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Beyond the Bounds of Truth: Cultural Translation and William Chambers's Chinese Garden

Posted on: Friday, 18 June 2004, 06:00 CDT

William Chambers's writings on Chinese gardening provide a rich context for understanding the workings of eighteenth-century exoticism. This essay re-examines these works through the lens of the travel narrative to highlight the psychological effects manifested in the encounter with foreignness.

The most abundant harvest, within eighteenth-century studies, of recent developments in literary and cultural theory has occurred at the margins of the literary and historical disciplines as they have been traditionally constituted. Feminist scholarship has restored dozens of neglected women writers to a prominent place in the literary canon and foregrounded a series of historical and theoretical concernsregarding sexuality, for example, consumerism, and medicine-that have become mainstays of early modern cultural studies. The field of postcolonial criticism that has emerged in the twenty years since Said's Orientalism has, meanwhile, shifted renewed attention toward the history of cross-cultural encounter in the century preceding Napoleon's conquests. The formation of modern national identities in the eighteenth century appears increasingly to have occurred through a process mediated in profound and complex ways by contacts with the foreign. Within British literary studies, for example, interest in travel writing from the Grand Tour and beyond-Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkey, Johnson and Boswell in Scotland, Mary Wollstonecraft in Sweden-along with renewed assessments of colonialist dynamics in India and the Caribbean have brought geographical peripheries into the centre of the historical stage and prompted investigations of the role of foreignness even in works that evince little explicit interest in the foreign.

If both feminism and postcolonialism have contributed to the range and vitality of scholarship on "the new eighteenth century," there remains, of course, a crucial distinction in the applicability of their methodologies and paradigms for work in this period. The central questions raised by feminist scholarship-questions about the cultural constitution of sexual identity, for example, and the social mechanisms of gender hierarchy-although configured differently in different periods, are broadly applicable across cultural and historical boundaries. The questions central to postcolonial studies, in contrast, questions of cultural identity in the once-colonized Third World, by definition presuppose a historical context subsequent both to colonial occupation and, often, to certain epistemological foundations in Enlightenment thought. While scholars have occasionally applied concepts borrowed from postcolonialism to the analysis of pre-colonialist or non- colonialist encounters, the history of such contacts in the early modern period remains relatively under-theorized. We are well positioned now to scrutinize the preconditions of British hegemony in India in the second half of the eighteenth century or the hybridization of cultural forms on early Caribbean sugar plantations, but recent work has equipped us less well, I would argue, to take an equally full and nuanced accounting of cross- cultural contacts mediated less predominantly, if at all, by an underlying ethos of violence and coercion.

Analyses of Europe's non-colonialist encounters with distant peoples-those that recent cultural criticism, in other words, has tended to overlook-typically define their significance in terms of one of several distinct modes of cultural translation. The first mode consists of the construction of imaginary geographies, the emergence of sensualized images of the East, for example, in the wake of Antoine Galland's translation of The Thousand and One Nights or of the wise eastern sage embodied in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes or Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World. The second form is more distinctly mimetic, involving the imitation or adaptation of alien practices in Europe, such as we find in garden structures modelled after mosques and pagodas or in the British adoption of the Turkish practice of smallpox inoculation promoted by Mary Wortley Montagu. The third, and perhaps most frequently invoked, category of cross-cultural translation is that of less direct forms of influence, which are, of course, notoriously tempting to posit and difficult to prove. We might cite here debates over the degree of Chinese influence on the development of the economic theories of Quesnay and the physiocrats in France, or indeed on the emergence of the natural style of landscape gardening, arguably one of the most important aesthetic innovations in eighteenthcentury England (Ch'en, Connor, Ge).

Images, imitations, influences: these are the familiar terms in which we are most accustomed to thinking about cross-cultural perception and response, and yet I would argue that as paradigms for grappling with the translative component of encounter they often prove inadequate. Our attention is directed in each case primarily toward the cultural products of encounter, the "translation" of foreignness, as it were, as it appears in the target language. This translation may be compared and contrasted, on occasion, with its source, and discrepancies duly noted and accounted for, but even so, the emphasis remains with the product, rather than the underlying cultural process of translation. The work of cultural translators, however, is never entirely disinterested, or fully removed from, the two worlds they are attempting to bridge. Their representations of the foreign must always arise, first of all, from distinct subject positions whose historical and cultural particularities lend themselves to certain limited and limiting ways of seeing the world. But, beyond this widely acknowledged phenomenon of epistemological lens warping, we should also take account of the psychological impact of the moment of cross-cultural perception and its effects on the very process of conceiving and representing the culturally foreign. The act of "translation," even in the metaphorical sense in which I am using it here, always produces a degree of that "split consciousness" that Haun Saussy associates with specifically textual translation and the jarring juxtaposition of disparate semiotic systems that it entails. This cognitive dissonance may be experienced at the moment of encounter as surprise, self- alienation, perplexity, or delight, but it seems safe to assume that its effects deeply colour enduring memories of that moment and leave its traces upon its subsequent representation. The question I wish to raise is how the artifacts of encounter-the products of translation-are themselves mediated by the cognitive and affective dislocation implicit in any confrontation with radical otherness. How does the elemental experience of foreignness itself, in other words, figure in the naturalization of the foreign?

