Thomson also calls the place a paradise:
Ye Powers
That o'er the garden and the rural seat
Preside, which shining through the cheerful land
In countless numbers blest Britannia sees;
O, lead me to the wide-extended walks,
The fair majestic paradise of Stowe!
Not Persian Cyrus on Ionia's shore
E'er saw such sylvan scenes; such various art
By genius fired, such ardent genius tamed
By cool judicious art, that in the strife
All-beauteous Nature fears to be out-done.
The poet somewhat mars the effect of this compliment to the charms of
Stowe, by making it a matter of regret that the owner
His verdant files
Of ordered trees should here inglorious range,
Instead of squadrons flaming o'er the field,
And long embattled hosts.
This representation of rural pursuits as inglorious, a sentiment so out
of keeping with his subject, is soon after followed rather
inconsistently, by a sort of paraphrase of Virgil's celebrated picture
of rural felicity, and some of Thomson's own thoughts on the advantages
of a retreat from active life.
Oh, knew he but his happiness, of men
The happiest he! Who far from public rage
Deep in the vale, with a choice few retired
Drinks the pure pleasures of the rural life, &c.
Then again:--
Let others brave the flood in quest of gain
And beat for joyless months, the gloomy wave.
Let such as deem it glory to destroy,
Rush into blood, the sack of cities seek;
Unpierced, exulting in the widow's wail,
The virgin's shriek and infant's trembling cry.
While he, from all the stormy passions free
That restless men involve, hears and but hears,
At distance safe, the human tempest roar,
Wrapt close in conscious peace. The fall of kings,
The rage of nations, and the crush of states,
Move not the man, who from the world escaped,
In still retreats and flowery solitudes,
To nature's voice attends, from month to month,
And day to day, through the revolving year;
Admiring sees her in her every shape;
Feels all her sweet emotions at his heart;
Takes what she liberal gives, nor asks for more.
He, when young Spring, protudes the bursting gems
Marks the first bud, and sucks the healthful gale
Into his freshened soul; her genial hour
He full enjoys, and not a beauty blows
And not an opening blossom breathes in vain.
Thomson in his description of Lord Townshend's seat of Rainham--another
English estate once much celebrated and still much admired--exclaims:
Such are thy beauties, Rainham, such the haunts
Of angels, in primeval guiltless days
When man, imparadised, conversed with God.
And Broome after quoting the whole description in his dedication of his
own poems to Lord Townshend, observes, in the old fashioned fulsome
strain, "This, my lord, is but a faint picture of the place of your
retirement which no one ever enjoyed more elegantly."[019] "A faint
picture!" What more would the dedicator have wished Thomson to say?
Broome, if not contented with his patron's seat being described as an
earthly Paradise, must have desired it to be compared with Heaven
itself, and thus have left his Lordship no hope of the enjoyment of a
better place than he already possessed.
Samuel Boyse, who when without a shirt to his back sat up in his bed to
write verses, with his arms through two holes in his blanket, and when
he went into the streets wore paper collars to conceal the sad
deficiency of linen, has a poem of considerable length entitled The
Triumphs of Nature. It is wholly devoted to a description of this
magnificent garden,[020] in which, amongst other architectural
ornaments, was a temple dedicated to British worthies, where the busts
of Pope and Congreve held conspicuous places. I may as well give a
specimen of the lines of poor Boyse. Here is his description of that
part of Lord Cobham's grounds in which is erected to the Goddess of
Love, a Temple containing a statue of the Venus de Medicis.
Next to the fair ascent our steps we traced,
Where shines afar the bold rotunda placed;
The artful dome Ionic columns bear
Light as the fabric swells in ambient air.
Beneath enshrined the Tuscan Venus stands
And beauty's queen the beauteous scene commands:
The fond beholder sees with glad surprize,
Streams glisten, lawns appear, and forests rise--
Here through thick shades alternate buildings break,
There through the borders steals the silver lake,
A soft variety delights the soul,
And harmony resulting crowns the whole.
Congreve in his Letter in verse addressed to Lord Cobham asks him to
Tell how his pleasing Stowe employs his time.
It would seem that the proprietor of Stowe took particular interest in
the disposition of the water on his grounds. Congreve enquires
Or dost thou give the winds afar to blow
Each vexing thought, and heart-devouring woe,
And fix thy mind alone on rural scenes,
To turn the level lawns to liquid plains?
To raise the creeping rills from humble beds
And force the latent spring to lift their heads,
On watery columns, capitals to rear,
That mix their flowing curls with upper air?
Or slowly walk along the mazy wood
To meditate on all that's wise and good.
The line:--
To turn the level lawn to liquid plains--
Will remind the reader of Pope's
Lo! Cobham comes and floats them with a lake--
And it might be thought that Congreve had taken the hint from the bard
of Twickenham if Congreve's poem had not preceded that of Pope. The one
was published in 1729, the other in 1731.
Cowper is in the list of poets who have alluded to "Cobham's groves" and
Pope's commemoration of them.
And Cobham's groves and Windsor's green retreats
When Pope describes them have a thousand sweets.
"Magnificence and splendour," says Mr. Whately, the author of
Observations on Modern Gardening, "are the characteristics of Stowe.
It is like one of those places celebrated in antiquity which were
devoted to the purposes of religion, and filled with sacred groves,
hallowed fountains, and temples dedicated to several deities; the resort
of distant nations and the object of veneration to half the heathen
world: the pomp is, at Stowe, blended with beauty; and the place is
equally distinguished by its amenity and grandeur." Horace Walpole
speaks of its "visionary enchantment." "I have been strolling about in
Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, from garden to garden," says Pope in
one of his letters, "but still returning to Lord Cobham's with fresh
satisfaction."[021]
The grounds at Stowe, until the year 1714, were laid out in the old
formal style. Bridgeman then commenced the improvements and Kent
subsequently completed them.
Stowe is now, I believe, in the possession of the Marquis of Chandos,
son of the Duke of Buckingham. It is melancholy to state that the
library, the statues, the furniture, and even some of the timber on the
estate, were sold in 1848 to satisfy the creditors of the Duke.
Pope was never tired of improving his own grounds. "I pity you, Sir,"
said a friend to him, "because you have now completed every thing
belonging to your gardens."[022] "Why," replied Pope, "I really shall be
at a loss for the diversion I used to take in carrying out and finishing
things: I have now nothing left me to do but to add a little ornament or
two along the line of the Thames." I dare say Pope was by no means so
near the end of his improvements as he and his friend imagined. One
little change in a garden is sure to suggest or be followed by another.
Garden-improvements are "never ending, still beginning." The late Dr.
Arnold, the famous schoolmaster, writing to a friend, says--"The garden
is a constant source of amusement to us both (self and wife); there are
always some little alterations to be made, some few spots where an
additional shrub or two would be ornamental, something coming into
blossom; so that I can always delight to go round and see how things are
going on." A garden is indeed a scene of continual change. Nature, even
without the aid of the gardener, has "infinite variety," and supplies "a
perpetual feast of nectared sweets where no crude surfeit reigns."
Spence reports Pope to have said: "I have sometimes had an idea of
planting an old gothic cathedral in trees. Good large poplars, with
their white stems, cleared of boughs to a proper height would serve very
well for the columns, and might form the different aisles or
peristilliums, by their different distances and heights. These would
look very well near, and the dome rising all in a proper tuft in the
middle would look well at a distance." This sort of verdant architecture
would perhaps have a pleasing effect, but it is rather too much in the
artificial style, to be quite consistent with Pope's own idea of
landscape-gardening. And there are other trees that would form a nobler
natural cathedral than the formal poplar. Cowper did not think of the
poplar, when he described a green temple-roof.
How airy and how light the graceful arch,
Yet awful as the consecrated roof
Re-echoing pious anthems.
Almost the only traces of Pope's garden that now remain are the splendid
Spanish chesnut-trees and some elms and cedars planted by the poet
himself. A space once laid out in winding walks and beautiful
shrubberies is now a potatoe field! The present proprietor, Mr. Young,
is a wholesale tea-dealer. Even the bones of the poet, it is said, have
been disturbed. The skull of Pope, according to William Howitt, is now
in the private collection of a phrenologist! The manner in which it was
obtained, he says, is this:--On some occasion of alteration in the
church at Twickenham, or burial of some one in the same spot, the coffin
of Pope was disinterred, and opened to see the state of the remains. By
a bribe of £50 to the Sexton, possession of the skull was obtained for
one night; another skull was then returned instead of the poet's.
It has been stated that the French term Ferme Ornée was first used in
England by Shenstone. It exactly expressed the character of his grounds.
Mr. Repton said that he never strolled over the scenery of the Leasowes
without lamenting the constant disappointment to which Shenstone exposed
himself by a vain attempt to unite the incompatible objects of ornament
and profit. "Thus," continued Mr. Repton, "the poet lived under the
continual mortification of disappointed hope, and with a mind
exquisitely sensible, he felt equally the sneer of the great man at the
magnificence of his attempt and the ridicule of the farmer at the
misapplication of his paternal acres." The "sneer of the great man." is
perhaps an allusion to what Dr. Johnson says of Lord Lyttelton:--that he
"looked with disdain" on "the petty State" of his neighbour. "For a
while," says Dr. Johnson, "the inhabitants of Hagley affected to tell
their acquaintance of the little fellow that was trying to make himself
admired; but when by degrees the Leasowes forced themselves into notice,
they took care to defeat the curiosity which they could not suppress, by
conducting their visitants perversely to inconvenient points of view,
and introducing them at the wrong end of a walk to detect a deception;
injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain." Mr. Graves, the
zealous friend of Shenstone, indignantly denies that any of the
Lyttelton family had evinced so ungenerous a feeling towards the
proprietor of the Leasowes who though his "empire" was less "spacious
and opulent" had probably a larger share of true taste than even the
proprietor of Hagley, the Lyttelton domain--though Hagley has been much,
and I doubt not, deservedly, admired.[023]
Dr. Johnson states that Shenstone's expenses were beyond his means,--
that he spent his estate in adorning it--that at last the clamours of
creditors "overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and that
his groves were haunted by beings very different from fauns and
fairies." But this is gross exaggeration. Shenstone was occasionally,
indeed, in slight pecuniary difficulties, but he could always have
protected himself from the intrusion of the myrmidons of the law by
raising money on his estate; for it appears that after the payment of
all his debts, he left legacies to his friends and annuities to his
servants.
Johnson himself is the most scornful of the critics upon Shenstone's
rural pursuits. "The pleasure of Shenstone," says the Doctor, "was all
in his eye: he valued what he valued merely for its looks. Nothing
raised his indignation more than to ask if there were any fishes in his
water." Dr. Johnson would have seen no use in the loveliest piece of
running water in the world if it had contained nothing that he could
masticate! Mrs. Piozzi says of him, "The truth is, he hated to hear
about prospects and views, and laying out grounds and taste in
gardening." "That was the best garden," he said, "which produced most
roots and fruits; and that water was most to be prized which contained
most fish." On this principle of the valuelessness of those pleasures
which enter the mind through the eye, Dr. Johnson should have blamed the
lovers of painting for dwelling with such fond admiration on the canvas
of his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds. In point of fact, Dr. Johnson had no
more sympathy with the genius of the painter or the musician than with
that of the Landscape gardener, for he had neither an eye nor an ear for
Art. He wondered how any man could be such a fool as to be moved to
tears by music, and observed, that, "one could not fill one's belly with
hearing soft murmurs or looking at rough cascades." No; the loveliness
of nature does not satisfy the thirst and hunger of the body, but it
does satisfy the thirst and hunger of the soul. No one can find
wheaten bread or wine or venison or beef or plum-pudding or turtle-soup
in mere sounds and sights, however exquisite--neither can any one find
such substantial diet within the boards of a book--no not even on the
pages of Shakespeare, or even those of the Bible itself,--but men can
find in sweet music and lovely scenery and good books something
infinitely more precious than all the wine, venison, beef, or plum-
pudding, or turtle-soup that could be swallowed during a long life by
the most craving and capacious alderman of London! Man is of a dual
nature: he is not all body. He has other and far higher wants and
enjoyments than the purely physical--and these nobler appetites are
gratified by the charms of nature and the creations of inspired genius.
