and monstrous, servile and abject . . . sacri-ficing all internal proportion, all intrinsicand real beauty and worth for the sake ofthings which carry scarce a shadow of thekind’.2

There would seem to be at least a pre-disposition in human beings to relatebeauty to goodness and innocence; and it isa short step to the supposition that a desirefor beauty might lead us to a desire for thehighest good. At the same time, moralphilosophers have always had a mistrust ofmere appearance, the ‘shadow’ of reality.Shaftesbury’s problem in relating theexternal beauty of objects to the inwardbeauty of the soul has an ancestry goingback to Plato. The problem dominates acurrent of ethical discourse in the eigh-teenth century, which we may identify as‘the Shaftesbury to Kant tradition’, andwhich we now call ‘aesthetics’.3 This dis-course involves various attempts to definewhat constitutes beauty, which is largelyexamined in terms of our psychologicalresponse to beauty, that is, in terms of ourpleasure in objects we call beautiful. Itinvolves also the distinction to be madebetween the beauty of nature and the beau-ty of art, with sometimes a discussion oftheir relative values. To a lesser extent itinvolves a definition of what constitutesfine art; and at a certain stage it involves adistinction between the beautiful and thesublime. Overall, however, there is the central proposition put forward byShaftesbury, being that beauty is represen-tative of a universal order and harmony inall worthwhile things, in accordance withwhich we should lead our lives.

In the matter of beautiful appearance,nature is perhaps to be more trusted thanhuman art, certainly if we have belief in abenevolent Creator. Indeed, for many, thebeauty of nature serves as evidence of thatbenevolence. In the Stoic philosophy,which was greatly influential on free-thinkers like Shaftesbury, nature, as a visible counterpart of God or logos (rea-son), could not be outdone in beauty byhuman art.4 That art ‘imitated’ nature wasof course a key principle inherited fromthe Greeks, and hardly questioned in arttheory and literary criticism in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries, thoughcapable of being interpreted variously. Theother key principle in the same periodapplicable to the production of fine art and

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Beauty and morality: theaesthetic and intellectualfunctions of statuary andornament in the eighteenth-century garden

Robert Neal

In a long, rambling footnote added to thesecond edition (1714) of Shaftesbury’sCharacteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,Times, there appears the following curiouspassage:

A parterre, cypresses, groves,wildernesses. Statues, here andthere, of virtue, fortitude, temper-ance. Heroes’ busts, philosophers’heads, with suitable mottoes andinscriptions. Solemn representa-tions of things deeply natural.Caves, grottoes, rocks. Urns andobelisks in retired places and dis-posed at proper distances andpoints of sight, with all those sym-metries which silently express areigning order, peace, harmony andbeauty! But what is there answer-able to this in the minds of the possessors? What possession ofpropriety is theirs? What constancyor security of enjoyment? Whatpeace, what harmony within?1

We can understand that Shaftesbury is heredescribing a princely garden, laid out in thebest taste, replete with fine statuary andornament, which by its disposition andform ‘silently’ expresses certain subjective-ly felt aesthetic qualities: ‘order, peace, har-mony and beauty’. And we are clearlymeant to infer that these are also moralqualities. The question then asked is whatmoral value does all this beauty actuallyimpart? Shaftesbury is a self-declared‘enthusiast’ for art and beauty, but he alsoplays the sceptical philosopher and thesatirist. To be simply lovers of beauty, hegoes on to observe, is to place ourselves incompany with the beaux, the gentlemen ofpleasure, ‘such as go no further than thedancing master to seek for grace and beau-ty’; and if we emulate, in their pursuit ofbeauty, the owners of those fine gardens,the ‘envied potentates’ and perfumedcourtiers, we might imagine that we add‘more lustre’ to ourselves, while ‘in our realcharacter and truer self’ we grow ‘deformed

literature was that of utile dulci, meaningthat the work should be both entertainingand morally instructive.5 Without enter-tainment the reader or spectator would be bored and would not be instructed.Without instruction the work would bemerely frivolous. There was of coursemuch poetry, art and craftwork which didnot give instruction, which was delightfuland tasteful and could in the ordinary way of speaking be described as ‘beautiful’,but such work was of a lower order in thehierarchy of beauty.