William Chambers, the architect of Somerset House in London and the Royal Gardens at Kew, stands out as one of the most prominent and influential practitioners of cross-cultural translation in eighteenth-century Britain. He spent his formative years studying the architectural marvels of Rome and Paris and is best known for his role, as the first academy-trained British architect, in transmitting the foundational design principles of Neoclassicism to England. He left his mark not only in his many prominent commissions but also in the hugely influential Treatise on Civil Architecture, the first systematic textbook on the subject in the English language. His pre-eminence as an architect, however, and identification with the style of Roman antiquity have never obscured a secondary affiliation with the aesthetic culture of the Chinese. Prior to settling on an architectural vocation and undertaking his studies on the Continent, Chambers had journeyed twice to the port city of Canton, in 1743-44 and 1748-49, as an agent of the Swedish East India Company, returning with copious notes, drawings, and first-hand impressions of a country that Englishmen did not visit in large numbers for another hundred years. Though little is known about the details of these trips, apart from the fact that he visited temples and gardens in and around the city, his youthful travels clearly left an indelible mark on his subsequent career. His first publication on his return to England in the mid-175Os brought together a series of designs of Chinese buildings, furnishings, and costumes along with an essay entitled "On the Art of Laying Out Gardens among the Chinese," which was widely reprinted and commented upon. The next several years gave him the opportunity to bring the ideas in his book to life at Kew Gardens, where a House of Confucius and glittering ten-storey pagoda soon bore witness to his facility as a transmitter of the exotic design motifs much in fashion during the heyday of chinoiserie. His final gesture of crosscultural translation in this vein came in 1772 and 1773 with a pair of extended treatises on oriental gardening that expanded on the principles elaborated in his earlier essay in the service of a polemical attack on the natural landscaping style promulgated with exasperating success by Chambers's rival Capability Brown.

The Chinese thread running conspicuously t\hrough the life and work of this cofounder of the Royal Academy and patriarch of the late-eighteenth-century architectural establishment has proven a source of considerable perplexity for Chambers's biographers and critics over the past 250 years. Rome and Canton have always seemed unlikely bedfellows as sources of inspiration for an eighteenth- century Man of Taste, and Chambers's own reputation as a man as sober and conservative in his personal bearing as in the academic style he championed has never sat easily with a seemingly whimsical interest in fashionable exotica, let alone the outrageous gothicisms and quasipornographic fantasies of his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. Horace Walpole's contrasting assessment of the manifestos that Chambers produced in support of each of the two styles provides some indication of the striking dissonance between them. Of the Treatise, Walpole wrote that it was "the most sensible book and the most exempt from prejudice that ever was written in that science" (Anecdotes lixiii); on reading the gardening book when it appeared in the spring of 1772, however, he found it "more extravagant than the worst Chinese paper" (Yale 28:34) and later complained that it "tended to bring back all manner of bad and whimsical taste" (Hilles and Daghlian 185). Chambers himself, in a chapter of his Treatise devoted to Corinthian columns, warned aspiring architects against the dangers of novelty and excess in ornamentation that this most decadent of orders seemed to invite. In a harsh condemnation of "crude momentary effusions of a vitiated fancy," he cautions against "deviating from the origin or reason of things, [...] as it opens a wide door to whim and extravagance, and leaves a latitude to the composer, which often betrays, and hurries him into ridiculous absurdities" (62-63).' How are we to reconcile the seemingly conflicting credos of the Treatise and the Dissertation, and to interpret Chambers's wholesale capitulation in the latter to the aesthetic exuberance he warned so vehemently against?

Chambers continually wavered in his expressions of commitment to the Chinese style, a fact that suggests he was acutely aware of the problems posed by his divided aesthetic loyalties but that also makes it difficult to assess the true nature and depth of his interest in Chinese models. This ambivalence first appears in the introduction to his Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils. On the one hand, he seems genuinely to admire Chinese architects for their originality and for the "singularity, justness, simplicity, and beauty" of their creations, going as far as to note certain resemblances with structures of classical antiquity. Yet, on the other hand, he feels compelled, at least in part by concerns for his reputation, to disclaim any intent "to promote a taste so much inferior to the antique," and ultimately dismisses the Chinese buildings whose designs fill his volume as mere curiosities and "toys in architecture" (preface). This equivocation reflects, in part, a contemporary ambivalence in Britain toward the much vaunted achievements of Chinese civilization. The Chinese, celebrated in countless Jesuit-inspired accounts for the justice and efficiency of their civil administration and the wisdom of their rationalist moral code, were increasingly, by mid-century, coming under fire for their alleged dishonesty in business dealings and for the worthlessness, by classical standards, of their aesthetic productions (Porter). Chambers was stepping out on a limb, in this climate, in his defence of Chinese design, and it is not at all surprising that he felt obliged to temper his praise.

