William Shenstone and the Leasowes
The English landscape garden in transition, c.1740-1763

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

[start page 34] Connecting Shenstone’s thoughts on gardening

William Shenstone’s influence on gardening was disseminated both by what he created at the Leasowes, and through his writings. His brief essay Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening, written in 1759 but not published until 1764, the year after his death,[1] is a compilation of epigrammatic sayings on the aims of gardening and the form which gardens should take. The essay both begins and ends abruptly, with little in the way of linking commentary and no coherent unifying structure. Shenstone appears simply to have noted down thoughts as they occurred to him, and left the resultant compilation unrevised; it is not clear that he ever intended the essay to be published.

In Unconnected Thoughts, Shenstone is concerned with 'landskip, or picturesque-gardening’ which ‘consists in pleasing the imagination by scenes of grandeur, beauty, or variety’.[2] What sets this type of gardening apart is that pleasure is its overriding purpose. The useful can be part of the picturesque, but only if it can be made pleasing: ‘Convenience merely [end page 34] has no share here; any farther than as pleases the imagination’.[3] The consideration of beauty alone in the landscape, in the sense of what one visitor described as the the ‘exquisite and ... sweetly varied’[4] scenes which could be enjoyed at the Leasowes, can detract from the qualities of grandeur and simplicity which also contribute to the effectiveness of a garden. These characteristics must be kept in balance with one another: ‘Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you encrease the other. Variety is most a-kin to the latter, simplicity to the former’.[5] Beauty has a part to play in ‘pleasing the imagination’, but not the only part: ‘Perhaps the division of the pleasures of the imagination, according as they are struck by the great, the various, and the beautiful, may be accurate enough for my present purpose’.[6] In a footnote, Shenstone further distinguishes the purely beautiful from other kinds of garden landscape, saying that ‘Garden-scenes may perhaps be divided into the sublime, the beautiful, and the melancholy or pensive; to which last I know not but we may assign a middle place betwixt the former two, as being in some sort composed of both’.[7]

Shenstone’s view of beauty, as expressed in Unconnected Thoughts, clearly reflects the influence of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, which appeared in 1757; but he was also strongly influenced by the works of the Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, who emphasized the importance of the infinite variety offered by the natural world in stimulating sensibility, and Alexander Gerard, who claimed that pleasurable associations existing in [end page 35] the mind were the fundamental cause of the appreciation of beauty.[8] From these sources, and from his own observations, Shenstone developed a theory of gardening which stressed the engagement of the imagination. He envisaged the garden as an environment to be actively experienced by its visitors, in terms of the associations, ideas, emotions and sentiments which it provoked. This theory accounted for those sensations experienced in a landscape that could not necessarily be ascribed only to the visual qualities of the object or scene being perceived; thus, Shenstone suggests that a ruin ‘may be neither new to us, nor majestick, nor beautiful, yet afford that pleasing melancholy which proceeds from reflexion on decayed magnificence’.[9] In this context, a gardener should not consider only the appearance of beauty in the features to be found in his garden, but ‘should avail himself of objects, perhaps not very striking; if they serve to connect ideas, that convey reflexions of a pleasing kind. Objects should indeed be less calculated to strike the immediate eye, that the judgement of the well-formed imagination; as in painting’.[10]

This associationist potential was ultimately related to the natural qualities of the site, but these alone were insufficient for in unimproved nature ‘we perceive many breaks and blemishes, several neglected and unvariegated places’[11] which may blend harmoniously into nature considered as a universal whole but which appear as shortcomings to limited human vision, capable only of apprehending a limited part of the natural world. Shenstone made this point in a discussion with the poet James Thomson during the latter’s visit to the Leasowes in 1746, when he spoke [end page 36] of ‘Collecting, or collecting into a smaller compass, and then disposing without crowding the several varieties of Nature’.[12] He expanded further on this theme in a letter of 1749 to Lady Luxborough, in which he asserted that it was ‘owing to y^e limited faculties of Men y^t there is any need of Taste ... Taste in Gardens &c: has little more to do than to collect y^e Beauties of Nature into a compass proper for it’s [sic]own observation’.[13] The improver’s role was to epitomize the beauties of the natural landscape in a limited space, and to make such carefully judged ‘alterations’ as were necessary:

to maintain a due proportion betwixt y^e objects you introduce; y^t you may not have so much Lawn, as to have none of the Beauty of Plantations; so much Wood as to have no Flower-work, & so on. The necessity of smoothing or brushing y^e Robe of Nature may proceed entirely from y^e same Cause.[14]

This concern with ‘due Proportion’ reflects the influence of Hutcheson, who argued that the maintenance of the correct ratio of uniformity to variety in a composition was conducive to beauty.