If we break down the garden describedby Shaftesbury into its component parts,we can readily apply this hierarchy. At thelower end of the scale there are the ‘urnsand obelisks’ which are mere ornaments,but being ‘disposed at proper distances andpoints’ pleasurably lead the eye and satisfy-ingly terminate the vistas. Then there isthe statuary which aspires to fine art and,in three slightly different ways, presents amoral content. First there are the directlydidactic allegorical portrayals of ‘virtue,fortitude, temperance’. Then there are thebusts of heroes and philosophers, withtheir mottoes and inscriptions which, byallusion, would serve to put us in mind ofnoble thoughts and deeds. And thirdly,there are the ‘Solemn representations ofthings deeply natural’, by which evocativephrase Shaftesbury must surely refer tofigures of the Olympian gods, who wereadmitted into Stoic theology as metaphorsfor the various forces of nature and thuswould, by symbolism, refer us to mattersdivine.6 Certain sublime aspects of natureare also represented, by direct imitation, inthe ‘caves, grottoes, rocks’; and the beautyof nature itself is of course actually presenteverywhere in the garden, perhapsarranged or modified by human design,but especially in the ‘groves’ and ‘wilder-nesses’ largely unmediated.

However, although we can separatelycatalogue these beautiful components of the garden, it was the garden itself, as a unified whole, which, at least in an eighteenth-century way of thinking,should be regarded as the beautiful work ofart. We are familiar with a somewhat fanci-ful account of the historical developmentduring that century, particularly inEngland, of the ‘natural’ landscape gardenwhich culminates with Lancelot‘Capability’ Brown supposedly sweeping

away all the temples, statues and orna-ments, and the parterres and cypresses(not to mention labourers’ cottages andany inconvenient village), to createunspoilt and perfected rural scenes,English Arcadias. There might then bequestions as to whether the beauty of suchgardens without sculpture and ornamentshould be admired at the highest level aspresenting us with the unsullied beauty ofnature, or merely at the lowest level of‘delightful’ art devoid of intellectual ormoral content. But a converse way of ask-ing those questions, which is pursued inthis article, is whether a garden with sculp-ture may have an enhanced beauty, and ifso, how does sculpture relate to the naturalbeauties of the garden, whether it is merelyan ornament upon the formal structure ofthe garden, or whether in fact it comprisesthe intellectual ‘content’ of the garden. Ishall consider these questions with refer-ence to Kant’s theory of ‘adherent’ beautyin the Critique of Judgment (1790), and alsoin the light of his brief remarks on the rela-tionship between the ergon (work) and itsparergon (surround). Although Kant saysonly a little that is specific to sculpture,and still less regarding gardens, theCritique of Judgment provides amongmuch else, a summation of eighteenth-century aesthetic thought, and is funda-mentally concerned with the problematiclinkage of beauty to morality with whichthis article began.7

In the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,the first and lengthier of the two parts intowhich the Critique of Judgment is divided,there are three particular points at whichKant focuses on the relationship betweenbeauty and morality. Set out here inreverse order, it is to the third that fullerdiscussion in this article is necessarily confined.

Section 59, the penultimate andarguably climactic section of the Critique ofAesthetic Judgment, is headed ‘On beautyas the symbol of morality’. Here Kantmakes a distinction between ‘symbolic’ and‘schematic’ or ‘discursive’ modes of repre-sentation, that is, ways of ‘exhibiting’ ideasand concepts. He says, in effect, that moralideas can only be exhibited symbolically.Thus, to invent an example, we may drawor describe a house, but we cannot draw or adequately describe ‘the good’. Beauty, Kant maintains, is the symbol of

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the morally good.8 This is, in an eighteenth-century context, hardly a surprising con-clusion, but it forms, as already suggested,a basic link in Kant’s philosophical scheme,the ramifications of which we fortunatelyneed not consider here.