A similar tension between admiration and disavowal appears in the collection of plans and panoramas from Kew Garden that Chambers published on completing his work there. The centrepiece of the volume is a fold-out depiction of the Great Pagoda that, even now, towers over the garden in incontrovertibly oriental splendour. His lavish description of this plate and its three accompanying illustrations of the pagoda in various sections and stages suggests considerable pride in the accomplishment, and the textual reminder that an engraving of the Chinese original had first appeared in Designs sin years before seems intended to reaffirm his own authority in the realm of Chinese architecture. Oddly, however, the one other important Chinese building in the garden, the House of Confucius, warrants only a single illustration and a summary description. John Harris has demonstrated persuasively (33-34) that Chambers originally designed this two-storey octagonal structure as well, and yet Chambers himself disowns the creation, vaguely asserting, " [It was] built a good many years ago, I believe from the designs of Mr Goupy," a contemporary craftsman in the rococo style (Plans 4-6).

Signs of pronounced ambivalence regarding his own indebtedness to the Chinese influence accompany even Chambers's boldest contribution to eighteenth-century chinoiserie, the Dissertation. He was sufficiently proud of his production to ship off copies soon after its publication to a host of European notables, including the King of Sweden and Voltaire, and to boast in at least one letter of the period that it had "met with a very favorable reception" in England, though this seems not actually to have been the case. At the same time, other letters introducing the work to his correspondents describe it as so much "coglionerie," or foolishness, and "a piece of nonsense," gestures of dismissal considerably harsher than conventions of authorial humility would normally require (Chambers to Frederick Chapman, 28 July 1771, British Library Add. MS 41133 f. 78; Chambers to the Earl of Charlemont, 13 June 1772, BL Add. MS 41133 f. 75; Chambers to J. Leake, 24 March 1773, BL Add. MS 41134 f. 19). In the Explanatory Discourse by Chet-qua, which accompanied the second edition of the Dissertation in 1773 as a response to the criticisms the first edition had provoked, Chambers initially repudiates any Chinese inspiration behind his ideas, describing their oriental setting in the earlier work as a mere ruse, a failed attempt to "[clothe] truth in the garb of fashion, to secure it a patient hearing" (112). And yet the main body of the Discourse, which is presented as the words of a Chinese sculptor recently resident in London, both reaffirms the controversial claim to the superiority of the Chinese style of gardening over the English, and prominently asserts its authentic Chineseness by providing the full transliteration and lengthy prose translation of a poem on tea drinking by the current Chinese emperor in a footnote that extends over the first four pages of the text.

The paradoxical disjuncture between Chambers's aesthetic affinities together with his endless equivocations concerning his own allegiance to the Chinese style have rendered the interpretation of his Chinese writings, and the Dissertation in particular, a bewildering task, and a critical consensus has remained elusive. Certain readers, on confronting his descriptions of the horrid and enchanted scenes found in Chinese gardens, with their imported tigers, elephants, implements of torture, and bolts of artificial lightning, have been inclined to dismiss his more extravagant recommendations as nonsensical absurdities, playful diversions, or proto-romantic flights of fantasy, while others have confessed to ambivalence about the seriousness with which they are intended. At least one garden historian has demonstrated that Chambers's central ideas about gardening derive from earlier English sources, while another has shown, equally persuasively, that they are firmly rooted in Chinese theories of gardening. Some critics have seen the jealous attack on Capability Brown as the chief raison d'etre for the work, while others have stressed the prophetic importance of its original contribution to the theory of landscape design. One of the few points of agreement among students of Chambers's work is that his presentation of the Dissertation as a work of cross-cultural translation complicates its reading considerably, in that the substance of his ideas on gardening is distorted beneath the "fashionable garb" of chinoiserie (Bald; Chase; E. Harris; Pevsner; Reaves).

But what if this fashionable garb itself, in all its confounding ambiguity, is the substance we are looking for? What if we were to evaluate the act of translation not as a more-or-less accurate means of transmitting a set of ideas across cultural boundaries but rather as an intimate process of engagement with foreignness that itself conditions the emergence of these ideas within their new cultural context? How might we read the traces of the primal drama of encounter within the naturalized, domesticated spectacle of exoticism? Chambers himself, no doubt, would have objected to such an approach to his work. The Chinese setting of the Dissertation was a necessary artifice, he protests, a mere vehicle to be separated from the substance it contained, a mask that, for want of perspicuity in the writer, careless readers have tended to mistake for the reality (Chambers, Explanatory, preface). But Sir William, I would maintain, doth protest too much. We have seen how his considerable Chinese oeuvre is rent through with a dizzying ambivalence toward the foreign object of his regard, even to the point of prompting a disingenuous disavowal of his own artistic progeny. He deeply admired the Chinese model, but simultaneously despised it. This ambivalence, while making it impossible to take as definitive any one of his pronouncements on the subject, may provide in itself a point of departure for more adequately addressing the various conundrums posed by his work.

