As Seamus Deane says in his introduction, Ciaran Murray here proposes "a new axis for the intellectual history of the 18th century," one which favors "altogether more irregular personalities." One that also favors uncommon means.
The author seeks to prove that "romanticism, in its immediate origins, is the aesthetic manifestation of the English revolution: a return to nature of which the landscape garden was both embodiment and symbol." He hence uses the 18th-century fashion of Asian garden design as a paradigm to illustrate a revolution that overturned taste and eventually society itself.
There were early signs. Francis Bacon liked a garden that "merged gradually into a natural park." John Evelyn in his diary expressed abhorrence for "formal projects" and much preferred "irregular ornaments." Joseph Addison thought the "artificial Rudeness" he had encountered in France and Italy "much more charming than Neatness and Elegancy" at home. William Temple thought the ordinary garden mere mathematics, but that the "Chinese garden" had a more subtle aesthetic.
The discovery or creation of this Eastern garden was useful in providing a pregnant alternative. It had the appearance of naturalness, and "untouched naturalness" was seen as both virtuous and modern.
So much so that, as Addison indicated in The Spectator, the inhabitants of China "laugh at the Plantations of our Europeans, which are laid out by the Rule and Line." There, the proper gardener "leapt the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden."
Their idea, wrote Temple, was a garden "where the beauty shall be great and strike the eye, but without an order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed." Though we "have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it . . . they say the 'sharawadgi' is fine."
His term is not Chinese. "Sharawadgi" seems to be Japanese filtered through Dutch. It has been suggested that it is a corruption of "sorowaji," an archaic verb which means something like "not being symmetrical," and would hence correspond to Temple's use.
He knew of these pleasingly asymmetrical gardens through Japan as well, from such sources as Engelbert Kaempfer, who went with the Dutch on their annual excursion from Deshima to the capital, stopping to view Kyoto. There they saw the gardens where, as the German naturalist recounts, everything was planted "in an irregular but agreeable manner."
The reason this was agreeable to the 18th century was that it appeared to confer an internal liberty, an external freedom from constraint.
Addison in his travels found something more gratifying in the natural waterfall at Termi "than in all the waterworks at Versailles." This fitted his later formulation that so expressed his times: As tyranny is to artifice, so is liberty to nature.
The supposedly Oriental garden became a paradigm. Visitors discovered Alexander Pope's riverside grounds to be practically democratic, one saying that here he found "as much freedom as in a forest." Horace Walpole liked the Gothic style (another predecessor of "natural freedom") but "I am almost as fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry in buildings, as in grounds or gardens," and demonstrated this in the surroundings of his Gothic Strawberry Hill.
The "Oriental garden" became a political template -- one of many -- for the revolution that overturned taste, manners and (eventually) politics. As Murray writes: "Edmund Burke validated his political vision through the imagery of the garden. As Temple had perceived the Japanese aesthetic as antimathematical and Addison had adopted it as a symbol of liberty . . . so Burke now saw the framers of the new French Constitution as clearing away as mere rubble whatever they found, and formed . . . everything into an exact level."
This eccentric book, in itself almost as asymmetrical as its subject, forever making perfectly natural detours to items of further interest, is much more like the natural waterfall at Termi than the academic waterworks at Versailles.
Written in a style both impressionistic and mannered (sharing much in tone with Lytton Strachey and the Sitwells -- as well as perhaps Edward Gibbon, the ultimate model) the book is, as one might have expected, privately printed.
And all the better for it. It escapes the dumbing down now imposed by commercial publishers even on histories of the 18th century, not to mention much else. On the other hand, the book is consequently deprived of commercial distribution. Copies may be obtained from International Scholars Publications, 7831 Woodmont Avenue, #345, Bethesda, MD 20814, USA. Some are for sale locally at the Kitazawa Book Store in Kanda.
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