Escaping the Crowds: The Harmonious Environments of Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Writings

Attempting to re-examine the concept of the aesthetic and to re-think its political implications, Jacques Rancière elaborates on the proposition that ‘a “human” nature is simultaneously also a “social” nature’. ¹ Human nature is not limited to the natural, but neither is it simply social: ‘This gap separating nature from itself is the site of an unprecedented equality’, Rancière adds, noting how, by evoking ‘nature’, revolutionary thought may challenge the social, even if, simultaneously, the absolute ‘reign of nature’ remains a delusion:

The revolutionary reign of nature thereby becomes a vain dream. But what emerges as a response to this impossible dream is the promise carried by the loss itself, that is by the suspension of the rules by which human nature is accorded with social nature: the humanity to come. ²

The French philosopher often makes reference in his work to the Romantic and Modernist projects of emancipation through art; this political promise of the aesthetic is somewhat reflected in Rancière's key term – the ‘distribution of the Sensible’ (partage du sensible) – which signals his interest not only in redefining the boundaries of art but in a wide-ranging politics of the partition of perception and participation. ³

Something of that aesthetic and political partition may be registered in the secretive and secluded character of the garden, including the English landscape garden, which I discuss here: ‘The secret garden, a hidden place of enchantment and peace, where all our ills can be cured, is one of the most powerful ideas in cultural history’. ⁴ Though cultural constructions of natural harmony may potentially contribute to politically radical thought, they may also translate, through a more limited social distribution, into a search for reinvigorating and morally edifying seclusion. In this article, I analyse some instances of the eighteenth-century discourses that envision such spaces of retirement, considering to what extent the constructions of a harmonious retreat may be read as merely escapist and/or elitist in their avoidance of conflict and society, and to what extent they perhaps prefigure the more profound and radical conceptions of Romanticism, which challenged many of the dominant values and aesthetic notions of mainstream eighteenth-century culture.

The shift from the Baroque formal garden to the English landscape garden has been discussed as paradigmatic for the ideological entanglements of the aesthetic view of nature in the long eighteenth century. In his important study The Enlightenment Against the Baroque (1992), Rémy Gilbert Saisselin accounts for that momentous shift in terms of the changing attitudes to power and economy: ‘The formal gardens of [André] Le Nôtre are pure art and pure expense’ with their ‘clipped hedges and shaped trees, [their] expanse, [their] multishaped, geometric parterres, fountains, pools, and water mirrors, [their] allées, circles and statues’ that confidently exhibited the design, the intellect, the systematic work as well as exorbitant expense that were all employed to curb, correct and systematise nature. ⁵ ‘By contrast the landscape gardens of the type “improved” by Capability Brown implied not only a different aesthetic, based on a different metaphysics of nature, but also a new economics’: in landscape gardens ‘beauty’ was to be found in ‘the given, empirical, experienced nature’, and the charms of the bountiful ‘prosperity of the land’ were as though merely aided by the now discrete labour of the designers and gardeners, so that landscape gardens could distil beauty from nature, the final product being cleansed of the traces of exorbitant spending. ⁶ Though this erasure of luxury in landscape gardens is perhaps not complete, Saisselin rightly observes that the eighteenth-century landscape gardens ‘employed’ nature to separate art from luxury: a process that shaped eighteenth-century aesthetic concepts and was a precondition for the possibility of a public and moral value of art.

If the geometrical rigour of the French garden ‘represses darkness of the chthonic powers’, the topography of the English landscape garden favours a shade that hides and protects; instead of the blazing sun symbolising both reason and a dominating eye of absolute monarchy, le jardin à l’anglaise has groves, multiple recesses and narrow winding paths that offer tasteful variety and promise secretive pleasures, in ‘the enjoyment of a possibility of transgression while relishing the benefits of protection of the well-established order’. ⁷ Overt discipline gives place to a tasteful regulation in the picturesque vistas of the English gardens. Their shadowy paths suggest natural, spontaneous growth but nonetheless are a product not of nature but of sophisticated design. Hence, a new distribution of the Sensible, for which ostentation of power and luxury proves offensive, produces gardens as embodiments of natural harmony that provide an appropriately screened space for rest and reinvigoration. The horticultural practices and discourses of the period thus connect with the cultural revaluation of duty and retirement, of sociability and solitude, as in Reverend William Gilpin's A Dialogue upon Gardens (1748), his early text on Lord Cobham's gardens at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, in which he notes that:

