The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 445 pages of information about The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times.

The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 445 pages of information about The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times.

The straight line was banished; in its place came wide spaces of lawn and scattered groups of trees of different sorts—­dark fir and alder here, silver birch and grey poplar there; and flowery fields with streams running through them stood out in relief against dark woodland.

Stiff walls, balustrades, terraces, statues, and so forth, disappeared; the garden was not to contrast with the surrounding landscape, but to merge into it—­to be not Art, but a bit of Nature.  It was, in fact, to be a number of such bits, each distinct from the rest—­waterfall, sheltered sunny nook, dark wood, light glade.  Kent himself soon began to vary this mosaic of separate scenes by adding ruins and pavilions; but it was Chambers the architect who developed the idea of variety by his writings on the dwellings and manners of the Chinese.[10]

The fundamental idea that the garden ought to be a sample of the landscape was common both to Kent and the Chinese; but, as China is far richer than England in varieties of scenery, her gardens included mountains, rocks, swamps, and deserts, as well as sunny fields and plains, while English gardens were comparatively monotonous.  When the fashion for the Chinese style came in, as unluckily it did just when we were trying to oust the Rococo, so that one pigtail superseded the other, variety was achieved by groups of buildings in all sorts of styles.  Stables, ice-houses, gardeners’ cottages took the form of pavilions, pagodas, kiosks, and temples.

Meanwhile, as a reaction against the Rococo, enthusiasm for Nature increased, and feeling was set free from restraint by the growing sentimentality.  Richardson’s novels fed the taste for the pleasures of weeping sensibility, and garden-craft fell under its sway.  In all periods the insignificant and non-essential is unable to resist the general stamp, if that only shews a little originality.

These gardens, with temples to friendship and love, melancholy, virtue, re-union, and death, and so forth, were suitable backgrounds for the sentimental scenes described in the English novels, and for the idyllic poets and moonshine singers of Germany.  Here it was the fashion to wander, tenderly intertwined, shedding floods of tears and exchanging kisses, and pausing at various places to read the inscriptions which directed them what to feel.  At one spot they were to laugh, at another to weep, at a third to be fired with devotion.

Hermitages sprang up everywhere, with hermits, real or dummy.  Any good house near a wood, or in a shady position, was called a hermitage, and dedicated to arcadian life, free from care and ceremony.  Classic and romantic styles competed for favour in architecture; at one moment everything must needs be purely classic, each temple Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric; at another Gothic, with the ruins and fortresses of mediaeval romance.  And not only English gardens, but those of Europe generally, though to a less degree, passed through these stages of development, for no disease is so infectious as fashion.

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The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.