THE
ENGLISH
LANDSCAPE GARDEN AND THE
ROMANTIC-ERA
NOVEL
Changing Concepts of Space
Marie-Luise Egbert
I
Attention has repeatedly been drawn to literary
anticipations of a change in taste which was to mark English
garden design in the eighteenth century. One of the earliest
voices to give expression to their dissatisfaction with
late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century practice
in garden design is Joseph Addison, who in a contribution
to the Spectator of 1712 wrote:
Writers, who have given
us an account of China, tell us, the Inhabitants
of that Country laugh at the Plantations of our Europeans,
which are laid by the Rule and Line; because, they say,
any one may place Trees in equal Rows and uniform Figures.
They chuse rather to shew a Genius in Works of this Nature,
and therefore always conceal the art by which they direct
themselves. … Our British gardeners, on the contrary,
instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as
much as possible. Our Trees rise in Cones, Globes, and Pyramids.
We see the Marks of the Scissars upon every Plant and Bush.
… For my own part, I would rather look upon a Tree in all
its Luxuriancy and Diffusion of Boughs and Branches, than
when it is thus cut and trimmed into a Mathematical Figure;
and cannot but fancy that an Orchard in Flower looks infinitely
more delightful than all the little Labyrinths or the most
finished Parterre.[1]
What Addison is taking issue with here is
the then dominant type of formal garden arranged in strictly
symmetrical patterns of neat parterres, terraces, paths
and alleys, which were themselves further subdivided according
to exactly the same patterns. An integral part of these
gardens were evergreen trees and bushes trimmed into the
geometrical shapes which Addison deplores. These formal
gardens were chiefly inspired by Italian Renaissance and
French Baroque gardens adorning aristocratic palaces.
They reflected a conviction that the world as set up according
to God’s plan was essentially an ordered one which offered
itself to description by scientific laws.[2]
Fig
1. Longleat, Wiltshire. Engraving by Kip and Knyff, c.1700
Apart from
aesthetic reasons, the gradual replacement of the formal
model by one which came to be known as that of the ‘landscape
garden’ came about not least for economic reasons. On
the one hand, the upkeep of formal gardens involved very
high maintenance costs which less stylized gardens avoided
in the long run. On the other hand, they allowed for the
integration of the surrounding farmland and woodland which
could thus be managed to greater financial advantage.[3]
The development
of the landscape garden went through two major stages,
which are often referred to as ‘emblematic’ and ‘expressive’,
respectively.[4]
Gardens created in the first half of the eighteenth century
drew their inspiration partly from the neo-classical landscape
paintings of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator
Rosa and appealed to the ideal of rural retirement expressed
by Horace and Virgil.[5]
These gardens were seemingly ‘natural’ spaces created
by a particular arrangement of features of the landscape
and interspersed with architectural elements. An example
of this is seen in the garden of Stowe (Buckinghamshire)
as landscaped by William Kent. The garden contained a
meticulously devised pattern of monuments and temples
alluding not only to Classical mythology and contemporary
literature but also making comments on the social and
political reality of the day. Thus, the garden held a
grotto with an artificial spring, reminiscent of the natural
cave in which, according to Roman mythology, the nymph
Egeria conversed with the muses.[6]
Elsewhere there was the Temple of Ancient Virtue, and
placed in stark contrast to it, the Temple of Modern Virtue,
which, significantly, lay in ruins.[7] As
Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock has pointed out, gardens of
this type employed a representation of nature which served
as a moral standard.[8]
Directed by the layout of monuments and paths to perceive
particular vistas and arrangements of features, the educated
beholder could not but read this intricate web of elements
in a predictable way. Put differently, this was a space
laden with emblematic significance which relied on the
beholder’s ability to compare and read the features of
the garden in the way required and to derive from them
a moral precept.
