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Foto: R. Lessenich: Stowe - Elysian Fields

In the eighteenth century the landscape garden, first brought to

maturity in England, set out on a triumphal march, perhaps unique in
its way, and soon became exemplary for the whole of Europe. Known
as "le jardin anglais", "der englische Garten" or "il giardino inglese", it
spread across the entire Continent and beyond. Its influence is felt
from Zrskoje Sel and Pavlvsk in Russia to Central Park or Prospect
Park in New York. With its softly rolling greenery, its irregular patches
of water especially the serpentine lakes , its naturally planted
clumps of trees and its "painterly" views of buildings pregnant with
meaning, the English landscape garden was a tremendous export hit.
It can with full justice be called an English creation. Naturally,
contemporary English authors such as William Mason in his poem The

English Garden (1772-81) stressed its autochthonous character, and

Horace Walpole, in his well-known History of the Modern Taste in
Gardening (1771-80) indignantly protested against the suggestion that
England must share its claim to originality with other nations.
Numerous references in European literature as, for instance, even
Rousseaus double-edged compliment in La nouvelle Hlose (1761),
testify to the prior claim of the English. It is with good reason that the
landscape garden remains the outstanding example of England not
being on the receiving end in its exchange with the Continent in the
field of fine arts; indeed it made a lasting impression on all of Europe.
For some time this cultural achievement has been the focal point of an
extremely lively research debate and presumably not only as a
reflection of ecological currents. I would now like to look at this debate
from the specific perspective of my discipline.
I

What motive does the Anglicist have in entering into the debate on the
landscape garden, a debate led with special intensity by art historians?
His justification rests upon the fact that literature played an amazingly
important role briefly, as we will see, a decisive one in the
landscape garden movement. In my paper, I shall take a closer look at
the literary contribution to the landscape garden, which, first of all,
made its appearance as a "Gesamtkunstwerk" (comprehensive work of
art) typical of neo-Classicism. In this I should like to concentrate on
the origin and early manifestations of the English landscape garden.
The English garden must be seen as the result of an intellectual
movement which developed over a lengthy period of time. After
desultory beginnings in the course of the seventeenth century it really
got under way after the turn of the new century and eventually
ushered in a new style of gardening. A person looking for external
signs of the rise of the English garden in the first two decades of the
eighteenth century, will, however, be disappointed. In practice the
French taste in gardening, or its more playful Dutch variant, reigned
unchallenged. The court gardeners George London and Henry Wise,
trained in the Le Ntre circle, worked along the lines of the French
formalist school, as Wises lay-outs of the royal gardens in London and
the famous gardens at Chatsworth, the seat of the Dukes of

Devonshire, serve to illustrate. In this context I may also mention

Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire. Charles Bridgeman, too who after
1709 worked together with the baroque architect and dramatist Sir
John Vanbrugh on the lay-out of the Duke of Marlboroughs gardens at
Blenheim Palace still harked back to the ideas of his predecessors
and for the most part remained true to the traditional concept of
tectonic forms and symmetrical landscape formation. And professional
garden treatises like Stephen Switzers The Nobleman. Gentleman, and
Gardeners Recreation (1715) clearly have their foundations in the past
and do not unequivocally indicate that they stand on the very
threshold of a new epoch in the art of gardening.
Suggestions for a new direction in gardening must, therefore, have
come from outside the circle of those professionally concerned with the
laying out of gardens. If one takes an enquiring look at the intellectual
scene of England at that time, one finds that the most important
impulses aimed at changing tastes in gardening did not originate with
gardeners, architects or other professionally interested men, but with
authors hommes de lettres in the broadest sense. Theirs is the merit
of having inaugurated the landscape garden movement proper. In the
following, I will give a summary of the major recurring thoughts of
these authors in order to establish the connection with the current
scholarly discussion on the origin of the English landscape garden.
Among those authors who intellectually pioneered the rise of the
landscape garden movement, Addisons contributions are of central
importance. In the first place, he can claim temporal and material
precedence; and, in the second, he expounded his futuristic
conceptions in the periodical essays of the moral weeklies, the new
and influential media of communication. Addisons critical examination
of the formal garden of French origin was persistent and profound and
in the final analysis resulted in a reversal of the order of importance
attached to nature and art in their respective relation to one another.
As early as December 1699 in a letter to William Congreve, Addison
advocated a divergence from the traditional style of gardening. This
document,1 which deals with Addisons encounter with Fontainebleau,
is of primary significance for the early, theoretically marked phase of
the landscape garden movement. By taking notice and approving of
certain links between the actual garden and the surrounding

