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THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY
AN
EXPLANATORY
DISCOURSE
BY
TAN CHET-QUA,
of
QUANG-CHEW-FU, Gent.
SIR WILLIAM CHAMBERS
(1773)
_Introduction by_
RICHARD E. QUAINTANCE, JR.
PUBLICATION NUMBER _191_
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
_1978_
GENERAL EDITOR
David Stuart Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles
EDITORS
Charles L. Batten, University of California, Los Angeles
William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles
Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
ADVISORY EDITORS
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Earl Miner, Princeton University
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
James Sutherland, University College, London
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Frances M. Reed, University of California, Los Angeles
INTRODUCTION
This "Explanatory Discourse" first appeared, in the latter part of March
1773, annexed to the second and last edition of Sir William Chambers'
_Dissertation on Oriental Gardening_ of the preceding May. As an effort,
curiously hedged, to impersonate a Chinese spokesman it seeks to exploit
the satiric vantage points of philosophic naivety and trenchant candor
enjoyed by Goldsmith's observer Lien Chi Altangi in London a dozen years
earlier. But Chambers' ventriloquism is both more defensive and more
aggressive than what we find in _The Citizen of the World_; the Preface
here in his own voice admits sensitivity to the "abuse" which the
Dissertation had incurred for its scenic fantasy, its brief opening and
closing attacks on "Capability" Brown, and its pervasive criticism of
the blandness of Brownian landscaping. By assuming the voice of Tan
Chet-qua Chambers is able to pretend to more authoritative familiarity
with actual Chinese gardens even as he deplores his readers'
misapprehension that his interest lay mainly in masquerade,
entertainment, or "the mere recital of a traveller's observation" (p.
113). It was probably a strategic error to entrust the substance of his
genuine and quite respectable challenging of Brownian style, to what he
terms the "vehicle" of alleged first-hand reports of preferable
"Chinese" lay-outs. By this date, some two decades after the chinoiserie
fad had crested in England, most of his readers might fairly be termed
rather jaded. They preferred to overreact to the frivolity and whimsey
they had come to think essentially Chinese, rather than to ponder what
Chambers seriously urges from behind his silken "screen": his interest
in a variegated emotional response to deliberately variegated landscape.
An admirer of Burke's Sublime, Chambers saw advantage in complicating
the suavity of Brown's gentle contours, shaven lawns, free-form
reflecting lakes, and still short tree-clumps, through a program of
landscaped stimulation of contrasting associative moods. This is the
essence of that argument which Chambers "cloathed ... in the garb of
fiction, to secure it a patient hearing" (p. 112) in three publications
appearing over sixteen years. There is no evidence that he was better
understood through publication of this "Discourse," the last of the
three.[1]
Of course, it is not as a satirist, an aesthetician of landscape, or
even as a masquerading orientalist that Sir William Chambers (1723-96)
has been best known in his time and since: with Robert Adam, he led the
British architectural profession virtually from the time he undertook
his first commissions around 1757. The two buildings for which he is
justly best remembered are the Chinese Pagoda at Kew Gardens and
Somerset House, between London's Strand and Waterloo Bridge. Yet from
that solid Palladian structure now housing the General Register Office
it takes more than the dozen miles up Thames to reach the pagoda which
in 1762 reared its eighty bright wing-displaying dragons on ten
successive roofs, and from the height of fifty meters flashed its glazed
tiles across suburbia. Chambers developed simultaneously and maintained
through his career two contrasted sensibilities. The dignified town
house he designed for his family in 1764 fronted Berners Street with a
massive rusticated doorway, yet had interior chimney-pieces and a rear
elevation modelled in "fanciful" papier-mache which his biographer John
Harris supposes was painted and varnished chinoiserie. He made his way
to the top of his profession and earned royal recognition through
tectonic skills that absorbed him with Somerset House, for instance,
during the last two decades of his life. But as early as 1752 he had
ventured the striking practice--standard by the century's end through
his pioneering and Adam's--of drawing elevations of a building proposed
as it would appear if already conditioned by time, decaying and
overgrown by vegetation.[2] Deciding what to make of his three
publications on Chinese gardens will not be eased by polarizing his
sources of inspiration or consigning his life into stretches during
which the dominant interest was product or process, structure or affect.
Here is no schizoid or frustrated Pre-Romantic--a Chatterton who somehow
survived his suicide attempt to edit copy for the _Gentleman's
Magazine_--but a consummate professional.[3] The mythic "Cina" of which
this "Discourse" was Chambers' latest account grew and changed with him
from his first-hand experience of Canton at the age of twenty, through
his architectural training in Paris and Rome, and throughout his
practice and success as the Establishment architect of his age in
England.
