An Explanatory Discourse By Tan Chet-qua Of Quang-chew-fu, Gent Part 1

An Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-qua of Quang-chew-fu, Gent.

by Sir William Chambers.

INTRODUCTION

This "Explanatory Discourse" first appeared, in the latter part of March 1773, annexed to the second and last edition of Sir William Chambers'

_Dissertation on Oriental Gardening_ of the preceding May. As an effort, curiously hedged, to impersonate a Chinese spokesman it seeks to exploit the satiric vantage points of philosophic naivety and trenchant candor enjoyed by Goldsmith's observer Lien Chi Altangi in London a dozen years earlier. But Chambers' ventriloquism is both more defensive and more aggressive than what we find in _The Citizen of the World_; the Preface here in his own voice admits sensitivity to the "abuse" which the Dissertation had incurred for its scenic fantasy, its brief opening and closing attacks on "Capability" Brown, and its pervasive criticism of the blandness of Brownian landscaping. By a.s.suming the voice of Tan Chet-qua Chambers is able to pretend to more authoritative familiarity with actual Chinese gardens even as he deplores his readers'

misapprehension that his interest lay mainly in masquerade, entertainment, or "the mere recital of a traveller's observation" (p.

113). It was probably a strategic error to entrust the substance of his genuine and quite respectable challenging of Brownian style, to what he terms the "vehicle" of alleged first-hand reports of preferable "Chinese" lay-outs. By this date, some two decades after the chinoiserie fad had crested in England, most of his readers might fairly be termed rather jaded. They preferred to overreact to the frivolity and whimsey they had come to think essentially Chinese, rather than to ponder what Chambers seriously urges from behind his silken "screen": his interest in a variegated emotional response to deliberately variegated landscape.

An admirer of Burke's Sublime, Chambers saw advantage in complicating the suavity of Brown's gentle contours, shaven lawns, free-form reflecting lakes, and still short tree-clumps, through a program of landscaped stimulation of contrasting a.s.sociative moods. This is the essence of that argument which Chambers "cloathed ... in the garb of fiction, to secure it a patient hearing" (p. 112) in three publications appearing over sixteen years. There is no evidence that he was better understood through publication of this "Discourse," the last of the three.[1]

Of course, it is not as a satirist, an aesthetician of landscape, or even as a masquerading orientalist that Sir William Chambers (1723-96) has been best known in his time and since: with Robert Adam, he led the British architectural profession virtually from the time he undertook his first commissions around 1757. The two buildings for which he is justly best remembered are the Chinese PaG.o.da at Kew Gardens and Somerset House, between London's Strand and Waterloo Bridge. Yet from that solid Palladian structure now housing the General Register Office it takes more than the dozen miles up Thames to reach the paG.o.da which in 1762 reared its eighty bright wing-displaying dragons on ten successive roofs, and from the height of fifty meters flashed its glazed tiles across suburbia. Chambers developed simultaneously and maintained through his career two contrasted sensibilities. The dignified town house he designed for his family in 1764 fronted Berners Street with a ma.s.sive rusticated doorway, yet had interior chimney-pieces and a rear elevation modelled in "fanciful" papier-mache which his biographer John Harris supposes was painted and varnished chinoiserie. He made his way to the top of his profession and earned royal recognition through tectonic skills that absorbed him with Somerset House, for instance, during the last two decades of his life. But as early as 1752 he had ventured the striking practice--standard by the century's end through his pioneering and Adam's--of drawing elevations of a building proposed as it would appear if already conditioned by time, decaying and overgrown by vegetation.[2] Deciding what to make of his three publications on Chinese gardens will not be eased by polarizing his sources of inspiration or consigning his life into stretches during which the dominant interest was product or process, structure or affect.

Here is no schizoid or frustrated Pre-Romantic--a Chatterton who somehow survived his suicide attempt to edit copy for the _Gentleman's Magazine_--but a consummate professional.[3] The mythic "Cina" of which this "Discourse" was Chambers' latest account grew and changed with him from his first-hand experience of Canton at the age of twenty, through his architectural training in Paris and Rome, and throughout his practice and success as the Establishment architect of his age in England.