countryside bordering walls were at that time still in general use he

declares his preference for Fontainebleau over the magnificent
Versailles. Phrases such as "the Genius of the place" and "Artificial
Wildness" show Addisons aesthetic predilection for gardens furnished
with the features of natural landscapes. As in this early document,
Addison in subsequent comments, especially the famous set of essays
on the 'Pleasures of the Imagination' in The Spectator in 1712,2 also
assigned art an ancillary function towards a conception of nature
endowed with a value of its own. Physical nature was decisively
revalued by becoming the source of mental pleasures in which Addison
saw a providential means for the pursuit of human happiness.3 It is of
the essence that he linked his new attitude towards gardening to a
revaluation of external nature, which was endowed with moral power
by means of a teleological line of argument, thus attaining a new
status. The followers of the landscape garden movement held that a
garden was essentially a moral performance. It is not by chance that
Addison also became an advocate of physico-theological thought4 in
many Spectator essays, assimilating the findings of modern science to
his optimistic world-view.
The expansion of physico-theology was a prerequisite for the
development of the landscape garden. As Jacques Boyceaus Trait du
jardinage selon les raisons de la nature et de l'art (1638) exemplifies,
French gardening theory of the seventeenth century saw no clash
between nature and symmetry and was devoted to a geometric
concept that stressed the possibilities of art to transform or even
violate nature. This concept was grounded on the assumption of the
defective state of physical nature.5 In his Sacred Theory of the Earth
(1681-89) Gilbert Burnet still adhered to the opinion that the world
had originally been geometrically designed and that nature had been in
a ruinous condition since the Fall. But this sombre view of mans
physical environment was increasingly superseded by the more
optimistic one of the physico-theologists who came to the fore about
the turn of the new century and had their intellectual stronghold in
England. With the help of physico-theological thinking I would like to
mention only William Derhams popular book Physico-Theology: Or, a
Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from His Works of
Creation (1713) the stamp of metaphysical approval was put upon
nature; the latter not only became more attractive aesthetically but

of major significance during the Enlightenment morally as well. The

new view of nature was widely disseminated by literature, especially in
the form of descriptive and didactic poetry, as testified to by
Blackmores poem Creation (1712). Addison expanded upon this
fundamentally new orientation, for example, in Spectator number 414
(25 June, 1712). It implied mans integration into nature and was an
important prerequisite for the principle that a dynamic attitude to
nature, as displayed in the formal garden which portrayed a nature
that was rigorously controlled, not to say violated should be
superseded by a more passive one. It must be noted in the same
breath that Addison very much in accordance with the basic
aesthetic tenets of neo-Classicism still, of course, had in mind the
embellishment of nature through art; but the norms were reset. The
fact that Claude Lorrains idealized paintings enjoyed the particular
esteem of the early landscape garden movement is also connected
with this underlying current of thought to be found in neo-Classicism.
Although, in his turn towards a garden conception oriented towards the
natural components of landscape, Addison postulated as in Spectator
number 477 (6 September, 1712) among others the replacement of
the hitherto prevailing regularity by the principles of
"irregularity","asymmetry" and "wildness", which alone promised the
desired effect of "variety", such aesthetic aspects must not be seen in
isolation. In their pleas for a new style of gardening, Addison as well as
Pope pushed for example the utilitarian aspect considerably into
the foreground. While Pope, in his well-known Guardian essay number
173 (29 September, 1713), directed against topiary art, called for an
ethically more adequate mode of gardening by drawing attention to
the social benefits of classical examples with their humanist aura of
utility, Addisons catchword in Spectator 477 was "Pleasure as well as
[...] Plenty". One could show kindly allow me to anticipate later
developments for a second that this utilitarian principle even
determines the tripartite structure of Popes Epistle to Burlington
(1731). which subordinates aesthetic considerations to social
significance by making them subject to moral-pragmatic categories. In
the previously mentioned Spectator essay (no. 414), Addison indicates
the disparity of the social foundations on which French and English
gardens (or parks) rest in France a court nobility intent on
ostentation and magnificent self-exhibition; in England an aristocracy

living in the country and interested in good husbandry.

The peculiar nature of the English life-style and, more exactly, of
English political conditions also made its impact in more specifically
ideological terms. I am referring to the political inspiration of the
English landscape garden in the sense of a reaction against French
absolutist patronage, since the sovereign manner in which nature was
appropriated in the formal French garden was interpreted as a selfrepresentation of royal omnipotence. In contrast to this, the literary
pioneers of the English landscape garden bound up their new
conception of nature postulated for this garden with the idea of
political liberty as its fundamental legitimatization. In the description of
an Alpine paradise in Tatler number 161 (20 April, 1710), Addison
made the association between liberty in politics and liberty in
landscape unmistakably clear. As described in this dream vision, nature
is distinguished by variety, plentifulness and disorder in all its aspects.
Prominent features are a meandering stream and a profusion of plants,
which allows all flowers to bloom in their individual beauty without
being penned into regular borders and parterres. It is expressly stated
that this Alpine paradise is the abode of the Goddess of Liberty. Thus
the connection between liberty in politics and liberty in landscape is
established beyond any doubt in this important genetic document.6 In
illustration of the ideological component in the rise of the English
landscape garden I have allowed myself a short quotation from
Shaftesbury to close this part of my paper; in his enthusiastic
description of the harmony of the world in The Moralists (1709)
Shaftesbury contrasts the beauty of unspoiled nature with "the formal
mockery of princely gardens".7 Even if his rhapsodic passages in The
Moralists cannot be taken as an unequivocal declaration in favour of
the future style of gardening, his revelation of the numinous qualities
even of wild landscape implies a positive reassessment of nature itself
inasmuch as the latter reflects the divine order of the universe.
II

