Part 2

This "Discourse" is appreciably more puckish in tone than the earlier two-thirds of Chambers' published "Chinese" work. The half-title here, page of the second edition, heaps Chambers' own initialed honors 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 superstitious 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. 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." Such quixotic energy even Mason had to salute, in the last line of his Heroic Epistle.

Douglass College Rutgers University

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

The "Explanatory Discourse" is the last of Chambers' works to be reissued in 20th-century facsimile. Chambers' Designs of Chinese Buildings (London, 1757), rpt. in facsim. (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), concludes its text with his essay "Of the Art of Laying Out Gardens Among the Chinese," pp. 14-19, rpt. in John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, eds., The Genius of the Place (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 283-288. A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London, 1772), of which the illus. title-page reappeared in the 2nd ed. (London, 1773), hence here, was rpt. in facsim. ed. John Harris (Farnborough, Hants.: Gregg International, 1972). I quote from pp. 111-113 of "An Explanatory Discourse"; Chet-qua drops his mask on p. 159 below. Concerning the fad see Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: John Murray, 1961), esp. ch. vi.

John Harris, Sir William Chambers, Knight of the Polar Star (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1970), p. 24 and pls. 7, 94 (not to be confused with the earlier accepted practice of designing ruins: pls. 31, 81). For the "fanciful" aspects of his town house see pp. 11, 217.

For the evidence of correspondence esp. from 1770-74 see Heather Martienssen, "Chambers as a Professional Man," Architectural Review, 135, 2 (1964), 277-283.

Harris gathers evidence for the meeting with Frederick, pp. 33-35, and on pp. 18-19, surmises that Blondel's teaching "may well have been the foundation of Chambers's eclecticism.... The choice of a Parisian education underlines Chambers' European character."

Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), IV, 188.

Designs, first page of unpaginated Preface; Dissertation (1773), p. iii. Cf. "William and John Halfpenny" [Michael Hoare], Chinese and Gothic Architecture Properly Ornamented (London, 1752), e.g. pl. 2.

Designs, second page of unpaginated Preface.

W. J. Bean, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (London: Cassell, 1908), pp. 194-195, following Sir John Hill, Hortus Kewensis (London, 1768); Chambers, Plans, Elevations, Sections and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew (London, 1763).

"Frederick Law Olmsted's Contribution," Roots of Contemporary American Architecture, ed. Lewis Mumford (New York: Reinhold, 1952), p. 111. Dissertation (1773), p. 103 and cf. his letter of 13 May 1772 in Harris (1970), p. 192; Walpole, On Modern Gardening, ed. W. S. Lewis (New York: Young Books, 1931), p. 66; Mason, The English Garden, Book I (1772), final line.

Designs, p. 15 (ed. Hunt and Willis, p. 284).

Chambers' prose is cited Dunciad-fashion in the Epistle, Minor English Poets, 1660-1780: A Selection from Alexander Chalmers' The English Poets [1810], ed. David P. French (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), VIII, 108. See Isabel W. Chase, "William Mason and Sir William Chambers' Dissertation on Oriental Gardening," JEGP, 35 (1936), 517-530; R. C. Bald, "Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden," JHI, 11 (1950), 287-320.

Cowper, Book III, "The Garden," 1. 766, in A Collection of English Poems 1660-1800, ed. Ronald S. Crane (New York: Harper, 1932), p. 998; Dissertation (1773), pp. xi, 23-30, 37-39, 91-99; cf. Derek Clifford, A History of Garden Design, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 211-212.

"Discourse," pp. 125-128, 133, 137-138, 143, 155-156; Dissertation (1773), pp. vi, 53; Harris, p. 192.

Pevsner, "The Other Chambers," Architectural Review, 101 (1947), 195-198.

Temple, "Upon the Gardens of Epicurus," ed. Hunt and Willis, p. 99; Osvald Siren, China and Gardens of Europe of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Ronald, 1950), p. iv; "Discourse," pp. 155-156.

I owe this information to Prof. Ching-I Tu of Livingston Coll. and Dr. Nelson Chou of the East Asian Lib., both at Rutgers Univ. Likewise helpful but in no way blameworthy in my remarks on matters Chinese were Prof. King-Lui Wu and Mr. Antony Marr of Yale Univ. and Prof. Andrew Plaks of Princeton Univ. Though some of the proper names Chet-qua uses eluded verification, the worst blunder noted was "Ty," which means "emperor," at p. 139n. Endowing Chet-qua with "nine whiskers" instead of the traditional five beards sorts with the unusually narrow proportions and numerous stories of the Kew Pagoda. Rhymes and short syntactic groupings in italics, pp. 141, 158, are not Confucian; the 28th year of Ch'ien-lung's reign (p. ) would be 1764. Yet the idiom in the final n., p. 163, is authentic.

The initials stand for Fellow of the Royal Soc. of Sweden; Member of the Royal Acad. of Arts, Paris; Member of the Italian Acad. of Arts, Florence; Treasurer of the Royal Acad.; Comptroller General of His Majesty's Works; Architectural Tutor to the Queen. Chambers' international reputation was assured by his Treatise on Civil Architecture (1759).

"Historical Chronicle," G.M., 41 (1771), 237-238; William T. Whitley, Artists and their Friends in England, 1700-1799 (Boston: Medici Society, 1928), I, 269-272; "Johnson, Percy, and Sir William Chambers," Bodleian Library Record, 4 (1952-53), 291-292.

Harris, p. 193 (Chambers' emphasis).

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The facsimile of "An Explanatory Discourse" is reproduced from a copy (Shelf Mark: PML 53026) "annexed to" the second and last edition of A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1773) in The Pierpont Morgan Library. The total type-page (p. 113) measures 208 x 127 mm.

DISSERTATION

ORIENTAL GARDENING;

S^r: WILLIAM CHAMBERS, Kn^t

Comptroller General of his Majesty's Works.