The Invisible Border between Art and Nature:
    Pope's Asethetic Principles Applied to Poetry and Landscape Gardening
                              by John D. Tatter
                         Birmingham-Southern College

   In 18th-century English landscape gardening, the garden structure known
   as the ha-ha, or sunken fence, provides a barrier [haha.gif] to keep
   pasture animals such as sheep, cattle, and deer out of the more formal
   garden areas while maintaining the illusion that these animals inhabit
   the same space as the landowner, who can glimpse them from the windows
   of his manor house and from carefully constructed points of view in
   walks through the garden. It is the ha-ha--like this one at Stowe
   Landscape Gardens in Buckinghamshire--that allows the landowner and his
   guests to imagine themselves in a pastoral landscape, to imagine
   themselves as shepherd-poets, without having to deal with the
   unpleasant aspects of the shepherd's life.

   This physical arrangement mirrors exactly the prescription Pope gives
   for proper pastoral poetry: "we are not to describe our shepherds as
   shepherds at this day really are," he says, "but as they may be
   conceived then to have been, when the best of men followed the
   employment . . . . we must therefore use some illusion to render a
   Pastoral delightful; and this consists in exposing the best side only
   of a shepherd's life, and in concealing its miseries." [arcadia.gif] A
   perfect visual example of this concept is Nicholas Poussin's painting
   Arcadian Shepherds, or as it is sometimes titled, Et in Arcadia Ego. In
   the painting, a group of shepherds gather around a tomb and discuss its
   inscription, translated as "I also am in Arcadia." Whether the
   inscription suggests that even death enters the perfect world of
   Arcadia or that through death (or art) one enters that perfect world,
   the shepherds seem to be spending more time discussing ideas than
   tending sheep. Like that of the pastoral painter, the business of the
   pastoral poet, at least according to Pope, is to create an illusion, to
   make the ideal look real and vice versa.

   In this sense Pope wanted to conceal the boundaries between art and
   nature. In his Essay on Criticism, for example, Pope encourages poets
   and critics to use nature as "the Source, and End, and Test of Art"
   (73). In fact, at one point Pope suggests that the best art is
   inseparable from nature--when Virgil examined Homer's poetry in order
   to use it as a model for his own Aeneid, Pope claims, "Nature and Homer
   were, he found, the same" (135). Therefore, according to Pope, the
   rules by which we measure poetry are "discover'd" (descriptive) "not
   devis'd" (prescriptive) and "Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz'd"
   (88-89). He encourages poets and critics to "Learn thence for Ancient
   Rules a just Esteem; / To copy Nature is to copy Them" (139-40). Or,
   putting it another way, "True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not
   Chance, / As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance" (362-63).

   Early in his Moral Essay Of the Use of Riches, which celebrates his
   friend Lord Cobham's gardens at Stowe as the epitome of landscape
   design, Pope makes a similar point, that the landscape architect
   planning a garden should "Consult the Genius of the Place" (57), or the
   natural contours of the land, so that nature "Paints as you plant, and
   as you work, designs" (64). The blending of the terms of nature and art
   is interesting here: it is nature that paints and the artist who
   plants; it is nature that designs the framework within which the
   architect works. In the same passage, Pope also claims that the
   landscape designer "gains all points who pleasingly confounds, /
   Surprises, varies, and conceals the Bounds" (55-56). In other words,
   the landscape garden must be artificially constructed but at the same
   time seem to be entirely natural. The great beauty of nature, as Pope
   celebrates it in his poem Windsor Forest, is that the natural elements
   "strive" or work together:

     Not Chaos-like together crush'd and bruis'd,
     But as the World, harmoniously confus'd:
     Where Order in Variety we see,
     And where, tho' all things differ, all agree. (13-16)

   Pope suggests that art and nature were one when the Creator formed the
   world, and that this unity was accomplished by giving order to variety,
   by providing an underlying harmony to apparent confusion. Pope
   encourages landscape architects to mimic this creative behavior and,
   rather than designing a garden that is highly symmetrical and therefore
   quite apparently un-natural (the practice of the previous generation of
   garden designers), to create instead what he calls an "artful wildness
   to perplex the scene" (116). The ha-ha, or sunken fence, was the
   principal means to join artfulness and wildness because it allowed the
   neater and more regular garden visually to blend with the larger
   countryside while at the same time allowing the countryside visually to
   seem more ordered by association with the garden. Hence the boundary
   formed by the ha-ha is actually more of a means of connection than a
   means of separation precisely because it is invisible to those standing
   inside the garden. As Horace Walpole later said of William Kent, the
   landscape architect responsible for the design of the gardens at Stowe
   during the time Pope knew them as a frequent visitor, "He leaped the
   fence, and saw that all nature was a garden."