In Section 49, ‘On the powers of themind which constitute genius’, Kant pro-vides an exposition of his theory of artisticcreativity. Here he describes ‘genius’ as theability to exhibit aesthetic ideas, the prod-ucts of the power of imagination, in combi-nation with intellectual ideas, the productsof the power of reason; and in Kant’s analy-sis, the power of reason is essentially con-cerned with questions of practical choice,i.e. with morality. In fact, as Kant argues, itis only through the genius’s creative use of the power of imagination that ideas ofreason can be ‘exhibited’ at all.9 Fine art istherefore fundamentally symbolic.

Earlier, in Section 16, Kant has drawn adistinction between free beauty (pulchritu-do vaga) and accessory or adherent beauty(pulchritudo adhaerens). The first categoryincludes the beauty of nature and nature’sproducts, and also the beauty of ‘abstract’art, such as decorative patterns, and musicnot set to words. This kind of beauty weappreciate through a ‘pure judgment oftaste’, that is, solely on the basis of our aes-thetic liking of or a particular pleasurableresponse to the beautiful object. However,in the case of the second category, adherentbeauty, our aesthetic liking for the beauti-ful object is combined with an intellectualor rational liking. In the first case, forexample beautiful nature, we do not haveto ask ourselves what is the object for, whatis its purpose, or what is it meant to be; butin the second case, for example fine art, wedo ask such questions, and we compare theobject with a concept of what it is meant tobe, and judge it according to the extent towhich it achieves the standard set by thatconcept. That is, in Kantian terminology,we judge it in relation to a concept of itsperfection.10 This is certainly how we doordinarily estimate the beauty of a poemor a painting; we consider what it is meantto express or represent, and how well itdoes so. It is also, though somewhat differ-ently, the way in which, to take one ofKant’s examples, we judge the physique ofa horse: both by its beauty in relation toour idea of how a fine horse ought to lookand by its fitness for its intended purpose.

For Kant, the beauty of the human figure isalso to be judged in relation to a concept,which in this case is the ‘ideal’ of the beau-tiful, being the expression of the moralpurpose of mankind.11 In the neoclassical1790s the taste in sculpture was, of course,for the noble, nude and antique, and Kanthad certainly read Winckelmann.

We may note in passing that Kant holdslandscape gardening to consist of naturalforms made, by means of light and shade,into ‘an entertaining arrangement’ andthat we judge its beauty without any needto have a concept of its purpose, that is,gardening falls under the category of freebeauty. This differentiates gardening fromarchitecture, where fitness for purpose isan important criterion in our judgment ofa building, as similarly in the case of ahorse. It also makes Kant ponder whetherlandscape gardening can be a fine art at all,though he seems to give it the benefit ofthe doubt.12 This marginal difficulty aside,there are more fundamental problemswhich Kant’s specification of the two kinds of beauty presents to his readers. Thechief of these problems is that he has beenarguing up to this point in the Critique ofJudgment that the only principle uponwhich we can truly call an object beautifulis that of the ‘pure judgment of taste’. Nowhe appears to argue for another kind ofbeauty, which breaks the defining limits of‘purity’, but which seems to be a beauty ofstill higher value.

Kant was by no means the first to makea distinction between two kinds of beauty.Joseph Addison (1672–1719), in a famousseries of essays published in the Spectatorin 1712 under the title ‘Pleasures of theImagination’, distinguishes primary andsecondary pleasures, being essentially thepleasures derived from the beauty ofnature and from the beauty of art respec-tively. The first is an immediate pleasure,which strikes us as soon as the beautifulobject is perceived. The second is mediatedthrough the mind; but for Addison, beautyin art is always related to an original expe-rience of beauty in nature, and art gainsfrom the perfection of its resemblance tothat experience.13

The philosopher, Francis Hutcheson(1694–1746), who maintained that all pleasure in beauty is derived from the perception, by an inner sense, of ‘uniformi-ty amidst variety’, carried Addison’s

