Part 2

It is in these painterly preconceptions of the characters and in Polypthon's account of Scottish scenery (pp. 23-4) that hints of Gilpin's later career are announced: the second edition of the Dialogue even talks of his "Observations" on Stowe, a term that became a standard ingredient in the titles of his picturesque tours. The education of sight by the study of paintings and prints was clarified and expounded in the Essay on Prints, written at least by 1758 and published ten years later. The picturesque tours themselves were started in the 1770s and published from 1782 onwards. In them Gilpin refines and enlarges upon the methods and ideas of his Stowe Dialogue. The adjudication between a taste for natural beauties (what his Three Essays term the "correct knowledge of objects") and the inclination to adjust them according to painterly criteria (in 1792 termed "scenes of fancy") is more sophisticated and consistent. He still delights in the variety of a landscape; but the roughness that Stowe only occasionally allowed becomes one of his guiding rules in appraising scenery.

Perhaps the most significant items in the Dialogue for readers of Gilpin's later writings will be his psychological emphasis and his attention to verbal and visual associations. Although his picturesque tours never entirely neglected the topographical obligation to describe actual localities, it is increasingly an imaginative response to landscape that is his concern. In the Dialogue he explained how a good imagination will "improve" upon the sight of a grand object, just as Burke a few years later was to discuss the essential vagueness of the sublime and its appeal to the private sensibility. Polypthon's reactions at Stowe suggest something of this potential in contradistinction to Callophilus' ability to read the message of each temple or vista. What Gilpin displays in 1748 is more intricately adumbrated in the Three Essays of 1792: a scene may strike "us beyond the power of thought ... and every mental operation is suspended. In this pause of intellect, this deliquirium of the soul, an enthusiastic sensation of pleasure over spreads it ...". As the final pages of Dialogue suggest, that experience was also available in the gardens of Stowe.

But the more mature imagination in Gilpin is tempted simultaneously in two directions, which perhaps explains why one contemporary was moved to commend the published tours for being "the Ne plus ultra of the pen and pencil united." At Stowe he is attentive to the expressive potential of scenery and its associations ("The Eye naturally loves Liberty" [p. 54]), which are best expounded in the written commentary. But he also delights in the shapes and forms of scenery, the abstract qualities of the Stowe landscape that please the eye rather than the mind's eye. These are best recorded in his watercolours and the illustrations which become a main feature of his later books.

Bedford College University of London

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

Before 1753 there was no guide to any English garden except Stowe; by then the Stowe guidebook had gone through sixteen editions (one in French) plus two pirated editions, the Dialogue itself which mentions the guidebook on p. 17, and two sets of engraved views. For a modern account of Stowe see Christopher Hussey, English Gardens and Landscapes, 1700-1750 (London: Country Life, 1967), pp. 89-113.

As a companion piece to this facsimile of Dialogue, ARS plans to publish in its 1976-77 series a facsimile of the Beauties of Stowe (1750), with an introduction by George Clarke.

Gilpin's authorship is argued by William D. Templeman, The Life and Works of William Gilpin (1724-1804), Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XXIV. 3-4 (Urbana, 1939), pp. 34-5.

The distinction is made by Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, 5th ed. (London, 1793), pp. 154-5.

The Grecian Valley is seen first on Bickham's engraved plan of 1753. This and other plans of Stowe are reproduced by George Clarke, "The Gardens of Stowe," Apollo (June, 1973), pp. 558-65.

See Peter Willis, "Jacques Rigaud's Drawings of Stowe in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 6 (1972), 85-98.

See George Clarke, op. cit., p. 560.

On this topic see two essays by Ronald Paulson: "Hogarth and the English garden: visual and verbal structures," Encounters, Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. John Dixon Hunt (London: Studio Vista, 1971), and "The Pictorial Circuit and related structures in eighteenth-century England," The Varied Pattern, ed. Peter Hughes and David Williams (Toronto: Hakkert, 1971).

"There is more Variety in this Garden, than can be found in any other of the same Size in England, or perhaps in Europe" (p. 290).

Derek Clifford, A History of Garden Design (London: Faber, 1962), pp. 138-9.

"Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the Science of Landscape, will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who dress and adorn nature": MS. annotation to William Mason's Satirical Poems, published in an edition of the relevant poems by Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), p. 43. For an anthology of similar comments see The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (London: Elek, 1975).

See Kenneth Woodbridge, Landscape and Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), plates 2a, 2b, and 3.

On this see Derek Clifford, op. cit., pp. 140 and 158.

I. W. U. Chase, Horace Walpole: Gardenist. An edition of Walpole's 'The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening' with an estimate of Walpole's contribution to landscape architecture (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1943), p. 26.

This is an apt example of the psychological theory of sight proposed by E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York: Pantheon, 1961).

Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (London, 1792), p. 49.

Carl Paul Barbier, William Gilpin, His Drawings, Teaching and Theory of the Picturesque (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 71, 106 and 139.

Op. cit., p. 49.

Cited by Templeman, op. cit., p. 228.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The facsimile of [William Gilpin's] A Dialogue Upon The Gardens ... At Stow (1748) is reproduced from a copy (Shelf Mark: 577.e.26) in the British Library. The total type-page (p. 7) measures 156 x 94 mm.

DIALOGUE

UPON THE GARDENS