"Unpleasant, tho' Arcadian Spots": Plebeian Poetry, Polite Culture, and the Sentimental Economy of the Landscape Park

In an essay on Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, the Quaker poet and commentator John Scott told the following anecdote: "The late Earl of Leicester, being complimented upon the completion of his great design at Holkham, replied, 'It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country. I look round; not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the giant of giant-castle, and have eat up all my neighbours.'"¹ By the 1770s Scott was one of a growing number of critics who, like the repentant Leicester, found it difficult to see a moral justification for the enormous parks associated with Lancelot "Capability" Brown. This was partly because Brown's ascendancy in the second half of the eighteenth century coincided with a perceived breakdown of paternalistic social relations and an actual decline in the real living standards of rural laborers.² For Scott, these "fashionable" "improvements" had been made possible by the accumulation of wealth into fewer hands, a development that, as Goldsmith had sought to show, involved the enclosure of commons; the "demolition," or at least relocation, of cottages; and the engrossment of small farms.³ Landscape parks, in other words, were funded by a highly commercialized system of agriculture, and this was profiting landlords, pauperizing laborers, and thus eroding the "moral" economy of a once paternalistic rural society. Isolating the country house from the working countryside, parks accordingly became signs of how landlords were abandoning public duty for private pleasure, leaving laborers with "less work, the same wages, and more expence for necessaries." "Pleasure," Scott protested, "may be justly said to have encroached on cultivation, and the rich to have remotely abstracted from the provision of the poor."⁴

A supporter of the American Revolution,⁵ Scott considered the landscape park as proof that the landed classes had become parasitic on the populace they were supposed to sustain. The Whiggish idea of liberty that such parks symbolized—what Horace Walpole described as "the opulence of a free country, where emulation reigns among many independent particulars"⁶ —was thus redefined as a form of luxury, the freedom of the patrician elite to make the land and its inhabitants serve their own personal pleasure. To a large extent this ethical attack on luxury was rooted in a classical republican theory of liberty that, since it defined a free and just polity as a manly and agrarian polity, was as hostile to women as it was to commerce. Indeed, many educated women moralized the Brownian landscape park in order to legitimize their participation in polite society, along with their involvement in the public sphere of aesthetic and political judgment. Walpole's friend Hannah More, for example, revealingly referred to "Browne" as a modern "Midas" who turned "gold itself into beauty," before adding "I had always a particular love for the talents of a man who could improve the taste of a country without impairing its virtue."⁷ In light of Scott's comments, More's insistence on the ethical probity of Brown must be read as an attempt to prevent his style of gardening from being apprehended as merely a form of luxury. Rather than embodying the corruption that was the outgrowth of conspicuous consumption, she regarded such parks as emblems of liberty—defined much more narrowly than Scott had defined it as the security of property. In this respect, More's argument paralleled that made by those apologists for modernity, from David Hume onward, who contended that women and commerce civilized and uplifted the nation. For More, as for a growing number of polite observers, the landscape park exerted a civilizing influence on agrarian life, refining a formerly brutal patriciate and reforming an intractably idle and irreverent populace.

Clearly, this conflict over the meaning of the landscape park was informed by two competing definitions of morality. On the one hand, there was the ancient, public, and (implicitly) masculine version of morality that emphasized the disinterested virtue of the gentleman of landed property and the consequent loyalty, bravery, and independence of the laboring...