Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic

Experience

Endre Szécsényi

In his Walkscapes, Francesco Careri claims that ‘before erecting menhirs . . . man

possessed a symbolic form with which to transform the landscape. This form
was walking, a skill learned with great effort in the first months of life, only
to become an unconscious, natural, automatic action.’ By means of walking
man has been able ‘to construct the natural landscape of his surroundings.’
After the basic needs of finding food and information for survival have been
satisfied, ‘walking takes on a symbolic form that has enabled man to dwell
in the world. By modifying the sense of the space crossed, walking becomes
man’s first aesthetic act, penetrating the territories of chaos, constructing an
order on which to develop the architecture of situated objects.’ So ‘walking is
an art’ from which different artistic forms stem like ‘the menhir, sculpture,
architecture, landscape.’1 In what follows, I shall not go so deep into the
human soul and so far back in time as Careri did, I will only endeavour to
outline a historic reconstruction of how walking, the evolving new taste of
natural landscape and emerging modern aesthetic experience related to each
other in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, of how the
authors of this period rediscovered walking as a performative art which, at
the same time, was shaping both a new landscape of prospects of rude or
bare nature and a new state or disposition of mind in the beholder – since, as
Solnit remarks, ‘imagination has both shaped and been shaped by the spaces
it passes through on two feet’.2 Thus the experience of landscape itself can
be regarded as performative art – in a double sense: on the one hand, Nature
as such (or God) can be conceived as the performer who expresses herself in
the ever-changing, dynamic and stream-like character of the natural prospect

 1 Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: El andar como práctica estética – Walking as an aesthetic

practice (Barcelona 2002), 19–20. – The main part of this research was supported
by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellowship (2014–2016) within the
Seventh European Community Framework Programme.
 2 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust. A History of Walking (London, New York, 2001), 4.
40 Endre Szécsényi

(something always happens even in a seemingly static prospect, growing and

declining, the changes of light, weather, season, etc.), and, on the other, the
walker or the wanderer can be a performer who moves across the space and
is embellishing or enriching the natural prospect, transforming it into a land-
scape with personal, emotional and spiritual significance. Walking is always an
exercise, while shaping a landscape is a kind of spiritual exercise. I shall apply
the latter meaning when I am speaking about the performative character of
landscape experience.
In a recent article, John Dixon Hunt speaks of two crucial ideas of the
eighteenth century: ‘the familiar development of the picturesque’ and ‘the less
noticed interest’ called the ‘art of walking’ after John Gay’s Trivia of 1716.
Hunt emphasises the importance of walking, he focuses on ‘what happens
during walking’, on how ‘the mind respond[s] to motion in and through land-
scape, as opposed to an insistence on the visual experience.’ Since ‘motion
prompted (at least) emotion’, more optimistically, ‘ideas and also emotions’.
Traditionally, however, the picturesque is thought to rely on the visual nature
of a prospect, that had produced an ‘overly static idea of landscape, a notion
that in its turn got unhappily transferred to making landscapes as if they were
pictures.’ Hunt’s aim is to offer a new argument for the importance and time-
liness of the picturesque through rediscovering the art of walking.3 While
Hunt’s historical survey ranges mostly from the eighteenth century (after John
Gay) to the present, from Denis Diderot to Ian Hamilton Finlay4 and Georges
Descombes, I am going to inquire into the prehistory of this development.
By the same token, I will suggest that the rediscovering of the ‘art of walking’
preceded the ‘development of the picturesque’, and that, in a sense, the latter
stemmed from the former.
Finally, in this proem, I mention Ronald W. Hepburn’s posthumous arti-
cle, in which he claims that ‘we do often aesthetically enjoy both vast spaces
and minute spaces: we enjoy resting in space and moving through space.’5
I shall discuss mostly vast spaces and the action or performance of the
‘moving through space,’ and suggest that they had certain priority in form-
ing and shaping of the modern aesthetic experience. I endeavour to exhibit
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century landscape as a (performative) art of
  3  John Dixon Hunt, ‘Time of Walking’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed
Landscapes 36 (2016), 297–304, 297–8.
  4  About Finlay’s Little Sparta near Edinburgh, Hunt also published a book, cf. John
Dixon Hunt, Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London, 2008).
  5  Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘The Aesthetics of Sky and Space’, ed. Emily Brady, Environmental
Values 19 (2010), 273–88, 274.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 41

moving in nature (whose constitutive parts are walking, wandering, expatiat-

ing, or travelling), as contrasted, in a sense, with gardening as a (creative) art
of dwelling in nature. I will recommend this dichotomy at least as a useful
tool to understand the early developments of landscape theory, and to suggest
that the modern non-architectural notion of garden or gardening could be
conceived from the angle of the new model of (performative) landscape
in the early eighteenth century. I consider this model as something differ-
ent – even though sometimes not clearly distinguishable – from walking in a
garden or in a pastoral (or georgic) countryside. In the latter cases, the walk-
ers meet familiar scenes, and contemplate and enjoy those in ways they have
earlier appropriated mostly from Classic literature, or, in the case of the hortus
conclusus tradition, originally from the Vulgate. In the case of the emerging
landscape tradition, however, we can frequently find the following key words:
‘discovery’, ‘surprise’, ‘astonishment’, ‘novelty’ and like; walking is an expedi-
tion, not only a survey, it is an encounter with the (partly) unfamiliar or even
with the unknown. Walking is something which the walker is “creating”, it
is something which is inevitable for the landscape experience (while we can
enjoy a garden standing in a single point, from un point de vue).6 And walk-
ing opens new dimensions of personal or individual depths, partly because it
always offers an opportunity to the walker to radically reconsider the dynamic
relationship between Nature and herself. Of course, there are several paral-
lels, both the garden and the new landscape experience appeal to all the five
senses, and both require activity for the beholder-walker’s part; still in the first
case activity rather means a skilful application of the inherited cultural tools
and schemes, while in the second it means a discovery of new spaces outside
and inside, a permanent invention of new forms of grasping this complex
experience. I try to show the theoretical potentials in this new, walkable land-
scape experience in the mirror of the “aesthetic” writings of Joseph Addison
throughout this article, especially in its concluding part.

  6  As, in his seminal article of 1966, Hepburn also suggests: ‘On occasion [the spectator]
may confront natural objects as a static, disengaged observer; but far more typically
the objects envelop him on all sides. In a forest, trees surround him; he is ringed
by hills, or he stands in the midst of a plain. If there is movement in the scene, the
spectator may himself be in motion, and his motion may be an important element
in his aesthetic experience.’ Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the
Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in idem, ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics
and Neighbouring Fields (Edinburgh, 1984), 9–35, 12.
42 Endre Szécsényi

1.  Gardens, landscapes, early aesthetics

In the first part of his influential Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of  Beauty and
Virtue of 1725, Francis Hutcheson mentions the example of the garden (or
gardening) only once – when not a mere element of an enumeration, such as
‘architecture, gardening, dress, equipage, and furniture of houses’ –, but does
it in an interesting context:

[S]ome Works of Art acquire a distinct Beauty by their Correspondence

to some universally suppos’d Intention in the Artificer, or the Persons
who employ’d him: And to obtain this Beauty, sometimes they do not
form their Works so as to attain the highest Perfection of original
Beauty separately consider’d; because a Composition of this relative
Beauty, along with some degree of the original Kind, may give more
Pleasure, than a more perfect original Beauty separately. Thus we see,
that strict Regularity in laying out of Gardens in Parterres, Vista’s, paral-
lel Walks, is often neglected, to obtain an Imitation of Nature even in
some of its Wildnesses. And we are more pleas’d with this Imitation,
especially when the Scene is large and spacious, than with the more
confin’d Exactness of regular Works.7

To be sure, gardening did not have a distinguished theoretical position in the

first philosophical aesthetics of Europe, Hutcheson did not use it as a paradig-
matic example of the perception of beauty. Still gardening or garden design
is exhibited as an art, undoubtedly one of the noblest human arts, which can
produce a special kind of blend of ‘relative’ and ‘some degree of original’
beauty. The beauty in gardens is one of the patent examples which shows
that certain imperfectness can cause ‘more Pleasure’ than the perfection of
‘original Beauty’ would do in the same circumstances. There is no formula or
any distinct rule of how to achieve or to judge the proper measure of imper-
fectness, it seems that it can be realised and justified solely by the amount of
pleasure received. In the case of gardens, the irregularity of ‘Wildnesses’ makes
us capable of tasting the deformity, or, in a sense, the chaos, within the world
of order and design which is most purely manifested in the geometrical forms
of ‘original beauty’ in Hutcheson’s Inquiry. Since the late seventeenth century,
the insight that regular works may not be so effective, though formally more
 7 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed.
Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis, 2004), 44.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 43

beautiful, than partly irregular, wild, deformed ones has been mostly discussed
in the context of the je-ne-sais-quoi, or in the context of the mountain experi-
ence (later: natural sublime) or immensity. It is not by chance that Hutcheson
immediately associates this type of blended beauty with the experience of
‘large and spacious’ scenes.
Still this special (in the fashionable discourse of délicatesse: “secret”) pleasure
is understood here in the conception of the organized beauty of garden. As
if the ‘Imitation of Nature even in some of its Wildnesses’ would simply be
an increase of the variety within the framework of the familiar Hutchesonian
formula of beauty as the ‘uniformity amidst variety’.8 Thus, in the case of the
garden, the irrational and, in a sense, inhuman element of ‘Wildnesses’ would
be domesticated in the blended type of beauty.
Hutcheson’s Irish patron was Lord Robert Molesworth, the author
of Considerations for Promoting of  Agriculture and Employing the Poor, for whom
aesthetic and political improvement was equally significant. As Michael Brown
writes: ‘For him, the logic of philosophical enquiry was harmonised with a
desire to defend liberty, improve the country and to create an aesthetically
pleasing environment.’9 Their life-long friendship began in Molesworth’s
Irish estate, Breckdenston. Beside its agricultural improvement (generally
elaborated in his Considerations), Molesworth was interested in its aesthetic
improvement, too. This estate was conceived primarily as a garden in the new
Dutch manner, and was ‘a blend of stately formalism and the informality of
wilderness.’ Breckdenston ‘emphasised the need for a mixture of formality
and natural expanses, informing the viewer of the authority of the owner over
the estate and enabling the viewer to relax and meditate on the natural land-
scape through which he moved.’10 On this spacious garden ground, however,
‘natural landscape’ was realized primarily as different spots of ‘wilderness’
(amongst other elements like parterre garden, cherry orchard, kitchen garden,
bowling green, etc.),11 and not as open and broad views to the wild, unculti-
vated (or only partly cultivated) country prospects beyond the stoned walls.12

  8  Ibid., 28.
 9 Michael Brown, Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719–1730 (Dublin, 2002), 40–1.
10  Ibid., 46.
11  For the diagram of Molesworth’s landscape from John Rocque’s Map of the County of
Dublin, see Finola O’Kane, Landscape Design in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Mixing Foreign
Trees with the Natives (Cork, 2004), 13 (Fig. 5).
12  ‘Two hundred length “of walling . . . necessary for securing the ground and gardens”
were built in 1709, despite the growing fashion for opening out the garden to the
surrounding landscape.’ Ibid., 14.
44 Endre Szécsényi