Thus far I have tried to give a condensed rendering of the essential

thoughts expressed by those authors whose names are bound up with
the landscape garden movement. At this point I enter into debate with
the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, whose views, owing to their

comprehensive range, even today continue to have an effect on any

discussion of the subject, although this is sometimes only grudgingly
admitted or even ignored. They are presented as a general frame of
reference against which my own line of thought can be checked and
differentiated. Of course I willingly admit to a grain of local patriotism
in thus drawing attention to the seminal work of Pevsner, who was a
Privatdozent in Gttingen until 1934 when he was obliged to emigrate
to England and as wicked tongues have it there established art
history as an academic discipline. In his historically highly influential
essay "The Genesis of the Picturesque", which appeared in the
Architectual Review in 1944 and has been reprinted several times,8
Pevsner, who was the first to stress its literary provenance, posed
three basic questions concerning the origin of the landscape garden:
"Why was it created by the English? Why was it created at that
particular moment, that is, between 1710 and 1730? And why was it
created at the same time and by the same men as the most rigidly
formal architectural style Lord Burlington Palladianism?"9 He
answered the first two questions I will come back to the third as
follows: "It was conceived in England , because it is the garden of
liberalism, and England just at that moment turned liberal, that is,
Whig".10 With this captivatingly concise explanation, which
undoubtedly contains a good measure of truth, Pevsner set the tone
for the debate of the subsequent decades, particularly among art
historians. I would, therefore, like to delineate more clearly my
position towards the genetic problem by dealing with Pevsners theses,
which he put forward again in his book The Englishness of English Art
(1956), and which I recapitulated because of their historically farreaching effect. The problems raised by him have again and again
absorbed the attention of scholars in this field, even without explicit
reference to Pevsner or acknowledgement of his pioneering research.
By the way, a commemorative volume, containing an essay on Pevsner
and Englishness, appeared a short time ago.11 To the three questions
Pevsner posed I want to add a fourth and in my opinion crucial one. It
is surprising that, apart from in my own publications,12 upon which I
shall sometimes draw, the following question has never been
thoroughly discussed until now: why was literature able to play such
an outstanding part genetically? As will be seen, the answer to this
question sheds additional light on the first two questions posed by
Pevsner and bids fair to give a satisfactory explanation of the inception

of the landscape garden.

First of all it must be stated that despite the altogether welcome
impetus aroused by Pevsners theses, his smooth summation does not
quite fit the bill. Thus, the beginning of what he characterizes as a
Whig epoch (1710-1730) actually coincided with a Tory renaissance.
Consequently, the genetically most productive phase was, if anything,
marked by a liberal low; Addisons extremely important contributions
mostly originated in the conservative era of Queen Anne. Of course,
one can avoid the difficulties suggested here - and this seems to be
the right perspective - by assessing the years between 1710 and 1714
as a period of time during which the already initiated process of
liberalization in England was merely delayed. Moreover and quite apart
from this fact, compared with its continental rival France, even the
England of the closing years of Queen Annes reign thought of itself as
the epitome of freedom. A fact more inconsistent with Pevsners Whig
thesis which many art historians have adopted without hesitation is
that Pope, a star witness for the genesis of the landscape garden, was
a Tory! A number of scholars have since become more cautious about
the strictly party-political orientation. Thus, Hunt and Willis express
themselves rather warily in the introduction to their well-known
anthology The Genius of the Place: "The English landscape garden was
associated from the start with the idea of Liberty".13 And finally one
has to consider that the antagonism between Whigs and Tories was
increasingly replaced by that between Court and Country after the
accession of the Hanoverians, which both blurred and to some extent
diminished party distinctions. This constellation also forms the
ideological basis for the sort of landscape garden with which I will later
illustrate my more theoretical statements.
Though Pevsners sweeping Whig thesis incorporating the Tory Pope
into the vanguard of liberal garden pioneers cannot be accepted as it
stands and, moreover, lacks the necessary subtle differentiation in the
analysis of the historical subject-matter, it still points to the
prominence of Whig initiative in the actual genesis of the English
garden. It is not for nothing that the strictly Whiggish Kit-Cat Club
where, for instane, Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, met Sir John
Vanbrugh, the architect of Castle Howard14 - has several times been
referred to as the organizational nucleus of the landscape garden

