A Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honorouble the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in Buckinghamshire. Gilpin William
catered to the propensity for retirement – the Hermitage, the Temple of Friendship, or the Temple of Sleep – as well as for the obligations of public life – the Temple of British Worthies, the gothic Temple of Liberty. The most emblematic items in the gardens, upon which Callophilus predictably expatiates because they were designed to be easily "read," are in the public places, where they firmly control the visitors' mental reactions and leave less scope for the private and enthusiastic reveries of Polypthon. It is a fair assumption that most visitors to the Temples of Liberty or Ancient and Modern Virtue would have understood their meanings just as Callophilus did (pp. 40 and 19-21).
But the aesthetic taste of Polypthon for the forms and shapes rather than the meanings of landscape betrays a potential for less controlled and more private rhapsodies. His quest "after beautiful Objects" (p. 24) takes him as much to the northern parts of Great Britain as to gardens like Stowe, and is obviously prophetic of Gilpin's own picturesque travels. Like Warton's Enthusiast or the Lover of Nature (1740), Polypthon rejects "gardens deck'd with art's vain pomps." This is because he is fascinated with the more radical landscapes of solely formal elements – the serpentine windings of the river at Stirling (p. 44) or what has been called the abstract garden9 that comes to fruition only in the decades after Gilpin's visit under the management of "Capability" Brown. But the fact that Polypthon finds sufficient abstract patterns to engage his attention at Stowe suggests that the Brownian mode was already latent among the richnesses of the Buckinghamshire gardens.
The "rejection" of Stowe by Polypthon as by Warton also signals their desire to indulge the enthusiastic fit. His very first reaction upon arrival at Stowe is an "Exclamation" that expresses his expectations of aesthetic delight (p. 2). Although his companion is equally susceptible and is accused by Polypthon of being an "Enthusiast" (p. 49) and in the third edition of the Dialogue (p. 12) determines himself to "indulge the thrilling Transport," it seems to be Polypthon whom Gilpin intends to characterize by expressive as opposed to explanatory outbursts as they proceed round the gardens. And it is he who concludes their visit (p. 58) with a catalogue of the various human moods for which the gardens cater, rather more extravagant in its expressive fervour than Callophilus' traditional identification of the passions on faces of other visitors (p. 51).
Gilpin's attention to his characters' intellectual and emotional reactions illuminates the roles of poetry and painting that have always been associated with the rise of the English landscape garden.10 If Milton's description of the Garden of Eden, so frequently invoked by eighteenth-century gardenists, implied an informal structure for designers to emulate, it equally encouraged associationist activity in gardens. The visual reminders of literary texts at Stowe —Il Pastor Fido (pp. 2ff) or Spenser (pp. 6-7) – which are sometimes accompanied by inscriptions which articulate the "dumb poetry" of the decorations (e.g., p. 13) serve mainly to provoke the imagination of visitors. Sometimes, as at the Hermitage, Stowe's designers force specific associations upon the mind; elsewhere they are content to manipulate the feelings in such a way as to stimulate merely general fancies to which the visitor himself must put whatever name he wishes. It is consistent with Gilpin's attempt to identify Polypthon with the less public aspects of Stowe that it is he who twice formulates his own responses to a scene: the quotations from Milton (pp. 10 and 52-3) may both describe the formal features of landscape, but they are also expressive of his emotional reactions.
Pictures, too, provided associationist focus when recalled in a garden: the most obvious instance being the probable allusion to Claude at Stourhead.11 Yet the actual influence of pictures on landscape gardens has been generally exaggerated.12 Where they were perhaps a force seems to have been in articulating the mental and emotional reaction of visitors. When Walpole praises William Kent for realizing in gardens "the compositions of the greatest masters in painting",13 I suspect that he is in part rationalizing his own associationalist instinct, when at Hagley he was reminded of Sadeler's prints or of the Samaritan woman in a picture by Nicolas Poussin. Allusions to pictures were a means of focusing evanescent mood.
Gilpin, too, organizes his characters' responses in pictorial focus. The Advertisement again alerts the reader to these studied painterly aims. Once inside the gardens Callophilus sees pictures everywhere: variously disposed objects "make a most delightful Picture" (p. 14), while on at least three occasions in the first half-dozen pages the ruins, prospects, and "Claro-obscuro" of trees are discussed in terms that suggest how his habits of vision have been educated in front of painted or engraved landscapes which in their turn are recalled to provide a suitable vocabulary for his experiences.14 Even Polypthon invokes the syntax of painting (pp. 25 and 41) to formulate his reactions to scenery.
It is in these painterly preconceptions of the characters and in Polypthon's account of Scottish scenery (pp. 23-4) that hints of Gilpin's later career are announced: the second edition of the Dialogue even talks of his "Observations" on Stowe, a term that became a standard ingredient in the titles of his picturesque tours. The education of sight by the study of paintings and prints was clarified and expounded in the Essay on Prints, written at least by 1758 and published ten years later. The picturesque tours themselves were started in the 1770s and published from 1782 onwards. In them Gilpin refines and enlarges upon the methods and ideas of his Stowe Dialogue. The adjudication between a taste for natural beauties (what his Three Essays term the "correct knowledge of objects" 15) and the inclination to adjust them according to painterly criteria (in 1792 termed "scenes of fancy") is more sophisticated and consistent. He still delights in the variety of a landscape; but the roughness that Stowe only occasionally allowed becomes one of his guiding rules in appraising scenery.
Perhaps the most significant items in the Dialogue for readers of Gilpin's later writings will be his psychological emphasis and his attention to verbal and visual associations. Although his picturesque tours never entirely neglected the topographical obligation to describe actual localities, it is increasingly an imaginative response to landscape that is his concern.16 In the Dialogue he explained how a good imagination will "improve" upon the sight of a grand object, just as Burke a few years later was to discuss the essential vagueness of the sublime and its appeal to the private sensibility. Polypthon's reactions at Stowe suggest something of this potential in contradistinction to Callophilus' ability to read the message of each temple or vista. What Gilpin displays in 1748 is more intricately adumbrated in the Three Essays of 1792: a scene may strike "us beyond the power of thought … and every mental operation is suspended. In this pause of intellect, this deliquirium of the soul, an enthusiastic sensation of pleasure over spreads it …".17 As the final pages of Dialogue suggest, that experience was also available in the gardens of Stowe.
But the more mature imagination in Gilpin is tempted simultaneously in two directions, which perhaps explains why one contemporary was moved to commend the published tours for being "the Ne plus ultra of the pen and pencil united." 18 At Stowe he is attentive to the expressive potential of scenery and its associations ("The Eye naturally loves Liberty" [p. 54]), which are best expounded in the written commentary. But he also delights in the shapes and forms of scenery, the abstract qualities of the Stowe landscape that please the eye rather than the mind's eye. These are best recorded in his watercolours and the illustrations which become a main feature of his later books.
Bedford College
University of London
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The facsimile of [William Gilpin's] A Dialogue Upon The Gardens … At Stow (1748) is reproduced from a copy (Shelf Mark: 577.e.26[3]) in the British Library. The total type-page (p. 7) measures 156 x 94 mm.
A DIALOGUE UPON THE Gardens of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham, &c
Polypthon was a Gentleman engaged in a way of Life, that excused
Derek Clifford,
"Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the Science of Landscape, will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the
See Kenneth Woodbridge,
On this see Derek Clifford,
I. W. U. Chase,
This is an apt example of the psychological theory of sight proposed by E. H. Gombrich,
Carl Paul Barbier,
Cited by Templeman,