Such green shades
Pat Rogers
The Figure in the Landscape John Dixon Hunt (John Hopkins University Press £12.00)
Like a hypochondriac who ransacks the medical dictionary, the British have never been short of a good ailment, At various times the English disease has meant melancholia, suicide, sexual aberration and poor industrial performance. But in the eighteenth century the pathological craze was landscape-gardening mania, furor lzortensis. Great estates blossomed where previously clumps of furze and dank featureless fens had divided the aesthetic interest. Every little half-acre was crowded with topiary, each corner of the land was subjected to improvement, every locus had its genius. In the words of the movement's presiding spirit, Lord Shaftesbury, one could expect everywhere 'a parterre, cypresses, groves, wildernesses. Statues here and there of virtue, fortitude, temperance. Heroes' busts, philosophers' heads, with suitable mottoes and inscriptions. Solemn representations of things deeply natural — caves, grottoes, rocks, urns and obelisks in retired places and disposed at proper distances and points of sight . . . But what is there answerable to this in the minds of the possessors?' A good question, and one that rang through the whole theory of art right up to the Romantic era. It is this issue which provides the basis for John Dixon Hunt's learned and fascinating book.
Of course there have been any number of attempts to chronicle the gardening rage itself. The novelty of Dr Hunt's approach is indicated only obliquely in his subtitle, Poetry, Painting and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century': what is fresh is the mode of interconnection rather than the act of linkage per se. He is interested in the way in which figures enter landscapes, people respond to gardens, or the mind directs the eye. He has some good phrases to describe this transaction between perceiver and perceived; he speaks of 'encounters between mind and landscape', of the 'drama of ideas and associations' presented to a visitor, of 'a language for man's relationship with nature.' He traces in remarkable detail the shift from the so-called 'emblematic' garden, based on Renaissance models, to the new 'expressive' English variant. The distinction is more or less the same as that between allegory and symbolism. Instead of oading the environment with referential lids (inscriptions, busts of great men, )bjects of historical interest), the new lesigner would try to make a garden into a cind of theatre of the nerves. The scenery vould be carefully orchestrated to answer the varied movements of the heart.' nstead of appeals to learning, incitements -co feeling; contemplation replaced by experience; the antiquarian supplanted by the affective. The beauty of landscape was re-routed to the mind of the beholder.
Now this sounds like a manifesto for Romantic art, even though the gardenists are thinking along these lines very early in the eighteenth century. And indeed, while Dr Hunt goes out of his way at the start to deny any 'teleological' account (all roads leading to Grasmere), there is no doubt that he thinks the movement was a good thing. That is, he shares the increasingly" popular
view that 'the rules of art, slavishly followed, do not answer human nature.' He celebrates 'the vision that is both sight and insight, thing and thought blended.' He finds the mood music richer in imaginative appeal than the old baroque compositions or the merely decorative or (ominous word) pretty flourishes of rococo design. This makes him a splendid expositor, since it allows him to approve of almost everything that happened in aesthetics during the period. It enables him to write eloquently of Gainsborough as well as Gray, of Cowper as well as Constable. And it does not matter if he is occasionally to unfair to lesser lights such as Edward Young, who catches the full brunt of The Dunciad here, and Francis Wheatley, a painter who seems inoffensive on the evidence presented.
Dr Hunt devotes a chapter to the background of seventeenth-century theory and practice, with Cowley, Marvell and the redoubtable Evelyn strongly in evidence. He starts from hermits, thus immediately challenging comparison with a lively chapter in Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics; if he loses the glitter and the strange menacing poetry of Dame Edith ('fear sleeping in the moonlight'), at least he does retell the marvellous story of the 'ornamental but retiring person' engaged by a Surrey landowner on a seven-year contract to live totally silent, on a steep mound in his estate. Horace Walpole thought it absurd to set aside a quarter of one's estate to be melancholy in; but hermits aside, all over the country gardens were being allotted similar psychological functions. Amongst other things, arborial retreats served in the office of an analyst's couch; they were places for emotional confrontations, and
hermits perfectly embodied the kind of willed dramatisation of solitude they encouraged.
The following chapters concern Pope and Thomson respectively. It is now hard to say anything fresh on Pope's Twickenham garden, which occupies more scholarly yardage annually than it ever took up on the face of the earth, but Dr Hunt manages very well. I am less sure about his treatment of Thomson, because I suspect that purelY descriptive prospect poetry has higher literary interest than Dr Hunt allows in his anxiety to get a subjective presence into event act. After this the story reaches Gray and Collins, and considers what happens when the habits of perception learnt in a garden are transferred to wilder scenery — here the author is at his best, both as regards poetrY and painting. Finally comes a long chapter on the landscape of sensibility; wideranging but perhaps striving to cover too much ground. The argument is a shade iterative by now, and what has been a densely allusive argument all along becomes positively difficult. There is a tendency to slap down somewhat emPfY, footnotes (which are at the end, and keyed only verbally to the text) — so that when iconography is mentioned, a note advises os to 'see' Praz, Seznec and Panofsky, without further clue as to what we might be looking for. Dr Hunt takes up so many rich and diverse aspects of cultural history that it is hard to avoid some attenuation, if nOt adulteration, of the full truth. On the whole he has contrived to avoid this danger W. a remarkable extent. The one serious oinission is the political dimension of marl gardenist features: among those discussed in this book, the royal hermitage and cave at Richmond had explicit political meanings which can be 'read' just like the psychological spaces of landscape. Again, the cult of Druids and bards had constitutional and patriotic resonances which the book does not explore. But it is unfair to ask everYthing of a single work, and it is only because the author's scholarship in every other regard is so exhaustive that the point arises. Any reader likely to pick up this book 011 probably know the main outlines of garden history, and so will be able. to profit fro° this well-pondered, .civilised and subtle argument. The tone is on the dry and cerebral side, as with most things that emanate from John Hopkins; but against this there are seventy-five nicely repro: duced illustrations, a veritable anthology °A1 choice quotations (several new to me), an a series of vivid insights into the taste of at time. We are now beginning to explore will might be called the deep grammar .° eighteenth-century artistic forms, building on the ideas of critics such as Ralph Cohen and John Barrell. The Figure in Landscape marks a further advance in °i. "e. fluency of our response to this idiom: ` shows how the experience of gardens bee' in the mind's eye, and it reveals aesthetic method in the gardening madness. Me
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