poetry, and it is well known how he strained his slender means in the effort to outshine his neighbors. “In time,” says Johnson, “his expenses brought clamours about him that overpowered the lamb’s bleat and the linnet’s song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fauns and fairies.”
The chief of Kent’s successors was Launcelot Brown, commonly called “Capability Brown” from his habit of murmuring to himself, as he gazed on a tract of land submitted for his diagnosis—“It has capabilities; it has capabilities.” He laid out Kew and Blenheim. Gazing one day on one of his own made rivers, he exclaimed, with an artist’s rapture,—“Thames! Thames! Thou wilt never forgive me.” He certainly imposed himself upon his own time, and, so far, was a great man. “Mr. Brown,” said Richard Owen Cambridge, “I very earnestly wish that I may die before you.” “Why so?” said Brown with some surprise. “Because,” said he, “I should like to see Heaven before you had improved it.” Among the romantic writers who were bitten by the mania for picturesque improvement were Horace
Walpole and even Sir Walter Scott. Everyone knows how Walpole bought from Mrs. Chevenix, the toy-shop woman, a little house called “Chopp’d Straw Hall” which he converted into the baronial splendors of Strawberry Hill; and how Scott transmitted a mean Tweedside farm, called Clarty Hole, into the less pretentious glories of Abbotsford.
After the practice came the theory. The painters and landscape-gardeners were followed by a school of philosophers, who expounded Taste and the laws of the Picturesque. Some extracts from the work of one of these, Thomas Whately, whose Observations on Modern Gardening appeared in 1770, will show to what excesses the whole nonsensical business had been carried. “In wild and romantic scenes,” says Whately, “may be introduced a ruined stone bridge, of which some arches may be still standing, and the loss of those which are fallen may be supplied by a few planks, with a rail, thrown over the vacancy. It is a picturesque object: it suits the situation; and the antiquity of the passage, the care taken to keep it still open, though the original building
is decayed, the apparent necessity which thence results for a communication, give it an imposing air of reality.” The context of this passages shows that the bridge leads nowhither. On the management of rocks Whately is a connoisseur. “Their most distinguished characters,” he says, “are dignity, terror, and fancy: the expressions of all are constantly wild; and sometimes a rocky scene is only wild, without pretensions to any particular character.” But ruins are what he likes best, and he recommends that they shall be constructed on the model of Tintern Abbey. They must be obvious ruins, much dilapidated, or the visitors will examine them too closely. “An appendage evidently more modern than the principal structure will sometimes corroborate the effect; the shed of a cottager amidst the remains of a temple, is a contrast both to the former and the present state of the building.” It seems almost impossible that this should have been offered as serious advice; but it was the admired usage of the time. Whately’s book was a recognized authority, and ran through several editions. He is also known as a Shakespeare critic, of no particular mark.
A more influential writer than Whately was William Gilpin, an industrious clergyman and schoolmaster, who spent his holidays wandering and sketching in the most approved parts of England, Wales and Scotland. His books on the Picturesque were long held in esteem. The earliest of them was entitled Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales . . . relative chiefly to picturesque beauty (1782). Others, which followed in steady succession, rendered a like service to the Lake district, the Highlands of Scotland, the New Forest, and the Isle of Wight. Those books taught the aesthetic appreciation of wild nature to a whole generation. It is a testimony to their influence that for a time they enslaved the youth of Wordsworth. In The Prelude he tells how, in early life, he misunderstood the teaching of Nature, not from insensibility, but from the presumption which applied to the impassioned life of Nature the “rules of mimic art.” He calls this habit “a strong infection of the age,” and tells how he too, for a time, was wont to compare scene with scene, and to pamper himself “with meagre novelties of
colour and proportion.” In another passage he speaks of similar melodramatic errors, from conformity to book-notions, in his early study of poetry.
The dignities of plain occurrence then
Were tasteless, and truth’s golden mean, a point,
Where no sufficient pleasure could be found.
But imaginative power, and the humility which had been his in childhood, returned to him—
I shook the habit off
Entirely and for ever.