The recent thorough Harris biography leaves it appropriate here only to survey the facts most pertinent to his publications on Chinese gardens and to advance a few speculations. The first son of a well-to-do Scottish sutler to the armies of Charles XII of Sweden, Chambers early left his native Gothenburg for schooling supervised by relatives in Yorkshire. Between the ages of 17 and 26 his cosmopolitan rearing proceeded with his apprenticeship to supercargoes or agents aboard three successive vessels of the Swedish East India Company trading in ports along the Indian coast and as far east as Canton. Although his eye and sketchbook were thus early busied with oriental sights, what Chambers later wrote of Peking (or much else Chinese beyond the docks of Canton) was, as he admitted, based upon the observations of others. Yet it must have been rare and significant enough in those days that when this Westerner determined to devote his earnings from the final voyage to an education in architecture, he had seen proportionately so much of non-European building. Even before enrolling in J.-F. Blondel's Ecole des Arts for the 1749-50 winter, Chambers may have met Frederick, Prince of Wales, in London, and been encouraged by Frederick's exotic interests.[4] It was during his second of five springs in Rome, living with his English wife over the shop of Piranesi, that Chambers learned of Frederick's death in March 1751 and designed for him a mausoleum based on the ancient and neo-cla.s.sical shapes before his eyes; in one of his sections for this project he depicted it decaying like some of them, with cypress trees beginning to grow out of the rubble that was to have been its roof! Though this design was never executed, Chambers did meet with royal patronage upon his return to London and dedicated to the new Prince of Wales--soon his pupil in drawing, and three years later, George III--his first book, _Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines and Utensils_ in 1757.

The opening sentences which Samuel Johnson contributed to Chambers'

_Designs_ scorned the "power" with which "novelty attracts regard"[5]--a ground-note directly contrary to Chambers' sarcastic apology for "the monster Novelty" here in his 1773 Preface. But in 1757 he could expect his crisp text and twenty-one plates to administer a calming dose of authenticity to the chinoiserie fever then raging. In fact, this large and handsome volume appears to have driven from the market the pattern-books of "William Halfpenny" and others, with their ridiculous dragon-finials atop Georgian hip-roofs and Venetian windows bordered by crockets--the carpentry trade trying to sustain a mood for renovations waning by the early fifties. Chambers hoped to put a stop "to the extravagancies that daily appear under the name of Chinese, though most of them are mere inventions, the rest copies from the lame representations found on porcelain and paper-hangings." This sniffy professionalism would broaden by 1772 into mockery of the "kitchen gardeners, well skilled in the culture of sallads, but little acquainted with the principles of Ornamental Gardening"[6]--which everyone took for a swipe at Launcelot "Capability" Brown, "yon stately gentleman in the black perriwig" (p. 157 below).

Yet probably a more general and generous motive prompted Chambers to boost in this public way, on the last five pages introducing his _Designs_, a landscape-style in which he could hardly expect to exercise his training or build the career just beginning. The lay-outs of Kent and Brown took inspired advantage of topography, plants and climate peculiar to the south of England, but to anyone coming like Chambers from the gardens in and near Paris and Rome it might appear by 1757 that the English style risked parochial self-exaggeration to the point where all anecdotal human interest would be suppressed in the name of a "Nature" literally isolated. Cosmopolitanism, more enlightened than ever, befitted a Britain engaged in Pitt's "Great War for the Empire"

which would extend its holdings from Montreal to Madras. Was there not an earlier empire whose leader had left visible tokens of his eclecticism? "[H]Adrian, who was himself an architect, at a time when the Grecian architecture was in the highest esteem among the Romans, erected in his Villa, at Tivoli, certain buildings after the manner of the Egyptians and of other nations."[7] It was timely to identify a pure "original" example of culture native to quite another organic whole, and then to transplant it intact to a British scene large enough to sustain it. Botanically viewed, this is the principle on which arduous horticultural experiments were being performed at this stage in England's imperial history: the removal to Kew of Lebanese cedars, oriental Ginkgoes, persimmons and Sophoras, or American locusts in the earlier 1750s, and later, the infamous Bounty venture to transplant in Jamaica breadfruit from the South Seas. Architecturally applied, it would seem to be the principle on which Chambers developed his designs for a score of buildings after the manner of the Romans, Chinese, Moors, and of other nations, erected at Kew Gardens by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763.[8] In this concern he seconded but went beyond the hopes of Horace Walpole and William Mason that "this whole kingdom might soon become one magnificant vast Garden, bounded only by the sea"

(below, page 133). The syntax of Lewis Mumford seems apposite: of Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York's Central Park just a century later, Mumford has remarked that "By making nature urbane he naturalized the city."[9] At Kew, by making the garden cosmopolitan, Chambers helped to globalize the capital of empire and proposed the world as Enlightened Eden.

It was not, of course, such national or global edenic visions which chiefly exercised readers of Chambers' 1757 essay "Of the Art of Laying Out Gardens Among the Chinese" and brought down upon his 1772 _Dissertation_ the ridicule which prompted the "Explanatory Discourse."