   In another sense, though, by concealing the borders between art and
   nature, an artist can manipulate the viewer or reader into valuing only
   the ways in which art and nature resemble each other, into valuing only
   the artistic aspects of nature and the natural aspects of art. Such a
   vision is a conservative one, in which order and agreement are assumed
   to be good and in which disorder and chaos are banished from within the
   borders of civilization or, in artistic terms, relegated to the area
   outside outside the frame of the landscape painting or outside the
   scope of the poem. Such a vision is also prescriptive while claiming to
   be descriptive: the governing principles that seem to be "discover'd"
   are actually quite carefully "devis'd." Whenever disorder does creep
   in, it must be controlled--by mowing the lawn and clipping the hedges
   of the garden, by reshaping the forms of land, water, and sky in a
   painting, and by careful editing in the drafting process of a poem.

   Disorder may also emerge in the encounter between the audience and the
   art form, and here it must also be controlled--not by the artist but by
   the audience. At the end of the first epistle of the Essay on Man, for
   example, Pope claims that in real life

     All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
     All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
     All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
     All partial Evil, universal Good:
     In spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,
     One truth is clear, "Whatever is, is RIGHT." (I, 289-94)

   The pairs of opposites created by the structure of these heroic
   couplets is an interesting one: Nature is grouped with chance, discord,
   and partial evil while Art is grouped with direction, harmony, and
   universal good. In such a context, the individual, finite human
   perspective (presented in terms of pride and erring reason) must defer
   to the grand design of the infinite Creator. What the Creator has
   created must be good, so humans in their turn must strive to know, see,
   and understand creation.

   It follows, then, for Pope that the creative artist enjoys a similar
   privilege in his or her relationship with the reader or viewer. If in
   the creation of an art form "whatever is, is right," then what seems
   like chance or discord to the viewer or reader may be assumed instead
   to be direction and harmony not yet appreciated. This assumption is
   based, of course, on an underlying assumption that artists design works
   of art on principles of order and harmony: as Pope suggests of Homer in
   An Essay on Criticism: "Those oft are Stratagems which Errors seem, /
   Nor is it Homer Nods, but We that Dream" (179-80). A few lines later in
   the same poem, Pope admonishes those aspiring to be literary critics
   that

     A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit
     With the same Spirit that its Author writ,
     Survey the Whole, nor seek slight faults to find,
     Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind; (233-36)

   In fact, Pope suggests, only if an audience shares with an artist a
   spirit that values order and harmony will nature move and rapture warm
   the mind. Likewise, if an artist "gains all points who pleasingly
   confounds"--that is, if the artist pleases the audience most when the
   work of art provides pleasant surprises-- the audience must already
   share with the artist a set of expectations that such surprises work
   against. In a poem, such a surprise might derive from encountering a
   metaphor or literary allusion that presents familiar information from a
   new perspective. "True Wit," Pope says, "is Nature to Advantage drest,
   / What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest" (297-98). Likewise,
   in a garden, a monument or temple may surprise a visitor not only by
   calling to mind images of similar structures in landscape paintings or
   in engravings of classical architecture, but also by slipping in and
   out of view as the visitor moves along the garden paths. Thus Pope
   encourages the landscape gardener to embellish nature as a fashion
   designer would dress a client:

     But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,
     Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;
     Let not each beauty ev'ry where be spy'd,
     Where half the skill is decently to hide. (53-54)

   By setting a boundary beyond which an observer is not allowed to go for
   the moment in viewing an object of beauty, the landscape designer, like
   the fashion designer, heightens the interest and sparks the
   imagination.

   There is a limit, however, to how many times one can be surprised by
   the views of a building in a landscape garden or by the appearance of a
   metaphor or literary allusion in a poem. As Samuel Johnson points out
   in his "Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare," "the irregular
   combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile . . . but the
   pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only
   repose on the stability of truth." The more seasoned reader of poetry
   or visitor to gardens must take pleasure in something beside or beyond
   surprise. The seasoned reader of poetry, for example, who encounters a
   literary allusion takes pleasure in the justness of the parallel
   relationship between two texts, what Johnson would call the "stability
   of truth." But the same reader also takes a more personal pleasure in
   his or her own familiarity with the text being alluded to. By noticing
   the connection between the two texts, the reader joins an interpretive
   community, an exclusive society that the author has established by
   creating the allusion in the first place. There is pleasure in being an
   insider--one who understands the structural elements of the work of art
   upon which the beautiful exterior depends for its form, one who
   understands the creative work from the creator's point of view.

