SHARAWADGI

The Romantic Return
to Nature
by
Ciaran Murray

International Scholars Publications

An Imprint of Rowman and Littlefield

THE mysterious sharawadgi, or asymmetry of the Romantic garden, has long intrigued historians. Here Ciaran Murray locates its origin in Japan, and follows its trajectory from the Dutch trading-post at Nagasaki to Temple, British ambassador at The Hague and patron of Swift. For Swift’s friend Addison, the irregular garden symbolised the liberty of nature invoked in the English revolution. In its cosmological implications, it fused with the findings of Galileo, bringing the dynamic universe of the Tao to bear on the surrealist vision of Swift and the unlimited vista of the Romantic elysium. Sharawadgi became the leitmotif of the English eighteenth century, underlying the subversive natural liberty of Walpole’s Gothic and Gibbon’s Germans, until its appearance in the French revolution induced the return to order of Burke. Ciaran Murray’s narrative unfolds with the immediacy of a novel – except that it is actual, and dramatically alters the landscape of intellectual history.

Preface

‘Some years ago, on a winter evening, as I watched the light fade on Mount Leinster from Oak Park, near Carlow, it was borne in upon me that the darkening lake in the middle distance, with its woods and its island, was as deliberate a creation as the Roman archway through which I had entered. I had lately come from Entsuji, in Kyoto, where the dark trunks of the cryptomeria frame the pale slopes of Mount Hiei in a geometrical arrangement; and for a moment I saw one in terms of the other. Each appeared to function on the principle of shakkei, or borrowed landscape, being built around the view of a distant mountain.
I spoke of this to Robert J. Smith, of Cornell, who sent me to the rare book cage of the Olin Library, and to Sirén’s China and the Gardens of Europe of the Eighteenth Century, where I learned of the Asian antecedents of the English landscape garden; and, as I read on into the subject, this came to seem a fundamental notation for the eighteenth century. I have attempted, therefore, to record the phenomenon, from its discovery and domestication at the beginning of the century to its strange disappearance, or transformation, at the end.’

Introduction

‘The sequence is coherent and irrefutable. The Restoration diplomat William Temple wrote a spellbound account of the gardens of the “Chineses”. The Queen Anne essayist Joseph Addison held these up as a pattern for England. The Georgian poet Alexander Pope put Addison’s programme into practice. But to state this is only to pose further questions. Temple does not merely supply exotic information; he confers prestige upon it. This would seem to imply a certain originality of perception. Addison does not rest content with paraphrase; he urges adoption of the alien schema. This would seem to indicate a certain boldness of thought. Pope does not simply concur; he builds, we are told, a “setting that expressed him” out of the creation of a man that he hated. This would seem to involve a certain paradox.
Here is the tale of three men and an idea; and none of these three, as conventionally understood, can have done what he did.’

Chapters

PART I: THE TREE OF LIFE: Origins of Romanticism

1. The Case of the Fastidious Envoy. Temple, British ambassador to the Netherlands, then the only European country in contact with Japan, identifies the principle of nature in Taoist government and the invisible order of the Sino-Japanese garden.
2. The Fireworks Night of Joseph Addison. Addison, finding in the second a metaphor for the first – as seen in the English revolution – initiates Romanticism.
3. Fair Thames and Double Scenes. An achievement concealed under the inconsistent and incoherent fabrications whereby Pope has contaminated the sources of intellectual history.

PART II: THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: Implications of Romanticism

4. The Singular Demon of Doctor Bentley. All the above unfolds against the recent astronomical validation of the unlimited universe posited in antiquity, which gives contemporary relevance to Temple’s identification with Epicurus, and induces metaphysical vertigo in his secretary Swift.
5. The Spacious Firmament on High. But exhilaration in Swift’s friend Addison.
6. Il Riposo di Claudio. And inspires the infinite vistas of Claude Lorrain: whose combination of these with classical architecture provides the blueprint for the English landscape garden; restoring in this the sacred landscape of antiquity.

PART III: IMPERIAL PARADISE: Ramifications of Romanticism

7. The Garden Invades the House. Horace Walpole revives the Gothic style in the name of sharawadgi, the Japanese word signifying asymmetry cited by Temple in relation to the naturalist principle of the Sino-Japanese garden.
8. The Eternal Moment. As it is again by Gibbon when he contrasts Gothic dynamism with the stasis of declining Rome: so formulating the central metaphor of the English eighteenth century as Germanic by origin and Roman by achievement.
9. A Vista to the Gallows. By the same token, the French revolution seemed an assault on an aristocratic paradise to him, Walpole and Burke: the last of whom initiated the nineteenth-century formula whereby Gothic building became an image of the growth of institutions through time – and so, like the classical, conservative – while the garden returned to formality.

‘Sharawadgi traces the history of English landscape design to the decentralised gardens of Japan. The author covers the romantic period during the eighteenth century, and the key personalities of William Temple, Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope. Murray explores the psychological subtleties of these men as well as the interchange between East and West. A fascinating read for students of Asia or English romanticism’ – www.amazon.com

‘Lucid and masterful...an important book’ – Seamus Deane, Dublin.

‘Ciaran Murray’s monumental Sharawadgi...quietly revolutionises our understanding of eighteenth-century intellectual history...One senses an energy and tension in Murray’s own journey, a great personal and psychic quest to unravel the truth of this most important historical transition in human feeling’ – Peter McMillan, Journal of Irish Studies, Tokyo.

‘Murray...reviews, with trenchant and illuminating commentary, a succession of the leading eighteenth-century personalities and key events in the fields of landscape, literature, art, architecture, philosophy, politics, science and religion...Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature should be read by serious students not only of garden history, but also of eighteenth-century culture in general...Murray’s impressive scholarship is enlivened by wit and the sheer quality and sparkle of the writing’ – Peter Hayden, Garden History, London.

‘Impressionistic...sharing much in tone with Lytton Strachey and...Edward Gibbon’ – Donald Richie, Japan Times, Tokyo.

‘Sharawadgi in itself – unusual and beautiful – this book is truly remarkable: rigorous, brilliant, vivid’ – Dimitri Shvidkovsky, Bulletin of the Journal of Decorative Art, Moscow.

‘A readable, new, fascinating, tautly-argued account of the influence of Japan on Romanticism’ – Pádraig Ó Snodaigh, Irish Times, Dublin.

‘The...word “sharawadgi” might as well be “shazam” for all of the power that Murray has invested it with...but what sets this scholarly book apart from the others on the shelf is its companionability and charm’ – Charlie Canning, Kansai Time Out, Kobe.

‘In-depth research’ – Lei Gao & Jan Woudstra, Shakkei.

‘Great book’ – Marilyn Gaull, The Wordsworth Circle, New York.

Sharawadgi Agonistes

Act I

Under the bam
Under the boo
Under the bamboo tree
T. S. ELIOT

When an excerpt from my book Sharawadgi appeared in Garden History, its then editor described its argument as ‘convincing’.¹ However, in a later issue, Wybe Kuitert asserts the opposite, alleging that my reflections on the ‘meaning and origin of the term Sharawadgi…lack conviction’: the reason given being that they ‘do not consider seventeenth-century sources’.²

As stated, this is unsustainable. Five of the nine chapters in my book have to do with the seventeenth century; all cite contemporary sources. Prof. Kuitert, on the other hand, provides no evidence for his assertion, merely referring us to ‘Wybe Kuitert, “Japanese art, aesthetics, and a European discourse: unraveling Sharawadgi”: which, we are assured, is to be found in ‘Japan Review (International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto), 26 (forthcoming)’. That might be difficult: Japan Review 26 was already in print, and Prof. Kuitert’s article was not in it. Nor would one expect it to be: it is a special issue devoted to erotic prints (shunga).

Kuitert’s reading of sharawadgi as a combination of share (‘refinement’) and aji (‘taste’) is not original: I have cited the suggestion that this was conflated with shorowaji (‘not being regular’). The case that Prof. Kuitert has to meet if he omits the latter is the existence of a word which not only means what Sir William Temple said it meant, but has been triangulated with the time and location of the Dutch settlement in Japan.³ That this should be coincidence seems incredible; but as we shall see, Prof. Kuitert expects us to believe still more extravagant propositions.

The question is not addressed in the essay Prof. Kuitert credits with having ‘inspired’ him, Makoto Nakamura’s ‘Sharawadgi ni tsuite’. This is a brief and avowedly tentative introduction to the subject; and, for what it is worth, since published in 1987 was unavailable to me when in 1980 I began the dissertation (on the ‘Intellectual Origins of the England Landscape Garden’, 1985) which underlies my book.⁴ At that time, and indeed for some time afterwards, a major obstacle to identifying sharawadgi as Japanese was a general belief among historians of architecture and the garden (with the formidable support of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner) that it was Chinese. That is what Temple seems to say, and what I had to explain: which I did by referring to – yes – seventeenth-century sources.⁵

Here again Prof. Kuitert puts forward an alternative: ‘In England, after war with the Dutch, it was deemed safer to distance oneself from these drunken and profane merchants living on an “indigested vomit of the sea”’. But if Temple was intimidated by prejudice against the Dutch, why is so much of his writing taken up with sympathetic accounts of them?⁶ However, Prof. Kuitert goes on: ‘Neither did Temple want to associate his deviation from the classics of Vitruvius’ – sic – ‘by referring to something as light-hearted as a robe from Japan… Temple was impressed by Chinese statesmanship and Confucianism; these were the things he liked to associate with his understanding of sharawadgi’. This is not original either;⁷ and the conspiracy theory bound up with it seems both implausible and superfluous. Implausible, because it does not explain some of the facts; superfluous, because all of them can be explained without it. Here is what Temple wrote: ‘And whoever observes the work upon the best India gowns, or the painting upon their best skreens or purcellans, will find their beauty is all of this kind (that is) without order’.⁸ If China is camouflage for Japan, why drag in India? The most natural reading, it still seems to me, is that Temple speaks of Asian design in general: a contention I have supported from – yes again, I am afraid – seventeenth-century sources, including a visitor to Temple’s house and a book he is known to have read, in terms of which ‘India’ includes China and Japan, and the two latter are interchangeable.⁹

What is in principle novel and to be welcomed is an attempt to expand the Dutch context for Temple’s information which has long been acknowledged by those who accept a Japanese origin for the term.¹⁰ This Prof. Kuitert does through consideration of Constantijn Huygens, providing a plan of his garden – which, however, shows it as uncompromisingly geometrical. Prof. Kuitert nevertheless insists that the area within the ‘blocks’ was ‘planted asymmetrically with trees, as in an Italian bosco’. This hardly proves Japanese precedent: limited irregularity was standard in the baroque garden, and both Temple and Addison had seen examples;¹¹ what was different about sharawadgi was that it involved asymmetry as its central principle: in Temple’s phrase, gardens ‘wholly irregular’.¹²

Prof. Kuitert cites Huygens on the asymmetrical designs that adorned Japanese clothing; but this is hardly indicative of support for them.

• I ended up with the unequal of the Japanese robe
• The incomprehensible of its staining so bewildered
• That makes the dress a decoration, but makes me ill at ease;
• And if I would happen to to tread such paths,
• Me thinks it would be like a gamble, or whatever,
• Where this tree would stand, or where that path would end.
• I would be discomfited, and where I came to turn,
• There would my head be turning, just like the planter did
• Who carelessly had everything diverged from its correct position.¹³

This sounds like a satire on sharawadgi, or at least a sense of being dizzied by it; and Prof. Kuitert provides no better evidence to the contrary than an assertion that the kimono, since it was symmetrical in shape though asymmetrical in pattern, ‘fitted precisely what Huygens was aiming at in his garden with its symmetric blocks of wilderness’. To describe this as unconvincing would scarcely do justice to the jugglery whereby a document is called in evidence for its diametrical opposite. And, in the end, Prof. Kuitert concedes of Temple: ‘Strikingly, he elevated lack of order to the level of a taste in beauty, whereas for Huygens the discussion was not much more than a kind of explanatory apology for a design idea’ – if it was that.

Prof. Kuitert further informs us that, in giving his essay the title ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’, Temple alluded to ‘a non-biblical, classical philosophy’. He did a great deal more, if we are to trust the seventeenth-century sources in which ‘the arguments of Epicurus had returned with new and terrible force’, consequent on the discovery by Galileo of an asymmetrical universe. I have devoted some space to this, and its linkage with the worldview of the Tao, as it affected Temple and Addison, as well as Temple’s secretary and Addison’s friend, Swift.¹⁴ It seems to me that if we are to account for the reception of sharawadgi in England, we must attempt to explain how the individuals responsible could have felt affinity with it.

All of this Prof. Kuitert glosses over, merely following his mention of Epicurus with the assertion: ‘Temple referred to classicists such as Horace and Varro as his teachers on the fruit garden, although all his fruits were imported from the Continent’ (sic). Even what he grew beside the Thames?¹⁵

• I may truly say, that the French, who have eaten my peaches and grapes at Sheen…
• have generally concluded, that the last are as good as any they have eaten in France, on this side Fontainebleau; and the first as good as any they have eat in Gascony…
• Italians have agreed, my white figs to be as good as any of that sort in Italy.¹⁶

I suppose I should not blame Prof. Kuitert for misrepresenting what I have written when he has failed to read properly the document on which he proposes to set me right.

Prof. Kuitert ends at the point where Addison assimilates Temple’s information; but the genius of Addison was that he transformed it by means of a general aesthetic that fed into Romanticism. I have sketched something of this;¹⁷ but no more imagined I had said the last word than the first: ‘So large a canvas made imperative that impressionism which, Butterfield has observed, is the inevitable effect of ellipsis: “the selection of facts for the purpose of maintaining the impression – maintaining, in spite of omissions, the inner relations of the whole”’.¹⁸ By implication, one might envisage any number of further investigations. I have myself attempted something of this kind in a subsequent volume, tracing sharawadgi and its sequels through the lens of Irish literature.¹⁹ A similar volume from a Dutch perspective might prove useful; meanwhile, Prof. Kuitert has adduced nothing to alter the conviction – tends, if anything, to intensify it – that what matters about sharawadgi is what happened to it in England.

Act II

And calm of mind, all passion spent
JOHN MILTON

In ‘Re-solving Sharawadgi: Some Thoughts on its Chinese Roots’, Lei Gao & Jan Woudstra wonder whether there is not after all a Chinese source for sharawadgi:²⁰ disagreeing with me, one might say, in most agreeable fashion. They suggest, accordingly, a possible solution in shīyihuajing 詩意畫境 or shīqinghuayi 詩情畫意, ‘poetic and picturesque emotions’; and go on to expatiate on ‘how the Chinese appreciated the beauty of nature as seen through their gardens’; on how deeply they loved ‘these landscapes and the philosophy embedded in them’. Here they preach to the converted: nobody with even the most cursory knowledge of the Chinese landscape tradition would question its subtlety and depth;²¹ I have pointed out, moreover, that the gardens of Japan were continually influenced by those of China, and Temple was aware of the similarity. A book he is known to have read shows a naturalistic Chinese garden, with pine-trees, waterfall and jagged stonework; and he knew, too, that the Chinese imperial palace was surrounded by ‘large and delicious gardens’, containing ‘artificial rocks and hills’.²²

However, the authors say of Chinese nature poetry that ‘there is no reference to irregularity, nor does it mention anything being irregular’. Precisely: the naturalistic irregularity that struck Temple so forcibly derived from his coming from a tradition in which gardens were overwhelmingly geometrical. One does not argue that Temple was versed in the inner meaning of the Sino-Japanese tradition; the whole point of his account, and its historical importance, derives from his having been an outsider with an altogether different world-view. Methodologically, therefore, one has to say that Temple’s lack of schooling in the intricacies of the Sino-Japanese landscape tradition not only does not detract from his observations, but constitutes their worth: a reaction of awed surprise that nevertheless is willing to acknowledge value in this exotic way of doing things.

Further points of methodology that arise include the following concession by the authors:

While checking the database of Si Ku Quan Shu (The Complete Library of Four Treasures), the biggest collection of Chinese books before the 18th century, it appears that the four characters shī yi hua jing 詩意畫境 were not used together in written language, however there are hundreds of examples where shī yi 詩意 (spirit of poem) and hua jing 畫境 (picturesque scenery) are used to describe an admirable quality of a painting or landscape. Additionally shīqinghuayi 詩情畫意 (poetic beauty; picturesque scenery) as a single phrase appeared twelve times, which was first used by the Chinese several centuries before Temple, as an expression of their sentiment towards a landcape.

One must observe, then, that in common with previous attempts to find a Chinese equivalent for Temple’s term, shīyihuajing is not ‘supported by actual usage’; while shīqinghuayi, like these earlier proposals,²³ sounds a great deal more remote from sharawadgi than the Japanese shorowaji.

The authors attempt to meet this objection by appealing to Cantonese, in terms of which they propose ‘si-ji-wa-ging’ for shīyihuajing, ‘si-tsing- wa-ji’ for shīqinghuayi, and ‘si-wa-ji-ging’ for shīhuayijing 詩畫意境 (‘poetic and picturesque landscape or conception’). To this reader, ‘si-ji-wa-ging’, ‘si-tsing-wa-ji’ and ‘si-wa-ji-ging’ still sound very distant from sharawadgi; and, though we are told that in ‘the 17th century most European visitors…lived in areas of Southeast China such as Macao and Canton’, we are not informed as to any connection Temple may have had with them. His connection with people who had visited Japan, on the other hand, is a matter of record.²⁴ As I have observed, though Temple

was aware from his reading that Chinese gardens were irregular…on those of Japan he had access to more privileged information. For he was accredited to the one country in Europe to which Japan was still open by trade; that trade was conducted through Djakarta by the Dutch East India company; and it was with that company that, in his trade negotiations in Holland, he had had to deal.²⁵

The authors, to their credit, do not insist on their hypothesis; and one is unwilling to engage in controversy with research which admits its limitations with such candour, and whose allusions to the present author are phrased with such courtesy, the result being a model of civilised dissent. All I would do, then, is recapitulate my reasons for suggesting what I did: i) Temple’s contemporaries regularly interchanged China and Japan; ii) he was aware that the gardens of the two were similar; iii) he had met Netherlanders who had served in Japan; iv) the usage shorowaji points to the time and place of the Dutch settlement; v) it indicates asymmetry, as Temple said it did;²⁶ vi) we are informed that knowledge by the Dutch in Japan and their Japanese interlocutors of each other’s languages was far from perfect; vii) so that, if conflated with the Japanese words share and aji (‘refinement’ and ‘taste’), shorowaji covers all of Temple’s claims for it.²⁷

A question raised in the course of the article involves the issue of priority: ‘A paper published by Takau Shimada one year before Murray’s thesis… suggested that…the word would better have been translated as sawaraji (or sawarazu or their derivatives), which means “let’s not touch”, “let things as they are”. This solution provides a different angle of understanding oriental gardens, which appreciates nature as art’.²⁸ My reply to this is that I became aware of it only after my book had been published; and that, once I had, it still seemed to me that shorowaji was closer both to sharawadgi and to Temple’s context of ‘gardens wholly irregular’.

However, to dispose of the question of priority once and for all, let me state that my first publication on the subject had been twenty years previously, when in 1978, at the request of a colleague at Shizuoka University, I published an account of the ongoing research which was to issue in the dissertation of 1980-85 alluded to above.²⁹ This article, ‘Kyoto and the Origins of English Romanticism’,³⁰ was distributed elsewhere in Japan; and, as I was informed by the colleague responsible, stimulated considerable interest in the subject. Here I cited the suggestion that sharawadgi represented the Japanese shorowaji made in 1931 and 1934 by E. V. Gatenby,³¹ a member of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and supported in 1968 by another member, Ivan Morris. I myself, as I have acknowledged, was introduced to the subject by yet another member, Robert J. Smith.³² This to get the question out of the way: it seems to me that, if there is to be any credit assigned for priority, it belongs properly to Gatenby.

What I attempted was to offer solutions to the difficulties created by Gatenby’s hypothesis. Of these, two stand out. The first, outlined above, is Temple’s citation of his source as ‘Chinese’. The second, which had even more formidable support at the time I wrote, was the contention that sharawadgi, whether Chinese or Japanese, was irrelevant to the naturalism of the English landscape garden. This derived ultimately from Pope’s declaration, a year after Addison, paraphrasing Temple, had made a pioneering proposal in this regard, that he, Pope, had found the principle in the European classics, rendering Asian influence superfluous. A large part of my dissertation was taken up with unravelling the relentless process of deceit, including a fabricated correspondence with Addison which reversed their respective roles, and which so imposed upon subsequent opinion that, at the time I wrote, whole books were still devoted to this proposition. I remain grateful to the eminent Popean who approved my arguments without alteration, so making it possible to appreciate once more the contribution of Addison and Temple to making sharawadgi known in Europe, with the result that we know as Romanticism.³³

A condensed version of the dissertation became the first six chapters of the book, with the last three tracing Temple’s contrast of regular and irregular design in Walpole (classical versus medieval architecture),³⁴ Gibbon (eastern versus western Roman empire)³⁵ and Burke (French versus English constitution).³⁶ Meanwhile, a series of conference papers, later given journal publication, offered previews of its findings: making these available a long time before its publication.³⁷

The subject, then, is one of extraordinary richness, sharawadgi and its sequels having transformed, not only the landscape of Europe but its consciousness. The tracing of sharawadgi as naturalistic irregularity through Temple, Addison, Walpole, Gibbon and Burke would seem to verify this understanding of the term in the course of its being absorbed into the English tradition; and, once it had been, the story as I saw it was complete in outline. I must leave it for others to elaborate.

Epilogue

‘Take off your shoes!’ he said.
‘You bring the problems of the world inside’
TAN TWAN ENG

I like to visit Kyoto every year; but having failed to on one occasion, went in the intercalary days after Christmas. As always, I tried to combine familiar places with vistas not seen before: though sometimes the one can turn into the other.

Given the season, all was quiet; by the same token, the weather was variable. Instead of the blaze of sunlight that points up the rock islands at Ryōanji, the overcast shed a uniform tone on the unshadowed gravel, and it was possible to locate the one spot from which the lines of force in the composition could be apprehended as a whole. Then suddenly the sun emerged, picking up the gleams in the quartz; and the light, instead of being over the garden, appeared to come out of it.

