At Home - Bill Bryson [140]
One less happy practice Vanbrugh introduced with Carlisle at Castle Howard was that of razing estate villages and moving the occupants elsewhere if they were deemed to be insufficiently picturesque or intrusive. At Castle Howard, Vanbrugh cleared away not only an existing village but also a church and the ruined castle from which the new house took its name. Soon villages up and down the country were being leveled to make way for more extensive houses and unimpeded views. It was almost as if a rich person couldn’t begin work on a grand house until he had thoroughly disrupted at least a few dozen menial lives. Oliver Goldsmith lamented the practice in a long, sentimental poem, “The Deserted Village,” inspired by a visit to Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire when the first Earl Harcourt was in the process of erasing an ancient village to create a more picturesque space for his new house. Here at least fate exacted an interesting revenge. After completing the work, the earl went for a stroll around his newly reconfigured grounds, but failed to recall where the old village well had been, fell into it, and drowned.*
Vanbrugh didn’t necessarily invent any of these things. Horace Walpole for one credited Bridgeman with inventing the ha-ha, and it may be, for all we know, that he gave the idea to Vanbrugh. But then it may equally be, for all we know, that Vanbrugh gave it to him. All that can be said is that by about 1710 people suddenly had lots of ideas for how to improve the landscape, principally by giving it an air of greater naturalism. One event that seems to have contributed was a storm of 1711 known as the Great Blow, which knocked down trees all over the country and caused a lot of people to notice, evidently for the first time, how agreeable a backdrop they had made. In any case, people suddenly became unusually devoted to nature.
Joseph Addison, the essayist, became the voice of the movement with a series of articles in The Spectator called “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” in which he suggested that nature provided all the beauty one could want already. It just needed a bit of management, or as he put it in a famous line: “A Man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions.” (The newish word landscape, you will gather, hadn’t quite settled in yet.) “I do not know whether I am singular in my Opinion,” he went on, “but, for my own part, I would rather look upon a Tree in all its Luxuriancy and Diffusion of Boughs and Branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a Mathematical Figure,” and all at once the world seemed to agree with him.
Stately homeowners everywhere gladly followed these precepts, introducing curving paths and wandering lakes, but for a time the improvements were mostly architectural. All across the country rich landowners packed their grounds with grottoes, temples, prospect towers, artificial ruins, obelisks, castellated follies, menageries, orangeries, pantheons, amphitheaters, exedra (curved walls with niches for busts of heroic figures), the odd nymphaeum, and whatever other architectural caprices came to mind. These were not ornamental trifles, but hefty monuments. The Mausoleum at Castle Howard, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (and where Vanbrugh’s patron the third earl is now passing eternity), was as large and as costly as any of Christopher Wren’s London churches. Robert Adam drew up a plan to erect a complete walled Roman town, picturesquely ruined and entirely artificial, across a dozen acres of meadowy hillside in Herefordshire simply to give a minor noble named Lord Harley something diverting to gaze on from his breakfast table. That was never built, but other diversions of startling magnificence were. The famous pagoda at Kew Gardens, rising to a height of 163 feet, was for a long time the tallest freestanding structure in England. Until the nineteenth century it was richly gilded and covered with painted dragons—eighty in all—and tinkling brass bells, but these were sold off by King George IV to pay down