The Journal of Garden History

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Ruins as a mental construct

Michel Baridon

To cite this article: Michel Baridon (1985) Ruins as a mental construct, The Journal of Garden
History, 5:1, 84-96, DOI: 10.1080/01445170.1985.10408625

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 JOURNAL OF GARDEN HISTORY, VOL. 5, No.1, 84-96

Ruins as a mental construct

Michel Baridon

The creative imagination of the eighteenth century seems to have attributed a greatpower
of stimulation to ruins. They were sung by Gray, described by Gibbon, painted by Wilson,
Lambert, Turner, Girtin and scores of others; they adorned the sweeps and the concave
slopes of gardens designed by Kent and Brown; they inspired hermits; they fired the zeal of
antiquarians; they graced the pages of hundreds of sketchbooks and provided a suitable
background to the portraits of many virtuosi." They were in demand everywhere; they
were thought so indispensable that substitutes (sometimes even cardboard) were erected in
the parks which proved destitute of authentic 'relics of the past'. 2 Ruins were indeed an
essential element of the landscape of sensibility; they gave it an element of nostalgia which
was part ofits essence; their popularity was so universally acknowledged that the task which
confronts the critic is to explain why emblems of decay were identified with the modernity
ofan age whose pride was in innovation. It has also to explain the vogue ofa taste which was
inseparably linked with the English garden and whose influence was felt in most countries of
Europe and in America.
To account for what B. Sprague Allen called 'the tides of taste', a critic can invoke
fashion. He can say, for example, that ruins had been seen in many Renaissance gardens;"
that a change took place when the French established the supremacy of geometry and
proscribed the irregularity of decayed buildings; that another change took place when the
picturesque garden developed in reaction against Versailles. Such an approach, however,
would merely be descriptive. It would beg the question and introduce a confusion between
art and fashion. It was Cocteau who remarked that fashion made beautiful things become
ugly while art made ugly things become beautiful, by which he meant of course that the
shape of Schubert's glasses could pass out of fashion and come back into it every 20 years,
while his lieder, which were not popular at first, will never ceaseto be classics. Cocteau was
right, of course. A true poet will always teach a critic a lesson: creative artists such as
Vanbrugh, Kent or Brown were not followers of fashion; they were discoverers of new
forms, revealers of things hitherto unseen which have become part of the heritage
transmitted by their age to subsequent ages. The true business of the critic is to explain why
and how they created a new vision of landscape, a vision which has attained to the
permanence of classics, and what part devolved to ruins in this process. This can only be
achieved by enquiring into the nature of the mental construct which acted in the creative
imagination of landscape designers. The purpose of this essay is to show that this mental
construct derived from a coalescence ofthe concepts used by the scientific movement and of
the myths actively diffused by the political circleswhose influence had become predominant
after the Glorious Revolution.

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The Regeneration Of Ruins By Political Myths

The best way to start is by a simple question: what did ruins represent at the end of the
seventeenth century? How did they stand in the mental eye of the English garden designers
of this crucial period? Roughly speaking they were of two different kinds: some were
imported, others home-grown. Some came from Italy with memories of the Grand Tour
and were commemorated in the much admired pictures of Poussin, Gaspar, Claude, Rosa,
Weenix, Cuyp and their numerous imitators. Others lay here and there in the English
countryside; they were yet undistinguished by a Turner or a Girtin; they lacked the prestige
enjoyed by their Italian counterparts because classicalruins were reputed to be the oldest and
the finest. Rome had been visited by crowds of tourists since the Middle ages" because the
remains of the Eternal City inspired current themes of Christian apologetics: the mistress of
the World had fallen because all things mundane must have an end. Once the Roman
Empire had united mankind to make it receptive to the message ofChrist, it had fulfilled the
mission assigned by Providence.P The monuments of its former greatness testified to the
triumph of faith over the greatest achievements of Man.
To an English gentleman of the eighteenth century, the ruins of Rome were as
impressive as ever; but far from lending themselves to the usual disquisitions on the vanity of
worldly things, they had acquired a political significance which enhanced their cultural
import. They had been regenerated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The downfall of
absolutism had turned them into symbols of 'the mixed constitution'. The filiation between
the political thought of the Ancients and the theory oflimited monarchy has already been
studied by historians such as]. G. A. Pocock, F. Raab, C. Robbins, H. T. Dickinson." There
is no need to repeat here what has already been explained elsewhere; I shall nevertheless give
some quotations which prove the symbolic function played by ruins in the rejection of
'tyranny'.
The first quotation is to be found in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, a seminal book
which completely overthrew the views commonly held concerning the superiority of the
Roman Empire over the Republic. For Machiavelli, the greatness of Rome resided in the
mixed government that existed in the days of Cicero, and he expressed his wish that the
political exemplum ofharmonious co-operation ofMonarchy (the consuls), Aristocracy (the
Senate) and Democracy (the comitiae) should be given as much attention as the ruins of the
Forum:
When, therefore, I consider in what honour Antiquity is held, and how - to cite
but one instance - a bit of an old statue has fetched a high price that someone may
have it by him to give honour to his house and that it may be possible for it to be
copied by those who are keen on this art; ... and when on the other hand I notice
that what history has to say about the highly virtuous actions performed by ancient
kingdoms and republics, by their kings, their generals, their citizens, their
legislators and by others who have worn themselves out in their country's service is
rather admired than imitated; nay, is so shunned by everybody in each little thing
they do, that of the virtue ofby-gone days there remains no trace, it cannot but fill
me at once with astonishment and grief. 7
Machiavelli's views were popularized in England by Harrington and when
Harrington's Works were re-edited by Toland in 1699, he expressed great enthusiasm at the
fact that the mixed government of England under William III presented the same
characteristics as 'the antick balance' of the Ancient Romans. King, Lords and Commons

