Alps on Alps arise!

Ferdinand Hodler, Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau above a sea of fog, 1908

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,
While from the bounded Level of our Mind,
Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize
New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!
So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,
Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;
Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,
And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

These days I find it easy to appreciate the sentiments in this extended landscape metaphor from Pope's 'An Essay on Criticism' (1709).  Among those Heights of Arts that I tackled in fearless Youth, one of the most daunting was Ezra Pound's Cantos. Basil Bunting once compared them to the Alps in a memorable short poem, which you can hear Bunting reading at the Poetry Archive.  Trying to penetrate the Cantos, Bunting says, is like trying to make sense of the mountains: 'who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?'  Pound himself, in a section of the ABC of Reading entitled 'COMPASS, SEXTANT, OR LAND MARKS', advises the reader to 'brace himself' for a list of the great writers - 'the minimum that a man would have to read if he hoped to know what a given new book was worth' - and uses another Alpine metaphor to describe a knowledge of the classics of literature: 'a man who has climbed the Matterhorn may prefer Derbyshire to Switzerland but he won't think the Peak is the highest mountain in Europe.'

John Ruskin, The Matterhorn, 1849

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Chiswick House Garden

Chiswick House, designed by the third Earl of Burlington, 

completed by 1729 

My photograph, July 2010

Last month we visited Chiswick House and its gardens for the first time in years, lured by the website which says: 'in recent decades the gardens fell into decline with over one million visits every year taking their toll. This decline has now been spectacularly reversed with an ambitious £12.1 million project which has restored the gardens to their original 18th century glory.'  There is a nice new cafe and children's play area, but anyone thinking of going may wish to wait until the restoration is complete - the Ionic Temple for example is still under scaffolding. 

The Ionic Temple and Orange Tree Garden, c. 1726

Source: Wikimedia Commons, photograph from 2008.

The restorers have erected several notices around the gardens in the form of picture frames.   The one shown below reproduces an idealised view of the house and invites you to compare it with the present view (somewhat obscured by trees).

Picturesque viewpoint, Chiswick House

My photograph, July 2010

The gardens designed by Burlington and William Kent have a special place in landscape history, having inspired Alexander Pope's fourth 'Epistle' on good taste, which argues that all should be 'adapted to the genius and use of the place, and the beauties not forced into it, but resulting from it.'  Here are the lines relating to garden design:

To build, to plant, whatever you intend,
To rear the column, or the arch to bend,
To swell the terrace, or to sink the grot;
In all, let Nature never be forgot.
But treat the goddess like a modest fair,
Nor overdress, nor leave her wholly bare;
Let not each beauty ev'rywhere be spied,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.
He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,
Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds.

Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

- Alexander Pope, 'Epistle to Burlington', 1731

The cascade, Chiswick House garden, designed by William Kent
My photograph, July 2010

As this verse implies, the garden is both formal and informal.  It has geometrical features like the Patte d’oie (‘goose-foot’) - three radiating avenues ending in small buildings - but it also has a lake created from a stream and 'naturalised'.  The overall design 'pleasingly confounds, surprises, varies'.  As John Dixon Hunt says in The Figure in the Landscape (p96), the visitor, once walking down the main axis of the garden, was confronted with 'frequent openings that tempted to left and right; once such invitations to divert from the main avenue were accepted the windings and intricacies of the garden were quickly discovered.'

Jean Rocque, Plan du Jardin & Vue des Maisons de Chiswick, 1736

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Finally, here are The Beatles in May 1966 performing 'Paperback Writer' in the gardens.  At the start you can see them at the exedra, a semicircular yew hedge which formed a backdrop to Burlington's copies of antique statues said to represent Caesar, Pompey and Cicero. The other main location is the conservatory, renowned for its camellias, designed by Samuel Ware in 1813, a forerunner of the famous glasshouses at Kew and Crystal Palace.