THE HISTORY OF GARDEN-MAKING 



than appears in his productions as a painter and sculptor, and some 

 of the buildings he designed are by no means unworthy of com- 

 mendation. 



But in his garden work his point of view was that of the painter 

 rather than the architect. He tried to produce pictorial effects, and 

 to re-arrange nature on the lines of the pictures by the painters of 

 classical landscape, whose canvases he had presumably learned to 

 admire while he was abroad. The principles he affected are summed 

 up by Horace Walpole : " Selecting favourite objects, and veiling 

 deformities by screens of plantations, he realised the composition of 

 the greatest masters in painting. The living landscape was chastened 

 and polished, not transformed." Walpole was of the naturalistic 

 faction, so his praise was not without bias, and his estimate of Kent's 

 capacities deserves to be to some extent discounted. Present-day 

 opinion would hardly endorse so readily this chastening and polishing 

 process, or count it as the evident invention of a brilliant genius. 

 For what Kent really did was to substitute one kind of formality for 

 another. He threw over topiary work entirely, he avoided regu- 

 larity of line, and, like Bridgman, would have nothing to do with 

 " square precision " ; but, nevertheless, he chastened Nature with 

 undue severity, and dressed her in a kind of penitential sheet which 

 cloaked most of her true beauties. His " great system " was a piece 

 of artificiality, and was, perhaps, best described by Scott, who said of 

 him, that " his style is not simplicity, but affectation labouring to 

 seem simple." His planted pictures lacked breadth and distinction, 

 and instead of the dignified quaintness of the old arrangements, had 

 a quite unnecessary restlessness and want of harmony. He com- 

 mitted many absurdities too, sticking up dead trees deliberately to 

 give a touch of realism to the little patches of sham forest which he 

 designed a trick which was adopted by the landscape painters of 

 the conventional school and building ruins of Gothic churches or 

 Grecian temples to increase what he conceived to be the picturesque- 

 ness of his gardens. 



It must be admitted, however, that his labours were much approved 

 by his contemporaries. Walpole was not the only writer who hailed 

 him as a genius ; there was a chorus of praise headed by Mason, the 

 poet, who exhausted the resources of the English language in eulogy 

 of Kent and his methods. During the first half of the eighteenth 

 century a spurious nature-worship had become fashionable spurious 

 because it was based not upon true sympathy with nature's inherent 

 charm, but upon a fancy for those scenic landscape compositions in 

 which such painters as Claude or Poussin travestied reality. How 



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