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Ruins as a mental construct

formed a trilogy as perfect as the Consuls, the Senate and the Comitiae. They would enable
England, Toland maintained, 'to become the sovrain mistress of the world'. London
deserved 'the name ofa new Rome in the West'; it could 'grasp at empire like Rome itself'. 8
Less than 25 years after the Glorious Revolution it became clear that this prediction might
well come true since the treaty of Utrecht opened the South Atlantic to English traders and
confirmed the imperial vocation of the country. It was liberty at home, and empire abroad;
the new system of limited monarchy worked wonders; the mixed constitution analysed by
Polybius, rediscovered by Machiavelli and anglicized by Harrington was extolled by
Thomson in the famous lines:
Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves
Never shall Britons be slaves.
This was a theme which he developed in his poem Liberty where the 'far famed ruins' of
Rome testify to the former glory of 'the centre of mankind'. 9
It was Gibbon's Decline and Fall, however, which gave full expression to the heroic
character ofRoman ruins. The last chapter of this great work begins, in the traditional vein
of Renaissance poets, with deploring ruins:
In the last days of Pope Eugenius the fourth, two of his servants, the learned
Poggius and a friend, ascended the Capitoline Hill; reposed themselves among the
ruins of columns and temples; and viewed, from that commanding spot, the wide
and various prospect of desolation. The place and the object gave ample scope for
moralising on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the
proudest ofhis works, which buries empire and cities in one common grave; and it
was agreed that in proportion to her former greatness the fall of Rome was the
more awful and deplorable.
But Gibbon's tone soon changes and his lament, begun in the company of 'the learned
Poggius', a leading figure of civic humanism, gradually turns into a celebration of Rome as
the Mecca of empire-builders:
The fame ofJulius the Second, Leo the Tenth, and Sixtus the Fifth is accompanied
by the superior merit ofBramante and Fontana, of Raphael and Michel Angelo;
and the same munificence which had been displayed in palaces and temples was
directed with equal zeal to revive and emulate the labours of antiquity. The map,
the description, the monuments of ancient Rome have been elucidated by the
diligence of the antiquarian and the student; and the footsteps of heroes, the relics,
not of superstition, but of empire, are devoutly visited by a new race of pilgrims
from the remote and once savage, countries of the north.t"
There can be no doubt that Gibbon accounted himself as one of the many 'pilgrims' who
visited 'the relics not ofsuperstition, but of empire' .11 This explains why, at Shugborough,
the Arch of Hadrian was erected to commemorate the visit of one of the great restorers of
British naval supremacy, Admiral Anson.F
So much Mediterranean sunshine should not blind the critic to the fact that gothic ruins
were not absent from English parks. They also co-existed peacefully with their proud
foreign counterparts. This may seem surprising for, in terms ofstrict logic, one cannot at the
same time celebrate the Roman empire and those who destroyed it. The decoration of
gardens, however, is not carried out by the same means as the writing ofpolitical treatises. It

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is inspired by myths, not by concepts, and myths can survive contradiction. At this point an
excursus into the nature of myths ought to be introduced in order to explain the co-
existence of gothic and classicin the mental construct which made ruins so indispensable to
the picturesque garden.
Myths are not easily defined because they defy the powers of reason; they have often
elicited suspicious remarks from philosophers. Aristotle thought them unworthy of serious
consideration; 13 Hegel spoke of their 'transience' and did not see them as 'part of original
history'.14 Yet Marx, no doubt because his approach to history was more sociological,
recognized their importance and provided some very perceptive insights into their elusive
nature in his Eighteenth ~f Brumaire ~f Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. The following is a
commentary on Robespicrrc's Roman 'stance' during the French revolution.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;they do not
make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the
dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain ofthe living. And just when
they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating
something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary
crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow
from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of
world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus
Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to 1814
draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman empire, and the
Revolution of1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the
revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795.5
What Marx describes here is the links that the necessities of immediate action establish
between past and present. Robespierre draped himself in a Roman toga because he had
imbibed from the works of Rousseau the ideal vision of a republic of equals and the
Plutarchian ring of the Discours sur L'Origine de l'[negalite. Such was the stance by which he
could best reconcile principle and precedent, the rights ofMan and the heroic example ofthe
tyrannicides of old. What is true of Robespierre's eloquence is also true of David's pictures;
they were inspired by the same plebeian myth, the same mental construct powerful enough
to make idea and form coalesce and so work on the feelings of other men. As the historian
Henry Nash Smith says:
A myth is an intellectual construction that fuses concept and emotion into an
image."
Gothic ruins in eighteenth-century gardens, like classicalruins, had ideological connections
with the political myths of the time. To understand what they stood for one has to
remember that the Society ofAntiquaries, founded in 1718 under the presidency ofWilliam
Stukeley, was then secularizing the 'antiquities' of the kingdom. Like his patron Harley,
Stukeley had preserved strong connections with the nonconformists and he was not slow to
avail himself of the opportunities offered as a result of the Glorious Revolution; he was one
of these 'presbyters turned latitudinarians' often denounced by uncompromising anglicans.
Nor was his interest in gothic architecture limited to ecclesiasticalarchitecture; as he wrote
in his Family memoirs:
We travelled together like errant virtuosos and when we came to an old castle we