This conception of the landscape gardener gathering and disposing the beauties of Nature to produce a pleasing composition is also found in many other writers of the period. Isaac Ware, for example, a member of the Burlingtonian circle of writer-architects, argued in his Complete Body of Architecture (1756) that the new taste in gardening aimed ‘to collect the beauties of nature; to separate them from those rude views in which her [end page 37] blemishes are seen, and to bring them nearer the eye; to dispose them in the most pleasing order, and to create an universal harmony among them’.[15] Another Palladian theorist, Robert Morris, wrote in his Lectures on Architecture (1734) that:

Care should be taken as to lay out and dispose the several Parts, that the neighbouring Hills, the Rivulets, the Woods and little Buildings interspers’d in various Avenues ... should render the Spot a kind of agreeable Disorder, or Artful Confusion; so that by shifting from Scene to Scene, and by serpentine or winding Paths, one should, as it were, accidentally fall upon some remarkable beautiful Prospect, or other pleasing Object.[16]

Shenstone used the same fundamental ideas, but with a different emphasis. Ware and Morris were speaking of formal gardens after the Palladian model, the kind of regular but asymmetrical landscape which had been laid out at Chiswick, and by Alexander Pope at Twickenham. Shenstone applied the ideas of variety and surprise inherent in ‘artful Confusion’ to an irregular landscape at the Leasowes, and introduced a balance between areas of variegated, uniform, improved, and more ‘savage’ scenery. His practice of taking the creation of variety so far as to include rough, unsightly, unimproved terrain which ‘by the semblance of rude neglect, add[s] to the real beauty and wildness of the scene’,[17] and expanses of [end page 38] ‘savage, gloomy wildness’[18] next to smooth and beautiful areas, demonstrates the way in which he transformed existing ideas of variety, contrast and surprise into a more ‘natural’ and irregular mode of gardening. As George Mason commented when describing what he called ‘the peculiarities in SHENSTONE’s style of gardening’ from the perspective of the 1790s, ‘novel was the idea of exhibiting a variety of natural landscapes by the mere assistance of a path along the side of a bordering hedge’.[19]

In a landscape thus made more varied and interesting, the associationist potential of particular scenes could be artificially intensified to strengthen a mood of melancholy, repose or reflection already suggested by the qualities of a particular site. Art, legend, history and the classics provided a rich repository of texts, objects, symbols and emblems which could serve this purpose, such as the inscription from Poussin’s ‘Arcadia’ of which Shenstone wrote ‘The idea of it is so very pleasing to me, that I had no peace till I had used the inscription on one side of Miss Dolman’s urn, "Et in Arcadia Ego."’[20] The choice of a suitable name for the area reinforces its ability to engage the interest and imagination of the viewer; thus a wooded dell with a waterfall and a stream becomes ‘Virgil’s Grove’, a pensive and poetic landscape which helps to sustain the classical arcadian vision of the whole garden, evoking ‘the mood of the ancient desiderium, the longing for what has irrecoverably departed’.[21] The distinctive ‘characters’ of the parts of a garden, Shenstone suggests, can be ‘strengthen[ed] ... by allowing every part some denomination, and then supporting it’s [sic] title by suitable appendages - For instance, The lover’s [end page 39] walk may have assignation seats, with proper mottoes - Urns to faithfull lovers - Trophies, garlands, &c. by means of art’.[22] By the same token, a garden should exploit any historical and legendary associations in its locality:

What an advantage must some Italian seats derive from the circumstance of being situate on ground mentioned in the classicks? And, even in England, wherever a park or garden happens to have been the scene of an event in history, one would surely avail one’s self of that circumstance, to make it more interesting to the imagination. Mottoes should allude to it, columns, &c. record it; verses moralize upon it; and curiosity receive it’s [sic] share of pleasure.[23]

When Shenstone visited Sanderson Miller’s estate at Radway in January 1750, he deplored Miller’s failure to make any reference to the Civil War battle of Edge Hill, the site of which fell within his property: ‘as y^e Field of y^t battle lies full in view & but just beneath his House, is it not strange y^t he has not on Motto, Urn, or Obelisk, that might impress y^t interesting Idea, & give a deep solemnity to his Recesses?’[24] By 1754 Miller was proposing to enrich his grounds with monuments to commemorate Edge Hill, delighting Shenstone who commented approvingly, ‘He will, by this means, turn every bank and hillock of his estate there, if not into classical, at least into historical ground’.[25] [end page 40]

There were no significant historical events associated directly with Shenstone’s own estate at the Leasowes, but the more general historical character of the area did inspire some of his poetry, such as his Elegy XXI: ‘Taking a view of the country from his retirement, he is led to meditate on the character of the ancient BRITONS’, which refers to the Welsh mountains which are visible from the Leasowes.[26] A similar use of local historical associations is to be found in Elegy XIII, ‘Reflections suggested by his situation’, which compares the cruelty of an Anglo-Saxon regicide which took place at Hagley with the tranquillity which had reigned there ‘Since LYTTELTON has crown’d the sweet domain / With softer pleasures, and with fairer fame’.[27]

The ‘ruinated priory’ which Shenstone had constructed in his grounds offered further scope for historical reflection. Not only did it produce a pleasing melancholy in the viewer, it also served to point a moral, as Shenstone commented in his Elegy XXI: ‘Here, if my vista point the mould’ring pile, / Where hood and cowl devotion’s aspect wore, / I trace the tott’ring reliques with a smile, / To think the mental bondage is no more!’[28] He devoted another lengthy poem entirely to such reflections on his priory, entitled ‘The Ruin’d Abby; or, the Effects of Superstition’. This poem provides a commentary on the Shenstonian landscape in action, engaging with the mind and emotions of the spectator, as ‘a thousand rural scenes / Suggest instruction, and instructing please’. The gardener is urged to ‘Produce thine axe’ and ‘Remove th’obstructive bough’, ‘Nor cease till, thro’ the gloomy road, the pile / Gleam unobstructed; thither oft thine eye / Shall sweetly wander; thence [end page 41] returning, soothe / With pensive scenes thy philosophic mind’.[29] The ruin, given greater prominence against a dark background of trees by its position in the midst of ‘A tract of brighter green’ where the ground has been cleared, reflects the peaceful pastoral harmony which now reigns, where the ‘gothic turret, pride of ancient days!’ is ‘Now but of use to grace a rural scene; / To bound our vistas ...’[30]

For Shenstone, the visual qualities and landscape settings of ruins had to be considered in terms of their ability to involve the imagination of the onlooker, in conceiving ‘an enlargement of their dimensions’ and recollecting ‘any events or circumstances appertaining to their pristine grandeur’:

The breaks in them should be as bold and abrupt as possible, - If mere beauty be aimed at (which however is not their chief excellence) the waving line, with more easy transition, will become of greater importance - Events relating to them may be stimulated by numberless little artifices, but it is ever to be remembered, that high hills and sudden descents are most suitable to castles; and fertile vales, near wood and water, most imitative of the usual situation, for abbeys and religious houses ...[31]

While ruined structures did indeed have qualities which made them beautiful objects, ‘principally irregularity of surface, which is VARIETY’,[32] [end page 42] it was their capacity for exciting the imagination that was most important to Shenstone.

Shenstone’s gardening theory thus relates the visual appeal of a garden to its imaginative appeal; it partakes of the emblematic and symbolic character of earlier gardens, while looking forward, in its inclusion of rough landscapes and picturesque views, to the expressionistic landscape gardens which were to develop during the later eighteenth century.

Shenstone, Pope, and the landscape garden in transition

Alexander Pope was an extremely influential figure in Augustan gardening, through his writing and the example of his own garden at Twickenham. Shenstone was an admirer (he took great care over the positioning of a ‘Busto of Mr. Pope’ when redecorating his library[33]) and his ideas of gardening show clear evidence of a knowledge of Pope’s ideas.[34] However, many of the similarities between Pope’s ideas and those of Shenstone can be ascribed to the common heritage of gardening theory which both men shared, as much as to the direct influence of the former on the latter. Neither Pope nor Shenstone were formulating new ideas, but rather were re-expressing old ones and applying them in new ways. Given this context, it is misleading to claim that Shenstone’s Unconnected Thoughts ‘can fairly be described as a paraphrase of Pope’s principles’ of gardening, or that ‘Shenstone’s garden theory and practice of gardening derive directly from Pope’s; the Leasowes was inspired by Pope’s [end page 43] principles of garden design’.[35] Shenstone’s garden theory and practice derive from a combination of Pope’s ideas, the received ideas from half a century of garden theory, and the fruits of his own thoughts and experiments with his own garden. Shenstone’s theories mark a transitional stage in the development and application of Pope’s gardening precepts, as they do for the landscape garden as an art-form.