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distinction forward. In his Inquiry into theOriginal of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue(1725) he contrasts ‘original’ or ‘absolute’beauty, with ‘relative’ or ‘comparative’ beau-ty.14 The latter is found in an object which isan imitation of an original and, he says,‘this beauty is founded on conformity or akind of unity between the original and thecopy’. Thus the relative beauty of the copy isnot founded on the beauty of the original,but arises in the relationship betweenthem. Furthermore, ‘the original may beeither some object in nature, or some established idea; for if there be any knownidea as a standard, and rules to fix thisimage or idea by, we may make a beautifulimitation’,15 whether or not, he specificallysays, there is any beauty in the original.Thus an idea of strength and courage (notinherently beautiful, we presume) may, byapplication of rule or convention, be madeinto a beautiful statue of Hercules.

Now, if we understand Hutcheson cor-rectly, works of art display both originalbeauty in themselves, and relative beauty,that is relative to the natural object or ideaimitated. The statue of Hercules, in thatcase, owes its beauty both to the harmonyof its various parts, its ‘uniformity amidstvariety’, and to its conformity with the ideaof strength and courage. This seems tanta-mount to saying that it has formal beautyand beauty of content, both distinct fromone another, but additive, as Hutchesonhimself makes clear, with regard to thepleasure they give, although the relativebeauty of the content does not by itselfgive pleasure in the same way, through theinternal sense of beauty, that the ‘unifor-mity amidst variety’ of the form does. Onefurther development of the notion of rela-tive beauty which Hutcheson makes con-cerns a kind of beauty that arises from thecorrespondence of a work of art to ‘inten-tion’ or, we might say, to the artist’s intend-ed idea for the work. In such a case theartist may gainfully sacrifice some, but notall, of the possible original beauty in thework in order to satisfy that intention. Asimple example, given by Hutcheson, is ofa stone column that slightly tapers towardsthe top. It is intrinsically less beautifulthan a perfect cylinder that has greater uni-formity, but it gains, and looks better, fromits enhanced stability.16

Another example Hutcheson gives ofrelative beauty from conformity to ‘inten-

tion’ is of a garden in which the beauty of astrictly regular plan of paths and vistas isneglected in favour of one that imitates themore random wildness of nature. Thegreater spaciousness of the latter pleasesus more than ‘the more confined exact-ness’ of a regular garden. Implicitly, theimitation in this case is of a particular ideaof nature rather than of a specific scene ofnature, as it would be in a topographicallandscape painting, where the relativebeauty would arise from a comparison ofthe accuracy of the imitation to the origi-nal scene. Implicitly also, the imitation ofthis idea of nature in its wildness differs inkind from the conventional representationof the idea of strength and courage in thestatue of Hercules, where the relative beauty derives from the sculptor’s skill incarrying the idea of those qualities into thefigure. Here, in the garden, we like to feelspaciousness rather than confinement, inthe same way that we like to feel stabilityin a pillar, and in both such cases we derivepleasure not only from the beauty of whatwe see but also from our recognition of the ingenuity of the gardener or architectin realizing the means to such beneficial feelings.

Hutcheson, who had a theological back-ground, takes his idea of relative beautyarising from correspondence to intentioninto the realm of nature itself, observingthe design of nature’s Author in the adapta-tion of parts to their own perfection, whilebeing subordinated to the good of the system as a whole. Nature thus has bothoriginal and relative beauty. We need notfollow him in this, since it returns us to the Critique of Judgment, the two parts ofwhich, relating to aesthetic and teleologicaljudgments respectively, have a commonconcern with the perception of ‘intention’in nature’s design, and our consequent sup-position that nature is somehow ‘purpo-sive’, though, as Kant acknowledges, we cannever know precisely what this purpose is.Thus in studying organisms scientifically,and particularly in investigating their function in the total environment, we pre-suppose that nature has an overall unity inits laws to which every organism is subject,though the totality of the laws of nature isfar too great for our actual comprehension.In other words, we make teleological judgments about natural purposes on thebasis of an apparent but indeterminate