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climb'd together through every story and stair case, mutually helping each other
over the gaping arches and rugged heaps of rubbish till I had occasion to draw a
sketch of them out. 1 7

Such an attitude to ruins marks a considerable change from that of High Church divines
who often made use of gothic ruins to anathematize the destructive temper of the puritans.
In short, the interest in ruins was becoming more general and nationwide, and this could not
fail to provide the gothic revival with a social basis.l" At the same time, the political changes
which accounted for the foundation of the Society of Antiquaries also accounted for the
spreading ofits influence; after a revolution thanks to which the portion ofpower lost by the
king had devolved on the aristocracy, 19 it became essential for the wielders of influence to
justify their political role by the antiquity of their 'seats'. Power was land-based in
eighteenth-century Britain and since the members of the nobility were, in Burke's phrase,
'the venerable oaks that shade the English country side', 20 ruins seemed to afford further
visible testimony of their ancestry. Nobles could present themselves as the protectors of
public liberties because they had often opposed the encroachments of monarchical power.
Here again precedents could be invoked, with particular insistence on Magna Carta and the
'whig martyrs', William Lord Russell and A. Sidney. But such historical precedents, useful
as they were for immediate use, could not appeal to the nation at large; they might justify
the claims ofthe aristocrats to act as the guardians ofthe liberties ofthe land, but they did not
account for the origins and for the nature ofthose liberties. This could only be achieved by a
myth of great magnitude, a myth comparable to the Roman myth of the mixed
constitution. Such a myth existed; it inspired the writings of countless upholders of the
Glorious Revolution and its new regime; it was the myth of gothic liberty. This myth is to
be found in the writings of Sir William Temple and in those of his protege Swift; it is also
invoked by Molesworth and Oldmixon.F' That a quartet such asthis should sing in unison is
good proof ofthe fact that Whigs and Tories concurred (with the exception ofthe Jacobites)
on this one point: that the liberties of the land dated from Saxon times, those happy times
when the power ofkings was limited by that of the nobles and of popular assemblies. King
Alfred was the founding father of a system of civic liberty which had been lost with the
Norman invasion, partly recovered by Magna Carta and by the Tudors, lost again under the
Stuarts and triumphantly reinstated by the Glorious Revolution. Now that Parliament had
regained its power, now that 'gothic institutions' had been restored to their pristine
splendour, English parks could accommodate statues and temples commemorating this
happy revival of the national past. Lord Bathurst restored 'Alfred's Hall' on his grounds at
Cirencester and Viscount Cobham dedicated his gothic temple at Stowe to Saxon liberty. 22
Stowe, which epitomizes 50 crucial years in the development of the picturesque garden in
England, proved that gothic and classic could co-exist pacifically in the middle decades of
the eighteenth century. But what was true of Stowe was also true in all fields of artistic
creation. Tom Jones, the structure of which is so obviously imitated from the models of
Antiquity, contains a description of Mr Allworthy's castle whose gothic style, Fielding
writes, 'rivalled the beauties of the best Grecian architecture'. 23 Pope distilled Horatian
precepts in his Essay on Criticism and yet he could dream of a gothic cathedral in a forest.s"
Similar examples could be found in Gray's works or in Thomas Warton's Verses on Sir
Joshua Reynolds's Painted Window at New College.
Yet, even if gothic and classic shared the favours of landscape designers, time was
insensibly playing in favour of the style of ruins which had direct links with the national