Shenstone’s insistence on the importance of variety in landscape design is an example of the way in which his theories both echo and diverge from Pope’s. One of Pope’s abiding concerns was the classical ideal of harmony arising from discord. In ‘Windsor-Forest’ he wrote of the differing characters of a landscape scene combining in an overall harmony which echoed that which once reigned in the ‘Groves of Eden’:

Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain,
Here earth and water seem to strive again,
Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d,
But, as the world, harmoniously confus’d:
Where order in variety we see,
And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree.[36]

Shenstone, like Pope, wished to preserve the differing characters of different kinds of ground; where he diverged from Pope and indeed from the whole tradition of garden theory from Shaftesbury onwards, which tradition informed Pope’s analysis, was in no longer seeking an overall harmony, a concordia discors.[37] Rather than seeking to create a scene in which ‘Parts [end page 44] answ’ring Parts, shall slide into a Whole’,[38] Shenstone wanted each part to retain its distinctive character, so that the spectator experienced surprise and novelty when moving through the garden from one to another.

It was in pursuit of this effect that an area characterized by ‘a confused mixture of savage and uncultivated ground, held up to the eye, and forming a landskip fit for the pencil of Salvator Rosa’[39] was contrived in the south-east of the Leasowes, a part of the garden which one visitor wrote ‘should be considered as a blemish’.[40] Shenstone’s use of such areas alongside the gentler, more evidently improved areas is consistent with his views as expressed in the Unconnected Thoughts. ‘It is no objection to the pleasure of novelty’, he comments,

that it makes an ugly object more disagreeable. It is enough that it produces a superiority betwixt things in other respects equal. It seems, on some occasions, to go even further. Are there not broken rocks and rugged grounds, to which we can hardly attribute either beauty or grandeur, and yet when introduced near an extent of lawn, though ever so beautiful, may satiate and cloy, unless the eye passes to them from wilder scenes ...[41]

William Mason, in his Essay on Design in Gardening (1768), recognised Shenstone’s intention and related his methods to those of a painter who [end page 45] subdues the less significant parts of his canvas so that the more important and beautiful portions strike the viewer more forcefully:

There is an art in the management of grounds, little understood, and possibly the most difficult to be accomplished: ’tis analogous to what is called keeping under in painting: by some parts being seemingly neglected, the succeeding are more strikingly beautiful. The effect of this management is very apparent at the LEASOWES.[42]

Another point of difference between Shenstone and Pope is to be found in Shenstone’s attitude to ruins. While both Shenstone and Pope valued ruins for their historical associations, it is impossible to imagine Shenstone agreeing with Pope that the ruined castle at Sherborne should be transformed into a garden with the courts ‘thrown into Circles or Octagons of Grass or flowers’ and that ‘Little paths of earth might be made ... to guide from one View to another on the higher parts’.[43] Pope’s gardening, like his poetry, is infused with a spirit of lucidity, in which a ruined castle can be opened up and incorporated into the garden as a pleasant arbour and elevated viewing-point; Shenstone’s precepts are more tuned to the exploitation of such features internally, by the mind, through the assocations - often melancholy or pensive - which they conjure up. The difference of emphasis underlies the two poets’ different versions of landscape gardening.

