by Roy Porter
Once the Deity had explained to man his place in the divine scheme, Ray reflected upon His assessment of what He saw:
I persuade my self, that the bountiful and gracious Author of Mans Being… is well pleased with the Industry of Man, in adorning the Earth with beautiful Cities and Castles, with pleasant Villages and Country-Houses … and whatever else differenceth a civil and well-cultivated Region from a barren and desolate Wilderness.51
The model typically prescribing the relations between man and Nature was thus the farm. According to Ray's contemporary Sir Matthew Hale, God was the great freeholder, the world his estate and man his tenant. ‘The end of man's creation,’ the Chief Justice explained in legal terminology, ‘was to be God's steward, villicus, bailiff or farmer of this goodly farm of the lower world.’ For this reason was man ‘invested with power, authority, right, dominion, trust and care, to correct and abridge the excesses and cruelties of the fiercer animals’ – in short, ‘to preserve the face of the earth in beauty, usefulness and fruitfulness’.52 Everyone would have understood Hale's fatherly metaphor of the good steward, be he in the Bible or in Bedfordshire. Nature would yield and yield well, but only if the principles of good husbandry were upheld: matching stock and crops to soils, adopting sound rotations, planning for long-term sustainability – quite literally ploughing back the profits.53
Such images of stewardship – paternal not plundering – sanctioned action and ordained environmental ethics and aesthetics. Pioneering in this respect was the work of John Evelyn, whose Silva, A Discourse of Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty's Dominions (1662) condemned wasteful land practices and exposed how, so as to provide charcoal and pasturage, ‘prodigious havoc’ had been wreaked through the tendency ‘to extirpate, demolish, and raze… all those many goodly woods and forests, which our more prudent ancestors left standing’.54 Evelyn's belief that sustainable economic growth depended on sound conservation practices set the tone for the new managerial approaches to Nature widely advocated in the eighteenth century.
‘Improvement’ was a label often applied to the land, serving as a code word for capitalist farming, notably enclosure, while also being applied to landscape gardening. From early works such as John Houghton's periodical, A Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (1692–1703), and Timothy Nourse's Campania Foelix, or a Dis-course of the Benefits and Improvements of Husbandry (1700), agricultural improvement was publicized by a vast new instructional literature. No mere jurist but also an agricultural improver, Henry Home, Lord Kames, brought out The Gentleman Farmer; Being an Attempt to Improve Agriculture by Subjecting it to the Test of Rational Principles (1776), which proved so popular that it had run to a fourth edition by 1798.55
Meanwhile, agriculture looked also to science. George Fordyce, a pupil of the Edinburgh professor William Cullen, produced Elements of Agriculture and Vegetation (1765), promoting the chemical aspects of farming. Dr Alexander Hunter, another who trained for medical practice in Edinburgh, set up the York Agricultural Society and edited Georgical Essays, a collection of papers on agriculture published in four volumes between 1770 and 1772.
The King of Brobdingnag memorably stated that ‘whoever could make two Ears of Corn, or two Blades of Grass to grow upon a Spot of ground where only one grew before; would deserve better of Mankind, and do more essential Service to his Country, than the whole Race of Politicians put together’.56 As well as thus serving political economy, agricultural improvement embodied the new relation between man and Nature advocated by enlightened thinking: the exercise of direct control over the soil, thereby making it succumb to man and thus yield greater crops.
