A New and Unusual Landscaping Ideal: Joseph Addison's Contribution to Romanticism

Abstract

Addison's landscape discussion in the famous 1712 Spectator essay on the pleasures of the imagination has often been regarded as the beginning of modern aesthetics. To see how this is the case but not in the way of conventional interpretations, it is important to remember the then revolutionary idea of “beauty without order” which Sir William Temple first discussed via the asymmetrical Chinese gardening style and which Addison enthusiastically endorsed in his horticultural reform agenda. Much more than the notions of beauty, greatness, and uncommonness which are the ostensible focus and usually noticed content of his essay and which are all derived from classical European aesthetics, it is this new and unusual love of things in their seeming irregularity and disorder, and the associated belief in their capability to work themselves out, that retrospectively seems to constitute Addison's most important contribution to English and European Romanticism.

Acknowledgments

The research for this essay was supported by a sabbatical leave grant from Niagara County Community College and short-term fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Lewis Walpole Library of Yale University, the William Andrews Clark Library of UCLA, the Beinecke Library of Yale University, the Yale Center for British Art, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, and the Warburg Institute of the University of London. For the crucial support of these institutions and the involved librarians and staff members, the author would like to express sincere gratitude. In addition, the author would like to express gratitude to an expert reader of the journal who read an earlier version of this essay and made careful and constructive suggestions for revisions.

Notes

NOTES

1. Joseph Addison, “No. 421 of The Spectator, Thursday, July 3, 1712,” in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3.580. Subsequent references to Addison's papers in The Spectator are cited in the text.

2. Carol Fabricant, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century British Art and Aesthetics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 49–81, at 49.

3. Erin Mackie, Market a la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in ‘The Tatler’ and ‘The Spectator’ (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xv. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 51. Anne F. Widmayer, “Mapping the Landscape in Addison's ‘Pleasures of the Imagination,’” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 50 (1996): 19.

4. E. F. Carritt, “Addison, Kant, and Wordsworth,” Essays and Studies of the English Association 22 (1937): 35.

5. Clarence D. Thorpe, “Addison's Contribution to Criticism,” in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope, ed. Richard Foster Jones (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951), 329.

6. Theodore A. Gracyk, “Kant's Shifting Debt to British Aesthetics,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 26 (1986): 215.

7. Arthur Lovejoy, “The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 32 (1933): 3. Robert Batchelor, “Concealing the Bounds: Imagining the British Nation through China,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 89.

8. Horace Walpole, On Modern Gardening, ed. Rebecca More (Hackney: The Stourton Press, 1987), 38.

9. John Donne, “An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary,” in John Donne's Poetry, ed. Arthur L. Clements, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1992), 205–8.

10. Isaac Newton, “Letter to Bentley, December 10, 1692,” in Newton, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall (New York: Norton, 1995), 332.

11. Longinus, “On the Sublime,” in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin, 1965), 108.

12. Thomas Burnet, The Theory of the Earth (London, 1691), part 1, 139–40.

13. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 63.

14. Ibid., 60.

15. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: Norton, 1963), 140.

16. Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 1.240.

17. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 152.

18. Peter Gay, The Science of Freedom, vol. 2 of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977), 311.

19. Ibid., 312.

20. Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (New York: Gordian Press, 1953), 196.

21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), #45, 149.

22. Ibid., #10, 55 and #12, 58.

23. Ibid., #46, 150.

24. Salim Kemal, Kant and Fine Art: An Essay on Kant and the Philosophy of Fine Art and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 60.

25. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 24.

26. Stephen Switzer, Ichnographia Rustica: Or, the Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener's Recreation (London, 1718), 3.44.

27. John D. Hunt, Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 1600–1750 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 197. In the last 20 years or so, Hunt has consistently promoted this revisionist reading of English garden history to moderate Walpole's blatantly nationalistic claim. However, even though he would like to present the new horticultural naturalism of the eighteenth-century English garden as derived from classical and Italian sources, scholars of the Italian garden do not always agree with him. The architecture and ornaments of “the landscape garden (then called the Anglo–Chinese style),” as Claudia Lazzaro points out, “alluded to different pasts and cultures, not to classical antiquity exclusively.” Claudia Lazzaro, “The Idea of Italy and the Italian Garden Tradition,” in Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, ed. Mirka Benes and Dianne Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 60.

28. Tom Williamson, Polite Landscape: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopins University Press, 1995), 52.

29. John Dixon Hunt, “Approaches (New and Old) to Garden History,” in Perspectives on Garden Histories, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 1999), 85.

30. Kant, Critique of Judgment, #22, 80.

31. Lovejoy, “The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism,” 3.

32. Sir William Temple, “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, of Gardening,” in The Works of Sir William Temple (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 3.237.

33. Ch’ien Chung-shu, “China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth Century,” Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography New Series 1 (1940): 351–84, at 376. Y. Z. Chang, “A Note on Sharawadgi,” Modern Language Notes 45 (1930): 221–224, at 223.

34. Addison, “To William Congreve [Blois, December 1699],” in The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 10–11.

35. Cf. Addison, “No. 101 of The Guardian, Tuesday, July 7, 1713,” in The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq, ed. Thomas Tickell (London: Jacob Tonso, 1721), 4.149.

36. Addison, “No. 161 of The Tatler, Thursday, April 20, 1710,” in The Works of Joseph Addison, 2.317. Subsequent references to Addison's papers in The Tatler are cited in the text.

37. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583–1610, trans. Louis J. Gallagher, S.J. (New York: Random House, 1953), 55.

38. Temple, “Gardening,” 3.238.

39. Michael Charlesworth, introduction to The English Garden: Literary Sources and Documents, ed. Michael Charlesworth (Robertsbridge: Helm Information, 1993), 18.

40. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 315.

41. The Faustian attitude or the aspiration to be Godlike, for instance, would be regarded in the traditional doctrine of Christianity as Satanic.

42. Mencius, The Book of Moncius, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover, 1970), bk. 4, part 1, chap. 7.

43. Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century, 95.

44. The single most important publication during the anti-Jesuit campaign was the treatise Traite sur quelques pointes de la religion des Chinois published in 1701 but written in 1623 by Nicholas Longobardi, who entered China in 1597 and lived there until his death at the age of 90 in 1655 and who was not only an early associate of Ricci but his successor as leader of the Jesuit mission after Ricci's death in 1610.

45. Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Critical and Historical of Mr Peter Bayle (1734), intro. Richard H. Popkin (London: Routledge, 1997), 5.217–18. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 155.

46. Temple, “Of Heroic Virtue,” 3.344.

47. Temple, “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, of Gardening,” 3.235.

48. John E. Wills, Jr., 1688: A Global History (New York: Norton, 2001), 141.

49. Kant, Critique of Judgment, #65, 219.

50. Ibid., #65, 220, 221.

51. Lord Byron, “Manfred,” in Byron's Poetry, ed. Frank D. McConnell (New York: Norton, 1978), I.ii.40–41.

52. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 21.

53. B. Sprague Allen, Tides in English Taste (1619–1800): A Background for the Study of Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 2.125.