Breckdenston’s wildernesses basically meant ‘densely planted’ places with

narrow winding walks from where the ‘axial effect of an avenue was more
intensely appreciated’.13 As such, it is a perfect prefiguration of Hutcheson’s
garden with some touches of ‘Wildnesses’ in his Inquiry. This eclectic envi-
ronment shaped by various types of gardening and the similarly eclectic but
inspiring social circle he found in Molesworth’s house had a significant influ-
ence on Hutcheson’s thought as he was working on his Inquiry.
Beside the example of Molesworth’s inspirational gardens, there are some
textual precedents of Hutcheson’s remark on ‘Wildnesses’ in gardens, and on
its association with ‘large and spacious’ natural scenes, even if these prec-
edents, as we shall see, possesses more potential in the context of nature and
art than that Hutcheson elaborates in the above-mentioned passage of his
Inquiry. The closest ones can be taken from Lord Shaftesbury’s and Joseph
Addison’s writings. The oft-cited loci are some passages of The Moralists (1709)
and those of The Spectator Nos. 414, 417, which belong to “The Pleasures of
the Imagination” series, and 477 (1712). Lord Shaftesbury emphasises the
distinction between rude nature and formal gardens, and seems to attribute
both aesthetic-moral and political significance to this, saying:

Even the rude rocks, the mossy caverns, the irregular unwrought
grottos and broken falls of waters, with all the horrid graces of the wil-
derness itself, as representing nature more, will be the more engaging
and appear with a magnificence beyond the formal mockery of princely
gardens.14

The violence or oppression over “nature” in formality is a clear sign of a

morally and politically intolerable power whose activity results in an “aestheti-
cally” absurd ‘mockery’. Lord Shaftesbury speaks about some intrinsic values
of some rude, irregular and raw elements of nature outside the man-made
and man-designed gardens, and claims that ‘even the rude rocks, etc.’ are better
representation of nature than the absurdities of formal gardens, but it would
not necessarily mean that these scenes of ‘horrid graces’ are the optimal
13  Ibid., 16. ‘Despite its complex formality of twisting paths and geometric clearings,
the wilderness was considered to be the most informal and natural part of the early
eighteenth-century garden, where nature made its more determined assault upon
art. Its complex patterning was thought to represent nature…’ Ibid. It has hardly
anything to do with the sublime landscape or the picturesque.
14  Lord Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E.
Klein (Cambridge, 1999), 317.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 45

representation of nature or that of the compatibility of human beings to

nature. Still, these uncustomary and inhuman scenes of intrinsic value – like,
for example, a desert – can be enjoyed without domestication, without the
familiar and cosy framework of a garden:

All ghastly and hideous as they appear, they want not their peculiar
beauties. The wildness pleases. We seem to live alone with nature. We
view her in her inmost recesses, and contemplate her with more delight
in these original wilds than in the artificial labyrinths and feigned wil-
dernesses of the palace.15

In Shaftesbury’s conception, these natural elements were meant to stimulate

some significant experience which the beauty (of forms and/or of order) in
itself could not do, not even simply to stress or to intensify the effects of
beauty by contrast. They have their own rights, and they would successfully
resist a Hutchesonian attempt of domestication within a garden design. The
remark on the ‘feigned wildernesses of the palace’ might be an anticipated
criticism of Hutcheson’s conception of ‘Imitation of Nature’ in gardens (and
also of Molesworth’s gardens in Breckdenston). Shaftesbury insists that during
the experience of a desert scene, ‘we seem to live alone with nature’ – nature
in its ‘original’, untouched state, nature as a whole. This appears as an eminent
occasion of the encounter with the divinity of nature.16
If we consider another locus of The Moralists17, we can clarify the status
of the above distinction between ‘rude rocks’ and ‘princely gardens’. This is

15  Ibid., 315.

16  In his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections of 1728,
Hutcheson seems to share Shaftesbury’s opinion on the intrinsic value of wilderness:
‘may not a Taste for Nature be acquired, giving greater Delight than the Observations
of Art?’ And: ‘Must an artful Grove, an Imitation of a Wilderness, or the more
confined Forms on Ever-greens, please more than the real Forest, with the Trees
of God? Shall a Statue give more Pleasure than the human Face Divine?’ Francis
Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections,
with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis, 2002), 114–15.
17  This is a long dialogue in which the interlocutors themselves are walking in nature
– as it was fashionable from Dominique Bouhours’ Enteretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène
of 1671 or Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s Les délices de l’esprit of 1677 to George
Berkeley’s Three Dialogues of 1713, and, of course, later in the eighteenth century. At
the same time, for example, at the outset of his Entretiens sur la Metaphysique, sur la
Religion of 1711, Nicolas Malebranche claims that we always need a study-room to
hear the voice of the reason, and not a garden or a walk in nature: the enchanted
places and charming sensations are disturbing to the contemplation.
46 Endre Szécsényi

another scene (as well as the desert was above) of a long imaginative, dream-
like, journey from the distant regions of the universe to the familiar spheres of
human life. In the middle of this trip, we enter a ‘vast wood’ of ‘deep shades’:

The faint and gloomy light looks horrid as the shade itself, and the pro-
found stillness of these places imposes silence upon men, struck with
the hoarse echoings of every sound within the spacious caverns of the
wood. Here space astonishes. Silence itself seems pregnant while an
unknown force works on the mind and dubious objects move the wake-
ful sense. Mysterious voices are either heard or fancied, and various
forms of deity seem to present themselves and appear more manifest
in these sacred sylvan scenes, such as of old gave rise to temples and
favoured the religion of the ancient world. Even we ourselves, who in
plain characters may read divinity from so many bright parts of earth,
choose rather these obscurer places to spell out that mysterious being,
which to our weak eyes appears at best under a veil of cloud.18

The phrases ‘read divinity’ and ‘spell out’ can refer to the old metaphor of
reading the book of nature, but here it is not the understanding – the clar-
ity and light of the eye and the intellect –, but the overwhelming emotional
effect of silence and obscurity that triumphs. The divine being who inhabits
in nature can be more appropriately approached when experiencing priva-
tion: through vast scenes with the lack of light and (articulated) sounds. The
traditional primacy of vision is also challenged here by, on the one hand, the
preferred obscurity, and, on the other, by the equal stress on audible experi-
ence. This passage can serve as a more general framework for understanding
the complexity of Shaftesbury’s conception of nature and natural beauty: ‘we
ourselves, who in plain characters may read divinity from so many bright parts
of earth’ may refer to the human-like order, also manifested in architectural
gardens, and to the intellectually comprehensible forms and regularity gained
by the light of the intellect, and still there is a secret inclination in us towards
‘obscurer places’ where we can feel those aspects of the ‘mysterious being’
which would be too powerful for ‘our weak eyes’.

18  Lord Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 316. – I have already
discussed this passage from another point of view in my ‘Francis Hutcheson and
the Emerging Aesthetic Experience’, Journal of Scottish Thought 7 (2016), 171–209,
189–90.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 47

The obscure and vast sylvan landscape offers a fuller, more profoundly
emotional experience of the divine in nature, than the clear and transpar-
ent prospects of a garden or the bright pages of the book of nature. As if
ancient religious practices (as, for example, of the Druids) associated with
such natural scenes may overcome the mitigated rational theology (or physico-
theology) of the age. Beside the triumph of the ‘unknown force’ over the
power of intellect, it brings forward a “temporal factor”, the astonishment of
this sylvan experience partly comes from the encounter of the ancient past, so
this imagined travel is being undertaken in both space and time. Nevertheless,
in these examples from Shaftesbury’s Moralists, we can see that certain natural
prospects and views (from the rude rocks to desert and vast woods) are more
appropriate occasions to encounter Nature in its genuine form or as a whole,
and to feel or to relish its divine force than those designed gardens offer inde-
pendently of their imitated natural elements and ingredients. Moreover, the
form of imaginative journey is not accidental: it refers, on the one hand, to the
indispensability of movement, and, on the other, to a special state of mind,
both are needed to see and to relish these scenes.
Another textual source or reference of Hutcheson’s above cited passage
can be a less-discussed essay written by Joseph Addison in The Tatler No. 161.19
In this we can read a long description of a dream: the dreamer is dreaming a
journey in the Alps. After Shaftesbury’s desert and sylvan scenes imagined in
an enthusiastic state of mind, this is a dreamed series of mountain scenes20:

I fancied my self among the Alpes, and, as it is natural in a Dream,

seemed every Moment to bound from one Summit to another, ‘till
at last, after having made this Airy Progress over the Tops of several
Mountains, I arrived at the very Centre of those broken Rocks and
Precipices. I here, methought, saw a prodigious Circuit of Hills, that
reached above the Clouds, and encompassed a large Space of Ground,
which I had a great Curiosity to look into. I thereupon continued my
former Way of travelling through a great Variety of Winter Scenes, ‘till
I had gained the Top of these white Mountains, which seemed another
19  Even if excerpts of this essay are presented together with passages from the more
familiar ones of The Spectator (Nos. 37, 414, 417 and 477) in Hunt’s and Willis’
canonical anthology, cf. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (eds.), The Genius of the
Place. The English Landscape Garden 1620–1820 (London, 1975), 139–40.
20 To be sure, I could also cite descriptions of mountain prospects from the same
imaginative journey of The Moralists. Cf. Lord Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times, 315–16.
48 Endre Szécsényi

Alpes of Snow. I looked down from hence into a spacious Plain, which
was surrounded on all Sides by this Mound of Hills, and which pre-
sented me with the most agreeable Prospect I had ever seen. There
was a greater Variety of Colours in the Embroidery of the Meadows,
a more lively Green in the Leaves and Grass, a brighter Chrystal in the
Streams, than what I ever met with in any other Region. The Light it
self had something more shining and glorious in it than that of which
the Day is made in other Places. I was wonderfully astonished at the
Discovery of such a Paradise amidst the Wildness of those cold, hoary
Landskips which lay about it; . . . The Place was covered with a won-
derful Profusion of Flowers, that without being disposed into regular
Borders and Parterres, grew promiscuously, and had a greater Beauty
in their natural Luxuriancy and Disorder, than they could have received
from the Checks and Restraints of Art.21

The last scene of a garden (a Paradise) contains that kind of “aesthetic” expe-
rience (‘the greater Beauty in . . . Disorder’) from 1710 to which Hutcheson
would refer fifteen years later.22 Addison is dreaming about a constellation of
the ‘cold, hoary Landskips’ of Alpine mountains and the Paradise-like garden
of ‘the most agreeable Prospect’.23 The garden is rounded by a ‘prodigious