Regularity and Exactness excites [sic] no manner of Pleasure in the Imagination, unless they are made use of to contrast with something of an opposite kind. The Fancy is struck by Nature alone; and if Art does any thing more than improve her, we think she grows impertinent, and wish she had left off a little sooner. ⁸

When art is allotted too much visibility, it threatens to turn a garden into an unnatural monstrosity, dotted with geometrically shaped trees, for instance. Gilpin himself admits that he is a philosopher of the shade: ‘I am a great Admirer of walking in a Shade; it is a kind of Emblem of the most agreeable Situation in Life, the retired one’. ⁹ The irregularity of nature provides a respite from labour and exchange in the city, a relief from the unimaginative ‘Exactness’ which Gilpin links with artificiality: gardens need to shade us from an existence that becomes unnaturally rigorous.

What needs to be addressed, in effect, is a certain tension between the private and the public (and between the aesthetic and the political) in the discourses that speak of gardens, nature, and retirement. The moral value of retirement concerns Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftsbury in Characteristics (1711), in the dialogue between Philocles and Theocles, where the latter argues for its necessity:

But I will venture to say more in favour of retirement: that not only the best authors but the best company require this seasoning. Society itself cannot be rightly enjoyed without some abstinence and separate thought. All grows insipid, dull and tiresome without the help of some intervals of retirement. ¹⁰

Otherwise a champion of polite sociability, Shaftesbury acknowledges here that in order to be ‘rightly enjoyed’ society might require a supplement of solitude that produces ‘separate thought’ – or else sociable life may degenerate into vanity and indulgence, becoming ‘that tedious circle of noise and show’, to evoke Theocles’ phrase. Though human nature is inherently social, a degree of separation from society is morally indispensable, as Lawrence E. Klein observes, commenting on Shaftesbury's stance:

Since ‘the world’ displaced one from the self, one might only be able to constitute oneself as a substantial character in retirement and privacy. Shaftesbury's notebooks contained exhortations to withdraw from the dizzying society of others […] Such sentiments explain Shaftesbury's periods of withdrawal, notably his two stays in Holland. ¹¹

Nevertheless, retirement and privacy seem to have a purely auxiliary character in Shaftesbury's ethics, whose aim was ‘to produce a notion of virtue which the gentleman could embrace. To be a gentleman in England was to have a public standing, to exist in the eyes of others: it required a substantial social dimension’. ¹² Rejecting any radical choices concerning retirement, Shaftesbury recommends an occasional, not permanent, separation from society, which, however ‘tedious’ it sometimes becomes, constitutes a rightful environment for (gentle)man's ethical existence.

A less equivocal praise of retirement can be found in Joseph Addison's Spectator (No. 15) essay from 15 March 1711. Importantly, however, Addison's discourse focuses not on gentlemen's but on women's pleasures. It contrasts ‘true Happiness’ with an illusory one, rhetorically associating the former with idyllic imagery pertaining to gardens:

True Happiness is of a retired Nature, and an Enemy to Pomp and Noise; it arises, in the first place, from the Enjoyment of ones self; and, in the next, from the Friendship and Conversation of a few select Companions. It loves Shade and Solitude, and naturally haunts Groves and Fountains, Fields and Meadows: In short, it feels every thing it wants within itself, and receives no Addition from Multitudes of Witnesses and Spectators. On the contrary, false Happiness loves to be in a Crowd, and to draw the Eyes of the World upon her. She does not receive any Satisfaction from the Applauses which she gives her self, but from the Admiration which she raises in others. She flourishes in Courts and Palaces, Theatres and Assemblies, and has no Existence but when she is looked upon. ¹³