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past. Many causes can be ascribed to this evolution: the first and most obvious is that gothic
ruins could be found on the spot about to be 'improved'. At Studley Royal, Aislabie made
use of the ruins of Fountains Abbey to adorn his grounds and this, David Watkin writes,
'prompted Thomas Duncombe to incorporate views of the ruined Rievaulx Abbey into his
own landscaped grounds at Duncombe, also in North Yorkshire'. 25 Gothic ruins were
readily available, especially to those whose estates had benefited from the dissolution of
monasteries-and they were many. But they also enjoyed the superiority of conveying to
the mind intimations of a political myth whose influence was becoming predominant.
Nobody, not even an eighteenth-century aristocrat.P" can monopolize the language of
liberty. Once the propagandists of the new regime had spread the idea that English liberty
was as old as the land itself, once it had been repeated a hundred times that the Saxons had
inherited their free institutions from the Germans, described by Tacitus in his Germania.V' it
became clear that the gothic myth was on native grounds while the Roman one was not.
Besides, a mutation of great importance took place when Warburton established a
connection between gothic architecture and the forest. If, as he maintained, the gloom and
the pointed arches of gothic buildings were 'ingeniously projected to make them resemble
groves as nearly as the distance of architecture would admit's" it was becoming evident that
the ruins which lay here and there in the countryside were evocative not only ofthe national
past but ofthe immemorial tradition which identified freedom with the woods in which the
Germans, the Saxons and indeed all the peoples issued from the 'northern hive' had always
experienced as 'the blessings of liberty'. The moment such a connection was established it
could not fail to multiply the expansive capacities of the gothic myth: the theory of a
translation ofliberty from the woods ofGermany to those ofGreat Britain and even to those
of America>? was often invoked by those who wished to extend the rights of the people.s"
Besides, the relation it introduced between a political concept and an element of the
landscape tallied with the great intellectual discoveries of the age: the poetics of natural
description and the association of ideas. This explains why so many poets identified their
love ofnature with the defence ofliberty; countless quotations could be produced to prove
that from this association radiated energies which artists and writers identified with the
modernity of the age. 3 1 This can also answer the question which was posed in the
introduction ofthis essay: symbols ofdecay could indeed inspire the intellectual aspirations of
the age. This was so fecund a discovery that its potential powers passed into the Romantic
age: Dyer's Ruins of Rome found an echo in Beethoven's Ruins of Athens and in Turner's
Ruins of the Carthaginian Empire. But since the term association ofideas has been used, it now
remains to analyse other elements of the mental construct which spread the vogue of ruins.
So far we have been exclusively concerned with myths; yet, as was said at the start, concepts
also played a part in the formation ofthis construct which will now be studied in its relation
with empirical science.

Ruins and empirical science

The scientific movement is the most active provider of new concepts in the intellectual life
of a given period and the eighteenth century could be no exception to the rule in an age
when the Royal Society was spreading the fame of the 'new science' all over the civilized
world. British scientists attributed the excellence of their achievements to their method, a
method which distinguished them from scholasticism on the one hand and from
Cartesianism on the other. Of the 'schoolmen' there is no need to speak here; they fought a
losing battle and ceased to be influential before the turn of the seventeenth century. But the

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Ruins as a mental construct

Cartesians represented a very different kind of opposition to the progress of empirical

science;they held their own for a long time, particularly in France.32 It would be too long to
relate the minutiae of the arguments which were used against them but briefly speaking the
critique ofCartesianism came under two different heads: the nature ofspace and the method
of scientific investigation.
The empiricists reproached Descartes with his description of space as a plenum. The
fundamental dualism he introduced between matter and thought posited that matter only
possessed extension; hence the hypothetical vortices with which he filled interstellar space.
Locke, Newton, Boyle, to mention only the greatest luminaries of the Royal Society, all
opposed this metaphysical interpretation of space. To them, Descartes had construed his
physics by reasoning backwards from his metaphysics; vortices were unwarranted by the
data ofexperience; space was not a plenum but a void in which particles were in motion and
such a view was absolutely essentialnot only to Newtonian mechanics, but also to Lockean
psychology and to the chemistry of Boyle.P"
The Cartesians had gone wrong because they were guilty of the same error as their
erstwhile enemies, the schoolmen: they had preferred a preconceived system to the patient
investigation of true experimentalists. This raised a problem ofmethod. A scientist might be
misled by Cartesian 'systems' but he would never go wrong ifhe put his trust in empirical
'histories'. The pages of the Philosophical Transactions ring with the praise of 'histories' and
provide many examples of their concrete application, to the study of various phenomena.
Learned gentlemen ofevery description sent 'histories' ofall sorts to the Royal Society; they
might concern snakes, the making ofsmall beer, earthquakes, insects, 'prodigies ofanimated
nature' or venial illnesses, but they invariably assumed the form of a painstaking
compilation of observations made in the true spirit of experimental science.
The Philosophical Transactions had sufficientimpact on the reading public to popularize
the opposition between 'history' and 'system' and the discoveries made by the scientists
found their way into the world ofliterary and artistic creation. Whether such discoveries'
were not already in operation there is difficult to assess for there is always a mysterious
osmosis between various fields of research in a given period; but be this as it may, histories
percolated into the world-picture of the age. Fielding's assertion in TomJones: 'I write a
history, not a system'34 is a striking proof of the fact: and this is by no means an isolated
example since we find Pope deriding 'the high priori road', Shaftesbury writing 'the
quickest way of making a fool of oneself is by a system' and even Malthus, as late as 1798,
opposing 'the grand and consistent theory ofNewton' to 'the wild and eccentric hypotheses
of Descartes'.35
That such a method was readily accepted is evident from the number of 'relations'
published by the Philosophical Transactions; some of them, A Relation of the Pico Teneriffe for
example, provide an hour-to-hour account of all the observations made by the explorers as
they proceeded. Descartes might invent a whole 'system' of the world without leaving his
poeles" but the experimentalists knew better: no country could be known unlessit had been
perambulated and the same osmosis which had made 'histories' popular ensured the success
of a new type of travel literature. The Cambridge Bibliography ofEnglish Literature lists no less
than 400 titles of 'voyages', 'tours', 'sketching tours', 'relations', 'trips', 'descriptions',
'expeditions', 'travels' and 'perambulations' ofthe British Isles for the period 1660-1800. As
late as the 1770sJohnson considered that Spain was still little known 'because it had never
been perambulated'.
What was true of a country was also true of a landscape; its essence could not be