21  The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, 1987; 3 vols), II, 398.
22  This observation concerning gardens is not even the invention of  Addison, he only
popularizes Sir William Temple’s opinion about the Chinese gardens and their
‘disorder’ introduced in his Upon the Gardens of  Epicurus of 1685. Cf., for example,
Lee Andrew Elioseff, The Cultural Milieu of  Addison’s Literary Criticism (Austin, 1963),
117–18. Already the first description of the ‘natural garden’ written by Henry Wotton
in 1624 contained that ‘Gardens should bee irregular’. Cited by S. Lang, ‘The Genesis
of the English Landscape Garden’ in Nikolaus Pevsner (ed.), The Picturesque Garden
and its Influence outside the British Isles (Washington, 1974), 1–29, 9.
23  We can find other examples of this combination of garden with some kind of natural
wilderness in Addison’s writings, like in his letter of 1699 to William Congreve on
Fontaine-bleau’s garden, and also in his Spectator essay No. 37 (1711) on Leonora’s
garden who was inspired by romances. Cf. Walter Graham (ed.), The Letters of Joseph
Addison (Oxford, 1941), 11, and The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, 1965; 5
vols), I, 158. (from now own, I refer to this edition with volume and page number
in parentheses) And most famously, in his Spectator No. 414: ‘our English Gardens
are not so entertaining to the Fancy as those in France and Italy, where we see a large
Extent of Ground covered over with an agreeable mixture of Garden and Forest,
which represent every where an artificial Rudeness, much more charming than the
Neatness and Elegancy’ of English gardens. (III, 551) This locus seems another
evident source of Hutcheson’s paragraph cited above, though Addison mentions
‘nobler and more exalted kind of Pleasure’ here, and not simply ‘more Pleasure’.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 49

Circuit of Hills’, which maintains a view and a regard of that ‘wonderfully

astonish[ing]’, ‘spacious Plain’ where this irregular garden is located. It has
nothing to do with some imitated wilderness in a garden, mountain scenes
in their raw naturalness, vastness and inhumanity are indispensable elements
of the whole experience of this dreamt journey. Moreover, the movement is
highly emphatic in this description. We are moving through different types of
mountain prospects until we reach and ‘discover’ the place of beauty which is
also ‘spacious’ in itself. The Paradise garden with its beaming colours, vivid-
ness, wonderful profusion and fecundity is very like the examples of beauty
Addison takes as the third type of the pleasures of the imagination in The
Spectator No. 412. (III, 542–4)24 Greatness and novelty – the other two types
of the pleasures of the imagination – belong mostly but not exclusively to
the mountain scenes: hills with ‘broken Rocks and Precipices’ offer great
prospect, the ‘great Variety of Winter Scenes’ are novel. Thus the course of
experience starts off the great (sublime) mountain landscapes through the
amazingly varied novel scenes to the brightness, profusion and exuberance of
a spacious plain, the beautiful garden-like landscape of meadows and streams.
The movement of the perspective is not accidental, it suggests that Nature
as a whole can be expressed only through all of these three aspects of natu-
ral views, that is, through all the “aesthetic” qualities which permanently
strengthen each other, and which are perceived in course of time by a dream-
ing spectator-walker. This encounter with the totality in nature needs not
the regard of a painter, but that of a wanderer, and not an ordinary state of
mind, but that of a dreamer. (As in the case of Shaftesbury’s sylvan and desert
scenes, here ‘Paradise’ may also refer to an ancient or genuine state of nature,
so this journey too is happening in both space and time.)
However, despite the conspicuous parallels between these two earlier texts
and Hutcheson’s passage of the Inquiry, it is telling that the systematic philo-
sophical treatise discusses neither the intrinsic values of natural scenes, nor
the inevitability of movement (walking, wandering, etc.), nor that of a special
state of mind. In his Inquiry, Hutcheson tries to appropriate the new landscape
experience in the form of imitated ‘Wildnesses’ of a ‘large and spacious’ scene
within the framework of man-made garden design. His domesticating efforts
24  Addison speaks about the beauty perceived in another member of the same species
(connecting this to the erotic attraction and eventually to the propagation of the
species), which beauty ‘work[s] in the Imagination with . . . Warmth and Violence’,
and the beauty of colours in which ‘the Eye takes most Delight’. While he just
fleetingly – as it were, obligatorily – mentions here the beauty in ‘the Symmetry and
Proportion of Parts’, and in ‘the Arrangement and Disposition of Bodies’.
50 Endre Szécsényi

may indirectly signify the new, uncommon energy arisen in the soul of a walker
on the series of views of (rude, untouched) nature. Here, as in his mountain
landscape dream of The Tatler essay, Addison too finds ‘a Paradise amidst the
Wildness’ which, at first sight, can remind us of Hutcheson’s description of the
blended beauty of garden, but it is a natural or “original” garden, a Paradise,
not the result of human design and cultivation, and actually it shows a differ-
ent approach to the relationship of garden and landscape. While Addison
considers the garden-like form as the fulfilment of his mountain experience
lived intensively in his dream – in the same way as beauty ‘gives a Finishing
to any thing that is Great or Uncommon’ (III, 542) –, Hutcheson uses the
element of wilderness only as an effective tool for ‘more’ (not even higher)
pleasure offered by man-made gardens. This ‘more Pleasure’ is not identical
with any kind of astonishment, Hutcheson’s spectators of the garden seem to
preserve their ordinary state of mind before and during the experience.
Finally, the transcendental overtone is completely missing from Hutcheson’s
passage on the beauty of garden, while Shaftesbury associates his sylvan scene
with the past of Druids and the encounter of the mysterious Being other-
wise not accessible, and Addison immediately populates (and allegorizes) his
‘happy Region’ of ‘spacious Plain’ with ‘the Goddess of Liberty’.25 In sum, the
elements of the intrinsic value of nature in her genuine state, the movement
of the beholder, the special state of mind and the hints of transcendence
(which is expressed neither in the visible order or design of the Creation,
nor in a mystical union with the divine) are constitutive for the emergence of
modern landscape.

2.  Steps outside

Before I proceed, I want to make it clear that by landscape I mean some natural
view or scene (or, more exactly, a series of views or scenes) and not a piece of
landscape painting. I agree with Lang who claims, concerning the fashion of
landscape gardens from the eighteenth century onwards, that nobody before
Horace Walpole ‘mentions Claude in connection with gardening. . . . There are

25  The Tatler, II, 398. – In the description of ‘Greatness’ (natural sublime) of The Spectator
No. 412, Addison will already write that ‘a spacious Horison is an Image of Liberty’
(III, 541), which may retrospectively refer to the fact that this Paradise garden is
closer to the sublime nature than to a designed garden, and may also mark the change
of the usage of emblems in the explanations of natural experiences.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 51

several more objections to the theory of an influence of Claude and Gaspard’

on the design of landscape gardens at least until the middle of eighteenth
century.26 By the same token, I think that the invention of the “aesthetic” or
“proto-aesthetic” experience of landscape in the seventeenth and early eight-
eenth centuries was also independent of the canvasses of Lorrain, Poussin,
Dughet or Salvator Rosa. It is quite telling that his much-discussed essay of
The Spectator No. 414, Addison speaks about natural prospects, then artificial
‘Landskips’, finally gardens (in this linear order) in the context of the compari-
son and interaction between nature and art. The second point could have given
a perfect occasion to him to discuss landscape painting, instead, he tells us
about ‘the prettiest Landskip [he] ever saw’ which was the projected image of
a camera obscura (probably seen in Greenwich Park, according to the editor,
Donald F. Bond). Camera obscura was an intriguing technical and scientific
experiment, and also a well-known metaphor of mind in philosophical texts
of the time; to Addison, however, here it offers an exceptional experience of
a living and moving (!) picture of the natural prospect of a ‘navigable River’
and ‘a Park’ on the wall of that dark room. Beside the ‘Novelty of such a
sight’ which is naturally pleasant to the imagination, ‘the chief Reason [of
its Pleasantness] is its near Resemblance to Nature, as it does not only, like
other Pictures, give the Colour and Figure, but the Motion of the Things
it represents.’ (III, 550–1) Neither in this essay nor in the other pieces of
the Imagination series Addison has a single word about landscape painting.27
26  Lang, ‘The Genesis of the English Landscape Garden’, 6.
27  When Addison analyses the effects of literary description, earlier, in 1697, in his
‘Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’, cf. Richard Hurd (ed.), The Works of Right Honourable Joseph
Addison (London, 1954; 4 vols), I, 154–61, 158; or later in The Spectator No. 416, he
writes: ‘Words, when well chosen, have so great a Force in them, that a Description
often gives us more lively Ideas than the Sight of things themselves. The Reader finds
a Scene drawn in stronger Colours, and painted more to the Life in his Imagination,
by the help of Words, than by an actual Survey of the Scene which they describe. In
this Case the Poet seems to get the better of Nature; he takes, indeed, the Landskip
after her, but gives it more vigorous touches, heightens its Beauty, and so enlivens the
whole Piece, that the Images, which flow from the Objects themselves, appear weak
and faint, in Comparison of those that come from the Expression.’ (III, 560–1) We
might apply it to landscape painting (by substituting words with well-chosen colours,
touches, or skilful figuration), but probably Addison would disagree. Even if he uses
extensively the metaphors of painting in this literary context, or in the explanation
of the operation of imagination in general. In No. 412, he writes: ‘the different
Colours of a Picture, when they are well disposed, set off one another, and receive
an additional Beauty from the Advantage of their Situation’ (III, 544) – but this is
a general remark about the effects of the dexterous disposition of colours which
concerns neither the particular subject of the picture, nor the comparison between
52 Endre Szécsényi

Elsewhere, generally speaking, rather classical literary genres (georgic and

pastoral) make an impact on him when he wants to formulate the landscape
experience.28
In this section, through examples taken from two seventeenth-century
authors, I am going to show that the invention of modern landscape was
possible only by reducing the “allegorization”29 of the garden and overturning
the vertical structure that derived from the relatively “static” contemplation of
the highest position provided mostly by Christian-Neo-Platonic discourse. In
the evolution of landscape as an “aesthetic” experience it was a crucial point
when the element of vertical elevation was replaced with some kind of hori-
zontal comprehension or embrace of the natural prospect.30
My first example of the modern stepping out into nature, is taken from
an influential and still densely allegorical novel, El Criticón written by Baltasar
Gracián in the middle of the seventeenth century. It is a pilgrimage. The
second chapter of its first book tells the story of Andrenio who had been
slumbering in a cavern of a mountain in the island of Saint Helena, then he
was freed and awakened by an enormous earthquake. Andrenio set his eyes

the presence of the object and its representation in art.