Rather, it was the lurid details through which both accounts maintained that "The Chinese artists, knowing how powerfully contrast operates on the mind, constantly practise sudden transitions, and a striking opposition of forms, coulours, and shades." Though this principle earned sympathetic response from theorists like Burke and Karnes at home and Delille on the Continent, Chambers pressed his luck too far when he described what he claimed to have observed, or heard from Chinese observers, of "three different species of scenes, to which they give the appellations of pleasing, horrid, and enchanted." Particularly vulnerable were the programmed _frissons_ of "their scenes of horror": "some miserable huts dispersed in the mountains serve, at once to indicate the existence and wretchedness of the inhabitants."[10] By 1772 the _Schadenfreude_ has deepened: "Their scenes of terrour are composed of gloomy woods, &c. gibbets, crosses, wheels, and the whole apparatus of torture are seen from the roads. Here too they conceal in cavities, on the summits of the highest mountains, foundries, lime-kilns, and gla.s.s-works, which send forth large volumes of flame, and continued columns of thick smoke, that give to these mountains the appearance of volcanos." This was the sort of opening which William Mason exploited in his _Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers_ of March, 1773:

Now to our lawns of dalliance and delight, Join we the groves of horrour and affright; This to achieve no foreign aids we try, Thy gibbets, Bagshot! shall our wants supply; Hounslow, whose heath sublimer terrour fills, Shall with her gibbets lend her powder mills.[11]

Mason's _Heroic Epistle_ was one of the century's most popular poems and, cheered on by Walpole, a viscously successful effort to tar with Chambers' lavish brush his patron George Bute and other a.s.sorted Scots, any critic of Brown, and the Tory establishment at large.

Yet behind Chambers' oriental screen the novelty, enduring interest, and even the practicality of some of his ideas can be observed. That concern to naturalize the smoky mills of industrialization may be developing a hint (concerning Middleton Dale, in the Peak District) on page 94 of Thomas Whately's supremely influential _Observations on Modern Gardening_ (1770). If Chambers' generation was neither the first nor last to grapple with what "progress" had done to the land, the English landscaping movement presented a new stage for that encounter. While Chet-qua's proposal to frame the dreary tracts around a metropolis "into scenes of terror" seems less than helpful, how neatly he antic.i.p.ates Cezanne's transfer of his easel into the abandoned Bibemus Quarry (pp.

130-132). Foreshadowing William Cowper's satire of "Th' omnipotent magician, Brown" in _The Task_, Chambers had warned that estate-"improvement" could lead to irreparable devastation of the nation's woodland. Several of Chambers' means to certain effects sound more like a practical landscape architect at work than a Disneyland impressario parading his promised thrills: when he urges diversification of material relative to seasonal change or human entertainments, for instance, or the use of wire fencing and other subst.i.tutes for the ha-ha. His interest in the harmonizing of diverse but ma.s.sed hues and textures has been recognized as an early glimpse of the "English"

effects secured by Gertrude Jekyll a century and a quarter later.[12]

Though extravagances of Chambers' language distracted attention from the liberalism of his views, such pa.s.sages of the _Dissertation_ as pp.

49-50 read like the Picturesque identified by William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight in the 1780s and '90s. Far from the (Sino-British) imperial privity which Mason tartly mocked are Chet-qua's suggestions that the country-house owner drop his palings and open his grounds to "Holy-day folks," as he opens his Park to his kitchen-garden.

More than this, he should offer "meats for every palate," plan not for his family or honored guests alone, but for tastes more susceptible to surprise than theirs. Likewise the circuit plan would be well replaced by another less coercive.[13] Points like these reveal in Chambers a solicitude on behalf of a general public of garden-strollers not at all necessarily landholding, nor self-conscious as "connoisseurs." Perhaps this is why, when the planners grouped around Nikolaus Pevsner and his _Architectural Review_ surveyed their task in postwar England, they would find fresh applications for the term "picturesque" and fresh relevance in this Tory's "Chinese" gardens.[14] Sinologists and landscape-historians have long recognized, to be sure, that Chambers'

descriptions (like most of what the West has wrought in the name of Chinese gardening since Sir William Temple enunciated his shadowy _sharawadgi_ principle in 1685), while they may correctly celebrate specific details, or the general principles of surprise and variety, register no sensitivity to the Taoist or Buddhist teleology crucial to oriental planning. What Chet-qua calls "supernatural scenery" is hence "enchanted" by the same spirit of diversion animating the Druid or Dark Walk and subterranean Fairy Music of Vauxhall Gardens, across the Thames from Somerset House.[15] Enlightened secularization of the genuine oriental principles of immanence and affect may, however, be exactly what makes a paragraph on page 52 of the 1773 _Dissertation_ sound so much like a ground-plan for a short story of strollers' interwoven and inconsequential conversations and interior monologues, Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens."