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purposiveness in nature. Somewhat simi-larly when we judge the beauty of nature,as when we say that a flower is beautiful,we proclaim a liking for the natural objectthat acknowledges an apparent purposive-ness in its suitability to our mental facul-ties, though again the actual purpose isindeterminate. It is a case of ‘purposive-ness without a purpose’, Kant’s notoriouslydifficult conception of Zweckmässigkeitohne Zweck, sometimes translated as ‘finality without an end’.17

The case is different when we judge thebeauty of a well-designed utensil, or evenof a useful animal, like a horse, for clearlythere is a purpose or intended functionwhich is well understood by us and wejudge it by its functionality as well as by itsformal beauty. This also is the basis of the‘two beauties’ as they relate to fine art. Webelieve, at least in an eighteenth-centuryway of thinking, that the artwork has amoral purpose, intended and expressed bythe artist. This is the work’s moral utility;and it is found in the content, not the formof the work. Thus, we judge the beauty ofthe form of the work ‘purely’ aesthetically,that is, without any determinate concept ofits purpose, though with a subjective feel-ing of purposiveness in the object. The content of the work, on the other hand, wejudge rationally, with a determinate con-cept of its purpose, namely its moral utili-ty, and in our judgment we may estimateits achievement of that purpose in terms ofits possible ‘perfection’.18 The question thatKant fails to answer as clearly as we mightlike is how these two very different ways ofexercising ‘taste’ in fine art combine withone another. Much vexation and controver-sy among Kant scholars has resulted.

The Kant scholar Paul Guyer suggeststhat there have been essentially three dif-ferent approaches to the problem.19 (1) Thefirst approach is to say that the satisfactoryfunction or moral utility of the beautifulobject is merely a precondition to ourenjoyment, through a purely aestheticjudgment, of the beauty of its form. Inother words, provided that an estimationof actual dysfunction does not seriouslydamage the possibility of our enjoyment,we can abstract our minds from the func-tion and concentrate on the form alone. (2)Alternatively, we may acknowledge that wejudge the object in two different ways, andif the object pleases us on both counts, that

is, in regard to both form and function, thetwo pleasures add to each other; though ifthe object dissatisfies on one count, it isunlikely that the object will please us at all.(3) Finally, we may take special pleasure inwhat we regard as the perfect interaction ofform and function. This last approach hasperhaps particular appeal to those broughtup with precepts of twentieth-centurymodernism, in which form and content inart, or form and function in design, aresupposed to be indissoluble and one.

We can extend these three possibilitiesto the case of the kind of garden we havebeen considering. First, we can abstractourselves from any intellectual thoughtsprompted by the sculpture and inscrip-tions, and simply enjoy the beauty of thevistas presented by the garden. This wouldnot, however, accord with eighteenth-century accounts of the thoughts and feel-ings of garden visitors, though it is quiteprobably the way in which most modernvisitors find enjoyment. If we have todayany intellectual pleasure in the garden it ismost likely to concern the particulars of itshistory, or to relate to a botanical or horti-cultural interest in its plants. Secondly, wemay enjoy in more or less equal measurethe beauty of the garden’s planting and itsvistas, and the separate beauties of thesculptural works it contains, making someeffort towards an intellectual understand-ing of the meaning or significance of thoseworks. Being satisfied with both the ‘free’visual beauty of the planting and the morecomplex ‘adherent’ beauty of the sculpture,our pleasure is doubled. And thirdly, wefind our pleasure in the feelings engen-dered by the garden as a whole, its overalldesign and the incidental beauties ofnature and art it comprises. What such feelings indicate to us may well be thosequalities of ‘order, peace, harmony, andbeauty’ that Shaftesbury found in his imag-ined garden at the beginning of this article,and which qualities could clearly bedescribed as both aesthetic and moral.