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Fig
2. William Kent, The Temple of Modern Virtue,
mid-C18th
|
In the second
half of the century, the emblematic landscape garden gave
way to an ‘expressive’ type which is associated chiefly
with the work of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Doing away
with the earlier coded meanings and using a minimalistic
repertory of lawns, trees, shrubbery and lakes, Brown
re-designed Stowe and offered to the eye views and perspectives
which could trigger associations more freely. The garden
no longer had to be deciphered but instead was turned
into a space which could express the beholder’s own feelings.
It was therefore experienced differently according to
the prevailing mood. A walk through the garden thus became
a very personal affair and provided opportunity for introspection.[9]
With the development
of the expressive garden and the new role of landscape
as a mode of eliciting and reflecting human emotions,
new possibilities were also opened up for literature.
The expressive potential was, of course, not exclusive
to man-made spaces but was also a feature of natural landscapes,
from which the gardens derived. But it was with the rise
of the landscape garden and with the contemporary interest
in the link between perception and emotion that the interaction
of landscape with the emotions moved to the fore, and
both natural and artificial spaces began to be put to
use in fiction.
Some late
eighteenth-century novels quite explicitly joined the
contemporary debate about the correct taste in garden
design (for example, Ann Radcliffe’s and later also Jane
Austen’s novels), but even where the literary texts are
less clear about their authors’ aesthetic allegiances,
they often use the emotional and psychological potential
of landscape. This is particularly evident in some Gothic
novels (of the late eighteenth century), which crucially
rely on the notion of the sublime to inspire in their
heroes and readers feelings of awe and terror. I will
present here readings of two examples from the Gothic
genre, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) in
order to trace different garden concepts and their application
to narrative ends.
Fig
2. Leasowes, Shropshire. Engraving by James Mason (after
a Painting by Thomas Smith), 1748
II
Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho
[10]
is the story of Emily, who after the untimely death of
her parents comes under the tutelage of her selfish and
narrow-minded aunt. Being forced to accompany her aunt,
who leaves France to live with her husband Montoni in
Italy, Emily is separated from her prospective husband,
Valancourt. In Italy, both aunt and niece become the object
of Montoni’s ploys to avail himself of their fortune.
To this end, he imprisons them in Udolpho, his castle
in the Apennines. After many an adventure, Emily is eventually
able to return to France, where she is at length reunited
with Valancourt.
The novel
is set entirely in France and Italy of the late sixteenth
century, but its landscape descriptions throughout appeal
to the categories of the beautiful, the sublime, and the
picturesque, which are the key terms in the aesthetic
debates going on in England from around the middle of
the eighteenth century. Writers and philosophers claimed
to see these categories implemented in contemporary landscape
gardens.[11]
In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the beautiful, the
sublime, and the picturesque serve to characterize the
landscapes of Southern France and Northern Italy which
make a profound impression on Emily.[12]
The forbidding grandeur and cragginess of the mountains
in the Pyrenées, for instance, are contrasted with the
gentler plains situated below, and the narrator states
that: ‘This landscape with the surrounding alps did, indeed,
present a perfect picture of the lovely and the sublime,
of “beauty sleeping in the lap of horror”.’ (p. 55) This
and many more occurrences of the key terms show Radcliffe’s
engagement with contemporary aesthetic theory,[13] but
beyond this, they are made to perform specific functions
in the novel. The fact that the sublime is likely to cause
sensations of pleasurable terror, for example, is fully
exploited to create the ghastly atmosphere setting the
scene for and accompanying the appearance of what are
supposed to be supernatural powers at Udolpho and the
Chateau-le-Blanc. More often still, attributes of the
natural surroundings point to the characters’ feelings
and moods.