The Scot James Hutton, no mere geologist, theorized the underlying philosophy. Having studied medicine at Edinburgh, in 1752 Hutton moved to a Norfolk farm to learn the skills of a practical farmer. During subsequent Continental travels, he observed the methods of foreign husbandry, before returning to his family estate where he made numerous innovations. His latter years were devoted to the ambitious ‘Principles of Agriculture’, a manuscript (still unpublished) of over one thousand pages which aimed ‘to assist the farming community to judge whether they were farming on sound scientific and economic principles; to promote the general good of the country’.57 The ‘Principles’ portrayed scientific agriculture as effecting a Promethean transformation of the relationship between man and Nature: ‘agriculture is a scientific operation’, wrote Hutton, whereby man becomes ‘like a God on earth… orders the system of this world, and commands this species of animal to live, and that to die’.58
Hutton's friend Erasmus Darwin was another warm advocate of scientific agriculture. In the introduction to his Phytologia (1800), he regretted that ‘Agriculture and Gardening… continue to be only Arts, consisting of numerous detached facts and vague opinions, without a true theory to connect them.’59 This had to change. The endeavour would progress only when integrated within rational, capitalist enterprise:
pasturage cannot exist without property both in the soil and the herds which it nurtures; and for the invention of arts, and production of tools necessary to agriculture, some must think, and others labour; and as the efforts of some will be crowned with greater success than that of others, an inequality of the ranks of society must succeed.60
For its part, the agricultural committee of the Royal Society of Arts (1754) gave prizes for innovations, and enthusiasm for progress found expression in the foundation of agricultural societies such as the Bath and West of England (1777). The Duke of Bedford and other landlords held shows at which go-ahead tenants explained their methods, and prizes were awarded for the best stock. Such enthusiasm led to the establishment in 1793 of the first Board of Agriculture, a private body supported by government funds.
In the business of agricultural improvement, none was more tireless than Arthur Young, farmer, traveller, author, editor of the Annals of Agriculture and finally secretary of the new Board of Agriculture.61 Writing in 1767, he proclaimed, ‘Agriculture is beyond all doubt the foundation of every other art, business, or profession’ – and he outlined the great Brobdingnagian commandment: ‘Make two blades of grass grow where one grew before.’ The formula? ‘To cultivate That crop, whatever it be, which produces the greatest profit Valued in Money’. The obstacle? The vicious circle of agricultural poverty, with all its dire consequences: put little in and you got little out.62
For Young, who regarded it as the ‘greatest of manufactures’,63 the new agriculture promised a more efficient environmentalism. The old common fields spelt waste – they were, he argued, a waste of Nature and hence of God's largesse and they were wasteful to individuals and the nation alike. Was it not revealing that the baulks and margins on the open fields were actually known as the ‘waste’?64 So the shift from ‘moral economy’ to ‘political economy’, from partial usufruct to complete private ownership, would end the waste of Nature and ensure the gain of all: ‘The universal benefit resulting from enclosures, I consider as fully proved’.65 The capitalist farm and the common fields thereby became parables of industry and idleness respectively. Young traversed the nation, raising anthems to environmental betterment, as here when visiting Norfolk:
All the country from Holkham to Houghton was a wild sheepwalk before the spirit of improvement seized the inhabitants, and this glorious spirit has wrought amazing effects: for instead of boundless wilds and uncultivated wastes inhabited by scarce anything but sheep, the country is all cut into enclosures, cultivated in a most husbandlike manner, richly manured, well peopled, and yielding a hundred times the produce that it did in its former state.66
Enclosure did not merely improve the land. Though, according to Young, ‘the Goths and Vandals of open fields’ still touched ‘the civilization of enclosures’, enclosing had ‘changed the men as much as it has improved the country’: ‘When I passed from the conversation of the farmers I was recommended to call on, to that of men whom chance threw in my way, I seemed to have lost a cent
ury in time, or to have moved 1,000 miles in a day.’67 In this national improvement drive, the captains of agriculture should rightly be the nobility, although they too must abandon notorious aristocratic waste: ‘there is fifty times more lustre in the waving ears of corn, which cover a formerly waste acre, than in the most glittering star that shines at Almack's’.68 Yet the basic message was simplicity itself: ‘He, who is the Best Farmer, is with me the Greatest Man’: presumably Farmer George (the King was an agricultural enthusiast) was meant to read that.69
With over 2,000 enclosure Acts and more than six million acres of land affected, enclosure and progressive agriculture in general presented a model to enlightened minds of proper environmental superintendence, wedding profit to paternalism, yet also incorporating cherished values. Traditional arcadian, pastoral myths – Nature as spontaneous bucolic bounty – could still be accommodated.