Before trying to give any order of precedence to these three possibilities, it isnoteworthy that Guyer, in concluding hisanalysis of the problem of adherent beautyin Kant, proposes that the three modes ofapproach are not mutually exclusive, andthat all three are in fact put forward byKant himself. It is perfectly reasonable tofind similarly that all three approaches to

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1 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. L. E. Klein, Cambridge, 1999, p. 417.This collection of essays and treatiseswas first published in 1711, thoughmost parts had appeared earlier.Shaftesbury was working on a revisedsecond edition at the time of hisdeath in Naples in 1713, and it waspublished posthumously by hisexecutors the following year, incorpo-rating his notes. Shaftesbury’sCharacteristics was widely read andadmired throughout the eighteenthcentury in Britain and on theContinent, especially it seems inGermany.2 Ibid. pp. 416–17.3 There are usefully concise accountsof this succession in the developmentof aesthetics from Shaftesbury to

enjoyment of the garden and its sculptureare equally acceptable. After all, as individ-uals the manner of our response to a par-ticular work of art may quite ordinarilyvary each time we look at it, or even whilewe are looking at it. There are, however,objections to all three approaches. The firstwould seem to ignore the intentions of theoriginal designers of the garden. The sec-ond ignores the integrity of the gardenitself as artwork. While the third places noparticular value on the garden and the art-works it contains which might not befound to a still greater degree in natureitself. In fact Shaftesbury writes elsewhereof nature having ‘a magnificence beyondthe formal mockery of princely gardens’.20

As attractive as this is, in its happy blend-ing of the aesthetic and the moral, we needto find a role that gives sculpture a place inthe garden, which is not simply ornamen-tal, and which satisfactorily overcomes allthree objections.

A possible approach is in effect a com-bination of two and three,21 in which wewould emphasize our general aestheticexperience of the garden and its variousbeauties and pleasures, while acknowledg-ing the separate significance of its monu-ments and sculpture as particular points of interest encountered on the way. Themodel in this case could be taken fromrhetoric in which the subject matter of thespeech is distinguished from its elocutio,that is, its style or diction, the latter beingfrequently ornamented with separatelystriking moral maxims or sententiae, andthe whole of which is united under theprinciple of decorum. The argument wouldthen be that garden sculpture functionedas the visual equivalent of such sententiae.This rhetorical model would seem to workparticularly well with regard to the so-called ‘emblematic’ gardens of the earlierhalf of the eighteenth century such asStowe. However, a more general theory, notincompatible with the rhetorical modeland its governing principle of decorum, butwhich more completely binds sculpturalornament into the Shaftesburian order andharmony of the garden as a whole, needs tobe found; and we can continue to look toKant for guidance.

We have discussed the two beauties,pulchritudo vaga and pulchritudoadhaerens, the one being appreciated pure-ly aesthetically, the other involving, partly

at least, a rational judgment. There is, how-ever, the lesser class of objects which wefind delightful and which, as Kant acknowl-edges, we are accustomed to describe asbeautiful. The so-called beauty of theseobjects, which Kant calls ‘charms’, is not,however, estimated by exercise of a purejudgment of taste, which engages our men-tal faculties, and thus causes us, as Kantsays, to ‘linger’ in our contemplation overthe object; nor is it estimated rationally.22

Rather it is estimated by way of an empiri-cal, impure aesthetic judgment in whichthe objects appeal through our sensibilitydirectly to our capacity for feeling plea-sure. Thus charms are not, on Kant’s terms,beautiful in a universal sense, but aremerely agreeable according to our individ-ual tastes. An example of charm is a simplecolour: green, for example. One might per-ceive a green object and say ‘I love thecolour’, or even ‘What a beautiful shade ofgreen!’, but the beauty of the object, if it istruly beautiful, can only result from theform, since only the form, not its charm,can suggest that vague feeling of intention-ality or ‘purposiveness without a purpose’which is the basis of pulchritudo vaga andpure aesthetic judgment. Still less hascharm anything to do with the determinateconcept of utility upon which we base ourrational judgment in the case of pulchritu-do adhaerens. This leads Kant to claim thatin all the visual arts, and he specifies paint-ing, sculpture, architecture and gardening,it is design that is essential. Colours, sincethey belong to the category of charm, canmake the object ‘vivid to the sense’, he says,but they cannot make it beautiful.