NOTES

1. Ciaran Murray, Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature (Bethesda, MD: International Scholars: an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Garden History, XXVI (1998), 114, 208-13.
2. Wybe Kuitert, ‘Japanese Robes, Sharawadgi, and the Landscape Discourse of Sir William Temple and Constantijn Huygens’, Garden History, XL (2013), 157-76.
3. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 37-8, 273-5.
4. The question of priority is dealt with more fully below.
5. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 33-5.
6. pp. 15, 25.
7. pp. 145-7, 300.
8. p. 34.
9. pp. 33-5, 274.
10. pp. 35, 37-8, 274-5.
11. p. 273.
12. pp. 32-3.
13. sic.
14. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 131-66.
15. p. 15.
16. Sir William Temple, Works, 4 vol. (London: J. Clarke et al., 1757), III, 218-19.
17. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 71-2, 78-9.
18. p. ix.
19. Ciaran Murray, Disorientalism: Asian Subversions, Irish Visions (Tokyo: Asiatic Society of Japan), 2009.
20. ‘Re-solving Sharawadgi: Some Thoughts on its Chinese Roots’, by Lei Gao & Jan Woudstra, Shakkei: The Journal of the Japanese Garden Society, XVII: 1 (2010), 2-9.
21. pp. 150-51.
22. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 35, 274.
23. pp. 273-4.
24. pp. 34-8, 273-5.
25. p. 35.
26. That naturalistic asymmetry is Temple’s subject can scarcely be disputed: ‘What I have said, of the best forms of gardens, is meant only of such as are in some sort regular; for there may be other forms wholly irregular that may, for aught I know, have more beauty than any of the others; but they must owe it to some extraordinary dispositions of nature in the seat, or some great race of fancy or judgment in the contrivance, which may reduce many disagreeing parts into some figure, which shall yet, upon the whole, be very agreeable. Something of this I have seen in some places, but heard more of it from others who have lived much among the Chineses; a people, whose way of thinking seems to lie as wide of ours in Europe, as their country does. Among us, the beauty of building and planting is placed chiefly in some certain proportions, symmetries, or uniformities; our walks and our trees ranged so as to answer one another, and at exact distances. The Chineses scorn this way of planting, and say, a boy, that can tell an hundred, may plant walks of trees in straight lines, and over-against one another, and to what length and extent he pleases’.
27. Temple goes on immediately from the passage cited in note 26: ‘But their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed: and though we have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it, and, where they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem. And whoever observes the work upon the best India gowns, or the painting upon their best skreens or purcellans, will find their beauty is all of this kind (that is) without order’ (Temple, Works, III, 229-30; this does not differ from the original edition except for such alteration in usage, or idiosyncrasy of the individual printer, as ‘Indian Gowns’ for ‘India gowns’, the latter as in ‘China tea’: Sir William Temple, Miscellanea: The Second Part, London: Simpson, 1690, pp. 57-8 of the garden essay; OED, s. v. China, India). Temple’s last sentence makes it clear that he is thinking of Asian design in general; as was a visitor to his house, who also went ‘to visit our good neighbour, Mr. Bohun, whose whole house is a cabinet of all elegancies, especially Indian; in the hall are contrivances of Japan screens… The landscapes of the screens represent the manner of living, and country of the Chinese’ (John Evelyn, Diary, ed. William Bray, 2 vol., London: Dent, 1952, II, 173, 275: 30th July 1682, 24th March 1688). Again: ‘Half a century later, the interior of a ‘Chinese House’ at Stowe would be described as ‘Indian Japan’ (Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 34-5, 274).
28. Citing ‘Is sharawadgi derived from the Japanese word sorowaji?’, Review of English Studies, XLVIII (1997), 350-52.
29. Ciaran Murray, ‘The Hollow Tree: Intellectual Origins of the English Landscape Garden’, National University of Ireland, 1985.
30. Jimbun Ronshū, ‘Studies in the Humanities’, XXIX, 1978, 1-15.
31. E. V. Gatenby, ‘The Influence of Japanese on English’, Studies in English Literature (Tokyo), XI (Oct. 1931), 508-20; ‘Sharawadgi’, Times Literary Supplement 1672 (15 Feb. 1934), 108. Hadfield in 1960 remarked that sharawadgi, ‘though opinions differ, is probably not a Chinese word, but of Japanese origin’; and Honour in 1961, while he spoke of sharawadgi as ‘either Chinese or Japanese’, proposed the Netherlands as Temple’s source (Miles Hadfield, Gardening in Britain, London: Hutchinson, 1960, p. 177n.; Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay, London: Murray, 1961, p. 145; Murray, ‘Hollow Tree’, p. 407; Sharawadgi, p. 274).
32. Douglas Moore Kenrick, A Century of Western Studies of Japan: The First Hundred Years of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1872-1972, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Third Series, XIV (1978), 293-4, 411, 439; Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. ix, 274.
33. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. x, 81-126..
34. pp. 194-6.
35. pp. 230, 237-8.
36. pp. 250-53.
37. Including ‘Swift’s Mentor, Japan and the Origins of Romanticism’, Kobe, 1989: The Harp, Tokyo, V (1990), 1-21; ‘The Japanese Garden and the Mystery of Swift’, Kyoto, 1990: International Aspects of Irish Literature (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996), pp. 159-68; ‘Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Irish: The Politics of Romanticism’, Leiden, 1991: The Literature of Politics, The Politics of Literature, 5 vol. (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), I, 23-31; ‘Poor Dick Steele: Catalyst of Romantic Thought’, Tokyo, 1991: The Harp, VII (1992), 1-22; ‘Chiaroscuro: The Infernal Image of William Temple’, Éire: Irish Studies, Tokyo, XI (1991), 60-72; ‘The Dublin M.A. of Samuel Johnson: Unlocking the Code of Romanticism’, Dublin, 1992: ‘Fashion as Fascism: Swift and the Lost Romantics’, Éire, XIV (1994), 79-87; ‘Edmund Burke and Sharawadgi: The Japanese Origin of a Metaphor’, Tokyo, 1993: The Harp, IX (1994), 39-50; ‘The First Romantic: William Temple’, Eigo Eibei Bungaku: English Language & Literature, Chuo University, Tokyo, XXXIV (1994), 329-39; ‘The Second Romantic: Joseph Addison’, Eigo Eibei Bungaku, XXXV (1995), 417-25; ‘Pope and Anti-Pope: Addison’, Eigo Eibei Bungaku, XXXVI (1996), 229-39; ‘The Golden Bough and Sharawadgi: Byzantium in Gibbon and Yeats’, Long Island, 1996: ‘The Golden Flower of Byzantium’, Éire, XIX (1999), 119-29; ‘The Japanese Dawn of Romanticism’, Chuo University, 1996: ‘Towards the Japanese Sunrise: A Celtic Pilgrimage’, Éire, XVII (1997), 90-101; ‘Pope and Anti-Pope: Atticus’, Eigo Eibei Bungaku, XXXVII (1997), 225-34; ‘Murder in the Garden: Addison, Atticus and the End of Romantic Japan’, Eigo Eibei Bungaku, XXXVIII (1998), 253-63; ‘Sharawadgi Resolved’, Garden History, XXVI (1998), 208-13; ‘Sharawadgi: The Japanese Source of Romanticism’, Tokyo, 1999: Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Fourth Series, XIII (1998), 19-34; ‘The Japanese Source of Romanticism’, Grasmere, 2000, The Wordsworth Circle, XXXI: 4 (2000), 176; XXXII: 2 (2001), 106-8.

Sharawadgi Resolved

Garden historians have long been intrigued by the mysterious sharawadgi invoked by Sir William Temple to describe the irregular gardens of the ‘Chineses’; yet no agreement has been reached on his source. This paper demonstrates that the solution has been available for many years, but that its true nature was disguised by the ambiguity of Temple’s language.

The main attempts at a solution were brought together by S. Lang and Nikolaus Pevsner in ‘Sir William Temple and Sharawadgi’, published in The Architectural Review in 1949.¹ They open with the statement from the Oxford English Dictionary that the word is ‘of unknown origin’. ‘Chinese scholars agree’, the OED continues, ‘that it cannot belong to that language’.² This Lang and Pevsner term ‘rather defeatist’, and they go on to cite two attempts to match the word with Chinese. Y. Z. Chang, in ‘A note on sharawadgi’ (1930), suggested sa-lo-kwai-chi, which he glossed as the ‘quality of being impressive or surprising through careless or unorderly grace’. However, in 1940 C. S. Ch’ien contended that this would mean no more than ‘graceful and magnificent’, and proposed instead san-lan-wai-chi, or ‘space tastefully enlivened by disorder’.³ Neither, however, is supported by actual usage; and Lang and Pevsner, agreeing that both are unsatisfactory, devote much ingenuity to the argument that the word was Temple’s invention. This seems defeatist indeeed, particularly as in 1931 E. V. Gatenby had suggested that sharawadgi derived from the Japanese sorowaji, or ‘not being regular’.⁴ This Lang and Pevsner dismiss as not being Chinese. Nevertheless a number of writers, including P. Quennell in 1968, have subsequently opted for the Japanese solution.⁵

Temple considered the gardens of Europe as mere mathematics; while those of the ‘Chineses’ involved a most subtle aesthetic. He wrote:

Among us, the beauty of building and planting is placed chiefly in some certain proportions, symmetries, or uniformities; our walks and our trees ranged so as to answer one another, and at exact distances. The Chineses scorn this way of planting, and say, a boy, that can tell an hundred, may plant walks of trees in straight lines, and over-against one another, and to what length and extent he pleases. But their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed: and, though we have hardly any notion of this kind of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it, and, where they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem.⁶

Sharawadgi, clearly, is the key to Temple’s source; but no Chinese equivalent has been established for it. Instead the suggestion has been made that it stands for the Japanese sorowaji: which in sound and sense – ‘not being regular’ – would correspond to Temple’s word. There is, however, one apparently insurmountable objection to this hypothesis. Temple speaks, unequivocally as it would seem, of the ‘Chineses’: a fact that looms across the path like the towering precipice of a Chinese landscape.

The context of the geography of Temple’s century – at the back of which still lurked the ill-defined notion of the ‘Indies’ – may provide a clue to the problem. ‘By the name of India’, declared one contemporary, ‘we comprehend all that tract between India…on the west…unto China eastward’; while another, still more generous, described as ‘Indian’ plants both from Barbados and Japan.⁷ Yet another of Temple’s contemporaries achieves a certain magnificence in his ambiguities. ‘Went’, records John Evelyn, ‘to visit our good neighbour, Mr. Bohun, whose whole house is a cabinet of all elegancies, especially Indian; in the hall are contrivances of Japan screens… The landscapes of the screens represent the manner of living, and country of the Chinese’.⁸ Is ‘Japan’ used here in its sense of lacquer, though the screens are Chinese: Chinese japan, as one might speak of Japanese china? Or are they in fact Japanese, though depicting, as Japanese artists commonly did, Chinese landscapes?⁹ We cannot tell, and it scarcely matters: because Evelyn, before setting out his eastern wares, unfolds them from a wrapping of ‘Indian’ fabric. And Temple, in a similar context, makes the same equation: ‘And whoever observes the work upon the best India gowns, or the painting upon their best skreens or purcellans, will find their beauty is all of this kind (that is) without order’.¹⁰

Temple’s ‘Chineses’, then, are not specifically Chinese: they are generically oriental, denizens of Cathay. Nor was he, in this instance, simply mistaken. The gardens of Japan were continually influenced by those of China,¹¹ and Temple was aware of the similarity. A book that he is known to have read shows a naturalistic Chinese garden, with pine trees, a waterfall and jagged stonework; and he knew, too, that the Chinese imperial palace was surrounded by ‘large and delicious gardens’, containing ‘artificial rocks and hills’.¹² Temple, then, was aware from his reading that Chinese gardens were irregular; while on those of Japan he had access to more privileged information. For he was accredited as ambassador to the one country in Europe to which Japan was still open by trade; that trade was conducted through Djakarta by the Dutch East India Company; and it was with this company that, in his trade negotiations with The Netherlands, he had had to deal.¹³

At the foot of the hills that crowd into Nagasaki harbour, a dusty tramline curves parallel to a muddy canal; between them runs a lane in a similar curve. These mark the outlines and the single street of Deshima: the artificial island, shaped like the paper of a fan, to which the Dutch were confined.¹⁴ Here was the only gateway between Japan and Europe; and the tall brush of an araucaria, carried by the Dutch from Indonesia, still stands in one of its gardens.

Of this ‘Dutch prison in Japan, for so I may deservedly call their habitation and factory at Nagasaki’, Englebert Kaempfer, the German naturalist who visited them there in the late seventeenth century, speaks in considerable detail and with considerable disdain. Once a year, however, restrictions were lifted; the island was left behind, and the Dutch travelled upcountry to pay homage to the shogun at Tokyo. On their return, they were allowed to halt at the more gracious imperial capital of Kyoto, still the major locus of the Japanese garden, and were taken to see its temples. On two of these occasions Kaempfer was with them. On the first, he observed ‘a row of small hills artfully made in imitation of nature’; and on the second, ‘a steep hill planted with trees and bushes in an irregular but agreeable manner’.¹⁵ ‘Irregular but agreeable’; ‘artfully made in imitation of nature’: …Temple’s sharawadgi.

Sharawadgi is a Japanese word connoting asymmetry; and no more characteristic concept could have arisen in that conversation reported to Temple. When the Chinese imperial city of Chang’an was reproduced in Japan as Kyoto, the chessboard perfection of its layout soon fell apart. The western half of the quadrilateral, after devastation by earthquake and fire, was allowed to revert to wilderness, while the eastern half flourished and overspread its original boundaries.¹⁶ The Chinese temple complex, likewise, had its symmetry overruled, in accordance with the asymmetrical groundplan of traditional Japanese architecture. This contrast has been pondered by K. Singer, who attributes it to geography: ‘Chinese civilisation seems one with China’s wide plains. Its foundations were laid in the North, where the…evenly balanced structure of the open spaces, obviously orientated to the cardinal points of the compass, had a visual force’. Here the alternating sequences of heat and cold, of light and dark, of Confucian fixity and Taoist flow, were integrated into symmetrical patterns. ‘The soil of Japan’, on the other hand, ‘essentially a world of thousands of great, small and minute islands, bays and valleys, is as much partitioned off and irregular as the immense Chinese plains are open and uniform. The cross of the four cardinal points is everywhere overlaid by a graceful wilderness of hills, volcanic ranges, fields and forests’. With asymmetry, in contrast with balance, goes motion as opposed to equilibrium, the passing in place of the permanent. ‘Chinese dwellings are cut into the soil, moulded from it, or joined to it in such a way that they appear to be part of the earth’s crust’. The archipelago of Japan, on the other hand, ‘is rocked by seismic shocks, invaded by storms, showered and pelted with rain, encircled by clouds and mists’; and its dwellings, accordingly, ‘attach themselves only lightly to the soil’.¹⁷ The contrast is immediately noticeable in their cities: where Suzhou is modelled in clay or carved in stone, Kyoto is the same structure translated into the idiom of timber. So too with their gardens. In China, the trailing willows and blossoming plums, the curving water channels and lotus-covered pools, subsist within a framework of solidity: the stone-paved courtyards opening out of one another, the lime-washed walls, the massive concatenations of rock. In Japan, however, where the sacred site was some numinous location in nature, the Taoist feeling for space and the spontaneous, for the understated and the inexpressible, given intense concentration by Zen, found a deeper echo.¹⁸ Here a garden may consist of pools of sunshine on a flooring of moss, or the shadows of maple in an earthen yard, or light glittering through a grove of bamboo. Or, where rocks are clustered in scattered islands, they acquire a curious permeability from their setting in gravel or sand: becoming, as in some romantic adagio, suggestions of form in a sea of silence.

Temple, then, could have spoken in The Netherlands to men who had stood in the gardens of Japan; and that this indeed was his source is confirmed by the very anomalies of his information. By the time that he wrote, sorowaji was obsolete in the standard language; but it survived in the south, where the Dutch settlement lay. The trick of speech through which it became shorowaji is still characteristic of the region; while the further change to sharawaji, or sharawadgi as Temple spelled it, is consistent with its having been filtered through Dutch.¹⁹ Deshima, too, unlocks the last of the word’s enigmas. Sorowaji is a verb – ‘would not be symmetrical’ – and not a noun,²⁰ as Temple implied (‘they say the sharawadgi is fine’); and here again the solution is provided by Kaempfer. The authorities, he explains, had provided the island with a disproportionate number of interpreters

on purpose to make it needless for us to learn the language of the country, and by this means to keep us, as much as lies in their power, ignorant of its present state and condition… If there be any of our people, that hath made any considerable progress in the Japanese language, they are sure, under some pretext or other, to…expel him the country.

But if the Dutch were limited in their Japanese, their would-be interpreters were scarcely more fluent in Dutch:

the knowledge and skill of these people is, generally speaking, little else than a simple and indifferent connexion of broken words…which they put together according to the Idiom of their own tongue, without regard to the nature and genius of the language out of which they translate, and this they do in so odd a manner, that often other interpreters would be requisite to make them understood^.21

We have arrived at the terminal point of sharawadgi. A Dutchman of little Japanese stands awestruck before a garden ‘irregular but agreeable’ and ‘artfully made in imitation of nature’. He enquires, and is answered in a ‘simple and indifferent connexion of broken words’. But out of this babel of mutual incomprehension the essential fact filters through: the sharawadgi is fine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am grateful to Peter Hayden, whose Biddulph Grange, Staffordshire: A Victorian Garden Rediscovered (London: George Philip, 1989), is a classic study of chinoiserie in the English garden, for his encouragement in this project.

NOTES

• 1. S. Lang and Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Sir William Temple and Sharawadgi’, The Architectural Review, 106 (December 1949), 391-2.
• 2. Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. ‘sharawaggi’.
• 3. Y. Z. Chang, ‘A note on sharawadgi’, Modern Language Notes, 45 (1930), 221-4; C. S. Ch’ien, ‘China in the Engish literature of the seventeenth century’, Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography, English edn., n. s., 1 (1940), 351-84.
• 4. E. V. Gatenby, ‘The influence of Japanese on English’, Studies in English Literature, Tokyo, II (October 1931), 508-20; idem, ‘Sharawadgi’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 1672 (15 February 1934), 108.
• 5. P. Quennell, Alexander Pope: The Education of Genius, 1688-1728 (New York, 1968), 181n., quoted the Japan scholar I. Morris that while the word could not be Chinese, it might well be Japanese. M. Hadfield, A History of British Gardening, 3rd edn (London, 1979), 177n., while noting that ‘opinions differ’, thought it ‘probably not a Chinese word, but of Japanese origin’. R. Faber, The Brave Courtier: Sir William Temple (London, 1983), 142, noted that it ‘may apparently be Japanese, rather than Chinese’.
• 6. Sir William Temple, Works (London, 1757), III, 229-30.
• 7. Hadfield, History of British Gardening, 96-7.
• 8. William Bray (ed.), John Evelyn, Diary, 3 vols. (London, 1952), II, 173. Half a century later, the interior of a ‘Chinese House’ at Stowe would be described as ‘Indian Japan’: Michael Charlesworth (ed.), The English Garden: Literary Sources and Documents (Mountfield, 1993), II, 69.
• 9. D. Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London, 1993), 43; I. Tanaka, Japanese Ink Painting: Shubun to Sesshu, translated by B. Darling (New York and Tokyo, 1974), 93.
• 10. Temple, Works, III, 230. Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie (London, 1961), 69-70, attests to the growing popularity of Asian design at this time, from Nell Gwynne’s snuffbox to Queen Mary’s porcelain.
• 11. L. Kuck, The World of the Japanese Garden (New York and Tokyo, 1968), 19-22, 49, 115-23, 127, 149-56, 168-9, 226-7.
• 12. H. E. Woodbridge, Sir William Temple: The Man and Hs Work (New York and London, 1940), 282-4; A. Montanus, Atlas Chinensis, Englished by John Ogilby (London, 1671), 570-1; Temple, Works, III, 320-1. Montanus’ illustration is a Chinese woodblock print; his volume also shows planted lake shores with vistas of dramatic mountains and pavilions set at picturesque intervals (pp. 684-5); but his Atlas Japannensis (London, 1670) is by comparison a disappointment. Its illustrations have clearly originated in Europe, the shogun’s garden at Tokyo (‘Jedo’) being shown with matching avenues, parterres and a tree-lined circle (opposite p. 146). If Temple saw this – and it was ‘Englished’, like the Chinese volume, by the Ogilby who was a fellow-courtier of Charles II – it would have increased his reluctance to make sharawadgi a specific attribute of Japan.
• 13. G. B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan (New York, 1973), 177-8; C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (Harmondsworth, 1973), 220-1; Woodbridge, Sir William Temple, 100. In his essay ‘Upon the Cure of the Gout by Moxa’, Temple speaks of a Chinese medical practice under its Japanese name: R. A. Miller, The Japanese Language (Chicago and London, 1967), 259. His information came from a Dutch friend, who had had it from ‘several who had seen and tried it in the Indies’, and from an ‘ingenious little book’ by a ‘Dutch Minister at Batavia’ or Djakarta (Temple, Works, III, 238-65). Honour, Chinoiserie, 145; Hadfield, History of British Gardening, 117n.; and Quennell, Alexander Pope, 181n., suggest The Netherlands as Temple’s source; but no one, as far as I am aware, has attempted to trace the full course of the word’s odyssey past the obstacles described in the text.
• 14. Engelbert Kaempfer, The History of Japan, translated by J. G. Scheuchzer (Glasgow, 1906), II, 174; G. K. Goodman, Japan: The Dutch Experience (London and Dover, NH, 1986), 18-23.
• 15. Kaempfer, History of Japan, II, 174ff., 275-7; III, 118, 191. Kaempfer cannot have been Temple’s informant, as he made his journeys in 1691 and 1692, and the sharawadgi passage appears in the first and second editions of Temple’s Miscellanea: The Second Part, which were both published in London in 1690. In the first, where the essays are paged separately, it will be found on pp. 57-8 of that on gardens; in the second, on pp. 131-2 of the volume. As Kaempfer states, however, that the visit to the temples was a ‘custom of long standing…by degrees turn’d almost to a law’ (History of Japan, III, 117), it is evident that Temple’s source had access to the same experience.
• 16. I. Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (Harmondsworth, 1969), 37-43.
• 17. K. Singer, Mirror, Sword and Jewel: The Geometry of Japanese Life (Tokyo, 1981), 107, 111-13, 144-7; H. Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York, 1972), 61-4; H. Welch, Taoism: The Parting of the Way (Boston, 1966), 21, 45, 158-9; F. Capra, The Tao of Physics (New York, 1984), 91-2. Singer finds a similar contrast between Chinese and Japanese verse-forms (pp. 133-5).
• 18. Kuck, World of the Japanese Garden, 67; Welch, Taoism, 159-61; Singer, Mirror, Sword and Jewel, 138-41, 147-8.
• 19. I owe these details to Professor M. Kanai, Tokyo University.
• 20. The modern equivalent is sorowanai desho, ‘would not harmonise, balance or match’: the Japanese subjunctive being a polite form of the indicative. Professor F. Daido, Tama Art University, has suggested that Temple’s informant conflated what he heard as sharawadgi with share and aji, both nouns which might be employed of a garden showing an impressive degree of taste (shareta niwa; aji ga aru niwa).
• 21. Kaempfer, History of Japan, II, 183-4, 203, 101.

The Secret Life of Sharawadgi

Built on Contradictions

It is ‘built on contradictions: it’s an art museum on an industrial structure. It’s a community space running a mile and a half through several neighbourhoods. It’s a botanical garden suspended over city streets’.

This is New York’s High Line, the former elevated railway which has been transformed into ‘an icon of contemporary landscape architecture’. It supplies a series of shifting vistas as it alternates between coppices, clearings and clusters of wildflowers. At the same time, ‘the High Line…never takes you away from New York… You can hear horns honking. You can see traffic and taxis’. ‘Unlike Central Park, it’s an immersion in the city, not an escape from it’.¹

On the team chosen to reinvent the derelict line was the Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf, his past work suggesting to the restorers an idealised version of the natural landscape they had come to love there: plants pushing up between the gravel ballast of the tracks, ‘almost… like nature trying to claw back the manmade structure and reclaim it… Piet composed grasses and perennials in naturalistic ways’.²

His achievements are at the heart of an exhibition in the Schunk Museum, Heerlen – ‘In Search of Sharawadgi: Landscape Works with Piet Oudolf and LOLA’ – of which the catalogue declares: ‘The planned eruptions of wild plants in the High Line Park wake us up from our feverish dream of symmetry… The…term sharawadgi has become synonymous with a style of landscape design or architecture that avoids rigid lines and symmetry to make the landscape appear organic and naturalistic’.³

Sharawadgi as Setting Free

The word ‘sharawadgi’ was reported by Sir William Temple, British ambassador to the Netherlands, who had had occasion to meet people who, serving on the island which was the Dutch enclave in Japan, had visited the gardens of Kyoto. Their naturalism, ‘without any order…that shall be…easily observed’, was particularly striking at a time in which European gardens were overwhelmingly symmetrical – ‘our walks and our trees ranged so as to answer one another’ – and mathematical – ‘at exact distances’.⁴

The principle became rooted in England after this account was paraphrased by Joseph Addison, a close friend of Temple’s secretary Jonathan Swift. And, since Addison was an ardent advocate of the parliamentary rule established under the Dutch king William III, the naturalistic layout was associated with a comparable decentralisation in politics, both being characterised as expressions of liberty, in contrast to the geometrical vistas of despotic France, monumentally expressed by Louis XIV at Versailles,⁵ as the exhibition catalogue notes.⁶

The genius of Addison, then, was that he transplanted the aesthetic of the Japanese garden, not through simplistic imitation, but in terms of his own, English, surroundings: ‘Why may not a whole Estate be thrown into a kind of Garden…? A Marsh overgrown with Willows, or a Mountain shaded with Oaks, are not only more beautiful, but more beneficial, than when they lie bare and unadorned. Fields of Corn make a pleasant Prospect, and if the Walks were a little taken care of that lie between them, if the natural Embroidery of the Meadows were helpt and improved by some small Additions of Art, and the several Rows of Hedges set off by Trees and Flowers, that the Soil was capable of receiving, a Man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions’.⁷

Throughout the eighteenth century, in consequence, sharawadgi, as classically formulated by Capability Brown, expressed itself in a sea of grass, punctuated by clusters of trees and given focus by a body of water, which reached to the walls of the house:⁸ within which, by contrast, an elaborate symmetry reigned; the two united by the belief that, while the latter recreated the bodily surroundings of republican Rome, sharawadgi represented its libertarian spirit.⁹

Sharawadgi as Stability

The landowners, however, who sat in parliament, which asserted liberty vis-à-vis monarchy, in practice constituted an oligarchy, and felt threatened by the French revolution, which asserted liberty as egalitarian. Edmund Burke countered this with the statement: ‘The distinguishing part of our constitution…is a liberty connected with order’; and his friend Humphry Repton, the successor to Capability Brown, turned the eighteenth-century synthesis inside out. Formal gardens were now, typically, to surround the house, as if in a cordon sanitaire to keep the wildness of the surrounding parkland at bay; while for the house he favoured Gothic architecture: which had long been assimilated to sharawadgi, with a ‘bold irregularity of outline’ derived from accretions over the centuries, and an alleged origin in an avenue of trees. This now conferred a sense of age-old rootedness in the land that seemed to validate aristocracy.¹⁰

While, then, the first revolution in English landscaping established freedom in the garden and formality in the house, the second inverted this to freedom in the house and formality in the garden; and, as the nineteenth century advanced, the latter grew in elaboration, enriched by plant collectors, working world-wide and in the face of ‘hideous dangers and atrocious hardships’. ‘Victorian gardens’, notes Tim Richardson, ‘were stylistically as well as botanically acquisitive’, so that the ever-growing repertory of exotic species was supplied with exotic settings, redolent of such locations as China and Japan, or displayed in the form of the carpet bedding associated with public parks.¹¹

Sharawadgi as Synthesis

Such ‘flat masses of strident colour’ were the particular target of William Robinson. Robinson has been described as Irish and irascible; and both of these he undoubtedly was. In American horticulture, he declared, he found ‘as much interest and novelty as a student of snakes could collect…in the land of St. Patrick’. But the full force of his vehemence was directed against that age-old antithesis of the English garden, Versailles: here he saw such soulless extravagance as to justify, in his view, the French revolution. As in England he deplored the lavish regimentation of flowers. In the words of Christopher Thacker, while he ‘appreciates, admires, understands’ the individual plants in such agglomerations; ‘he loathes – italics are weak to express Robinson’s detestation – the straitjackets in which they are confined’. And, in this prepossession, he ‘contributed to a revolution in garden design. His influence still flourishes in the current taste for informality, with bulbs massed among grass, mixed borders of native and exotic plants, and a softer and more subtle use of colour and plant associations’. He has indeed been described as ‘the conscience of modern horticulture’.¹²

In this capacity, he became embroiled with Reginald Blomfield: who, in creating ‘gardens with Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline inflections’, ‘dogmatically opposed the freer and informal style of gardening…supported by…Robinson. He strongly advocated a return to formal gardening, using architectural shape, structure and materials, with plants as decorative adjuncts’.¹³

Into the resulting space stepped Gertrude Jekyll. Jekyll, it is suggested, was drawn to Robinson by his book The Wild Garden, ‘which must have come as a breath of fresh air…, extolling the beauties of English wild flowers to a society obsessed with…palms and bamboo groves and monkey-puzzle trees’. Accordingly, the two ‘became firm friends’, and Jekyll a regular contributor to Robinson’s journal The Garden. However, her principles were less exclusive: ‘she argued energetically in defence of colourful bedding plants, pointing out that it was not the plants’ fault that they were used in ignorant and foolish ways’. Jekyll, trained as a painter, had spent hours on end contemplating the sweeps of vivid colour in the landscape canvases of Turner; and she was to adopt similar values in her massing of flowers. So that when Blomfield asserted, as against Robinson’s vision of nature as the ‘perfection of harmonious beauty’, that ‘design was an intellectual abstraction relating to mass, void and proportion’ and the ‘job of the gardener…to prevent wayward plants from obscuring the plan so carefully worked out on the drawing-board’, Jekyll demonstrated that ‘this dichotomy of design and plantsmanship was…nonsense’.¹⁴ Which was the basis of her affinity with Edwin Lutyens.

Lutyens, owing to ill-health in childhood, lacked a regular education, instead roaming the lanes of his native Surrey, obsessed by its architecture: his own early essays in which, writes Richardson, are ‘steeped in the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts vernacular, with tiled roofs sweeping down in a low embrace of high gables, and leaded windows winking from half-timbered walls covered in climbing roses’. From these he went on to formulate ‘his own cool, modern version of the straightforward Surrey cottage style of his youth and then fitfully progressed towards a more romantic and formalised classicism’. As for Jekyll: ‘“Most of her gardens were based on a…plan, with terracing, pools and the shaping of lawns and borders contributing to the formality of the layout. Within this disciplined structure, Jekyll’s bold drifts of planting and ingenious use of colour would have appeared all the more rich and exuberant”’. As a consequence: ‘What was different about the work of Lutyens and Jekyll…was the way that the garden seemed to have been designed as all of a piece with the house’.¹⁵

Of his original encounter with Jekyll, Lutyens recalled: ‘We met at a tea-table, the silver kettle and the conversation reflecting rhododendrons’;¹⁶ and this image of plant and artefact fused might stand for the remarkable synthesis of nature and art that the two were to bring about. Their collaboration, wrote Lutyens’ biographer, ‘virtually settled that controversy, of which Sir Reginald Blomfield and William Robinson were for long the protagonists, between formal and naturalistic garden design. Miss Jekyll’s naturalistic planting wedded Lutyens’ geometry in a balanced union of both principles’.¹⁷

And at this point the English garden converged with the Japanese. ‘The Japanese garden’, declares Günter Nitschke, displays a ‘symbiosis of right angle and natural form… These two ways of perceiving beauty – as natural accident and as the perfection of man-made type – are not, to my mind, mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite: it is their simultaneous cultivation and conscious superimposition that best characterises the traditional Japanese perception of beauty… Each loses vibrancy if taken separately from the other. Without the contrast provided by a rectangular visual frame or rectilinear background, it would not be possible to recognise a handful of boulders, however carefully selected, as a garden’.¹⁸

Where, then, the first revolution in the English ensemble saw an irregular garden around a regular house, and the second a regular garden around an irregular house, the third saw regularity and irregularity conjoined in the garden itself; and this synthesis, lending itself to unlimited variety, is the basis of the masterworks which followed.

Sharawadgi as Secret

Hidcote was a house on a bare hill down which flowed a stream, later to be lined by a woodland walk. But the immediate requirement was shelter from the winds, which was secured by a complex of tall hedges. These enclose a short axis down the hill, with a long one crossing it; and, between these two, a series of outdoor rooms leading into one another. The result is described by Richardson: a ‘geometrically inventive plan of interlocking circles, squares and rectangles… The…wide, empty Long Walk at a right angle to the main allée, which suddenly frees up the heart of the garden, is well timed: a shaft of pure void that seems to shoot up from the surrounding landscape’; while the ‘pool garden, in which the great dark round almost completely fills the space, has always drawn admiration …for…its transcendent power’: ‘caught in a moment between space and time’.¹⁹ ‘Hidcote’, concludes Edward Hyams, ‘is a secret garden, a stillness’.²⁰

Sissinghurst was ‘created with equal originality by the combined talents of Vita Sackville-West, the supreme artist-plantswoman, and her husband Harold Nicolson, who was able to help…give form to the planted areas and to link them together by strong axes into a satisfying design’. It was ‘the life-project of two intellectuals, expressive of their world-views, of their unconventional love for each other, and of a passion for the place itself’. Their garden ‘consists of a series of…outdoor “rooms”, asymmetrically arranged; formal in shape but informally planted’; says Richardson, ‘a succession of dreamlike episodes and intimacies’; or, as Nicolson himself phrased it, ‘a series of escapes from the world, giving the impression of cumulative escape’.²¹

Richardson, again, delicately conjures up the aura of the most celebrated of these ‘rooms’: ‘The White Garden is the essence of the dream that is Sissinghurst. It combines deep intensity of emotion with a feeling of ethereal suspension, because whiteness occupies space in a unique manner… It was made for the night, perhaps even more than for the day, because it is then…that the whites come into their own, almost fluorescent in the moonlight’^.22

‘We have got’, declared Nicolson, ‘what we wanted to get – a perfect proportion between the classic and the romantic, between the element of expectation and the element of surprise’. The classic may be seen in the fact that most of the ‘narrow brick paths, encroached upon by plants and defined by yew walls, lead to some formal focus’; while the romantic is inherent in the site itself, encompassing as it does the remnants, dominated by their tower – a ‘unifying presence’ which ‘seems to make sense of all the different axial views and walks’ – of a half-ruined castle, also composed of ‘the red brick which mellows to such a beautiful soft rose colour’.²³ Richardson explains: ‘At Sissinghurst the main house had fallen down or been removed, leaving a sequence of unconnected buildings and portions of walls’: making possible ‘the unique atmosphere created by a set of spaces that do not obey the rules…, where a fragmented layout and sometimes violently contrasting moods are the modus operandi’. ‘This’, he concludes, ‘is what makes it a greater garden, ultimately, even than Hidcote. We can never entirely know it. It bamboozles us with the illogicality of its effects and disorientations’.²⁴

Assimilating the Satanic

Through all these shifting fashions in the garden, Temple’s original preference for sharawadgi over mathematics, echoed by Addison, seems to have sunk deeply into – or, it has been suggested,²⁵ elicited something inherent in – the English psyche; and from time to time it burst forth in unexpected and original forms. Blake adapted it to the industrial revolution: in his contrast of dark satanic mills with an originally green and pleasant land, the machine was the new Versailles. Dickens pitted the living reality of a circus-girl’s horse against the abstraction of a dictionary definition which, in an educational system organised as for factory production, was the only acceptable method of apprehending its existence. Lawrence, once more, evoked the quivering, whinnying panic of a mine-owner’s mare as it was borne down upon by a shrieking and clattering train.²⁶

Yet the High Line has assimilated even this industrialised landscape, so menacing to Blake, Dickens and Lawrence. As Sissinghurst transformed the Tudor ruin, converting the depredations of time into a cycle of decay and renewal, Oudolf has absorbed industrial civilisation itself into the processes of nature. ‘One of the most powerful impressions when we first stepped onto the High Line’, said one of its restorers, ‘was the effect of nature taking over the ruins’.²⁷ This was in keeping with what the visionaries who salvaged the line had seen in it: ‘the spaces underneath…had a dark, gritty, industrial quality, and a lofty, church-like quality as well… There was a powerful sense of the passing of time. You could see what the High Line was built for, and feel that its moment had slipped away’:²⁸ like some abbatial remnant in a landscape by Friedrich.²⁹ And they were aware of their antecedents in Romanticism.³⁰ The High Line has indeed been seen in terms of mono no aware, ‘the awareness of impermanence’,³¹ so closely anticipated by Vergil in lacrimæ rerum, as his hero moves from the destruction of Troy to its reconstitution in Rome.³²

This vision is enacted, as at Hidcote or Sissinghurst, in a succession of contrasting spaces. Woodland is succeeded by grassland, thicket by meadow and wildflower, punctuated by open areas that borrow views of the streets with their fluctuating traffic or the flow of the Hudson river; and all along an irregular pathway.³³

Wildest of Dreams

In planting the High Line, then, Piet Oudolf has encapsulated the entire history of sharawadgi. And, in the English layout named for him, he has returned to its origins. ‘Oudolf’, says the exhibition catalogue, ‘considers the design for the Hauser & Wirth art gallery in Somerset as the commission where he had the most freedom’. In the Oudolf Field, the ‘flowing beds smoothly blend into one another in a soothing rhythm of waves and curves, of textures and colours… The traditional view among gardeners is that spring should be a climax, full of growth and promise. Oudolf turned this idea around. He opted for a large share of perennials, including grasses, which are in bloom late in the season. He selected plants that look good in their final phase, and continue to express their character after they have died. At the start of winter, the colour spectrum gradually narrows to a subtle palette of brown hues’. But before that happens, the vista is of a strikingly beautiful, almost psychedelic brushwork of buff and gold, maroon and violet, scarlet and crimson and rose.³⁴ Here Addison’s vision of ‘the natural Embroidery of the Meadows’, ‘helpt and improved by some small Additions of Art’, has found a realisation, one feels, beyond his wildest dreams.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author is deeply grateful to the staff of the Schunk Museum, and particularly Joep Vossebeld, for warm support and encouragement in the writing of this essay.

NOTES

• 1. Oudolf, Piet and Rick Darke, Gardens of the High Line: Elevating the Nature of Modern Landscapes (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2017), p. 13, 41, 104-5, 129, 216; Fabian de Kloe, Peter Veenstra, Joep Vossebeld & Brigitta van Weeren, Landscape Works with Piet Oudolf and LOLA: In Search of Sharawadgi (Rotterdam: naio10, 2021), p. 133; Joshua David & Robert Hammond, High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), pp. 123, 125, 128.
• 2. The advocates of the High Line’s restoration were aware of the Promenade Plantée in Paris; and though this was ‘on a different kind of elevated rail structure…, made of masonry arches instead of steel’, it indicated that the New York scheme ‘was not a totally insane idea’ (David & Hammond, pp. 12, 14, 77). Another prototype, the Natur-Park Südgelände in Berlin, a former railyard which ‘repurposes trackways as pathways and is clothed almost entirely with the spontaneous vegetation that colonised the site after its abandonment’ (Oudolf & Darke, p. 34), was a far simpler matter; in New York: ‘We…had to remove everything first. We had to get down to the concrete slab that held the gravel ballast, to make repairs and put in a new drainage system… The site preparation work was the most expensive thing about the project… First the contractors painted yellow numbers on the steel railroad tracks, tagging them according to a site survey, so we could reinstall any rail in its original location’. Again: ‘We…brought a group of volunteers up to the…High Line…to harvest seeds from native plants so that we could replant them…after construction’ (David & Hammond, pp. 94-5, 100). Oudolf had previously worked on the Lurie Garden in Chicago, ‘slowly emerging from decades of decline for major American cities in the former industrial “rust belt”’, and laced with areas of ‘urban dereliction awaiting redevelopment. A particular eyesore was adjacent to the centre of downtown – as Mayor Richard M. Daley himself noted one day as he looked out of the window of his dentist’s office on Michigan Avenue. He began a campaign to clean up this messy patch of abandoned former railway land’; for which Oudolf designed what has been described as ‘a stylised representation of a natural prairie’, chiming with Chicago’s history: ‘The designer Wilhelm Miller had promoted prairie vegetation…at about the same time that Frank Lloyd Wright was leading the Prairie School of architecture’ (Piet Oudolf & Noel Kingsbury, Oudolf: Hummelo: A Journey through a Plantsman’s Life, New York: Monacelli, 2021, pp. 235-40).
• 3. de Kloe, Veenstra, Vossebeld & van Weeren, pp. 6, 16. This volume is a work of art in itself, beautifully designed and vividly illustrated, its text set in a typeface based on woodcut lettering: angular, individual and ‘akin to the spirit of sharawadgi’ (p. 187).
• 4. Sharawadgi has been traced to (i) sorowaji, ‘be irregular, unequal, asymmetrical’, (ii) possibly conflated with share and aji, ‘nouns which might be employed of a garden showing an impressive degree of taste’ (Ciaran Murray, Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature, Bethesda, MD: International Scholars, 1999, pp. 33-8, 273-5); and Temple stresses (i) the irregularity of the Sino-Japanese garden and (ii) the aesthetic subtlety involved in its arrangement. I have no difficulty with Wybe Kuitert’s assertion that share’aji is a term ‘still used by kimono fashion critics’, to do with the ‘symbolism of designed patterns in the dress…, and matching it to place, time and occasion’ (Wybe Kuitert: ‘How Japan inspired the English Landscape Garden: Sharawadgi!’, Shakkei, volume 21, number 3, Winter 2014/2015: 20-21): it could be taken as a corroboration and elaboration of point (ii).
• 5. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 49-55, 62-4, 67-9, 72-3.
• 6. de Kloe, Veenstra, Vossebeld & van Weeren, pp. 16-17. The pattern was further overdetermined by the fact that the new astronomy, a preoccupation both of Temple and Addison, had discovered decentralisation in the universe (Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 137-63).
• 7. Murray, Sharawadgi, p. 73.
• 8. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 233-4.
• 9. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 169-70.
• 10. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 194-5, 256-7, 260-63. ‘The proclamation of egalitarianism had provided the French Revolution with one of its headiest appeals’ (John Keegan, A History of Warfare, London: Pimlico, 2004, p. 357).
• 11. Edward Hyams, The English Garden (New York: Abrams, n.d.), pp. 121-2, 126-8; Tim Richardson, English Gardens in the Twentieth Century: from the Archives of Country Life (London: Aurum, 2005), pp. 9-10; Geoffrey & Susan Jellicoe et al., ed., The Oxford Companion to Gardens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), s. v. England: Nineteenth Century; Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening, 3rd edn. (London: Murray, 1979), pp. 322-8. At Biddulph Grange, a ‘bastion-like’ topiary construction, ‘to resemble the monumental entrance to a tomb’, and culminating in a topiary pyramid, is entered through a masonry portal along an avenue lined by sphinxes; while, through ‘a rocky tunnel, longer and darker than most garden tunnels, you arrive inside a Chinese pavilion, and look out from its crimson-painted balcony across a small, still lake, surrounded by bamboos, antique massy stones and exotic trees. Across the lake, a lacquered bridge, reflections, and beyond, high up as if in a mountain range, a weather-worn tower in the Great Wall’ (Hadfield, p. 354; Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens, London: Croom Helm, 1979, pp. 240, 245; Jellicoe & Jellicoe, s. v. Biddulph Grange). The layout at Tully, though designed by a Japanese gardener, and including a tea-house and stone lanterns, was ‘devised as a symbol of man’s pilgrimage through life. From the Gate of Oblivion it passes through a cavern and winds along the Path of Childhood, up the Hill of Learning, across the Bridge of Matrimony, until it finally passes out through the Gateway of Eternity’ (Jellicoe & Jellicoe, s. v. Tully).
• 12. However one might qualify his responsibility for the revolution of which he is acknowledged to have been the instrument: ‘by raising a verbal tidal wave of opposition to bedding, and by coining the term “wild garden” to crystallise…other gardeners’ efforts, and by introducing these ideas to a very large number of readers who might not otherwise have discovered them, he was arguably more influential as a populariser than were the originators’ (Richard Bisgrove, William Robinson: The Wild Gardener, London: Frances Lincoln, 2008, pp. 62-3, 71, 85-7, 242-7; Thacker, p. 248; Richardson, English Gardens, p. 79). Piet Oudolf is repeatedly viewed in terms of Robinson (Richardson, English Gardens, pp. 201-2; Oudolf & Darke, pp. 22-4; Rory Dusoir, Planting the Oudolf Gardens at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Chicago, IL: Filbert Press, 2019, pp. 14-18; Oudolf & Kingsbury, p. 408).
• 13. Richardson, English Gardens, p. 93; Jellicoe & Jellicoe, s. v. Blomfield.
• 14. Richard Bisgrove, The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll (London: Frances Lincoln, 1992), pp. 10-12; Jane Brown, Gardens of a Golden Afternoon: The Story of a Partnership: Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 26.
• 15. Lutyens’ ‘romantic and formalised classicism’ may be seen at Viceroy’s House at Delhi: in form essentially Palladian, but with the body of the structure ‘assimilating…the Moslem polychrome tradition, expressed in the contrast of the red sandstone base with white above’, surmounted by a dome suggesting the Buddhist stupa (Brown, pp. 29-30; Richardson, English Gardens, pp. 46-7, citing Fenja Gunn, Lost Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, London: Letts, 1991; Ciaran Murray, ‘The Raj as Romantic Vision’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, V, ii, 2010, pp. 181-8). Arts and Crafts: Murray, Disorientalism: Asian Subversions, Irish Visions (Tokyo: Asiatic Society of Japan, 2009), pp. 87-108.
• 16. Brown, p. 19.
• 17. Bisgrove, Jekyll¸pp. 18, 137, citing Christopher Hussey, The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens, 1950.
• 18. Günter Nitschke, Japanese Gardens: Right Angle and Natural Form (Köln: Taschen, 2007), pp. 10-12.
• 19. Richardson, English Gardens, pp. 111, 117-19.
• 20. Hyams, pp. 150-55.
• 21. Jellicoe & Jellicoe, s. v. Sissinghurst; Tim Richardson, Sissinghurst: The Dream Garden (London: Frances Lincoln, 2020), pp. 10, 31, 212.
• 22. Richardson, Sissinghurst, pp. 189-90. White is ‘“not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour”, as Herman Melville put it in Moby-Dick, one of Vita’s favourite novels’ (p. 200). Melville links it, indeed, with ‘the heartless voids and immensities of the universe’ (Moby-Dick; or The Whale, 1851, ch. 42). Such exotics as the Himalayan blue poppy had altered the entire palette available to the gardener; as well as the enclosure planted with ‘white flowers and silvery foliage’, Sissinghurst boasts a purple border (Richardson, English Gardens, pp. 87, 115; Hyams, p. 170).
• 23. Richardson, English Gardens, pp. 113-15; Sissinghurst, p. 175; Hyams, p. 167.
• 24. Richardson, Sissinghurst, pp. 183-4. Richardson further suggests: ‘The garden’s dreamlike character arose in part as a result of the strategies of physical disorientation, disintegration and deconstruction that Harold deployed in his apparently illogical ground plan. It was a working method that can be related to contemporary artistic currents, including the stream-of-consciousness device of…Virginia Woolf…, the eclectic and deconstructed form of T. S. Eliot’s poetry’, and so on (Sissinghurst, p. 12). This is hardly fanciful: Sissinghurst houses – or did when visited by the present author – the handpress on which Vita’s lover Virginia Woolf and her husband printed The Waste Land. And the term ‘bamboozles’ may serve as a hint of how deeply the modernist movement was influenced by the wave of Japonisme associated with Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound (Murray, Disorientalism, pp. 147-68).
• 25. Richardson, Sissinghurst, pp. 45-6.
• 26. Temple’s natural/geometrical divide can be traced through Burke’s sublime/beautiful, Schiller’s naïve/sentimental, and Nietzsche’s Dionysus/Apollo (Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 248-50, 265-6; Disorientalism, pp. 20-21, 32; Ports of Call: Red Fort to Crystal Palace, Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2020, pp. 93-102 & n.). It may also be discerned in Wuthering Heights. The antithesis is stated explicitly in the text of the novel: ‘He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees murmuring dreamily about among the bloom and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly. That was his most perfect idea of heaven’s happiness: mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted all to be in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine’ (ch. 24). A sun that shines ‘steadily and cloudlessly’ might well be thought an anticipation of Nietzsche’s Apollo; while ‘sparkle and dance’, ‘wild with joy’, is pure Dionysus. The ‘two opposed principles’, notes Allen, ‘are symbolised…in the two houses…, Wuthering Heights on its bleak eminence… Thrushcross Park in the fat valley below’: the one ‘exposed’ (Walter Allen, The English Novel: A Short Critical History, London: Phoenix House, 1954, p. 186); the other by definition fenced in. The ultimate expression of the former is an alien, scorned on one side as a ‘gipsy’ or ‘Lascar’, but on the other imagined as Chinese or Indian royalty (chh. 4, 6, 7). Yet he will come to be seen as ‘an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone’ (ch. 10), or heath and cliff; the name bestowed by his rescuers will assimilate the exotic to the wilder landscapes of England, in a curious parallel to the trajectory of sharawadgi. And, when this denizen of Wuthering Heights is set – as embodiment of ‘half-civilised ferocity’ – against the inhabitants of Thrushcross Grange – as ‘spoiled children’, who ‘fancy the world was made for their accommodation’ (ch. 10) – it is the contrast of Burke’s sublime, instilling terror, and beautiful, eliciting pity. None of which, naturally, would preclude, in the ‘complex genesis’ of the novel, a concomitant influence from the tale of the Irish forebear who, in the course of a voyage to Liverpool, adopted a dark foundling who became his favourite, arousing resentment among his children; and who, appropriating family funds, reinvented himself as a gentleman (Edward Chitham, Western Winds: The Brontës’ Irish Heritage, Dublin: History Press Ireland, 2015, pp. 177-88).
• 27. Oudolf & Darke, citing James Corner, pp. 33, 42.
• 28. David & Hammond, pp. 6, 12.
• 29. Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (London: Reaktion, 1990), p. 169. The mood is caught in Blyth’s version of a haiku by Shiki: ‘Only the gate / Of the abbey is left / On the winter moor’ (R. H. Blyth, Haiku, 4 vol., Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1949-52, IV, 284).
• 30. Oudolf & Darke, p. 28.
• 31. Oudolf & Darke, p. 309.
• 32. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 229-30, 314-15.
• 33. David & Hammond, p. 123; Oudolf & Darke, pp. 40, 53-4, 71-3, 86-9, 91, 95, 99-101, 122-3, 129, 144-9, 164-9, 206-7, 223, 248-9, 262-3, 282. In the language of the indigenous Lenape (‘Len-AH-pay’), the Hudson is the Shatemuc, ‘river that flows both ways’, being tidal. A remnant of primeval forest survives on the northwest corner of Manhattan, at Inwood Hill Park, a post-glacial landscape of valleys, its clusters of boulders used prehistorically as rock shelters, disposed around a central ridge. ‘Manahatta’ is traced to ‘hilly island’: some of these heights remain, though others have been levelled. Further traces of the original topography are the outcroppings of bedrock in Central Park; while the pre-urban trail of Broadway continues to slant northwest to southeast across the later gridwork of streets and avenues (‘Manahatta to Manhattan: Native Americans in Lower Manhattan’, New York: National Museum of the American Indian, 2010, pp. 1, 3; Niles Eldredge & Sidney Horenstein, Concrete Jungle New York City and Our Last Best Hope for a Sustainable Future, Oakland: University of California Press, 2014, pp. 31-9, 45, 56-8, 65, 69-70, 105, 112-17, 119, 165, 171-2, 200-01; The Cultural Landscape Foundation: Inwood Hill Park: tclf.org/inwood-hill-park, retrieved 17.xii.21).
• 34. de Kloe, Veenstra, Vossebeld & van Weeren, pp. 40-45. The ‘Radić Pavilion, a giant pebble-like structure that was brought from its first location at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park now acts as a slightly off-kilter focal point… Its irregular, curvaceous form suits the Oudolf Field well’ (Dusoir, pp. 26-7).

Sharawadgi and its Dwellings of Dream

Fusion of Illusions

‘I am almost as fond’, wrote Horace Walpole, ‘of the sharawadgi, or Chinese want of symmetry, in buildings as in grounds or gardens’; and this he discerned in Gothic architecture. Two mistakes here: as sharawadgi was Japanese rather than Chinese, so Gothic, in its origins, was not asymmetrical. But as in mathematics the product of two negatives is positive, these two misapprehensions would merge into a movement. Or, as Pierre Hadot has put it, the history of thought is sometimes the history of a series of misunderstandings.

This particular fusion of illusions was not merely Walpole’s; there was a received connection between the two. To Renaissance Italy the Gothic style, with its ‘pointed arches and overshading rib vaults’, suggested an origin in the forests of the north: a view that was echoed in England. Gothic had in fact been drawn out in obedience to the most exhaustive of schemata: to the summa of scholastic theology, which attempted to combine all knowledge, divine and human, into a single structure of unparalleled clarity, coherence and completeness, in what Panofsky describes as ‘visual logic’. So the medieval architect, taking the pointed arch as module, had woven it into an echoing and interacting structure that articulated, in high severe sculpture and glowing glass, in masonry that appeared, in the words of Henderson, ‘weightless and shot through with visible energy’, the lineaments of an otherworldly order. Nothing could have been more ethereal in effect, or more rational in foundation.

Haphazard Habitations

However, certain medieval projects had been left incomplete, others supplemented from time to time; so that Gothic had by now acquired what John Summerson describes as an ‘air of natural growth through centuries’. Similarly, Walpole’s house at Strawberry Hill evolved in organic fashion, culminating in an ample round tower, beside which a pointed one rose in studied asymmetry; and it was this ‘deliberate irregularity’, states Summerson, that was ‘its most important innovation’.

In this it was paralleled by Walpole’s Gothic novel. The Castle of Otranto had come to him in a dream; and he sat down afterwards ‘without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate’. Like all dreams, it was a compound of memory and impulse. While he recognised that certain details had other sources – as when, years afterwards in Cambridge, he found himself in the courtyard of Otranto – in outline the imagined castle and his own house were the same. As his narrative took form, he drew the one in terms of the other, and he indicated in the preface to his novel that the scene was ‘undoubtedly laid in some real castle’; that the author ‘had some certain building in his eye’. In private, he was still more explicit. When he acquired a suit of armour for Strawberry, he said: ‘It will make a great figure here at Otranto’.

In essence, indeed, they were identical. Walpole was fully aware of what he called ‘the wildness of the story’. ‘I wrote it’, he said, ‘in spite of rules’. More specifically, ‘my rule was nature’; he had been ‘desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty’. Nature, as in the English garden, connoted liberty; it was the rejection of oppressive order; it was that which, seemingly formless, had a form not immediately discernible, which was the expression of its own inherent energies. It was, in a word, sharawadgi, that naturalism of the Japanese garden reported on by the Restoration diplomat Sir William Temple, now transposed by Walpole to architecture.

Pride of Ancestry

As he continued to build, though it never quite lost its playfulness, his house became increasingly splendid. In the glass of his great gallery are displayed his ancestral arms. Light streams through the escutcheoned windows into coloured pools on the floor, while on the opposite side the room floats into infinity through alcoves of looking-glass under a running network of gold. The library, too, approached through the armoury, shows the family bearings, in ‘supreme expression’, says his biographer, of ‘pride of ancestry’. So in Otranto, the gigantic helmet, the mailed hands and feet that emerge from the walls of the castle, are those of an avenging ancestor.

For the Goth was a figure of radical ambivalence. Destroyer of Rome, it was a decadent Rome that he destroyed. And what made this view more authoritative was its assertion by Rome itself. The Germans, wrote Tacitus under a senate subservient to autocracy, limited the power of their rulers: nec regibus infinita aut libera potestas. These were listened to by right of persuasion rather than command: auctoritate suadendi magis quam iubendi potestate; and, while they were permitted to decide on lesser matters, the greater required the deliberation of all: de minoribus rebus principes consultant, de maioribus omnes.

And the English were heirs to this Germanic liberty. The Goths, wrote Temple, were ‘our ancestors’; and the constitution ‘universal among these northern nations’, and ‘so well known in our island’, was a ‘government of freemen’. For seventeenth-century England, these immemorial institutions lived on. The ‘grounds of our common laws’, parliament was informed, ‘were beyond the memory or register of any beginning, and the same which the Norman conqueror found within the realm’.

Scholarship, on the other hand, argued that the common law, as a regulation of tenure, presupposed Norman feudalism: so that, the king was told, there was no particle of land which was ‘not held in fee of your majesty’. The summons to parliament was based upon tenure from the crown: it was a feudal curia, in which the barons, as vassals, met their royal lord, and out of which the subordinate knights and burgesses had evolved into a separate house. Scholarship, however, was no match for long-held conviction, still less for events. In the debates on the settlement under which the sovereign’s power was limited by that of parliament, notes Pocock, it was asserted that the ‘original of government came from Germany’; and this – yet another misapprehension – was received doctrine to the eighteenth century.

For Walpole, too, his house was a Germanic temple. ‘I...am always’, he wrote, ‘impatient to be back with my own Woden and Thor, my own Gothic Lares’. It was a realisation of mythic origins; for, as Tacitus had stated, the temples of the Germans were woods and groves: lucos ac nemora consecrant; as they scorned to confine their deities within walls: nec cohibere parietibus deos. And so, for Walpole, the Gothic building breathed and moved. It was organic nature – branch, leaf and flower, still in motion though transposed into stone – which continued the life of the forest, and embodied the energies of its inhabitants. Ce beau système, declared Montesquieu of the English constitutional arrangements, a été trouvé dans les bois.

Windsor Resurgent

And so, when the French revolution threatened to subvert English liberty by linking it with equality – thus, in the view of Edmund Burke, mistranslating it – he compared the nation’s monarchy to the ‘proud keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of kindred and coëval towers’: the royal core surrounded by the twin houses of parliament, in a vision both feudal and defensive. George III, with his once-unpopular notions of social subordination, now became a symbol of national unity; and in his rebuilding of Windsor, continued under his son, the central tower was doubled in height.

Burke saw English liberty as founded on law, and the nineteenth-century Houses of Parliament are the perfect Burkean artefact: sharawadgi on the skyline, symmetry underneath. David Cannadine, moreover, detects a significant imbalance between the splendid though seldom-used royal apartments and the cramped accommodation provided for the Commons. ‘Under the broad pressure’, writes F. M. L. Thompson, ‘of subversive and revolutionary ideas and events’, the aristocracy, abetted by successive ministries, began to formalise itself into a hierarchy, obsession with degree a new phenomenon, and intermediate rankings such as that of marquess significantly expanded. The ‘idea of a liberal descent’, Burke had asserted, ‘...carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles’.

His friend the landscape gardener Repton entered happily into the spirit of this pronouncement. He felt, we are told, a veneration for ancient families, and suggested to one of his clients that the market-house, monuments or milestones of the adjoining town might be adorned with his arms. For this he received much ridicule; more effective was his advocacy, to another client, of the castle. It would, he argued, have ‘infinitely more picturesque effect’ than a classical building, ‘by blending a chaste correctness of proportion with bold irregularity of outline, its deep recesses and projections producing broad masses of light and shadow, while its roof is enriched by turrets, battlements, corbels and lofty chimneys’. So the castle came in, once more, through the garden; and, as ‘bold irregularity of outline’, retained the marks of its origin in sharawadgi.

The new century’s castle was brought to dramatic life by Scott. Like Walpole, he built a castle of his own; like Walpole, replaced the sculpture gallery of the classical mansion with an armoury; and, like him, evoked the world of its origins in fiction. But Ivanhoe, to an immeasurably greater extent than Otranto, altered the consciousness of its age. The hammers of armourers rang out again in the London of the industrial revolution; tournaments were fought at the end of journeys by steamboat and train; baronies were called out of abeyance; and when this failed, names were changed. One Wilkins, who had made a fortune in India, reinvented himself as de Winton, and built a castle to prove it. And in Pugin, for whom Ivanhoe was an epiphany, and who as a youth designed stage-sets for Kenilworth, these perceptions became a programme. By recreating its churches, he wished to restore, amid the industrial desolation of his century, that medieval beauty which for him inhered in ritual Catholicism.

Sharawadgi Supreme

Ruskin, seizing on his principle of integrity in design, recaptured the movement for ethical Protestantism. Of the Doge’s palace in Venice he remarked: ‘It…will be noticed that the two windows on the right are lower than the other four of the façade’; and in ‘this arrangement there is one of the most remarkable instances I know of the daring sacrifice of symmetry…which was…one of the chief noblenesses of the Gothic schools’.

Morris, building on both Pugin and Ruskin, and representing an age in which, freed from the pressures of revolutionary and Napoleonic France, political reform had become a viable ideal, found in the arts and crafts of the middle ages at once adornment and occupation for his earthly paradise of socialism. Walpole’s exotic had by now become second nature: adherents of every religious tradition, or none – or, alternatively, princes, peers and populace – were united in the communion of sharawadgi. With Pugin and Ruskin, Morris saw in medieval architecture the embodiment of an ideal society; with Tennyson and Arnold, he retold the medieval romances; and he illustrated them with Rossetti and Burne-Jones. And that was only the beginning. ‘If a chap can’t compose an epic poem’, he growled, ‘while he’s weaving tapestry, he’ll never do any good at all’.

His vision found spatial expression in the habitation he had reared for himself: Red House with its pointed arches, its gabled roof, its turreted well and deliberate asymmetry. Morris’ biographer describes it as a ‘dream dwelling’. So it was, in more senses than one.

NOTE

When Edward Hollamby lived at Red House, it was as if he was possessed by Morris’ largeness of spirit. Being a family home, visitors had to be restricted to limited numbers at limited times. On applying, the present author was told that the quota had already been filled – but that anyone willing to travel all the way from Japan to see Morris’ house deserved to be let in.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Burke, E., 1986. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. by Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Burke, E., 1899. Works. 12 vols. London: Nimmo.
• Cannadine, D., 2000. ‘The Palace of Westminster as Palace of Varieties’. In The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture. Ed. by Christine & Jacqueline Riding. London: Merrell. pp. 11-29.
• Clark, K., 1970. The Gothic Revival. London: Murray.
• Fussell, P., 1965. The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Girouard, M., 1981. The Return to Camelot. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Hadot, P., 2006. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. Trans. by Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• Henderson, G., 1967. Gothic. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Hill, C., 1962. Puritanism and Revolution. London: Mercury.
• Hollamby, E., 1993. Red House: Philip Webb. London: Phaidon.
• Hussey, C., 1986. English Country Houses. 3 vols. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club.
• Ketton-Cremer, R. W., 1964. Horace Walpole. London: Methuen.
• Kliger, S., 1972. The Goths in England. New York: Octagon.
• Lovejoy, A. O., 1948. Essays in the History of Ideas. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press.
• MacCarthy, F., 1996. William Morris. London: Faber.
• Mellor, R., 1994. Tacitus. New York: Routledge.
• Montesquieu, C. L. S., 1949-51. Oeuvres Complètes. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Murray, C., 1999. Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature. Bethesda, MD: International Scholars.
• Murray, C., 2009. Disorientalism: Asian Subversions, Irish Visions. Tokyo: Asiatic Society of Japan.
• Murray, C., 2014. ‘Sharawadgi Revisited’. Shakkei, 21(2), 2-4.
• Murray, C., 2022. ‘The Secret Life of Sharawadgi’. Shakkei, 29 (1), 24-30.
• Panofsky, E., 1974. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. New York: Meridian.
• Pares, R., 1967. King George III and the Politicians. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Pocock, J. G. A., 1967. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. New York: Norton.
• Ruskin, J., 1907. The Stones of Venice. 3 vols. London: Routledge.
• Summerson, J., 1970. Architecture in Britain, 1530 to 1830. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Temple, W., 1757. Works. 4 vols. London: Clarke, Wotton et al.
• Thompson, F. M. L., 1971. English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century. London: Routledge.
• Townshend, D., 2019. Gothic Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Walpole, H., 1969. The Castle of Otranto. Ed. by W. S. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Walpole, H., 1937-83. Correspondence. Ed. by W. S. Lewis et al. 48 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sharawadgi: Borrowing the Illimitable

It will hardly be thought accidental that sharawadgi, understood as the naturalist asymmetry of the Japanese garden, should have been introduced to Europe at a time when the universe was seen to be subject to comparable disarrangement. Still less so when we find that the two individuals responsible – the Restoration diplomat William Temple, who reported on its presence in Japan, and the Queen Anne essayist Joseph Addison, who advocated its practice in England – should also have been deeply involved in the cosmological debate.

Japanese China, Chinese Japan

A preliminary question that has vexed investigators is why, though he had access to individuals in the Netherlands who had visited the gardens of Japan, Temple spoke of the latter as Chinese.

Though puzzling at first sight, the solution is in fact remarkably simple. In the geography of Temple’s century lurked a hazy notion of the ‘Indies’, which might stretch from India proper to the Caribbean, and within which any differences between Japan and China might well seem incidental. The diarist John Evelyn described a house he had visited as abounding in ‘elegancies, especially Indian; in the hall are contrivances of Japan screens... the landscapes of the screens represent the manner of living, and country of the Chinese’.

Is ‘Japan’ used here in its sense of lacquer, though the screens are Chinese: Chinese japan, as one might speak of Japanese china? Or are they in fact Japanese, though depicting, as Japanese artists commonly did, Chinese landscapes? We cannot tell; and it scarcely matters: because it is clear that, for Evelyn, China and Japan are simply component parts of a generic ‘Indies’.

So too it is for Temple, as he winds up his account of sharawadgi with the words: ‘And whoever observes the work upon the best India gowns, or the painting upon their best screens or porcelains, will find their beauty is all of this kind (that is) without order’.

Temple’s ‘Chineses’, then, are not specifically Chinese; they are generically oriental, denizens of Cathay. Nor was he, in this instance, simply mistaken. The gardens of Japan were continually influenced by those of China, and Temple was aware of the similarity. A book that he is known to have read – Montanus’ Atlas Chinensis – shows a naturalistic Chinese garden, with pine-trees, waterfall and jagged stonework; and he knew, too, that the Chinese imperial palace was surrounded by ‘large and delicious gardens’ of this type. Temple, then, was aware from his reading that Chinese gardens were as naturalistic in appearance as any that might have been reported to him from Japan.

Crisis in Cosmology

Nor did his interest in the Sino-Japanese continuum cease with its gardens; he was no less involved with the philosophy that underlay them.

His was no simplistic exoticism; on the contrary, it was bound up with the intimate intellectual crisis that haunted all thinking Europeans of his time.

The telescope has been thought to have arisen from the combination of two lenses, said to have occurred from the play of children in the shop of a spectacle-maker in the Netherlands. But its full significance only became apparent in another republic, far to the south. When Galileo, in Venice, looked outward into space, he saw the mountains and valleys of the moon, and went on to add thirty-six stars to the Pleiades, eighty to the belt and sword of Orion, while in the orbit of Jupiter he found ‘four planets, never seen from the very beginning of the world up to our own times’.

On the day on which his findings appeared in print, the English ambassador to Venice sent to King James I what he considered the ‘strangest piece of news’ that his majesty ‘hath ever yet received’: that Galileo had ‘overthrown all former astronomy’. The ambassador was Henry Wotton; he was the lifelong friend of John Donne; and it was in the following year that Donne’s lamentation appeared: ‘And new philosophy calls all in doubt, / The element of fire is quite put out; / The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit / Can well direct him where to look for it’.

Donne had grasped the implications of the vision compelled by the telescope: that, in exploding the traditional cosmos, it had revealed a chaos of peculiar horror: ‘And freely men confess that this world’s spent, / When in the planets and the firmament / They seek so many new; they see that this / Is crumbled out again to his atomies’.

The Universe of Epicurus

Here was the terrible, unspeakable secret: that the heavens, as now seen at closer quarters, appeared to vindicate the materialist philosophy, in which the world was created from a random collocation of atoms, propounded by Epicurus.

This was countered by Ralph Cudworth, Temple’s tutor at Cambridge, with an appeal to an order behind appearances: human reason implied transcendent reason, and therefore design in nature. But when he came to write the essay which introduced the Japanese garden to England, Temple titled it ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’, and a contemporary declared that he ‘was an Epicurean both in principle and in practice’, who ‘seemed to think that things were as they are from all eternity’.

This certainly was the teaching of Epicurus: that the universe was matter in motion, uncreated and indestructible; and this it was which earned him his place in Dante’s hell, where those for whom the soul perished with the body were, considered as his followers, laid living in the tomb.

For Temple, however, questions such as whether the world had been produced ‘by some eternal mind…, or by the fortuitous concourse of atoms’ had come to seem unanswerable. What was left was Epicurus as guide to existence, and here he was found supreme. His attitude, as Temple saw it, was ‘neither to disquiet life with the fears of death, nor death with the desires of life; but in both, and in all things else, to follow nature’.

Apprehending the Dao

The critic who had denounced him as an Epicurean also declared that Temple was ‘a great admirer of the sect of Confucius in China, who were atheists themselves but left religion to the rabble’. This, again, is at best an oversimplification of what Temple wrote. Their ‘gross and sottish idolatry’, he had stated, ‘is only among the vulgar or illiterate’; but ‘the learned adore the spirit of the world, which they hold to be eternal’.

Nevertheless, it is intriguing that the two should have been connected: since Confucius was indeed for Temple a kind of eastern Epicurus. ‘The chief principle he seems to lay down for a foundation, and builds upon, is, that every man ought to study and endeavour the improving and perfecting of his own natural reason to the greatest height he is capable, so as he may never (or as seldom as can be) err and swerve from the law of nature’. This, however, does not belong to Confucianism proper, but to the Neo-Confucian syncretism which, in the words of Joseph Needham, ‘set, by a prodigious effort of philosophical insight and imagination, the highest ethical values of man in their proper place against the background of non-human nature’.

This philosophy of nature was taken over from the Dao (Tao), in which Needham finds a ‘close and unmistakable’ parallel with the Epicurean quietism; and with which, certainly, Temple’s affinities are to be found. ‘His life’, it is said of the sage in the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), ‘is like the drifting of a boat’. For the Dao is the way of water, the philosophy of continuous flow; and it is this living line that is manifest in the Chinese, and through it the Japanese, garden. In the landscape arts of Japan, writes R.H. Blyth, ‘the aim is to reduce the complexity, the wild lawlessness of the material, to that point, and not beyond it, where the true nature of the thing is revealed to the poetic eye’. This might be a paraphrase of Temple’s sharawadgi, ‘where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed’.

Temple, then, had discovered, not only the aesthetic of sharawadgi, but the worldview that it implied. While he did not recommend imitating the gardens of his ‘Chineses’, with their underlying principle he was in inherent accord. Expenditure on gardens, he declared, was wasted ‘if nature be not followed; which I take to be the great rule in this, and perhaps in everything else, as far as the conduct not only of our lives, but our governments’. The secret, he wrote at the time of the alliance he concluded with the Netherlands, of ‘all that has seemed so surprising in my negotiation’ was that ‘things drawn out of their centre are not to be moved without much force, or skill, or time; but, to make them return to their centre again, there is required but little of either, for nature itself does the work’. He would have understood this, from the Dao De Jing (Tao Tê Ching): ‘The man of highest “power” does not reveal his “power”; therefore he keeps his “power”’: it was what he enjoined upon Charles II. He would have understood this: ‘Tao never does; yet through it all things are done’: it was how he advised him to deal with his parliament.

Temple had grasped the principle of nature in government; he had grasped it in the garden. In retrospect, the next step is obvious: as in retrospect it always is. But at the time it requires a creative violence: the wrenching of ideas from their customary context; the discernment of likeness in what none had linked before. And this was the achievement of Joseph Addison.

Temple had negotiated the marriage which gave the Dutch king William III his claim upon the throne of England, in a revolution which balanced the power of the monarch with that of parliament, and Addison came to prominence as a celebrant of the resulting liberty.

Thread through the Labyrinth

This was not merely political; it was psychological – the mind, he wrote, ‘naturally hates anything that looks like a restraint upon it’ – and philosophical. He had been exposed to the issue already as a schoolboy at Charterhouse – still an island of the middle ages in the roar of the City of London – the master of which was obsessed with the new cosmology. The latter, Thomas Burnet, had like Temple been a student of Cudworth’s at Cambridge; and, like Temple, espoused it: in such fashion as was thought to have cut short a promising career in the Church of England. Nevertheless, Addison celebrated his vision in a Latin ode addressing him as ‘most distinguished’ (insignissimus); and when, in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, he defended the thesis that the new philosophy was to be preferred to the old, he hailed it as a liberation from constriction.

By now, however, this no longer carried the threat of disorientation. For the Epicurean moment had not endured. The frightening, chaotic prospect opened up by Galileo was returned to order by Newton. ‘No other work’, writes A. R. Hall, ‘in the whole history of science equals the Principia either in originality and power of thought, or in the majesty of its achievement... Order could be brought to celestial physics only once, and it was Newton who brought order’. By delineating – an operation which required the development of the infinitesimal calculus – the power of the sun’s attraction, or gravity, Newton accounted for all observable motion in the universe; and so, at the end of the century of Donne, coherence was restored.

In a play that celebrated political liberty, Addison summed up the result: ‘The ways of heaven are dark and intricate, / Puzzled in mazes and perplexed with errors: / Our understanding traces them in vain, / Lost and bewildered in the fruitless search; / Nor sees with how much art the windings run, / Nor where the regular confusion ends’. That is to say, cosmos lay behind the appearance of chaos: as in Temple’s sharawadgi.

Inverting Versailles

Addison pondered these issues, with momentous results, when he travelled abroad. He found a particular satisfaction in the republic of San Marino: ‘Nothing…can be a greater instance of the natural love that mankind has for liberty, and of their aversion to an arbitrary government, than such a savage mountain covered with people, and the Campania of Rome, which lies in the same country, almost destitute of inhabitants’. And when, on leaving San Marino, he stood before the great waterfall at Terni: ‘It is impossible to see the bottom on which it breaks for the thickness of the mist that rises from it, which looks at a distance like clouds of smoke ascending from some vast furnace, and distils in perpetual rains on all the places that lie near it’. ‘I think’, was his conclusion, ‘there is something more astonishing in this cascade than in all the waterworks of Versailles’.

Gradually, in the course of Addison’s travels, a formula gathered force: as tyranny is to artifice, so is liberty to nature. And now he was ready to propose its corollary: if artifice was the fitting expression of continental despotism, nature was that of English liberty.

However, the role of Versailles in the story is not simply as apotheosis of the unnatural. Addison exulted in distant prospects, of a kind evocative of the new cosmology. At Capri, he saw ‘a vast extent of seas, that runs abroad further than the eye can reach’; while at Tivoli was a vista which ‘opens on one side into the Roman Campagna, where the eye loses itself on a smooth spacious plain’: which, he observed, the ‘Roman painters often work upon’.

Though the reference is generic, none of the Roman painters worked upon that landscape with greater intensity than Claude Lorrain; and the ‘real subject’, writes Marcel Röthlisberger, of Claude’s early paintings, ‘is the dramatic effect of the sun…, and what can truly be claimed Claude’s greatest invention – the painting of the sun itself’. ‘Strange as it may seem’, he comments, ‘this is unprecedented’.

The strangeness may abate a little when it is recalled that Claude lived in the Rome of Galileo, being already settled in the area of Trinità dei Monti when the astronomer was lodged there during his trial: a trial which revolved around the centrality of the sun. It may not be thought coincidence, either, that the Sun King showed himself avid for the paintings of Claude, that the creator of his views had some in his possession, and that Louis appropriated them.

At Versailles the elaborate parterres, the lavish pools, are gathered into a vista by the woods on either side; while, amid the emblematic fountains, presumptuous commoners are transformed into frogs, or Apollo lashes his horses through a shattering brilliance of broken light. ‘There is’ wrote Christopher Thacker, ‘an extraordinary and intended emphasis on the Apollo-sun-god allegory: not only are there many features related to different aspects of the mythology connected with Apollo, but they dominate the gardens, from the statues of Apollo and Diana set by the central window of the Galerie des Glaces to the group of Apollo and his chariot at the head of the canal, and the Latona fountain midway between the château and the canal (Latona or Leto was Apollo’s mother). The east-west axis of the gardens, marked by these memorials of the sun god’s power and progress, seems to be united to the axis of the sun itself, as it rises beyond the château, and sets at the far end of the great canal’.

Louis, moreover, refused to have any terminal point to his avenue: there is no obstruction to the sweep down the green tapestry in the centre, and out over the long water to the horizon. It is a vista without limit; and there can be little doubt as to whose pretensions it expressed. With an arrogance of cosmic dimensions, Louis had translated the new astronomy into terms of himself.

Addison was undeniably impressed. ‘I could not believe’, he wrote of the royal gardens, ‘it was in the power of art to furnish out such a variety of noble scenes’. And yet, while lauding the magnificence of Louis’ creations, in a single deft formula he inverted their meaning. A ‘spacious horizon’, he declared, ‘is an image of liberty’.

Shakkei in England

And so it may be thought inevitable that, when Addison adapted Temple’s principle of sharawadgi, thereby inventing the English landscape garden and giving it internal liberty, he should also bestow upon it external freedom from constraint, so that it borrowed from its surroundings as assiduously as its Japanese prototype (shakkei 借景).

Or that it should consciously create visions redolent of Claude. As in the scattering of classical temples at Stourhead: forlorn in the woodland, these are intimations of a vanished past, an evocation of Vergilian melancholy over the inescapable procession of nature: the tears of things, lacrimæ rerum.

To which Ivan Morris has posited a correspondence with mono no aware. A more specific counterpart might be found in Buson: 白梅や墨芳しき鴻鸕館: shiraume ya sumi kanbashiki kōrokan; ‘White plum-blossoms; / in the Kōrokan, the aroma / of ink’. This in the rendering of Blyth, who notes that the Kōrokan was a Chinese Office which had disappeared centuries before, as Homer’s Troy had for Vergil. The poignant juxtaposition of vanished past and vivid present is heightened by the contrasts: the flower, with its sweetness, white; and the ink, with its astringency, black. And the two in combination may perhaps suggest the whirling of yang and yin, the revolution of the worlds.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Addison, J., 1901-12. Works. Ed. by Henry G. Bohn. London: Bohn.
• Blyth, R. H., 1949-52. Haiku. 4 vols. Tokyo: Hokuseido.
• Capra, F., 1984. The Tao of Physics. 2nd edn. New York: Bantam.
• Fox, H., 1963. André le Nôtre: Garden Architect to Kings. London: Batsford.
• Hall, A. R., 1963. From Galileo to Newton, 1630-1720. London: Collins.
• Jellicoe, G. & S. et al., 1991. The Oxford Companion to Gardens, s. v. eye-catcher, folly. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Koestler, A., 1968. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Koyré, A., 1968. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
• Kuck, L., 1968. The World of the Japanese Garden. Tokyo: Weatherhill.
• Manwaring, E. W., 1965. Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England. London: Cass.
• Marburg, C., 1932. Sir William Temple: A Seventeenth Century ‘Libertin’. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Mitford, N., 1976. The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles. London: Sphere.
• Montanus, A., 1671. Atlas Chinensis. Trans. by J. Ogilby. London: Johnson.
• Morris, I., 2013. The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan. New York: Vintage.
• Murray, C., 1978. ‘Kyoto and the Origins of English Romanticism’. 人文論集 (‘Studies in the Humanities’), 29.
• Murray, C., 1985. ‘The Hollow Tree: Intellectual Origins of the English Landscape Garden’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University College Dublin.
• Murray, C., 1994. ‘The First Romantic: William Temple’. Eigo Eibei Bungaku, 34.
• Murray, C., 1995a. ‘The Second Romantic: Joseph Addison’. Eigo Eibei Bungaku, 35.
• Murray, C., 1995b. ‘Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Irish: The Politics of Romanticism’. In The Literature of Politics, The Politics of Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
• Murray, C., 1996. ‘The Japanese Garden and the Mystery of Swift’. In International Aspects of Irish Literature. Gerrards Cross: Smythe.
• Murray, C., 1998. ‘Sharawadgi Resolved’, Garden History, 26.
• Murray, C., 1999. Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature. Bethesda, MD: International Scholars.
• Murray, C., 2001. ‘A Japanese Source of Romanticism’. The Wordsworth Circle, 32.
• Murray, C., 2014. ‘Sharawadgi Revisited’. Shakkei, 21 (2), 2-4.
• Murray, C., 2022. ‘The Secret Life of Sharawadgi’. Shakkei, 29 (1), 24-30.
• Murray, C., 2023. ‘Sharawadgi and its Dwellings of Dream’. Shakkei, 29 (3), 36-9.
• Needham, J., 1956. History of Scientific Thought (Science and Civilisation in China, 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Nicolson, M., 1935. ‘The “New Astronomy” and English Literary Imagination’. Studies in Philology, 30.
• Nicolson, M., 1962. The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the ‘New Science’ upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry. 2^nd edn. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Possin, H.-J., 1965. Natur und Landschaft bei Addison. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
• Röthlisberger, M., 1960. ‘The Subjects of Claude Lorrain’s Paintings’. Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 55.
• Röthlisberger, M., 1961. Claude Lorrain: The Paintings. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Röthlisberger, M., 1968. Claude Lorrain: The Drawings. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Thacker, C., 1979. The History of Gardens. London: Croom Helm.
• Waley, A., 1956. Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China. Garden City: Doubleday.
• Waley, A., 1958. The Way and its Power: A Study of the Tao Tê Ching and its Place in Chinese Thought. New York: Grove.
• Weiss, A., 1995. Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
• Welch, H., 1966. Taoism: The Parting of the Way. Boston: Beacon.
• Woodbridge, H., 1940. Sir William Temple. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
• Woodbridge, K., 1970. Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of English Culture at Stourhead, 1718-1838. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

 

Sharawadgi as the Sublime

Psychology Decentralised

One of the great transitions of intellectual history, I have argued, is the imaginative transformation in England of the naturalism of the Japanese garden, described as sharawadgi and understood as asymmetry, into what became Romanticism (Murray 2022). I have suggested that the reception of this aesthetic was influenced by two factors: with the limitation of the power of the sovereign by that of parliament, a decentralisation in politics (Murray 2022-23); and, under the impetus of Galileo’s telescopic observations, a decentralisation in philosophy (Murray 2023). Here I should like to posit a third factor, overlapping with both the others: that decentralisation in psychology – that dethronement of rational dominance – which was the sublime.

It was as British ambassador to the Netherlands that William Temple accomplished the first of his notable achievements. Here he forged the prototype of the series of alliances that would curb the ambitions of Louis XIV, and negotiated the marriage between William of Orange and the Princess Mary which would give William his claim on the throne of England. This was realised in the revolution whereby the power of the sovereign was limited by parliament: a principle in which Temple passionately believed. ‘The ground’, he wrote, ‘upon which all government stands is the consent of the people’.

It is of one of the great ironies of history that the revolution in England was implemented through a man who resented bitterly the restrictions it placed upon him. One has only to recall the Prince of Orange’s great garden at Het Loo, with its suggestions of Versailles, to realise that he had something in him of the domineering temper of his adversary Louis. Temple detected this at an early stage, recommending as an ideal for him to serve a free land rather than lord it over a servile one (potius inservire patriæ liberæ quam dominari servienti).

Transplanted Frieslanders

Temple’s aim was to return England to what he considered its natural alliance with the Netherlands. This he did not think of merely as passing advantage, or the accident of proximity, but deep-seated affinity. He traced the parallels in language and institutions between the two countries to a common origin: making the Anglo-Saxons, in effect, transplanted Frieslanders. The ancient Batavians, he asserted, were regarded by Roman writers as ‘the most obstinate lovers and defenders of their liberties’; and this quality, he went on, ‘seems to have continued constant and national among them ever since that time, and never to have more appeared than in the rise and constitutions of their present State’.

The second of his notable achievements, also made possible by his sojourn in the Netherlands, though less deliberate was no less fundamental: a favourable account of the gardens of Japan derived from people who had viewed them. At Nagasaki was an outpost of the Dutch East India Company, that trading network the global reach of which is so ingeniously explored by Timothy Brook through the paintings of Vermeer. Temple visited its directors in Harlem, Amsterdam and Leiden, in the last of which the connection has been fitly remembered.

Baroque Apotheosis

The person responsible for the adaptation of Japanese naturalism to English conditions was Joseph Addison; and Addison first appears upon the stage, both of history and of literature, in a panegyric on the enthronement of the Dutch king and his queen. As Vergil, in the beautiful language of the ninth Eclogue, had placed Caesar’s spirit among the stars – Ecce Dionæi processit Cæsaris astrum – so Addison performs a similar service for William and Mary: he is the sun, she the moon. Inflated as such images may seem, at this distance from baroque apotheosis, there is every reason to believe their underlying sentiment sincere. Certainly the poem, and its reception, marked the turning-point of his life. His talent as a propagandist was immediately recognised, and he was given a scholarship at Oxford, followed by a fellowship; he received the patronage of the Whig architects of the revolution; and through their influence was awarded a Treasury grant to travel in Europe and prepare himself for public office.

However, while he was still abroad the Dutch king died, his patrons fell from power, and Addison himself wandered, rather aimlessly, in the general direction of home. He spent some time in the Netherlands, where he visited the university at Leiden; and a somewhat lugubrious letter has survived, in which he makes a contrast between his own meditations among the anatomical exhibits there and a more ebullient friend’s encounters with the fine women of The Hague.

Uprooted Boxwood

Queen Anne had had no great love for her Dutch brother-in-law: a story is told of her having boxwood hedges at Hampton Court rooted up because they reminded her of him. But she had the wisdom to follow his strategy for Europe, limiting the expansionism of Louis XIV. It was something the more insular Tories found unpalatable; so she was obliged to find support among the Whigs, as a result of which Addison arrived in Dublin as secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. ‘I…do not at all’, he wrote, ‘regret the leaving of England whilst I am going to a place where I shall have the satisfaction and honour of Dr. Swift’s conversation’.

It would be pleasing to assume that it was in the course of such conversation with Swift – Temple’s former secretary – that Addison hit upon the idea of making the Japanese garden the prototype of the English one: intellectual history would in that case have taken on a peculiarly satisfying shape. I do not think, however, that we can do so. ‘Where he touched’, the Whig historian Trevelyan observes of Swift, ‘he scorched’; and few passages are more blistering than that in which Swift satirises the Netherlands precisely on the point of its relations with Japan. One may recall that the most improbable of all students of Leiden University was Lemuel Gulliver; that he was fluent in Dutch and therefore able to pass himself off as a native of the Netherlands among the Japanese. But when he appealed to the shogun not to have to trample on the crucifix, that dignitary ‘began to doubt whether I were a real Hollander or no; but rather suspected I must be a CHRISTIAN’.

No, what happened to Addison in Dublin, the impetus that he encountered there and that altered his subsequent history, came to him from another Irish friend, his Charterhouse schoolfellow Richard Steele. It was in Dublin that Addison came across that lively publication the Tatler, recognised Steele’s hand in it from an observation that he himself had once made to him, submitted contributions, was taken into partnership, and, when Swift’s Tories drove Steele and himself out of office, found in the Tatler and its successor the Spectator an alternative career and his historic vocation (Murray 1995).

Sappho to Genesis

In the treatise On the Sublime, the anonymous author traditionally referred to as Longinus expresses admiration for such overwhelming moments in literature as that which articulates the passion of Sappho (‘If I see thee but for a little, my voice comes no more and my tongue is broken’), or the grandeur of Genesis (‘“Let there be light”; and there was light’). For Longinus, greatness of style is involved with greatness of soul: ‘For it is impossible that those whose thoughts…are petty and servile should flash out anything…worthy of immortal life’ (On the Sublime 9:3). And so, notes Abigail Williams, the ‘re-emergence of the sublime in this period was crucially linked to its long-standing relationship with political liberty’, earlier republican writers having perceived that its ‘transgressive qualities…made it a mode fitting for revolutionary times, enabling poets to echo in stylistic terms the subversiveness of their radical political ideology. The rejection of formal precision and order that the sublime entailed also offered a critique of the specious harmony associated with royalist poetics… Longinus’ theories of poetic process were rooted in the concept that great writing could only flourish with political freedom’. Williams concludes: ‘The emphasis on irregularity…and…the transgression of the known boundaries of poetic experience that was central to Whig definitions of the sublime runs directly counter to the elegant wit and order privileged by Tory critics’.

The blank verse, accordingly, of the radical Milton, promoted in the Spectator as the great English exponent of the sublime, was viewed as freedom from the symmetry of the rhyming couplet; as his lost paradise was ‘wild above rule or art’ (Paradise Lost 5:297), like elements of the gardens he is presumed to have seen in Baroque Italy (Hunt; Murray 1999). Milton’s God, remarks David Norbrook, evinces an ‘apparent preference for asymmetrical forms’: the disproportion between the insignificance of the earth and the vastness of the heavens confounds human understanding. The poet’s ‘spaces incomprehensible’ (Paradise Lost 8:20), then, might be seen as foreshadowing sharawadgi. Nor is it astonishing, since Milton made a point of having met Galileo in person (Butler, 2002), that one may detect in him the vertiginous distances of the latter’s astronomy: ‘from morn / To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, / A summer’s day’ (Paradise Lost 1:742-744). To the question of what Lewis calls the ‘lost bewilderment, loneliness and agoraphobia’ these induced (‘I was afraid of being overlooked amidst the immensity of nature’), Addison replied with the classic reassurance: ‘God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’.

Aesthetics of Transcendence

It was an issue which had been explored comprehensively by his mentor at Charterhouse, Thomas Burnet (Murray 2023): ‘The greatest objects of nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold; and next to the great concave of the heavens, and those boundless regions where the stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon with more pleasure than the wide sea and the mountains of the earth…: and whatsoever hath but the shadow and appearance of INFINITE, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration’. Robert Doran locates a parallel statement in Longinus (On the Sublime 35:3), for whom sublimity evokes ‘the mighty mind of God’ (On the Sublime 36:1). Doran, accordingly, can speak of his ‘aesthetics of transcendence, …analogous to mystical…experience’.

When Burnet’s erstwhile pupil Addison initiated the English landscape garden (Spectator 414), it was in the vicinity (Spectator 412) of the similarly Longinian declaration: ‘Our imagination loves to…grasp anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views’. And, in the combination of political, psychological and philosophical dimensions that will make the English creation emblematic for the eighteenth century, ushering in Romanticism (Murray 1999), he adds: ‘a spacious horizon is an image of liberty’ (Murray 2023).

He opens the garden essay with a comparable reflection: ‘If we consider the works of nature and art, …we shall find the last very defective…; for…they can have nothing in them of…vastness and immensity’. When, therefore, we see nature ‘imitated in any measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted kind of pleasure than what we receive from the nicer and more accurate productions of art’.

Arresting and Inexplicable

This leads to an account of the Japanese naturalism he knew of from Temple, who had defined sharawadgi as that which – in contrast to the ‘proportions, symmetries or uniformities’ of European practice – would ‘strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed’. Which, in other words, was both arresting and inexplicable, in common with the sublime. Temple, who had had occasion to read Boileau, then the foremost exponent of that concept, connects it with amazement: which might well describe his attitude to the Asian garden.

Addison, who has been rated ‘barely second…to Boileau…as a populariser of Longinus among the English’ (Monk), again suggests the influence of the classical theorist when he proposes the adoption of sharawadgi in England: ‘Why may not a whole estate be thrown into a kind of garden…? ...Fields of corn make a pleasant prospect, and if the walks were a little taken care of that lie between them, if the natural embroidery of the meadows were helped and improved by some small additions of art…, a man might make a pretty landscape…’. For this interweaving of nature and art – the landscape as artform – might also be viewed as Longinian (On the Sublime 2:2-3; 36:3). Posing the question of whether the sublime ‘is more a matter of nature (physis) or of art (technē), he replies, notes Doran (2015), with a ‘dialectical conception of the nature/art opposition’: not that they are ‘antipodes’, but ‘mutually reinforcing’; again, as in the Japanese garden (Murray 2022). ‘For art is only perfect when it looks like nature, and nature succeeds only by concealing art’ (On the Sublime 22:1)

One may conclude, then, that for the England of this time, subject to decentralising revolutions in its constitution, its cosmology and an aesthetic which encompassed both, receptivity to the Japanese idea was overdetermined. When Monk declares that the sublime ‘negates reason and transcends rules’, he might well be speaking of sharawadgi.

Delightful Horror

A Whig writer (Dennis) on the sublime observes, in relation to his crossing of the Alps, that nature’s ‘careless, irregular and boldest strokes are most admirable’, the ‘dreadful depth of the precipice’ inducing ‘delightful horror’; and this ambivalence, remarks Doran, this tension ‘between two poles of a single experience – of being at once below and above, inferior and superior, humbled and exalted – produces the special dynamism of the sublime’, Longinus speaking of being simultaneously overawed (seized by wonder, thaumasion, or ekplēxis, terror) and exalted (ekstasis, standing outside oneself). Addison had had a similar experience amid the same mountains: ‘an agreeable kind of horror’; but the most remarkable of all these epiphanies of the sublime is to be found in yet another Whig theorist.

Between the allusions to sharawadgi of Temple and Addison, Shaftesbury too expresses a preference for the irregular over the regular. Unlike them, however, his concern is not with the garden as such; he contrasts this, as it was known to his time, with untamed nature, seeing the ‘rude rocks’ and the ‘irregular unwrought grottos’ as bodying forth ‘a magnificence beyond the mockery of princely gardens’. But what is most striking is Shaftesbury’s response to mountain landscape: ‘Here space astonishes; silence itself seems pregnant’.

Space and Silence

One could hardly find a deeper affinity with the aesthetics of Japan: in which, I have noted elsewhere, the ‘use of space came from Song China, and that version of Buddhism known as Ch’an or Zen… Here, against the depth of water, mist or sky are set down mountains, trees and fishing-boats’: ‘with, writes Sherman E. Lee, “extremely bold ‘flung-ink’ techniques, as drastically simple as a sword cut or an explosion…a pictorial parallel to the mystic’s sudden enlightenment”. And this aesthetic was reproduced with what has been called “astonishing completeness” in Japan. Here, however, it was carried further; here, it has been observed, splashes of ink on white paper are transposed into rocks on white gravel: paintings metamorphose “into meditation gardens…devoid of foliage and water…making them into deeper statements of Zen Void”’ (Murray 2009, citing Lee, Waley, Covell & Yamada).

And among the passages most admired by Longinus was that in which Homer (Odyssey 11: 543-67) has his underworld hero express himself by a silence ‘more sublime than any speech’. Again: ‘Ishibashi Hiro, in her study of Yeats and the Noh, says that among the striking features of that drama’s music “are its sense of tension, of silence…This ‘silence’ should…enable one to feel immense depth and a sense of infinity…as space does in…painting”.

‘As space to substance, so silence to speech; and this too has roots deep in religion. The Greek word “mystery” has been traced to a cognate of Latin “mute”; and throughout mystical literature are intimations that ultimate reality is beyond language. Says Eckhart, Gott ist namenlos: nameless in the sense of indescribable. Divinity, asserts Eriugena, nihilum non immerito uocitatur: “is not unreasonably called ‘Nothing’” – that is to say, no thing, nothing that can be spoken of. Plotinus cites from Plato the statement that supreme being can neither be spoken of nor written about: oude rhēton oude grapton. In the Hindu scriptures the concept is pervasive, as when Arjuna is instructed by Lord Krishna (Radhakrishnan): avyakto ’yam acintyo ’yam avikāryo ’yam ucyate: the spirit is avyaktah – invisible, avikāryah – unchanging, and acintyah – incapable of being thought.

‘This philosophy of the unspoken is equally prominent in Buddhism, being most characteristically expressed in China and Japan through Zen, which traces itself to an original silence. In the words of Yeats: “Do you remember the story of Buddha who gave a flower to someone, who in his turn gave another a silent gift and so from man to man for centuries passed on the doctrine of the Zen school?”’ (Murray 2009, citing Watkins, Radhakrishnan et al.).