O the Pleasure of the Plains,
Happy Nymphs and happy Swains,
Harmless, Merry, Free, and Gay,
Dance and sport the Hours away.70
Thus sang the chorus in Handel's Acis and Galatea (1718). A quasi-physiocratic doctrine could also be grafted on – Nature as the root of all value or, in Adam Smith's dictum, ‘land constitutes by far the greatest, the most important, and the most durable part of the wealth of every extensive country’.71 And finally the Protestant ethic would serve as fertilizer: labour consecrated private gain into a public and ecological good. Hence it became the received wisdom that what was good for farming was good for the nation; a friend of England was a friend of the Earth. Robert Andrews, Esquire, and his new bride, Frances, as famously painted by Gainsborough, surely agreed: ownership, affluence and aesthetics clearly coalesced in their politics of landscape. Lords of all they surveyed, no waste ground, no peasants, paupers and poachers, and not even any happy nymphs encroached upon their power and privacy.72
Yet this vision of environmental bounty, if primarily Whig and patrician, was not exclusive to the privileged. It could equally serve those who envisaged the economy of Nature as supporting the march of mankind. ‘Three-fourths of the habitable globe, are now uncultivated,’ commented the scandalized William Godwin, rationalizing the biblical ‘go forth and multiply’ into political radicalism. Properly managed, Nature would sustain boundless human improvement: ‘Myriads of centuries of still increasing population may pass away, and the earth be yet found sufficient for the support of its inhabitants.’73 Not just that but, for Godwin and many others, the domestication of Nature furthered the civilizing process – for wild environments bred wild people. As Addison and Steele's Spectator buffed up the bourgeoisie, agriculture was sowing civility in the shires.74 This cosy consensus remained in place until Malthus's dismal Esssay on the Principle of Population (1798). The parson's version of the eco-system as a zero-sum game not only deflated revolutionary utopians; it amounted to an abandonment of shared broad-church assumptions about how environmental management guaranteed human progress.75
Enlightened apologists, as has been said, represented the environment as a farm, promoting policies for the responsible management of natural resources for private profit and long-term public benefit. The mastering of the wild was a source of pride.
I sing Floods muzled, and the Ocean tam'd,
Luxurious Rivers govern'd, and reclam'd
Waters with Banks confin'd, as in Gaol,
Till Kinder Sluces let them go on Bail;
Streams curb'd with Dammes like Bridles, taught t'obey,
And run as strait, as if they saw their way…76
ran a verse celebration of the draining of the Fens, penned by Sir Jonas Moore, Charles II's Surveyor-general of the Ordnance: one need not be a devout Foucauldian to catch the tenor of this fantasy of the great confinement of Nature. Taming the wilderness remained a favourite theme. ‘When we behold rich improvements of a wild and uncultivated soil,’ enthused the Cumbrian chauvinist John Dalton, ‘we are struck with wonder and astonishment, to see the face of Nature totally changed.’77
But as the wild was being rendered both profitable and pleasing, another facet of the environment was becoming a problem: the garden, traditionally designed to be a rather formal and often walled appendage to the country seat.78 Affluence and ambition threatened to change all that: why think small in an age of aristocratic aggrandizement marked by ever statelier homes? ‘May not a whole Estate,’ suggested Joseph Addison, ‘be thrown into a kind of garden by frequent Plantations… A man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions’ – that is, create the impression that one's property stretched boundlessly throughout Nature – an illusion enhanced by William Kent's invention of the ha-ha.79 But Addison's modest proposal merely compounded the problem of the garden, since it seemed to destabilize the distinctive elements of the estate.
So long as Nature had worn a wild air, its antonym, the garden, was bound to be orderly – hence the classical formal gardens of the Renaissance, with their chessboard plans, mazes, hedges, alleys and statuary, seemingly echoing model cities and serving as citadels protecting civilization against the horrid wilderness. But as Nature itself became regularized into a farm, and geometrized by the parliamentary surveyors’ charts and chains, so artifice inevitably lost its compelling rationale. With Nature tamed, wildness itself could at last become aesthetically prized, rather as, once enlightened élites had divested themselves of a belief in witchcraft and diabolical possession, the supernatural was ripe for repackaging in Gothic novels and ghost stories.