Chambers's architectural career, it is worth remembering, was entirely devoted to the task of cultural translation. Quite apart from his ins\trumental role as the only eighteenth-century European architect of any note to have visited China, his extensive travels and systematic studies in France and Italy positioned him as a crucial conduit for the foreign ideas that sustained architectural innovation in neoclassical Britain. Architectural historians acclaim his contribution, in both his writings and his designs, as that of a master borrower and synthesizer rather than as a creative genius in his own right. For all the success enjoyed by his Treatise, its author made no claim to originality in the work. The role he saw for himself, rather, was that of a compiler and an adjudicator of taste, as he set out "to collect from the works of writings of others, or from his own observations, in all parts of Europe, famed for taste; such particulars, as seemed most interesting; or properest to give a just idea of so very useful, and truly noble an art" (iv). It is worth noting that Chambers's early volume of Chinese designs with its accompanying essay on gardening was premised on a similar methodology, grounded in the fastidious observation and unbiased evaluation of foreign aesthetic models. This systematic procedure might justly be considered, then, as a habitual modus operandi, and the cornerstone of his essentially mimetic approach to the work of cultural translation.

To the extent that the Dissertation recycles the basic account of Chinese gardening that Chambers had presented in the earlier essay, it remains in keeping with this approach. But the text is more obviously characterized by the extravagant polemics and hyperbolic exoticisms that have perplexed and beguiled generations of subsequent readers. A more nuanced understanding of the latent workings and myriad possibilities of cultural translation is called for, I would suggest, in digesting passages like the following:

Their summer scenes compose the richest and most studied parts of their Gardens. They abound with lakes, rivers, and water-works of every contrivance; and with vessels of every construction. [. . .]

In the center of these summer plantations, there is generally a large tract of ground set aside for more secret and voluptuous enjoyments; which is laid out in a great number of close walks, colonnades and passages, turned with many intricate windings, so as to confuse and lead the passenger astray. [. . .] The whole is a wilderness of sweets, adorned with all sorts of fragrant and gaudy productions: gold and silver pheasants, pea-fowls, partridges, bantam hens, quails, and game of every kind, swarm in the woods; doves, nightingales, and a thousand melodious birds, perch upon the branches; deer, antelopes, spotted buffaloes, sheep, and Tartarean horses, frisk upon the plains. (25-26)

Clearly there are elements here that recall the three familiar modes of processing the spectacle of otherness briefly outlined in the introduction to this essay. Chambers draws heavily on both the cliched eighteenth-century image of a richly sensual and eroticized east and the early modern image of China as a land of unmeasurable wealth. He imitates the Chinese more directly in his carefully assembled menagerie of exotic species. The prominence of water in his fantasy garden, and of "close walks" and "intricate windings," suggest meanwhile a more generalized influence of Chinese gardening principles. The distinct aura of a traveller's tale, however, the Marco Polo-like wonder that suffuses the account, points to a mode of engagement with the foreign that transcends the analytic categories of imaginary projection, imitation, and influence. The Dissertation frequently reads, in fact, like an allegorical narrative of voyage and discovery, with its visitor described repeatedly as a "traveller" or "passenger" as he makes his way among the garden's seemingly endless labyrinthine passages. The magnificence of the vistas he encounters fully justifies the use of such terms: these are not backyard arrangements of rock gardens and goldfish ponds but seemingly full-scale depictions of natural wonders that transport the "visitor" into a compellingly "real" virtual world.

This allegorical component of the Dissertation seems particularly significant in light of Chambers's extended remarks on the benefits of travel in another context. Reflecting, no doubt, on the importance of his own youthful travels to his later professional success, he urges the aspiring architect who reads his Treatise to spend time on the road before presuming to set up practice at home. "An architect cannot aspire to superiority in the profession without having travelled. [. . .] Travelling to an artist, is as the university to a man of letters, the last stage of a regular education." Although the purpose of this education in the artist's case is in part to cultivate his taste, sharpen his critical faculties, and fill notebooks with sketches for later study and imitation, there is a distinct romantic component as well to Chambers's pedagogical prescription. Not only does travel "[set] the reasoning faculties in motion" and "[open] the mind to a more liberal and extensive train of thinking," but it also, crucially, "rouses the imagination; the sight of great, new, or uncommon objects, elevates the mind to sublime conception; enriches the fancy with numerous ideas" (Treatise 14-15).

Read alongside Chambers's paean to the Grand Tour, the allegory of travel in the descriptive passages of the Dissertation begins to appear less an incidental literary motif and more a vivid dramatization of a deeply held credo and its nostalgic underpinnings in his own youthful experience. Indeed, a close analysis of the argument of the work reveals three fundamental claims that each bear the mark of Chambers's own confrontation with Chinese otherness. Briefly, these claims concern the importance of proper training and genius in the landscape gardener, the role of contrast and variety in structuring a pleasurable garden experience, and the place of extraordinary scenes and artifices in achieving the desired psychological effect in the mind and imagination of the viewer. Each of these concerns, I will argue, is inscribed with the imaginative trauma of encounter, suggesting that the dissonance and ambiguity that characterize Chambers's Chinese work might be fruitfully reinterpreted from within a model attuned to the affective dimension of the process of cultural translation.

