LITMIR.BIZ

LANDSCAPE INTO GARDEN

I—Reason and Romanticism

      A GARDEN is a work of art. It is also a number of other things, such as a place for rest and recreation, and for the pursuit of horticulture, but to be a garden in the true sense of the term it must first be an aesthetic composition.

      The necessity for keeping this in mind arises from a two-centuries old confusion between the idea of gardens as pure works of art, and as works of art in imitation of nature. When Addison said, “Gardens are works of art, therefore they rise in value according to the degree of their resemblance to nature,” he propounded the most fallacious argument that it has ever been the lot of the landscape artist to try to confute. It was perhaps inevitable that, already using her own materials, the pursuers of this art who had just begun to break free from deep-rooted fears of nature as a tyrannical mother, and who now began to woo her as a mistress, should on occasions have confused the means with the end; even so, it could hardly be expected that Addison’s initial error should have led others down the strange and tortuous paths which have brought the modern landscape architect to his present anomalous position. Painters, poets, novelists, musicians and architects were all dragged through the mire, so it is hardly surprising that the fashionable eighteenth-century landscape gardeners did not emerge with their artistic integrities unstained; the matter for regret is that their counterparts of today have not profited by the experience of brother artists who, in almost every sphere of aesthetic activity, have wiped the mud from their shoes and set off on a straighter road towards a more clearly defined horizon.

      The occasion of Addison’s visit to Italy, which roughly corresponds with the opening of the eighteenth century, marked the end of one literary age and the beginning of another. It also sounded the death knell of the old “formal” style of gardening. The next forty years saw the most complete revolution in gardening taste which the art has ever known; our quarrel, however, is not with the influence of that period, but of a later one. The earlier landscape gardeners contributed much to the enlargement of artistic experience—they gave us incidentally the familiar outlines of our present countryside—and although their work contained the germ which gave rise to the subsequent aesthetic malady of gardens, these painters in nature’s materials, as they have been called, were only its harmless carriers.

      For an exact diagnosis it will be necessary to examine the development of gardens together with the artistic trends of the last two hundred years. At the beginning of this period, particularly, gardening was influenced by painting and literature in a manner so marked that these two arts have from the first been recognized as affecting English landscape design more strongly than the economic upheaval which was just beginning.* “The Greeks had no Thomsons because they had no Claudes” was an often quoted saying of the latter part of the century, and while English poets formed their taste on a study of Italian paintings, landscape gardeners drew their inspiration from both. A small acquaintance with the literary and artistic thought of the period makes it clear that gardening followed literature and painting fairly closely, and not architecture, as some writers would have us believe. On the contrary, this latter art was influenced by gardens to a certain extent. Certainly the revived cult of the Gothic in architecture first appeared in gardens, into which ruined abbeys and crumbling castles were introduced as likely to induce the feeling of pensive melancholy, considered a highly satisfactory reaction in the spectator of a landscape garden.

      This inter-reaction of the governing ideals of painting, literature and gardening began with the enthusiasm for Italian landscape as seen through the eyes of painters like Claude and Salvator, and as elaborated in the writings of travellers who had made the Grand Tour, such as Addison, Thomson, Dyer, Gray, and, later, Horace Walpole. The serene and glowing landscapes of Claude and the romantic savagery of Salvator were thought typical in the first case of the Italian plains and the country round Rome and in the second of the wilderness of the Alps through which the English usually passed, at some hazard to their personal safety, on the journey to Italy. Paintings of both these artists found their way across the water and were praised above those of the Dutch masters in which the classical touch so much admired by the new generation of history-conscious “men of taste” was disappointingly absent. The Italian style was feverishly copied and England became a nation of amateur artists.

      Was it not perhaps natural that those who found themselves only mediocre painters in oils and still wished to be accounted as following the fashion should turn to the new style of gardening when it evolved, as a supposedly more facile means of expression? Landscape gardening became the hobby of every English gentleman, and a resulting confusion of ideals was thus perhaps only to be expected.