An Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-Qua of Quang-Chew-Fu, Gent.

Part 1

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THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY

AN EXPLANATORY DISCOURSE

BY TAN CHET-QUA, of QUANG-CHEW-FU, Gent.

SIR WILLIAM CHAMBERS (1773)

Introduction by RICHARD E. QUAINTANCE, JR.

PUBLICATION NUMBER 191 WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 1978

GENERAL EDITOR

David Stuart Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles

EDITORS

Charles L. Batten, University of California, Los Angeles William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles

ADVISORY EDITORS

James L. Clifford, Columbia University Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Earl Miner, Princeton University Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library James Sutherland, University College, London H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Frances M. Reed, University of California, Los Angeles

INTRODUCTION

This "Explanatory Discourse" first appeared, in the latter part of March 1773, annexed to the second and last edition of Sir William Chambers' Dissertation on Oriental Gardening of the preceding May. As an effort, curiously hedged, to impersonate a Chinese spokesman it seeks to exploit the satiric vantage points of philosophic naivety and trenchant candor enjoyed by Goldsmith's observer Lien Chi Altangi in London a dozen years earlier. But Chambers' ventriloquism is both more defensive and more aggressive than what we find in The Citizen of the World; the Preface here in his own voice admits sensitivity to the "abuse" which the Dissertation had incurred for its scenic fantasy, its brief opening and closing attacks on "Capability" Brown, and its pervasive criticism of the blandness of Brownian landscaping. By assuming the voice of Tan Chet-qua Chambers is able to pretend to more authoritative familiarity with actual Chinese gardens even as he deplores his readers' misapprehension that his interest lay mainly in masquerade, entertainment, or "the mere recital of a traveller's observation" (p. 113). It was probably a strategic error to entrust the substance of his genuine and quite respectable challenging of Brownian style, to what he terms the "vehicle" of alleged first-hand reports of preferable "Chinese" lay-outs. By this date, some two decades after the chinoiserie fad had crested in England, most of his readers might fairly be termed rather jaded. They preferred to overreact to the frivolity and whimsey they had come to think essentially Chinese, rather than to ponder what Chambers seriously urges from behind his silken "screen": his interest in a variegated emotional response to deliberately variegated landscape. An admirer of Burke's Sublime, Chambers saw advantage in complicating the suavity of Brown's gentle contours, shaven lawns, free-form reflecting lakes, and still short tree-clumps, through a program of landscaped stimulation of contrasting associative moods. This is the essence of that argument which Chambers "cloathed ... in the garb of fiction, to secure it a patient hearing" (p. 112) in three publications appearing over sixteen years. There is no evidence that he was better understood through publication of this "Discourse," the last of the three.

Of course, it is not as a satirist, an aesthetician of landscape, or even as a masquerading orientalist that Sir William Chambers (1723-96) has been best known in his time and since: with Robert Adam, he led the British architectural profession virtually from the time he undertook his first commissions around 1757. The two buildings for which he is justly best remembered are the Chinese Pagoda at Kew Gardens and Somerset House, between London's Strand and Waterloo Bridge. Yet from that solid Palladian structure now housing the General Register Office it takes more than the dozen miles up Thames to reach the pagoda which in 1762 reared its eighty bright wing-displaying dragons on ten successive roofs, and from the height of fifty meters flashed its glazed tiles across suburbia. Chambers developed simultaneously and maintained through his career two contrasted sensibilities. The dignified town house he designed for his family in 1764 fronted Berners Street with a massive rusticated doorway, yet had interior chimney-pieces and a rear elevation modelled in "fanciful" papier-mache which his biographer John Harris supposes was painted and varnished chinoiserie. He made his way to the top of his profession and earned royal recognition through tectonic skills that absorbed him with Somerset House, for instance, during the last two decades of his life. But as early as 1752 he had ventured the striking practice--standard by the century's end through his pioneering and Adam's--of drawing elevations of a building proposed as it would appear if already conditioned by time, decaying and overgrown by vegetation. 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. 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. It was during his second of five springs in Rome, living with his English wife over the shop of Piranesi, that Chambers learned of Frederick's death in March 1751 and designed for him a mausoleum based on the ancient and neo-classical shapes before his eyes; in one of his sections for this project he depicted it decaying like some of them, with cypress trees beginning to grow out of the rubble that was to have been its roof! Though this design was never executed, Chambers did meet with royal patronage upon his return to London and dedicated to the new Prince of Wales--soon his pupil in drawing, and three years later, George III--his first book, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines and Utensils in 1757.

The opening sentences which Samuel Johnson contributed to Chambers' Designs scorned the "power" with which "novelty attracts regard"--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"--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? "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." 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. 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." At Kew, by making the garden cosmopolitan, Chambers helped to globalize the capital of empire and proposed the world as Enlightened Eden.

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