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Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity

Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity yue zhuang Kuitert has highlighted the Dutch dimension and the role played by the Introduction applied arts in the cross-cultural interaction underpinning the emergence of Sir William Temple (1628–1699), the eminent English ambassador to the the English garden. Kuitert notes Temple’s special garden friendship with Sir Dutch Republic and a widely read essayist, famously used the term ‘shar- Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), the Dutch poet, secretary to the stad- awadgi’ (beauty without an apparent order) to describe the layout of Chinese holder, and an Anglophile. Temple, during his ambassadorships to The gardens in his essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’: Hague in the 1660s–1670s, visited Huygens’ garden estate, Hofwijck, at Voorburg, many times. In a letter to Temple in 1682, Huygens addressed Among us, the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly, in some his younger friend as ancien Hofwijcquiste (‘old Hofwijckist’), a kindred spirit certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees who shared his garden pleasures over many years. Huygens further granted ranged so, as to answer one another, and at exact Distances. The Chineses scorn Temple the privilege of visiting Hofwijck any time he wished after his death. this way of Planting, and say a Boy that can tell an hundred, may plant Walks of Notwithstanding its geometrical layout, the Hofwijck garden featured Trees in strait Lines, and over against one another, and to what Length and Extent He pleases. But their greatest reach of Imagination, is employed in informal tree planting in blocks. These blocks of wilderness within Hofwijck’s contriving Figures, where the Beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but regularity, Kuitert asserts, owed to ‘intelligence from Japan’ — namely the without any order or disposition of parts, that shall be commonly or easily irregular pattern design of the symmetrical frame of the Japanese kimono, observ’d. And though we have hardly any Notion of this sort of Beauty, yet then fashionable in the Netherlands. Kuitert thus attributes the source of they have a particular Word to express it; and where they find it hit their Eye at inspiration for sharawadgi and Temple’s irregular gardening at Moor Park in first sight, they say the Sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression Surrey to Huygens’ Hofwijck, and in turn, to Japanese clothing, without also of Esteem. considering Temple’s explicit references to porcelain and lacquer screens — both were arriving in Europe from China in far greater quantities. But a more Later in the early decades of the eighteenth century, Temple’s comments on immediate issue in Kuitert’s argument, an issue that has been long-standing in sharawadgi were repeatedly evoked in the English campaign for a new, irre- scholars’ arguments supporting an influence of the Far East on the European gular or naturalistic style of gardening. The significance of sharawadgi for garden aesthetic, is that he considers the role of the Far East in enabling ‘the English gardening has been the theme of numerous modern scholarly seventeenth-century departure from the fixed frames of Renaissance papers — some advocate it, others reject it. In a recent examination, Wybe 288 issn 1460-1176 # 2022 the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. vol. 41, no. 4 https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.2017682 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ classicism towards a more enlightened understanding, including the birth of hand, and the tradition of Christian optimism, on the other. A psychological a picturesque taste in landscape art.’ dimension features in both traditions. Aristotle states in his Rhetoric, ‘Change Like many previous scholars, Kuitert narrowly identifies Renaissance classi- in all things is sweet.’ Cicero associates varied events in a plot line with cism with the principles of geometry and harmonic proportion as reason and pleasure. This principle of variety is based on the notion that the human cosmic order. This harmonious classicism of the High Renaissance had its mind is naturally pleased with change. Developing Aristotelian psychology th th 13 influence on 17 –18 -century aesthetic doctrines, but its importance was not and classical rhetoric, Renaissance humanists believed that when the mind so dominant as to exclude other aspects of humanist engagement with the classical (understanding) was supplied with ‘a varietie of objects whereon to worke’, it tradition — literature, rhetoric, art and philosophy — in the early modern period, was possessed with ‘a strong delight’, or heated ‘motions’ of the senses and with all of which gardening was associated. The principles of variety and contrast, passions. The mission of poetry or rhetoric, for those political humanists, th 22 widely applied in 17 -century poems, landscape paintings and gardens, merit was to instruct virtues through delight. A variety of images therefore were 14 th attention. In the 17 -century context where there was increasing recognition more powerful than didactic reasoning because they were capable of moving 15 23 of the passions as being an integral part of human nature, the principles of readers to ‘well-doing’ and to improve the world. This view was strongly variety and contrast worked on the reader or viewer’s senses and passions. As propagated in works such as the Defence of Poesie (1595) by the eminent writer leading European statesmen, both Huygens and Temple were educated in the and statesman, Sir Philip Sidney. Both Huygens and Temple deeply admired 16 25 political humanist tradition and cultivated a virtuoso taste for gardens. For both and agreed with Sidney’s view. Just as variety characterised Sidney’s popular Huygens and Temple, as I shall argue, appreciating images of variety and con- pastoral romance Arcadia and produced the passions, so it characterised trast — whether in poetry and painting, or gardens and the applied arts — was Huygens’s and Temple’s own garden descriptions with a similar effect. a poetic technique to temper their passions to achieve a humanist ideal — neo- On the other hand, the tradition of Christian optimism supplies the th Stoic and Epicurean tranquillity. principle of variety with more vitality and promotes its application in 17 - This technique, it may be suggested, was an important, yet hitherto over- century creative expressions concerning natural scenery. Consisting of looked, cultural framework within which the European cultural elite received a complex of ideas which were common in Christian, Neoplatonic, Stoic the Asian aesthetic with their structural pattern seemingly also emphasising and Calvinist thoughts, Christian optimism holds that God made the world variety and contrast. Evoking contrary passions in the reader or viewer, literature, a beautiful dwelling place for man by making it diverse. With growing rhetoric, and artworks that embody variety and contrast had an effect on the mind interest in the study of the visible, material world, Dutch and Flemish painters th th akin to the effect of sharawadgi, described by Lovejoy as ‘irregularity, asymmetry, in the 16 –17 centuries painted landscapes in praise of God’s grace, with its variety, [and] surprise’. Probing into the intersections among gardens, rhetoric, all-encompassing harmony of unity and multiplicity, yet not without con- psychology, philosophy and the applied arts in the global early modern period, tingencies and imperfections. we may go beyond the impasse of debate surrounding an oversimplifying ques- As an extension of the principle of variety, late Renaissance humanists tion — ‘did the East influence the West?’ and produce new observations on showed an increasing taste for ‘contrast’. With the influence of Neoplaton- political humanist gardens and their reception of Asian designs. ism and Stoicism, Richard Ashley, for example, in his Of the interchangeable course or variety of things in the whole world, translated in 1594 from the French of Louis Le Roy, observed the world order being ‘maintyned by countraries’; ‘in like manner is the Earth, and euery other thing is the world tempered and The principles of variety and contrast 30 conserued by things of dislike and contrarie qualitie.’ In northern landscape th With its common appeal to critics, writers and artists in the 17 century, the paintings, mountains stand in opposition to valleys, as light is in contrast to principle of variety is found in the classical rhetorical tradition, on the one darkness. Man’s body was equally dominated with its contrary humours and 289 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang passions, an ancient concept that remained alive and well in the suffering and unprecedented possibilities for individuals. Following the teach- Renaissance. Excessive and unbridled passions were understood to be harm- ing of Lipsius’ interpretation of Seneca and Cicero, these political humanists 32 44 ful in daily life. Despite overt claims for the primacy of reason at the time, such as Huygens, ‘the Constanter’, and Temple who celebrated ‘tranquillity many writers, artists and patrons believed that the passions could only be of mind’ considered that reason (practical reason) was not opposed to controlled or tempered by other passions, which they aimed to achieve passion, but only sprang forth from a tranquil disposition or ‘an even balance’ through mood-alternating techniques such as reading poetry and viewing of the mind. This enabled one to find the golden mean — making prudent 34 47 paintings. Developed in tandem with poetry and painting, Renaissance decisions in political affairs, as necessitated by their duties as courtiers. Being gardens, which were typically composed of a regular garden and an irregular ‘virtuosi’ or ‘liefhebbers’ (lovers of art) themselves, these political humanists grove, had similar functions. Whereas the regular garden was often asso- habitually engaged with