28  Before the Spectator essays, we can see that approach in his ‘Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’
or in Dialogues upon Ancient Medals (the beginning of Dialogue III). Cf. Mavis Batey,
Oxford Gardens. The University’s Influence on Garden History (Amersham, 1982), 95–8. – In
The Tatler No. 218, he is very explicit: ‘Those who are conversant in the Writings of
polite Authors, receive an additional Entertainment from the Country, as it revives in
their Memories those charming Descriptions with which such Authors do frequently
abound.’ The Tatler, III, 140. It seems that literary memories (and schemes) are not
the constitutive elements of the natural experience, only offer ‘additional’ pleasures.
In the Dialogues, Addison reflects also on the exaggerations of poetical imagination:
‘It is Cicero’s observation on the plane-tree that makes so flourishing a figure in one
of Plato’s dialogues, that it did not draw its nourishment from the fountain that ran
by it and watered its roots, but from the richness of the style that describes it.’ The
Works of Joseph Addison, ed. George Washington Greene (Philadelphia, 1867; 6 vols)
II, 113.
29  Of course, lessening the significance of allegories in gardens and landscape gardens
or in the descriptions of natural prospect is a very long and complicated process,
cf. Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression. Meaning in English Art of  the Eighteenth
Century (London, 1973), 19–47; John Dixon Hunt, ‘Emblem and Expression in the
Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden’ in idem, Gardens and the Picturesque. Studies
in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA, London, 1992), 75–102. –
Addison puts it clear: allegories, metaphors and allusions are indispensable tools for
a writer to affect the readers’ imagination. (III, 578)
30  About this shift, Tuveson wrote in detail in his seminal book: Ernest Lee Tuveson,
The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1960), 56–71.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 53

on the world outside of the cave for the first time in his life. His position
of seeing is not a view from a summit or a tower top. (He did not climb a
mountain, on the contrary, his mountain had had to be collapsed before he
could see.) In this chapter, Andrenio, as an allegorical figure of mundo natural
is talking to Critilo, the allegorical figure of mundo civil about his first impres-
sions on the newly discovered natural world. Albeit the whole initial situation
is conceived and fully allegorical, Andrenio’s reactions are still noteworthy.31
Having stepped out into the world from his cave, he is astonished and shocked
by the view of the ‘grand Theatre of Heaven and Earth’:

I would here express, but it is impossible, the intense violence of my

Affections, the extravagant Raptures of my Soul . . . I beheld . . . the
Sea, the Land, the Heaven, and each severally, and altogether, and in the
view of each I transported my self without thoughts of ever ending,
admiring, enjoying, and contemplating a fruition which could never
satiate me.32

In this description some elements are especially emphatic, namely the vision
of the objects together as a whole and separately in themselves, the strong and
rich emotional effects which stemmed directly from the natural scenes (not as
the results of some later or additional spiritual reflection), the theatrical nature
of this prospect (which may refer to both the inevitable position of a special
spectatorship and to the performative character of the view), and the profu-
sion and the inexhaustibility of the sensuous experience. Critilo’s reflection on
it is also intriguing:

O! How much I envy thee . . . this unknown happiness of thine, the only
priviledge of the first Man, and you, the Faculty of seeing all at once,
and that with Observation, the Greatness, Beauty, Harmony, Stability,

31  Especially if we consider a very similar example in Boyle’s Usefulness of Natural

Philosophy of 1671 (which is far from being an allegorical fiction), in which Boyle
speaks about the case of a maid who was blind in the first eighteen years of her life:
the girl’s vehement and emotionally strong reactions on the visible world are very like
Andrenio’s. Cf. The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (London, 1772; 6 vols), II, 6.
32  Baltasar Gracián, The Critick, Written originally in Spanish by Lorenzo Gracian One of the
Best Wits in Spain, trans. Paul Rycaut (London, 1681), 15. In French: L’Homme detrompé,
ou Le Criticon de Baltasar Gracián, Traduit de l’Espagnol en Française, trans. Guillaume de
Maunory (Paris, 1696), 18. – Only the first book of the three-volume El Criticón was
available in English and French translations.
54 Endre Szécsényi

and Variety of this created Fabrick. . . . For we enter into the World with
the Eyes of our Understanding shut, and when we open them unto
Knowledge the Custom of seeing hath rendred the greatest Wonders,
neither strange, nor admired at the Judgments disclosure. Therefore the
wise Worthies have repaired much of this defect by reflections, looking
back again as it were to a new Birth, making every thing, by a search and
examination into its Nature, a new subject of astonishment; admiring,
and criticizing on their Perfections. Like those, who walk in a delicious
Garden, diverted solely with their own Thoughts, not observing at first
the artificial adornments, and variety of Flowers; yet afterwards return
back to view each Plant, and Flower with great Curiosity: So we enter
into this Garden of the Universe walking from our Birth, until our
Death, without the least glance on the Beauty, and Perfection of it:
unless some wiser Heads chance to turn back, and renew their Pleasure
by a Review, and Contemplation.33

In and by his first vehement sensory impressions of the natural world,

Andrenio possesses the theologically and morally distinguished regard of the
first man, who is capable of seeing everything at once, and also separately, and
of fully and deeply enjoying the order of the cosmos – not in the framework
of the ancient Greek theoria tou kosmou,34 but in the “proto-aesthetic” quali-
ties of ‘Greatness, Beauty, Harmony, Stability, and Variety’, in which we can
see perhaps the best prefiguration of Addison’s above-mentioned “aesthetic”
triad of ‘Greatness’ (i.e. sublime), ‘Beauty’ and ‘Novelty’. Since harmony is the
beauty of sounds, and stability and variety together can constitute the dynamic
structure of novelty.35
In this discourse, albeit it is still evidently allegorical, the vertical structure
of ascent was replaced by a horizontal one: by ‘a search and examination into’
the nature of things to discover wonders in them. Moreover, the mode of this

33 Gracián, The Critick, 16; idem, L’Homme detrompé, 18–19.

34  According to Ritter, the Christian–Neo-Platonic vocabulary of the ascent of the
soul from the body to the Soul relies on this earlier Greek philosophical tradition
which dealt with nature (physis) for its own sake, that is, tried to grasp the Whole in
it, to participate in the divine in it, without any practical interests of glory or profit.
Cf. Joachim Ritter, ‘Landschaft: Zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen
Gesellschaft’ in idem, Subjektivität. Sechs Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 141–63,
143–4.
35  As I argued elsewhere, cf. Endre Szécsényi, ‘The Regard of the First Man: On Joseph
Addison’s Aesthetic Categories’, History of European Ideas 43 (2017), 582–97, 595.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 55

experience of nature, at least the reformed or regained way of it, is figured in

the form of a walk in ‘this Garden of the Universe’. To be sure, both ‘walk-
ing’ and ‘garden’ are metaphors here, still the description may suggest that
these terrestrial, sensuous, ordinary scenes are ever-amazing and enjoyable,
they constitute eminent occasions for the walking beholder to experience the
presence of the divine. To reach this prelapsarian state of mind other ones
need enormous efforts of reflection by the aids of the wisest, but it is not
impossible. Nevertheless, Andrenio – through his regard of ‘the first Man’36
– discovers nature by her “proto-aesthetic” qualities in a horizontal structure
where the beholder can and must move to gather the series of views and scenes.
Andrenio’s path is different from a purgatorial ascent, it is rather a winding
walk among the terrestrial and sensuous things during which he is capable of
‘making every thing . . . a new subject of astonishment’. Of course, walking
may contain several moments when one stops and stands to “contemplate”
the view, nonetheless walking (expatiating, travelling, etc.) in itself provides a
new model in which nature as landscape could gradually emerge.
The movement of the beholder as a major feature of the experience offers
a new mode of perception in which the walking or wandering beholder can
acquire or touch the transcendence in and not beyond the view. My next example
is taken from John Dennis’s reports on his Alpine journey as a part of his
Grand Tour, which was published in 1693.37 In his oft-cited letter dated 21
October, 1688, Dennis writes:
36  This seems an “innocent” state of mind, and this innocence may be echoed in
Addison’s famous phrase of ‘innocent Pleasures’ in his Imagination series (No. 411).
At the same time, as Picciotto writes, during the seventeenth century, innocence
begins meaning ‘objectivity’ in the discourse of the new experimental sciences, ‘the
physical world itself could become an object of originary desire. As instruments of
innocent perception, these observers seek to restore their readers to the world in
which they already live.’ Moreover, ‘Addison and Steele’s persona [in The Spectator]
was identified with an ideal spectatorial body, modelled on the artificial organs of the
microscope and telescope: a walking instrument of truth’. Joanna Picciotto, Labors
of  Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA, London, 2010), 510 and 567.
At the same time, the earlier interpretation of innocence also plays an important
role in Addison’s “aesthetic” theory, for example, in The Spectator No. 477, one of
the most famous essay of his aesthetics of garden, Addison explicitly claims that
‘the most innocent Delights in Human Life’ offered by gardens can be traced back
to the pleasures of the Paradise, ‘the Habitation of our First Parents before the Fall.’
(IV, 192)
37  It is only very probable that Addison read the French or English translation of
Gracián’s novel – as he remarks: ‘there are very few celebrated Books, either in the
Learned or the Modern Tongues, which I am not acquinted with’. (I, 2.) –, but it is
quite sure that he knew Dennis’s letters, as we can see, for example, in the phrases
56 Endre Szécsényi

We entered into Savoy in the Morning, and past over Mount

Aiguebellette. The ascent was the more easie, because it wound about
the Mountain. But as soon as we had concque’d one half of it, the
unusual heighth in which we found our selves, the impeding Rock that
hung over us, the dreadful Depth of the Precipice, and the Torrent
that roar’d at the bottom, gave us such a view as was altogether new
and amazing. Its craggy Cliffs, which we half discover’d, thro the misty
gloom of the Clouds that surrounded them, sometimes gave us a horrid
Prospect. And sometimes its face appear’d Smooth and Beautiful as the
most even and fruitful Vallies. So different from themselves were the
different parts of it: In the very same place Nature was seen Severe
and Wanton. In the mean time we walk’d upon the very brink, in a lit-
eral sense, of Destruction. . . . The sense of all this produc’d different
motions in me, viz. a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same
time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled.38

The traveller’s aim was to pass through the mountain not to climb it for the
top view (or for its own sake39); here the route itself at an ‘unusual heighth’
he used in the report on the round-trip around Geneva Lake in his Remarks on Several
Parts of Italy, &c in the Years of 1701, 1702, 1703 (1705; London, 1767), 258–61. See
also Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge, 2015),
127. – Richard Steele, in The Spectator No. 364, appreciates the useful ends of a Grand
Tour as a part of education, and, in a later omitted passage, he warmly recommends
Addison’s Remarks on Italy (cf. III, 369n) as the best guidebook, but he mentions
neither the exceptional experience of  Alpine mountains or countryside landscapes
near Rome, nor the pieces of Roman landscape painting amongst the benefits of a
Continental tour. In his classical book, Hussey claims: ‘The awakening in England
to an appreciation of landscape was a direct result of the Grand Tour . . . Not only
did the passage of the Alps and the journey through Italy compel some attention
being given to scenery, but in Italy the traveller encountered landscape painting.’ Both
such landscape poets as James Thomson and John Dyer, and the landowners who
improved their grounds ‘adopted, as a model of correct composition, the Claudian
landscape.’ Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque. Studies in a Point of  View (London and
New York, 1927), 12. But we cannot find the tokens of this picturesque fashion in
The Spectator essays, see also footnote 27.
38  John Dennis, Miscellanies Verse and Prose (London, 1693), 133–4.
39 In the scholarship, there is a deeply rooted tradition which considers Francesco
Petrarca’s ‘for its own sake’ climbing of Mont Ventoux near Avignon as a corner
stone in the history of landscape or landscape painting, and also in that of modern
aesthetics. I have no space here to give an account of the different interpretations
of this famous expedition and its possible connections to the present topic. For
Petrarca and Mont Ventoux, see, for example, Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art
(London, 1949), 6–12; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995), 419–21;
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 57