Chambers's depiction of the genius of Chinese gardeners in the Dissertation is directed at two polemical aims. The author intends, most conspicuously, to paint an unflattering contrast between the exalted abilities of landscape artists in China and those of their English counterparts, and especially of his nemesis, Capability Brown. But he also hopes, more constructively, to elevate the status of this art in England to that which architecture-owing largely to his own exertions-now enjoyed. In the final version of the Treatise, he quoted approvingly the bold claim of French architect Marc- Antoine Laugier that "there is perhaps as much genius, good sense, and taste requisite, to constitute a great architect, as to form a painter or poet of the first class" (7). The Dissertation, from its chiding opening lines, seems calculated to promote the art of ornamental gardening in much the same way: "Amongst the Chinese, Gardening is held in much higher esteem, than it is in Europe; they rank a perfect work in that Art, with the great productions of the human understanding. [. . .] Their Gardeners are not only Botanists, but also Painters and Philosophers, having a thorough knowledge of the human mind, and of the arts by which its strongest feelings are excited" (11).

The Treatise, to extend the comparison, defines the requisite genius of the architect as "a strong inclination and bias of mind towards the pursuit in question," that enables the artist "to comprehend, and to perform certain things, with much ease" and fills his imagination with "ideas, combinations and improvements, equally new, striking and agreeable" (9-10). A corresponding passage in the Dissertation indicates that Chinese gardeners, likewise, express their genius through new and striking improvements. "Poets and painters soar above the pitch of nature, when they would give energy to their compositions. The same privilege, therefore, should be allowed to Gardeners, [. . .] [who], like poets, should give a loose to their imagination, and even fly beyond the bounds of truth, whenever it is necessary to elevate, to embellish, to enliven, or to add novelty to their subject" (18-19). One senses, however, a marked difference in emphasis between these two passages. While the great architect is noted for his facility in innovation and the performance of his craft, the Chinese gardener seems to achieve an altogether more liberating imaginative transcendence that resonates tellingly with Chambers's account of the salutary effects of travel on the impressionable mind. To soar beyond nature and fly beyond truth would seem, indeed, precisely the prerogative of an imagination roused from quotidian slumbers by the intrinsic sublimity of the foreign.

Chambers's conception of Chinese genius as transcending the realm of familiar orthodoxies emerges, then, as a consequence of his own recollected experience of alienation and radical unfamiliarity in China as a young man. The impression of striking novelty that often accompanies an encounter with the truly foreign, after all, bears close comparison with the effects of genius. In Chambers's case, I am suggesting, the overwhelming impression of strangeness he must have received wandering the streets and gardens of Canton was ultimately transformed into a programmatic projection of imaginative virtuosity onto a favoured class of Chinese artists. The disjunctive experience of the foreign sublime anchors his boldly original conception of Chinese aesthetic sensibility. As a cross-cultu\ral translation, then, the Dissertation should be read not as a more-or- less accurate rendering of "authentic" Chinese practice than as a narrative mapping of the lived experience of Chinese difference. One might object to this interpretation on the grounds that the sagacious and often disdainful Oriental visitors to Europe that had been stock characters in French and English fiction since Montesquieu would provide a more obvious source for Chambers's supercilious Chinese gardener. While granting the validity of the comparison, I would be tempted to respond that the eighteenth- century archetype of the visiting Eastern sage was itself in large measure a similarly constituted product of the period's rapt fascination with the novelty of the cultures that Jesuit accounts and Arabian tales were rapidly bringing into view.

The genius of Chinese gardening expressed itself, for Chambers, through an aesthetic of contrast, variety, and surprise. While the modern English landscape park numbed the viewer with its monotonous repetition of formulaic conventions-the serpentine walks, clumps of trees, and vast expanses of lawn that were the hallmarks of Brown's style-the Chinese garden spurred the imagination with a splendid panoply of riveting scenes, calculated to lead the viewer through a succession of intense emotional catharses. The psychological premise of the experience lay in its very unpredictability; suspense, confusion, bewilderment, and awe were the necessary catalysts of the "strong sensations" and "uncommon degree of pleasure" it set out to achieve. The basic components of the aesthetic vision Chambers ascribed to Chinese gardeners had more obvious precedents not only in Burke's conception of the sublime but also in the English gardening theory of the previous half century. Alexander Pope had famously advocated a topography of "pleasing intricacies" in his Epistle to Burlington:

Let not each beauty everywhere be spied,

Where half the skill is decently to hide.

He gains all points who pleasingly confounds,

Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds. (lines 53-56) Thomas Whately, whose more recent Observations on Modern Gardening Chambers had carefully read and annotated, had likewise emphasized the importance of variety and contrast, and of the effects of "surprise and astonishment" produced by the "singularity" of a landscape scene (E. Harris 154; Whately 15, 21-22). John Dixon Hunt has shown that the theatricality of the garden setting, with its changing scenes, spectacles, and illusions, was an established trope of both Italian garden art and the countless pleasure gardens it inspired in early- eighteenth-century England (49-74).