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perceived by a traveller who took the 'high priori road' it had to be gradually imbibed by a
perambulator who discovered things as he went along meandering country lanes; he would
then notice a wood on one side, a hill on the other, a castlein the distance, a ruined church on
the roadside, two or three tombstones nearby and, quite unexpectedly, a fine prospect from
the brow of a hill over-hanging 'a smiling plain'. Such was the English landscape observed
by a perambulator; his progress was marked by a mental accumulation by which he could
form his conception of the whole. Variety and irregularity had become essential to the true
knowledge of a landscape. They were soon to become essential to the theory oflandscape
gardening.
This was the natural result of an easy filiation: a garden is almost always a microcosmic
reconstitution of the world. It combines the elements of the landscape in such a way as to
offer a miniature reproduction of the wide universe. If the face of the land was thought to
reflect variety and irregularity, the garden must follow suit; the garden must become
unsystematic, it must abandon the artifices of symmetry, it must relinquish geometrical
lines. If the French garden requires the gardener to work 'by line and level', if it displays the
harmonious system of its parterres and of its basins, the English garden, on the contrary,
hardly alters the face ofnature and construes the landscape as a history in progress. One is to
be surveyed from above; the other to be perambulated at leisure. The opposition between
the two is made clear by the comparison of two texts; the first is by Descartes, describing
what he calls 'a beautiful city' -a rare occurrence of aesthetic pronouncement in Descartes'
works; the second by Vanbrugh, pleading for the preservation of the ruins of Woodstock
manor on the grounds of Blenheim.
Thus we see that buildings planned and carried out by one architect alone are
I
usually more beautiful and better proportioned than those which many have tried
to put in order and improve, making use of old walls which were used with other
ends in view. In the same way also, those ancient cities which originally were
villages and have become in process of time great towns are usually badly
constructed in comparison with those which are regularly laid out on a plain by a
surveyor who is free to follow his own ideas. Even though, considering their
buildings each one a part, there is often as much or more display of skill in the one
case than in the other, the former have large buildings indiscriminately placed
together, thus rendering the streets crooked and irregular, so that it might be said
that it was chance rather than the will of men guided by reason that led to such an
arrangcmcnt.P?
I hope I may be forgiven, if I make some faint Application of what I say of
Blenheim, to the Small Remains of ancient Woodstock Manor. It can't indeed be
said it was erected on so Noble nor on So justifiable an Occasion, But it was raised
by One of the Bravest and most Warlike of the English Kings; and tho' it has not
been famed as a Monument ofhis Arms, it has been tenderly regarded as the Scene
of his Affections. [...].
But if the Historical Argument Stands in need of Assistance; there is still much
to be said on Other Considerations.
That Part ofthe Park which is seen from the North Front ofthe New Building,
has little Variety of Objects [...] It therefore stands in Need of all the helps that can
be given [...] in which this Old Manor gives so Happy an Occasion for; that were
the inclosure filld with Trees (principally Fine Yews and Hollys) Promiscuously

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Ruins as a mental construct

Set to Grow up in a Wild Thicket. So that all the Building left, (which is only the
habitable Part and the Chappel) might Appear in Two Risings amongst 'em, it
would make One of the Most Agreable Objects that the best of Landskip Painters
can invent.s"

What Descartes stresses is uniformity of design, regularity, geometrical proportions, the