If allowances are made for the persistent difficulty of transcribing Chinese phonemes, and for Chambers' dependence upon Cantonese rather than Mandarin dialect, the oriental dress of the _Discourse_ is less bogus than might be a.s.sumed. Chambers' varying spellings of the then reigning emperor's name would exemplify the first problem, my failure to authenticate the poem on pages 118-119 the second. (Over 42,000 unindexed poems in Mandarin are attributed to this emperor, now known here as Ch'ien-lung.) Proustian though they may seem to Westerners, the synesthetic effects of tea-taking and the evocativeness of the scents and hues of "Mei-hoa" (plum-blossom), "fo-cheou" (chrysanthemum), and pine are indeed celebrated in much Chinese poetry.[16] Whoever wrote the poem, it aptly dramatizes the suggestible ethos which Chambers recommends to English artists and their public.

This "Discourse" is appreciably more puckish in tone than the earlier two-thirds of Chambers' published "Chinese" work. The half-t.i.tle here, page [109] of the second edition, heaps Chambers' own initialed honors[17] upon the Canton "Gent." Chet-qua, and with the ironies of his Preface and elaborate courtesies of the Introduction, the fun has begun.

Identification of a Chinese alter ego enables Chambers to claim a kind of diplomatic immunity for both his enthusiasms and his judgments against the English style. By half-heartedly ascribing the preceding 107 pages of _Dissertation_ also to Chet-qua, and receding as mere "Editor"

of the lovable old gourmet's remarks (page 148n), he trusts to keep one step ahead of his Whig adversaries. With exemplary tolerance such as had enhanced the European stereotype of the Chinese sage throughout the century, Chet-qua finds more to commend in French and Italian gardens, more to tease disarmingly in the Dutch, than Chambers had earlier.

Finally, since an actual Chinese artist-about-town usually known as Chitqua had only recently returned to Canton, Chambers may have hoped his masquerade could stir British hospitality for his ideas. Within weeks of reaching London in August 1769, Chitqua had had a royal audience. The miniature portrait busts he modelled in clay at ten guineas apiece, as well as his delicate manners and physique ("the eyelashes almost always in motion") earned the admiration of Wedgwood's friend Thomas Bentley. One of his busts was shown in the 1770 Royal Academy exhibition, and during that year he visited Oxford, met Chambers and Bishop Percy, and sat down with Horace Walpole among others at the first official Academy dinner. Lashes and all, he figures in Zoffany's "Life School of the Royal Academy," painted in 1771. But what peculiarly recommends Chitqua to Chambers' purposes here is perhaps a mob's intervention at the start of his homeward voyage to Canton that spring, when xenophobia and "the superst.i.tious fears of the mariners" forced him to return to London for another ship. On page 141 Chambers differs from the _Gentleman's Magazine_ reporter who had Chitqua "accidentally ...

fall overboard" at Gravesend, but whatever the facts, the parallel to Jonah at Joppa might be as clear to Chet-qua's adversaries as it was to that reporter and win the "Discourse" a more candid hearing than the _Dissertation_ had enjoyed.[18] To an unidentified reader of his first edition Chambers had justified such artfulness, and his entire "Chinese"

myth for the promotion of a change in landscaping-style, this way: "I thought it necessary to move in an exalted sphere. Our Gardeners, and I fear our Connoisseurs too, are such _tame_ animals, that much sparring is necessary to keep them properly on their haunches."[19] Such quixotic energy even Mason had to salute, in the last line of his _Heroic Epistle_.

Dougla.s.s College Rutgers University

PREFACE.

Every new system naturally meets with opposition; when the monster Novelty appears, all parties, alarmed at the danger, unite to raise a clamour: each cavils at what it doth not like, or doth not comprehend, till the whole project is pulled to pieces, and the projector stands plumed of every feather; not only robbed of the praise due to his labour and good intentions, but, like a common enemy, branded with scorn and abuse. In the first hurry of criticism, every deviation is accounted an error; every singularity an extravagance; every difficulty a visionary's dream: warm with resentment, bia.s.sed by interests and prejudices, the angry champions of the old, rarely show mercy to the new; which is almost always invidiously considered, and too often unjustly condemned.

Sensible of these difficulties, the Author of the foregoing Dissertation, written in direct opposition to the stream of fashion, harboured no sanguine hopes of fame from his Publication: far from expecting at the first, either applause or encouragement, he even judged artifice necessary to screen him from resentment; and cloathed truth in the garb of fiction, to secure it a patient hearing.