The difference in Chambers lies in the centrality of the experience of foreignness in his conception of an aesthetic of novelty and surprise. Not only does he include distinctly "Chinese" elements in many of his scenes, but he also repeatedly stresses the usefulness of "transplanting the peculiarities of one country to another" (Dissertation 43) in achieving the requisite variety of sensory impressions in gardens anywhere. The well-travelled gardener has no need of the vain extravagancies of topiary to realize the desired effect: "If the planter be a traveller, and a man of observation, he can want no such helps to variety, as he will recollect a thousand beautiful effects along the common roads of the countries through which he has passed, that maybe introduced with much better success" (44). Chambers reinforces this implicit identification of the aesthetic of novelty with the personal experience of cultural difference in his treatment of the lavish scenes that distinguish the Chinese garden. While certain of these scenes he describes as staged spectacles to be admired from a distance, in other cases his voice shifts from the mode of dramaturgy to that of travel writing, transforming the passive spectator into an intrepid explorer thoroughly immersed in a fantastic, all-consuming narrative of rapturous exoticism.

Sometimes the traveller, after having wandered in the dusk of the forest, finds himself on the edge of precipices, in the glare of day- light, with cataracts falling from the mountains around, and torrents raging in the depths beneath him; or at the foot of impending rocks, in gloomy values, overhung with woods, on the banks of dull moving rivers, whose shores are covered with sepulchral monuments, under the shade of willows, laurels, and other plants, sacred to Manchew, the genius of sorrow. [. . .] Sometimes, in this romantic excursion, the passenger finds himself in extensive recesses, surrounded with arbors of jessamine, vine and roses, where beauteous Tartarean damsels, in loose transparent robes, that flutter in the air, present him with rich wines, mangostans, ananas, and fruits of Quangsi; crown him with garlands of flowers, and invite him to taste the sweets of retirement, on Persian carpets, and beds of camusathkin down. (Dissertation 25-27, 38-40)

Chambers's fantasy transcends the illusionistic theatricality of the European pleasure garden to recreate the essential experience of unadulterated wonder in the traveller's encounter with the unknown. While its celebration of an aesthetic of variety and novelty is indebted in its conceptual foundations to Addison, Pope, and others, the Dissertation infuses these terms with an unfamiliar power by aligning them incontrovertibly with what surely, for the eighteenth century, was the paradigmatic occasion of aesthetic eclat. For as well-travelled a man as William Chambers was, the abstractions of aesthetic theory could not be separated from their epistemological origins in the psychology of the voyage.

The passage just quoted points to the final facet of the Dissertation's argument that I will take up here, namely the implicit claim that a successful garden requires not only genius and variety but also a pronounced excess or extravagance in its scenery. The seeming outrageousness of many of Chambers's prescriptions-the wolves, tigers, African giants, monstrous birds, impetuous cataracts, artificial lightning bolts, and dancing concubines in magnificently furnished seraglios-seriously undermined the credibility of his scheme among his readers and occasioned a blistering satire by William Mason, whose great success rendered Chambers something of a laughing stock, especially among his Whiggish adversaries. A number of critics have been inclined to dismiss the less plausible aspects of his account either as romantic flights of fancy or as so much unaccountable nonsense. Chambers himself gives support to such a reading in a letter to an unidentified correspondent who had objected to the "whimsical productions" in his plan. "These little sportive Episodes are introduced, & are only to be considered as Episodes in a poem or Interludes in a Drama, which serve to relieve the fatigued mind, and prepare it for something of Greater Consequence. They are chiefly contrived to amuse the curious, the vulgar, or the childish" (J. Harris 192). The defensive attitude here is one we have seen before, and the precedents, I argue, justify a certain scepticism on the reader's part. If the author had genuinely intended his whimsical interludes as comic relief for the vulgar and childish among his readers, surely he would have had the foresight to anticipate the bewildered reaction of the mature readership he hoped to impress with the seriousness of his underlying design. Chambers admits in the Explanatory Discourse to a "want of perspicuity" in writing the Dissertation, and, indeed it would seem, on the whole, a less calculated enterprise than shamefaced rationalization might have suggested to him after the fact.

