Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 103

Joseph Addison was a prominent literary figure in early eighteenth‐century England. His poetry and drama have now faded from view, but his most lasting contribution was as an essayist in pioneering publications such as the Tatler and The Spectator. Read and discussed by a wide metropolitan audience in the new coffee houses, such publications played a key role in the establishment of the ‘public sphere’, that hallmark of civil society in emerging modernity. Addison’s long essay on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ was published in 11 daily parts between Saturday 21 June and Thursday 3 July 1712. For Addison, as he wrote a few days earlier in an essay on ‘Taste’, the imagination occupies an interim position between the comparatively ‘gross’ pleasures of the senses and the more ‘refined’ pleasures of understanding; but because it develops from the stimulus of the senses, it can be more influential on human conduct than purely rational intellection. In Addison’s view, Nature is a more powerful stimulus to the imagination than Art, and the commingling of the two, stronger still. Gardens, that is to say, can play an important role in the work of the imagination. Although a supporter of the classical tradition, and a critic of the Gothic, it is interesting from the point of view of the present anthology that Addison recommends Chinese gardens over European ones – and especially over the then‐predominant fashion in England for geometric garden design. The present short extracts are taken from the fourth part of the essay, published on Wednesday 25 June 1712, reprinted in The Spectator, Volume the Sixth, London 1757 pp. 99 and 101–4.

If we consider the works of Nature and Art, as they are qualified to entertain the Imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in comparison of the former; for though they may sometimes appear as Beautiful or Strange, they can have nothing in them of that Vastness and immensity, which afford so great an entertainment to the mind of the beholder. The one may be as polite and delicate as the other, but can never shew herself so august and magnificent in the design. There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of Nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of Art. […]

But though there are several of these wild scenes, that are more delightful than any artificial shows; yet we find the works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art: For in this case our Pleasure rises from a double principle; from the agreeableness of the objects to the eye, and from their similitude to other objects. […]

[T]here is generally in Nature something more grand and august, than what we meet with in the curiosities of Art. When, therefore, we see this imitated in any measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted kind of pleasure, than what we receive from the nicer and more accurate productions of Art. On this account our English gardens are not so entertaining to the Fancy as those of France and Italy, where we see a large extent of ground covered over with an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent every where an artificial rudeness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country. […]

Writers, who have given us an account of China, tell us the inhabitants of that country laugh at the plantations of our Europeans, which are laid out by the rule and line; because, they say, any one may place trees in equal rows and uniform figures. They choose rather to shew a genius in works of this nature, and therefore always conceal the Art by which they direct themselves. They have a word, it seems, in their language, by which they express the particular beauty of a plantation that thus strikes the Imagination at first sight, without discovering what it is that has so agreeable an effect.¹ Our British gardeners, on the contrary, instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissars upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure; and cannot but fancy that an orchard in flower looks infinitely more delightful, than all the little labyrinths of the most finished parterre.