The recent thorough Harris biography leaves it appropriate here only to
survey the facts most pertinent to his publications on Chinese gardens
and to advance a few speculations. The first son of a well-to-do
Scottish sutler to the armies of Charles XII of Sweden, Chambers early
left his native Gothenburg for schooling supervised by relatives in
Yorkshire. Between the ages of 17 and 26 his cosmopolitan rearing
proceeded with his apprenticeship to supercargoes or agents aboard three
successive vessels of the Swedish East India Company trading in ports
along the Indian coast and as far east as Canton. Although his eye and
sketchbook were thus early busied with oriental sights, what Chambers
later wrote of Peking (or much else Chinese beyond the docks of Canton)
was, as he admitted, based upon the observations of others. Yet it must
have been rare and significant enough in those days that when this
Westerner determined to devote his earnings from the final voyage to an
education in architecture, he had seen proportionately so much of
non-European building. Even before enrolling in J.-F. Blondel's Ecole
des Arts for the 1749-50 winter, Chambers may have met Frederick, Prince
of Wales, in London, and been encouraged by Frederick's exotic
interests.[4] It was during his second of five springs in Rome, living
with his English wife over the shop of Piranesi, that Chambers learned
of Frederick's death in March 1751 and designed for him a mausoleum
based on the ancient and neo-classical shapes before his eyes; in one of
his sections for this project he depicted it decaying like some of them,
with cypress trees beginning to grow out of the rubble that was to have
been its roof! Though this design was never executed, Chambers did meet
with royal patronage upon his return to London and dedicated to the new
Prince of Wales--soon his pupil in drawing, and three years later,
George III--his first book, _Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture,
Dresses, Machines and Utensils_ in 1757.
The opening sentences which Samuel Johnson contributed to Chambers'
_Designs_ scorned the "power" with which "novelty attracts regard"[5]--a
ground-note directly contrary to Chambers' sarcastic apology for "the
monster Novelty" here in his 1773 Preface. But in 1757 he could expect
his crisp text and twenty-one plates to administer a calming dose of
authenticity to the chinoiserie fever then raging. In fact, this large
and handsome volume appears to have driven from the market the
pattern-books of "William Halfpenny" and others, with their ridiculous
dragon-finials atop Georgian hip-roofs and Venetian windows bordered by
crockets--the carpentry trade trying to sustain a mood for renovations
waning by the early fifties. Chambers hoped to put a stop "to the
extravagancies that daily appear under the name of Chinese, though most
of them are mere inventions, the rest copies from the lame
representations found on porcelain and paper-hangings." This sniffy
professionalism would broaden by 1772 into mockery of the "kitchen
gardeners, well skilled in the culture of sallads, but little acquainted
with the principles of Ornamental Gardening"[6]--which everyone took for
a swipe at Launcelot "Capability" Brown, "yon stately gentleman in the
black perriwig" (p. 157 below).
Yet probably a more general and generous motive prompted Chambers to
boost in this public way, on the last five pages introducing his
_Designs_, a landscape-style in which he could hardly expect to exercise
his training or build the career just beginning. The lay-outs of Kent
and Brown took inspired advantage of topography, plants and climate
peculiar to the south of England, but to anyone coming like Chambers
from the gardens in and near Paris and Rome it might appear by 1757 that
the English style risked parochial self-exaggeration to the point where
all anecdotal human interest would be suppressed in the name of a
"Nature" literally isolated. Cosmopolitanism, more enlightened than
ever, befitted a Britain engaged in Pitt's "Great War for the Empire"
which would extend its holdings from Montreal to Madras. Was there not
an earlier empire whose leader had left visible tokens of his
eclecticism? "[H]Adrian, who was himself an architect, at a time when
the Grecian architecture was in the highest esteem among the Romans,
erected in his Villa, at Tivoli, certain buildings after the manner of
the Egyptians and of other nations."[7] It was timely to identify a pure
"original" example of culture native to quite another organic whole, and
then to transplant it intact to a British scene large enough to sustain
it. Botanically viewed, this is the principle on which arduous
horticultural experiments were being performed at this stage in
England's imperial history: the removal to Kew of Lebanese cedars,
oriental Ginkgoes, persimmons and Sophoras, or American locusts in the
earlier 1750s, and later, the infamous Bounty venture to transplant in
Jamaica breadfruit from the South Seas. Architecturally applied, it
would seem to be the principle on which Chambers developed his designs
for a score of buildings after the manner of the Romans, Chinese, Moors,
and of other nations, erected at Kew Gardens by the time the Treaty of
Paris was signed in 1763.[8] In this concern he seconded but went beyond
the hopes of Horace Walpole and William Mason that "this whole kingdom
might soon become one magnificant vast Garden, bounded only by the sea"
(below, page 133). The syntax of Lewis Mumford seems apposite: of
Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York's Central Park just a
century later, Mumford has remarked that "By making nature urbane he
naturalized the city."[9] At Kew, by making the garden cosmopolitan,
Chambers helped to globalize the capital of empire and proposed the
world as Enlightened Eden.
It was not, of course, such national or global edenic visions which
chiefly exercised readers of Chambers' 1757 essay "Of the Art of Laying
Out Gardens Among the Chinese" and brought down upon his 1772
_Dissertation_ the ridicule which prompted the "Explanatory Discourse."