ugly character of historical discrepancies. What Vanbrugh stresses, on the contrary, is
variety, unevenness, wildness and the 'picturesque' character of historical associations
conveyed by ruins. The two texts are in sharp contrast and provide irrefutable proof of the
changes which had intervened in less than a century. Neither Descartes nor the Sun-king
could ever have imagined an architect making a plea for ruins which, to them, were a
disgrace to the grounds of a palace. No less interesting is the care Vanbrugh takes to
'enbosom' the ruins of the manor in 'two risings' ofyews and holly trees 'promiscuously Set
up in a Wild Thicket' - an intuition which reveals his awareness of the relation between
architecture and vegetation and which accounts for his pioneering role in the gothic revival.
Woodstock manor, to him, was a 'romantick' reminder of 'gothick times'; it had
sentimental associations with the past and made its presence palpable in a way which, as the
antiquarians were beginning to discover, was inseparable from the history of the landscape.
Time was becoming part of aesthetic perceptions thanks to the junction thus operated
between history in the general senseand 'history' in the sensepopularized by the empiricists.
This had been made possible by the 'historical plain method' of the Royal Society.
Since the phrase 'the historical plain method' is used by Locke in the opening chapter of
his Essay upon Human Understanding, the transition from epistemology to psychology is
easily managed. The former enabled us to see how irregularity and variety had made their
way into the aesthetic canon ofthe eighteenth century; it also made it possible to account for
the part played by ruins in the complete perception of a landscape. The latter will now
explain why sense impressions and the association of ideas enabled ruins to epitomize,
paradoxically enough, the modernity of the English garden.
Sense impressions, it will be remembered, play an essential role in Lockean psychology;
they constitute the fabric of our mental life, the material from which complex ideas are
derived. To see, to hear, to smell is to perceive the impact of invisible particles hitting our
sensory organs in an unceasing bombardment ofstimuli which are transformed into abstract
ideas by the operations ofthe faculties ofthe mind. Receptiveness to senseimpressions is the
first requisite to intellectual activity; sensibility to the outward world the only way to
furnish 'the empty cabinet of the mind'. It would be preposterous to say that men had to
wait for Locke to become aware ofthe fact that they had eyes, ears, hands and a nose: the five
senseswere as common a theme for decoration or disquisition as the four seasons, the seven
deadly sins or the ten commandments. Painters, garden designers, tapestry makers, poets
and even preachers are evidence of the facilities offered by such memoranda. Yet, if the
garden may be seen as a microcosm, or, at least, a model assembling the significant elements
of a world-picture seen in reduction, it must also reflect the intellectual processes by which
the world itself is explored and intellectually perceived. Again, a comparison between the
'formal' and the picturesque gardens will show that the second provides more sense
impressions, and those in quicker succession, than the first.
When the Sun-king paraded his own person at Versailles, his eyes were not closed to the
beauty of the parterres, his ears not dead to the song ofbirds, his nose not unaware of a most
welcome change from the staircases of the palace. But it was quite another thing to

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perambulate the winding alleys or the belts designed by a Kent or a Brown; they were
planned to provide surprises; they took you into the shade, then away from it; they caused
the sun to appear now to the right and then to the left; they made you go up and downhill;
they revealed a prospect and then hid it from sight; many were their possibilities to change
the nature and influ;' of sense impressions. Variety and irregularity served their purpose in
the perambulation of the garden as they did in its structure. Yet, ruins, static though they
were, stood for the very image of these two concepts, and as such they provided sense
impressions of all descriptions. Their jagged outline and rough surface were palpably
irregular. They displayed contrasting colours since their old stones were overgrown with
ivy and variegated wall flowers; nor did they fail to strike the ear with the moaning of the
wind, the hooting of owls and the croaking of ravens. We read in Dyer's Grongar Hill:
And ancient Towers crown his Brow

'Tis now the Raven's bleak abode

And there the pois'nous adder breeds,

Conceal'd in Ruins, Moss and Weeds:
While, ever and anon, there falls,
Huge heaps of hoary mouldr'd Walls. 39

Other examples could be provided from Shenstone, from Gray's famous Elegy, from
Thomas Whately's discussion of ruins, from William Mason's The English Garden. It was in
this last poem, however, that ruins were invoked to play an outstanding part in the gothic
revival and assumed such a role in the history of eighteenth century aesthetics that the
present study may safely be concluded with an analysis of the process which brought them
to such eminence.
This process found its origin at a later stage of the development of Lockean psychology,
a stage which (it may be said in passing) Locke had hardly foreseen since he was in two minds
about the association of ideas. But Locke's disciples endlessly sought to reduce the function
which the Essay allotted to the facuIties of the mind.s? In this they were faithful to the
general spirit of the Essay which banished whatever smacked of innate characters; their aim
was to account for the formation ofideas by a direct 'natural' process of association. Ruins,
then, were required to add another function to the one they already performed as sense
impression providers; they were required to connote notions which ranged from the most
limited to the widest context from the tears shed on the death of a friend to the 'philosophic
melancholy' inspired by the decline of empires. Diderot's famous invocation to ruinsv' has
made their associative power so evident to all students of eighteenth-century literature that
there is no need to deal with this aspect of things here. Yet, this associative power deserves
further attention for two reasons. First, it conferred on ruins a privileged function as
providers of association in the Art/Nature relationship. Second, it enabled gothic ruins to
conquer precedence over classical ones in the creative imagination of landscape designers
and thus accelerated the dynamics of the gothic revival.
The Art/Nature relationship is, as everybody knows, central to the problematics of
eighteenth-century aesthetics. If the garden offered the best possibilities to demonstrate
de visu the beauty of the variations which one could play on such a theme, then grottoes and
ruins were the embellishments in which virtuosity was most easily perceived. After all, they
represented what the scientist would call 'limit-cases' in the union of Art with Nature; they