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Fig
4. Salvator Rosa, ‘Soldiers and Peasants in
a
Rocky Landscape’, c.1650
|
A young woman
of high sensibility, Emily is susceptible to the scenes
of nature, and her response to the environment is often
expressive of her present state of mind. This connection
is at times made explicit by the narrator, as, for example,
at this juncture when Emily cannot bring herself to forget
Valancourt, whose honourable character she has come to
doubt:
Having reached the watch-tower,
she seated herself on the broken steps, and, in melancholy
dejection, watched the waves, half hid in vapour, as they
came rolling towards the shore, and threw up their light
spray round the rocks below. Their hollow murmur and the
obscuring mists, that came in wreaths up the cliffs, gave
a solemnity to the scene, which was in harmony with the
temper of her mind, and she sat, given up to the remembrance
of past times. (p. 558)
Such functional
uses of landscape description in narrative are familiar
to today’s readers, but they were a relatively new development
in the novel in Radcliffe’s day. It was only possible
for Radcliffe and others to use them because of the contemporary
interest in the relationship between the qualities of
an object and the feelings to which its perception gave
rise. It is this relationship which was at the centre
of the controversy about the above-mentioned aesthetic
categories.
Alongside
landscapes, the novel also features gardens. Both landscape
gardens and formal gardens are described, and it is quite
apparent that the narrator uses them in order to characterize
their owners. Thus, Emily’s parental estate, La Vallée,
is situated in a landscaped garden to which her father,
St Aubert, makes only very minor alterations in his time,
carefully preserving the ancient trees planted by his
forebears. St Aubert’s brother-in-law, Quesnel, on the
other hand, effects massive changes in the house and garden
at Epourville. Paying no respect to its long history,
he takes down an entire wing of the old chateau
to make it more comfortable and cuts down an old chestnut
tree for the reason that it obstructs the view (p. 13).
In this, Pierre Arnaud recognizes an allusion to Capability
Brown’s habit of cutting down existing trees and shrubbery
to create the vistas he was seeking to achieve.[14]
What is more, Quesnel intends to plant the park with Lombardy
poplars. In his reaction to the project, St Aubert shows
this to be a sign of very poor taste, remonstrating that
poplars may create an effect in an Italian landscape where
they agree with other such sprightly plants and with the
style of architecture but that they are entirely out of
place among the chestnuts of Gascony (pp. 13–14). Quesnel’s
taste in gardening and his lack of a sense of tradition
combine with his desire for ostentation and help to mark
him out as an altogether superficial person contrasting
with those who are capable of real sentiment, like Emily
and her father.
In a similar
way, Emily’s aunt (Mme Cheron) is characterized by the
very garden she owns. It is Emily who becomes aware of
the flagrant contrast between this and her father’s garden:
‘The straight walks, square parterres, and artificial
fountains of the garden, could not fail … to appear the
worse, opposed to the negligent graces, and natural beauties
of the grounds of La Vallée’ (p. 120). The aunt’s garden
is the very mirror image of her artificial manners and
lack of natural graces, and the strict organization of
the grounds points to the pettiness of her thinking and
to her lack of compassion for Emily. The moral superiority
of the natural over the artificial which is implied here
is supported by various other passages, as when Emily
praises ‘the scenes of nature—those sublime spectacles,
so infinitely superior to all artificial luxuries!’ (p.
60). It appears then that Radcliffe pits the outmoded
formal model against the new taste for landscape gardening
in order to characterize her protagonists and in the process
shows landscaping to be preferable. As was shown, however,
she also criticizes such excesses in landscape gardening
as were concomitant with Brown’s improvements.
Lewis’s The Monk [15]
shares with Radcliffe’s and with many other novels of
the genre the description of landscapes to create a
‘Gothic’ atmosphere consonant with the apparitions of
the supernatural. Besides this characteristic employment
of landscape, The Monk also displays specific
uses of gardens.
The Monk
is the story of its hero’s decline from virtue to
vice. Considered by all Madrid the epitome of honour
and religious authority, the Capuchin monk, Ambrosio,
falls prey to the darker sides of his personality. He
breaks his vows of celibacy and has an affair with Matilda,
a young woman of noble birth who has entered the abbey
disguised as a novice. When she fails to satisfy his
lust, Ambrosio endeavours to gain possession of the
sixteen-year-old Antonia. His sexual depravity eventually
makes him add murder to his breach of chastity. Combined
with this is another plot which centres around two young
Spanish noblemen, Raymond de las Cisternas and Lorenzo
de Medina, the former being a suitor to Lorenzo’s sister
Agnes, the latter falling in love with Antonia.
The novel
is set in Madrid at the time of the Holy Inquisition,
and a considerable part of the action takes place in
the Capuchins’ abbey and in the adjoining grounds. These
comprise the abbey garden as well as the cemetery, which
is used jointly by the monks and the nuns from the neighbouring
convent of St Clare. The abbey garden provides the setting
for the encounter between Ambrosio and Rosario in which
the latter reveals himself to be a woman, Matilda de
Villanegas (pp. 47–55). The garden is introduced in
a brief description which shows it to bear astonishingly
little resemblance to a monastic garden and the sobriety
one would associate with it:
It was laid out with the
most exquisite taste; the choicest flowers adorned it in
the height of luxuriance, and, though artfully arranged,
seemed only planted by the hand of Nature. Fountains,
springing from basons [sic] of white marble, cooled
the air with perpetual showers; and the walls were entirely
covered by jessamine, vines, and honey-suckles … and the
nightingale poured forth her melodious murmur from the shelter
of an artificial wilderness. (p. 47, my emphases)
The artful arrangement which receives
such praise here is the very principle on which the
landscape garden relies. It is man-made nature which
does not give away its craftedness. What is more, Lewis’s
abbey garden contains a hermitage in the shape of a
grotto, complete with bench and inscription and in this
sense holds some of the stock features of those gardens.
There is no mention of enclosing walls or of the actual
extension of the place, and its apparent openness differs
from the abbey as an inside space. With its openness
as well as its serenity and calm, Lewis creates a striking
contrast to the austerity of the abbey and provides
for the abbot and the supposed novice a place for private
conversation where feelings may be revealed. The garden
itself both reflects and influences the characters’
present moods.
The abbot
enjoys the open space with its pure air and the sweet
song of the nightingale and thus overcomes his former
uneasiness. For Rosario (not yet revealed as Matilda),
on the other hand, the grotto situated within the relative
openness of the garden offers reclusion similar to that
of the abbey itself, but while the abbey is a place
for communal withdrawal, the grotto provides for its
occupant a solitary exile. In this place, Rosario can
give way to his self-pity and lament his unrequited
love. In this respect, the garden is clearly a place
for introspection. The inscription placed inside the
grotto is a piece of verse in which a hermit boasts
of his voluntary and unregretting retirement from the
world, pitying those who leave it with unanswered hopes
and feelings. This is not an emblematic message which
could be read in a predictable way, rather, it elicits
a very personal response on the part of Rosario. The
inscription speaks to Rosario’s heart, who would follow
the hermit’s example of complete retirement from society
only too gladly, were it not for the fact that he is
pining for Ambrosio. In all this, Lewis’s abbey garden
reveals itself as an expressive landscape garden. The
author has thus anachronistically created an eighteenth-century
garden in medieval Spain to exploit its expressive potential
for his narrative ends.
Another
garden which provides an important setting in the novel
is the convent garden of St Clare. Young Agnes de Medina,
a new member of the nuns’ convent, is in the habit of
coming here to converse with the prioress or with one
of her fellow nuns. Disappointed by Raymond, who has
failed to abduct her from the castle of her aunt and
uncle, Agnes has at last resigned herself to her parents’
wish that she dedicate her life to God. Raymond at length
discovers Agnes’s whereabouts and, hoping that he may
yet convince her to leave the convent, assumes the role
of gardener’s assistant in order to be admitted to the
grounds. Their nightly meetings in the convent garden
continue for some weeks before Raymond avails himself
of the opportunity to deprive her of her virginity.
Compared with the abbey garden, the narrator gives strikingly
few indications as to the layout and character of the
convent garden. All that is revealed is that there is
a bench and that it takes a gardener to maintain the
place (p. 158). Clearly, it is not so much the
details of its layout as its symbolic potential which
makes the convent garden central to the plot. Part of
the convent, the garden shares the sanctity of the buildings.
It is shut in by walls on all sides and provides a protective
space for its occupants. In this respect it is an example
of the medieval hortus conclusus, literally a
‘closed garden’. Such medieval gardens separated their
occupants or visitors from the outside world and were
a space for religious contemplation. In a figurative
sense, the hortus conclusus served as a Christian
allegory of the Virgin Mary, who is conceptualized in
medieval painting and thinking as an impenetrable garden,
the impenetrability symbolizing her maidenhood.[16]
The convent garden in Lewis’s The Monk also has
both a literal and a symbolic function. It literally
separates Agnes from the world and at first hides her
from her lover. However, when Raymond gains access to
the garden, this allegorically foreshadows the imminent
violation of the virgin. If Raymond’s seduction of the
young woman is an immoral act in itself, it is heightened
to monstrosity by the fact that it occurs in a place
where females ought to be shielded from such danger.
By using
an expressive landscape garden on the one hand and the
hortus conclusus on the other, Lewis has at his
disposal two very evocative sources of meaning. While
the landscaped abbey garden chiefly serves to create
mood and to reflect the characters’ own feelings, the
convent garden is used for symbolic purposes deriving
from a traditional allegory, and in this respect it
resembles an emblematic landscape garden.
It is apparent
that Lewis with his hortus conclusus reaches
much further back than Radcliffe does with her formal
seventeenth-century garden. But while the hortus
conclusus is consistent with the period in which
The Monk is set, Lewis’s abbey garden as well
as Radcliffe’s seventeenth-century garden are not. Lewis’s
novel also differs from Radcliffe’s in that his gardens
serve as mere settings, partly with a symbolic meaning,
whereas Radcliffe goes beyond this by thematizing different
tastes in garden design on the level of fictional discourse
and in this way makes a comment on contemporary taste.
Even so, the co-existence of older models of gardens
alongside more recent ones in both novels proves to
be an astonishingly fertile source for the creation
of meaning.
NOTES
1. The
Spectator 414 (25 June 1712), 98–102 (pp. 101–2).
2. David
C. Streatfield, ‘Art and Nature in the English Landscape
Garden: Design Theory and Practice, 1700–1818’, in Landscape
in the Gardens and the Literature of Eighteenth-Century
England. Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar,
18 March 1978, ed. David C. Streatfield and Alistair
M. Duckworth (Los Angeles: University of California, The
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1981), pp. 3–87
(pp. 5–8).
3. Ibid.,
p. 10. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards,
the passing of the so-called Enclosure Acts gave
estate owners the opportunity of enlarging their
grounds by integrating into their estates those
parts of the surrounding land which had formerly
been used for communal grazing. However, the grounds
thus acquired historically had often been the property
of local peasants who had made them available for
communal pasturing once a year. For them, the Enclosure
Acts meant losing a source of income.
4. See
John Dixon Hunt, ‘Emblem and Expressionism in the Eighteenth-Century
Landscape Garden’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 4
(1971), 294–317.
5. Streatfield,
‘Art and Nature’, p. 19.
6. Hunt,
‘Emblem and Expressionism’, 296–7.
7. This
and other satirical comments found at Stowe have been
interpreted as visual counterparts of some of Pope’s poetry
and of the allegorical vision Addison had given in the
Tatler (no. 123, 21 January 1709, 99–104). See
Hunt, ‘Emblem and Expression’, 301, and Heinz-Joachim
Müllenbrock, ‘The English Landscape Garden: Literary Context
and Recent Research’, Yearbook of English Studies
14 (1984), 291–9 (p. 298).