on the mountain is the point; the ascent was ‘more easie’, while the emotion-
ally demanding part of the journey consisted of the walk ‘upon the very
brink . . . of Destruction’. In addition, this height does not provide an open
view, a visually comprehensible vastness of the horizon, not even a portion
of sky (altogether it was very far from the “picturesque”). The extraordinary
effects of the passage, the famous ‘delightful Horrour’ and ‘terrible Joy’ come
from the very blocking of the view, the hindrance of the free prospect. The
‘misty gloom of the Clouds’ around the close opposite mountain, and also the
‘impeding Rock’ above and the only audible roaring torrent below constitute
a very different position for the beholder. He is not elevated but swallowed by
the experience which is unfolding before his eyes and in his ears, and is chang-
ing from the ‘horrid Prospect’ to the ‘Smooth and Beautiful’, valley-like scene.
The ever-changing views and sounds amount to the most important part of
the experience: it is ‘altogether new and amazing’. It has nothing to do with a
fixed point of view.
About a hundred and thirty years earlier, in the middle of the sixteenth
century, when he returned home from Italy, Pieter Bruegel the Elder took
approximately the same trip across the Alps, during which he drew a series of
Alpine landscapes, necessarily always from a fixed point of view (this series is
considered as a milestone in the history of European landscape painting40). In
most of these drawings, the rude rocks and gloomy cliffs appear as parts of a
dark or threatening background, and some vast and open prospect of a valley
(sometimes with a river, or a distant town, or with some human or animal
figures, groves, bushes, etc.) stands in the centre of the composition. Bruegel
stopped and began to draw where the view opened to some peaceful, familiar
and human prospect amongst the wilderness. Dennis’s description shows and
appreciates a completely different aspect of this passage, it reports an evolv-
ing experience in which the series of mostly bare, inhuman and closed scenes
produces shocking and exceptionally astonishing but enjoyable impressions

Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe,

trans. E. C. Otté (London, 1871; 5 vols), II, 419; Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization
of the Renaissance Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (Vienna, New York, n.d.), 153–4;
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of  the
Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959; Seattle and London, 1997), 49–50; Ritter, ‘Landschaft’,
141–50; Ruth Groh – Dieter Groh, ‘Petrarca und der Mont Ventoux’, Merkur 46
(1992), 290–307; László Kisbali, ‘A modern esztétika születése és a hegymászás
szelleme [The Birth of Modern Aesthetics and the Spirit of Mountaineering]’,
BUKSZ [Budapest Review of Books] 21 (2009), 136–7.
40  See, e.g., Ludwig Münz, Bruegel: The Drawings (London, 1961).
58 Endre Szécsényi

on the traveller. And the continuous changing of perspectives which comes

from the movement of the beholder seem to play an eminent part in trans-
forming the merely horrid views into delightful ones.
In Dennis’s letter, the traveller whose mountain experience unfolded imme-
diately in time was swallowed by the spatial dimensions and was overwhelmed
by the stimuli of the sensuous: the obscure visible and the extreme audible.
Obscurity, moreover, has a potential – not yet fully exploited here by Dennis,
but, as we have seen, acknowledged by Shaftesbury in his sylvan scene – to
activate, to warm, to inspire the imagination, and, with this, to maintain move-
ment and dynamism in mind and, so to speak, to avoid tranquillity. It seems
that the soul needs enrichment from the terrestrial instead of getting rid of its
impulses and stimuli for some more spiritual elevation or purgation.
Three days later, having mentioned the traditional contrast – a common-
place in the growing literature of Grand Tour – between the garden of Italy
and the crude, uncultivated and threatening mountains of the Alps, Dennis
claims that these mountains were not parts of the original Creation, so they
cannot be explained within the framework of some providential plan. The
mountain experience of the traveller is beyond the ‘delight that is consistent
with Reason, a delight that creates or improves Meditation.’ This signifies the
inapplicability of some traditional intellectual schemes to grasp and under-
stand that experience: neither the traditional Neo-Platonic–Christian ascent
from the sensuous to the meditative-spiritual, nor the Protestant tradition of
empiricist meditation cultivated by Joseph Hall, Robert Boyle and other seven-
teenth- and early eighteenth-century scientists and divines41 provide the right
approach here.

…transporting Pleasures follow’d the sight of the Alpes, and what unu-
sual transports think you were those, that were mingled with horrours,
and sometimes almost with despair? But if these Mountains were not
a Creation, but form’d by universal Destruction, when the Arch with
a mighty flaw dissolv’d and fell into the vast Abyss . . . then are these
Ruines of the old World the greatest wonders of the New. For they are
not only vast, but horrid, hideous, ghastly Ruins. . . . [Later when we]
descend[ed] thro the very Bowels as it were of the Mountain, for we
seem’d to be enclos’d on all sides: What an astonishing Prospect was
there? Ruins upon Ruins in monstrous Heaps, and Heaven and Earth
41  Cf. Courtney Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early
Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville and London, 2016), 1–68.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 59

confounded. The uncouth Rocks that were above us, Rocks that were
void of all form, but what they had receiv’d from Ruine; the frightful
view of the Precipices, and the foaming Waters that threw themselves
headlong down them, made all such a Consort up for the Eye, as that
sort of Musick does for the Ear, in which Horrour can be joyn’d with
Harmony.42

Inspired by Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681, 1684), Dennis
offers an explanation of the existence of this ‘astonishing Prospect’: the Alps
are the results of a gigantic destruction (produced by the biblical Floods),
a cataclysm which left behind an enormous ruin (of the original symmetri-
cal Paradise-garden).43 Thus the transcendental cause of the current view is a
series of “events” in historic time, and not an eternal divine “production”. The
wandering beholder is literally swallowed in the ‘Bowels . . . of the Mountain’,
and is shocked by uncommon and horrid prospects and sounds. We cannot
be farther from an open summit-view associated with elevation and spiritual
consummation.
Yet the transcendence is directly given: ‘Ruins upon Ruins in monstrous
Heaps, and Heaven and Earth confounded’. The divine in nature is not a
rationally grasped order, nor even a comprehensible Whole in an open hori-
zon, but it is an evolving experience in which we are entangled with sensuous
vastness, we are experiencing the depth (not height) where the sensuous and
the spiritual, earth and heaven are inseparably bound together. It is the gradu-
ally unfolding perception of an immense irregularity (which was itself the
result of “historical” events: the Fall of man and the Floods), a chaos that can
only be born through transporting feelings.44 Beyond the sphere of pastoral
42  Dennis, Miscellanies Verse and Prose, 138–9.
43  From Gilbert Burnet’s Travels (1687) through James Thomson’s Liberty to Edward
Young’s Night Thoughts, there are several works containing parts inspired by the idea
of the cosmic ruin of Sacred Theory. Cf. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory,
225 ff. – At the same time, there were critics also, as, for example, Richard Bentley
who claimed that originally Eden must have been ‘a land of Hills and Valleys with an
infinite Variety of Scenes and Prospects’ in one of his Boyle lectures. Cf. Martin C.
Battestin, The Providence of Wit. Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and Arts (Oxford,
1974), 37.
44  The whole description has a Longinian overtone (Dennis was one of the first critics
who exploited Peri Hypsous in his literary criticism), this distinction between ‘delight’
and ‘transporting Pleasures’ may originate in the Greek text, especially, but not
exclusively, in its section xxxv. As also, the passages of Burnet’s Sacred Theory about
the quality later called ‘natural sublime’ can be interpreted as an ‘extended paraphrase’
of section xxxv. Cf. Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, 86–8.
60 Endre Szécsényi

harmony, beyond the sphere of meditative elevation, Dennis offers a fresh

look, a new regard: let us consider these ‘monstrous Heaps’ of ‘Heaven and
Earth confounded’. This regard transforms these uncommon, inhuman, irreg-
ular natural scenes into ‘the greatest wonders’ of our world: an astonishing
and moving mountain landscape. It seems to me that the movement of the
beholder makes these ‘transporting Pleasures’ possible, makes them intensively
‘transporting’. Passing through this extraordinary space makes the experience
deeply lived and felt, makes this “moving” in the emotional sense. Earlier the
sensual or natural offered the occasion of raising lofty thoughts and consid-
erations about the spiritual, in Dennis’s case the theological or cosmological
perspective of the Creation as a gigantic ruin prepares the mind of the walker
to see, to hear, to taste, to feel the series of natural scenes as enjoyable land-
scape of divine Nature.
This regard can be considered – in Hepburn’s words – a ‘metaphysi-
cal thought-component [which] is externally related to [the] scene’; but there
is another version of the exercise of ‘metaphysical imagination’ when ‘the
metaphysical imaginative schema is better described as internal to the apprecia-
tive experience itself, since it is concerned, perhaps, with the relation between
subject and object’.45 This will be the case with Addison when he speaks about
the landscape experience in the context of polite imagination, and when he
connects that primarily to the ‘Great’46 and the ‘Novel’ qualities of natural
scenes. Being epistemologically mostly Lockean, Addison’s version of the
imagination is not a purely creative faculty which would be capable of fully
determining the form of our experience from within,47 yet his imagination or

45  Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination’, Environmental

Values 5 (1996), 191–204, 197.
46  Tuveson claims that the ‘category of the “great” . . . is a means of implementing
the ideal of the horizontal comprehension of nature.’ And here Tuveson refers us
to the last essay of The Spectator written by Henry Grove, in which the universe is
described as an ‘immense theatre’, within which man is a spectator, but his ‘spiritual
ascent consists in increased capacity to grasp the grandeur of the scene and to
understand the “hidden springs of Nature’s operation.”’ ‘Thus comprehension of
wider and wider circles of knowledge, rather than spiritual ascent in the strict sense
of the phrase, is the vision of the heavenly life;’ and the natural sublime offers this
experience ‘here on earth.’ Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace, 105–6.
47  According to Myers, Addison, following Locke, thinks that though ‘the initial
reception of the [retinal] image is passive’, ‘we learn from experience to interpret
[the two-dimensional visual idea] as having depth’, that is, by means of ‘Judgement’
and ‘an habitual custom’ (Locke’s words) we can perceive convex body; so this
‘notion that what we perceive is partly the result of our judgements about optical
data allowed Addison to present the imagination as an active and creative process,
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 61

fancy – which is closely connected to dreaming activity – must be much more

than a delicate instrument, a kind of fine filter, through which we can, so to
speak, mechanically discover new aspects and shades of the natural world
during our walks.48

3.  Addison, walking, aesthetic experience

Addison liked walking from his years at Magdalen College onwards49 and
also writing about interesting walks during which he perceived and enjoyed
significant natural experiences usually associated with some other-worldly
connotations. For example, in the pastoral essay of The Tatler No. 218, he tells
about a Spring-time walk into the countryside in order to ‘divert [himself]
among the Fields and Meadows, while the Green was new, and the Flowers
in their Bloom’; the ‘unspeakable Pleasure’ offered by the fields and meadows
during walking accompanies with the reflection on ‘the Bounty of Providence,
which has made the most pleasing and most beautiful Objects the most

filling the gap between sensation and perception’. Katherine Myers, ‘Ways of Seeing:
Joseph Addison, Enchantment and the Early Landscape Garden’, Garden History 41
(2013), 3–20, 7–8. I do not have space here to elaborate this topic, but I think that
it is much more complicated, let it suffice to mention only the famous Lockean
distinction between judgement and fancy or wit, which was exploited by Addison
himself in his Spectator essays on wit; according to this, judgement is the means of
intellect, while imagination is sharply differentiated from understanding in Addison’s
Imagination series.
48  Walking or the walkable landscape is not the only model to Addison for describing
“aesthetic” experience of nature, he also applies, for example, the old metaphor of
theatre (as we have seen in Grove’s essay of The Spectator, No. 635 or in El Criticón):
‘[T]he whole Universe is a kind of Theatre filled with Objects that either raise in us
Pleasure, Amusement or Admiration.’ (III, 453) At the same time, the “performative”
character is essential in this case, too.
49  Cf. Batey, Oxford Gardens, 91–103.; idem, ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination: Joseph
Addison’s Influence on Early Landscape Gardens’, Garden History 33 (2005), 189–
209. – Similarly, in his inaugural lecture delivered before the community of Glasgow
University, Hutcheson calls forth his fond memories of his student’s years, amongst
them he stresses the particular site of their ‘gentle, friendly convers[ation]’: ‘we
walked in the gardens of the university or in the lovely countryside around the city,
which the Glotta [i.e. the River Clyde] washes with its gentle stream. As I recalled
all these things, my departure for Scotland seemed happy and cheerful and full of
joy.’ Francis Hutcheson, ‘On the Natural Sociability of Mankind’ in idem, Logic,
Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind, eds. James Moore and Michael
Silverthorne (Indianapolis, 2006), 189–216, 192.
62 Endre Szécsényi

ordinary and most common’.50 In The Spectator No. 110, he reports on ‘a long
Walk of aged Elms’ to ‘the Ruins of an old Abby’ when already the cawing
of ‘the Rooks and Crows that rest upon the Tops’ of the rocks is consid-
ered as ‘a kind of natural Prayer to that Being who supplies the Wants of his
whole Creation’ (I, 453). In respect of landscape and walking or touring, some
passages of his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, the report of his Grand Tour
of 1699, can be connected to that mountain-feeling tradition whose major
earlier proponent was Dennis.51
In the history of the garden and especially the landscape garden, Addison’s
essay of The Spectator No. 477 has had an eminent importance in which a new
taste in gardening was influentially formulated. The same essay also proves
that the garden was conceived from the perspective of walkable natural land-
scape: even the ‘Humorist in Gardening’, Addison himself, is ‘pleased when
[he is] walking in a Labyrinth of [his] own rising, not to know whether the next
Tree [he will] meet with is an Apple or an Oak, an Elm or a Pear-tree.’ (IV, 189
– my emphasis, E. Sz.) Despite the evident signs of reconciliation or synthesis
between the conceptions of garden and landscape here and in other essays,
the distinction between the two remains alive and intriguing. In The Spectator
No. 417, for example, he gives a spectacular comparison between different
writing styles and the qualities of his new “aesthetic” triad: ‘Iliad is like travel-
ling through a Country uninhabited, where the Fancy is entertained with a
thousand Savage Prospects of vast Desarts, wide uncultivated Marshes, huge
Forests, mis-shapen Rocks and Precipices.’ Thus the sublime (or great) natu-
ral landscape expresses best the heroic style of Homer, while ‘Aeneid is like a
well-ordered Garden, where it is impossible to find out any Part unadorned, or
cast our Eyes upon a single Spot, that does not produce some beautiful Plant
or Flower.’ The architectural garden, the man-made artificial nature represents
the beautifying manner of Virgil. Finally, ‘when we are in the Metamorphosis,
we are walking on enchanted Ground, and nothing but Scenes of Magick
lying round us.’ (III, 564) Homer’s sublime scenes and Ovid’s enchanted pros-
pects belong to some natural landscape, while Virgil’s beautiful plots to the
designed garden. What is telling is that we are – of course, metaphorically, still
– ‘travelling through’ the Iliad’s landscape, and are ‘walking’ on the marvellous
ground of the Metamorphosis – the characterization of Virgil’s garden, however,
is lacking the active verb expressing some passing-through of the beholder.52
50  The Tatler, III, 140 and 143.
51  Cf. footnote 37.
52  There are further similar examples in The Spectator, for example, in No. 160, Addison
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 63

Besides the acknowledgement of the inevitability of the movement in the

cases of the sublime and the uncommon, this distinction between walkable
landscapes and contemplative and/or pleasure garden can indirectly support
my presupposition that the former somewhat preceded and established the
new ideas concerning gardening, and this natural landscape associated with
walking, expatiating, discovery, surprise, novelty, the uncustomary and the like
– or in the Imagination series, with ‘Great’ and ‘Uncommon’ – meant the
“engine” of the shift or transformation from the purely geometric, architec-
tural and contemplative to the early eighteenth-century aesthetic which centres
a new, live and dynamic relationship between the beholder and her object. At
the same time, on a large scale, Addison as Neo-Classical critic, scholar and
poet inclined towards preferring Virgil’s style.
It is not without precedent in the scholarship, that the conception of garden
and landscape is considered as a central issue or model in Addison’s aesthetics
in general. Michael G. Ketcham devotes a section entitled ‘Esthetic Perception
and the Metaphor of the Garden’ to this topic in chapter iii (‘The Psychology
of Time’) of his monograph. According to him, ‘The Spectator in effect drama-
tizes Locke’s account of duration.’ It can be illustrated also ‘in the stream of
impressions attributed to Mr. Spectator. . . . The Spectator’s scenes allude to our
succession of perceptions as one essay follows the next in a kinematographic
image of social life, but they can be lifted out of time, isolated, and moved
into a form of timelessness.’ 53 This dynamism (or tension) characterizes the
Spectator project in general. ‘Both the continuity and the intensity of time are
elaborated in Addison’s imaginary of the garden’, and garden imaginary as a
manifestation of this effort. ‘The esthetic psychology of time, however, is
characterized less by consciousness of succession than by a consciousness
speaks about two classes of poetical geniuses, in cases of Virgil or Milton ‘a rich Soil
in a happy Climate’ is ‘laid out in Walks and Parterres, and cut into Shape and Beauty
by the Skill of the Gardener’, while Homer’s or Shakespeare’s poetry ‘produces a
whole Wilderness of noble Plants rising in a thousand beautiful Landskips without
any certain Order or Regularity’ (II, 129). Or in No. 476, Addison characterizes two
types of writing, the one, the ‘Methodical Discourse’ is associated with order, design,
and ‘regular Plantation’, while the other, the essay-writing, with wildness, irregularity,
and ‘Wood’: ‘You may ramble in the one a whole Day together, and every Moment
discover something or other that is new to you, but when you have done you will have
but a confused imperfect Notion of the Place’. (IV, 186) – Tranquil contemplation of
the whole prevails in the first, rambling and discovering new in the second, which, at
the same time, because of its ‘Irregularity and want of Method’, needs more genius
and knowledge for the author’s part.
53  Michael G. Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the Spectator
Papers (Athens, GA, 1985), 82–3.
64 Endre Szécsényi

of the moment that Addison typically represents through the image of the
garden.’ The garden is used as a metaphor concerning memory, composition
and style, the pleasures of the wise man, and “aesthetics”. ‘The man in the
garden . . . is no longer the man in contemplative retirement. Instead, he is the
figure of the spectator whom we see in No. 206 [by Steele] – the man who enjoys
a walk on a sunshiny day, and who attends to the movements of his mind.’54
Ketcham acknowledges the distinctive role of movement, at the same time he
dissolves the emerging conception of walkable landscape into that of ‘expan-
sive’ garden. Addison’s garden described in No. 414 ‘is laid out to provide the
visitor with changing perspectives and with a variety of psychological effects
that both stimulate and mirror the movements of the mind. The garden thus
becomes an emblem of time not as continuity but as psychological expansion
of a single moment.’55
In his recent book, Sean Silver sets up an intriguing parallel between
Addison as a collector of medals and as a gardener, saying that these two
practices ‘were in his mind related.’ From these activities, a dualism arises
which ‘makes its way into the aesthetic of the Spectator’: ‘Design and digres-
sion would appear to cross purposes with one another. The one is governed
by Cartesian geometry even as it constructs a Cartesian self; the other relies
on the abstracted logics of bodily movement to govern strange topographies
of time and space.’56 Based on The Spectator No. 447, Silver claims that ‘paths’
and ‘walks’ basically express custom and association, ‘[t]he mind as a whole
develops channels or associative “paths” according to the single calculus of
pleasure’.57 Moreover, it appears that designed gardens and plantations have
a priority to landscape walking, rambling or ‘digression’. ‘[I]t was during the
years that Addison was most thoroughly engaged in the pleasures of planting
that he presented to the public his most formal aesthetic remarks’; his own
garden in Bilton Hall and the ‘walks’ named after him in this Warwickshire
garden, and in Oxford, or in the National Botanical Garden of Ireland (built
by his botanic friend, Thomas Tickell), show the preference of ‘straight lines’
and the ‘triumph of design, the articulation of method’. This traditional
taste appears in his implicit and explicit allusions to the Classics: ‘The most

54  Ibid., 86. – my emphasis, E. Sz.

55  Ibid., 87.
56  Sean Silver, The Mind is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought
(Philadelphia, 2016), 129–30.
57  Ibid., 139.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 65

common way that a landscape can set Addison a pleasant associative task is by
reminding him of Virgil’s Georgics’.58
Both scholars put the conception of a garden into the centre of Addison’s
“aesthetic” thinking, and natural landscape is conceived from the viewpoint
of a garden designer or ‘Humourist in Gardening’. Their interpretations seem
to have a similar structure: ‘succession’ is overcome by ‘intense moment’
(Ketcham), ‘digression’ by design (Silver); that is, eventually, walking and
expatiating amongst (rude) natural scenes are overcome by the standards and
values derived from Addison’s Neo-Classical taste. Ketcham and Silver are
probably right in general, even if the interpretations of Addison’s conception
of landscape garden show a more balanced picture in the reception from the
eighteenth century onwards. Still I argue that Addison was aware of the new
potential in walkable natural landscape which could undoubtedly include or
absorb both the elements of the pastoral and georgic,59 but its core was that
uncustomary and astonishing experience of rude nature which were formu-
lated in Burnet’s, Dennis’s and Lord Shaftesbury’s writings in the framework
of passing-through. The way of the appropriation of this natural experience
might seem difficult for Addison, and not without ambiguities. To take only
one example, the prospect of a ‘desart’ is either one of the eminent views of
“aesthetic” great or sublime (cf. The Spectator Nos. 412 and 417, or the earlier
No. 387), that is, it is regarded as the ‘rude kind of Magnificence’ which causes
‘pleasing Astonishment’ in the spectator (III, 540), or the sample of that bare
and inhuman prospect which remains necessarily outside of the “aesthetic”
or ‘enchanted’ sphere of innocent pleasures (cf. No. 413), it represents that
bareness, formlessness, irregularity and inhumanity which is unbearable for a
Neo-Classicist, as it is expressed in the retrospective view of an ignorant man’s
life (cf. No. 94). At the same time, ‘desart’ appears as a present physical reality
in the former cases, while it is only a traditional metaphor in the latter cases.
The Neo-Classicist tendency, as Ketcham and Silver – and of course others,
like, for example, Youngren, Saccamano, Syba60 – suggest, is becoming domi-

58  Ibid., 144–5 and 147.

59  These two genres were built around the preference of the peace of the countryside to
the turmoil of urban life: the pastoral around the life and world of a shepherd, and
the georgic around the life and world of a husbandman. At the same time, there is a
difference between nature as landscape (which is a modern invention) and nature as
manifested in countryside or associated with rural life; in the latter, nature remains
always familiar, homey, and closely related to human working and industry. Cf. Ritter,
‘Landschaft’, 146–7.
60  Cf. William H. Youngren, ‘Addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics’,
66 Endre Szécsényi

nant already in the Imagination series or in No. 477; applying to our current
topic, some new features of the walkable natural landscape are appropriated
in the framework of designed garden (similarly to Hutcheson’s example on
blended beauty), and by means of stressing the connection between these
features and those of the ‘Great’ and the ‘Novel’ as the sources of the pleas-
ures of the imagination, the new conception of landscaped garden is born.
At the same time, I think, there is an intriguing affinity between walkable
landscape and the transcendence which is significant in the mirror of the
emerging modern aesthetic. This experienced affinity or relationship between
the sensory, physical or spatial and the spiritual and eternal means something
new, something which is neither the heir of the traditional mystical experience,
nor a simple derivation from the contemporary natural philosophical insights
on the divine order of the Creation.
As we have already seen in The Tatler No. 161 above, natural (mountain)
landscape can preserve its own rights: besides the fact that the non-designed
paradise-like garden was the final accomplishment of that dreamed journey,
this prospect did not annihilate or even appropriate the experience or qualities
of the series of prior mountain scenes. This series was experienced through a
travel in a dream. And this dream can refer to that special state of mind which
also differs from some traditional attitudes like mystical elevations or even from
a Shaftesburian Platonic enthusiasm. Briefly, the original sensory impressions
become more intense and more vivid in a dream, the passions more intensively
felt than in the ordinary state of mind, and the soul becomes free from the
mechanical constraints of the body, and deals ‘with numberless Beings of her
own Creation . . . She is herself the Theatre, the Actors, and the Beholder’ (IV,
229) as Addison writes in The Spectator No. 487 on dreams.61 During walking,
the beholder’s moving body in the space – partly emancipating from its inertia
and heaviness – stimulates and maintains a dream-like state for the mind, and
vice versa the mind is enriching the same space with intensive impressions,
and altogether transforming it into an “aesthetic” landscape.62 In The Spectator

Modern Philology 79 (1982), 267–83; Neil Saccamano, ‘Force of Words in Addison’s

“Pleasures”’, English Literary History 58 (1991), 83–106; Michelle Syba, ‘After Design:
Joseph Addison Discovers Beauties’, Studies in English Literature 49 (2009), 615–35.
61  I have no space here to elaborate this topic, but the complex relationship between
dreaming, imagination, and ‘innocent delusions’ can be traced back to Sir Thomas
Browne’s insights on dreams in his Religio Medici (1643) and in his posthumous essay
On Dreams. Addison lengthily quotes and interprets Browne’s Religio Medici in No.
487.
62  Ross emphasizes the interaction between imagination and movement in Addison’s
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 67

No. 413, this dream-like and walking state seems the general condition of an
“aesthetic” spectator of nature: ‘our Souls are at present delightfully lost and
bewildered in a pleasing Delusion, and we walk about like the Enchanted Hero of
a Romance, who sees beautiful Castles, Woods, and Meadows; and at the same
time hears the warbling of Birds, and the purling of Streams’. (III, 546 – my
emphases, E. Sz.)
In The Spectator No. 565 – its motto comes from Virgil’s Georgics: ‘since
there is a god in everything, earth and the expanse of sea and the sky’s depths’
(trans. A. S. Kline) –, the first piece of a series of meditations (entitled Essays
Moral and Divine ) on eternity and infinitude, Addison tells the story of a
‘Sun-set walking in the open Fields’ when later ‘the full Moon rose at length
in that clouded Majesty, which Milton takes notice of, and opened to the Eye
a new Picture of Nature, which was more finely shaded, and disposed among
softer Lights than that which the Sun had before discovered to us.’ (IV, 529)
And this sight of the walking Moon amongst the constellations of the stars
entails the serious question after David (Ps. viii. 3–4): ‘what is man’ from the
viewpoint of his Creator? This ‘new Picture of Nature’ means the opportu-
nity of a new connection between the terrestrial to the celestial during a walk.
(IV, 529)63 The first passages of this essay exhibit a moving picture, so to
speak: ‘the Night insensibly fell upon’ the beholder (this is also an allusion to
the almost imperceptible nuances and shades the Moon- and stars-light offer),
and gradually shows or opens a new view of nature, and it is, at the same time,
a gradual shift from the earth to the sky. Spectators can experience another
type of profoundness during an evening walk than the sun-light can give
them. The abundance of experience after sun-set has nothing to do with, for
example, the multitude of species, or the detailed contrivance of creatures, or
the design of the whole creation, as it can be familiar from physico-theological
discourses; instead, this expresses a new, somehow secret and inexhaustible

case, saying that ‘a central feature of our enjoyment of gardens, and of other natural
landscapes as well, is imagining ourselves performing some sort of action in that
landscape, or in response to it, coupled with the possibility of actually going on and
doing one or all of these things.’ She calls this feature the ‘invitation’ of gardens or
landscapes. ‘We take up these invitations by exercising our imagination, our senses,
and our bodies.’ Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean (Chicago and London, 1998),
166–7. This approach, however, suggests that there is no essential difference between
the experience of a traditional hortus conclusus and that of a natural landscape.
63  Walking as a model of “aesthetic” perception is applied by other authors of the time,
like Richard Steele in The Spectator, No. 454 on urban flânerie, or George Berkeley in
his Essay on Pleasures, Natural and Fantastical of Guardian No. 49.
68 Endre Szécsényi

dimension, which is simultaneously outside in the immense space and inside

in the depth of human soul.
It might seem that we are reading an occasional meditation in the manner of
Joseph Hall or Robert Boyle. The scientifically exact, observable physical facts
of the experience trigger elevated thoughts, here, thoughts on the existential
status or destiny of human beings in the created universe.64 Yet, there are some
significant differences between Addison’s and Boyle’s empiricist contempla-
tions. In the preliminary discourse to his popular Occasional Reflections, Boyle
cites the very same lines of David that we can find in Addison’s essay No. 565.
This locus from the Book of Psalms is the starting point of a contempla-
tion. Boyle’s recommended meditative practice, ‘Meleteticks’, ‘awakens good
thoughts, and excites good motions . . . This friendly property to Devotion . . . is
a very easy and genuine off-spring of the marriage of the two others: The
Beams of Knowledge, acquired by such Reflections, having in them, like
those of the Sun, not onely Light but Heat.’65 Then, having cited the words
of David, of ‘the truly inspired Poet (who, by his omitting to speak of the
Sun, seems to have compos’d this Psalm in the night)’, Boyle promises a ‘few
short Reflections’ on the theme of the Moon. Based on certain physical or
astrophysical features and attributes of the Moon and its relationships to the
Earth and to the stars, a series of similitudes and emblems ensue with moral-
izing interpretations on ‘the mutability of humane things’.66 Finally, Boyle
concludes: ‘even when she is at the full, is never free from dark Spots; so the
Mind of Man, nay, even of a Christian, is but partly enlighten’d, and partly in
dark’.67
In Boyle’s meditation, the Moon provides, via similitudes, resemblances
and emblems, different moral lessons. These were meant to be moving lessons
on the inevitable imperfectness of the human mind, both in a cognitive and a
moral sense. However, it is a static image of the Moon, despite the informa-
tion about its changes. This Moon can be only an illustration from a book, or

64  Commenting Boyle’s Occasional Reflections of  1665, Smith characterizes this practice
as follows: ‘this method of “attentive observation” to “a multitude of particulars”
in nature could offer the observer “some new practical consideration” . . ., but it
could also offer “Examples to imitate, or shew him the Danger, or Unhandsomeness,
or Inconvenience of some thing that he should avoid, or raise his thoughts and
affections Heaven-wards” . . . Close attention to nature accessed both physical facts
and clues about God’s will for humanity.’ Smith, Empiricist Devotions, 33.
65  Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (1665; Oxford, 1848), 46–7.
66  Ibid., 50–1.
67  Ibid., 55.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 69

can be a recalled memory of the meditator, its actual presence is not necessary
at all. While, in Addison’s passages we cannot find emblems or similitudes
(only two textual allusions to Milton and David), but we can read about a real
process, both in the form of the spectator’s walking and that of the gradual
Moon-rise. The physical and mental vividness, rendered by the poetical diction,
and stimulated by the movement itself, is an essential part of this experience.
The spectator meets – is walking into – the immensity of the universe (as the
first, “aesthetic” version of infinitude and eternity), and he is not only thinking
on it (as an intelligent naturalist), he is not only being affected or inspired by
its moral lessons (as an empiricist meditator), but he is experiencing or facing
the immensity with his full personality, and, at the same time, is feeling or tast-
ing his own existential status in the Creation. This is an astonishing encounter,
which could be a clear example of the primary pleasure of natural sublime
from The Spectator No. 412; at the same time, it may remind us the anxiety of
the 72. fragment of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées of 1669, or of a very similar passage
from Lord Shaftesbury’s The Moralists of 1709.68
The ‘new Picture of Nature’ in the Moon- and star-light relates to that
‘another Light’ in which a ‘Man of a Polite Imagination’ is capable to look
‘upon the World’ and to discover ‘in it a Multitude of Charms’. This exer-
cise of imagination makes the spectator feel ‘a greater Satisfaction in the
Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in the Possession’ in the
Imagination series. (III, 538)

A Man should endeavour . . . to make the Sphere of his innocent

Pleasures as wide as possible, that he may retire into them with Safety,
and find in them such a Satisfaction as a wise Man69 would not blush
to take. Of this Nature are those of the Imagination, which do not
require such a Bent of Thought as is necessary to our more serious
Employments . . . but, like a gentle Exercise to the Faculties, awaken
them from Sloth and Idleness, without putting them upon any Labour
or Difficulty. (III, 539)

68  Cf. Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 298–9. – Eventually,
the Pascalian anxiety about the loss of the individual ‘amidst the Immensity of
Nature’ will be solved by the ‘Consideration of God Almighty’s Omnipresence and
Omniscience’ in the following reflections of this essay.
69  The reference can connect the Imagination series to both the Nos. 93 & 94 on the
pleasures of the wise man and the Cheerfulness series (Nos. 381, 387, 393).
70 Endre Szécsényi