Capability Brown's landscape gardens were characterized by their unassuming simplicity: a typical vista took in expanses of gently rolling turf punctuated only by strategically placed clusters of trees. In its embrace of "unadorned" nature, the Brownian revolution inaugurated a thoroughgoing shift from an emblematic to an expressive mode of representation in the English garden. The statues, grottoes, engraved obelisks, and other visual exhibits arranged strategically about the grounds at Stowe and Pope's Twickenham estate had offered up intricately coded meanings to those viewers with the necessary wit and erudition to read the elaborate iconography of their literary and historical allusions (Hunt 75- 104). The seemingly artless panoramas of the naturalistic garden, in contrast, required no studied examination to grasp but rather seemed to speak immediately to the emotions, with all "the force of a metaphor," in Whately's words, "free from the detail of an allegory" (Hunt 76). The Chinese garden, in Chambers's account, includes elements of both these modes. In addition to scattering ancient inscriptions, verses, and memento mori about their grounds, the Chinese layer their gardens with emblematic meanings by "introducing statues, busts, bas-reliefs, and every production of the chisel, [. . .] observing, that they are not only ornamental, but that by commemorating past events, and celebrated personages, they awaken the mind to pleasing contemplation, hurrying our reflections up into the remotest ages of antiquity" (Dissertation 16-17). At the same time, Chinese gardeners are attentive to the expressive quality of their plantings, surrounding rustic garden structures with wild scenery, for example, and complementing gay buildings with luxuriant foliage.

But there is a third, rather more quixotic, mode of representation in Chambers's Chinese garden, one that subverts the underlying premise of the first two. Both emblematic statues and expressive scenes operate on the presumption of a degree of legibility, the presence of a definable and ultimately communicable idea or emotion that the creator sets out to convey and the viewer to absorb. And yet we find features in Chambers's garden that steadfastly resis\t and even parody this familiar economy of meaning and interpretation. The colossal dragons that lurk in certain dark passages cut in the rock, for example, "hold in their monstrous talons, mysterious, cabalistical sentences, inscribed on tables of brass; with preparations that yield a constant flame; serving at once to guide and to astonish the passenger" (Dissertation 39). The steady illumination and bold lettering hold out the promise of moral or spiritual guidance, only to snuff it out in the mocking obscurity of a forgotten, esoteric language. Certain pathways are designed "so as to confuse and lead the passenger astray, "while any number of compositions tend to evoke incertitude, anxiety, and a perpetual sense of mystery. Chambers extends the traditional garden motif of the labyrinth, in other words, into a dizzying phantasmagoria of perplexity and doubt, a "magnificent confusion" of conflicting impressions that cannot, finally, be resolved in the certainty of a single interpretive response (25, 46-49, 73).

If the cabalistic writing and the air of mystery in the Chinese garden signal its resistance to interpretation, the sheer extravagance of Chambers's descriptions evokes the traveller's response to the radical illegibility of the foreign. The excess implied in all that is monstrous or fantastical points to a realm of experience that cannot be schematized, ordered, or contained, to the unassimilability of an object of interpretation within familiar structures of meaning. All that is wondrous and magical in Chambers's account may well be, as he rather peremptorily called it, "nonsense," and yet it is an emblematic nonsense in that it points precisely to that residue of translation that is beyond the reach of sense and that emerges into consciousness in the likeness of a dream. As he nears the end of the Dissertation, Chambers cautions that "European artists must not hope to rival [the] Oriental splendor" (92) he has portrayed. His depictions, it turns out, may be less well suited as models for imitation than as sources of inspiration, a reminder of the infinite possibilities entailed in the imagination's encounter with the foreign. "To the generality of Europeans many of the foregoing descriptions may seem improbable; and the execution of what has been described, in some measure impracticable: but those who are better acquainted with the East, know that nothing is too great for Eastern magnificence to attempt; and there can be few impossibilities, where treasures are inexhaustible, where power is unlimited, and where munificence has no bounds" (93). By way of justifying the extraordinary flights of imagination that his hazy reminiscences of China had induced, he extends the boundless wonder he has ascribed to the Chinese garden to the topos of the East as a whole, reverting, without a doubt, to a cliched orientalist fantasy but reaffirming, in the process, the evocative potentiality of the illegible sign.

Ironically, the most extravagant of all Chambers's recommendations turned out to be the most prescient in the subsequent history of garden design. Not content to confine his wild schemes within the limits of the country estate, he envisaged the transformation of the entire surrounding landscape in accordance with the principles he had set forth. "Any tract of land," he writes in the Explanatory Discourse, "whose characteristick expressions have been strengthened by art, and in which the spontaneous arrangements of nature have been corrected, improved and adorned by the hand of taste, ought to be considered as a Garden" (125). The possibilities for such improvement arc far more than meet the untrained eye. Fields covered with corn, turnips, and beans, he suggests, if tastefully interspersed with country churches and cottages, require little modification to be more picturesque than a Brownian expanse of lawn "curiously dotted with clumps" (128). The dismal sight of collieries, brick kilns, and glass works might be artfully blended with "gloomy plantations" to create a poignant landscape of desolation. Stone quarries might be transformed into amphitheatres, chalk pits into rustic arcades, and mines into grottos, which features, with the addition of some planting, "might be converted into the most romantic scenery imaginable" and eventually "by these means the whole kingdom might soon become one magnificent vast Garden, bounded only by the sea" (131-33). If the achievement of the eighteenth century, according to a modern garden historian, was to bring the landscape into garden planning, the task facing the twentieth was, very much in accordance with Chambers's vision, to "bring the garden into the landscape" (Tunnard 166; Bald 175).