Rather, it was the lurid details through which both accounts maintained
that "The Chinese artists, knowing how powerfully contrast operates on
the mind, constantly practise sudden transitions, and a striking
opposition of forms, coulours, and shades." Though this principle earned
sympathetic response from theorists like Burke and Karnes at home and
Delille on the Continent, Chambers pressed his luck too far when he
described what he claimed to have observed, or heard from Chinese
observers, of "three different species of scenes, to which they give the
appellations of pleasing, horrid, and enchanted." Particularly
vulnerable were the programmed _frissons_ of "their scenes of horror":
"some miserable huts dispersed in the mountains serve, at once to
indicate the existence and wretchedness of the inhabitants."[10] By 1772
the _Schadenfreude_ has deepened: "Their scenes of terrour are composed
of gloomy woods, &c. gibbets, crosses, wheels, and the whole apparatus
of torture are seen from the roads. Here too they conceal in cavities,
on the summits of the highest mountains, foundries, lime-kilns, and
glass-works, which send forth large volumes of flame, and continued
columns of thick smoke, that give to these mountains the appearance of
volcanos." This was the sort of opening which William Mason exploited in
his _Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers_ of March, 1773:
Now to our lawns of dalliance and delight,
Join we the groves of horrour and affright;
This to achieve no foreign aids we try,
Thy gibbets, Bagshot! shall our wants supply;
Hounslow, whose heath sublimer terrour fills,
Shall with her gibbets lend her powder mills.[11]
Mason's _Heroic Epistle_ was one of the century's most popular poems
and, cheered on by Walpole, a viscously successful effort to tar with
Chambers' lavish brush his patron George Bute and other assorted Scots,
any critic of Brown, and the Tory establishment at large.
Yet behind Chambers' oriental screen the novelty, enduring interest, and
even the practicality of some of his ideas can be observed. That concern
to naturalize the smoky mills of industrialization may be developing a
hint (concerning Middleton Dale, in the Peak District) on page 94 of
Thomas Whately's supremely influential _Observations on Modern
Gardening_ (1770). If Chambers' generation was neither the first nor
last to grapple with what "progress" had done to the land, the English
landscaping movement presented a new stage for that encounter. While
Chet-qua's proposal to frame the dreary tracts around a metropolis "into
scenes of terror" seems less than helpful, how neatly he anticipates
Cezanne's transfer of his easel into the abandoned Bibemus Quarry (pp.
130-132). Foreshadowing William Cowper's satire of "Th' omnipotent
magician, Brown" in _The Task_, Chambers had warned that
estate-"improvement" could lead to irreparable devastation of the
nation's woodland. Several of Chambers' means to certain effects sound
more like a practical landscape architect at work than a Disneyland
impressario parading his promised thrills: when he urges diversification
of material relative to seasonal change or human entertainments, for
instance, or the use of wire fencing and other substitutes for the
ha-ha. His interest in the harmonizing of diverse but massed hues and
textures has been recognized as an early glimpse of the "English"
effects secured by Gertrude Jekyll a century and a quarter later.[12]
Though extravagances of Chambers' language distracted attention from the
liberalism of his views, such passages of the _Dissertation_ as pp.
49-50 read like the Picturesque identified by William Gilpin, Uvedale
Price, and Richard Payne Knight in the 1780s and '90s. Far from the
(Sino-British) imperial privity which Mason tartly mocked are Chet-qua's
suggestions that the country-house owner drop his palings and open his
grounds to "Holy-day folks," as he opens his Park to his kitchen-garden.
More than this, he should offer "meats for every palate," plan not for
his family or honored guests alone, but for tastes more susceptible to
surprise than theirs. Likewise the circuit plan would be well replaced
by another less coercive.[13] Points like these reveal in Chambers a
solicitude on behalf of a general public of garden-strollers not at all
necessarily landholding, nor self-conscious as "connoisseurs." Perhaps
this is why, when the planners grouped around Nikolaus Pevsner and his
_Architectural Review_ surveyed their task in postwar England, they
would find fresh applications for the term "picturesque" and fresh
relevance in this Tory's "Chinese" gardens.[14] Sinologists and
landscape-historians have long recognized, to be sure, that Chambers'
descriptions (like most of what the West has wrought in the name of
Chinese gardening since Sir William Temple enunciated his shadowy
_sharawadgi_ principle in 1685), while they may correctly celebrate
specific details, or the general principles of surprise and variety,
register no sensitivity to the Taoist or Buddhist teleology crucial to
oriental planning. What Chet-qua calls "supernatural scenery" is hence
"enchanted" by the same spirit of diversion animating the Druid or Dark
Walk and subterranean Fairy Music of Vauxhall Gardens, across the Thames
from Somerset House.[15] Enlightened secularization of the genuine
oriental principles of immanence and affect may, however, be exactly
what makes a paragraph on page 52 of the 1773 _Dissertation_ sound so
much like a ground-plan for a short story of strollers' interwoven and
inconsequential conversations and interior monologues, Virginia Woolf's
"Kew Gardens."
If allowances are made for the persistent difficulty of transcribing
Chinese phonemes, and for Chambers' dependence upon Cantonese rather
than Mandarin dialect, the oriental dress of the _Discourse_ is less
bogus than might be assumed. Chambers' varying spellings of the then
reigning emperor's name would exemplify the first problem, my failure to
authenticate the poem on pages 118-119 the second. (Over 42,000
unindexed poems in Mandarin are attributed to this emperor, now known
here as Ch'ien-lung.) Proustian though they may seem to Westerners, the
synesthetic effects of tea-taking and the evocativeness of the scents
and hues of "Mei-hoa" (plum-blossom), "fo-cheou" (chrysanthemum), and
pine are indeed celebrated in much Chinese poetry.[16] Whoever wrote the
poem, it aptly dramatizes the suggestible ethos which Chambers
recommends to English artists and their public.
This "Discourse" is appreciably more puckish in tone than the earlier
two-thirds of Chambers' published "Chinese" work. The half-title here,
page [109] of the second edition, heaps Chambers' own initialed
honors[17] upon the Canton "Gent." Chet-qua, and with the ironies of his
Preface and elaborate courtesies of the Introduction, the fun has begun.
Identification of a Chinese alter ego enables Chambers to claim a kind
of diplomatic immunity for both his enthusiasms and his judgments
against the English style. By half-heartedly ascribing the preceding 107
pages of _Dissertation_ also to Chet-qua, and receding as mere "Editor"
of the lovable old gourmet's remarks (page 148n), he trusts to keep one
step ahead of his Whig adversaries. With exemplary tolerance such as had
enhanced the European stereotype of the Chinese sage throughout the
century, Chet-qua finds more to commend in French and Italian gardens,
more to tease disarmingly in the Dutch, than Chambers had earlier.
Finally, since an actual Chinese artist-about-town usually known as
Chitqua had only recently returned to Canton, Chambers may have hoped
his masquerade could stir British hospitality for his ideas. Within
weeks of reaching London in August 1769, Chitqua had had a royal
audience. The miniature portrait busts he modelled in clay at ten
guineas apiece, as well as his delicate manners and physique ("the
eyelashes almost always in motion") earned the admiration of Wedgwood's
friend Thomas Bentley. One of his busts was shown in the 1770 Royal
Academy exhibition, and during that year he visited Oxford, met Chambers
and Bishop Percy, and sat down with Horace Walpole among others at the
first official Academy dinner. Lashes and all, he figures in Zoffany's
"Life School of the Royal Academy," painted in 1771. But what peculiarly
recommends Chitqua to Chambers' purposes here is perhaps a mob's
intervention at the start of his homeward voyage to Canton that spring,
when xenophobia and "the superstitious fears of the mariners" forced him
to return to London for another ship. On page 141 Chambers differs from
the _Gentleman's Magazine_ reporter who had Chitqua "accidentally ...
fall overboard" at Gravesend, but whatever the facts, the parallel to
Jonah at Joppa might be as clear to Chet-qua's adversaries as it was to
that reporter and win the "Discourse" a more candid hearing than the
_Dissertation_ had enjoyed.[18] To an unidentified reader of his first
edition Chambers had justified such artfulness, and his entire "Chinese"
myth for the promotion of a change in landscaping-style, this way: "I
thought it necessary to move in an exalted sphere. Our Gardeners, and I
fear our Connoisseurs too, are such _tame_ animals, that much sparring
is necessary to keep them properly on their haunches."[19] Such quixotic
energy even Mason had to salute, in the last line of his _Heroic
Epistle_.
Douglass College
Rutgers University
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1] The "Explanatory Discourse" is the last of Chambers' works to be
reissued in 20th-century facsimile. Chambers' _Designs of Chinese
Buildings_ (London, 1757), rpt. in facsim. (New York: Benjamin Blom,
1968), concludes its text with his essay "Of the Art of Laying Out
Gardens Among the Chinese," pp. 14-19, rpt. in John Dixon Hunt and Peter
Willis, eds., _The Genius of the Place_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1975),
pp. 283-288. _A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening_ (London, 1772), of
which the illus. title-page reappeared in the 2nd ed. (London, 1773),
hence here, was rpt. in facsim. ed. John Harris (Farnborough, Hants.:
Gregg International, 1972). I quote from pp. 111-113 of "An
Explanatory Discourse"; Chet-qua drops his mask on p. 159 below.
Concerning the fad see Hugh Honour, _Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay_
(London: John Murray, 1961), esp. ch. vi.
[2] John Harris, _Sir William Chambers, Knight of the Polar Star_
(University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1970), p. 24 and pls.
7, 94 (not to be confused with the earlier accepted practice of
designing ruins: pls. 31, 81). For the "fanciful" aspects of his town
house see pp. 11, 217.
[3] For the evidence of correspondence esp. from 1770-74 see Heather
Martienssen, "Chambers as a Professional Man," _Architectural Review_,
135, 2 (1964), 277-283.
[4] Harris gathers evidence for the meeting with Frederick, pp. 33-35,
and on pp. 18-19, surmises that Blondel's teaching "may well have been
the foundation of Chambers's eclecticism.... The choice of a Parisian
education underlines Chambers' European character."
[5] _Boswell's Life of Johnson_, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F.
Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), IV, 188.
[6] _Designs_, first page of unpaginated Preface; _Dissertation_ (1773),
p. iii. Cf. "William and John Halfpenny" [Michael Hoare], _Chinese and
Gothic Architecture Properly Ornamented_ (London, 1752), e.g. pl. 2.
[7] _Designs_, second page of unpaginated Preface.
[8] W. J. Bean, _The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew_ (London: Cassell,
1908), pp. 194-195, following Sir John Hill, _Hortus Kewensis_ (London,
1768); Chambers, _Plans, Elevations, Sections and Perspective Views of
the Gardens and Buildings at Kew_ (London, 1763).
[9] "Frederick Law Olmsted's Contribution," _Roots of Contemporary
American Architecture_, ed. Lewis Mumford (New York: Reinhold, 1952), p.
111. _Dissertation_ (1773), p. 103 and cf. his letter of 13 May 1772 in
Harris (1970), p. 192; Walpole, _On Modern Gardening_, ed. W. S. Lewis
(New York: Young Books, 1931), p. 66; Mason, _The English Garden_, Book
I (1772), final line.
[10] _Designs_, p. 15 (ed. Hunt and Willis, p. 284).
[11] Chambers' prose is cited _Dunciad_-fashion in the _Epistle, Minor
English Poets, 1660-1780: A Selection from Alexander Chalmers'_ The
English Poets [_1810_], ed. David P. French (New York: Benjamin Blom,
1967), VIII, 108. See Isabel W. Chase, "William Mason and Sir William
Chambers' Dissertation on Oriental Gardening," _JEGP_, 35 (1936),
517-530; R. C. Bald, "Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden,"
_JHI_, 11 (1950), 287-320.
[12] Cowper, Book III, "The Garden," 1. 766, in _A Collection of English
Poems 1660-1800_, ed. Ronald S. Crane (New York: Harper, 1932), p. 998;
_Dissertation_ (1773), pp. xi, 23-30, 37-39, 91-99; cf. Derek Clifford,
_A History of Garden Design_, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1966), pp.
211-212.
[13] "Discourse," pp. 125-128, 133, 137-138, 143, 155-156;
_Dissertation_ (1773), pp. vi, 53; Harris, p. 192.
[14] Pevsner, "The Other Chambers," _Architectural Review_, 101 (1947),
195-198.
[15] Temple, "Upon the Gardens of Epicurus," ed. Hunt and Willis, p. 99;
Osvald Siren, _China and Gardens of Europe of the Eighteenth Century_
(New York: Ronald, 1950), p. iv; "Discourse," pp. 155-156.
[16] I owe this information to Prof. Ching-I Tu of Livingston Coll. and
Dr. Nelson Chou of the East Asian Lib., both at Rutgers Univ. Likewise
helpful but in no way blameworthy in my remarks on matters Chinese were
Prof. King-Lui Wu and Mr. Antony Marr of Yale Univ. and Prof. Andrew
Plaks of Princeton Univ. Though some of the proper names Chet-qua uses
eluded verification, the worst blunder noted was "Ty," which means
"emperor," at p. 139_n_. Endowing Chet-qua with "nine whiskers" instead
of the traditional five beards sorts with the unusually narrow
proportions and numerous stories of the Kew Pagoda. Rhymes and short
syntactic groupings in italics, pp. 141, 158, are not Confucian; the
28th year of Ch'ien-lung's reign (p. [115]) would be 1764. Yet the idiom
in the final n., p. 163, is authentic.
[17] The initials stand for Fellow of the Royal Soc. of Sweden; Member
of the Royal Acad. of Arts, Paris; Member of the Italian Acad. of Arts,
Florence; Treasurer of the Royal Acad.; Comptroller General of His
Majesty's Works; Architectural Tutor to the Queen. Chambers'
international reputation was assured by his _Treatise on Civil
Architecture_ (1759).
[18] "Historical Chronicle," G.M., 41 (1771), 237-238; William T.
Whitley, _Artists and their Friends in England, 1700-1799_ (Boston:
Medici Society, 1928), I, 269-272; "Johnson, Percy, and Sir William
Chambers," _Bodleian Library Record_, 4 (1952-53), 291-292.
[19] Harris, p. 193 (Chambers' emphasis).
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The facsimile of "An Explanatory Discourse" is reproduced from a copy
(Shelf Mark: PML 53026) "annexed to" the second and last edition of _A
Dissertation on Oriental Gardening_ (1773) in The Pierpont Morgan
Library. The total type-page (p. 113) measures 208 x 127 mm.
A
DISSERTATION
ON
_ORIENTAL GARDENING_;
BY
S^r: WILLIAM CHAMBERS, Kn^t
_Comptroller General of his Majesty's Works._
[Illustration: Jacket Cover]
LONDON:
Printed by W. GRIFFIN, Printer to the ROYAL ACADEMY; sold by Him in
_Catharine-Street_: and by T. DAVIES, Bookseller to the ROYAL ACADEMY,
in _Russel-Street, Covent Garden_: also by J. DODSLEY, _Pall Mall_:
WILSON and NICOLL, _Strand_: J. WALTER, _Charing Cross_: and P.
ELMSLEY, _Strand_. 1772.
A
DISSERTATION
ON
_ORIENTAL GARDENING_;
BY
S^R WILLIAM CHAMBERS,
COMPTROLLER-GENERAL OF HIS MAJESTY'S WORKS, _&c._
THE SECOND EDITION, WITH ADDITIONS.
TO WHICH IS ANNEXED,
AN EXPLANATORY DISCOURSE,
BY
TAN CHET-QUA, of QUANG-CHEW-FU, Gent.
LONDON:
Printed by W. GRIFFIN, Printer to the ROYAL ACADEMY; sold by Him in
_Catharine-street_; and by T. DAVIES, Bookseller to the ROYAL ACADEMY,
in _Russel-street, Covent-Garden_: also by J. DODSLEY, _Pall-Mall_;
WILSON and NICOLL, _Strand_; J. WALTER, _Charing-Cross_; and P.
ELMSLEY, _Strand_. 1773.
