analyses of the English garden-which largely av
political analogies-indulged in that cultural polemic
landscape garden to be, precisely, English. Equally,
den was to be worth writing of as a national art, t
had to be asserted; as a result, writing on the Engl
pelled at some level to engage with those discourse
garden to claim its liberal status. The very import
garden as one of England's few great contributions
almost inevitably made it a site for bitter controver
William and George Mason, as in those of Horace W
Price, varying political claims are made quite overt.
the fact that these writers differ in the exact construc
public meaning, and decry some gardens as the p
mechanics, a fundamental confidence in, and willin
liberal status of the English garden remains. The c
garden is a liberal art is not at issue; rather, the que
gardens are genuinely liberal, and which are merel
this very question which made the work of "Capab
troversial (fig. 8).
Despite the persuasiveness of claims for a transiti
literature from the allegorical to the descriptive, an
the private,22 a transition which has also been asser
painting,23 a parallel transition is less apparent in t
Shared public meaning did not simply disappear fr
the advent of "Capability" Brown's mature work; it
go a shift in its construction from a site within the gar
source of the written text. If subjective respons
always possible-whatever the style of garden design
important to detail a mode of constructing public
garden that has been disregarded, and disregarde
, .:. . ,..... k t. r// .. . ., . , . . , , ' . . .r ..: . ,
Fig. 8. House and landscaping by "Capabili

Belvedere from the earlier garden design o
trees to the left of the house. Engraving fro
Nobility and Gentry, Chelsea, 1779-86 (Hun
slewing our conception of available re

role of literature in the ordering of th
den was an implicit discussion of the
asserting rules for garden design, gard
upon those discourses a normative
public meaning. Indeed, except as an a
the garden, it is difficult to explain th
which was to appear in the later eight
once set about constructing and assert
as a worthy member of the liberal art
English nation.
NOTES
1. George Mason, An Essay on Design in Gardening, 2d ed
2. See, for example, H. F. Clark, The English Landscape Ga

Christopher Hussey, English Gardens and Landscapes, 170
John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Pain
ing the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore and London, 1976);
Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford,
History of British Gardening (London, 1979), chap. 5.
3. Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, Ill

(London, 1770).
4. John Dixon Hunt, "Emblem and Expressionism in the

Landscape Garden," Eighteenth Century Studies, 3 (Sprin
Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English
Century (London, 1975).
5. George Clarke, "Grecian Taste and Gothic Virtue: Lor

Programme and Its Iconography," Apollo, 97 (June 1973):
6. However, for Stourhead, for example, see Kenneth W

Landscape: Painters and the Lake Garden of Stourhead,"
210-14; and idem, Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of Engli
(Oxford, 1970); James Turner, "The Structure of Henry H
Bulletin, 61 (1979): 68-77; Malcolm Kensall, "The Iconogra
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 46 (1983):
Charlesworth, "On Meeting Hercules in Stourhead Garden
History, 9 (1989): 71-75. For Rousham, see for example M
View Rousham by Kent's Gardener," Garden History, 11
R. Coffin, "The Elysian Fields of Rousham," Proceedings of
Philosophical Society, 130 (1986): 406-23.
7. Quoted from George Clarke, "Grecian Taste," 568.
8. For my account of Hill's garden I rely upon David Wat

1831, and the Neo-Classical Ideal (London, 1968), 147-51.
9. I rely here upon the account given by Brian Allen, "Jo

Garden," Journal of Garden History, 1 (1981): 215-38.
10. For a history of this trope, see John Prest, The Garden
Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (London, 1981).
11. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R.