movement.15 The ideological bent of the latter and much of its inner
dynamics are further illuminated by the fact that the adoption of the
Palladian style, particularly promoted by Lord Burlington, can be
regarded as a parallel move to opt for the kind of architectural form
that seemed best suited to project the image of English political
liberty.16 A Whig halo that does not quite encircle Pope does indeed
seem to surround the inception of the landscape garden. Pevsners
third question referred to the in no way self-evident fact that the same
persons one could speak of trendsetters in taste who launched the
new style in gardening also assisted in the breakthrough of Palladian
architecture. Natural gardens and Palladian architecture are in fact
closely connected, and Palladian buildings villas, temples, bridges
are just as much a fixed element of the landscape garden at least in
the first half of the century as pointed arches are a necessary
component of Gothic churches. The softly modelled nature the neoClassical landscape garden was still quite a bit removed from the
Romantic conception of nature seems to embrace these Palladian
buildings with ease. You can still experience this co-operation, this
joint effort of nature and architecture, in the sense of an atmosphere
conducive to meditation, in such famous landscape parks as Studley
Royal in Yorkshire or Stourhead in Wiltshire. Yet the symbiosis of the
natural garden with the austere architectural formalism of the Palladian
style is not a particularly compelling one aesthetically. With this I
return to the specific limitation of the aesthetic impulse which I hinted
at in connexion with Addisons genetic contributions. The limitation of
mere aesthetic categories decisive for understanding the neoClassical landscape garden can here be explicated. From an
exclusively aesthetic point of view, I feel that the rationalistic formal
garden with its transparent orderliness and clear proportions would be
an appropriate or even more compatible partner to Palladian
architecture. And baroque buildings like St. Peters Cathedral in Rome
which Pope draws on, not accidentally, as a model in An Essay on
Criticism (ll. 247-252) satisfy the neo-Classical ideal of the symmetry
of parts and the harmony of the whole almost as well as the Palladian
buildings, which cannot conceivably be separated from the landscape
garden. Palladian architecture, with its severe symmetry and its
extreme sense of proportion, in no way corresponded with the
tendencies of asymmetry, irregularity, contrast and variety17 aimed at
in the natural style of gardening. Thus, from a purely aesthetic point of

view, certain discrepancies continue to bother us. For this reason, the
art historian Rudolf Wittkower has tried to find an escape from these
inconsistencies by pursuing Pevsners socio-cultural line of
argumentation and stressing the affinity of Palladianism to the natural
garden from an ideological angle. His most important statement reads:
"Burlingtons Neoclassicism and so-called romanticism vis-a-vis nature
were two sides of the same medal inscribed 'LIBERTY'".18 Wittkowers
approach, with which one might tentatively agree, certainly facilitates
the elucidation of a difficult problem. Judith Hook clearly supports this
view: "[...] Shaftesbury, Colen Campbell and Lord Burlington had
already begun to view Palladianism as that architectural form which
best expressed the new English political liberty".19 She even maintains
that the adoption of the Palladian style was tantamount to "a test of
Whig political orthodoxy [...]".20
In my opinion, no doubt can remain that the occupation with the most
essential components of the landscape garden requires us to put the
importance of the aesthetic side into perspective. For it is only in this
manner that the various elements of the landscape garden under the
aegis of literature can be united in a genetically plausible manner. I
will clarify this with one last example, which is linked to the present
chain of argument. It concerns the influence of painting, which played
an important role in the practical realization of the English landscape
garden. As you can see by the example of Stourhead, the landscape
garden movement had a marked predilection for certain schools of
painting, but especially for the culture-saturated art of Claude Lorrain.
In his pictures, suffused with a mild, Arcadian quietude, reality and
ideal are harmoniously blended. This special orientation towards
Claude Lorrains paintings partly followed premises of an ideological
nature, for according to "naturalistic" criteria other schools of painting,
for example the Dutch, should have met with more approval. As the
mention of Jacob van Ruisdael and others in Richard Payne Knights
poem The Landscape (1794) testifies,21 the influence of the Dutch
landscape painters, however, only made itself felt at a later stage, that
is during the heyday of the picturesque garden. Even in this sector,
aesthetics remained functionally dependent on specific contemporary
modes of thought, which betrayed their historico-political motives
through their commitment to classical antiquity.

Source: Wikipedia

III

With my considerations on the proper limitation of the importance of

the aesthetic element not of course its neglect I return to the
question I added to the original three posed by Pevsner and which can
now be given full attention, that is, why literature was able to play
such an outstanding part genetically. The English landscape garden
was a comprehensive work of art, which in Rudolf Shnels words
was marked by "die Verbindung von Freiheitspathos, Naturandacht und
Antikenkult.22 In this characterization the ideological aspect also takes
precedence. In my opinion, the socio-political approach offers a valid
approach for answering the question of function. The rise of the new
type of garden coincided with the consolidation of the rule of a

