THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN
Shaftesbury spoke of "the mockery of princely gardens", and Pope
satirised them in his neat couplet:
"Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other \
Now this enforcing of architectural rule on the garden is certainly
something unnatural. And so Addison wrote in The Spectator in
1712: "For my own part I would rather look upon a tree in all its
luxuriance and diffusion of boughs and branches than when it is cut
and trimmed into a mathematical figure". That profession of faith in
nature not.tampered with is evidently a revolt of liberalism and
tolerance against tyranny; it is a "Whig revolt. But the curious
thing about it is that although these attacks were made in the name
of nature, nature was still understood by Addison and Pope in
Newton's and indeed in Boileau's sense. Boileau's objections in his
Art of Poetry of 1674 against the Baroque of the South were that it
was unreasonable and therefore unnatural. Reason and nature are
still synonyms with Addison and Pope, as we have seen in Pope's
comments on Blenheim.
Add to this Shaftesbury's "passion for things of a natural kind"
and his idea that "the conceit or caprice of Man has spoiled their
genuine order by breaking in upon (their) primitive state", and you
will be near an answer to the puzzling parallelism between classicist
architecture and natural gardening. The original state of the universe
is harmony and order, as we see it in the ordered courses of the stars
which were revealed by the new telescopqs, and in the structures
of organisms which were revealed by the new microscopes. "Idea
or Sense, Order, Proportion everywhere", to use Shaftesbury's
words once more. Now to illustrate the superiority of harmony
over chaos Shaftesbury explicitly refers to the superiority of the
"regular and uniform pile of some noble Architect" over "a Heap
of Sand or Stones". But is not the heap of sand nature in her primi-
tive state? That the early i8th century did not want to recognise.
So we arrive at this curious ambiguity. Simple nature is order and
harmony of proportion. So a natural architecture is an architecture
according to Palladio. But simple nature is also, in the common
speech of everybody, fields and hedgerows, and of these people were
genuinely fond, at least in England. So the garden should be left as
close to this simple nature as possible. Addison was the first to reach
this conclusion. He exclaimed: "Why may not a whole estate be
185