Generally in the arts, we may under-stand Kant to say, it is the structure, not thesurface, that matters. In the specific case ofthe garden we might therefore infer thatsculptural ornaments, or vivid flowerbeds,are artistically superfluous. This wouldconfirm, rather than mitigate, the objec-tion to the third case above. However, thereis a particular class of objects that Kantcalls parerga, examples of which he givesas ‘picture frames, or drapery on statues, orcolonnades around magnificent build-ings’.23 These are ornaments that are‘extrinsic additions’ to, not ‘intrinsic con-stituents’ of, the principal work or ergon,but that serve to increase our pleasure inthe work. They might in themselves bebeautiful, such as a fine carved and gilded

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Kant by Paul Guyer in chapter 2, ‘Thedialectic of disinterestedness’, in Kantand the Experience of Freedom,Cambridge, 1996, and chapter 1, ‘Theorigins of modern aesthetics’, inValues of Beauty, Cambridge, 2005.See also R. E. Norton, The BeautifulSoul: Aesthetic Morality in theEighteenth Century, Cornell, 1995,especially pp. 9–54. 4 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, BookXI §10, Loeb Classical Library No. 58,ed. C. R. Haines, Cambridge, MA, 1916,p. 301.5 omne tulit punctum qui miscuit

utile dulci,lectorem delectando pariterquemonendo.(He has won every vote who hasblended profit and pleasure,at once delighting and instructingthe reader.)

Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 343–44, Loeb Classical Library No. 194, ed. H. R. Fairclough, Cambridge, MA,1926, p. 479.6 This interpretation of Shaftesbury’sphrase is mine, but I have seen noother. The Stoic position on theancient gods is described by Cicero inDe Natura Deorum, Book II §24onwards, Loeb Classical Library No.268, ed. H. Rackham, Cambridge, MA,1933, pp. 185–93.7 Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). TheCritique of Judgment was first pub-lished in 1790, and is often referred toas the Third Critique, following theCritique of Pure Reason (1781) andCritique of Practical Reason (1788), thethree ‘critiques’ together claiming to form a comprehensive system ofphilosophy. The Critique of Judgmentis divided into two parts: a Critique ofAesthetic Judgment, and a Critique ofTeleological Judgment (from Greektelos, meaning purpose). The first ofthese parts is divided between discus-sions of ‘the beautiful’ and of ‘the sub-lime’, and somewhat separately alsoof the fine arts. It is the discussion ofthe beautiful, especially in sections 13to 17, with which this article is mainlyconcerned. The translation used hereis by W. S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, 1987,hereafter ‘Pluhar’ with its page num-bers, giving also, as is customary, thepage references in the Akademie (Ak.)edition (volume 5 in this case). ThePluhar edition has a helpful introduc-tion by the translator. There is ofcourse a vast literature concerningthe Third Critique. In addition to thetwo books by Guyer cited in note 3above, see H. E. Allison, Kant’s Theoryof Taste, Cambridge, 2001. 8 Ak. 353–54: Pluhar, pp. 228–30.9 Ak. 313–15: Pluhar, pp. 181–83.10 Ak. 229–31: Pluhar, pp. 76–78.11 Ak. 235: Pluhar, pp. 83–84.12 Ak. 323: Pluhar, p. 192 (footnote).13 19 June to 3 July, 1712, Spectator,Nos. 409 & 411–21, No. 416 in particular.14 Francis Hutcheson was Professorof Moral Philosophy at the University

frame, and Kant does in fact include orna-mental borders among his specific exam-ples of free beauty.24 In fact Kant insiststhat parerga will only enhance the beautyof the principal work if they do so by rea-son of their own formal beauty. A goldframe that attracts us by its glitter would‘charm’, but not be beautiful; and it wouldcertainly detract from the painting, ratherthan enhance it.