predominantly Whig aristocracy, whose political and cultural

independence from the court as an all-embracing centre of power
manifested itself in their magnificent country seats. Whereas in France
an aristocracy based on the court and given to ostentation was
attached to the capital as the only sphere of influence, in England an
aristocracy dispersed in rural centres of gravitation and interested in
the economic exploitation of the land was able to display its political
and social self-image through the creation of landscape gardens. In the
previously mentioned number 414 of The Spectator Addison at least
hinted at these dissimilar social conditions that were operative in the
paradigmatic change of norms from the French to the English garden.
It is certain that the economic motive of using the spacious pasture
grounds that were becoming readily available through the enclosures
at that time provided an additional incentive for the nascent
aspirations towards an aesthetic ennoblement of the countryside.23
The French formal garden was the visual embodiment of a grand
concept of order; its replacement by the English landscape garden
apparently required the presence of an equally all-embracing
intellectual counter-movement which articulated itself above all
through literature. If the beginnings of the English landscape garden
can to a significant extent be ascribed to the impulses of a uniquely
liberal English civilization upon which matter some sort of agreement
seems to prevail then it was literature coming as it did into closer
contact with the social world than the other arts that was
predestined to articulate the English lead in this field and to become
the pioneer of a cultural undertaking of national dimensions.
The specific part adopted by literature was compatible with the
increasing interest in landscape an interest that was specifically
aroused in the early eighteenth century through the poetic and
philosophical associations evoked by nature. The landscape garden of
the first half of the eighteenth century, which Ronald Paulson
appropriately calls "the poetic garden or the emblematic or learned
garden",24 was like a kind of moral stage. The new definition of the
meaning of nature transmitted by literature could easily become the
sounding-board for related ideas. To quote one pertinent example, the
free growth of a plant was compared to the free development of a
human being25 an analogy which implied as its antithesis the formal
garden as a symbol of unnaturalness.26 Literature was able to become

the theoretical promoter of the landscape garden movement because it

was the privileged and fairly popular medium for the propagation of
certain ideological notions notions that led to the gradual erosion of
the French concept of gardening. It can to a large degree be credited
to literature in its role as the transmitter of basic political and
intellectual ideas that the gardens coming into existence in Georgian
England were associated with liberty and p e r c e i v e d by
contemporaries in terms of national characteristics always a
revealing piece of information. The aura of liberty surrounding the
English garden must not, of course, mislead one into thinking of it as a
wholly autochthonous creation with respect to its art-historical
configurations. Thus Marie-Luise Egbert seems to exaggerate when she
critically remarks that "many writers on gardens deliberately passed
over in silence the obvious foreign inspirations of the new garden
model, thereby creating the very myth of the Englishness of the
landscape garden".27 New works of art are never creationes ex nihilo,
which would be against all experience in cultural matters, and no
sound scholar ever denied that the English landscape garden,
especially in the realization of its architectural components, profited
from the rich store of forms made available by earlier periods of the
history of art. The ideological ambience is, however, sufficient to
substantiate the claim for a national archetype in gardening
determined more by semantic predispositions than by objective data
relating to the ordinary give-and-take of the arts. The fact that
literature possessed a public dimension and was not only a transmitter
of taste but also of values, enabled it to become the fundamental
conveyor of meaning within the framework of a friendly artistic climate
at this stage of the landscape garden movement.
Above and beyond performing the function of an interpretative agent,
a fundamental bestower of meaning, literature was largely responsible
for the timing of a genetic process resulting in the replacement of one
cultural model by another. It was literature that assumed the part of a
co-ordinating agency, ensuring not only the conceptual but also the
temporal coalescence of essential components such as the new moral
vindication of nature and the patriotic preoccupation with the freedom
of unrestrained landscape. This revaluation of nature was bound to
activate latent objections to the French formal garden and to rouse
aspirations towards a more uninhibited shaping of landscape. However,

it was by no means clear w h e n the new moral vindication of nature

would become effective in genetic terms. It seems to me that the
support rendered by empirical science through the publications of the
Royal Society, for example, did not become genetically effective until
the later part of Queen Annes reign, when the physico-theological
approach to nature drew substantial support from contemporaries and
permeated other, more easily accessible spheres of intellectual life. We
have to come to terms with the fact that the decisive theoretical
foundations of the landscape garden were laid during the exact phase
of the War of the Spanish Succession when England, opposing French
ambitions of hegemony, became the centre of world politics and
acutely aware of its privileged position based on constitutional liberty.
It was the prerogative of literature to shape the national profile. The
English authors who advocated a break with the past in the art of
gardening under the impact of political circumstances performed a
function that devolved upon them in the cultural context at the end of
Queen Annes reign. It was the fact that literature possessed a public
dimension and was the fundamental transmitter of values indicative of
national self-identity that enabled it to become the prime mover of
change at this stage of the landscape garden movement. That such
impulses made themselves felt so early, and well before any practical
achievements, proves the significance of ideological incentives; their
anticipatory appeal makes David Watkins readiness "to see the
political interpretation as a rhetorical justification after the event,
rather than as a guiding inspiration from the start"28 seem unjustified.
The genetically crucial query ought to be when and under what
conditions were certain visual props at the permanent disposal of the
fine arts used to accomplish a break with the French taste in
gardening. Seen in this light, borrowing from Italian gardens;29 for
instance, only means that artistic support was needed in order to
realize ones native ambitions. The argument put forward here is the
very reverse of what Stephen Bending implies, namely that "One of
the myths of the English landscape garden in the eighteenth century
was of its almost miraculous 'discovery' as a wholly native art in the
early years of the Hanoverian succession".30 Of course the landscape
garden was not a creation sprung fully armed from the brains of
Addison, Shaftesbury and others; nor can a causally flawless,
historically preordained ineluctability for its inception be construed.
Still, some attempt to discover a degree of historical plausibility is