Assemblies and crowded spaces in the city nurture an illusion of happiness, which dissipates as soon as the fashionable crowds disperse. In the paragraphs that follow, Addison constructs an idealistic counter-image of Aurelia, who, ‘tho’ a Woman of Great Quality, delights in the Privacy of a Country Life, and passes away a great part of her Time in her own Walks and Gardens’, a vision which, as Stephen Bending postulates, ‘stresses the importance of self, and the independence of a self that does not require an audience’. ¹⁴

If Shaftesbury's gentleman needs for his (moral) health only an occasional respite from crowded public spaces, Addison's ‘Woman of Great Quality’ does not wish at all to ‘draw the Eyes of the World upon her’ – public spaces, in fact, threaten her happiness, which ‘loves Shade and Solitude’. The image of the garden thus helps to redefine the domestic sphere as a somewhat feminised realm of privacy and personal happiness, to be guarded against (and shaded from) the noise and falsity of the public spaces. Addison's essay offers an idealisation of that sphere of private happiness conducted in bluntly gendered terms, which nonetheless seems to shade some of its premises. The woman-in-the-garden figure represents domestic bliss and ideal harmony as well as promising some (substitute of) power to women (Addison says that a family living in country-house seclusion becomes ‘a little Common-Wealth within it self’). But the pronoun used to denote ‘false Happiness’ signals the prominent gendering of the city life: ‘She flourishes in courts and palaces […]’ (not It – the pronoun selected to denote ‘true Happiness’). The pleasures of city life are thus feminised as well, this time by capitalising on avowedly negative connotations of femininity, including the dangers of vanity and superficiality to which a lady frequenting crowded fashionable places becomes vulnerable. Aurelia needs to escape the crowds in order not to become Fulvia: a monstrously sociable female of whom Addison caustically remarks: ‘The missing of an Opera the first Night, would be more afflicting to her than the Death of a Child’. ¹⁵

As Patricia M. Spacks remarks, ‘[the] concept of privacy in its nature raises questions about the proper balance between responsibility to oneself and to other people. Given a society that values social relations as potential moral discipline, privacy embodies danger’. ¹⁶ Nevertheless, eighteenth-century writers were also ready to appreciate ‘the emotional, and conceivably even the moral, value of privacy’, especially when commenting on the hypocrisy and vanity of social life. ¹⁷ What may be added is that the concept of privacy itself embodies a contradiction – privacy is culturally constructed and socially negotiated, yet it also implies a sphere of that individual activity which supposedly remains socially unconstrained and is seen as a spontaneous expression of the self.

When this contradiction is erased, the privacy of retirement might be unproblematically idealised as a return of the self from its estrangement in crowded places of falsity and pretence. Such is the tone, at times, of Elizabeth Montagu's reflections on her experience of countryside retirement, in letters written at Sandleford, her country estate in Berkshire. ¹⁸ In a letter to Elizabeth Carter from 5 June 1764, Montagu finds in her countryside refuge a means to return to a more natural way of being:

This careless sauntering mightily repair’d my shatter’d health & fatigued spirits. I was too agreably amused even to want to read much, and what can one read so agreably as the great volume of infinite wisdom in this fair creation! In books of doctrine how much false reasoning! in history how many shocking facts! in poetry how many dangerous allurements! But while one contemplates the creatures who have instinct for their guide, there is no error, nor mischief, nor vice to offend one. The same wise wisdom that taught the day spring to know his place, teaches the insect where to find his food, and the little bird where to make his nest. ¹⁹

Some decades before William Wordsworth would make Nature his sole guide in the Prelude (in the 1805–6 version of the poem we read: ‘I look about, and should the guide I chuse/Be nothing better than a wandering cloud/I cannot miss my way’), ²⁰ Montagu juxtaposes the ‘infinite wisdom’ of natural instinct with the mischief and error of book learning. She associates solitude not with excessive reading but with ‘careless sauntering’ that repairs her health and mind and allows her to read mostly from the ‘great volume’ of Nature's wisdom.

