Climate Change and the Humanities by Alexander Elliott James Cullis & Vinita Damodaran

Author:Alexander Elliott, James Cullis & Vinita Damodaran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Cattle and mountains were just so much rustic detail, and of course the ideal number of rural labourers in a picturesque scene was no labourers at all. Gilpin certainly knew that the countryside was full of people going about their business. He even encountered groups of labourers in Cumbria on one of the year’s rent days, and admits ‘we were not a little entertained by the simplicity, and variety of the several groups and figures we met’. But they had no place in picturesque art: ‘In grand scenes, even the peasant cannot be admitted, if he be employed in the low occupations of his profession: the spade, the scythe, and the rake are all excluded’. What was allowed was pastoral idleness: ‘the lazy cowherd resting on his pole … the peasant lolling on a rock’, an angler rather than a fisherman, and gypsies, banditti, and the occasional individual soldier in antique armour. 36 The image of the countryside presented therefore looked very much in need of improvement—slack, inefficient, indigent, lawless, and archaic. Moreover, once ‘improved’ the landscape was likely to be as empty of agricultural labour as the picturesque depicted it since nearly all the peasantry would have been forced off the land. 37 The emergence of the picturesque as the enclosure of common land began to accelerate is surely no coincidence. The picturesque was not so much an expression of nostalgia for old, pre-agrarian country life before the Industrial Revolution as an exoneration of the forces of agricultural change that were pauperizing hundreds of thousands of rural labourers.

But for all its dreadful and artful contrivance, the picturesque did not disappear. Throughout the nineteenth century, guidebooks advised that the Lake District was best experienced ‘during the wet months, when clouds, mists, and moving vapours gave the landscape a luminous softness most like a wash drawing or an aquatint’. 38 Valuing a season simply for the range of aesthetic effects with which it is associated rather than for the social and agricultural benefits it brings will either turn the starving rural poor into an artistic spectacle of light, colour, and shade, or simply leave them out of the picture altogether. Both were (and are today) morally unacceptable.

But the cult of the picturesque spread like a weed beyond painting and tourism to shape the practices of English gardening. 39 Pastoral poetry and picturesque painting drained history, tradition, and folklore from the representation of the countryside through a disengaged sentimentality, and English landscape gardening performed the same operation at ground level—with the same result: labour and indeed nature were comprehensively effaced from the horticultural scene. William Mason’s commentary on the third book of his poem The English Garden (1783) was quite explicit on this point:As we have all along considered the Garden as a Picture, so we are under the necessity of considering the unadorned and naked soil as the Painter’s canvas, and, consequently, of looking on every means of ornament as the pencils and colours with which he is to work.

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