Repudiating what were increasingly denounced as the claustrophobia of the Italian garden and the sterile symmetries of Versailles, the English garden was refashioned to follow Nature, shedding its overt artifice and manicured paraphernalia. The great house abandoned the formal garden, while also tucking the home farm and kitchen garden out of sight. Inspired by ‘Capability’ Brown, a generation of gardeners fostered a new arcadian escapism by turning the great house into an island lapped by a sea of parkland, whose austere simplicity - mere turf, tree clumps and sheets of water - could pass for Nature, thanks to the art that concealed art.80
The cultural psychology underlying this new departure was perfectly understood by that great Victorian gardener John Claudius Loudon:
As the lands devoted to agriculture in England were, sooner than in any other country in Europe, generally enclosed with hedges and hedgerow trees, so the face of the country in England… produced an appearance which bore a closer resemblance to country seats laid out in the geometrical style; and, for this reason, an attempt to imitate the irregularity of nature in laying out pleasure grounds was made in England… sooner than in any other part of the world.81
Taste never stands still; soon Brown was in his turn being mocked as one obsessed with shaving, trimming and cropping, and his successors, notably Humphry Repton and Richard Payne Knight, while upholding his touchstone of artless Nature, took it to its logical conclusion. Paying court to fancy, they unashamedly brought wildness right up to the house itself by waving ‘the wand of enchantment’ over the estate, as urged by Marmaduke Milestone, the Reptonian landscaper in Peacock's Headlong Hall, who promised to impart ‘a new outline to the physiognomy of the universe’.82 Some were predictably intimidated by this new proximity of naked Nature. ‘Knight's system appears to me the jacobinism of taste,’ muttered Anna Seward, deploring the ‘uncurbed and wild luxuriance, which must soon render our landscape-island as rank, weedy, damp and unwholesome as the incultivate savannas of America’.83
Yet this new noble savagery in landscaping was hard to resist completely, since it was sanctioned by a sea change in taste. ‘The wildness pleases,’ Lord Shaftesbury had declared at the beginning of the century: ‘We… contemplate her with more Delight in these original Wilds than in the artificial Labyrinths and wildernesses of the palace.’84 And such judgements, with their Whiggish, liberty-loving credentials, wrought great changes in the aesthetics of the environment.
Take mountains. The mundus senescen
s trope had regarded them as pathological, Nature's pimples. Joshua Poole's poet's handbook, English Parnassus (1657), commended some sixty epithets for them, many expressing distaste – ‘insolent, surly, ambitious, barren,… unfrequented, forsaken, melancholy, pathless’, and so forth. ‘Mountain gloom’ lingered long: as late as 1747 the Gentleman's Magazine judged Wales ‘a dismal region, generally ten months buried in snow and eleven in clouds’.85
The aesthetic ennoblement of mountains owed something to the much-mocked but nevertheless influential critic John Dennis, who championed Longinus. While describing the Alps as ‘Ruins upon Ruins’, he could relish their ‘tremendous’ and ‘dreadful’ qualities.86 Within a generation, responses had turned to awestruck admiration. ‘Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry,’ fluttered Thomas Gray as he crossed the Alps in 1739.87 Such thoughts were possible because mountains could be validated through the eye of art, and perceived more as paintings than as mere natural objects: ‘Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings, Salvator Rosa' – so wrote Horace Walpole in 1739.88 Indeed, the very essence of the Picturesque creed, theorized in the 1780s by William Gilpin, was that the test of a scene lay in how well it actualized the qualities making a fine painting.89 The true challenge, however, to the aesthetics of civilized order came with Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), which extolled the stupendous, rugged and bleak and all else productive of ‘ideas elevating, awful and of a magnificent kind’. Crags, precipices and torrents, windswept ridges, unploughed uplands – these now became the very acme of taste, precisely because they had not been ruled and refined by the human hand.90 ‘Compared to this what are the cathedrals or palaces built by men!’ rhetoricized Sir Joseph Banks on seeing Fingal's Cave; and he supplied the answer to his own question: