Repton and Romanticism

A mania for “improvements” gripped the upwardly mobile land-owning classes of the 18th century. By the end of the century, the landscape styles of Lancelot “Capability” Brown were in decline. Richard Payne Knight put the objections to Brownian style in poetic form in his 1794 The Landscape , launching the “picturesque controversy”:

Oft when I’ve seen some lonely mansion stand, Fresh from th’improver’s desolating hand, ‘Midst shaven laws, that far around it creep In one eternal undulating sweep; And scattered clumps, that nod at one another, Each stiffly waving to his formal brother . . . .

Tir’d with th’extensive scene, so dull and bare, To Heav’n devoutly I’ve address’d my pray’r, Again the moss-grown terraces to raise, And spread the labyrinth’s perplexing maze; Replace in even lines the ductile yew, And plant again the ancient avenue. Some features then, at least, we should obtain, To mark this flat, insipid, waving plain; Some vary’d tints and forms would intervene, To break this uniform, eternal green.

Brown was out; Humphrey Repton was in. In place of Brown’s “eternal green” lawns, Repton was sensitive to natural grandeur and sought to enhance that grandeur with his improvements. He was taken with the natural setting of Blaise Castle (built in 1766, though Austen’s John Thorpe claims it is ancient), which, though within a short distance of large urban areas, “the woods and lawns and deep romantic glens belonging to Blaise Castle are perfectly secluded from the ‘busy hum of man.’”

Repton redesigned the approach to the Castle, so that the entrance was through a Gothic Lodge. He hoped that “When time has thrown its ivy and creeping plants over the rawness of the new walls and fresh-hewn rocks, the approach will be in strict character with the wildness of the scenery, and excite admiration and surprise without any mixture of that terror which though it partakes of the sublime, is very apt to destroy the delights of romantic scenery.” Passing through a wood, the visitor would find to his delight that the house was not a “mouldering castle” but “a mansion of elegance, cheerfulness and hospitality where the comforts of neatness is blended with the rude features of nature, without committing great violence to the genius of the place.”

To enhance the effect, he proposed that a cottage be built in a clearing in the wood: “This cottage will give an air of cheerfulness and inhabitancy to the scene which would without it be too sombre, because the castle through perfectly in character with the solemn dignity of the surrounding woods, increases rather than relieves the apparent solitude.” Besides, “the occasional smoke from the [cottage] chimney will not only produce that cheerful and varying motion which painting cannot express, but it will frequently happen in a summer’s evening that the smoke from the cottage will spread a thin veil along the glen, and produce that kind of vapoury repose over the opposite wood which painters often attempt to describe.”

Repton was not a romantic. However much he might enjoy the “wildness” of the castle’s surroundings, he doesn’t want the scenery to verge into the terrible or the sublime. But, one wonders whether, without the movement for landscape improvement, and the simultaneous interest in the picturesque, Wordsworth would have existed. One wonders whether without these 18th century movements, the world that so fascinates Wordsworth would have been there for him to recollect in tranquility.