   [ancient.gif] A perfect example--and a more literal one--of the
   phenomenon of joining a society of insiders occurs at Stowe when a
   garden visitor climbs the steps and enters the Temple of Ancient Virtue
   in the area of the garden known as the Elysian Fields. As long as one
   just walks past the Temple, one appreciates only the architectural form
   of the building and its placement in the landscape, both of which are
   impressive enough. When one enters the Temple, however, one first
   notices the statues of four men who represent the virtues of ancient
   Greece--Homer the poet, Socrates the philosopher, Lycurgus the
   lawgiver, and Epaminondas the general--and the inscriptions above them
   that emphasize their importance. But there is more to notice: it
   becomes significant where the statues are placed. The statue of the
   greatest general of the ancient world looks out of the northeast door
   of the building on a direct line toward a monument commemorating the
   death in battle of a member of the family. Likewise, the statue of the
   greatest philosopher of the ancient world looks out of the southeast
   door of the building on a direct line toward the Temple of Friendship
   in the southeast corner of the garden where Lord Cobham gathered with
   his friends to discuss politics. [grenvill.gif] When a garden visitor
   enters the Temple, when he or she physically becomes an insider by
   standing among the representatives of Ancient Virtue, the meaning of
   the Temple's name and the axes that form the larger structure of the
   garden design become apparent.

   Those structural axes, those lines of sight, are concealed from an
   outsider just as the boundary of the garden is concealed by the ha-ha.
   But the garden designer, by providing paths and opening up views,
   invites a visitor to become an insider, to imagine that he or she is a
   member of the society of Ancients and to imagine that a walk through
   the garden is a walk through nature. The garden visitor completes the
   garden by making the connections that the designer created but left
   obscure. In the same way, a poet provides paths to meaning by using
   traditional, recognizable poetic techniques, and the reader completes
   the poem by following those paths and arriving at the meaning that the
   poet (apparently) intended.

   The boundaries, then, between artist, audience, and work of art become
   indistinct if each has a part in the poetic experience. Pope makes this
   phenomenon clear when, at the end of the first section of Essay on
   Criticism he invokes the aid of the Ancient poets and critics whom he
   admires, and prays

     Oh may some Spark of your Coelestial Fire
     The last, the meanest of your Sons inspire,
     (That on weak Wings, from far, pursues your Flights;
     Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes)
     To teach vain Wits a Science little known,
     T'admire Superior Sense, and doubt their own! (195-200)

   Pope identifies himself as both reader and writer within the context of
   a poem about writing and criticizing poetry. Moreover, he claims his
   own kinship with Ancient writers and critics while inviting outsiders
   into the society of Ancients. The only prerequisite for joining this
   society seems to be to defer to "superior sense" when in doubt on a
   point of aesthetics. Pope makes a similar stipulation in his essay on
   gardening when he admonishes landscape architects to

     Still follow Sense, of ev'ry Art the Soul,
     Parts answ'ring parts shall slide into a whole,
     Spontaneous beauties all around advance,
     Start ev'n from Difficulty, strike from Chance;
     Nature shall join you, Time shall make it grow
     A work to wonder at -- perhaps a STOWE. (65-70)

   Two things in this passage relate to the blurring of boundaries. First,
   for Pope, as we have seen in previous passages, sense is the soul of
   art--that is, art is rational, ordered, and reasonable. One of the
   beauties of a work of art is the way in which its parts relate to one
   another and form a coherent whole. Second, Pope claims that the
   landscape architect who follows sense will be joined by nature and time
   in creating that coherent whole. Over time, the boundary between art
   and nature becomes less and less distinct. This phenomenon allows the
   garden visitor to take a more active role in creating the art form of
   the garden as he or she walks through it and to experience the "wonder"
   Pope refers to in the final line of the passage.

   The term ha-ha, as reported by the Oxford English Dictionary, according
   to French etymologists, derives from the exclamation of surprise one
   has upon encountering a sunk fence. Perhaps this "ah-ha!" exclamation
   may serve to describe all experiences of delight when a reader of
   literature or viewer of paintings or garden visitor discovers something
   unexpected and thereby feels a stronger personal connection to the work
   of art or, if you will, discovers that the boundary between subject and
   object is often hard to draw with any certainty.
     __________________________________________________________________

   This paper was presented at the International Conference on Borders and
                                Foundations,
      State University of West Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia, October 1997.
     __________________________________________________________________

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