Although in Chambers's work this extension of his theories is less obviously a chinoiserie production than some of his more detailed descriptions, his Utopian contribution to the evolution of landscape theory bears the distinct imprint of his aesthetic engagement with the Far East. If the Chinese garden, for Chambers, embodies the essence of his impressions of China in its genius, variety, and wondrous indecipherability, the dream of transforming the kingdom into a garden represents the transposition of an enthralling imaginative response to foreignness back to his more immediate surroundings. The dream is Chinese not in its specific content, in other words, but in the derivation of its aesthetic vision from a subjective confrontation with Chinese difference.

A reading of Chambers's work that remains attentive to the complex and conflicted processes of cross-cultural translation begins to resolve certain of the perplexities that an exclusive attention to its products has tended to foreground. The apparent dissonance within his own aesthetic sensibility fades from significance once we recognize that his simultaneous attraction to both Roman and Chinese models stemmed not only from their particular merits but also from the rich and unfamiliar stimulation that each provided to his imagination and critical faculties. His life-long ambivalence toward the Chinese style appears less maddeningly equivocal once we are able to distinguish his aesthetic judgement of particular instantiations of the style from the invigorating source of aesthetic insight and imaginative inspiration he found there. And, finally, the unaccountable indulgence of whimsical fancy that colours the horticultural ruminations of a conservative Tory architect may appear somewhat less bewildering once we grasp the significance of fancy as an inevitable component of an earnest eighteenth-century Englishman's contemplation of a largely unintelligible East. But the most far-reaching conclusion suggested by such a reading is that the experience of encounter, in the end, cannot be understood solely in terms either of power and mastery or of reciprocal influence and projected fantasies. The processes by which one culture finds meaning in another, rather, entail adaptive strategies that are themselves potentially transformative. To read the artifacts of a moment of contact is to confront testimony to variously motivated acts of translation and response, but it means also to bear witness to the imaginative epiphany engendered by the recognition of difference.

NOTE

1/This is the third and final edition of the Treatise that Chambers prepared. Apart from changing the title more accurately to reflect the book's contents (Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture), he revised the preface and some parts of the main text and added a new introduction. Subsequent textual references are to this edition.

WORKS CITED

Bald, R.C. "Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden." Discovering China: European Interpretions in the Enlightenment. Ed. julia Ching and Willard G. Oxtoby. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 1992. 147-75.

Chambers, William. Correspondence. British Library, London.

_____ . Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils. London: 1757.

_____. Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. London: 1772.

_____. Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-qua. Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. 2nd ed. London: 1773. 111-63.

_____ . "On the Art of Laying Out Gardens among the Chinese." Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils. London: 1757. 14-19.

_____. Plans, Elevations, sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew, in Surrey. London: 1763.

_____ . Treatise on Civil Architecture. London: 1759.

_____. Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture. London: 1791.

Chase, Isabel. "William Mason and Sir William Chambers' Dissertation on Oriental Gardening'' Journal of English and Germanic Philology 35 (1936): 517-29.

Ch'en, Shou-Yi. "The Chinese Garden in Eighteenth-Century England." T'ien Hsia Monthly 2 (1936): 321-39.

Conner, Patrick. "China and the Landscape Garden: Reports, Engravings and Misconceptions." Art History 2 (1979): 430-40.

Galland, Antoine. Arabian Nights Entertainments. London: 1712.

Ge, Liangyan. "On the Eighteenth-Century English Misreading of the Chinese Garden." Comparative Civilizations Review 27 (1992): 106- 26.

Goldsmith, Oliver. The Citizen of the World. London: 1762.

Harris, Eileen. "Designs of Chinese Buildings and the Dissertation on Oriental Gardening." Sir William Chambers: Knight of the Polar Star. Ed. John Harris. London: A. Zwemmer, 1970. 144-62.

Harris, John, ed. Sir William Chambers: Knight of the Polar Star. London: A. Zwemmer, 1970.

Hilles, Frederick, and Philip B. Daghlian, eds. Anecdotes of Painting in England. By Horace Walpole. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1937.

Hunt, John Dixon. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. London: MIT P, 1992.

Montesquieu, Charles de secondat, Baron de. Lettres persanes. Paris: 1721.

Pevsner, Nikolaus. "The Other Chambers." Architectural Review 101 (1947): 195-98.

Pope, Alexander. An Epistle to the Right Honourabl\e Richard Earl of Burlington. London: 1731.

Porter, David. Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

Reaves, R.B., Jr. "Sir William Chambers: A Study of Georgian Taste." Diss. U of Wisconsin, 1971.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Tunnard, Christopher. Gardens in the Modern Landscape. London: Architectural Press, 1938.

Walpole, Horace. Anecdotes of Painting in England. 4 vols. London, 1765.

_____ . The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence. 48 vols. Ed. W.S. Lewis. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1937-1983.

Whately, Thomas. Observations on Modern Gardening. London: 1770.

DAVID PORTER is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe and several articles on the reception of the chinoiserie style in eighteenth- century England.

Copyright MOSAIC Jun 2004

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