Continuing, the Essayist adds: “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 out by the rule and line; because they say, anyone may place trees in equal rows and uniform figures. They choose rather to show a genius in works of this nature, and therefore always conceal the art by which they direct themselves. They have a word, it seems, in their language, by which they express the particular beauty of a plantation that thus strikes the imagination at first sight, without discovering what it is that has so agreeable an effect. 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 scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but 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 of the most finished parterre. But, as our great modellers of gardens have their magazines of plants to dispose of, it is very natural for them to tear up all the beautiful plantations of fruit trees, and contrive a plan that may most turn to their own profit, in taking off their evergreens, and the like movable plants, with which their shops are plentifully stocked.”
It will be perfectly obvious that when Addison found it necessary to draw comparisons between a free and natural style of gardening, and the artificial methods carried out with mathematical precision in his time, to the distinct advantage of the former system, that geometric gardening, coupled with the excessive use of Topiary work, had made English gardens dreadfully monotonous. Essays were fashionable in the early years of the eighteenth century, and, remembering that their publication was extended over a considerable period, it must be presumed that they were freely read and discussed, and thus exerted a very considerable influence upon public opinion, just as a well thought out and carefully written leading article does in our own time. We may take it, then, that the gardeners of his time were considerably impressed by Addison’s quiet denunciation of the existing style, and no doubt a revolution had already commenced in the minds, if not in the gardens, of the wealthy, when, a little more than a year later, Pope published in the Guardian (Tuesday, September 29, 1713), his famous essay on “Verdant Sculpture.”
Not so subtle in his irony nor so engaging in his literary style as Addison, Pope was however the more forcibly satirical, maliciously spiteful, and elfishly humorous. His keen wit seized upon the proper psychological moment for following up Addison’s comparatively mild exposure with an attack that did as much as, or more than, anything else to bring about that rapid decline of Topiarian art that quickly followed. Pope had evidently the genius of a great soldier, who delivers his fiercest attack when the enemy is wavering.
As Pope’s essay is not by any means well known, neither is it especially easy of access, I need not apologise for quoting freely from it. Pope, however, believed with Dryden that satire was—
“The boldest way, if not the best,
To tell men freely of their foulest faults,
To laugh at their vain deeds and vainer thoughts,”
and in the course of his essay he allowed his sarcastic mockery to find expression here and there in a manner common enough in his time but which would be likely to offend the ears of modern polite folk, consequently I have in a few instances forestalled the editorial blue-pencil.
“I lately,” writes Pope, “took a particular friend of mine to my house in the country, not without some apprehension that it could afford little entertainment to a man of his polite taste, particularly in architecture and gardening, who had so long been conversant with all that is beautiful and great in either. But it was a pleasant surprise to me, to hear him often declare, he had found in my little retirement that beauty which he always thought wanting in most of the celebrated seats, or, if you will, villas, of the nation. This he described to me in those verses, with which Martial begins one of his epigrams:
“‘Our friend Faustinus’ country seat I’ve seen: