Le Jardin Anglais in India
The second cause which led to the decline of Indian gardening was less obvious but more destructive. It was the introduction of the English landscape garden, le Jardin Anglais, of the eighteenth century, 'the mock wild garden' which surrounded the English classic houses of that period. This change was a revolt of the garden alone against some of the final absurdities of the Dutch designs and a lifeless formalism which had become dreary, a change which may be partly traced to the East, for it was to some extent inspired by travellers' tales of the landscape gardens of China and Japan.
All styles have their weak points, which in the end bring about their decadence and make for change. In Europe, Gothic architecture, degenerating in France to a riot of flamboyant curves, made the renaissance of the severer classical lines a welcome relief. The classical formality, at first so charming in its restrained yet decorative outlines of house and garden, in its turn sank to decadence after the period of Versailles, where, to quote from Sir George Sitwell's most valuable book, On the Making of Gardens,-a book with no direct reference to the East, yet so full of suggestion and imaginative sympathy with beauty in every form that one wishes it might be the text-book of every garden-maker, whether in England or in India-' The long drawn-out monotony of the new style, which took no account of the genius of the place, but sought everywhere to overwhelm nature, was bound to provoke a reaction. As under Louis XIV. the garden had encroached upon the park so now the park swept back over the garden, bringing the one unending sweep of the bare English lawn up to the very windows of the house.... The garden was deprived first of its boundaries and then of its flowers, sham rivers, dead trees, and broken bridges were planted in appropriate positions, while over the country-side in the neighbourhood of the great houses there broke out a dreadful eruption of Gothic temples and Anglo-Saxon keeps, Corinthian arches and Druid amphitheatres, of classic urns, Chinese pagodas and Egyptian pyramids, all with inscriptions in Greek or black-letter appealing to the eye of taste and the tear of sensibility.'