Dr. Johnson's gastronomic allusions to nature recal the old story of a
poet pointing out to a utilitarian friend some white lambs frolicking in
a meadow. "Aye," said, the other, "only think of a quarter of one of
them with asparagus and mint sauce!" The story is by some supposed to
have had a Scottish origin, and a prosaic North Briton is made to say
that the pretty little lambs, sporting amidst the daisies and
buttercups, would "mak braw pies."
A profound feeling for the beautiful is generally held to be an
essential quality in the poet. It is a curious fact, however, that there
are some who aspire to the rank of poet, and have their claims allowed,
who yet cannot be said to be poetical in their nature--for how can that
nature be, strictly speaking, poetical which denies the sentiment of
Keats, that
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever?
Both Scott and Byron very earnestly admired Dr. Johnson's "London" and
"The Vanity of Human Wishes." Yet the sentiments just quoted from the
author of those productions are far more characteristic of a utilitarian
philosopher than of one who has been endowed by nature with
The vision and the faculty divine,
and made capable, like some mysterious enchanter, of
Clothing the palpable and the familiar
With golden exhalations of the dawn.
Crabbe, also a prime favorite with the authors of the Lay of the Last
Minstrel, and Childe Harold, is recorded by his biographer--his own
son--to have exhibited "a remarkable indifference to all the proper
objects of taste;" to have had "no real love for painting, or music, or
architecture or for what a painter's eye considers as the beauties of
landscape." "In botany, grasses, the most useful but the least
ornamental, were his favorites." "He never seemed to be captivated with
the mere beauty of natural objects or even to catch any taste for the
arrangement of his specimens. Within, the house was a kind of scientific
confusion; in the garden the usual showy foreigners gave place to the
most scarce flowers, especially to the rarer weeds, of Britain; and were
scattered here and there only for preservation. In fact he neither loved
order for its own sake nor had any very high opinion of that passion in
others."[024] Lord Byron described Crabbe to be
Though nature's sternest painter, yet the best.
What! was he a better painter of nature than Shakespeare? The truth is
that Byron was a wretched critic, though a powerful poet. His praises
and his censures were alike unmeasured.
His generous ardor no cold medium knew.
He seemed to recognize no great general principles of criticism, but to
found all his judgments on mere prejudice and passion. He thought Cowper
"no poet," pronounced Spenser "a dull fellow," and placed Pope above
Shakespeare. Byron's line on Crabbe is inscribed on the poet's tombstone
at Trowbridge. Perhaps some foreign visitor on reading the inscription
may be surprized at his own ignorance when he learns that it is not the
author of Macbeth and Othello that he is to regard as the best
painter of nature that England has produced, but the author of the
Parish Register and the Tales of the Hall. Absurd and indiscriminate
laudations of this kind confound all intellectual distinctions and make
criticism ridiculous. Crabbe is unquestionably a vigorous and truthful
writer, but he is not the best we have, in any sense of the word.
Though Dr. Johnson speaks so contemptuously of Shenstone's rural
pursuits, he could not help acknowledging that when the poet began "to
point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks and
to wind his waters," he did all this with such judgment and fancy as
"made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the
skilful; a place to be visited by travellers, and copied by designers."
Mason, in his English Garden, a poem once greatly admired, but now
rarely read, and never perhaps with much delight, does justice to the
taste of the Poet of the Leasowes.
Nor, Shenstone, thou
Shalt pass without thy meed, thou son of peace!
Who knew'st, perchance, to harmonize thy shades
Still softer than thy song; yet was that song
Nor rude nor inharmonious when attuned
To pastoral plaint, or tale of slighted love.
English pleasure-gardens have been much imitated by the French. Viscomte
Girardin, at his estate of Ermenonville, dedicated an inscription in
amusing French-English to the proprietor of the Leasowes--
THIS PLAIN STONE
TO WILLIAM SHENSTONE;
IN HIS WRITINGS HE DISPLAYED
A MIND NATURAL;
AT LEASOWES HE LAID
ARCADIAN GREENS RURAL.
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