Montagu hence offers yet another version of the eighteenth-century ideal of retirement as that which puts one away from the folly and falsity of the (urban) crowds: ‘Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife’, as Thomas Gray's influential phrase, later adopted by Thomas Hardy, has it. In the ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), the poet finds wisdom in the modesty and simplicity of life in the countryside: a life of ‘noiseless tenor’, led according to the wisdom that must remain illiterate, for it is ‘the’ unletter’d muse’ that ‘teach[es] the rustic moralist to die’ (ll. 81–4), while ‘fame and elegy’ only stir that madness which makes people forget that ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave’ (l. 36). What offers some hope in the face of death and forgetfulness in Gray's poem is not the writing of ‘fame and elegy’ (which proves too impersonal, leading to an impersonality and formality of writing that links ‘fame’ with the madness of the ‘crowd’) but a heart found in ‘some fond breast’ to which ‘Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries’ (ll. 88–90). ²¹

The task of reading nature, of deciphering its wisdom, is a prominent theme in another poem by Gray, ‘Ode on a Spring’ (1748), later illustrated by William Blake. ²² It is also away from the crowds that the speaker of that poem hopes to learn from ‘The untaught harmony of spring’ (l. 7):

Beside some water's rushy brink

With me the Muse shall sit, and think

(At ease reclin’d in rustic state)

How vain the ardour of the crowd,

How low, how little are the proud,

How indigent the great! (ll. 15–20)

The ease and charm of spring gradually give place to ‘sober’ contemplation, in which the hordes of flying and creeping insects become a metaphor for human societies; the existence of both flies and peoples is guided by ‘the hand of rough Mischance’ (l. 38) and, however diverse and rich in shape and colour, both must abandon their pursuits all the same, ‘in dust to rest’ (l. 40). Nature itself, it would seem, embodies madness, when seen through ‘Contemplation's sober eye’ (l. 31): the restless activity of the insects, often abruptly terminated by sudden death, becomes absurd only through the lens of rational thought afforded by solitary meditation.

If insects represent a lack of awareness of death, humans risk forgetting their own mortality, becoming mindlessly engaged in their insect-like, hectic busyness. Death is the defeat of the rationality of life, but while mortality turns life into an absurd affair, the awareness of death is also posited as the only hope for a ‘sober’ release from the confines of that madness. Hence, the madness of the crowd is finally juxtaposed in the poem with the solitary reflection which – viewing life from a certain distance – sees it as ultimately pointless and absurd:

Methinks I hear in accents low

The sportive kind reply:

Poor moralist! and what art thou?

A solitary fly!

Thy joys no glitt’ring female meets,

No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets,

No painted plumage to display:

On hasty wings thy youth is flown;

Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone—

We frolic, while ‘tis May. (ll. 41–50)

The perspective shifts as the lone ‘moralist’ proves actually no better than a ‘solitary fly’ – this ‘kind’ rebuke contrasts the organic connectedness that reigns in the world of nature with a futile solitude of the speaker.

Commenting on the motif of Spring in Blake's poetry, Jeremy Tambling notes that, if Spring represents the restless energies of life, Nature's invitation to ‘frolic, while ‘tis May’ in Gray's poem may point to the state of being ‘beyond life and death distinctions, a happy fly, thoughtless, in a commitment to madness, or a desire for it’. ²³ But Tambling also argues that for Blake ‘the light of Enlightenment rationality is a source of madness’: constructed to curb the energies of life, including in terms of sexuality, modern rationality propels a desire for madness as an escape from an uninspiring life of rationalised regulation. ²⁴ The fly – a creature seemingly insignificant and thoughtless – may thus stand for the affirmation of madness as something which is, much like death, inherent to life, hence as something to be embraced rather than repressed. While in ‘The Fly’ (1794) Blake asks, ‘Am I not / A fly like thee?’ (ll. 5–6), rejecting the separation of thought from life (‘If thought is life / And strength & breath / And the want / Of thought is death’, ll. 14–17), ²⁵ in the poem ‘Earth's Answer’, also from the Songs of Experience (1794), he speaks of Earth ‘Chain’d in night’ by ‘Starry Jealousy’ and asks a rhetorical question about Spring's modesty and hence the mor(t)ality of life: ‘Does spring hide its joy / When buds and blossoms grow? Does the sower? / Sow by night?’ (ll. 16–19). ²⁶ Life, joy, sexuality – those belong in the light of day, whereas the darkness of night stands for the fear of death as that which brings absurdity and madness to life, which rationalist thinking fears and wants to eliminate, or at least hide and enclose. Shame, modesty, and privacy are signs of self-imposed regulation, but the Spring / Earth must celebrate the spontaneous overflow of energy, thus rejecting the policing of the Sensible, to evoke Rancière's parlance, which wants to define madness negatively, confining it to darkness, making it invisible.

Nature's imagined response to the ‘poor moralist’ in Gray's ‘Ode’ implies that it is the joyful sense of communality and connectedness – not the sterile isolation – that may breed thought that is closer to life. The ‘untaught harmony of spring’ is a crowded kind of harmony – dynamic and diverse, but not chaotic, it does not require regulation or instruction. The moralist's rejection of the insect-like crowds is a form of vanity, slightly scorned by the colourful abundance of the Spring. Gray's poem hints at a certain preromantic readjustment of the role of retirement: it is not to function as a mere ‘sobering’ respite from the madness of too hectic a life, but should involve an active search for a (re)connection with oneself, where at stake is not some rigorous contemplation of a ‘moralist’ but a harmonious daily practice of living/thinking that would allow also for some joyful thoughtlessness. As Rancière puts it, speaking of the Romantic ‘expansion’ of the aesthetic beyond the garden and the museum: ‘The prose of everyday life becomes a huge, fantastic poem. Any object can cross the border and re-populate the realm of aesthetic experience’. ²⁷

Before Romanticism, the search for natural harmony propels the fascination with the environments that promise instruction and enjoyment. In A Dialogue, Gilpin postulates that the architecture of a garden, in order to provide delight, needs to acquire a ‘romantick’ character:

Thus a regular Building perhaps gives us very little pleasure; and yet a fine Rock, beautifully set off in Claro-obscuro, and garnished with flourishing Bushes, Ivy, and dead Branches, may afford us a great deal; and a ragged Ruin, with venerable old Oaks, and Pines nodding over it, may perhaps please the Fancy yet more than either of the other two Objects. – Yon old Hermitage, situated in the midst of this delightful Wilderness, has an exceeding good Effect: it is of the romantick Kind; and Beauties of this sort, where a probable Nature is not exceeded, are generally pleasing. ²⁸

The way to achieve harmony in the garden is, first, to respect ‘probability’ (the landscape garden as an example of modern simulacra, an eighteenth-century version of virtual reality; it needs to appear earthly and natural, while engineering novelty and excitement) and, second, to follow the aesthetic precepts of what Gilpin would later term ‘the picturesque’ (the term suggests a reverse simulation, in a sense in which there appears an effect of painting without paint, whereby nature itself is perceived as a ‘picture’).

Expanded and refashioned by Kent and Brown, the garden at Stowe (on which Gilpin based his aesthetic theories) aimed at uniting art and nature, not without certain political implications, as Jonathan Lamb asserts:

It was a garden famous for its combination of classical and Gothic motifs, crossing stern axioms of duty with erotic extravagances, and uniting the austerities of the Palladian ideal with shell temples and chinoiserie. It has been interpreted ever since as a celebration – and even as an allegory – of political liberty. ²⁹

It is noteworthy that earlier plans of Stowe, used under John Vanbrugh and Charles Bridgeman in 1720–25, show it as a military garden, ‘an incomplete green fort, with bastions, embankments, ravelins and horn-work’. ³⁰ When the landscape garden style was adopted, the lines were softened, but militaristic elements remain discernible: ‘the Temples of Venus and Friendship occupy their green bastions[,] Castle Howard is still ringed with curtain walls, bastions and turrets’. ³¹ If the military garden found its purpose in neat regularity and the display of power (‘Castle Howard is an “heroic” garden rather than a “beautiful” one […] Hercules, Meleager and Apollo Belvedere feature among the statues’), ³² the landscape garden opts for ‘delightful Wilderness’ and ‘romantick’ vistas that speak of peaceful rural retirement. In his reading of the public character of Cobham's garden, enjoyed by retired Lord Cobham's influential friends, but also open for paid tours, with a printed guide provided for visitors, Lamb notes a shift in the function of the garden towards an open public space. He also underscores the combination of the horticultural and the political in the garden's promotion of patriotic sentiment, commercial exchange, and aesthetic taste – those being, however, difficult to fuse. Thus, Cobham's Stowe ultimately fails as a civic space, but succeeds in transforming what was a display of great wealth into a revered tourist attraction and a place for the exchange of money and ideas. ³³ A display of wealth mediated by nature and art: the garden becomes a simulacrum of the public sphere.

Cobham's Stowe testifies to the attempts at fusing the luxury and relative seclusion of the garden with the benefits of public participation. The variety of pleasing sights at Stowe, Gilpin insists, may fail to instruct if not aided by proper guidance, as Polypthon admits:

What an happy Man you are, thus to find an Opportunity of moralizing upon every Occasion! What a noble View you have displayed before me; when perhaps if I had been alone, I should have entertained myself no otherwise than in examining the Busts. ³⁴

Polypthon's declaration may be read as a metacommentary on the purpose of the entire text, for A Dialogue clearly indicates that Stowe's potential visitors may need some aesthetic training. The text supplements the garden in promoting the ideal of harmonious and instructive sociability, supportive of the acquisition of knowledge and polite taste, and hence suggesting that a public benefit may arise from enjoyable private interaction with nature, art, and good company. Gilpin addresses as well, through Polypthon, certain concerns about prolonged idleness among the shadowy groves: ‘If all the World thought as you do, we should have neither Statesmen to mend our Laws, nor Coblers to mend our Shoes: We should all run and hide ourselves amongst Trees, and what then would become of Society?’ ³⁵

Callophilus’ answer echoes Shaftesbury's limited endorsement of retirement:

I am an Advocate for no other Retirement than such as is consistent with the Duties of Life. A Love for which kind of Retirement, properly qualified, is Health to the Mind; but when it is made up unskilfully, it throws us into a fatal Lethargy, from whence begins the Date of an useless Life. ³⁶

Gilpin, much like David Hume, registers the risk of the garden. This risk is both moral and medical, for the intoxicating powers of what Hume would call the ‘genial heat’ of Pleasure (capitalised and feminised by Hume, in the essay called ‘The Epicurean’ (1741), as the goddess who ‘pours around […] all the embellishments of the spring’ ³⁷ ) may prove detrimental to both one's health and conscience. Not merely ‘surrendering to the actual pleasure’ is at stake (Gilpin, like Hume, allows for pleasure and delight), but ‘a more threatening possibility of an endless extension of this pleasure and its projection unto other areas of life’. ³⁸ In other words, the risk of taking Pleasure seriously (in accordance with Hume's advice: ‘render not your joys too serious’) is forgetting that the garden is a simulacrum, that is, a place for retirement, not for (serious) living.

Resembling less and less the military/classicist gardens of the previous age, the landscape garden provides much (shaded) space for fancy and wilderness: pagodas, narrow paths, brooks with wild ducks, and ornamental farm buildings (ferme ornée) were the new sources of delight that replaced turrets and bastions. ³⁹ William Shenstone's garden at The Leasowes near Halesowen was a prominent example of a garden envisioned as an aesthete's paradise. It was formed into a collection of charming sights and scenes much like an art gallery (hence its decidedly ‘picturesque’ quality) but with a modest and palpably rustic air to avoid formality and ostentation, becoming ‘a natural museum of sorts, of which art does not partake and whose natural beauties are not marked by art’. ⁴⁰ A poet, essayist, and garden designer, Shenstone, who penned ‘Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening’ (included in his Works, published in 1764), ‘thought of The Leasowes as a ferme ornée, made it an elegant grazing farm, a series of lawns which led the eye to wilder scenes’. ⁴¹ A luxurious garden thus shades its lavishness, and pretends to be a charming rustic farm.