AN
EXPLANATORY DISCOURSE,
BY
TAN CHET-QUA,
OF
Quang-Chew-fu, Gent. FRSS, MRAAP;
ALSO,
MIAAF, TRA, CGHMW and ATTQ.
WHEREIN
The PRINCIPLES laid down in the Foregoing
DISSERTATION, are illustrated and
applied to PRACTICE.
PREFACE.
Every new system naturally meets with opposition; when the monster
Novelty appears, all parties, alarmed at the danger, unite to raise a
clamour: each cavils at what it doth not like, or doth not comprehend,
till the whole project is pulled to pieces, and the projector stands
plumed of every feather; not only robbed of the praise due to his labour
and good intentions, but, like a common enemy, branded with scorn and
abuse. In the first hurry of criticism, every deviation is accounted an
error; every singularity an extravagance; every difficulty a visionary's
dream: warm with resentment, biassed by interests and prejudices, the
angry champions of the old, rarely show mercy to the new; which is
almost always invidiously considered, and too often unjustly condemned.
Sensible of these difficulties, the Author of the foregoing
Dissertation, written in direct opposition to the stream of fashion,
harboured no sanguine hopes of fame from his Publication: far from
expecting at the first, either applause or encouragement, he even judged
artifice necessary to screen him from resentment; and cloathed truth in
the garb of fiction, to secure it a patient hearing.
The success of his little work, however, in one sense, far exceeded
expectation: at its first appearance here, it found not only a patient,
but a very indulgent reception; and it has since been equally fortunate
in France, and other parts of Europe; where Monsieur Delarochette's
elegant translation has made it known.
Yet flattering as this extensive suffrage may seem, it is in reality
rather mortifying to the Author; who finds, from the nature of the
encomiums bestowed upon his performance, that it has been more generally
liked than understood; and that, whilst a few have honoured it with a
deliberate reading, and separated the substance from the vehicle in
which it was contained, far the greater number have mistaken the mask
for the reality, and considered it simply as a pleasing tale; as the
mere recital of a traveller's observation; or, as the luxuriant
effusions of a fertile imagination, a splendid picture of visionary
excellence.
Whether these misapprehensions arose from want of perspicuity in the
writer, or want of attention in the readers, admits of no dispute; the
former was most probably the case. The Author therefore, who wishes to
be perfectly understood, and is more ambitious of being useful than
entertaining, humbly begs leave to offer, at the end of this second
edition, such reasons and explanations as seem necessary, either to
remove doubts, or clear obscurities; he flatters himself they will be
found sufficient, and serve to place the work in its true, its most
advantageous light.
Of these illustrations he saw the necessity some time ago, and framed
them into a Discourse supposed to be pronounced by Chet-qua, then in
England; judging it, at that time, a sort of propriety to put in the
mouth of a Chinese, what farther information was wanted relative to his
country.
But as there is now no longer any necessity for disguise, both the
Dissertation and Explanatory Discourse ought certainly to appear in
their natural dress. To new-model them, however, would require more time
than the Author can possibly spare; he therefore has republished the
Dissertation, in its original form, and the Discourse as it was
originally written; hoping the indulgent reader will pardon these
defects, and gather the fruit, if there be any to gather, without
minding the trees on which it grows.
_Introduction._
All the world knew Chet-qua, and how he was born at Quang-chew-fu,[20]
in the fourth moon of the year twenty-eight; also how he was bred a
face-maker, and had three wives, two of whom he caressed very much; the
third but seldom, for she was a virago, and had large feet. He dressed
well, often in thick sattin; wore nine whiskers and four long nails,
with silk boots, callico breeches, and every other ornament that
Mandarins are wont to wear; equalling therein the prime macarones, and
scavoir vivres, not only of Quang-chew, but even of Kyang-ning, or
Shun-tien-fu. Of his size; he was a well-spoken portly man, for a
Chinese; a pretty general scholar; and, for a heathen, a very compleat
gentleman. He composed a tieh-tse, or billet-doux, at pleasure; recited
verses, either in Mantchou or Chinese, and sung love-songs in many
languages. He likewise danced a fandango, after the newest taste of
Macao, played divinely upon the bag-pipe, and made excellent remarks;
which, when he lodged at Mr. Marr's, in the Strand, he would repeat to
his friends over a pipe, as often as they pleased; for he was fond of
smoaking, provided the tobacco was good; and, upon these occasions, was
always vastly pleasant, and very communicative.
Amongst his favourite topics were painting, music, architecture and
gardening; to the last of which he seemed most affected, often
disserting thereon till he was tired, and the audience fast asleep; for
the tone of his voice was like opium to the hearers; his method was
diffuse, and the subject, though a good one, not generally interesting.
One day he launched out into a long description of the Eastern Gardens,
especially those of his own country, to which he was exceedingly
partial; and, in the conclusion, compared them to a splendid feast, at
which there were pleasures for every sense, and food for every fancy;
whilst our Gardens, he said, were like Spartan broth, which was
disgustful to all but Spartan palates; or like the partial niggardly
treats of the fable, adapted only to organs of a peculiar construction:
he advanced many other odd positions, spoke very freely, as well of our
Gardeners, as Gardens, and ended recommending the Chinese taste, in
preference to all others.
We were diverted with the discourse, from its singularity, and the
variety of new ideas in which it abounded; yet as it ran in direct
opposition to the general opinion and usage of England, and recommended
a system which appeared to us rather visionary than practicable, we
animadverted upon all its parts with the utmost freedom; neither sparing
the speech nor speaker in any particular.