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were symmetrically opposed in space by the surface ofthe ground, offering the same kind of
irregularity and variety above it as under it. They were also symmetrically opposed in time,
and this was even more important, considering the important role history was playing in the
English garden. This opposition in time resulted from the fact that in grottoes, the
Art/Nature relationship was in its incipient stage, while in ruins it reached the end of the
cycle, the final dissolution. Irregular rocks roughly hewn into shape underground might be
associated with the primitive efforts made by the hand of man to gain control over nature;
but, crumbling stones overgrown with ivy demonstrated visually that such victories have
an end when Nature comes into her own again -a sad reminder to empire builders and a
philosophic warning to avoid the dangers of corruption! What was most appreciated here
was that the lesson should be conveyed in a true Ovidian spirit which established direct
connections with the much-admired Italian gardens and also that such truths could become
evident to the mind by the association of ideas. Ruins were palpable proof of the fact that
what was seen, what was felt and what was thought were perceived together by 'the flow of
soul'. Such were the powers bestowed on ruins by the new 'Science of the mind'.
They manifested themselves in a more limited though no less essential way when they
credited gothic ruins with more aesthetic consistency than any other. Such was the view
expressed by one of the champions of the gothic revival, the poet William Mason. Mason
was a member of the Strawberry Hill circle. A friend of Walpole, Cole and Gray, he was
occasionally in correspondence with Sanderson Millar, the creator of fake ruins. He was a
whig who made no secret of his republican tendencies and a believer in the myth of Saxon
liberty; in this, he shared the views of his friends who, with the notable exception of Cole,
supported 'the great Commoner' in his fight against royal prerogative. He was also, like all
of them, a well-versed antiquarian. His intellectual pursuits epitomize what has been said in
this paper concerning political myths and the empirical rediscovery of the presence of the
past in the English landscape. It was this feeling for the past which led him to discover local
colour, a discovery which found expression in the following lines of The English Garden:
... tho' classic rules to modem piles
Should give the just arrangement, shun we here
By those to form our ruins; ...
. . . who, on British grounds
Attempts the task, builds but a splendid Lye
Which mocks historical credence.f-'
This was a decisive advance towards a fuller appreciation of landscape. It invested gothic
ruins with an exclusive right to stand for history whenever the English countryside was
represented and thus led to the identification of what was true with what was localized.
Mason's friendship with Paul Sandby, the father of the British school oflandscape painting
in water colour, was certainly not accidental. These two names must be associated in the
intellectual formation of Turner, Girtin and so many others whose contribution to English
and indeed to world art history is of unequalled originality and brilliance. Girtin's Kirkstall
Abbey and Turner's The Ruins of Tintern Abbey are among the most valuable masterpieces
produced in the eighteenth century and they have achieved a universal character by
capturing the poetic essence of the English landscape. A critic must be happy if his work
sheds some light on the genesisof such masterpieces, so I hope I have proved that they now
belong to our cultural heritage because ruins played an essential part in the creative
imagination of an age famous for its discoveries 'in wide landskip'.
Universite de Dijon
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 Michel Baridon