necessary. In this context, even the prosaic indications provided by

mere chronology should not be despised. There is no denying the fact
that the landscape garden only came into existence and pretty
rapidly, at that - after its literary promoters had made their appeal for
its establishment; the constituents of this appeal point to a strong
Anglocentric strain as a motive for the creation of this new form of art.

Although Addisons explicit ideological pronouncements are rather the

exception, the literary initiators of the landscape garden joined in
seeking to invest this with certain expectations of a political nature.
Thus, for instance, even if as I said Shaftesburys well-known
statement quoted earlier cannot be read as an unequivocal declaration
in favour of a definite type of garden, it can still be interpreted in the
context of his many utterances pleading for cultural independence from
political motives. In his Letter concerning the Art or Science of Design,
written in 1712, he rejected the baroque art of Sir Christopher Wren,
blaming its orientation on the corrupt taste of courts. As art criticism
here overlaps with criticism of society, he is quite consistent in
postulating the development of a national taste in the arts as the
cultural equivalent of contemporary political conditions. With an
emphatic gesture he expresses his confidence that England will reap
great cultural rewards from the propitious circumstance of a political
liberty that bears on all the arts.31 That such a scope of activity was
just then being envisaged, was in accordance with what I would like to
call the logic of contextual determinants. Addisons statements along
with Shaftesburys provide incontrovertible evidence of authentic
contemporaneity and cannot be contradicted with the argument
perhaps valid to a certain extent in the case of Masons poem The
English Garden that they are the result of reasoning after the event.
Addisons essays were born of the mental climate of which he was,
perhaps, the most reliable spokesman. In this context I might also
mention that the recent attempts of Stephen Bending and other
scholars to deny the relevance of Horace Walpoles well-known history
of eighteenth-century gardening have not convinced me.32 Walpoles
narrative may be somewhat one-sided in that it overstates some
aspects while omitting others, but it does not fall prey to inadmissible
monocausal explanations and does full justice to basic cultural and
social trends that acted as stimuli to the landscape garden movement.

It was in the complex but sharply delineated political and cultural

contours of the later part of Queen Annes reign that literature, which
allied the new moral vindication of nature to ideological
predispositions, was able to perform the preparatory and accelerating
function of a purveyor of ideas and help foster an intellectual
atmosphere in which the ambition to create a national type of garden
was put on the public agenda. The pilot function of literature,
interestingly, underlines the conception of the English garden as a
spiritual landscape in the sense pointed out by Bruno Snell.33
IV

Foto R. Lessenich: Elysian Fields and Cobham's Column

Let me close by casting a brief glance at Stowe a corroborative

glance in that it confirms the national aura of the landscape garden

and the contributing function of literature as a fundamental conveyor

of meaning. Stowe is both representative and exceptional
representative in that it is the most famous and widely mentioned
English landscape garden of the eighteenth century, exceptional in that
it illustrates the intellectual endowment of "the poetic garden or the
emblematic or learned garden" to an unusual degree. Stowe testifies
to the genetic priority of literature which, as an abstract medium, could
only make its imprint on this garden because the latter was to an
unusual degree accessible to external ideological influences primarily
brought to bear upon it by authors. As detailed research has shown,34
literature was instrumental in defining the character of the Elysian
Fields, the outstanding part of the newly laid out grounds. There, the
contrastive principle operative in satire and structurally determinative
in Addisons essay in number 123 of The Tatler (21 January, 1710) was
transposed to the pictorial level. More specifically, it is only through the
help of literature as the main vehicle of the national idea of liberty that
the meaningful interaction between the buildings to which the walkers
attention is directed can take full effect. The relations between the
Temple of Ancient Virtue, the Temple of Modern Virtue and the Temple
of British Worthies, the most spectacular building there, only emerge in
all their neatly adjusted concatenations when one realizes the degree
to which literature offered semantic pre-coding.

Foto R. Lessenich: Stowe - Exedra

Thus, to quote but one relevant example, in the Temple of Ancient

Virtue, Lycurgus, whom Thomson praised as the founder of the mixed
state in Liberty35 symbolizes the political ideal of contemporary
England and forms the counterpart to King Alfred the Great. The latter,
represented in the Temple of British Worthies, is intended, according to
the superscription, to be looked upon as the protector of liberty and
thus to call to mind the very virtue the destruction of which was held
against Sir Robert Walpole by the Opposition circle around Lord
Cobham. In order to disseminate its intended meaning, the Temple of
British Worthies - as well as the Temple of Ancient Virtue - could not
simply rely upon traditional symbols, but had to benefit from the
assistance of literature, which had made certain political motives its
peculiar province and put them at the disposal of an admittedly select

public.
The patriotic aura of Stowe as a cohesive force imbuing the gardens
with meaning becomes most unmistakably evident in the muchdebated stylistic pluralism36 a phenomenon relevant to the English
landscape garden in its entirety. The coexistence of classical-Palladian,
Gothic-medieval, Chinese and a little later Greek buildings cannot
satisfactorily be explained from a strictly formal or aesthetic point of
view.