The severity of our criticism at first disconcerted poor Chet-qua, who
remained silent, and in apparent confusion; but, after a short pause, he
reassumed his usual good humour, his countenance cleared up, he arose,
bowed to the company, and stroking his nine whiskers, began the
following discourse.
DISCOURSE, _&c._
_Tan lou ty tchan yue[21]
Ko ou, pou ko choue.
Ou yun king tai pan
Fou fou teou lo ty_
If, in the hurry and warmth of speaking, Chet-qua has used expressions
that seemed disrespectful, or inadvertently started notions that
appeared extravagant, as you, Gentlemen, are pleased to assert, it is
more than he intended; his sole aim at this meeting, has been to point
out a style of Gardening preferable to your's; and to shew how much more
may be done in that Art, than has hitherto been thought on, by your or
any other European nation: to enumerate impossibilities, or amuse an
audience with golden dreams and glittering shadows, would answer no
useful purposes; and could, therefore, neither be the business nor
intention of Chet-qua, who speaks not for the pleasure of speaking, nor
with a desire of tickling the ear, but with the hope of being
serviceable; he laments his want of perspicuity, to which alone your
misapprehensions must be imputed; and begs leave to trespass on your
patience a few moments longer, to explain himself more clearly, and
endeavour to remove your prejudices against him.
He is sorry to have been under a necessity of censuring, even in a
distant manner, what seemed to him imperfect amongst you; but whoever
would be instrumental in the advancement of science, must declare his
mind freely, and sometimes enforce his precepts by examples that exist:
his observations have been as general as the subject would permit; for
it is never his inclination to give offence; yet where truth is to be
investigated, the truth must necessarily be told; else little or no
progress can ever be made: where men play the sycophants, and tacitly
suffer, or meanly applaud, what they do not approve; no amendment can
ever be expected.
It is true, that dissentions in opinion, however well meant, will often
bear an invidious aspect, and always must offend some interested
individuals; yet, to the community, they are generally advantageous,
and should always be favourably received, as they give birth to new
discoveries, and ultimately point out the highest perfection: had no man
ever ventured to dissent from his neighbour, our age would be as dark as
were those of Fo-hii, Shing tong, or Whoang-tii;[22] and I am firmly
persuaded, that your English Gardening would now have been much more
perfect, had any one ever dared to dispute its excellence: but to
dissent, is an unthankful business; a dangerous talk, that few have
spirits to undertake, particularly where party-rage is violent, at it
now and then seems to be amongst you.--But I come to the point.
In China, our large Gardens are obtained at an almost incredible
expence, and attended with many inconveniencys: amongst you, whose
policy, whose manners are totally different from ours, they might often
be had at a moderate charge, and without much trouble; for formidable
as they may at first appear, it is certain that most of their scenery is
easily executed, when proper opportunities occur, which is frequently
the case in Europe, particularly in England; where your illustrious
families have large domains; where agriculture is neater and more
various than in other countries; and where the face of nature is in
general more luxuriant; as well as better contrasted.
It is natural enough for a stranger to be dazzled with the splendor of
our Oriental plantations; upon a cursory inspection, to conclude them
too vast, too magnificent, too expensive for European imitation; and
that, in your part of the world, the greatest princes should not be
indulged with such articles of luxury, calculated, as they seem, to
exhaust their treasures, waste their lands, rob and oppress their
subjects: but a more attentive examination will probably give birth to
more favourable opinions, and serve to prove, that not only your
princes, but even your private gentlemen, may emulate us in this
particular very safely; and that our style of Gardening may be adopted
amongst you, even in its whole extent, without being attended with any
of the inconveniences just now recited.
It is not the fence that constitutes the Garden; Cobham, Stourton,
Blenheim, would still be what they are, though the pales or walls by
which they are enclosed were taken away: neither is privacy necessary to
the essence of a Garden; for Richmond and Kew are surely the same, when
open to all the world, as when they are only accessible to the Royal
Family; nor is useful or profitable culture incompatible with the idea,
either of our Chinese, or your English Gardening.
Any tract of land, therefore, whose characteristick expressions have
been strengthened by art, and in which the spontaneous arrangements of
nature have been corrected, improved and adorned by the hand of taste,
ought to be considered as a Garden, though only fenced with common
hedges, and although the roads or paths passing through it be publick,
and the grounds of which it is composed cultivated to the utmost
advantage.
There remains then no obstacle to your rivalling the Chinese, either in
the grandeur or extent of their Gardens: in which, you seem to fix, the
insuperable difficulties of the imitation; since you have parks,
forests, manors and royalties, some even in private hands, more
extensive than is necessary; and since these may be so improved, and
converted into gardens upon the plan now mentioned, without waste of
land, without invasion of property, without annoyance or seclusion of
the public, and certainly with less damage or expence to the owner, than
are usually incurred in the article of your common Gardening; as no
chargeable keeping or fencing would be necessary, no grounds
unprofitably employed, no considerable assistance from art wanted: for
the features of real nature, being in themselves generally more perfect,
as well as greater than the finest imitations, require very few helps;
seldom any that are expensive.