The success of his little work, however, in one sense, far exceeded expectation: at its first appearance here, it found not only a patient, but a very indulgent reception; and it has since been equally fortunate in France, and other parts of Europe; where Monsieur Delarochette's elegant translation has made it known.

Yet flattering as this extensive suffrage may seem, it is in reality rather mortifying to the Author; who finds, from the nature of the encomiums bestowed upon his performance, that it has been more generally liked than understood; and that, whilst a few have honoured it with a deliberate reading, and separated the substance from the vehicle in which it was contained, far the greater number have mistaken the mask for the reality, and considered it simply as a pleasing tale; as the mere recital of a traveller's observation; or, as the luxuriant effusions of a fertile imagination, a splendid picture of visionary excellence.

Whether these misapprehensions arose from want of perspicuity in the writer, or want of attention in the readers, admits of no dispute; the former was most probably the case. The Author therefore, who wishes to be perfectly understood, and is more ambitious of being useful than entertaining, humbly begs leave to offer, at the end of this second edition, such reasons and explanations as seem necessary, either to remove doubts, or clear obscurities; he flatters himself they will be found sufficient, and serve to place the work in its true, its most advantageous light.

Of these ill.u.s.trations he saw the necessity some time ago, and framed them into a Discourse supposed to be p.r.o.nounced by Chet-qua, then in England; judging it, at that time, a sort of propriety to put in the mouth of a Chinese, what farther information was wanted relative to his country.

But as there is now no longer any necessity for disguise, both the Dissertation and Explanatory Discourse ought certainly to appear in their natural dress. To new-model them, however, would require more time than the Author can possibly spare; he therefore has republished the Dissertation, in its original form, and the Discourse as it was originally written; hoping the indulgent reader will pardon these defects, and gather the fruit, if there be any to gather, without minding the trees on which it grows.

_Introduction._

All the world knew Chet-qua, and how he was born at Quang-chew-fu,[20]

in the fourth moon of the year twenty-eight; also how he was bred a face-maker, and had three wives, two of whom he caressed very much; the third but seldom, for she was a virago, and had large feet. He dressed well, often in thick sattin; wore nine whiskers and four long nails, with silk boots, callico breeches, and every other ornament that Mandarins are wont to wear; equalling therein the prime macarones, and scavoir vivres, not only of Quang-chew, but even of Kyang-ning, or Shun-tien-fu. Of his size; he was a well-spoken portly man, for a Chinese; a pretty general scholar; and, for a heathen, a very compleat gentleman. He composed a tieh-tse, or billet-doux, at pleasure; recited verses, either in Mantchou or Chinese, and sung love-songs in many languages. He likewise danced a fandango, after the newest taste of Macao, played divinely upon the bag-pipe, and made excellent remarks; which, when he lodged at Mr. Marr's, in the Strand, he would repeat to his friends over a pipe, as often as they pleased; for he was fond of smoaking, provided the tobacco was good; and, upon these occasions, was always vastly pleasant, and very communicative.

Amongst his favourite topics were painting, music, architecture and gardening; to the last of which he seemed most affected, often disserting thereon till he was tired, and the audience fast asleep; for the tone of his voice was like opium to the hearers; his method was diffuse, and the subject, though a good one, not generally interesting.

One day he launched out into a long description of the Eastern Gardens, especially those of his own country, to which he was exceedingly partial; and, in the conclusion, compared them to a splendid feast, at which there were pleasures for every sense, and food for every fancy; whilst our Gardens, he said, were like Spartan broth, which was disgustful to all but Spartan palates; or like the partial n.i.g.g.ardly treats of the fable, adapted only to organs of a peculiar construction: he advanced many other odd positions, spoke very freely, as well of our Gardeners, as Gardens, and ended recommending the Chinese taste, in preference to all others.

We were diverted with the discourse, from its singularity, and the variety of new ideas in which it abounded; yet as it ran in direct opposition to the general opinion and usage of England, and recommended a system which appeared to us rather visionary than practicable, we animadverted upon all its parts with the utmost freedom; neither sparing the speech nor speaker in any particular.

The severity of our criticism at first disconcerted poor Chet-qua, who remained silent, and in apparent confusion; but, after a short pause, he rea.s.sumed his usual good humour, his countenance cleared up, he arose, bowed to the company, and stroking his nine whiskers, began the following discourse.

DISCOURSE, _&c._

_Tan lou ty tchan yue[21]

Ko ou, pou ko choue.

Ou yun king tai pan Fou fou teou lo ty_