8. Müllenbrock
, ‘The English Landscape Garden’, 296.
9. Hunt,
‘Emblem and Expressionism’, 306; Streatfield ‘Art and
Nature’, p. 49.
10.
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries
of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (1794; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980). Subsequent references to the
text are taken from this edition, and will be included
in parenthesis in the essay.
11.
Brown’s gardens in particular seem
to be realizations of the ideas concerning the beautiful
and the sublime expressed by Burke in his Inquiry into
the Origins of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime
(1756). The picturesque was formulated by William
Gilpin in 1792 as a mediating category between the beautiful
and the sublime. It could be seen implemented in gardens
designed by William Mason in the 1770s (Streatfield, ‘Art
and Nature’, pp. 56, 60–63). For more detail see Hans-Ulrich
Mohr, ‘ “Picturesque and Sublime”: Zur Inter- und
Metatextualität der englischsprachigen Bestände der Bibliothek
Corvey’, Literatur und Erfahrungswandel 1789–1830,
ed. Rainer Schöwerling, Hartmut Steinecke, and Günter
Tiggesbäumker (Munich: Fink, 1996), pp. 283–316.
12.
The narrator occasionally likens the vistas which
Emily perceives to landscape paintings by Salvator Rosa
and Domenichino (pp. 30, 377). The protagonists’ impressions
as well as readers’ responses to such passages in the
book are moulded by their knowledge of those paintings,
and this points to the importance which landscape painting
had for landscape gardening as well as for literature..
13. See
Pierre Arnaud, ‘Les Jardins dans les romans de Mrs. Radcliffe’.
Autour de l’idée de la nature: histoire des idées et
civilisation, pédagogie et divers. Actes du congrès de
Saint-Etienne, 1975 (Paris: Didier, 1977), pp. 83–9.
14. Ibid.,
p. 86.
15. Matthew
G. Lewis, The Monk, ed. Christopher MacLachlan
(1796; London: Penguin, 1998). Subsequent references to
the text are taken from this edition, and will be included
in parenthesis in the essay.
16. Gisela
Ecker, ‘Hortus conclusus: Weiblicher Körper und
allegorischer Raum in der Literatur der Moderne’, Allegorien
und Geschlechterdifferenz, ed. Sigrid Schade, Monika
Wagner, and Sigrid Weigel (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994), pp.
171–85, pp. 172–3.
COPYRIGHT
INFORMATION
This article is copyright ©
2000 Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, and is
the result of the independent labour of the scholar or scholars
credited with authorship. The material contained
in this document may be freely distributed, as long as the
origin of information used has been properly credited in the
appropriate manner (e.g. through bibliographic citation, etc.).
This
essay is the revised version of a paper given at the conference
‘Exploring the Romantic-Era Novel, 1780–1840’ in Groningen,
17–19 November 1999.
REFERRING
TO THIS ARTICLE
M.-L. EGBERT. ‘The English Landscape Garden
and the Romantic-Era Novel: Changing Concepts of Space’,
Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 5 (Nov 2000).
Online: Internet (date accessed): <http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles/cc05_n01.html>.
CONTRIBUTOR
DETAILS
Marie-Luise Egbert studied English and French
at Osnabrück University to become a teacher at German Gymnasium,
spending terms abroad at the Institut Marie Haps in Brussels
and at York University (UK). She took a post-graduate course
in literary translation at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität,
Munich. From 1994 onwards, she has been teaching graduate-level
courses in translation studies and English literature at Chemnitz
University of Technology and took her PhD there in December
1998 with a thesis on Lexical Repetition in English-German
Literary Translation (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier,
1999). Her present research interests are in 18th-century
English literature and, more particularly, in literary anticipations
and reflections of the English landscape garden.
Last modified
31 December, 2001
.
This document is maintained by Anthony Mandal (Mandal@cf.ac.uk).
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