Every artist, therefore, who has the fortune to meet with patrons of
large possessions, and liberal sentiments, may give full scope to his
imagination, and boldly apply whatever he has seen, heard, or his own
fancy may have suggested, that is great, extraordinary, or surprising:
instead of confining his views to a few acres, to form a trifling
composition, scarcely superior to the desert at a festival; and which,
insignificant as it would be, none but the healthful and vigorous could
ever see; he may convert a whole province into a Garden; where the
spectator, instead of toiling on foot, as usual, to see a few nothings,
and performing more revolutions than a horse in a mill, may wander over
a whole country at his ease, in ships or in barges, in carriages or on
horse-back, feasting the sight with scenes of the boldest dimensions,
and contemplating the luxuriant varied productions of Nature, improved
and nobly enriched by Art.
And permit me to say, that Gardens of this sort, would not only be more
magnificent, but also much more beautiful and perfect in every respect,
than any even amongst the best of your artificial performances. In the
great style of Gardening, neatness is not only superfluous, but
destructive of the principal intent: the common roads, bridleways and
paths, of a country, however wild, are always preferable to the stiff,
formal, made walks of a Garden; they are, in themselves, grander, more
natural, and may, with a very little assistance; a few accompanyments,
be made as commodious, as rich, as varied, and as pleasant.
Fields covered with corn, turneps, beans, potatoes, hemp, or productions
of a similar nature; meadows, pasture lands, hop grounds, orchards, and
other parts of English culture; interwoven with common hedges, or
blended with accidental plantations, require little, if any assistance
from Art, to be more picturesque than lawns the most curiously dotted
with clumps; and villages, country churches, farm-houses or cottages,
when placed with judgement, and designed with taste, enrich and adorn a
landscape as well as more expensive structures.
The rivers of Nature flow in forms that Art can never equal: their
natural modifications, particularly in mountainous places, are
sufficiently numerous; a little management heightens or diminishes all
their expressions, varies their appearances, and adapts them to scenes
of any character: their banks are soon adorned, even in the richest
manner; for roses, a thousand other shrubs, and most perennial flowers,
will grow as easily, and with as little culture, as primroses and briars
do. A few of these, a little planting properly employed, and blended
with rural buildings, bridges, ruins, monumental urns, and other
trifling decorations, spread over the whole an appearance that equals,
even surpasses the most elaborate cultivation.
In every large tract of land, there generally are some places abundantly
supplied with water, which often flows through uncouth marshy bottoms of
little use or value to the owner: by raising heads at their extremities,
these are easily overflowed; and lakes of very considerable dimensions
may thus be obtained, often without much trouble, always with great
advantages, as well in point of profit as of pleasure; and wherever it
may be necessary to dig, in order to give a proper depth to the water,
the earth may be raised into islands of various shapes, which serve to
complicate the forms, to enrich and beautify the scenery.
Though woods, from various causes, are now more rare than heretofore
amongst you, yet are there, in most parts, some still remaining; their
natural beauties are many, and little more is left for art to do in
them, than to form roads, to thin or thicken them occasionally; where it
may be wanting, to intersperse, amongst the plantations, a few proper
shrubs and flowers; to open recesses, and to decorate them with objects;
this done, they will be infinitely superior, in every respect, to any of
the gaudy trifling confused plantations with which all your English-made
Gardens are so crouded.
England abounds with commons and wilds, dreary, barren, and serving only
to give an uncultivated appearance to the country, particularly near the
metropolis: to beautify these vast tracts of land, is next to an
impossibility; but they may easily be framed into scenes of terror,
converted into noble pictures of the sublimest cast, and, by an artful
contrast, serve to enforce the effect of gayer and more luxuriant
prospects.
On some of them are seen gibbets, with wretches hanging in terrorem upon
them; on others, forges, collieries, mines, coal tracts, brick or lime
kilns, glass-works, and different objects of the horrid kind: what
little vegetation they have, is dismal; the animals that feed upon it,
are half-famished to the artist's hands; and the cottagers, with the
huts in which they dwell, want no additional touches, to indicate their
misery: a few uncouth straggling trees, some ruins, caverns, rocks,
torrents, abandoned villages, in part consumed by fire, solitary
hermitages, and other similar objects, artfully introduced and blended
with gloomy plantations, would compleat the aspect of desolation, and
serve to fill the mind, where there was no possibility of gratifying the
senses.
In prosecuting a plan of this extensive nature, many other opportunities
would present themselves to the able artist, of dignifying nature, and
of heightening his compositions with all the force of novelty and
grandeur; stone quarries, chalk pits, mines, might as easily be framed
into vast amphitheatres, rustic arcades and perystiles, extensive
subterraneous habitations, grottos, vaulted roads, and passages, as into
other shapes; hills might, without much difficulty, be transformed into
stupendous rocks, by partial incrustations of stone, judiciously mixed
with turf, fern, wild shrubs and forest trees; gravel pits, or other
similar excavations, might be converted into the most romantic scenery
imaginable, by the addition of some planting, intermixed with ruins,
fragments of sculpture, inscriptions, or any other little
embellishments; and, in short, there would be no deviation, however
trifling, from the usual march of nature, but what would suggest, to a
fruitful imagination, some extraordinary arrangement, something to
disguise her vulgarity, to rouse the attention of the spectator, and to
excite in his mind a succession of strong and opposite sensations.