STTLES OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN 45 



and the wide, straight, tree-planted avenues, the formal vistas, the star- 

 shaped street-intersections, which came to their greatest use in the work 

 of Haussmann, certainly trace much of their inspiration to the style 

 of Le Notre. 



In England, the Grand style appealed especially to those of the The Romantic 

 great land owners who were prominent in public life, familiar with the ^^^^<^^P^ 

 work in France, or employing French-trained gardeners, and desirous of 

 themselves emulating this magnificence and ostentation. Some people 

 of smaller means and more conservative tastes retained their gardens 

 of the Tudor style, but many of the great estates were redesigned and 

 much good work of an earlier time was destroyed to produce second- 

 rate adaptations of the dignity of Versailles. But the very class of 

 people who were so eager to run after the novelties oifered by Italy and 

 France were those who first tired of them. There was now gathering 

 force throughout Europe the impatience of formalism and restriction 

 and artificiality, which manifested itself early in literature in such 

 diverse writings as those of Addison and Pope and later Thompson in 

 England, and of Klopstock in Germany. In relation to landscape 

 appreciation the first effect of this great general movement seems to 

 have been an impatience of formal shapes and definite boundaries, and 

 a groping appreciation that in the forms of Nature there was a freedom 

 and inspiration that the man-imposed forms lacked. But Kent and 

 the following landscape designers did not turn whole-heartedly to Nature 

 herself for inspiration. Rather they studied the work of the few land- 

 scape painters that had then arisen, notably the work of Claude Lor- 

 rain, and endeavored to impose on their landscape designs the rules of 

 a related but essentially different art. The reaction against formalism 

 also had a simpler manifestation. Tired of geometrical shapes, the 

 landscape gardeners introduced shapes which were not organized geomet- 

 rically but which were unfortunately not organized in any other way, 

 and so substituted, for the existing formal gardens, schemes which were 

 not worthy to be called designs at all, since they expressed little more 

 than the wayward fancy of those who perpetrated them.* This work, 



* Cf. Repton's strictures on the " slovenly carelessness " of the reactionaries 

 from formalism in Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening, 1794, Chapter VI, 

 Of the Ancient Style of Gardening, — especially p. 44. 



