A Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honorouble the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in Buckinghamshire. Gilpin William

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      A Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honorouble the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in Buckinghamshire

      INTRODUCTION

      Stowe is certainly the most documented of all English Augustan gardens,1 and William Gilpin's Dialogue probably one of the most important accounts of it. He was at Stowe in 1747 and published his record of that visit anonymously the following year.2 The Dialogue reached a second edition, with some slight alterations in the text, in 1749 and a third in 1751, when the dialogue was transformed into narrative.

      The Dialogue recommends itself both to the historian of the English landscape movement, in which Stowe was a prime exhibit, and to the student of the later vogue for the picturesque, in which Gilpin was a major participant. His account of Cobham's gardens illuminates some of the connections between the cult of the picturesque that Gilpin fostered with his publications of the 1780s and the earlier eighteenth-century invocation of pictures in gardens.

      Perhaps in no other art form were the tensions and transformations in the arts more conspicuous than in landscape gardening. Gilpin is especially rewarding in his instinctive attention to these shifting patterns; although the dialogue form is not very skillfully handled, it yet allows some play between the rival attitudes. Thus his characters attend to both the emblematic and the expressive garden;3 to both its celebration of public worth and its commendation of private virtue. While Gilpin seems sufficiently and indeed sharply aware of set-piece views in the gardens, the three-dimensional pictures contrived among the natural and architectural features, he also reveals himself as sensitive towards the more fluid psychological patterns, what one might term the kinema of landscape response. Above all, his obvious delight in the landscape garden and appreciation of it vie with an equally strong admiration for scenery outside gardens altogether.

      At the time of Gilpin's visit, Lord Cobham's gardens were substantially as they are represented in the engravings published in 1739 by the widow of Charles Bridgeman, one of Stowe's designers. In the year of Gilpin's visit work had just started in the northeast part of the grounds upon the natural glade that came to be known as the Grecian Valley.4 Whether it is the work of Lancelot ("Capability") Brown, who was then a gardener at Stowe, or only prophetic of it, the Grecian Valley was a hint of the less architectural, the more carefully "natural" gardens of the next decades. Although Gilpin would presumably have seen little of this most advanced example of gardening style, he would still have observed what were, in the terms customarily invoked, formal and informal ingredients at Stowe. From the Rotunda, for example, he looked over the (now vanished) Queen's Pool, "laid out with all the Decorations of Art" (p. 15), including the oblong canal itself and various statues; the first body of water encountered beside the Lake Pavillions (p. 4) was octagonally shaped and bore an obelisk at its centre. Yet elsewhere there was frequent occasion to praise prospects that obviously seemed much less artificial.

      If there is any distinction between the two participants in the Dialogue, it is certainly between the one's taste for the evidence of art and the other's penchant for natural beauties. If their opposition is not very conspicuously maintained by Gilpin, it is surely because his own loyalties were divided and were to be reconciled only with some subtlety and ingenuity later in his career. Callophilus, who cites Pope's balanced instructions on the mixture of art and nature (p. 26), is more inclined to appreciate these elements in the garden where Nature's defective compositions have been improved; the love of beauty that his name announces is of beauty methodized, though without exceeding "a probable Nature" (p. 6). On the other hand, his enthusiastic companion, Polypthon, directs his eponymous ill-will mostly against the decorations of art: the "hewn Stone" of Dido's Cave particularly offends him (p. 14), and he "cannot very much admire" the canal below the Rotunda (p. 15). Yet he seems to share Callophilus' notions about "mending" nature (p. 23), and it is he who proposes a landscape that, substituting farm-houses for temples (p. 45), approximates most clearly to that prettiest of eighteenth-century landscape ideas, the ferme ornèe. Polypthon's predilection for scenery outside gardens seems equally compromised by his ready assent to Callophilus' praise of the carefully studied contrasts in Stowe gardens: so that he may turn from the less agreeable vista down the Queen's Pool and look instead over Home Park, earlier noted for its "rural scene" (p. 8), and now admired as a natural field – though the cattle prominent in Rigaud's drawings5 are not mentioned.

      But what is artless for Polypthon is studied by his companion in terms of art: "the Field is formed by that Semi-circle of Trees into a very grand Theatre" (p. 15, my italics), and his eye registers an architectural feature – Vanbrugh's Pyramid – as the apt centre of that field of vision. This particular exchange at the Rotunda suggests that the usual modern discussion of landscape gardens in terms of their diminishing formality or escalating informality is less Gilpin's concern than the mind's involvement with the various landscapes. Callophilus and Polypthon can apparently both contemplate the same scene from the Rotunda, southwest towards Kent's Temple of Venus and Vanbrugh's Pyramid, yet adjudge its artifice differently. What is evidently at work in Gilpin's record of this garden is the mental experience of it, and in his case the ambiguities of his visual response.

      The complicated geometry that began on Bridgeman's drawing board6 and then was transferred to shape the grounds is certainly a survival of the old-fashioned French style in gardens. Its presence is registered by Gilpin, who allows Callophilus to note how the Gibbs building, like many other objects at Stowe designed to be seen along a variety of axes, "has its Use … in several Prospects" (p. 8). But the psychology of the viewer has at least equal weight in Gilpin with the many-faceted object viewed from different positions.7 And in those circumstances the presence of formal or informal designs upon the ground or the drawing-board matters less than the variety of objects and scenes within a garden and even, as at the Rotunda, the variety of viewpoint and interpretation within one vista.

      Variety had, of course, always been essential to the English garden and is a special feature of Stowe, as Pope implies in the Epistle to Burlington and as the writer of the appendix to Defoe's Tour of 1742 explicitly stated.8 What we have in Gilpin's Dialogue is both valuable evidence of response to garden structures, the visitor's rather than the designer's or client's account, and some hints of how the idea of variety, itself a painterly term, presented itself to Gilpin in the days before his picturesque tours.

      Gilpin's path through the gardens at Stowe is recorded in the Dialogue as a journal of the mind's responses: the Advertisement (p. iv) prepares the reader for this with its insistence upon the role memory has played in its composition. The varieties of mental experience are sometimes registered by the dialogue form; more often the two visitors share responses which correspond to the changes of Stowe's scenes. This is most amusingly illustrated by the "impertinent Hedge" that suddenly blocks their view (p. 11); Callophilus' ingenious explanation, a curious parallel to Sterne's blank page in Tristram Shandy, is that thereby the visitor's "Attention" is kept awake (p. 12). More strenuous is their intellectual involvement with the monuments, statues, and inscriptions in the Elysian Fields (pp. 19ff), emblems that provoke in Callophilus "a Variety of grand Ideas" (p. 29). Yet, as the text of the third edition makes precisely clear (p. 11), in face of the same objects his companion is more fascinated than he with the formal elements of an art – contrasts in landscape textures, style of inscriptions (p. 30), or unadmirable workmanship in bas-reliefs (p. 37). The "Subject[s] for … Rapsody" (p. 30) that Polypthon mocks were an essential aspect of any Augustan garden, and six pages later they divert even Polypthon himself into moralizing. But his stronger inclination is to ignore the iconographical problems of the Saxon busts (p. 44) and gaze "into the Country" where his companion solicitously directs his attention to the elegant woods (p. 45).

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