Notes
1. As for example in Pope's portrait after his own design for An Essay on Man. Reproduced in]. D. HUNT, The
Figure in the Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 61.
2. Sir William Chambers's artificial ruins at Kew arc a famous example (B. SPRAGUE ALLEN, Tides in English Taste
[New York, 1969], vol. II, plate 73). Ruins painted on canvas are to be seen in BATTY LANGLEY'S New Principles
oj Gardening (London, 1728), plate xx.
3. DAVID R. COFFIN, ed., The Italian Garden (Washington, D.C., 1972). See in particular E. BATl1STI, 'Natura
artificiosa to Natura artificialis', PI'. 30-31.
4. R. MORTIER, La Poetique des Ruines en France (Geneve, 1974), p. 22.
5. Such was the theory according to which the empire was the most accomplished form reached by Rome
(see DANTE'S De Monarchia). This view was totally reversed by the 'civic humanists' of the Renaissance
(HANS BARON, The Crisisof the EarlyItalian Renaissance (Princeton, 1955), vol. I, p. 55 on Poggio Bracciolini
and p. 95 on Bruni).
6. H. T. DICKINSON provides a select bibliography in his Politics andLiterature in the 18th Century (London, 1974).
7. MACHIAVELLI, Discourses, ed. and translated by L.]. Walker (London, 1975), PI'. 205-206.
8. An Address totheLordMayor, Aldermen andSheriffs ojLondon,prefixed by Toland to his edition of The Oceana oj
John Harrington (London, 1700).
9. THOMSON, Poems, ed.]. Logie Robertson (London, 1961), p. 315.
10. GIBBON, A Historyoj the Decline and Fallojthe Roman Empire, ed.]. B. Bury (London, 1896-1900), vol. VII,
p. 301 and p. 324.
11. A Centre du Voyage en Italie jointly founded by the universities of Turin and Chambery specializes in: the
study of the legions of travellers who crossed the Alps.
12. DAVID WATKIN, The English Vision (London, 1982), p. 30.
13. ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, ed. W. D. Ross (London, 1958), vol. I, p. 239.
14. HEGEL, The Philosophy of History, tr. Sibrcc (New York, 1956), PI'. 1-2.
15. MARX, The Eighteenth ofBrumaire oj Lot/is Napoleon Bonaportc, tr. D. De Leon (New York, 1898), PI'. 1-2.
16. HENRY NASH SMITH, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol andMyth (Harvard University Press, 1950),
p. V.
17. W. STUKELEY, Family Memoirs (London, 1882), p. 16.
18. On the successof the Society of Antiquaries see]. EVANS, A Historyojthe Society ojAntiquaries (London, 1956).
That DICKENS made fun of it in his Pickwick Papers proves that it must have been of public interest.
19. The supreme power was defined as 'the king in Parliament', but the House of Lords was in aristocratic hands
and there were so many 'younger sons' in the Commons that Namier defined it as a 'peculiar club' (England in
the Age oj the American Revolution [London, 1961], p. 1).
20. Burke to Lord Richmond, The Correspondence oj E. Burke, ed. Lucy S. Sutherland (London, 1960), vol. II,
p. 377-
21. '[The Saxon conquest) induced a change ofnames, oflanguage, ofcustoms, oflaws [... Jand even ofthe whole
face of nature through the whole kingdom', TEMPLE, Works, 1814, III, p. 98. 'As to Parliaments I adore the
wisdom of that Gothick institution', SWIFT to Pope, The Correspondence ojJ. Swift, ed. H. Williams (London,
1963), II, p. 372. 'My notion of a whig [... J is one who is exactly for keeping up the strictness of the true old
gothick constitution', quoted by H. T. DICKINSON, Politics and Literature, 01'. cit., p. 24. 'No nation has
preserved their gothick constitution better than the English', OWMIXON, The Critical History oj England
(London, 1726), Introduction. Oldmixon is quoted by S. KLIGER in The Goths in England (Harvard U. Press,
1952), p. 203. KLIGER'S book is one of the most valuable studies extant on gothic liberty.
22. D. WATKIN, The English Vision, p. 46 on Bathurst. On politics at Stowe, the classic study by GEORGE CLARK,
'Grecian Taste and Gothic Virtue', Apollo, 97 (1973), PI'. 566-571.
23. Tom Jones, The Wesleyan Edition (London, 1974), I, p. 42.
24. On Pope and the gothic, MORRIS R. BROWNELL, A. Pope and the Arts oj Georgian England (London, 1978),
PI" 249--251.
25. D. WATKIN, 01'. cit., p. 46.
26. In his essay 'The parties of Great Britain', HeMl showed how the Tory opposition tried to outbid the Whigs in
a way which threatened to favour democratic criticisms of the constitution. HUME, Philosophical Works, ed.
T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London, 1882), Ill, PI'. 133-143.
27. TACITUS, Cermania, Loeb classical Library, 45, tr. W. Peterson, p. 275 and PI'. 279-283.
28. The full quotation is to be found in LOVEJOY'S The First gothic revival', M.L.N., XLVII, VII (1932), p. 435.
29. 'Britain was formerly the America of the Germans', FRANKLIN in The Gentleman's Magazine (Sept. 1773).
Reproduced in H. SMYTH, The Writings ojBenjamin Franklin (New York, 1905-1907), VI, 1'.127.
30. Such as Hulme, Burgh and others. See CAROLINE ROBBINS, The 18th CenturyCommenweaithman (New York,
1968), PI'. 320-377-
31. SHEI-:STONE'S 'liberty decks the plain' (Elegy XXIII) is one example among many others. In a similar way
THOMSON'S patriotic meditation rises from the sight of Hagley (The Seasons, Spring, 1. 904 sq. in Poems,
01'. cit., p. 37).

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Ruins as a mental construct

32. See A. VARTANIAN, Diderot and Descartes (Princeton, 1953) and R. SHACKLETON, Montesquieu. A Critical
Biography (OUP, 1961), pp. 258-260.
33. Locke had need of the particles to explain the impact received by sense organs. Boyle used them to explain
chemical reactions as a mixing of particles.
34. Tom Jones, XII, VIII. Wesleyan ed. II, p. 651.
35. Essay on the Principle of Population, chap. IX of 1st ed. (Penguin, 1970), p. 126.
36. As is the case in his Meditations where he builds a whole system of the world 'dans [s] a paisible solitude'.
37. DESCARTES, A Discourse on Method. Part II, chap. 1. Everyman ed., tr.]. Veitch (London, 1953).
38. The whole letter is in]. D. HUNT & P. WILliS, eds., The Genius of the Place, 1975, pp. 120-121.
39. Grongar Hill, 1. 71 to 84.
40. 'The development ofempirical philosophy from Locke to ... Hume represents a seriesofattempts to minimize
the difference between sensation and reflection, and finally wipe it out altogether.' CASSIRER, The Philosophy of
the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1951), p. 100.
41. On Diderot and ruins, R. MORTIER, op. cit., chapter VII. On the part played by associationism in the English
Garden, H. F. CLARK, '18th century Elysiums',Journalofthe Warburg & Courtauld Institutes (1943), pp. 165-189
and]. D. HUNT, 'Emblem and Expressionism in the 18th C. Landscape Garden', Eighteenth Century Studies, IV
(1971), pp. 294-317.
42. W. MASON, The English Garden (1783), IV, 1. 401 sq.

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