To conclude, we now have a hierarchyin the garden that overcomes all the diffi-culties discussed. There are minor orna-ments or ‘charms’ which give us somedelight, but only up to a point. Too manygarden gnomes, or their eighteenth-century equivalents (cupids perhaps), ortoo many bright beds of dahlias will vul-garize and destroy the beauty of a garden.Then, much more importantly, there arethe parerga, which are themselves formallybeautiful. They may be simply ornamental,like ‘urns and obelisks’, in which case theywill be ‘free’ beauties, judged purely aes-thetically. Alternatively, and perhaps at ahigher level, they will have ‘adherent’beauty, either being functional as well asornamental, as in Kant’s example of acolonnade as a parergon, or because theyhave moral significance, like the statuaryin Shaftesbury’s imagined garden, whichseemed to have its own hierarchy in itsmodes of representation. The key point isthat the parerga are themselves beautifulobjects, and for that reason they increaseour pleasure in the garden to which they

are extrinsically added, but their individualbeauties adhere in a secondary fashion tothe beauty of the garden itself whichremains the principal work. It is not a case,as it might be if we were considering amodern ‘sculpture park’, of the garden acting as a parergonal frame to the works itcontains.

Thus, finally to return to the threeobjections, we now have an understandingof the beauty of the garden, with its statu-ary and ornaments as important, albeitextrinsic, contributive elements, which satisfies all of them. With regard to the first our scheme accords with eighteenth-century precepts relating to the morallyinstructive role of art. With regard to thesecond, we have reconciled our separatepleasures in the formal (or visual) beautyof the garden to our enjoyment of the more intellectual pleasures in the ‘moralmaxims’ presented by its sculpture; and wehave thus preserved the garden’s integrityas an artwork. And with regard to the third,we have given a positive role to sculpturalornament in enhancing the integral beautyof the garden. We have been able to drawthis conclusion from our reading of Kantwhich describes how the beauties of thestatuary and ornament adhere to the formal beauty of garden, which is itselfadherent to a rational idea of its harmo-nious perfection. It is indeed the ‘order,peace, harmony, and beauty’ of the gardenas a whole that ultimately symbolizes themorally good.

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of Glasgow from 1729. A ‘disciple’ ofShaftesbury, he was much influencedby Locke. His Inquiry into the Originalof our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue(1725) consists of two treatises, onbeauty and moral good respectively.His intention was to show that wehave a natural ‘inner sense’ whichenables us to perceive beauty, in orderto show that we have an analogousmoral sense. The third edition (1729)of the Inquiry is currently available inreprint from Kessinger Publishing(www.kessinger.net). For a modernstudy of Hutcheson’s aesthetics see P. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, Oxford,2003.15 Hutcheson, section 4: ‘Of relativeor comparative beauty’, pp. 39–45.16 Ibid. pp. 43–44.17 Ak. 221: Pluhar, p. 66.18 Ak. 230–31: Pluhar, pp. 77–78.19 Guyer, as at note 3, ch. 5, ‘Free andadherent beauty: a modest proposal’,pp.129–40.20 Shaftesbury, as at note 1, p. 317.21 My article ‘Adorning nature:emblematic sculpture in the earlyeighteenth-century garden’, based ona paper given to the conference‘Sculpture in Arcadia’ at theUniversity of Reading, February 2007,is due to be published this winter(2007/8) in Studies in the History ofGardens and Designed Landscapes.22 Ak. 222–25: Pluhar, pp. 68–72.23 Ak. 226: Pluhar, p. 72. I am particu-larly indebted at this point to thecommentary of Martin Gammon in‘Parerga and pulchritudo adhaerens: areading of the Third Moment of theAnalytic of the Beautiful’, Kant-Studien, 90, 1999, pp. 148–67. Also toHenry Allison, who endorsesGammon’s reading, in Kant’s Theoryof Taste; Allison, as at note 7, pp. 131–43. 24 Ak. 229: Pluhar, p. 76.