[end page 46] According to Joseph Spence, the term ‘landscape gardening’ was the joint creation of Pope and Shenstone.[44] To Spence’s note of Pope’s remark made at Oxford in 1734, ‘All gardening is landscape-painting. (Spoken on the round of Inigo Jones and the view through it at the Physic Garden at Oxford) Just like a landscape hung up’ is appended the phrase ‘Shenstone therefore calls it landscape-gardening’. Pope’s comment has been taken as indicating that he was urging gardeners to follow precepts in gardening which would make their gardens look like landscape paintings.[45] In particular, the omission of Spence’s comments on the specific circumstances in which the remark was made, ‘(Spoken on the round of Inigo Jones and the view through it at the Physic Garden at Oxford)’, makes it appear that Pope wanted gardens in which the effect for the viewer was ‘just like a landscape hung up’, when in fact that last statement is far more likely to have been a direct description of the effect of the view of the Oxford Physic Garden (which was, after all, a rigidly formal garden) framed by Inigo Jones’s entrance arch. This misreading of Pope’s comment is used in conjunction with his remarks on vistas and picturesque effects[46] to establish a view of Pope as the prophet of the natural style in gardening. It is more accurate to see his precepts as deriving from, and applicable to, regular gardens. Shenstone’s importance is that he applied them, along with other ideas, to an irregular garden.

For Pope, Nature, in the form of the ‘Genius of the Place’, is the painter of the landscape, as he makes clear in his ‘Epistle to Burlington’.[47] To perform the act of gardening is to work in harmony with Nature, permitting Nature to paint the landscape. Shenstone is more concerned with applying the rules [end page 47] of balance and composition employed in painted landscapes to the creation of those garden scenes in which the beauties of Nature are ‘collect[ed] and epitomis[ed’:[48] ‘Landskip should contain variety enough to form a picture upon canvas; and this is no bad test, as I think the landskip painter is the gardiner’s best designer’;[49] and ‘I believe one is generally sollicitous for a kind of ballance in a landskip, and, if I am not mistaken, the painters generally furnish one: a building for instance on one side, contrasted by a group of trees, a large oak, or a rising hill on the other’.[50] These are the principles behind the visual composition of the landscape; but the imaginative creation of a garden, for Shenstone, goes beyond these purely aesthetic considerations.

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Notes

1. Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening is in Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, pp. 77-91, and is also reproduced in Hunt & Willis, Genius of the Place, pp. 289-97.

2. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 77.

3. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 77.

4. Arthur Young, A Six Months Tour Through the North of England (1770), p. 345.

5. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 90.

6. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 77.

7. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 77. This footnote is not reproduced in Hunt & Willis, Genius of the Place.

8. See Shenstone’s essay On Taste, in Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, pp. 186-98.

9. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 77.

10. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 77-8.

11. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 88.

12. Quoted in Hunt & Willis, Genius of the Place, pp. 244-5.

13. Mallam, Letters, p. 143.

14. Mallam, Letters, p. 143.

15. Quoted in John Dixon Hunt, William Kent: Landscape Garden Designer (London, 1987), p. 91.

16. Quoted in Paulson, Emblem and Expression, p. 21.

17. Anon., A Companion to the Leasowes, Hagley, and Enville (Birmingham, 1789; repr. 1800), p. 3.

18. Heely, Letters, p. 178.

19. Mason, Essay (1795 edn.), p. 118.

20. Mallam, Letters, p. 375.

21. Humphreys, William Shenstone, p. 101.

22. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 79.

23. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 79.

24. Mallam, Letters, p. 189.

25. Mallam, Letters, p. 293.

26. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. I, p. 53.

27. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. I, p. 56-7.

28. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. I, p. 52.

29. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. I, p. 213.

30. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. I, p. 222.

31. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 81.

32. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 81.

33. Williams, Letters, p. 142; Mallam, Letters, p. 133.

34. Brownell, Alexander Pope, pp. 235-41.

35. Brownell, Alexander Pope, p. 237, 235.

36. Pope, ‘Windsor-Forest’, lines 11-16; in Pope: Poetical Works, ed. Davis, p. 37.

37. See John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 134.

38. Pope, ‘Epistle to Burlington’, line 66; Pope: Poetical Works, p. 316.

39. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 206.

40. Anon., Description of ... the Leasowes (c.1800), p. 26.

41. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 78.

42. Mason, Essay (1768 edn.), pp. 47-8.

43. Alexander Pope, letter to Martha Blount (c.1724); in Hunt & Willis, Genius of the Place, p. 210.

44. Spence, Observations, vol. I, anecdote 606, p. 252.

45. For example, Brogden, ‘The ferme ornée’, in Maccubbin & Martin (eds.), British and American Gardens.

46. For example, Pope’s letter of 2 June 1725, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), vol. II, p. 296.

47. Pope, ‘Epistle to Burlington’, lines 57-64; Pope: Poetical Works, p. 316.

48. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 88.

49. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 79.

50. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, pp. 82-3.