London, 1975), 240.
12. Here I paraphrase John Barrell's discussion of Fuseli in

Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven and Londo
13. See Robert Williams, "Making Places: Gar

Journal of Garden History, 3 (1983): 382-85, w
temples, banquet and summer houses, rotun
baths, grottoes, towers, columns, ruins, dair
stables. It is these very structures for which
14. David Morris, Thomas Hearne and His Lan
15. See Nigel Howard Everett, "Country Jus

Improvement and English Conservatism, wit
1790s," Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambrid
Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tr
66-83.
16. I refer throughout to The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books. To which is
added a commentary and notes by William Burgh (York, 1783); this appears also
as volume 2 of Poems by William Mason M.A. A New Edition (York, 1796).
17. An unsympathetic summary of Mason's influence upon later works,

including reviews, is provided by J. W. Draper, William Mason: A Study in
Eighteenth-Century Culture, 233-35.
18. Here I rely upon John Barrell's treatment of Reynolds in Political Theory of
Painting, chap. 1, passim.
19. For the standard discussion of history painting, see Rensselaer W. Lee, "Ut
Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting," Art Bulletin, 22 (1940): 197-
269.
20. Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700-
1820 (London, 1989), 3.
21. See John Barrell, "The Public Prospect and the Private View: The Politics of
Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain," in Reading Landscape: Country-City-
Capital, ed. Simon Pugh (Manchester, 1990), 28-29.
22. See Hunt, "Emblem and Expression," and John Barrell, "The Public Figure
and the Private Eye: William Collins' 'Ode to Evening'," in Teaching the Text, ed.
Susanne Kappeler and Norman Bryson (London, 1983), 1-17.
23. This is the primary subject of Paulson's Emblem and Expression.

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Re-Reading the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape Garden

Author(s): Stephen Bending

I certainly did not hesitate ... to speak of a decided superiority of

Writing in 1795-and looking back to the views he had expressed nearly

It is helpful to begin with a very brief summary of some ideas

Fig. 2. The Vale of Venus, by William Kent, Ro

Trnldram. ^.f?u r7ftff, J SO;a / O Jar. p

Fig. 3. "Capability" Brown's landscaping at Tren

The idea of the emblematic garden is now we

Fig. 4. The Temple of Modem Virtue, Stow

Fig. 5. The Temple of British Worthies, Sto

ideals of government being contrasted with th

must be to every mind in a state of

Hope and the Picturesque

'_ c x GROTTO S ' -

rolittod Repentance 11Grot to

Spqeen , m \>^ S ence Reason

t Repentance 4 " f '

Fig. 6. Reconstruction of Aaron Hill's Moral Rock Garden of 1734, reproduced

viewer to recognize and respond with

design catered to such subjective responses is in a se

Gardening, as far as Gardening is an Art, or entitle

Gardens are necessarily man-made and impose a set

[T]here are in all considerable objects great charact

and research, which are only the busi

Reynolds's concern in this passage is

instead an apparently foreign style of garden d

were inappropriate to the new layouts

Fig. 7. Brown's Gothic Bathhouse at Corsham Court, Wiltshire, reproduced

friend William Burgh, appearing in 178

of liberty and the English constitution; the spatial a

For William Mason and Horace Walpole the garden is an emblem of

to citizenship. Thus formulated, the v

act of earth-moving or tree-planting. However, in t

, .:. . ,..... k t. r// .. . ., . , . . , , ' . . .r ..: . ,

Fig. 8. House and landscaping by "Capabili

slewing our conception of available re

1. George Mason, An Essay on Design in Gardening, 2d ed

2. See, for example, H. F. Clark, The English Landscape Ga

3. Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, Ill

4. John Dixon Hunt, "Emblem and Expressionism in the

5. George Clarke, "Grecian Taste and Gothic Virtue: Lor

6. However, for Stourhead, for example, see Kenneth W

7. Quoted from George Clarke, "Grecian Taste," 568.

8. For my account of Hill's garden I rely upon David Wat

9. I rely here upon the account given by Brian Allen, "Jo

11. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R.

12. Here I paraphrase John Barrell's discussion of Fuseli in

13. See Robert Williams, "Making Places: Gar

14. David Morris, Thomas Hearne and His Lan

15. See Nigel Howard Everett, "Country Jus

17. An unsympathetic summary of Mason's influence upon later works,

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