Foto R. Lessenich: Stowe House

It can only be explained by reference to the integrative power of the

prevailing idea of liberty that was responsible for the semantic
standardization of vastly dissimilar buildings. Aesthetically the
discrepancy between the Gothic Temple and the Palladian buildings is

manifestly evident;37 their simultaneity only becomes plausible on an

ideological plane. The Gothic Temple, known as the Temple of Liberty
for the first few years, conspicuously associated the Gothic style in
architecture with the national idea of liberty.38 This association was
rendered possible through contemporary modes of thought: the term
Goths was used for all the Germanic invaders of Rome, who were
believed to be the ancestors of the present English constitution which,
in contemporary usage, was also designated as "our old Gothick
Constitution".39 It was literature that paved the way for the new
connotation of medieval architecture. Thus, to quote again only one
particularly pertinent example, the topical theme of Gothic or Old
English liberty was extensively treated in Thomsons Liberty (1735-36).
In this work the same stamp of approval was put upon classical (Greek
and Roman) and Gothic-medieval liberty that established semantic
accord between stylistically dissimilar buildings. It is the very aesthetic
heterogeneity of the garden buildings that makes the dependence of
the early landscape garden on ideological impulses emerge all the
more strikingly. In the consciousness of contemporary observers the
stylistic pluralism of the garden buildings appeared to be subsumed
under the semantic monism of the patriotic glorification of political
liberty40 an English privilege indicative of fundamental human rights
and therefore cosmopolitan by implication. To repeat a point already
made: it does not invalidate the argument pursued in my paper that
the Englishness of the early landscape garden could only assert itself
under the art-historical terms of selective but assimilative borrowing.
After all, nobody questions the national aura of Versailles as the
epitome of the French formal garden in spite of its hints of Italian
models. Internationalism in the fine arts did not prevent the landscape
garden from becoming imbued with the spirit of an enlightened
nationalism.
Stowe certainly offers an especially advantageous object for the
connexions established in the course of my paper. Other parks,
however, also reveal the fact that in the landscape garden of the early
eighteenth century, exuding to an astonishing degree the very spirit of
political integrity, it was literature that acted as the pre-eminent giver
of meaning.

Footnotes
This article (slightly revised) was originally given as a lecture at the annual
conference of the South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Cocoa
Beach (Florida) on 24 February 2006.
1 See The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford, 1941), 10-12.
2 See numbers 411-421 of this periodical.
3 Cf. Heinz-Joachim Mllenbrock, "Die Literaturtheorie Joseph Addisons", in
RdigerAhrens and Erwin Wolff (eds.), Englische und amerikanische Literaturtheorie.
Studien zu ihrer historischen Entwicklung, 2 vols. (Heidelberg 1978-79), I, 275.
4 On the tradition of this important school of thought see the informative fourth
chapter in Thomas Noll, Die Landschaftsmalerei von Caspar David Friedrich.
Physikotheologie, Wirkungssthetik und Emblematik. Voraussetzungen und Deutung
(Mnchen and Berlin, 2006), pp. 47-55. See also pp. 63-68 of this book.
5 See Louis Hautecoeur, Les Jardins des Dieux et des Hommes (Paris, 1959), p. 151.
6 See also the comment in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1987), II,
401, note 6.
7 Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times,
etc., ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. (Gloucester, Mass., 1963), II, 125
. 8 See, for instance, Nikolaus Pevsner, Studies in Art, Architecture and Design, 2
vols. (London, 1968), I, 79-101.
9 Nikolaus Pevsner, "The Genesis of the Picturesque", The Architectural Review 96
(1944), pp. 139-146: 139.
10 Ibid., p. 146.
11 See Andrew Causey, "Pevsner and Englishness", in Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner,
ed. Peter Draper (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 161-174.
12 See Heinz-Joachim Mllenbrock, "The English Landscape Garden: Literary Context
and Recent Research", The Yearbook of English Studies 14 (1984), pp. 291-299; Der
englische Landschaftsgarten des 18. Jahrhunderts und sein literarischer Kontext
(Gttingen, 1986); "The Englishness of the English landscape garden and the
genetic role of literature: a reassessment", Journal of Garden History 8 (1988), pp.
97-103; "Der englische Landschaftsgarten des 18. Jahrhunderts: Zur Funtion der
Literatur bei der Genese eines epochemachenden Gesamtkunstwerks", in Kunstgriffe.
Ausknfte zur Reichweite von Literaturtheorie und Literaturkritik. Festschrift fr
Herbert Mainusch, ed. Ulrich Horstmann and Wolfgang Zach (Frankfurt a.M., 1989),
pp. 241-251.