The presence (purely ornamental) of the quaint rustic farm in the ferme ornée thus works towards two goals that were explicitly discussed by Shenstone with reference to the role of art in garden design. Firstly, in order to retain art's respectability, its visibility must be appropriately limited: simplicity and usefulness are the only justifications for its appearance. ‘But though art be necessary for collecting nature's beauties, by what reason is she authorized to thwart and oppose her? Why fantastically endeavour to humanize those vegetables, of which nature, discreet nature, thought it proper to make trees?’; in this case, ‘art seems very affectedly to make display of that industry, which it is her glory to conceal’. ⁴² Secondly, art separated from labour, in its ethereal simplicity produces and sustains ‘grandeur’: an aesthetic category contrasted (like the picturesque and the sublime) with mere beauty. ‘Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former’, and though ‘it is most eligible to compound your scene of beauty and grandeur’, the former should not undo the latter: ‘Suppose a magnificent swell arising out of a well-variegated valley; it would be disadvantageous to increase its beauty by means destructive to its magnificence’. ⁴³

It is in its effortless simplicity that art approaches the grandeur of nature, Shenstone seems to claim, but it would be more accurate to acknowledge that, paradoxically, while ‘supposedly sheltering nature’ from the intrusion of an ostentatious art, aesthetic discourse actually ‘subordinates [nature] to the very mechanism of aesthetic thought’. ⁴⁴ As Rancière observes, ‘[both] industrial production and artistic creation are committed to doing something on top of what they do – to creating not only objects but a sensorium, a new partition of the perceptible’. ⁴⁵ The inconspicuous aesthetisation of nature (the natural world is now perceived as a series of objects, of ‘nature's beauties’ to be collected) simultaneously ‘naturalises’ the aesthetic thought, which, no longer a prey to fashionable crowds, finds in nature a harmonious environment for the exercise of aesthetic judgment: ‘To be valid, taste had to be beyond the whims of fashion’. ⁴⁶ The category of taste borrows its moral force (‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste) from the authority of nature. It is only under such conditions that an artificial farm with a purely ornamental function may appear as imitating the tasteful ways of nature, when the gardens designed by Brown would increasingly be received as ‘artificial’. The ferme ornée provides a lesson for how to spend enormous money tastefully.

A harmonious garden speaks of the delicacy of taste, whereas ‘[a] crowd, with little resemblance to a community, represents the social as unpredictable and incoherent’: crowds do not belong in the increasingly regimented community of valid aesthetic judgement. ⁴⁷ As David H. Solkin notes, Shaftesbury or Addison's doctrines of refinement would see taste as a ‘social virtue’ and ‘the product of nurture, of education and interaction, and not the expression of preordained status’ – a stance that contributed to such projects as the public Pleasure Gardens at Vauxhall – whereas in the later eighteenth century ‘the classical polis of the Characteristics is no more’, being replaced by ‘the fragmented world of The Wealth of Nations, where a thoroughly privatised morality has replaced a public ethics’. ⁴⁸ If the Garden at Stowe could induce its visitors to see it as an allegory of political liberty, later picturesque gardens, like the landscape paintings that inspired their development, would shift towards what John Barrell identifies as ‘the private view’ (as opposed to ‘the public prospect’). ⁴⁹ Within the problematic ethics of sentimental response, the role of the picturesque garden is more to impress a solitary viewer with the tastefulness of its detail and less to be publicly appreciated as a meaningful design.