Addison emphasizes that the attentive approach to nature via the imagination
is easy, it is a ‘gentle Exercise’, it does not require efforts and diligence of the
spectator, and consequently is available to everybody in principle, just as the
‘unspeakable Pleasure’ of the natural beauties in the case of the countryside
walk of The Tatler No. 218, while the empiricist meditations can be exercised
only by an intellectual elite through hard labour and pertinence.70
In the last piece of his Cheerfulness series, The Spectator No. 393, in which
Addison deals with this ‘Habit of the Mind’ (which I incline to call “aesthetic”),
he acknowledges that

Natural Philosophy quickens [the] Taste of the Creation, and renders

it not only pleasing to the Imagination, but to the Understanding. It .  .  .
considers the several Ends of Providence . . . and the wonders of
Divine Wisdom . . . It . . . raises such a rational Admiration in the Soul
as is little inferior to Devotion. (III, 475)

Until this point, Addison seems to follow Boyle’s meletetics, as Robert Mayhew
also remarks upon in his important book;71 but Mayhew does not recognise a
conspicuous shift here. Addison hastens to add to this point that ‘[i]t is not in
the Power of every one to offer up this kind of Worship to the great Author
of Nature, and to indulge these more refined Meditations of Heart’ (III, 475).
Then, in the last passage of this essay – and eventually of this series –, Addison
recommends a ‘Practice’ for everyone:

I would have my Readers endeavour to moralize this natural Pleasure

of the Soul, and to improve this vernal Delight [from the season of
spring] . . . into a Christian Virtue. When we find our selves inspired
with this pleasing Instinct, this secret Satisfaction and Complacency
arising from the Beauties of the Creation, let us consider to whom we
stand indebted for all these Entertainments of Sense . . . The Apostle
instructs us to take Advantage of our present Temper of Mind, to graft
upon it such a religious Exercise as is particularly comfortable to it . . .
70  Even if Boyle, for example, tried to convince his readers that it is not the case in
his preliminary discourse of Occasional Reflections. At the same time, there is some
ambiguity in Addison’s Imagination essays between the ‘Polite Imagination’ of
a cultural elite and the seemingly universal availability of the pleasures of the
imagination to everybody.
71 Robert J. Mayhew, Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660–1800
(Basingstoke, 2004), 84.
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 71

The Chearfulness of Heart which springs up in us from the Survey of

Nature’s Works is an admirable Preparation for Gratitude. . . . A grate-
ful Reflection on the Supreme Cause who produces it, sanctifies it in
the Soul, and gives it its proper Value. Such an habitual Disposition of
Mind consecrates every Field and Wood, turns an ordinary Walk into a
Morning or Evening Sacrifice, and will improve those transient Gleams
of Joy . . . into an inviolable and perpetual State of Bliss and Happiness.
(III, 475–6)

In her oft-cited article, Zeitz claims that ‘Addison’s psychology of aesthetic

perception grows out of a shared aesthetic argument in physico-theological
thought. The Spectator’s observations on human responses to nature . . . are
in part inspired by a similarly “affective” and “aesthetic” component in some
of the period’s popular “design arguments” for the existence of God.’72
Accepting the profound influence which William Durham, John Ray, Isaac
Barrow, Boyle and others could have on Addison’s religious and “aesthetic”
thought, I think, however, that this ‘habitual Disposition of Mind’ cannot be
interpreted simply as the “aesthetic” version or extension of the design argu-
ment.73 This ‘habitual disposition’ is conspicuously different from the ‘rational
Admiration’ endorsed by physico-theologians and empiricist meditators of
this period. The religious or devotional interest in this walkable landscape
experience is not about the divine wisdom by means of which the Creation
was designed and built. It requires only a general reflection upon the exist-
ence of the Author of nature by the spectator-walker; it is enough to know or
rather to feel that everything around exists for our sake as a personal gift from
the divine. In the first piece of the Cheerfulness series, Addison makes that
clear: this ‘chearful State of Mind’ is ‘a constant habitual Gratitude to the great

72  Lisa Zeitz, ‘Addison’s “Imagination” Papers and the Design Argument’, English
Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 73 (1992), 493–502, 493.
73 According to Syba, in Cheerfulness essays, ‘cheer is the emotion induced by
apprehending instances of divine design in nature’, then, in the Imagination series,
there is ‘a movement away from authorial design’ which is comparable with Addison’s
as critic’s shift from the ‘Greatness of Plan’ to the ‘local textual beauties’ of literary
pieces. Syba, ‘After Design: Joseph Addison Discovers Beauties’, 633–4, n32. – I
think, however, there is also something different from (something wider than) the
apprehension of design in the experiences described in Cheerfulness and Imagination
series. In a sense, Addison steps beyond the intelligent design theory, indeed, but it
does not mean the end of ‘the dependence of theology and aesthetics’ (Ibid.). The
very ‘not so conspicuous’ beauties and the new ‘intimacy between the author and the
reader’ (Ibid., 628) may be associated with an “aesthetic” type of devotion.
72 Endre Szécsényi

Author of Nature.’ It ‘is an implicit Praise and Thanksgiving to Providence

under all its Dispensations. It is a kind of Acquiescence in the State wherein
we are placed, and a secret Approbation of the Divine Will in his Conduct
towards Man.’ (III, 430) Through cheerful mind we can contact the providen-
tial God (and not the wise designer-Creator); his Will becomes felt, not his
intellect or wisdom understood and adored with delight. The divine volition
becomes a felt reality for the walking beholder whose position may remind us
of that of the ‘Devout Man’ in The Spectator No. 465. Here Addison discusses
five methods of how to strengthen faith ‘in the Mind of Man’; the fourth is
‘more Persuasive’ than the previous practical-rational and moral ones. This is
the method of ‘an habitual Adoration of the Supreme Being’74: ‘The Devout
Man does not only believe, but feels there is a Deity. He has actual Sensations
of him; his Experience concurs with his Reason; he sees him more and more
in all his intercourses with him’. (IV, 143) Walking in nature, in untouched
nature, can be an eminent exercise to gain the series of these intercourses with
the divine being. Though this experience does not contradict reason (other-
wise it can run into intolerable zealotry or enthusiasm), but it is not identical
with ‘rational Admiration’. It is true that ‘the imagination could be discussed
as a God-given faculty designed by the Creator for specific ends’75, and we can
also find detailed teleological explanations of the possibility of the imagina-
tive pleasures in the great, the uncommon and the beautiful in The Spectator
No. 413, but these natural theological or even theodicean accounts do not
play a major role, if any, in the particular, direct and immediate, “aesthetic”
experience.
In No. 393, there is a direct link between the ‘secret Satisfaction’ of our
‘pleasing Instinct’ affected by the natural beauties of the spring and the
‘perpetual State of Bliss and Happiness’. The gap between the two can be
bridged by means of ‘a religious Exercise’. The outcome of this exercise is a
state of mind, cheerfulness, which is not simply delighted by certain percep-
tions of ‘lively picture’, ‘gay embroidery’, ‘elegant symmetry’ in nature – to cite
these phrases from one of Isaac Barrow’s popular sermons76 –, but this state
of mind actively ‘consecrates every Field and Wood, turns an ordinary Walk

74  Interestingly, the last method Addison mentions is the traditional ‘religious Meditation’
in ‘retirement from the World’, he puts it in the context of court and country, but he
does not compare it with the ‘habitual Adoration’ (cf. IV, 143–4).
75  Zeitz, ‘Addison’s “Imagination” Papers and the Design Argument”, 495.
76  Isaac Barrow, The Works of the Learned Isaac Barrow, ed. John Tillotson (London, 1700;
2nd edn; 3 vols), II, 87 (Sermon vi).
 Landscape and Walking: On Early Aesthetic Experience 73

into a Morning or Evening Sacrifice’; supposedly, the evening walk of No. 565
is the result of the same consecrating process.77
I think that in the case of No. 565 we can see the “sublime” version of an
“aesthetic” walk during which the spectator creates an enjoyable and transcen-
dentally engaging and committed natural landscape; and in the case of No. 393
we can see its “novel” version connected to spring-time natural scenes. Both
the ‘gentle Exercise’ motivated by a polite imagination and even more the
‘habitual Disposition of Mind’ of cheerfulness can be easily associated with
and, in a sense, modelled by the dynamism of walking through ever-changing
natural prospects. Cheerfulness as a habitual state of mind is not contempla-
tive, it is rather an agile, active, productive attitude to the world outside and
inside, it can permanently re-shape or “re-create” the world as our world and
can render natural scenes sanctified reality in which the ‘transient Gleams of
Joy’ of the spatial and bodily is being improved into the perpetual state of
celestial bliss of the temporal (eternal) and spiritual: it is not an elevation,
but an improvement – the word which will be used in the context of build-
ing gardens and landscape gardens throughout the eighteenth century. ‘The
Creation is a perpetual Feast to the Mind of a good Man, every thing he
sees chears and delights him’ (III, 475), being ‘a good Man’ is the result of
a permanent exercise. Walking through life in the manner of wandering in a
natural – great, novel and beautiful – landscape. And this permanent activity
and movement is a ‘way of Life’78 which is inseparable from the idea of ‘the
true Spirit of Religion’, as a little bit later, in No. 494, Addison claims:

Religion contracts the Circle of our Pleasures, but leaves it wide enough
for her Votaries to expatiate in . . . the true Spirit of Religion cheers, as
well as composes the Soul; it . . . fills the Mind with a perpetual Serenity,

77  As Norton claims interpreting The Spectator No 393: ‘To appreciate the world’s
aesthetic splendours . . . is for Addison an inherently spiritual, even reverential act’.
Brian Michael Norton, ‘The Spectator and Everyday Aesthetics’, Lumen: Selected
Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (2015), 123–36, 129.
78  Cf. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault,
transl. Michael Chase, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford, Malden, MA, 1995).
Several recent papers by Christian Maurer, Laurent Jaffro, or John Sellars discuss
the Socratic-Stoic tradition of meditation in the early eighteenth century, primarily
in Lord Shaftesbury’s works. Here I can cite Steele’s words: ‘There is no life, but
cheerful life . . . Whatever we do we should keep up the Chearfulness of our Spirits . . .
The Way to this is to keep our Bodies in Exercise, our Minds at Ease . . . When we are
in the Satisfaction of some Innocent Pleasure, or pursuit of some laudable Design,
we are in the Possession of Life, of Human Life.’ (II, 65)
74 Endre Szécsényi

uninterrupted Chearfulness, and an habitual Inclination to please

others, as well as to be pleased in it self. (IV, 254. – my emphasis, E. Sz.)

Walkable landscape elaborated by Dennis, Lord Shaftesbury and Addison

during the emergence of the modern aesthetic opens a new dimension of the
relationship between man and nature, eventually between man and God, and
the encounter with wilderness during walking in nature offers opportunity to
grasp the spectator’s individuality and the direct presence of the divine. As
such, walking in nature can be the model or at least the paradigmatic example
of the modern “aesthetic” versions of spiritual exercises, everyday practice
and ‘habitual Disposition of Mind’ as a way of life.

University of  Aberdeen,
ELTE Eötvös Loránd University