13 The Genius of the Place. The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, ed. John
Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (London, 1975, repr. 1979), p. 33.
14 Cf. Valentin Hammerschmidt and Joachim Wilke, Die Entdeckung der Landschaft.
Englische Grten des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1990), p. 27.
15 See, for instance, Dorothy Stroud, "Eighteenth Century Landscape Gardening", in
Studies in Architectural History, [vol. I], ed. William A. Singleton (London and York,
1954), p. 37; and Joseph Burke, English Art 1714-1800 (Oxford, 1976), p. 45, note
3.
16 See Judith Hook, The Baroque Age in England (London, 1976), pp. 46, 51.
17 The unfolding of this element even made Henry Home (Lord Kames) maintain the
superiority of gardening over architecture; cf. Erwin Panofsky, "The Ideological
Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator", Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society, vol. 107, no.4 (Philadelphia, 1963), p. 274.
18 Rudolf Wittkower, "English Neo-Palladianism, the Landscape Garden, China and
the Enlightenment", in id., Palladio and English Palladianism (London, 1974), p.183.
19 The Baroque Age in England, p. 51.
20 Ibid., p. 51.
21 See the extract in Hunt and Willis (eds.), The Genius of the Place, p. 344.
22 Rudolf Shnel, Der Park als Gesamtkunstwerk des englischen Klassizismus am
Beispiel von Stourhead (Heidelberg, 1977), p. 8.
23 The economic component is, however, overemphasized by Wolfgang Schepers,
Hirschfelds Theorie der Gartenkunst 1779-1785 (Worms, 1980), pp. 5-6.
24 Ronald Paulson, "The Poetic Garden", in id., Emblem and Expression in English Art
of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1975), p. 20.
25 See Adrian von Buttlar, Der englische Landsitz 1715-1760: Symbol eines liberalen
Weltentwurfs (Mittenwald, 1982), p. 143.
26 Significantly - and quite in line with national idiosyncracies - the formal geometric
garden was likewise associated with the "got naturel" of the French nation! Cf. Gert
Grning and Uwe Schneider, "Nationalistische und regionalistische Tendenzen in der
Gartenkultur am Beispiel von Frankreich, den USA und Italien", in iid. (eds.),
Gartenkultur und nationale Identitt: Strategien nationaler und regionaler
Identittsstiftung in der deutschen Gartenkultur (Worms, 2001), p. 8.
27 Marie-Luise Egbert, "Patriotic Islands: The Politics of the English Landscape
Garden", Erfurt Electronic Studies in English 5/2002 (http:// www.uni-erfurt.de/
eestudies/ eese/ artic22/ egbert/ 5-2002.html ).
28 David Watkin, The English Vision. The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and
Garden Design (London, 1982), p. 1.

29 See especially John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove. The Italian Renaissance
Garden in the English Imagination: 1600-1750 (London and Melbourne, 1986).
30 Stephen Bending, "A Natural Revolution? Garden Politics in Eighteenth-Century
England", in Refiguring Revolutions. Aesthetics and Politics from the English
Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker
(Berkeley, 1998), p. 242.
31 See Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times, with a Collection of Letters, 3 vols. (Basil, 1790), III, 331, 335.
32 See my forthcoming article "Horace Walpoles Place in the Historiography of the
English Landscape Garden" in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the
Early Modern Era.
33 See Bruno Snell, "Arkadien. Die Entdeckung einer geistigen Landschaft, in id., Die
Entdeckung des Geistes. Studien zur Entstehung des europischen Denkens bei den
Griechen (3rd impr., Hamburg, 1955), pp. 371-400.
34 For references see my contributions listed in note 12.
35 See Liberty, Book II, lines 114-120.
36 Discussed as metastyle by von Buttlar, Der englische Landsitz, pp. 68-70. This
discursive move does not, however, solve the problem of aesthetic heteromorphism,
but only shifts it to another plane.
37 In Shotover Park (Oxfordshire), by the way, the clash is not nearly as conspicuous
as in the case of Stowe, because a skilful solution of the aesthetic predicament the Gothic eye-catcher, perhaps the earliest known Gothic folly, is placed at the end
of a canal so that it cannot clash with adjacent classical buildings.
38 For the Gothic as the mythical domain of the national idea of liberty see Christine
Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth,
1725-1742 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 108-149.
39 See Josef Haslag, Gothic im siebzehnten und achtzehnten Jahrhundert. Eine
wort- und ideengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Kln and Graz, 1963), pp. 30-35.
40 Bernd-Peter Lange seems to subscribe to my view first expressed in 1988, though
he does not refer to it; see his article "The English Garden and the Patriotic
Discourse", Englishness [anglistik & englischunterricht 46/47 ], ed. Hans-Jrgen
Diller et al. (Heidelberg, 1992), p. 57.