A picturesque garden thus becomes nature (pun intended), but nature ‘aestheticised’, as if allowed to express its own powers (Shenstone's ‘grandeur’). The emergence of landscape gardens was directly linked with the massive privatisation of land in England and Scotland through parliamentary enclosures (as opposed to unlegalised forceful enclosures of land in earlier centuries). Though wealthy patrons ‘sent artists such as William Kent to Italy to bring back paintings’, attractive landscapes were increasingly designed to be ‘enjoyed by landowners who walked their grounds as beholders’:

This translation from the book and gallery to the estate obviously could not have taken place without wealthy landowners […] Over three million acres of land were enclosed through acts of Parliament alone in the course of the eighteenth century, transforming the face of England. ⁵⁰

Picturesque gardens frame nature as a ready-made ‘natural’ painting and thus occlude the arbitrariness of landowner's wealth. ⁵¹

In their writings on the picturesque, Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price derided both ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphrey Repton for being ‘mere’ gardeners and not artists able to acknowledge the primacy of the eye: ‘the Picturesque eye’ is ‘anti-georgic’, Malcolm Andrews remarks, noting that ‘man's presumptuous “improvements” are repudiated by the Picturesque eye […] Man is humbled before the untamed grandeur of Nature’. ⁵² In his Essay on the Picturesque (1794), Price criticises the ‘dull smoothing and levelling’ of landscape done by Brown; ‘levelling’ is ‘an activity Price deplores, in both its horticultural and political senses, and his Picturesque preference for the forms of humble life should not be mistaken for egalitarianism’. ⁵³ This hostility towards ‘improvement’ testifies to the more general political agenda that made the Romantics (including Wordsworth) view the cult of the picturesque with suspicion, for in expelling ‘improvement’ from the garden it reveals its reactionary and anachronistic component, not because of its appreciation of nature (a trait present in some of the more ‘radical’ poetry and art of the period), but because it partakes in an ethically problematic aesthetic partition of the political and the natural. The ‘grandeur’ of nature and its picturesque ‘roughness’ are to communicate a primordial and unalterable order, an allure of the world frozen into a harmonious and monumental ‘picture’. The effect relies heavily on a scale, and it was only in the early nineteenth century that a ‘struggle to reduce the scale of operations [of a landscape architect] from thousands of acres, a seeming quarter of Hertfordshire or any other county, to something more manageable, was initiated’. ⁵⁴

Expectedly, alternative ways of addressing the aesthetic partition between the social and the natural – and alternative views of retirement – developed, notably within the Romantic movement. Elizabeth Montagu, writing some time before the Romantic movement gained momentum, writes in a 1764 letter to the Earl of Bath: ‘I do not want a fine garden, a beautiful park, a rich prospect to amuse me, my imagination does all without trouble or expense […] I want not Stewart, Adams, or Brown, to build me a palace, or lay a County into a garden for me’. Montagu's irony contrasts the majesty of a grand-scale landscape garden with the powers of her imagination that appear sufficient (despite her status as an affluent socialite) for a satisfying appreciation of nature. ⁵⁵ As Montagu could say, by focusing on ‘nature's beauties’ one may lose sight of ‘nature's wisdom’. Examining her correspondence, Bending finds a certain ambivalence when it comes to the spiritual powers of the garden: ‘the garden can also be an abnegation of responsibility, a space that leads to confidence in one's moral virtues only because they are not being tested’. ⁵⁶ The danger of retirement is that of moral confidence achieved outside social reality – if the garden functions as ‘a public spectacle of prosperity’, it also works as ‘a private theatre of imaginative pleasures’. ⁵⁷

Gilpin, in A Dialogue at least, would distinguish between ‘natural and moral Beauties’, admitting that to find excitement in nature's beauties we need to relieve ourselves, at least partly, of our ‘social Affections’. ⁵⁸ For Shenstone, in turn, nature allows one to escape from monotony not because it is ‘romantick’ but because it demands patience and careful appreciation, which is why ‘objects’ in a garden should ‘be less calculated to strike the immediate eye, than the judgment or well-informed imagination, as in painting’. ⁵⁹ However, though Shenstone's garden perhaps wishes to read nature's wisdom, it insistently imposes on it the standards of a well-cultivated taste (the imagination of the viewer must be ‘well-informed’), whose careful application is the true source of pleasure. For Elizabeth Montagu, amusement requires imagination, but it does not require ‘a fine garden’ or ‘a rich prospect’. Her statement signals a shift in emphasis from taste to imagination: a shift that would prove crucial to Romanticism.