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Horace Walpole and Eighteenth-Century Garden History Author(s): Stephen Bending Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 57 (1994), pp. 209-226 Published by: The Warburg Institute Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/751470 . Accessed: 02/09/2014 13:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Warburg Institute is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 13:50:02 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HORACE WALPOLE AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GARDEN HISTORY Stephen Bending ... All these devices are rather emblematicalthan expressive; they may be ingenious contriv- ances, and recall absent ideas to the recollection; but they make no immediate impression ... and though an allusion to a favourite or well known subject of history, poetry, or of tra- dition, may now and then animate or dignify a scene, yet as the subject does not naturally belong to a garden, the allusion should not be principal; it should seem to have been suggested by the scene: a transitory image, which irresistibly occurred; not sought for, not laboured; and have the force of a metaphor, free from the detail of an allegory. (Thomas Whately, Observationson ModernGardening..., 1770, p. 151) * homas Whately's distinction between the emblematic and the expressive in T garden ornamentation has been proposed by a number of recent garden his- torians as an appropriate description of historical changes in the eighteenth- century landscape garden:1 changes in form, it is suggested, can be explained in terms of a shift from readable intellectual designs to instantaneous effects upon the sensibility. Thus, if Alexander Pope's garden at Twickenham demands an educated and intricate response, 'Capability' Brown's designs later in the century are con- cerned to evoke the more immediate, less structured responses of mood. Whately's distinction implies an historical transition not only from emblem to metaphor, from the indirect to the direct, but also from the artificial to the increasingly natural; and since the late eighteenth century, garden histories have tended to fit individual gardens within a similar narrative of 'progression'. Arguably the greatest support for such a history of progressive 'naturalness' in garden design came from Horace Walpole in his well-known essay 'On Modern Gardening'. Walpole, writing at about the same date as Whately, did not challenge the notion of emblem and expression as an historical distinction; but his work articulated a far more explicit political ideology, and Walpole's essay therefore offers a substantially different account of garden history. If not all of Walpole's polemical claims are now accepted, his notion of an historical narrative of great gardens and great designers continues to have considerable influence as a framework for many modern accounts of the 'rise' of the landscape garden in eighteenth-century England.2 Yet despite the influence of Walpole's history, its judgements did not go unchal- lenged by his contemporaries. In this essay I will explore some of the competing * Observations on Modern Gardening, illustrated by De- 2 See e.g. J. Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The scriptions, London 1770. Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1700- 1 j. D. Hunt, 'Emblem and Expressionism in the 1789, London 1986, pp. 154-65; and D. M. Roberts's Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden', Eighteenth Cen- introduction to D. C. Streatfield and A. M. Duckworth, tury Studies, iii, Spring 1971, pp. 294-317; and R. Paul- Landscape in the Gardens and the Literature of Eighteenth- son, Emblem and Expression. Meaning in English Art of the Century England (Clark Library Seminars, 1978), Los Eighteenth Century, London 1975. Angeles 1981. 209 Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 57, 1994 This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 13:50:02 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 210 STEPHEN BENDING attempts to construct a history of the English landscape garden in this period, and the importance of those histories to contemporary interpretations of gardens as a part of English culture. It is well known that by the later eighteenth century the English landscape garden was characterised as originating quite abruptly with the Spectator papers of Addison in 1712, the influence of Pope's writings and his garden at Twickenham, and the work of William Kent in the 1730s. It is now accepted that such a position is untenable: foreign influence, textual sources and an inconvenient chronology all belie the assertion. Much work has been done to establish the stylistic genesis of the landscape garden,3 one result of which has been that the contemporary defenders of a now debunked history are largely ignored. This essay considers the strategies by which eighteenth-century writers of garden history set about supporting the orig- inality and significance-indeed the Englishness-of the English landscape garden. It traces through the works of a number of these writers the construction, and de- fence, of an historical discourse which was deemed appropriate to the aims of the landscape garden. The task which these garden historians undertook may be char- acterised, through a paraphrase of Whately, as that of forging an 'irresistible' link between the English landscape garden and British political history: of demonstrat- ing that British political history is a subject which 'naturally belongs to a garden'. The later eighteenth century saw a surge in the number of publications on the history of the English garden. Earlier works on gardens had sometimes included discussion of the gardens of other ages, but they were not conceived with the same stringent historical-and polemical-objectives as their later counterparts; nor did they so confidently judge gardens of past ages, or from within such a firm historical narrative. Many of the later works are openly Whiggish in their historical stance, and defiantly patriotic: a discourse of aesthetic history is constructed as a means of providing, and justifying, value-judgements upon what was considered by some to be England's major original contribution to the fine arts in the eighteenth century.4 Yet one need not adhere to the later eighteenth century's homogenising narra- tive of natural progress. I want first to consider a work from earlier in the century which fails to fit neatly within the constructed tradition: Richard Bradley's Survey of Ancient husbandry and Gardening (1725).5 Bradley, who had recently been made pro- fessor of Botany at the University of Cambridge despite a complete ignorance of Latin and Greek, spends much of his time in this work detailing the techniques of ancient husbandry as a guide for modern agriculture, but briefly considers the de- sign of ancient gardens. He writes: 3 See e.g. H. F. Clark, The English Landscape Garden, can call our own; the only proof of our original talent London 1964; Hunt (as in n. 1); idem, Garden and Grove: in matter of pleasure, I mean our skill in gardening, or the Italian Renaissance Garden and the English Imagination rather laying out grounds; and this is no small honour 1600-1750, London 1986; Paulson (as in n. 1); and to us, since neither Italy not France have ever had the Streatfield and Duckworth (as in n. 2). least notion of it, nor yet do at all comprehend it when 4 See Gray's much quoted comment on the orig- they see it'. The Poems of Mr Gray. To which are prefixed of the Memoirs his and W Mason, York inality English landscape garden: challenging of Life Writings by M.A., Count Algarotti's views, Gray denied European and 1775, pp. 386f. Chinese influence upon the English style and wrote, 5 R. Bradley, A Survey of the Ancient husbandry and 'He is highly civil to our nation; but there is one point Gardening, collectedfrom Cato, Varro, Columella, Virgil, and in which he does not do us justice; I am the more sol- others..., London 1725. icitous about it, because it relates to the only taste we This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 13:50:02 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HORACE WALPOLE 211 In the next place I come to take Notice of the State-Gardens of the Ancients, how they were design'd for Grandeur; the Fashion, or Taste of the Greeksand Romans,in such Grand Gar- dens, was to make them free and open, to consist of as much Variety as possible; to afford shade, and give a refreshing Coolness by variety of Jet-d'eauxand Water-falls. When they laid out their gardens in any Figures (for I do not find that they ever used Knots or Flourishes) those Figures were either Squares, Circles or Triangles, which they commonly encompass'd with Groves of Pines, Firrs, Cypress, Plane-Trees, Beech, or such like; in some convenient Place they also contrived their Ornithons,or Aviaries... He continues that among these features there were also fish ponds, ... in which it was a Custom to have moving Figures, contrived by a famous Clock-Maker at Athens,which, by the motion of the Waters, were continually in Action, which Piece of Art was held mightily in Esteem.

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