THE HISTORY OF GARDEN-MAKING 



been accepted as in accordance with the spirit of nature seems to us 

 now almost incredible, and it is difficult to understand how anyone 

 of intelligence could have believed that this sort of empty formality 

 was worthy to be described as landscape gardening. But though 

 Brown's methods were ridiculed by some people and but faintly 

 praised by others — Daines Barrington, for instance, said of him that 

 " he had undoubtedly great merit in laying out pleasure grounds ; 

 but I conceive that in some of his plans I see more traces of the 

 kitchen gardener of old Stowe than of Poussin or Claude Lorraine '* 

 — the fact remains that the royal gardener was for many years a 

 kind of dictator in matters of taste, and at his death, in 1783, left a 

 large fortune, the accumulation of the fees paid to him by grateful 

 clients. 



The other members of the group were not more scrupulous and 

 hardly more intelligent ; they rivalled " Capability " Brown in 

 destructiveness, and they had no better understanding of the 

 subtleties of the art which they misused. But so strong wa s the 

 influence of the fashion which dominated gardening during the 

 latter half of the eighteenth century that these men were able to do 

 anything they pleased, and were given an absolutely free hand by 

 the people who employed them. Wheatly wrote a book, " Observa- 

 tions on Modern Gardening," which, with Walpole's " Essay on 

 Modern Gardening," published a few years later, became the 

 accepted authority on the new type of design not only in England, 

 but on the Continent as well. The rage for destruction spread 

 widely, indeed, and the English influence was powerful enough 

 abroad to produce effects which seem now scarcely defensible. We 

 have at the present time a truer appreciation of the value of relics 

 from the past than was common among the people of the eighteenth 

 century, and we can sincerely regret the zeal of the reformers who 

 were so needlessly anxious to be modern at all costs. 

 But the movement in the direction of landscape gardening, as 

 opposed to the trim formality of the earlier school, was too strong to 

 be stemmed by the protests of the few thinkers who realised what 

 was being lost. The formal garden had become discredited»..partly 

 because its decorative characteristics had been allowed to get 

 beyond reasonable bounds into sheer extravagance, and partly be- 

 cause its particular features had grown too familiar to the public, 

 and had in consequence lost the charm of freshness. Its associati ons 

 were forgotten, and its claims to consideration were overlooked. 

 Ilardly anyone~paused to think whether, after all, the price that was 

 being paid for novelty was not too high. Yet in the wilderness of 



xix 