NOTE

‘In a corner of the deerpark that lies behind Magdalen College, where the sound of the street is muted as to the hum of some distant shore, stands the gateway that once formed the entrance to Addison’s garden... In the iron of the structure are wrought the initials of Addison and his wife. The A of Addison intertwines with the W of Warwick; the J of Joseph overlaps with the C of Charlotte. Michael Strutt, head porter of Magdalen, kindly devoted a Sunday morning to helping me locate the gates: having been placed in an inaccessible corner, they had been virtually forgotten at the time of my visit. Brenda Parry-Jones, the college archivist, with equal kindness provided extensive documentation of their provenance’ (Murray 1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Addison, J., Steele, R. et al., 1891. The Spectator. Ed. by Henry Morley. London: Routledge.
Aristotle; Longinus; Demetrius, 1932. The Poetics; On the Sublime; On Style. Trans. by W. H. Fyfe & W. R. Roberts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Borges, J. L., 1970. ‘The Fearful Sphere of Pascal’. In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed. by D. A. Yates & J. E. Irby. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Brook, T., 2009. Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. London: Profile.
Butler, G. F., 2005. ‘Milton’s Meeting with Galileo: A Reconsideration’. Milton Quarterly, 39(3), pp. 132-139.
Covell, J. & Yamada S., 1974. Zen at Daitoku-ji. Tokyo: Kodansha.
Dennis, J., 1943. Critical Works. Ed. by E. N. Hooker. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Doran, R., 2015. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eckhart, 2002. Deutsche Predigten. Ed. by L. Gnädinger. Zürich: Manesse.
Edwards, K. L., 2014. ‘Cosmology’. In The Cambridge Companion to Paradise Lost. Ed. by Louis Schwartz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eriugena, 1996-2003. Periphyseon. Ed. by E. A. Jeauneau. 5 vols. Turnhout: Brepols.
Hunt, J. D., 1981. ‘Milton and the Making of the English Landscape Garden’. Milton Studies, 15, pp. 81-105.
Ishibashi H., 1966. Yeats and the Noh: Types of Japanese Beauty and their Reflection in Yeats’ Plays. Ed. by A. Kerrigan. Dublin: Dolmen.
Koerner, J. L., 1990. Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape. London: Reaktion.
Lee, S. E., 1962. Chinese Landscape Painting. 2nd edn. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art.
Lewis, C. S., 1967. . 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Milton, J., 1938. Poetical Works. Ed. by H. C. Beeching & J. Skeat. London: Oxford University Press.
Monk, S. H., 1960. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Murray, C., 1995. ‘Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Irish: The Politics of Romanticism’. In The Literature of Politics, The Politics of Literature. 5 vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Paper read at Leiden University, 10^th July 1991.
Murray, C., 1999. Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature. Bethesda, MD: International Scholars.
Murray, C., 2009. Disorientalism: Asian Subversions, Irish Visions. Tokyo: Asiatic Society of Japan.
Murray, C., 2022. ‘The Secret Life of Sharawadgi’. Shakkei 29:1.
Murray, C., 2022-23. ‘Sharawadgi and its Dwellings of Dream’. Shakkei 29:3.
Murray, C., 2023. ‘Sharawadgi: Borrowing the Illimitable’. Shakkei 29:4.
Nicolson, M. H., 1997. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Norbrook, D., 2000. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plotinus, 1966-89. Enneads. Ed. & trans. by. A. H. Armstrong. 7 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Radhakrishnan, S., ed. & trans. by, 1993. The Bhagavadgītā. Delhi: Indus.
Shaftesbury, A. A. Cooper, 3rd Earl of, 1900. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc. Ed. by J. M. Robertson. 2 vols. London: Grant Richards.
Swift, J., 1939-74. Prose Works. Ed. by H. Davis et al. 16 vols. Oxford: Blackwell.
Temple, W., 1757. Works. 4 vols. London: Clarke, Wotton et al.
Trevelyan, G. M., 1930-34. England under Queen Anne. 3 vols. London: Longmans, Green.
Waley, A., 1923. An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting. New York: Scribner.
Watkins, C., ed., 1985. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Williams, A., 2009. Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681-1714. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Winton, A. 1980. Turner and the Sublime. London: British Museum.
Woodbridge, H., 1940. Sir William Temple. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
Yeats, W. B., 1954. Letters. Ed. by A. Wade. London: Hart- Davis.

Sharawadgi to Serendipity

Intuitive Reconstruction

The human species, notes Carlo Ginzburg, has hunted for millennia: learning, ‘in the course of countless chases’, to ‘reconstruct the shapes and movements of...invisible prey’; to ‘execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers’.

‘This rich storehouse of knowledge has been passed down by hunters over the generations. In the absence of verbal documentation to supplement rock paintings and artifacts, we can turn to folklore, which transmits an echo, though dim and distorted, of the knowledge accumulated by these remote hunters. An oriental fable that circulated among Kirghiz, Tartars, Jews, Turks, and others relates the story of three brothers who meet a man who has lost a camel or, in variant versions, a horse. They describe it for him without hesitation: it is white, blinded in one eye, and carries two goat-skins on its back, one full of wine, the other of oil. Then they have seen it? No, they have not. So they are accused of stealing and brought to trial. For the brothers, this is a moment of triumph: they demonstrate in a flash how, by means of myriad small clues, they could reconstruct the appearance of an animal on which they have never laid eyes.

‘Obviously, the three brothers are the repositories of some sort of venatic lore, even if they are not necessarily hunters. This knowledge is characterised by the ability to construct from apparently insignificant experimental data a complex reality that could not be experienced directly. Also, the data is always arranged by the observer in such a way as to produce a narrative sequence, which could be expressed most simply as “someone passed this way”… The hunter would have been the first “to tell a story” because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events.

‘“To decipher” or “to read” animal tracks are metaphors. We have tried, however, to take them literally, as the verbal condensation of a historical process which brought us…to the invention of writing. The same sort of connection has been articulated…by Chinese tradition, which attributes the invention of writing to a high official who had observed bird tracks on the sandy banks of a river...

‘I mentioned earlier…the oriental fable of the three brothers who described an animal they had never seen. The story first appeared in the West in the collection of Giovanni Sercambi. It reappeared as the centrepiece of a much larger anthology of stories, presented as translations from Persian into Italian by a certain Cristoforo the Armenian, published in Venice in the mid-sixteenth century with the title Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo. In this version the book was reprinted and translated several times…into the principal European languages. The story…enjoyed such great success that it led Horace Walpole in 1754 to coin the neologism serendipity’.¹

Talisman of Discovery

Walpole had written of a ‘critical discovery’, ‘made by a talisman…by which I find everything I want…whenever I dip for it. This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavour to explain… I once read a silly fairy tale, called the three Princes of Serendip: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right – now do you understand Serendipity?’²

Robert Merton and Elinor Barber, commenting on this passage, have observed that if his correspondent had: ‘looked into the fairy tale that helped Walpole to mint the word, he might have been confused, for its story line scarcely resembles Walpole’s account of it... Walpole was looking for information…and only happened, by “serendipity”, to find it at just the right moment, but the three princes of the fairy tale…merely gave repeated evidence of their powers of observation… The complexity of meaning with which Walpole endowed serendipity, carelessly and inadvertently, at its inception, was permanently to enrich and to confuse its semantic history’.³

Dissolving Disjunction

Certainly, there is disjunction here; though it might be argued that, by slipping in the word ‘almost’, Walpole showed himself aware of the discrepancy. He combined two separate, though related, ideas – in both instances, problems were solved: in the first by accident, in the second by inference – into a single, original, concept: ‘making discoveries…of things which they were not in quest of’.

Nor was ‘serendipity’ Walpole’s only venture of this kind. He had written, I have remarked elsewhere: ‘“I am almost as fond“ of the sharawadgi, or Chinese want of symmetry, in buildings as in grounds or gardens”; and this he discerned in Gothic architecture. Two mistakes here: as sharawadgi was Japanese rather than Chinese, so Gothic, in its origins, was not asymmetrical. But as in mathematics the product of two negatives is positive, these two misapprehensions would merge into a movement’.

Door of Dreams

I have noted further that Walpole’s remaking of his actual dwelling in terms both of Gothic and asymmetry was matched by that of his imagined one. The Castle of Otranto had come to him ‘through the secret door of dreams; and he sat down that evening, he recalled, “without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate”. Like all dreams, it was a compound of memory and impulse. In the domineering ruler, the neglected wife, the sought-after mistress, the son who is crushed by the father’s excesses, may be recognised themes from the Walpole family romance; while in the avenging presence of the lord of Vicenza, the city of Palladio, there runs a lingering sense of Gothic as the transgression of order...

‘Walpole was fully aware of what he called “the wildness of the story”. This he justified by inverting a line from his classical namesake, Horace, who had written that incongruity of form was like a feverish dream, in which head and foot belonged to different bodies: vanae / fingentur species, ut nec pes nec caput uni / reddatur formae.

‘Walpole altered this to read tamen ut pes, et caput, indicating that the poet’s “unmeaning visions” – vanae species – might well possess an order of their own. This, indeed, is virtually a summary of the story: the gigantic helmet, which crashes into the courtyard of Otranto, is found to belong to the same wearer as the outsized foot in the “great chamber next to the gallery”.

‘Incongruity, then, was quite deliberate. “I wrote it”, he said, “in spite of rules”. More specifically, “my rule was nature”; he had been “desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty”. Nature, once again, was liberty; it was the rejection of classical order; it was that which, seemingly formless, had a form not immediately discernible, which was the expression of its own inherent energies. It was, in a word, Temple’s sharawadgi, which he had transposed from the garden to the building, now applied to imagination in general’.⁴

Absurd and Insipid

Macaulay commented: ‘We cannot say that we much admire the big man whose sword is dug up in one quarter of the globe, whose helmet drops from the clouds in another, and who, after clattering and rustling for some days, ends by kicking the house down. But the story, whatever its value may be, never flags for a single moment… The excitement is constantly renewed. Absurd as is the machinery, insipid as are the human actors, no reader probably ever thought the book dull’.⁵

Given that the critic is himself among the great narrative historians, this is no insignificant concession. And it also underlines a crucial element in the novel’s organisation: its – once more – disjunction. The avenging genius loci appears in fragmentary form, before finally making an appearance as a concentrated force: precisely the structure we find in the tale Walpole tells to illustrate serendipity: the creation of a connected story out of apparently unconnected fragments of evidence.6

Macaulay concludes: ‘He had a strange ingenuity peculiarly his own, an ingenuity which appeared in all that he did’.7 And here he makes a most astute observation: ‘His wit…consisted in an exquisite perception of points of analogy and points of contrast too subtile for common observation’. Again, Temple on sharawadgi (‘without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed’).

Act of Creation

But the analysis goes more deeply still: Macaulay has identified what in fact is the most distinctive element in the workings of Walpole’s imagination, and the one that has been most influential: the tendency to connect what few others would. This has indeed been defined as the essence of the creative process;8 and it is what Walpole did in relation to sharawadgi – connect the Sino-Japanese garden with European architecture – and again in relation to serendipity – connect the science of detection with the surprise of unexpected discovery.

NOTES

1. ‘A few years earlier Voltaire, in…Zadig, had revised the first novella of the peregrinaggio, which he had read in the French translation. In Voltaire’s version the camel of the original had become transformed into a bitch and a horse, which Zadig succeeded in describing minutely by deciphering their tracks on the ground. After he was accused of theft and conducted before the judges, Zadig exculpated himself by recounting out loud the mental process which had enabled him to sketch the portrait of two animals he had never seen… These lines, and those which followed, were the embryo of the mystery novel’ (Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, tr. John & Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pp. 102-3, 115-16). OED, 1912, 1913, s. v. serendipity: ‘f. Serendip, a former name for Ceylon + -ITY. A word coined by Horace Walpole, who says (Let. to Mann, 28 Jan. 1754) that he had formed it upon the title of the fairy-tale “The Three Princes of Serendip”’. A supplement, 1909, to The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, 1889-91, traced Serendip through the Arabic Serendib, Sarandib or Sarandip to Sanskrit Simhala-dvipa: simha, ‘lion’ + dvipa, ‘island’ (Robert K. Merton & Elinor Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 110).
2. Merton & Barber, pp. 1-2, citing Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. 48 vol. (London, Oxford & New Haven 1937-83): XX, 407-11.
3. Merton & Barber, p. 2.
4. Ciaran Murray, ‘Sharawadgi and its Dwellings of Dream’, Shakkei, XXIX, iii, 2022-3, 36-9 (p. 36); Ports of Call: Córdoba to Valparaíso. Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2023, 87-93 (pp. 87-8); Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature (Bethesda, MD: International Scholars, 1999), pp. 196-7; OED, s. v. Sharawaggi: ‘also sharawadgi… Of unknown origin; Chinese scholars agree that it cannot belong to that language. Temple speaks as if he had himself heard it from travellers… 1685 SIR W. TEMPLE… 1750 H. WALPOLE, Let. to Mann, 23 Feb., I am almost as fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry, in buildings, as in grounds or gardens‘.
5. Thomas Babington Lord Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, ed. A. J. Grieve, 2 vol. (London: Dent, 1907), I, 345.
6. A similar pattern – apparently inconsequential detail adding up to a coherent whole – might be discerned in Walpole’s more personal writings. Ketton-Cremer provides the background: ‘He set down, in…private letters to his friends, …an illustrative commentary which could enlighten posterity as to the subtleties and undertones, the anecdotes and manners and social trivialities, which formed the background to the march of great events. Some of his correspondences were evidently designed at first to serve as rough material and useful memoranda for a more serious type of history. But he never underestimated the value of the letters themselves; and in time came to regard them as…likely to rank higher… – as indeed they most emphatically do… He selected with great care the friends whom he proposed to favour with his letters; he saw to it that each particular branch of his activities and interests – politics, literature, antiquarianism, social life – should be regularly depicted in a series…addressed to an appropriate correspondent; and if, by death or disagreement, he lost one of these “key” correspondents, the gap was filled with as little delay as possible, so that the narrative of events should not suffer’. His correspondents were expected to preserve his letters, and ‘return them periodically to their writer’: who then ‘subjected them to an elaborate process of editing, annotation and (in many cases) alteration, and left them to his executors in the shape of a historical and social chronicle…, carefully prepared for the benefit of posterity’ (R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Horace Walpole: A Biography, 3^rd edn., London: Methuen, 1964, pp. 18-19, 113). Of the result Austin Dobson judged: ‘It is as a letter-writer…that he attains his highest point. In the vast correspondence…there is scarcely a dull page … For gossip, anecdote, epigram, description, illustration, playfulness, pungency, novelty, surprise, there is nothing quite like them in English’ (DNB, s. v. Walpole, Horatio or Horace, fourth Earl of Orford). Timothy Mowl observes: ‘Horace had, in his letters, invented a new art-form which has still not been given a name… It occupied a literary ground somewhere between War and Peace and A la recherche du temps perdu – life as a prolix novel’ (Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider, London: Murray, 1996, p. 257). Walpole lived through a time when his society made itself predominant from Canada to India – hence Tolstoy – and, as the son of a powerful prime minister, and inheritor of his aristocratic title, enjoyed privileged access to it – hence Proust (Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 187-216). So it was that Leslie Stephen could declare: ‘The history of England, throughout a very large part of the eighteenth century, is simply a synonym for the works of Horace Walpole’ (Hours in a Library, 2^nd Series, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 154).
7. ‘If we were to adopt the classification…which Akenside has given of the pleasures of the imagination, we should say that with the Sublime and the Beautiful Walpole had nothing to do, but that the third province, the Odd, was his peculiar domain’ (Macaulay, I, 343). Akenside (1744) ‘derived his categories “the sublime, the wonderful, the fair”‘ from Addison (‘the great, the uncommon, the beautiful’, 1712); but after Burke (1757) had simplified these to the polarity of the Sublime and Beautiful, followed his lead in a later (1772) edition. It will be noted that Macaulay has demoted Akenside’s ‘wonderful’ to the merely ‘odd’ (Thomas Babington Lord Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, ed. A. J. Grieve, 2 vol., London: Dent, 1907, I, 343-4; Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960, pp. 56-9, 70-72, 85-98; Ciaran Murray, Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature, Bethesda, MD: International Scholars, 1999, pp. 33, 248-50). Hazlitt had earlier spoken of Walpole’s ‘manner of thinking’ as ‘odd and quaint’ (Merton & Barber, p. 24).
8. ‘Temple had grasped the principle of nature in government; he had grasped it in the garden. In retrospect, the next step is obvious: as in retrospect it always is. But at the time it requires a creative violence: the wrenching of ideas from their customary context; the discernment of likeness in what none had linked before. Jung has written wryly of the disability of the discoverer, who ever “stumbles through unknown regions…forever losing the Ariadne thread”. Temple had isolated both of the elements; they would fuse in the crucible of another psyche’. Addison ‘assimilated the idea of the Japanese garden into the ideology of the English revolution; and by mediating this through his own inmost needs, initiated the romantic return to nature’ (Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 39, 78). ‘It has been said that discovery consists in seeing an analogy which nobody had seen before… The act of discovery has a disruptive and a constructive aspect. It must disrupt rigid patterns of mental organisation to achieve the new synthesis… At the dawn of the fifteenth century printing was no longer a novelty in Europe. Printing from wooden blocks on vellum, silk and cloth apparently started in the twelfth century, and printing on paper was widely practised in the second half of the fourteenth… But there exists a series of letters…which…gives a graphic description of the manner in which Gutenberg arrived at his invention… “You have seen…playing-cards and pictures of saints…engraved on small pieces of wood, and below the pictures…words and entire lines… Well, what has been done for a few words, for a few lines, I must succeed in doing …for whole books”… In the letters which follow, we see him desperately searching for a simpler method to replace the laborious carving of letters in wood. “Every coin begins with a punch…, one end of which is engraved with the shape of one letter, several letters, all the signs which are seen in relief on a coin… It is into these…that are placed the little discs of gold, to be converted into coins…by a powerful blow”… When the favourable opportunity at last offers itself, he is ready for it: “I took part in the wine harvest. I watched the wine flowing, and going back from the effect to the cause, I studied the power of the press”… The wine-press has been lifted out of its context…and connected with…stamping…with a seal’ (Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation , London: Pan, 1970, pp. 103-4, 121-3).

Sharawadgi Setting

The context in which sharawadgi came to England was the baroque: its sponsor, Sir William Temple, declaring that ‘the perfectest figure of a garden I ever saw…lies upon the side of a hill…upon which the house stands… the great parlour opens into the middle of a terrace gravel-walk…: from this walk are three descents, by many stone steps, in the middle and at each end, into a very large parterre. This is divided into quarters by gravel-walks, …adorned with…fountains and…statues… From the middle of the parterre is a descent by many steps flying on each side of a grotto…into the lower garden, which is all fruit-trees, ranged about the several quarters of a wilderness which is very shady’.1

Baroque

The baroque garden, states Wölfflin, ‘did not follow the terrain; it subordinated it to a unified scheme. The whole design was dominated by one all-embracing view, and the position and effect of every detail was determined by its relation to the whole… But the natural park did not entirely disappear under this schematic treatment; the formless and unconfined were drawn into the composition… Turning by stages into a wilderness it came nearer to unformed, untamed nature, and the view of the landscape beyond became in turn an essential part of the composition, with avenues laid out expressly to end in a distant view. In other words, non-structural, formless and unbounded elements were absorbed as the necessary complement to form and structure’.2

Beside the garden of the Villa Lante of Bagnaia, with twin pavilions and square parterres, lay an enclosed hunting-ground where relative informality reigned, with wandering pathways and scattered fountains. And, while a wall separated the two, both, writes Attlee, were treated as ‘elements of the same iconographic programme’, designed to point up an ‘ascent’ from nature to art, the ‘idea of form…emerging from chaos’.

Masson perceives a ‘logical development’ of this scheme in the unified layout of the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati, behind which was a ‘water staircase cutting a swathe through the wooded hillside’. At ‘its highest point, the stonework and fountains are quite rustic. The design becomes progressively more formal closer to the villa’. As she puts it, ‘the garden has passed from the monumental formality’ of ‘the great semi-circular nympheum that stands behind the house’ to ‘the wild of the forest, whose trees have been pressing in closer and ever closer on the perspective as it recedes from view… There are also terraces and walks on the hillside, but, unlike a Renaissance garden, these are simply grassy alleys lined at first by clipped trees and hedges and gradually merging into woodland paths’.3

‘The natural garden, Miles Hadfield observes, had “long been latent” in Europe. It is implicit in the pastoral of antiquity, in which nature is superior to art; and in the pastoral of the Renaissance, it resurfaces as if in a dream… In the actual gardens of the time, however, it exists, where it exists, as a foil: as a coign of wildness in thrall to architecture: as a dream half-remembered to the waking mind. Through the increasing elaborations of the baroque, it surfaces as a growing unease: as the recognition that nature ought indeed to be natural, and as the repeated cry for a return to it. But the catalyst of the change, the crisis after which reality can no longer be held at bay, comes in Temple. Gardens “wholly irregular”, he writes…, may “have more beauty” than those of the regular kind. “Something of this”, he goes on, “I have seen in some places, but heard more of it from others who have lived much among the Chineses… Among us…, the beauty of building and planting is placed chiefly in some certain proportions, symmetries, or uniformities”…; while those of the “Chineses” involve a most subtle aesthetic…”where the beauty shall be great…, but without any order…that shall be…easily observed…, and, where they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem”’.⁴

Mannerism

John Shearman declares that ‘all phases in the history of art’ are ‘connected, however indirectly, with those that precede and follow’;⁵ and what preceded the Baroque was the Mannerist. Pevsner writes of the Laurentian Library at Florence: ‘The anteroom is high and narrow. This alone gives an uncomfortable feeling. Michelangelo wanted to emphasize the contrast to the long, comparatively low and more restful library itself … The colour scheme of the room is austere, a dead white against the sombre dark grey of columns… and other structural or decorative members. As for the…columns, one would expect them to project and carry the architraves, as had always been the function of columns. Michelangelo reversed the relations. He recessed his columns and projected his panels so that they painfully encase the columns… It is…illogical, because it makes the carrying strength of the columns appear wasted… The staircase tells of the same wilful originality…a heavy, weary flow as of lava… What Michelangelo’s Laurenziana reveals is…Mannerism in its most sublime architectural form and not Baroque – a world of frustration… every force seems paralysed. The load does not weigh, the support does not carry, natural reactions play no part – a highly artificial system upheld by the severest discipline’.

Again: ‘Michelangelo’s architectural masterpiece, the back and the dome of St. Peter’s, are also an expression of revolt against Bramante and the spirit of the Renaissance…, condensing the composition into one central dome resting on piers that Bramante would have refused as colossal, i. e., inhuman… Bramante’s dome was to be a perfect hemisphere. Michelangelo raised his on a higher drum’: which, ‘with its upward thrust, heralded the Baroque… The sixteenth century was inspired by Michelangelo’s Mannerism, the seventeenth appreciated his terribilità and made the Baroque out of it’.⁶

Mannerism has once more been identified in the Sacred Grove, Sacro Bosco, at Bomarzo, with its focus upon ‘the impossible, the contrived or the unexpected’.⁷ As when ‘a huge laughing mask is cut from the living rock’, and other sculptures depict ‘the trials in love and war of the mad Orlando, the central character of…Ariosto’s popular contemporary epic’: the ‘giant warrior’ being portrayed ‘ripping a woodsman…limb from limb’, or an ‘overscaled Etruscan urn’ representing ‘the one containing Orlando’s wits’; while ‘architecture, the symbol of harmony and order, is portrayed askew’.⁸ ‘In this’, comments Shearman, ‘lies the difference between the Mannerist and the Baroque garden in which so many features were, of course, repeated; the former is not usually to be grasped as a unity, nothing predominates, and there is no dramatic focus… The successive, cumulative impression is more important than the immediate – the grand vista’.⁹

He notes a similar opposition elsewhere: ‘Vignola…showed a splendid sense of theatre when he aligned the steps and grottoes of the Farnese Gardens on the Palatine with the great arches of the Basilica of Maxentius across the Forum; but it is a relationship that is appreciable only on an intellectual level, for he did not give us any point from which the elements may be seen in this dramatic conjunction, as a Baroque artist would have done. It is no more than an ingenious ‘point’ that one notices in a succession of ingenuities’.

Renaissance

The ‘balance and symmetry’ that Mannerism defied may be seen in the early Renaissance creation of the Villa Medici, designed by Michelozzo on a ‘precipitous’ hillside at Fiesole, where the formality of the successive terraces contrasts with the naturalism of the ‘fabulous’ view they command ‘over Florence and the valley of the Arno’. The effect, concludes Masson, ‘of a series of garden rooms projecting into space, is truly superb’. However, she points out: ‘The lower terraces of the garden can only be reached from the cellars of the house or by a circuitous route leading from the entrance avenue, a somewhat clumsy arrangement that shows clearly the elementary stage of garden design at the time when the villa was built, which did not yet envisage the exploitation of a hillside site as an opportunity for the spectacular use of connecting stairs and ramps that was to become a tour de force of later Renaissance garden architects’.¹⁰

As in the papal palace at Rome: separated, by ‘a rising stretch of open ground’, from ‘a villa built on the top of the Vatican Hill, to which commanding site and beautiful views it owed its name of Belvedere’, associated with which was a garden terrace. Bramante, writes Derek Clifford, ‘left the garden terrace’ here ‘as it was, but immediately beyond it stepped down…to the level of the palace below’, in series of further terraces, in a ‘magnificent arrangement of staircases and balustrading’. ‘With this one plan’, comments Masson, he ‘dictated the basis of European garden design for more than two centuries to come. The Italian gardens that followed, and the French ones that drew their inspiration from them, were really variations on his original theme of the discipline of a propitious site…in accordance with the Renaissance ideals of symmetry and proportion’.

The earlier and the later Renaissance gardens, then, while varying in emphasis, were at one in an attitude that subordinated nature to humanity; where those of the Baroque reflected a ‘growing consciousness’ of human ‘insignificance…in garden designs where the formal layout gradually merged into the wild’.¹¹

Classical

Of the ideals that the Renaissance reanimated, Vincent Scully observes: ‘The mountains and valleys of Greece were punctuated during antiquity by hard, white forms, touched with bright colours, which stood out in geometric contrast to the shapes of the earth… Greek sacred architecture explores and praises the character of a god…in a specific place. That place is itself holy and, before the temple was built upon it, embodied the whole of the deity as a recognised natural force. With the coming of the temple, housing its image within it…, the meaning becomes double, both of the deity as in nature and the god as imagined… The landscape and the temples together form the architectural whole…, and must therefore be seen in relation to each other’.¹²

Or, as Kazantzakis puts it: ‘Then, suddenly, behind a turn in the terrain, looming unexpectedly before you in the heart of the Peloponnesus, is the famous temple of Apollo at Bassae. It is constructed from the same grey stones that compose the mountain, and the moment you face it you sense the profound correspondence between temple and site… You might say that the entire mountain had been longing for aeons inside its tenebrous bulk to find expression, and that the moment it acquired this temple of Apollo, it…assumed a meaning, its own meaning, and rejoiced’.¹³

As also in Japan. ‘The very early people venerated hills, rocks and trees as the abode of spirits. Certain spots were considered sacred and marked off by a rope of rice straw – a custom continued in some places to the present day. The strong feeling of awareness for these natural elements was the foundation on which was easily developed an interest in the Chinese idea of creating a garden landscape in the pattern of nature.’¹⁴

As east and west, then, converged in an archaic sense of the world as numinous, sharawadgi was the mantra of a return to paradise.

NOTES

1. Sir William Temple, Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, ed. Colin Amery (London: Pallas, 2004), pp. 49-52. ‘A “wilderness” of this time was a grove, not necessarily informal – one such is described as being “cut and formed into several ovals, squares and angles, very well ordered” – or, if it was, as an accent to an overall formality’ (Ciaran Murray, Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature, Bethesda, MD: International Scholars, 1999), p. 30).
2. Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, tr. Kathrin Simon (London: Collins, 1984), pp. 150-51.
3. Georgina Masson, Italian Gardens, rev. edn. (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1987), pp. 142-3, 151; Helena Attlee, Italian Gardens: A Cultural History (London: Frances Lincoln), 2012, pp. 64-73, 91-5.
4. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 32-3.
5. John Shearman, Mannerism (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 175.
6. Michelangelo turned architecture into ‘an instrument of individual expression. The terribilità that frightened those who met him fills us with awe…immediately we are faced with any work of his’ (Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, rev. edn., London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), pp. 118-24. ‘The…Laurentian Library…is the first building that seems to have been turned outside in, for the massive treatment of the interior walls belongs by tradition to exteriors…; it seems…as if the architecture had become organic, capable of movement’: a development ‘most obvious…in the staircase, shaped in viscous curves that pour downwards from the reading room to the floor… Michelangelo’s principal contribution, then, to Mannerism in architecture was the notion of imposing an all-powerful artistic will on forms of classical derivation’ (Shearman, pp. 74-5).
7. Shearman, pp. 123-5.
8. Geoffrey & Susan Jellicoe et al., ed., The Oxford Companion to Gardens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), s. v. Italy: Mannerism; Orsini, Villa.
9. Shearman, p. 125.
10. Masson, pp. 5-6, 75.
11. Masson, pp. 122-5; Derek Clifford, A History of Garden Design (London: Faber, 1962), p. 36. ‘It was not only the first truly monumental construction to rise out of the medieval city, but one in which for the first time an ancient sense of scale and spatial composition was re-vivified… Bramante’s contemporaries must have been overwhelmed by his control of a vast area of seemingly unmanageable terrain within a rational tectonic scheme… In fact, no contemporary church, palace or villa was so completely free of the impediments of tradition and habit, for here a form of architecture which had been extinct since imperial times was suddenly brought to life. It is the architectural garden, which at the same time takes its form from the contours of the site and re-forms its natural environment’ (James S. Ackerman, ‘The Belvedere as a Classical Villa’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XIV, i-ii, 1951, 70-91: p. 83).
12. Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple and the Gods (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 1-2.
13. Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, tr. P. A. Bien (London: Faber, 1973), p. 163. I remain grateful to James Dunne for having recommended this volume as ‘your kind of thing’. ‘“If one goes far back in time”, wrote Pausanias, “one sees the Greeks paying honour not to statues, but to unwrought stones”… Thus Hermes, before becoming the “person” we know in post-Homeric religion and literature, was at first simply a theophany of stone… We are witnessing an evolution here, but an evolution quite without any “purification” or “enrichment” of the divinity, an evolution which merely alters the…conception of the divinity… Hermes ceased to be one with the stone; his appearance became human, his theophany became myth’ (Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, tr. Rosemary Sheed, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, pp. 234-5). ‘Hermes is one of the Greek divinities nearest to the stone culture. His name seems to denote some kind of fixed standing stone; that is what he was at first, a reason he has so many different meanings, which bewildered antiquity. Among other things he is a grave-stone; obviously a monolith “spirit house”, half remembered in the “herms” of classical times, stone blocks sculptured to a head only at the top’ (W. F. Jackson Knight, Epic and Anthropology, ed. John D. Christie, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967, pp. 167-8).
14. Loraine Kuck, The World of the Japanese Garden: From Chinese Origins to Modern Landscape Art (Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1968), p. 67.

Sharawadgi Synthesis

The Pantheon is still there, floating, on the lake in the western hills. The wind stirs, and it vanishes. It is still, then, in the sunlight, and Rome is back again, solid.

Here is the Vergilian command for reverence at the entrance to a sacred site: procul o, procul este, profani. Here is the Vergilian descent into an underworld: facilis descensus Averno. And here is a re-ascent, around the rim of the lake, to a hillside temple of Apollo.¹

And so one might say that, among English manifestations of sharawadgi, Stourhead is the most complete realisation of the classical vision.

 

The Other Culture

Addison, observed Horace Walpole, ‘travelled through the poets, and not through Italy’; and in so doing exemplified what Lionel Trilling has described as the ‘other culture, the ideal culture, that wonderful imagined culture of the ancient world’: which, he goes on, ‘no-one but schoolboys, schoolmasters, scholars and poets believed in’.

In the eighteenth century, however, politicians believed in it; or thought it expedient to appear as if they did. The elder Pitt, dying in a season of disaster for England, asked that there be read to him, from the final lines of the Iliad, the stately obsequies of Hector and Troy’s despair. And his son in turn, when he faced the mockery of parliament for having concluded peace with Bonaparte, answered in the words of Aeneas that he had not consulted his own desires. Me si fata meis, he began, paterentur ducere vitam / auspiciis et sponte mea componere curas…: ‘Did the Fates suffer me to shape my life after my own pleasure and order my sorrows at my own will…’. Somewhere around here he faltered; and Fox, his lifelong rival, prompted him through the rest: urbem Troianam primum dulcisque meorum / reliquias colerem, Priami tecta alta manerent, / et recidiva manu posuissem Pergama victis: ‘my first care should be the city of Troy and the sweet relics of my kin; Priam’s high house would still abide, and my own hand should have set up a revived Pergamus for the vanquished’. Even the ferocious practicality of Johnson was stilled before that compound of majesty and magic. ‘All the modern languages’, he declared, ‘cannot furnish so melodious a line’ as formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas. So it was that, when Addison liberated the English landscape, it was by the invocation of classical authority. ‘The Beauties of the most stately Garden or Palace’, he wrote, ‘lie in a narrow Compass, the Imagination immediately runs them over, and requires something else to gratifie her; but, in the wide Fields of Nature, the Sight wanders up and down without Confinement’. ‘For this Reason’, he went on, ‘we always find the Poet in love with a Country-Life’: a contention he illustrated from Horace and Vergil.² And so it may be taken as inevitable that the romantic English garden, with its vista of illimitable woodland, should be set with the temples of antiquity.

Curved against the Winds

However, Addison’s travels, abstract and unreal though they may have seemed, had a more immediate, not to say imperative, dimension.

King James, as Duke of York, commanded an English fleet against the Dutch; and a Dutch settlement on the American coast, with a wall on the landward side, and a canal curved against the winds from the sea, was renamed after him. As lord high admiral, he trusted in authority, and as king seems to have expected a like trust from his subjects. But by imposing fellow-Catholics on the army and the church, he alienated the bases of his power, until the very bishops rose in revolt, and enjoyed for a moment the unwonted sensation of martyrdom. James put them on trial; on the day they were acquitted, an invitation went out to his son-in-law, William of Orange; and, on his and Mary’s agreeing to rule in conjunction with parliament, these were crowned king and queen.³

This turn of events, states Macaulay, had nowhere ‘been hailed with more delight than at Magdalen College. That great and opulent corporation had been treated by James…with an insolence and injustice which…had done more than even the prosecution of the Bishops to alienate the Church of England from the throne. A president, duly elected, had been violently expelled from his dwelling: a Papist had been set over the society by a royal mandate: the Fellows who…had refused to submit to this usurper…had been driven forth… But the day of redress and retribution speedily came… In consequence of the troubles through which the society had passed, there had been no valid election of new members during the year 1688. In 1689, therefore, there was twice the ordinary number of vacancies’; and one of these, in consideration of some Latin verses he had written, was given to Addison.

In these verses, he brought the stately pastoral of Vergil to bear upon the English revolution: appealing, like his model, to the value of libertas. ‘Liberty’ was a word which still largely clung to its medieval connotation: of ‘privilege held by grant or prescription’. The ‘freeholder on the land’, writes David Ogg, ‘and the freeman in the town were, each in his sphere, the accredited elements in society’. It was this that was at issue in the resistance of Magdalen, as Macaulay reveals: ‘The President defended his rights with skill, temper, and resolution. He professed great respect for the royal authority. But he steadily maintained that he had by the laws of England a freehold interest in the house and revenues annexed to the presidency’. And what was true of the Oxford college was true of the country as a whole: ‘There was no prebendary, no rector, no vicar, whose mind was not haunted by the thought that, however quiet his temper, however obscure his situation, he might, in a few months, be driven from his dwelling by an arbitrary edict’.

It was by the resistance of such individuals, Tories by interest and inclination, that the revolution was set in motion. But its momentum was to work to the advantage of the Whigs. Those who had voted, writes J. R. Jones, for the exclusion of James from the throne ‘were not going to be worried now by fears that the monarchy would become an elective institution’; where the Tories were plunged into ‘ideological difficulties’ by the subordination of ‘royal prerogative to…common law’.

Addison’s invocations of William can have had little effect upon that monarch: for, as Johnson sardonically observes, ‘his study was only war’. However, he continues, ‘by a choice of ministers, whose disposition was very different from his own, he procured without intention a very liberal patronage to poetry’. Amongst these was Somers, who had served as counsel for the bishops tried by James, and Montague, who helped found the Bank of England to finance William’s wars. Having attracted the attention of both, Addison received a grant from the Treasury: he was to travel abroad, and prepare himself for public office.

Nature and Liberty

Everything that he saw on the continent, he saw as a convinced Whig should. Everywhere, Peter Smithers remarks, ‘the Protestant Establishment, the Revolution Settlement, and Whig economics were confirmed by observing their opposites’. Italy, as the heartland of Catholicism, evoked such reflections as might have been expected from the supporter of a revolution that found the despotism of James indistinguishable from his religion, resolving it to be ‘inconsistent with the safety...of this Protestant kingdom to be governed by a Popish Prince’.

Nothing that Addison wrote upon his travels, remarked an early biographer, could not just as well have been written at home, with the single exception of the description of San Marino. But there is a sense in which it might be said that nothing was more emphatically written at home: that Addison’s account of the mountain republic was the focal point of a pre-existing pattern. Whig feelings found a peculiar satisfaction in the ‘petty Republick’ of San Marino, which ‘has now lasted thirteen hundred years, while all the other States of Italy have several times changed their masters and forms of government’. Its ultimate significance lay in its contrast with the Papal States: ‘Nothing indeed can be a greater instance of the natural love that mankind has for liberty, and of their aversion to an arbitrary government, than such a savage mountain covered with people, and the Campania of Rome, which lyes in the same country, almost destitute of inhabitants’.

Here Addison spoke in the voice of Whig theory. For Locke, ‘all Men are naturally in…a State of perfect Freedom’; and the Williamite revolution had been an assertion of ‘Natural Rights’. For Addison, then, this propensity of human nature leapt out at San Marino over all the disadvantages of a ‘savage mountain’.

But another, and opposite, train of thought had begun to work in him, whereby the savagery of the mountain was to be seen, not as an obstacle that liberty might overcome, but as its analogue and its visible sign: a train of thought which was to issue in an account of an imagined realm. ‘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; but found at length, that this happy Region was inhabited by the Goddess of Liberty; whose Presence softened the Rigours of the Climate, enriched the Barrenness of the Soil, and more than supplied the Absence of the Sun’. Further: ‘The Place was covered with a wonderful 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’.

The parallel of nature and liberty is now complete: it has been carried from the mountain landscape to the heart of the garden. It remained only to advocate it in practice; and this, too, would be the work of Addison. ‘If we consider the Works of Nature and Art, as they are qualified to entertain the Imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in Comparison of the former; for though they may sometimes appear as Beautiful or Strange, they can have nothing in them of that Vastness and Immensity, which afford so great an Entertainment to the Mind of the Beholder’. When, therefore, we see nature imitated in any measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted kind of Pleasure than what we receive from the nicer and more accurate Productions of Art’.

Asian Prototype

And when he completes the process, it is by grafting onto the stock of his own aesthetic the scion of an exotic prototype: ‘Writers, who have given us an Account of China, tell us, the Inhabitants of that Country laugh at the Plantations of our Europeans, which are laid out by the Rule and Line; because, they say, any one may place Trees in equal Rows and uniform Figures. They chuse rather to shew a Genius in Works of this Nature, and therefore always conceal the Art by which they direct themselves. They have a Word, it seems, in their Language, by which they express the particular Beauty of a Plantation that thus strikes the Imagination at first Sight, without discovering what it is that has so agreeable an Effect’.

Sharawadgi.

‘Why may not a whole Estate be thrown into a kind of Garden by frequent Plantations, that may turn as much to the Profit, as the Pleasure of the Owner? A Marsh overgrown with Willows, or a Mountain shaded with Oaks, are not only more beautiful, but more beneficial, than when they lie bare and unadorned. Fields of Corn make a pleasant Prospect, and if the Walks were a little taken care of that lie between them, if the natural Embroidery of the Meadows were helpt and improved by some small Additions of Art, and the several Rows of Hedges set off by Trees and Flowers, that the Soil was capable of receiving, a Man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions’.⁴

Roman Re-enactment

One further component was required to complete the synthesis of the English landscape garden.

‘When King James II’, states Simeon Potter, ‘observed that the new St. Paul’s Cathedral was amusing, awful, and artificial, he implied that Sir Christopher Wren’s recent creation was “pleasing, awe-inspiring, and skilfully achieved”’. For the Whig aesthetician Shaftesbury, on the other hand, the new cathedral was amusing, awful, and artificial in precisely the modern senses of these words: he found it risible, unsightly, and unnatural.

And so there arose the apparent paradox noted by Wittkower: that ‘in the reign of Queen Anne...Baroque houses were placed in “unnatural”, formal gardens derived from France, while in the reigns of George I...and his successors classical houses were given “romantic” landscape-garden settings’. The paradox, however, was only apparent: garden and house were subsumed in a higher ideal; or, as Wittkower phrases it, were ‘two sides of the same medal inscribed “LIBERTY”’. ‘All that was ever desirable’, wrote the republican martyr Algernon Sidney, ‘or worthy of praise or imitation in Rome, proceeded from its liberty, grew up, and perished with it’. And the classical house, as then understood, traced itself to republican Rome, as recreated by Palladio. Palladio had in fact, with great originality and imagination, invented a style in which classical motifs were gathered into unity within a Renaissance order. The interior of the villa was harmonised into ‘subtlety of proportion, composition and equilibrium’ through the Pythagorean theory of number as music: room opening out of room in a continuing chordal echo.

Soon after Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, returned from his grand tour to find Queen Anne succeeded by King George, two books of architecture, dedicated to the king – and ‘thus’, comments Summerson, ‘stamped as Whiggish products’ – appeared. One illustrated the designs of Palladio; the other urged imitation of his ‘antique simplicity’ in England.

Burlington, finding in the classical master the counterpart of his own austere formality, was a man possessed. He set out again for Italy, and, annotating his text as he went, traversed the languid canals and muddy fields to the blinding façades and cool interiors of the Palladian villas; or stood entranced in Venice, where in the floating blaze the lines of San Giorgio are edged and lucid as an antique gem.

Returning to England, he took the theme of the domed cube of the Rotonda, on its sun-drenched hill outside Vicenza, and played a set of learned variations on it along the soberer reaches of the Thames. Chiswick was not a mansion, it was a manifesto: England would abide no longer in the Pandaemonium of the baroque.⁵ These principles were realised in the house at Stourhead;⁶ and, in the resulting amalgam of countryside and classical city, it was as if that belief had been made visible in which Flora was the secret name of Rome.7

Dream of Antiquity

Here, as a schoolboy, came Edward Gibbon; here he found a volume on the Roman empire; and, when the dinner-bell rang, was crossing the Danube with the Goths. And of a later adventure he confessed: ‘The pilgrimage of Italy, which I now accomplished, had long been the object of my curious devotion’. The religious imagery did not belie his feeling. In the summer heat of Florence, he stood with a ‘secret respect’ at the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo, ‘the restorer of the arts and of philosophy’. As he passed in autumn through Viterbo, with its papal palace and shadowed alleyways, with their echoes of medieval riot and assassination, his thoughts were on the region in classical times. And now at last he found himself in Rome, ‘in a dream of antiquity’.

A dream it was. He experienced the city in the double exposure of the Renaissance, as in the great image invoked by Freud. ‘Let us suppose’, writes the analyst, ‘that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity’: as indeed it is. ‘In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand – without the Palazzo having to be removed – the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus’. For ‘in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish... everything is somehow preserved, and...in suitable circumstances...can once more be brought to light’.

So it was for Gibbon. On the evening on which he ‘sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter’, the twin images momentarily coalesced, and ‘the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind’. But it was the church that was the dream, and the temple that was the reality: ‘Those gods and those men had long since vanished; but, to the eye of liberal enthusiasm, the majesty of ruin restored the image of her ancient prosperity’.⁸

Prototype of Parliament

For Gibbon, it has been observed, saw everything from the standpoint of Rome. He ‘identified himself with his subject’, writes Dawson, ‘as no other historian has done. A contemporary...said of him that he came at last to believe he was the Roman Empire, and though this was said in jest by an unfriendly critic it contains a real element of truth. For this...absurd little man...with his pug face and his pot belly, was possessed and obsessed by the majestic spirit of Rome... He felt as a Roman; he thought as a Roman; he wrote as a Roman’.

Gibbon denied the continuity of Parliament with Germanic institutions, preferring to find its prototype at Rome: ‘The temperate struggles of the patricians and plebeians had finally established the firm and equal balance of the constitution; which united the freedom of popular assemblies with the authority and wisdom of a senate and the executive powers of a regal magistrate’. And this fusion of commons, aristocracy and king was vindicated by its capacity for empire. Gibbon’s triumphal Rome marched in step with his triumphal England. Of Trajan, the last great Roman conqueror, he wrote: ‘Every day the astonished senate received the intelligence of new names and new nations that acknowledged his sway’: a passage, notes Swain, which must have recalled Pitt’s victories; while the senate to which they were reported delighted equally in the image of liberty. Had that image become reality, wrote Gibbon, in an evident parallel with England, ‘the privileges of the subject would have secured the throne of the monarch; the abuses of an arbitrary administration might have been prevented, in some degree, or corrected, by the interposition of these representative assemblies; and the country would have been defended against a foreign enemy by the arms of natives and freemen. Under the mild and generous influence of liberty, the Roman empire might have remained invincible and immortal’.

Most Awful Scene

But it had not done so; and in its fall he saw ‘the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind’.9

Lytton Strachey considered it an ‘extreme improbability’ that the ‘gigantic ruin of Europe through a thousand years’ should have been ‘mirrored in the mind of an eighteenth-century English gentleman’. On the contrary, nothing was more probable – indeed, inevitable. For the eighteenth century was par excellence the age of the ruin. ‘The inheritance of humanism’, writes Laurence Goldstein, carried ‘an entail of doom’.

The lament for Rome had begun with its fall; throughout the middle ages, the site evoked sadness and awe; and, as the hopes of the Renaissance were clouded, and the painters of the baroque absorbed themselves in divagations from the ideal, dead cities appeared in their canvases whose ‘wild and irrationally decadent towers, spires, palaces and statues’, notes Rose Macaulay, ‘tumble so startlingly yet exquisitely on to strange quays, in an elegant nightmare of decay’. But the great poet of ruin was Claude Lorrain; and in the English vision of landscape, his influence was ubiquitous. The ‘solemn scene’, intoned Dyer, ‘Elates the soul, while now the rising sun / Flames on the ruins, in the purer air / Tow’ring aloft, upon the glitt’ring plain’.

In Claude’s landscapes, however, the Roman edifices as they were in his own day – ruined, or with medieval additions – stand side by side with their imagined restoration, in ‘an idealised Campagna...enhanced by the dimension of the antique’. For the ultimate subject of Claude is not the past in itself, but in its relation to the present. The juxtaposition of the two creates depth in time, as his perspective creates depth in space, with the lengthened vistas of dawn or sunset adding a further suggestion of transience. He was supreme, said Constable, in the ‘evanescent character of light’.

All this was glossed most completely by Keats, setting out from his meditation on Claude’s ‘Enchanted Castle’: its casements opening from a delicate Roman façade, shadowed by Gothic tower and battlement, while behind over the sea glimmers the chill light in which Psyche appears forlorn. And he went on, in the great odes, to tease out its ramifications: of melancholy over perfection that must pass; of the luxury and impending desolation of autumn; of desire arrested, and so capable neither of fading nor fulfilment, in the eternal present of an antique urn; of all history encompassed in a nightingale’s song, at the timeless instant before the epiphany passes; of Psyche, who, though she inhabits no temple, lives on in the landscape of the mind, still dreaming of transformation within the magical palace of Eros.¹⁰

The Claudian moment, then, is one of exquisite intensity, at the same time haunted by the intimation of mortality. It is a moment such as that in which his master, Vergil, has Aeneas return to life from shipwreck and simultaneously, through the medium of art, apprehend his own past: ‘There are tears to things, and all that is mortal touches the mind’.

sunt lacrimæ rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.¹¹

Troy is evoked for Aeneas on his voyage to refound it in Rome; Rome in turn has fallen; and this is the epic subject of Gibbon. He sees the imperial capital, after its capture by the Goths, in a Claudian vista of desolation – ‘the vacant space of the eternal city’ – and everything in his vast panorama speaks of time and its silent passage. ‘Insensible’ and ‘imperceptible’ are favourite adjectives. The ‘nations of the empire insensibly melted away into the Roman name and people’; under this uniform government, the provinces ‘insensibly sunk into the languid indifference of private life’; and, in a discouraged populace and an undisciplined military, the empire’s greatness was ‘insensibly undermined’. The church, meanwhile, ‘imperceptibly changed the language of exhortation into that of command’; and, after the closure of the temples, the people, again ‘insensibly’, imbibed the doctrines of the new religion. And this unperceived progression of the city is linked explicitly with the life of the individual. Of the fable of the Seven Sleepers, Gibbon declares: ‘We imperceptibly advance from youth to age, without observing the gradual, but incessant, change of human affairs, and, even in our larger experiences of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions. But, if the interval between two memorable æras could be instantly annihilated; if it were possible, after a momentary slumber of two hundred years, to display the new world to the eyes of a spectator, who still retained a lively and recent impression of the old; his surprise and his reflections would furnish the pleasing subject of a philosophical romance’.

It was this poetry of passage that he found wanting in Byzantium. To Gibbon, the history of the eastern empire seemed a ‘dead uniformity’ of ‘spiritual despotism’: like one of its own icons, remote from human drama or passion; lacking in emotion as it appeared to lack motion. Small wonder, then, that he should have criticised it in the most devastating imagery his century could afford. As the France of Louis XIV had once seemed the embodiment of the artificial and the unnatural, so now for Gibbon was the domain of the eastern emperors. ‘The coasts and islands of Asia and Europe’, he wrote, ‘were covered with their magnificent villas; but...the marble structure of their gardens served only to expose the riches of the lord and the labours of the architect’. And these were contrasted with the ‘modest art which secretly strives to hide itself and to decorate the scenery of nature’.¹²

Sharawadgi.

But if Rome had declined and fallen, it had, like the ‘scenery of nature’, revived. Waiting at the gates of the corrupted city Gibbon saw, with Tacitus, a ‘hardy race of barbarians, who despised life when it was separated from freedom’. And it was they, now, who embodied what had once been represented by Rome. ‘The most civilised nations of modern Europe’, he declared, ‘issued from the woods of Germany’.

England, Germanic by origin, was Roman by achievement. Walpole emphasized the first of these aspects, Gibbon the second. Their differences were differences of standpoint within a common historical vista. In the English revolution, Goth and Roman had combined to create a new order of the ages; and in the English garden, following Claude, medieval and classical buildings stood side by side: as they did at Stourhead.¹³

Between Eternities

But the process would, inevitably, continue: it was inevitable because the principle of nature. The Goth, too, was subject to the depredations of time, and Gothic ruins also found a place in the landscape vista. The meaning of the ruin, wrote Diderot, was this: ‘everything perishes, everything passes, only time goes on... I walk between two eternities’.

And so, while the American colonists sought to assert a ‘political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption of the constitution’ – an issue expressed in terms of Cato and Tacitus – while, in their words, the ‘BRITISH CONSTITUTION seems fast tottering into fatal and inevitable ruin’ – a morning and evening scene of Claude’s were printed as emblematic of the ‘rise and fall, or ascendancy and decline of the Roman Empire’. In Gibbon’s history, Walpole noted a passage which ‘I believe the author did not intend to be so applicable to the present moment’: ‘the Imperial ministers pursued with proscriptive laws, and ineffectual arms, the rebels whom they had made’. And, as his father’s policies, perceived as the corruption of a people, had been commemorated by a ruin at Stowe, so now, when they seemed to the colonists to live again in the ‘adroit manipulation of Parliament by a power-hungry ministry’, the Whig Duke of Norfolk set up ruins to mark the British reverses in America. Franklin, reported Walpole, ‘said he would furnish Mr. Gibbon with materials for writing the History of the Decline of the British Empire’; Washington was inspired by Addison’s Cato to resist the despotism, no longer of a Louis XIV, but of a George III; Jefferson combined authorship of the Declaration of Independence with the construction of a house that he named, after Palladio’s account of his Villa Rotonda, Monticello. And America went on to create its own Capitol, its own monumental classicism, its own myth of morning and the unlimited vista. It was a cycle that had long before been anticipated at Rome: ‘And once again to Troy is sent the great Achilles’.

atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles.

‘Worlds succeed to worlds’, wrote Horace Walpole, ‘in which the occupiers build the same castles in the air. What is ours but the present moment?’¹⁴

NOTES

1. Ciaran Murray, Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature (Bethesda, MD: International Scholars, 1999), p. 217; Kenneth Woodbridge, Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of English Culture at Stourhead, 1718 to 1838 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 1-3, 33-5, 58; Margaret Lyttelton, Baroque Architecture in Classical Antiquity (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), pp. 237-9. Of the iconography of the garden, Woodbridge observes: ‘The pictorial and literary clues point to The Aeneid. The painting’ by Claude Lorrain ‘in the National Gallery called Coast View of Delos with Aeneas…, which bears more than a casual relation to the design of the garden …, shows…a terrace…overlooking the harbour… Beyond…is a temple like the Pantheon. The story in The Aeneid reads: “To Delos I now sailed, and our tired band received a safe and kindly welcome… We disembarked and paid reverence to Apollo’s city. The king was Anius, who was priest of Apollo as well…, and wore the holy bay-leaves…on his brow… Reverently I entered the temple built of ancient stone and prayed: ‘Apollo, give us a home of our own… Give us a walled city which shall endure… Let there be some new citadel for us; henceforth preserve it as a remnant of Troy…’. I had scarcely spoken when of a sudden everything seemed to quake, even the God’s entrance-door and his bay-tree… A voice came to our ears: ‘O much enduring Dardans, the land of your ancestors…shall receive you on your return to her… And from this land the House of Aeneas…shall bear rule over the earth’s widest bounds’”. The connection between this painting and the garden is admittedly conjecture. The inscription on the Temple of Flora is not. The quotation, Procul o, procul este, profani, is from the sixth book… After…Aeneas came to…Cumae’s coast…he “made his way to the fastness where Apollo rules on high, and to the vast cavern beyond which is the awful Sibyl’s own secluded place”. Here…the oracle told Aeneas of the future… “And behold, soon before the first gleam of the rising sun, the ground bellowed beneath their feet, the slopes of the forest-clad mountains began to move, and there appeared shapes like hounds howling and just visible through the shadows; the Goddess’ – ‘Hecate, who was said to be accompanied by the sound of howling dogs’ – ‘was coming and was very near. “Stand clear!”, cried the Priestess, “All you who are unhallowed; stand clear!”’. Procul o, procul este, profani (Woodbridge, pp. 33-5 & n., citing Aeneid, III, 78-98; VI, 1-263). The background is supplied by Jackson Knight: ‘Sibyls are very ancient; and they are all partly divine instruments of necromantic prophecy, not purely upper-world, Apolline prophecy… It has been said that the sibyl at Cumae is, strictly, Apollo’s priestess only, and that Vergil himself made her Hecate’s priestess also, in order that she might lead Aeneas through Hades. If so…Vergil, by the extraordinary poetic imagination which enabled him to reconstruct ideal realities, restored a connection that was there before Apollo came. Sibyls belong to the earth and caves…, echoing from the many orifices in the stone’ (W. F. Jackson Knight, Vergil: Epic and Anthropology, ed. John D. Christie, London: Allen & Unwin, 1967, pp. 164-6). ‘Is the path around the lake’, Woodbridge now muses, ‘an allegory of Aeneas’ journey? The imperceptible descent to the Grotto and the steep climb out of it evoke the Sibyl’s words, Facilis descensus Averno; noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; / sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, / hoc opus, hic labor est: ‘easy is the descent to Avernus: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recall thy steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this the toil!’. He quotes from a letter written by the creator of Stourhead: ‘I have made the passage up from the Sousterrain Serpentine & will make it easier of access facilis descensus Averno’. And all this, he concludes, suggests that he ‘was celebrating the founding of Rome… It is worth noting in passing that, according to the twelfth-century chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Aeneas, through his grandson Brutus the Trojan, was an ancestor of the British race’ (Woodbridge, pp. 35-6, citing Aeneid, VI, 126-9; Fairclough, I, 514-15). This reading, certainly, gives a peculiar cohesion to the sequence of the monuments: the warning, by Apollo’s sibyl, of the approach to sacred space, the descent into subterranean gloom, the reascent to daylight, the vision of the Pantheon – a shorthand version of Rome – and the final ascent up a hillside to the temple of Apollo himself.
2. Murray, Sharawadgi, p. 167-8; Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al., 48 vol. (London, Oxford & New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937-83), XIII, 231; Joseph Addison, Miscellaneous Works, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 2 vol. (London: Bell, 1914), II, 128; Lionel Trilling, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1955), p. 46; William Edward Hartpole Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vol. (London: Longmans, 1890-91), IV, 84-5; V, 72n.; Aeneid, IV, 340-44; H. Rushton Fairclough, ed. & tr., Vergil, rev. edn., 2 vol. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978): I, 418-19; James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman & J. D. Fleeman (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 325; Eclogues, I, 5: ‘Set groves re-echoing Amaryllis’ grace’; The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), III, 549, citing Horace, Epistles, II, ii, 77 & Vergil, Georgics, II, 467- 70.
3. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 41-2.
4. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 49-54, 63-4; 72-3; Thomas Babington Lord Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, ed. A. J. Grieve, 2 vol. (London: Dent, 1907), II, 456-7; History of England, 4 vol. (London: Dent, 1967-72), II, 104-8; Vergil, Eclogues, I, 27; David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II & William III (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 54-6; J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), pp. 314-18; Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vol. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1968), II, 85; Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 63; T. Tyers, An Historical Essay on Mr. Addison (London: Nichols, 1783), p. 25; W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 11, 103; Addison, Miscellaneous Works, II, 71-6; Edward A. & Lillian D. Bloom, ‘Joseph Addison and Eighteenth-Century “Liberalism’”, Journal of the History of Ideas XII (1951), 560-83 (pp. 560-62); J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 105-6, 123-4; H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: University Paperbacks, 1979), pp. 65-6; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 155, 287; The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), II, 397-401; The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), III, 548-53.
5. Wittkower (Architectural Principles) expounds the philosophy involved: ‘Palladio…demanded a hall in the central axis and absolute symmetry of the lesser rooms at both sides… The geometrical keynote is, subconsciously rather than consciously, perceptible to everyone who visits’ his ‘villas… Palladio took the greatest care in employing harmonic ratios not only inside each single room, but also in the relation of the rooms to each other’. Pythagoras had ‘discovered that tones can be measured in space… If two strings are made to vibrate under the same conditions, one being half the length of the other, the pitch of the shorter string will be one octave…above that of the longer one. If the lengths of the strings are in the relation of two to three, the difference in pitch will be a fifth…, and if they are in the relation of three to four, the difference in pitch will be a fourth… Thus the consonances on which the Greek musical system was based – octave, fifth, and fourth – can be expressed by the progression 1: 2: 3: 4… One can understand that this staggering discovery made people believe that they had seized upon the mysterious harmony that pervades the universe… In the wake of the Pythagoreans, Plato…found this harmony in the squares and cubes of the double and triple proportion starting from unity, which led him to the two geometrical progressions, 1, 2, 4, 8 and 1, 3, 9, 27…, …which express the secret rhythm in macrocosm and microcosm alike’. Said the Neoplatonist Francesco Giorgi: ‘According to the writings of Pythagoras it was believed that in these numbers and proportions the fabric of the soul and the whole world was arranged and perfected. And from the odd as from the male, and from the even as from the female – from these powers together – everything is generated. But in the cube of the one and the other, they said, the work was terminated. For one cannot proceed beyond the third dimension in length, width and depth’. ‘It appears certain’, comments Wittkower, ‘that Palladio, a generation later, knew…and…appreciated Giorgi’s…speculations’, having absorbed from the circles he moved in ‘the spirit of the Platonic Academy… Palladio declares three different sets of ratios for height to width and length to be good proportions for rooms… His first example: suppose a room measures 6 x 12 feet; its height will be 9 feet. Second example: a room is 4 x 9 feet; its height will be 6 feet. Third example: a room is again 6 x 12 feet; its height will be 8 feet… In…these three examples the height of the room represents the arithmetic, geometric and “harmonic” mean between each of the two extremes… In the arithmetic proportion, the second term exceeds the first by the same amount as the third exceeds the second (b – a = c – b, as in 2 : 3 : 4, i. e., Palladio’s first example: in the geometric proportion, the first term is to the second as the second is to the third (a : b = b : c, as in 4 : 6 : 9, i. e., Palladio’s second example). The formula for the “harmonic” proportion, Palladio’s third case, is…defined in the Timaeus as “the mean exceeding one extreme and being exceeded by the other by the same fraction of the extremes”… In Palladio’s example 6 : 8 : 12, the mean 8 exceeds 6 by ⅓ of 6 and is exceeded by 12 by ⅓ of 12’ (Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 169-70; Simeon Potter, Our Language, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, p. 116; Rudolf Wittkower, Palladio and English Palladianism, London: Thames & Hudson, 1974, pp. 115, 119-24, 127-8, 178-80, 183, 185-6; Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London: Academy Editions, 1973, pp. 16, 70-72, 103-10; Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1945, p. 157; James S. Ackerman, Palladio, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, pp. 19, 160-62, 165-7; James Lees-Milne, Earls of Creation: Five Great Patrons of Eighteenth-Century Art, London: Hamilton, 1962, pp. 113, 115-16, 122-5, 127-8, 139-40, 149-53; John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530 to 1830, 5^th edn., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, p. 318). For Pythagoras, ‘the mathematical bodied forth the metaphysical. If one is added to an odd number, the result is even; if it is added to an even number, the result is odd. Pythagoras’ one, then, since it encompassed odd and even, was seen by implication as reconciling all other polarities, like some Hellenic union of yin and yang. However, while the first number contained all the rest, the first four, tetractys, became a “secret key to the understanding of” the cosmos, the “source and root of…ever- flowing nature”. Placed together, they produce a descending series.

   
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   ‘And this encapsulates the “basic harmonies of music”. “For the octave consists in the ratio 2:1, the fifth 3:2, the fourth 4:3”’ (Ciaran Murray, ‘Heart Sutra at Hanging Rock’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, V, iii, 2011, 184-91: pp. 187-8; Voyagings: Ireland, Japan, India, Tokyo: Castle Quarter Press, 2014, pp. 229-35: p. 232, citing Christoph Riedweg, Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching and Influence, tr. Steven Rendall, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005, pp. 82-7). The structure of Eclogue VIII is symmetrical: a diptych of tales, told by rival poets, of contrasting responses to the loss of love. One gives way to despair; the other seeks to win back the beloved by means of magic. This takes its cue from a similar scene in Theocritus (Idyll II), but with singular interweavings of Vergil’s own: as Jackson Knight reminds us, he is a brooding figure whose utterances resonate on numerous levels, ‘layer on layer of thought and emotion’ (W. F. Jackson Knight, Roman Vergil Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, p. 131); and here he links the lover’s efforts with his own, asserting that poetry, too, is the weaving of a spell: ‘by means of song, Circe transformed the comrades of Ulysses’ (carminibus Circe socios mutavit Ulixi); and we recall that ‘chant’ and ‘charm’ are cognate with ‘incantation’ (Joseph T. Shipley, The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, s. v. kan): as if to draw attention to the fact that we are reading a poem within a poem. Again, in relation to the threefold nature of the rebinding ritual (three threads, of three different colours, wound about the lover’s image, and drawn three times about the altar), he asserts numero deus impare gaudet: ‘In numbers odd / Exults the god’. According to Aristotle’s account of Pythagorean thought, the one, immobile and good are linked with the odd, and the many, mobile and evil with the even (Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, tr. Edwin L. Minar, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972, p. 51).
6. The connections between Burlington and the creators of Stourhead – the Hoare banking dynasty – included intermarriage between the families; and the author of one of the Palladian volumes which had inspired Burlington’s return to Italy – Colen Campbell – was the architect of the house there, the dimensions of which are given as: ‘hall, a thirty-foot cube; music-room, thirty by twenty feet; dining-room, twenty-five by twenty feet; saloon, …thirty by thirty feet’ (Woodbridge, pp. 18-21, 26, 38-9; Summerson, p. 330).
7. Woodbridge, pp. 2, 28-30; C. G. Jung & C. Kerényi, The Science of Mythology: Essays on the Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), p. 23. ‘The goddess of spring and flowering or blossoming plants, Flora was an Italian goddess whose cult was in existence at Rome at an early date. A temple was dedicated to her in 238 B.C. on the advice of the Sibylline Books, and her festivals, the Floralia, were celebrated annually. She was later identified with the Greek goddess Chloris’ (F. Guirand & A.-V. Pierre, ‘Roman Mythology’, in New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, tr. Richard Aldingon & Delano Ames, new edn., Feltham: Hamlyn, 1968, pp. 199-221: p. 217): chloros, ‘green’ (Adrian Room, NTC’s Classical Dictionary: The Origins of the Names of Characters in Classical Mythology, Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company, 1990, s. v.). ‘Hawthorn blossom has, for many men, a strong scent of female sexuality’: its ‘orgiastic use…corresponds with the cult of the Goddess Flora’ (Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, rev. edn., London: Faber, 1961, p. 176). In Botticelli’s Primavera, ‘Zephyr, the wind of spring, swiftly pursues, as in Ovid’s Fasti, the innocent earth-nymph Chloris. With blowing cheeks he rushes from behind a tree which bends under his impact. Chloris tries to escape his embrace, but as Zephyr touches her, flowers issue from her breath, and she is transformed into Flora, the resplendent herald of spring’ (Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. edn., New York: Norton, 1968, p. 115). It will be noted that Addison’s goddess of Liberty seems to overlap with Flora, as though he had conflated the notions of flourishing and flowering: even to the extent of – in the term ‘promiscuously’ – suggesting the orgiastic associations of the latter.
8. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 217, 220-21; Gibbon, Autobiographies, ed. John Murray (London: Murray, 1896), p. 302; Journey from Geneva to Rome: Journal from 20 April to 2 October 1764, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1961), pp. 213, 235; D. M. Low, Edward Gibbon, 1737- 1794 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937), pp. 176-83; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vol. (London: Methuen, 1909-13), VII, 132; Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vol. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), XXI, 69-70.
9. Murray, \, pp. 215-16, 227-8; Low, pp. 320-21; Christopher Dawson, Introduction to Gibbon, Decline & Fall, 6 vol. (London: Dent, 1966-74), I, xi; Gibbon, Decline & Fall, ed. Bury, I, 6; III, 357; IV, 147, 160; VII, 325; Lewis P. Curtis, ‘Gibbon’s Paradise Lost’, in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (New York: AMS Press, 1978), pp. 73-90 (p. 84); Joseph Ward Swain, Edward Gibbon the Historian (London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 128-9.
10. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 228-9; Lytton Strachey, Portraits in Miniature & Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), pp. 159-60; Laurence Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 7; Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), pp. 9-35, 165-92; H. V. S. & M. S. Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955), p. 53; Michael Kitson & Deborah Howard, The Art of Claude Lorrain (London: Arts Council, 1969), pp. 9-10; Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700-1800 (London: Frank Cass, 1965), pp. 95-107; Mark Akenside & John Dyer, Poetical Works, ed. Robert Aris Willmott (London: Routledge, 1855), pp. 24-40 (p. 25); Michael Clarke & Nicholas Penny, The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, 1751-1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 40-41; Marcel Röthlisberger, ‘The Subjects of Claude Lorrain’s Paintings’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, LV (1960), 209-24 (p. 218); Claire Pace, ‘Claude the Enchanted: Interpretations of Claude in England in the Earlier Nineteenth Century’, Burlington Magazine, CXI (1969), 733-40 (p. 737); John Keats, Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1975), pp. 320-26, 514-21, 523-41, 650-55; Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 127-30, 219-21; Michael Kitson, Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis (London: British Museum, 1978) pp. 153-4; Helen Langdon, Claude Lorrain (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989), pp. 133-6; Harold Bloom, ‘The Ode to Psyche and the Ode on Melancholy’, in Walter Jackson Bate, ed., Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 93-8; Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine, tr. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 9-11, 79-84.
11. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 229, 314-15; Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: Murray, 1949), p. 65; Marcel Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings, 2 vol. (London: Zwemmer, 1961), I, 35; ‘Subjects’, pp. 221-2; Michael Kitson, ‘The “Altieri Claudes” and Vergil’, Burlington Magazine, CII (1960), pp. 312-18 (pp. 312-15); A. G. McKay, ‘Vergilian Landscape into Art: Poussin, Claude and Turner’, in Vergil, ed. D. R. Dudley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 139-60 (pp. 147-8); Aeneid, I, 462. Lacrimæ rerum has an almost exact Japanese equivalent in mono-no-aware, aware being rooted in the interjectional ‘ah!’, while mono is both ‘palpable matter and formless space’, permeated by an as yet undifferentiated spirit (Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 208; Sen-Ichi Hisamatsu, The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics, Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1963, pp. 13-16; Makoto Ueda, Literary and Art Theories in Japan, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1991, pp. 199-204; Kenzo Tange & Noboru Kawagoe, Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture, Cambridge, MA: M. I. T. Press, 1965, pp. 20-23). As for the Latin: when Jackson Knight states that ‘res, “a thing”, often in the sense of “a thought”…is connected with reri, “to think”, as “thing” and think” are connected in English and German’ (W. F. Jackson Knight, Roman Vergil, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, pp. 240-41), the last, with its suggestion of the ancient participation mystique, may be thought a happy accident, since the English terms have been traced to diverse roots: ‘thing’ to tenk, ‘stretch’, and ‘think’ to tong, ‘think, feel’ (Calvert Watkins, rev. & ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985, s. vv.). Nonetheless, Wharton declares that the ‘referential meaning’ of rerum is ‘protean’: that by’ offering an excess of interpretive options’ Vergil’s line ‘disrupts the flow of our reading and draws us into explicit contemplation’ (David Wharton, ‘Sunt Lacrimæ Rerum: An Exploration in Meaning’, Classical Journal, CIII, iii , Feb.-Mar. 2008, 259-79: pp. 271, 276). Reinke likewise suggests that ‘what Vergil means here by res, I feel, are…things in the sense of…life itself’ (Edgar C. Reinke, ‘Vergil’s Lacrimæ Rerum’, Classical Outlook, LIX, I, Sept. 1963, 5-7: p. 7); while Keith declares: ‘Woodberry describes lacrimæ rerum as the best known and the central phrase of the Aeneid and asserts that it might be regarded as the other name of the poem’ (Arthur L. Keith, ‘A Vergilian Line’, Classical Journal, XVII, vii, Apr. 1922, 398-402: p. 398, citing George Edward Woodberry, Vergil, New York: Authors Club, 1930). Vergil’s poignant juxtaposition of vanished past and vivid present may also be found in Buson: shiraume ya / sumi kanbashiki / kōrokan (白梅や墨芳しき鴻鸕館: Blyth, 2: 300-301): ‘White plum-blossoms; / in the Kōrokan, the aroma / of ink’. The Kōrokan was a Chinese Office which had disappeared centuries before; and its distance from the immediacy of early spring is heightened by the contrasts: the flower, with its sweetness, white, and the ink, with its astringency, black: the latter, like Vergil’s Trojans, carrying within itself the entire tradition of an antique culture.
12. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 229-30; Gibbon, Decline & Fall, ed. Bury, I, 39, 56-7, 194; II, 44; III, 207-8, 414-15; IV, 405; V, 170; VI, 75-7.
13. The master of Stourhead found in Walpole’s Strawberry Hill a ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’ that ‘tho Gothic dissolves the scene in Extasy’; and in spite of the ‘tho’, notes Woodbridge, was soon ‘clearly converted’, as he accepted the Bristol High Cross, to be set up again near the medieval village church by the lakeside entrance to the garden. Other medievalising features followed, such as Alfred’s Tower and a Rustic Convent; though, initially at least, the ‘new features did not…intrude into the classical sequence round the lake’ (Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 194-6, 215-16, 231; Woodbridge, pp. 56-60; Gibbon, Decline & Fall, ed. Bury, I, 2, 213; Manwaring, p. 137; John Dixon Hunt, William Kent: Landscape Garden Designer, London: Zwemmer, 1987, pp. 41-2, 79-88).
14. Murray, Sharawadgi, pp. 231-2; Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival (London: Murray, 1970), pp. 47-50; Macaulay, Ruins, pp. 22-33, 36; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 19, 22, 41-4, 51, 94; John Gage, ‘Turner and Stourhead: The Making of a Classicist?’, Art Quarterly, XXXVII (1974), pp. 59-87 (p. 76); Walpole, XXIV, 103; XXIX, 115, 135; Gibbon, Decline & Fall, III, 480; John Martin Robinson, Temples of Delight: Stowe Landscape Gardens (London: Philip, 1990), p. 90; Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 178; Garry Wills, George Washington and the Enlightenment (London: Hale, 1985), pp. 133-7; Summerson, pp. 546-9; Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 45-6; Vergil, Eclogues, IV, 36.