literature, poetry and art at their leisure as ciated with ‘joy and delight’, the grove or wilderness, evoked ‘solitary a productive and virtuous diversion, which helped them practice the mas- 36 49 reverence’. With the balance between the wilderness and the regular gar- tery of the passions prompted by real-life experiences, or ‘emotional horti- den, the overall design reflects the harmony of the universe, just as the human culture’, to borrow Richard Tuck’s phrase. In this light, their approach to passions are balanced and at peace in the soul. gardens with features of variety and contrast, may not have been merely for indulgence in sensuous pleasure or status symbols and ‘conspicuous consump- tion’, as some have assumed. But rather, these may be seen as a mechanism Tempering the passions to achieve neo-Stoic and Epicurean tranquillity for cultivating their emotional disposition to achieve neo-Stoic constancy or Epicurean tranquillity. While their country estate would allow them to be at The emphasis on cultivating a calm, balanced disposition by tempering the th a distance from the court under uncertain and at times dangerous circum- passions to achieve the golden mean manifests the eclectic nature of 17 - stances, the cultivation of this inner fortress of tranquillity in a garden would century psychology and philosophy. Absorbing themes from Aristotle’s contribute to the regulation of stress and thus to their mental strength to hold moderation and the golden mean to the Stoic therapy of emotions, this up to their values and stay involved in public life. emphasis was particularly associated with neo-Stoicism and Epicureanism. This mechanism of gardens as a poetic and psychological technique for Both the (neo-)Stoics and the Epicureans regarded the attainment of apatheia achieving tranquillity in an active life has hitherto been overlooked in the or ataraxia (both meaning ‘free from disturbances’) as the way of living a good th context of 17 -century Dutch and English gardens. Moreover, I shall life. Quite contrary to the typical view held by early Stoics that the passions contend that this mechanism functioned as a framework within which were all negative and must be conquered by reason, the Flemish neo-Stoic Huygens and Temple perceived the Asian aesthetic of gardens and land- philosopher, Justus Lipsius, in his De Constantia (1584), following Cicero, scapes and Temple coined his term sharawadgi. Despite, or because of, the shifted the rigid reading of Stoic apatheia as ‘eliminating passions’ to ‘good seeming foreignness, images of Asian gardens and landscapes could appeal passions’ (eupatheiai), or constancy. Resting on an even balance of the to the European humanists through the lens of the principles of variety and passions, ‘constancy’ of the mind is ‘an immovable strength of the minde, contrast. The irregular design from Asia may be less an ‘other’ than an neither lifted up, or pressed down with external accidents.’ Constancy is ingenious device or exemplar that was located comfortably within the thus close to the Epicurean ataraxia, or ‘tranquillity of mind’ as the neo- European cultural framework of caring for the passions. Temple’s shara- Epicurean philosopher Pierre Gassendi described: it is the tranquil motion of wadgi, it may be supposed, is not separate from his perception of the the mind in balance, ‘moved neither by exultant joy, nor depressed sorrow’. parallels between neo-Stoic and Epicurean tranquillity and the Confucian This disposition of inner calm, it is worth noting, was an ideal sought after th 43 discourse on the passions, and between European humanist and Chinese by humanists active in the 17 -century political arena, where the momen- forms of government based on virtue. tous events of the reformation, iconoclasm and wars created both terrible 290 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ To make this argument, I shall first, in the following, present a close reading of Huygens’ and Temple’s garden descriptions — Huygens on Hof- wijck and Temple on Moor Park (not the estate in Surrey, which he was only to purchase later in 1685, but the Moor Park at Hertfordshire, created by Lucy Harington Russell (1580–1627) the Countess of Bedford, which he described in the Epicurean garden essay preceding the account of sharawadgi). Both gardens shared kinship with Italianate gardens having a mostly regular layout, but neither writer followed the rules of harmonious classicism exclu- sively to identify geometry and harmonic proportions with reason. Instead, they both showed an understanding that (practical) reason, as an ability to keep to the golden mean, only emerged from a tranquil disposition where the passions are in balance — as in neo-Stoic constancy and Epicurean tranquil- lity. Such a tranquil disposition was cultivated in a guided stroll through the garden, where a series of programmed images of variety and contrast were encountered. Temple and Huygens’ garden stroll, raising and allaying the passions so as to achieve a tranquil balance, accustomed them to sharawadgi- like Asian designs in porcelain, lacquer screens and kimonos, where similar structural patterns of variety and contrast are displayed. figure 1. Hofwijck (dated 1653), by Constantijn Huygens and an unknown engraver. Courtesy: Huygens’ Hofwijck, Voorburg. Reuse not permitted. Huygens and Hofwijck out, Huygens was mediating between classical theory and the old concept Hofwijck was built as a country residence in 1640–1642 on a lot of land of imitatio naturae, by which he meant the study and artistic imitation of in Voorburg near The Hague. As the name’s double meaning indicates — nature as variety and vitality. The unorthodox application of the Vitru- both ‘a house with a garden’ and to ‘avoid the court’ — it was a place for vian man in the layout of a garden rather than as a building’s façade the secretary to the stadholder to take a quick refuge from the bustling expressed this mediation — a matter to which we shall return. And court of political affairs in The Hague. Like contemporary Dutch and unlike most contemporary Dutch gardens, which featured elaborate and European gardens in general, the estate of Hofwijck has a regular layout, decorative knots, bosquets and parterres with flower-beds organized into consisting of woods, an orchard and a square with a house (figure 1). The mathematical order, the glory of Hofwijck was its trees. As Kuitert has proportions of the three-part garden models on that of the ‘Vitruvian’ noted, the trees were planted informally in blocks in the woods, the man: the woods (the lower garden) constitute the lower part of the body; orchard and near the house. This contrasting effect is captured in a set the orchard (the upper garden) represents the breast; and the small house of illustrations which Huygens included in his 1653 publication about the the head. This feature may easily be taken as evidence of Huygens’ estate, a poem entitled Hofwijck. With almost 3000 lines, Hofwijck is one commitment to the classicism of the High Renaissance. The then new of the earliest and longest country house poems in the Netherlands. In tendency for classicism in Dutch architecture was already reflected in the poem, Huygens guided his imagined visitors on a stroll along a path Huygens’ house built in the 1630s. Yet Huygens was not through the plan of the Vitruvian man. a wholehearted classicist. At Hofwijck, as Boudewijn Bakker pointed 291 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang The stroll started from the woods, proceeded to the orchard and ended at disordered passions towards a tranquil balance and constancy. Such inner the house on the surrounding moat. The tripartite structure of the garden is calm was not pursued without reference to outward circumstances. Rather, as mirrored in the structure of the poem. Following Italian precedents, early Lipsius argued in Politicorum sive Civilis doctrinae libri sex (Six Books on Politics or modern country houses or villas in England and the Netherlands commonly Civil Doctrine, 1589), inner calm is an active achievement of the will, a way to consisted of a garden (in a regular shape) and a grove (mostly free-form), as in survive civil war and other extreme forms of political difficulty through active the case of Moor Park in Hertfordshire, recollected by Temple. And as in engagement in public life. This neo-Stoic belief underlines Huygens’ com- Moor Park, a typical itinerary through these villas would be from the garden mitment as a devoted civil servant — he was the secretary to the stadholder to the grove. This is apparently not the case in Hofwijck, where all three parts Frederik Hendrik, a position which he continued to hold under William II of the estate, organised into an anthropomorphic body, were regular in their and William III. As the editors of his poems noted, ‘few servants of any state layout. Robert van Pelt argued that the particular itinerary in Hofwijck was can have performed their duties for so long, or with such exemplary fidelity: a progression through the Neoplatonic universe, from the terrestrial to the living his name, Constanter.’ celestial and empyrean worlds, which corresponds to a journey through the Yet the neo-Stoic garden does not have to be tranquil all the time, for microcosm of the human: Body, Soul, and Mind. The application of the training a constant mind and tranquil heart requires exposure to strong or Vitruvian man was therefore a signifier for the idea of the body as the path even violent passions as one experiences in real life. Aside from the peaceful through Creation to God. garden, Lipsius’s De Constantia also features ‘let showres, thunders, light- Offering an apparently coherent scheme for Huygens’ mind and garden, eninges, and tempestes fall round about thee, thou shalt crie boldlie with Van Pelt’s reading has evident merit. But this Neoplatonist reading may be a loude voyce, I lie at rest amid the waves.’ Lipsius’ constancy thus th too clean-cut to fit an eclectic mind typical of a 17 -century European provided a way of compromising with the Augustinian emphasis on experi- humanist like Huygens’, and his many-sided poem, Hofwijck. As Thijs West- encing the passions, an emphasis central to Huygens’ Calvinist belief. The steijn has noted, for the early modern period, it is not always possible to combined form of Stoicism and Augustinism as an intellectual framework distinguish rigidly between the lines of argument denoted by terms such as was by no means singular, but was commonly observed amongst Renais- 61 71 Stoicism, Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism. This eclectic nature is imme- sance humanists. Huygens’ earlier poem Ooghentroost (Ocular Consolation, diately reflected in the intensive quotations of classical authors in Huygens’ 1647), as has been shown, also combined Stoic consolatory writing and poem, especially those by Seneca, among which the use of Stoic consolatory Augustine’s thoughts on grace. This way we are allowed to consider topoi is evident. Hofwijck is indeed therapeutic for Huygens: ‘Here do Huygens’ emphasis of contrary passions (pleasure and pain), an emphasis I flee for refuge, sheltered here and cool, | …. A haven now and then from which mainly lies in the journey through the woods (the body), as a neo- stormy winds at Court | Whereby the soul’s refreshed, the body is restored’. Stoic process of cultivation in order to achieve constancy or tranquillity. Huygens’ experience thus echoes what Lipsius described as living in a garden This tranquillity in the soul, or the heart (the breast), is symbolised by the in the beginning of the second part of his De Constantia: ‘tranquillity, seclu- orchard, where images of balance and harmony dominate, as shown in the sion, meditation … and all of that in a relaxed manner, without effort.’ The poem. Through the ultimate movement from the orchard towards the Flemish philosopher’s neo-Stoicism was a shaping influence on his contem- house, a symbol of divine mind, the Stoic’s tranquil soul seems to embrace th 65 73 porary and 17 -century intellectuals. The very name Constanter [Constan- God’s grace in Augustine’s vision. tijn] reveals Huygens as a like-minded man, whose endorsement of Lipsius’ Focusing on the use of the principles of variety and contrast to manage the teaching is evidenced by his acquisition of a large collection of manuscripts passions towards tranquillity, I shall confine the following analysis to the and annotated books which Lipsius had left at Leiden University. For the woods or the lower garden of Hofwijck and correspondingly the first third neo-Stoics, the garden is a refuge where one can recompose or heal (about 1000 lines) of Huygens’ long poem, Hofwijck. Guiding his guests 292 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ through the beautiful trees he cultivated, the poet’s pleasure is deemed at once At Hofwijck, where the land was typically flat and empty, void of hills and human and rational: valleys, it was only rational (in the sense of being practical) to layout the garden geometrically. More nuanced demonstration of reason or the golden Don’t ask me for its size in roods or feet—but stand mean applied in the design is illustrated in the balance between the tameness At one end and you see no ending to the trees, and wilderness of the trees: The end is quite far off where eyes discern no end. This the tame wilderness of wild civility; Too tame would be too formal here; too wild, too coarse, Or so I call the wood, as Reason I love well So that which lies between can satisfy us best. And love the balance of the Golden Mean … But the tameness and wilderness of the trees are also images of the passions. ‘Reason’ thus is not represented primarily by the geometrical forms of the Understanding that the passions had more than an analogical relation to liquid estate imitating a human body, nor by the fine proportions of the house. states and forces of nature (thanks to their close functional relation to the four Indeed, on this anthropomorphism, Huygens merely noted ‘that shape is humours), early modern writers commonly describe the passions as ‘winds God’s own work and it is therefore good’, without identifying the shape and waves of the body’. Conversely, the variety of landscapes also matched with ‘reason’. Huygens would certainly have known that the English author the sense of change and variety in the human passions and soul. The and diplomat, Henry Wotton, a senior friend of his, had credited architects imagery of storms, for example, features in John Donne’s verse letters as an by virtue of using the system of harmonic proportions as ‘a Diver into example of life under the free sway of the passions. Holding the highest Causes and into the Mysteries of Proportion,’ to which Huygens alluded respect for the English poet, Huygens had translated nineteen of Donne’s in Hofwijck. However, to Huygens, the architect ‘wins not every time’ ‘in poems into Dutch in the 1630s. In Hofwijck, Huygens echoed Donne’s such a lottery’, ‘[a]nd draws blank all too often.’ In writing so, Huygens analogy, ‘we search the still and green depths of my waves, | My moving was, as Bakker pointed out, more consonant with his younger, sceptical self, sea of leaves, which we hear clamouring | and moving still above us’. when he had little interest in classicism and saw a world in terms of Clamouring passions may be disturbing, yet for Huygens, as for Donne, contingencies, not universalities. The mid-aged Huygens was more they were not to be exterminated, but rather balanced, for passions were accepting of classicism (universalities) as the organising principle, but humanity the marks of man’s humanity. As Huygens, the Dutch poet, recognised: remained firmly as the organic centre of creation. Made in ‘God’s image and … we are sober and extravagant by turns. likeness’, Hofwijck mirrored nature as variety and vitality, as conceptualised in Even the gravest man is human flesh and blood, the northern Renaissance tradition, but seen through the Vitruvian eyes of And moves, as all do, like the ebbing, flooding waters: geometry. To find the golden mean between universality and humanity, rules Our gravity still seeks a balanced levity. and real life, geometry and variety, Huygens trusted practical reason, the This is my observation, my reading and my thought, We are in truth no angels, Reason does its best prudent sense of judgment, rather than any theoretical rules applied by force. But fickleness is not the last thing to affect us. That is why he could endorse a design based on disordered elements as in a Japanese robe to be applied in garden designs, but only in such topographies Thus, the Vitruvian man at Hofwijck is indeed to be taken literally — not that were not blank and where asymmetry would provide a satisfying merely as a model of ideal proportions, but as a body of flesh and blood, solution. As he wrote: humours and passions (figure 2). Van Pelt was right to point out that Huy- gens’ Vitruvian man parallels Donne’s image of the body of Christ as the path Tailors (Planters) mending older works I can accept with mercy, through Creation to God. Yet unlike Van Pelt’s exclusive Neoplatonic But I see no way to pardon cutters of new cloth. reading of Hofwijck — in which woods were an image of a chaotic world, My sheet was still a whole, and I would be an astigmatic fool, and man living in such a world, depending upon his senses, was ‘blind’, at If I would cut it up in pieces after a senile plan. 293 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang in the poem, variety was a guiding principle in the design of the woods. Composed of as many species of trees as possible, the woods acquired both visual beauty and utility. A medley of varieties (poplars, birches, etc.), these trees framed views, providing elegant markers along the walks and avenues. As there were digressions in the poem to avoid monotony and enrich pleasure, Huygens in the design of the woods also included some curved paths, deviating now and then from straight lines. ‘Let us turn to right or left: or do the curves disturb | That which this world now disapproves, but times of old preferred?’ Even though our reason tells us that straight is preferable to curved, curved ‘also has its virtues’: the bends in a long path prevent boredom, and where a straight path would seem too short, a winding route will make it longer. The principle of variety in the discourse on natural scenery and landscape paintings exerted similar influence on Huygens’ garden design. Having had the privilege of taking lessons in miniature painting from his famous uncle, Jacob Hoefnagel, Huygens matured into an influential lover of northern Renaissance landscapes and discussed both landscape and painting countless times in his many writings. In those depictions of landscape such as by figure 2. Bird’s-eye view of Hofwijck (detail of figure 1). Consisted of trees throughout, the Vitruvian man, indicated by Orange lines, is a body of the passions. Courtesy of Huygens’ Hofwijck, Voorburg. Reuse not permitted. Hofwijck, Hugyens was capable of tempering the passions and finding calm in the midst of turmoil. In search of ‘the still and green depths of my waves’, he moved through the woods (both physically and literarily), in which variety and contrast were the prevalent principles: Man remains always Man; he accepts judgments ripe and immature and sensuous pleasures, young or old; how diverse we may be Change gives us pleasure, and stability yields pain. As noted earlier, changes or the quality of variety capable of producing pleasure, are long-standing themes in the rhetorical tradition. The rules of rhetoric were consciously deployed in the composition of Hofwijck, as Will- emien B. De Vries demonstrates in his analysis of the poem. Huygens himself also declared in his autobiography that ‘among all the things rhetoric offers, is there a single thing that is more important than the ability to present figure 3. Jacques de Gheyn, Landscape with the Temptation of Christ. Rijksprenten- the separate elements in the right order and in a pleasing composition?’ As kabinet, Inv. No. RP-P-OB-5714, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Public domain). 294 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ Jacques de Gheyn (figure 3), Huygens saw the world — with all its variety in the Neoplatonic Stuart masques, where the main contrast is found and vitality, as well as all its imperfections and coincidences — the literal between woods and garden, or chaotic reality and Edenic order, at Hof- manifestation of God’s power, whereas witnessing ‘free, fresh, and lively’ wijck, in the woods alone, the contrary passions of pleasure and pain, peace drawing was an education to the soul. Huygens wrote: and war or suffering, as well as the contrast between light and darkness, are all violently blended together. Huygens described the beauty of the stately [One can] succinctly but tellingly describe painting, the education of the eyes, avenues, planted with oaks, evoking pleasures, which were then disturbed the full sister of poetry, as the art of seeing. I truly regard those who are not by unexpected associations with war and destruction: lines 181–200 recall adept in this scarcely as complete persons. I call them blind people, who look movingly the Low Countries’ struggle for freedom in the Eighty-Years’ no differently at the sky, the sea or the earth than do their cattle that they let 100 War against Spain; in lines 499–502 and 1235–40 he summarily condemned graze with their heads down. They look at those things without seeing them. the Civil War in England, upon which he maintained a position of consistent if strained civility to both sides. Whilst the thought that these In this kind of painterly viewing, contrary elements (e.g. hills and dales, river trees would flourish in a hundred years and would be the financial source and sun) in landscapes and landscapes of contrary moods were perceived to for his descendants gave the poet reassurance and pleasure, anxiety about affect the passions in opposite ways. The value placed on the mood of future wars never stayed away: he warned his children that they should not a painting with landscape may be traced back to Leonardo da Vinci and uproot these trees, only with the exception of an intervening war. As Alberti. In the same vein, the Italian art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo a neo-Stoic as well as a Calvinist, Huygens knew all too well that on this divided landscapes into chief categories according to their moods such as earth a garden of Eden was not possible. Rather pleasure and pain, love and ‘places of delight’ and ‘sinister dens’ in his artistic treatise. Huygens death, peace and war were the real conditions of life that we should enjoy owned a copy of the English translation of Lomazzo’s treatise. Such con- and endure. To do so, a mastery of the passions to achieve tranquillity, to trast representing natural forces controlled or untamed was visualised in Stuart remain calm in every situation, is fundamental. court masques through Inigo Jones’ stage design: stormy seas and dark forests As the highlight of the lower garden, a panorama was attained by ascend- representing untamed nature, whereas cultivated gardens and elegant villas ing a watch tower on top of a hill in the centre of the woods. The tower implying earthy and cosmic harmony. An admirer of English court culture, replaced an obelisk that was dedicated to Huygens’ happy years with his the young Huygens was mesmerised by the Jacobean masques during his wife. As Bakker noted, at first this ascension appears to be about the sensual diplomatic embassies to England in 1621–1622, and later was commissioned joy of simply looking out over the tree-tops at ‘Holland’s best parts’ — for to write a masque for Elizabeth Stuart (the Electress Palatine) who took her the view encompasses village, city, palace and church, as well as fields, refuge in The Hague. When Huygens came to create Hofwijck, he was at woods, hills and the sea. But by way of a pun on the word overzien a point in his life when the bright outlook turned grimmer: he had suffered (meaning ‘to command a view of’ as well as ‘to supervise’), this panoramic the loss of his beloved wife, Suzanna, who died in 1637; the outbreak of the view takes on political and territorial connotations: ‘I am master up to the English civil war in 1641 involved him in an extremely difficult position, waves in the northern brine. | I call that over-seeing.’ Yet the ‘master[ing] negotiating between the pro-Parliamentarian States and English friends like up to the waves’ may also be an allusion to the mastery of his own passions — the Queen Henrietta Maria begging him to use his influence. The undulating to ‘the still and green depths of my waves’; or like the rocky watch tower, happiness and sorrow, peace and war, would have prompted him to experi- standing firmly against the attacks from turbulent political situations. Unlike ment with the principle of contrast in his landscaping and garden design at the men who governed the country from The Hague, ‘whose view was Hofwijck as a strategy for emotional modulation. obscured by clouds of political woes’, and whose passions were uneven, Both spatial and emotive contrasts were dominant in the narrative of the Huygens could enjoy the lively view of ‘the visible world’ with its vitality first part of Huygens’ poem, that is, the journey through the woods. Unlike 295 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang and variety. It was such dynamic viewing and strolling through the woods — to calm the ‘restlessness of minds and thought’ of the public, which Temple that tempered his passions to achieve tranquillity and to grasp the golden perceived to be the root of discontent in England in the middle 1680s. mean. In the later years, Huygens never quite recovered the assured position Huygens’ Hofwijck was certainly very close to Temple’s heart. But when of mutual trust and respect which he had formerly held at court. Never- he later came to recall the perfect gardens he had ever seen ‘whether at home theless, he continued to be the capable civil servant who performed his duty or abroad’, a seemingly very different garden was deemed the ‘sweetest for six decades. place’. That garden was at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, created from 1617–1627 by Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford. Garden histor- ians conventionally treated the Countess’ Moor Park as a typical luxurious Italianate garden, with a sophisticated terrace system, elaborate parterres, Temple and Moor Park fountains, statues and a grotto (figure 4). th All these elements were extremely costly, which would confirm the Countess’ The reputation of Sir William Temple suffered severely from the 19 -century reputation as being extravagant, and would contrast with the sombre and ‘natur- historian Thomas Macaulay’s Whiggish account. The latter’s accusation alistic’ appearance of Huygens’ Hofwijck. Yet that extravagance was surely not regarding Temple’s sensuous epicureanism seems to be confirmed by the very what Temple perceived of the garden. Temple defended the Countess by stating title of Temple’s own essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’. The philosophy of that ‘greater Sums may be thrown away without effect or Honour, if there want Epicureanism also appears to contradict Huygens’ austere Stoicism and Calvin- Sense in proportion to Mony, or if Nature be not followed, which I take to be the ism. Yet as discussed earlier, constancy, the cardinal virtue of neo-Stoicism was great Rule in this.’ To live according to nature is taught by many philosophers closely linked to ataraxia (tranquillity of mind), that is, the highest pleasure held including both the Stoics and Epicureans. Often this maxim is taken as living a life by Epicureanism. Seneca drew from Epicurus to define tranquillitas as an of ascetic discipline. Yet this is not the view of Epicurus and Seneca. Epicurus abiding stability of mind (‘stabilem animi sedem’). The extent to which the th recommended one to ‘avoid all pain.’ Seneca, renowned for his affluence, said: ‘At two schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism mingled in 17 century England has our birth, nature made us teachable, and gave us reason, not perfect, but capable of been well documented. In his garden essay, Temple made it clear that ‘the being perfected.’ It is therefore, ‘unnatural’, not to use good gifts as Heaven may difference between these two seems not easily discovered’: ‘the most reasonable have placed at our disposal to develop the potentialities of ours and others. Temple of the Stoics made the pleasure of virtue to be the greatest happiness, and the best would have certainly known that Huygens had brought in Seneca and the neo- of the Epicureans made the greatest pleasure to consist in virtue.’ Huygens Stoical golden mean in the margin of Hofwijck to justify the propriety of his own would be such a Stoic to Temple, as he credited Huygens with being the happiest acts of building the country estate. In his garden essay, Temple echoed Huygens man he knew — with health, longevity and free from disturbances. with a quotation of Lucan’s lines in Pharsalia — describing the character of the Like his fellow statesman in Holland, Temple was strongly committed to austere Cato — ‘Servare Modum, finemq; tueri, | Naturamq; sequi’. (To observe a public life and was esteemed for his wisdom and prudence. To contain the moderation and hold fast to the limit, to follow nature.) The point of following ambitions of Louis XIV, he twice negotiated peace and alliance between England nature therefore is not to stick to dogmatism, but to use practical reason to find the and Holland in 1668 and in 1674. To reinforce the Anglo-Dutch alliance, he played narrow path toward responsible spending. a key role in arranging the marriage of William of Orange (William III) and th Neo-Stoicism was popular in England from the late 16 century, especially Princess Mary of England (Mary II). His early retirement was only forced by within the circle of Sir Philip Sidney and his alliance. The Countess of extreme circumstances: vehement party division over the Exclusion Crisis and Bedford, a kinswoman to Sidney (her grandmother was Mary Sidney, Sir his efforts to unite the king and parliament being betrayed by the frivolous Charles Philip’s sister) and a spokesperson of the Sidney alliance during the 1610s– II. Despite his withdrawal, Temple’s writings continued to be public-oriented 1620s, continued to patronise neo-Stoic works: she was the dedicatee of John — a practice firmly in line with Seneca and Cicero, as well as Lipsius and Sidney 296 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ Sidney’s secretary), Temple sympathised with their neo-Stoic leaning — to achieve constancy as an aid in public life and keep to their values (limited monarchy — the monarch’s will is curbed by the aristocracy’s counsel). For Temple, the Countess may have been a model neo-Stoic, as he deliberately evoked the poem of John Donne, who configured the Countess as a keeper of a ‘Stoick’s heart’, a ‘rock’ that no ‘wave’ could undermine. The Stoick’s heart is the location for mastering the passions, whilst the imagery of the rock amidst the sea signifies the immovable inner strength of constancy or tranquillity. This imagery had earlier been applied to heroes in Sidney’s Arcadia in which constancy is one of the key values — ‘it is a mind well trained and long exercised in virtue … doth not easily change any course it once undertakes.’ For the alliance, like Sidney writing Arcadia from Wilton House, the posture of neo-Stoic withdrawal and cultivation of constancy at a critical ‘country’ distance from the court provided them with the mental strength to maintain a discourse on the critique of the court, against encroach- ing monarchical absolutism — either domestic or foreign. Whilst retreating to Moor Park, the Countess played a key role in promoting the cause of the Palatinate in Bohemia against the Habsburgs, a cause which she shared with Huygens. Assuming a political withdrawal himself at Sheen against Charles II’s arbitrariness and party factions, Temple’s recollection of Moor Park as ‘the sweetest place’ and the Countess as ‘among the greatest wits of her time’, thus, may not be separate from his appreciation of the neo-Stoic constancy or tranquillity embodied by the Countess. And we may not be too far from the truth in considering that the shared neo-Stoic and Epicurean ethos allowed Temple to recommend Moor Park as an exemplar garden in an Epicurean garden essay extolling tranquillity. Temple described in detail the layout of the Hertfordshire Moor Park in his Epicurean essay. As mentioned earlier, Temple, like Huygens, also used a stroll through the estate as the ordering principle. But Temple’s description figure 4. Diagram of the layout of the Countess of Bedford’s Moor Park in Hertfordshire, moves in contrary motion to that of Huygens’: the former walking from the adapted from Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames and house to the garden and thence to the orchard and the wilderness. This Hudson, 1979), p.145. Reuse not permitted. itinerary is similar to those in some Renaissance Italian villas such as Villa Lante in Bagnaia, which consisted of a garden and a grove. As no writing Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays and Arthur Gorges’ 1614 on Moor Park by the Countess and her close circle was found, and there was translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, which Temple quoted by no coincidence. little physical trace of the garden, it is difficult to pin down a specific scheme A descendent from an associate of the alliance (Temple’s grandfather was of Moor Park at its conception. But Temple’s description certainly speaks for 297 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang his perception of the Countess’ garden. Conversant with a promoter of each of the eight statues and the two fountains, explaining their mythological empirical investigation like Francis Bacon, Temple highlighted the varied and theological themes. Is this because of Temple’s ‘indolence’, or rather and ever changing imagery on the stroll throughout the entire garden, because what matters for him is already there in his account — namely the pointing directly to a psychological experience. features of variety and contrast on this stroll, which are all highlighted with Following Temple on his stroll, one stepped out of the Countess' house, nuance? experiencing a first major change of space, from inside to outside. The Early modern garden visitors were sensitised to diverse spaces and contrasting terrace was spacious, a gravel walk, three-hundred paces long. As Roy Strong scenes to which they correspond with different moods or passions. In Italian has noted, as a high spot, here one would have a panoramic view of the villas, as already mentioned, it was a commonplace that a garden was associated landscape in the far distance. Back on the terrace, there were laurels at the with joy and a wood inspired solitary reverence; quick transitions provoking border and orange trees further away. The descent to the parterre marked surprise were also practised: Alberti recommended that a high spot be created in the second major change of space. In contrast to the spaciousness of the the garden where a splendid prospect of fields, woods and streams would terrace, and the panoramic landscape of the countryside of Hertfordshire, suddenly be revealed, an effect materialised in many villas such as Villa here one’s senses were stimulated by a greater variety of art forms, sounds and D’Este. In England, such literary gardens as the lodge of Basilius, Sidney’s scents yielded by statues, fountains, and the quarters of a parterre. On both king of Arcadia and Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ offered a surrounding ‘being sides of the parterre were double layered cloisters: on the low level were diversified between hills and dales’, ‘The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing ‘walks of shade’, contrasted by airy walks on the upper level. The cloister space.’ In real gardens such as Sir John Danvers’ Chelsea House, panoramic facing south was covered with vines, the other facing north, with myrtles. At views of the Thames and the countryside of Surrey brought delight to guests in the end of the terrace-walk were two summer-houses, which were likely used the dining hall, whereas a transition from the ‘gay Paradise [garden] into the as galleries according to the convention of the time. The descent from the darksome, deep vault [grotto]’ would affect one with ‘a kind of Religious parterre into the lower garden indicated another change of space, where fruit horror’. And more generally parterre gardens would evoke pleasure and dispel trees ranged about the several quarters of a shady wilderness. The walks here grief, whereas summer houses and cloisters were the places where one might seek were all green, and the grotto under the staircase embellished with a variety of tranquil solitude. Thus as Temple strolled through Moor Park, from a sunny, figures of shell rock-work, fountains and water-works. On the other side of open terrace to a shaded, private grove; from the airy walks to ‘walks of shade’ in the house, there was another garden of all greens, ‘very wild, shady, and the double layered cloisters; from a view of the ordered parterre to the rough adorned with rock-work and fountains’; the location of this wilderness would wilderness, the passions would be shifting from cheerfulness towards meditation, have been on the extension of the lower garden, had there not been from joy to solitary reverence. a common way going through the park. The management of the passions was central to Temple’s Epicureanism, the core In Temple’s description, the measurement of the aesthetic or a garden’s teaching of which was understood as ‘tranquillity of mind and indolence [health] of capacity to please is not determined by whether its overall layout appears body’. A Montaignian sceptic, Temple had little trust in the power of reason (as regular or not (although like Huygens, Temple recommended regular shapes); didactic reasoning) for controlling the passions and bringing tranquillity. He rather, it depends on to what extent the garden affords a rich variety that opened his garden essay with a charge of reason itself making men restless; it was stimulates the pleasure of the senses of visitors on their stroll, and whether it ironic that reason must again be called in to ‘allay those disorders which itself had affords contrasts that keep the passions balanced. Notably, Temple’s descrip- raised, to cure its own wounds.’ Since we cannot escape the pursuit of passions tion does not include details about ornaments such as the pattern of the in this needy, uncertain life, Temple claims, so we should divert ourselves as well parterres or the hydraulic machinery in the grotto installed by Isaac de as we might. Whilst some may turn to drink or play, love or business, ‘the Caus. Nor are there, as often was the case at the time, descriptions of imaginations of the witty and the wise’ find out ways ‘how to revive [the 298 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ imagination] with pleasure, or relieve it with diversions; how to compose it with frames and fabrics out of nothing, which strike with wonder and with pleasure 145 155 ease and settle it with safety’. Such is Temple’s belief in an art of living, that the eyes and imaginations of those who behold them.’ In accordance with ‘men should temper these passions one with another; according to what by age or his appreciation of varied and contrasting scenes in the garden, Temple condition, they are most subject.’ Temple’s idea was a commonplace found in extoled the power of poetry in moving the passions. ‘Upon the reading or a range of early modern philosophical writings and treatises on the passions. hearing of some excellent pieces of poetry’, ‘so many more should feel such Robert Burton, for example, in Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) suggests the indu- turns or curdling of their blood.’ And true poetry ‘may have the force to cing of a passion opposite to the disturbing one in order to restore a balance in the raise passions and to allay them, to change and to extinguish them, to temper 148 157 passions of the mind. It is notable that Burton included gardens as antidotes to joy and grief, to raise love and fear’. Such an effect, Temple proposed, th melancholy, a mood of depression which many 17 -century Englishman simul- would rebalance the ‘unequal humours’ and healing ‘inconstant passions’ of taneously suffered from and cultivated: ‘To walke amongst Orchards, Gardens, the English people, a people who were not only affected by the uncertain Bowres, Mounts and Arbors, artificiall wildernesses, greene thickets, Arches, weather, but who also had suffered from great civil and political uncertainty 149 158 Groves, Lawnes, Rivulets, Fountains and such like pleasant places’. Temple during the past fifty years. Aiming to provide a model for his landed readers both as a youth and during his intense political career suffered from sudden fits of to lay out their own gardens, Temple would be minded that the garden was ‘the spleen’. In an essay ‘On Health and Long Life’, he remarked that ‘fear, and a therapy for the passions that would calm their ‘heads and hearts’ and achieve regret, and melancholy apprehensions, which are the usual effects of the Spleen, tranquillity, thus reforming the morals of society. with the distractions, disquiets, or at least intranquillity they occasion, are the worst accidents that can attend any diseases’. Thus, gardens with their diverse and contrasting scenes, such as Moor Park, were Temple’s favourite diversion. In Sharawadgi his modest estate at Sheen, his sister, Lady Giffard, tells us, he was extremely sensible to the arrangement of his garden, bought as many pictures and statues as In his Epicurean garden essay, Temple’s description of the Countess’ Moor his moderate fortune would permit, and enjoyed ‘scenes he had made pleasant Park immediately preceded his brief account of Chinese sharawadgi, the about him in his garden & House.’ The varied and contrasting scenes at his ‘wholly irregular’ manner to lay out a garden. Naturally, the emphasis in own Moor Park in Surrey, made in memory of the Countess’ garden, such as the description of Moor Park on the imagery of variety and contrast being a regular parterre and a wilderness, serpentine paths and waterways versus an encountered on the stroll and its effects on the passions may frame his elongated recess cut in the hill, thus may similarly be understood as a way of perception and conception of sharawadgi. To Temple, the Chinese visual ‘mending [the] self’ through tempering the passions. form of sharawadgi would feature a structural pattern of variety and contrast Such psychological garden sensibility conforms perfectly with Temple’s not dissimilar to that of the European gardens. Because of its obvious foreign- view and critiques of poetry, as expressed in his essay, ‘Of Poetry’, published ness, that pattern would lead to a greater effect on the senses and passions than in the same volume as the garden essay. Echoing Philip Sidney in his Defence the European norm such as Moor Park. of Poesie, Temple could not allow poetry ‘to be more divine in its effects than Examples of sharawadgi, Temple advises us, may be found in ‘the best in its causes, nor any operations produced by it to be more than purely Indian Gowns, or the painting upon their best Skreens or Purcellans’. As natural.’ To write poetry, one is required to have great imagination and novel and polite goods, these Asian applied arts were pouring into Europe in practical reason arising from inner tranquillity: ‘there must be a great agitation vast quantities through European-Chinese trade. With their East India Com- th of mind to invent, a great calm to judge and correct.’ Temple indeed pany being a leader in this trade in the 17 century, the Dutch nobility, prior considered gardeners as being like the Greek poets and artists, whose vocation to their counterparts in England, enjoyed possession and consumption of was to contrive images to play upon the passions: ‘[they] raise admirable these objects. Temple whilst in The Hague had himself painted in 299 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang 162 167 a portrait, wearing a Japanese gown, following the Dutch fashion. As for Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In the upper centre of figure 5(a) is porcelain and lacquer screens, the House of Orange was among their most a landscape in a fan shape: a scholar accompanied by his servant is strolling prominent collectors. A frequent visitor at the Dutch Palace of Huis ten along the bank of a river; on the right are two crossed pine trees, their slender Bosch, Temple would certainly have been impressed by the porcelain and curvy shapes contrasted with the rocky cliffs emerging out of the river on collections and lacquer rooms assembled by the princesses of Orange, from the left; some bushes dash here and there, with hills in the far background — Amalia van Solms to Mary II. (Most of these Asian items, as with other all in a free manner. Another panel on the same jardinière (figure 5(b)) shows European artworks, would have been sourced by Huygens who advised on a pavilion in a garden setting, where several official and warrior figures and artistic and cultural matters for the House of Orange. ) The collection noble women are at a gathering. Multiple linear elements constituting the brought by Mary II to England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was pavilion, its interior furniture and a terrace are balanced with a dynamism of to form a sensation in Temple’s home country. Looking at Mary II’s collec- two tall plantain trees in the garden and bulky rocks surrounding the pavilion. tion may therefore shed light on Temple’s concept of sharawadgi. At the bottom left of figure 5(b) is a circular panel, showing a scholar seated in A Jingdezhen porcelain jardinière (figure 5(a,b)) is one such example from a garden, attended by servants; above his head is a tree shelter, with a solitary, the collection. Painted around the side are eight variously shaped panels, stupendous Taihu rock in the foreground. The affinity between these garden showing varied scenes of landscapes, gardens, and a camping site. These scenes and landscape scenes is that they all consist of naturalistic elements of asym- would form a narrative, possibly adapted from woodblock illustrations of The metrically planted trees and rocks, emphasising variety and contrast. To figure 5. (a, b). A Jingdezhen porcelain jardinière showing multiple landscape and garden views in separate panels. Dated 1660–90. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021. Reuse not permitted. 300 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ educated Chinese eyes, this affinity represents a common Chinese aesthetic demonstrated a similar approach. Describing patterns of sharawadgi which ‘strike principle, namely that the craftsmanship of heaven or nature, as shown in the eye’ and ‘hit their eye’, ‘without any order or disposition of parts, that shall be landscapes, should be followed when creating a garden. Or, as a Ming treatise commonly or easily observ’d’, his appreciation of Chinese garden designs was The Craft of Gardens (1631) summarises, ‘sui you ren zuo, wan zi tian kai’ (雖由 close to what he perceived in ancient Greek artworks which, as cited earlier, 人作,宛自天開 ), meaning ‘though man-made, as if created by nature.’ ‘strike with wonder and with pleasure the eyes and imaginations of those who The Chinese cosmos is conceptualised as consisting of yin-yang energies (qi) behold them.’ Wonder, surprise, or ‘a frisson of exotic delight’ were often used th which, in their constant movement and transformation, nurture ten thousand by 17 -century Europeans to describe their emotional status when encountering things. To achieve the effect of being created as if by nature as ongoing Asian objects. And as René Descartes, Huygens' friend, related, ‘Wonder is the processes, Chinese garden designers commonly deploy varied elements of first of all the passions. It has no opposite, because if the object presented has rocks, plants, earth and water to simulate topography as a miniature cosmos nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it th 176 with contrasting elements and constant changes. To 17 -century European without passion.’ Robert Burton also noted that wonder can exhilarate the humanist eyes like Temple’s, Chinese imagery of variety and contrast with passions, thus restore the mind to balance from alienation and despair. The fact elements of nature on their applied arts would have struck structural resem- that Asian applied arts were so highly sought after by the European cultural elite, blances to the landscapes of a wide range of Dutch artists such as Jacques de therefore, may not be separate from their preoccupation with the productive Gheyn, Hendrick Avercamp, and Esaias van de Velde — and Huygens diversion and tempering of their passions, rather than merely as a pastime and himself, for whom imitating nature as vitality and variety, was key in land- the display of their royal status, as often assumed. Temple, who was accustomed scape paintings. The Dutch indeed had a word to express the liveliness to use painting and statues as well as strolling through the garden to temper his and diversity that one found in nature, ‘schilderachtig’ (or ‘as if it were a passions, would naturally be intrigued by the Chinese imagery of sharawadgi's painting’), which Huygens used in his poem: capacity to modulate emotions. Temple would have also been struck by the Chinese scholar-official figures Go stroll with them through woods and hills and dales, That, they say, is frequenting the landscape and garden scenes on Chinese export porcelain at the a schilderachtig view. Methinks they are saying: God makes ingenious copies time. As illustrated in the jardinière (figure 5) — the scholar-official is either Of our originals. strolling in the landscape, or seated in the garden or a pavilion — all appear to be The same term was also used by the Dutch to describe the attractiveness they serene and tranquil. Such images would have confirmed Temple’s conviction found in curious and exotic articles like the Japanese kimono. Bakker has pointed that the learned Chinese have achieved perfection of body and mind, following out that Huygens’ casual reference to the Japanese in Hofwijck was closely their sage, Confucius’ teaching. The basis of Confucian moral cultivation is connected to the poet’s early endorsement of nature as vitality and variety, rather the concept of harmonising the passions (qing 情 ) to achieve tranquillity — 172 th than as a mathematically conceived order. To be sure, 17 -century humanists a status not void of emotions, but achieving a dynamic equilibrium and did not and needed not understand the seemingly parallel notions of imitatio harmony (zhonghe 中和 ), so that one can keep to the path of the Mean naturae and wan zi tian kai. As a general rule of cross-cultural contact, recipients (zhongyong zhi dao 中庸之道 ). This concept of the Confucian Mean, similar would locate the other cultures within the symbolic framework of their own or to the Aristotelian and Stoic golden mean, was made available to Europeans the observing culture. Huygens noted in a letter to a friend that the Japanese through various versions of Jesuit translations of the Confucian classics such as robe was ‘one of the most agreeable personal things that I know and to which the Sinarum Scientia Politico-Moralis (1669), which would have been known to 174 181 free flow of a joyful hymn on marriage should be given’, thus revealing his Huygens ; and Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687), to which Temple expli- approach to Asian applied arts centring on the senses and passions — and it was citly referred. In an abridged, English version of Confucius Sinarum Philoso- serene, good passions comparable to a joyful hymn on marriage. Temple phus appearing under the title of The Morals of Confucius (1691), we read: 301 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang Confucius Teaches … he continually watches over … the most secret motion of disposition as an aid to an active life, this essay shows the previously neglected his heart, always square himself according to this just Mean … the wicked being common approach in the early modern political humanist tradition — tempering not restrain’d, neither by Fear, Modesty, … their extravagant Passions do always the passions to achieve tranquillity, an approach which was also applied in the carry them into Extreams. reception of Asian designs of sharawadgi. Developing in tandem with the rhetoric and poetical arts of the time, gardens like Hofwijck and Moor Park in Hertford- Such discussion struck an Epicurean such as François Bernier, a correspondent with shire played a role in the management of the passions to achieve tranquillity, Temple, who translated the Jesuit Latin version of Confucian classics into French, 184 providing mental strength for the garden owners to be active in their public life as being very similar to the teaching of the European political humanists. Temple while maintaining their values. The parallels between the European and Chinese himself went even further noting that the Epicurean emphasis on tranquillity with 185 concepts — from notions of tranquillity and zhonghe, to imitating nature as balanced passions was derived from ancient Chinese learning. Surely Temple vitality and variety and wanzi tian kan, demonstrate that the early modern would have been able to project the European neo-Stoic and Epicurean approach aesthetics of Europe and the Far East did not have to be treated as binaries, as to the garden — as a technique to temper the passions — on to his perception of they often have been in modern times. Rather, such parallels facilitated the sharawadgi in Chinese gardens and landscapes where the figure of a Chinese scholar- 186 European humanists to locate incoming Asian designs like sharawadgi within official strolls while displaying an air of tranquillity. 187 their own cultural framework of managing the passions to achieve tranquillity Based on Jesuit writings, Temple was amongst the early European free- as an aid in public life. Despite the apparent difference in their layouts, both the thinkers who propagated the discourse that China was governed by irregular imagery of Chinese gardens and the regular European gardens con- a philosopher-king who sought the counsel of the wise and learned scholar- formed with the structural pattern of variety and contrast, and were perceived officials — an ideal form of government which secured ‘public tranquillity’ for 188 against a similar philosophical soil for neo-Stoic-Epicurean and Confucian emo- China. In accordance with the Jesuits in his description of the Chinese tional horticulture. They brought forth similar emotive effects — cultivating government in the same volume as the Epicurean garden essay, Temple lauded 189 tranquillity, the achievement of which, as Temple perceived, would provide the the Chinese scholar-officials for their virtue and prudence. To Temple, there th English ruling class of the 17 century with a reliable psychological foundation, were no best forms of government. Instead, the ‘best Governments’ were those 190 so that the English government could be, like the Chinese, constituted with good ‘where the best Men govern’. The virtuous Chinese scholar-officials he read people who govern well. in the Jesuits’ writings would naturally, in his mind, have been visualised as those tranquil Chinese scholar-official figures strolling through the scenery of variety and contrast on a Chinese object. Cultivating ‘tranquillity of mind’ in his own garden, Temple would have surely identified himself with such Acknowledgements Chinese scholar-officials, and would have perceived many of the English ruling This work was supported by EU FP -People Marie Curie Actions under class as their polar opposites — troubled with restless and inconstant passions. Career Integration Grant [631798] (“Entangled histories of ‘Nature’ in the The evocation of sharawadgi would therefore be appropriate to support his idea landscape discourses of early modern China and Europe”) and The Lever- of laying out a garden as a poetic technique to temper the passions to achieve hulme Trust under Research Fellowship [RF-2016-215\5] (“Cultivating tranquillity, the status of having a virtuous mind that would aid Englishmen to happiness: Sir William Temple, Confucianism and the English landscape exercise prudent judgment in their public life. garden”). The author gratefully acknowledges the help and comments of many individuals in the preparation of this essay, including Michael Charles- Conclusion worth, Laurent Châtel, Emile de Bruijn, Mark Dorrian, Jonathan Israel, By probing into the principles of variety and contrast in both rhetoric and the arts, Ullrich Langer, Willemijn van Noord, Philippa Potts, Qiheng Wang and as well as the neo-Stoic and Epicurean emphasis on cultivating a tranquil inner Thijs Weststeijn. 302 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Exeter, Disclosure statement Exeter, UK No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). ORCID Yue Zhuang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0026-5426 NOTES 1. See Samuel H. Monk, ‘Introduction’, in S.H. Monk Imagination, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: The John Hopkins (ed), Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple Pennsylvania Press, 1996 [1986]), pp. 83–9. University Press, 1976); David Jacques, ‘On the th th (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 15. Many 16 -17 century philosophers no longer trea- Supposed Chineseness of the English Landscape Gar- 1963), pp. vii–xlii; Richard Faber, The Brave Courtier: ted the passions as largely perturbations of the soul den’, Garden History, 18/1, 1990, pp. 180–91. Sir William Temple (London: Faber & Faber, 1983). whose existence bespoke abnormal and unnatural 6. Wybe Kuitert, ‘Japanese robes, sharawadgi, and the 2. For debates over the origin of the term, see Ciaran states of mind. Rather, the passions came to equal landscape discourse of Sir William Temple and Con- Murray’s Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature or to exceed reason as elements defining human stantijn Huygens’, Garden History, 41/2, 2013, (Bethesda: International Scholars Publication, 1999), nature. See Maureen Flynn, ‘Taming anger’s daugh- pp. 157–176. pp. 34, 37; Shimada Takau, ‘Is “Sharawadgi” ters: new treatment for emotional problems in 7. Ibid., p.168. See also Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: Derived from the Japanese Word “Sorowaji”?’ The Renaissance Spain’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51/3, How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (London: Review of English Studies, 191/48, 1997, pp. 350–352. 1988, pp. 864–86; Dean T. Mace, ‘Dryden’s dialogue Harper Perennial, 2008), p.217. 3. Sir William Temple, ‘Upon the Gardens of Epi- on drama’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti- 8. Letters from Huygens to Temple dated 2 June 1682. curus, or of Gardening in the Year 1685’, in tutes, 25/1/2, 1962, pp. 87–112. Letter 7188, in J.A. Worp (ed), De Briefwisseling van Miscellanea: The Second Part (London: Ri. and 16. Political humanism may be described as an amalgam Constantijn Huygens (1608–1687), Zesde Deel 1663–87 Ra. Simpson, 1690), pp. 131–32. of a Florentine philosophy of political engagement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1917), p.442, cited in 4. These include Joseph Addison (1672–1719)’s ‘The and active life with older chivalric ideas about the Jardine, Going Dutch, p.217; see also Kuitert, ‘Japa- Pleasure of Imagination’, The Spectator (1712), in relationship between a monarch and the aristocracy, nese Robes’, p.168. Richard Steele and Addison, The Spectator, ed. see F.J. Levy, ‘Francis Bacon and the style of politics’, 9. Ibid., pp. 158, 166–68. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, English Literary Renaissance, 16/1, 1986, pp. 102–3. 10. See text surrounding reference marks 161–165. 1965), 3: 552 and Alexander Pope (1688–1774), 17. Lovejoy, ‘The Chinese origin of a romanticism’, p. 2. 11. Kuitert, ‘Japanese Robes’, p.157. Epistle IV. To Richard Boyle, Early of Burlington, in 18. Ogden, ‘The principles of variety and contrast’; 12. E.g., Lovejoy, ‘The Chinese origin of John Butt (ed) The Poems of Alexander Pope (New Ullrich Langer, ‘Pleasure as unconstrained move- a romanticism’, pp. 1–2. Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 586–95. ment’, French Studies, 65/1, 2010, pp. 13–25. 5. The advocating voices include, for example, Arthur 19. Aristotle cited this from Euripides with 13. For a few good examples, see ibid. O. Lovejoy, ‘The Chinese origin of a romanticism’, a pejorative note, see Langer, ‘Pleasure as uncon- 14. H. V. S. Ogden, ‘The principles of variety and con- th The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 32/1, strained movement’, p.18. trast in 17 -century aesthetics and Milton’s poetry’, 1933, pp. 1–20; Yu Liu, ‘Tapping into a different 20. Cicero, Ad familiares 5.12, cited in ibid. Journal of the History of Ideas, 10/2, 1949, pp. 159–82; cultural tradition: Sir William Temple’s Aesthetic 21. Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Facul- K. Claire Pace, ‘ “Strong Contraries … Happy Dis- Innovations’, The European Legacy: Toward New Para- ties of the Soule (London: Robert Bostock, 1640), cord”: Some eighteenth-century discussions about digms, 15/3, 2010, pp. 301–15. The opposing views p.18. landscape’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 40/1, 1979, are seen in, e.g. John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the 22. Brian Vickers, ‘Philosophy and Humanistic Disci- pp. 141–55; John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the plines: Rhetoric and Poetics’, in C.B. Schmitt, The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English 303 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang Q. Skinner, et al. (eds) The Cambridge History of 38. For a discussion of the innovative ways the English an important part of the shift from late Renaissance Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, authors interpreted Aristotle’s golden mean and styles to Baroque styles in architecture and painting. 1988), p.718. moderation, see Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean Ogden purposely avoided the use of the term ‘bar- 23. Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie (1595); cited in in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Prince- oque’, considering it safer and more effective to use ibid., p.737. ton University Press, 2002). For the influence of Stoic the terms recognised and used by the critics and poets 24. Sidney synthesised and developed from the theories therapy of the emotions in the early modern period, of the period being studied. I follow his precedent. of both Horace and Julius Scaliger. See Blair Wor- see M. J. Osler ed., Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility: 30. Cited in ibid., pp. 167–76, where more examples den, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought (Cam- are included. Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On the 31. Ibid. See also Stanley W. Jackson, ‘The Use of Press, 1996), pp. 3–22; Gavin Alexander, ‘The clas- impact of neo-Stoicism in Holland and England from the Passions’, in Care of the Psyche: A History of th th sics in literary criticism’, in Patrick Cheney and the late 16 to 17 century, see Mark Morford, Stoics Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale Univer- Philip Hardie (eds), The Oxford History of Classical and Neo-Stoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Prin- sity Press, 1999), pp. 201–15. Reception in English Literature, vol. 2: 1558–1660 ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); and 32. For an overview of this, see Susan James, ‘Rea- (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 94. Adriana McCrea, Constant minds: Political Virtue and son, the passions, and the good life’, in The Cam- 25. See A.G.H. Bachrach, Sir Constantine Huygens and the Lipsian Paradigm in England, 1584–1650 (Toronto: bridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy, ed. Britain: 1596–1687: A Pattern of Cultural Exchange, University of Toronto Press, 1997). For a brief Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: vol.1 1596–1619 (Leiden: At the University Press, account of Epicureanism and its development in Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.1359. 1962), p.106; William Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, in seventeenth-century England, see Howard Jones, 33. Ibid., pp. 1380–1. Miscellanea: The Second Part, p.311. The Epicurean Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992), 34. Stephen Pender, ‘Rhetoric, grief, and the imagina- 26. Jacqueline T. Miller, ‘The Passion Signified: Imi- chap. 8. See also, Osler, Atoms, Pneuma, and tion’, Philosophy & Rhetoric, 43/1, 2010, pp. 54–85; tation and the construction of emotions in Sidney Tranquillity. Tina Skouen, ‘The rhetoric of passion in Donne’s and Wroth’, Criticism, 43/4, 2001, p.407. 39. Gisela Striker, ‘Ataraxia: Happiness as tranquil- holy sonnets’, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of 27. See Ogden, ‘The principles of variety and con- lity’, The Monist, 73/1, 1990, pp. 97–110. Rhetoric, 27/2, 2009, pp. 159–88. Suzanne Walker, trast’, pp.160–3, with several examples including 40. See Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism ‘Composing the passions in Rubens’ Hunting an essay called ‘Theologia ruris, sive Schola & and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Prin- Scenes’, in The Passions in the Arts of the Early Modern scala naturae’, which appeared as an appendix to ceton: Princeton University Press), pp. 6, 59–60, 70. Netherlands. ed. Stephanie S. Dickey and Herman G. Ashwell’s The History of Hai Eb’n Yockdan, an 41. Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. John Roodenburg (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 109–24; Indian Prince: or, the Self-Taught Philosopher (1686). Stradling (London: Printed by Richard Johnes, Ulrich Heinen, ‘Huygens, Rubens and Medusa: The term Christian optimism was first discussed 1595), p.8. Reflecting the Passions in Paintings, with Some by Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: 42. Cited in Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Free- Considerations of Neuroscience in Art History’, in A Study of the history of an idea (Cambridge, MA: dom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor- ibid., 151–76. See also E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Harvard University Press, 1936), chapters 2–3. nell University Press, 1996), p.72. Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Land- 28. See Boudewijn Bakker, Landscape and Religion: From 43. Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, scape’, Norm and Form (London, 1966; 2nd ed., 1971), Van Eyck to Rembrandt, trans. Diane Webb (Abing- 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University pp. 107–21. don: Routledge, 2016), p.255. See also Thijs West- Press, 1993), pp. xiv, 7–9, 52–4. 35. Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden steijn, The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art 44. See Davidson and Van der Weel, A Selection of the (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Poems of Sir Constantijn Huygens, p.45. Hunt, Garden and Grove, pp.110–19. Golden Age, trans. Beverley Jackson and Lynne 45. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p. 88. 36. Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden, pp.120, 123, Richards (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 46. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p.54; Lipsius, Two th 2008). Bookes of Constancie, pp. 14, 15–6. In his Politicorum 37. A wide range of 17 -century works of meditative 29. Ogden, ‘The principles of variety and contrast’, pp. - sive Civilis doctrinae libri sex (Six Books on Politics or nature reflect this emphasis. See Skouen, ‘The 173–74 noted that this change was often regarded as Civil Doctrine, 1589), a sequel to De Constantia, rhetoric of passion’, pp. 174–5. 304 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ a ruler’s prudence in actual practice is emphasised Architectural Relations from 1625 to 1700 (Delft: 67. Morford, ‘The Stoic Garden’; see also his discussion throughout. See Justus Lipsius, Politica: Six Books of Delft University Press, 1980), pp. 57–82. of Rubens’ garden in Stoics and Neo-Stoics, Politics or Political Instruction, edited by Jan Waszink 54. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, pp. 248, 255. On pp. 189–94. (Assen: Royal van Gorcum, 2004). imitatio naturae, see Anthony J. Close, ‘Philosophical 68. Ibid. 47. For a discussion of the mean being related to pru- Theories of Art and Nature in Classical Antiquity’, 69. Davidson and Van der Weel, A Selection of the dence, see Scodel, Excess and the Mean, pp. 3–4. Journal of the History of Ideas, 32/2, 1971, pp. 163–84; Poems of Sir Constantijn Huygens, p.45. 48. For a study of this subject in the English context, see and Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge: 70. Lipsius, Two bookes of constancie, p.84. Kim Sloan, A noble art: Amateur artists and drawing Cambridge University Press, 1995). 71. William J. Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Human- masters c. 1600–1800, catalogue exhibition (London: 55. Ibid., p.165. ism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance British Museum, 2000); and Ann Bermingham, 56. Kuitert, ‘Japanese robes’, p.161. Thought’, in Heiko A. Oberman and Thomas Learning to draw: Studies in the cultural history of 57. Constantijn Huygens, Vitaulium. Hofwyck. Hof- A. Brady, Jr. (eds) Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of a polite and useful art (New Haven: Yale University stede Vanden Herre van Zuylichem Onder Voorburgh the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Press, 2000); in the Dutch context, see Michael (The Hague, 1653). Transformations (Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 3–60. Zell, ‘A leisurely and virtuous pursuit: Amateur 58. De Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, p.86. 72. Lise Gosseye, ‘Salutary Reading: Conversion and artists, Rembrandt, and landscape representation 59. Van Pelt, ‘Man and cosmos’, pp. 162–168. Calvinist Humanism in Constantijn Huygens’ in seventeenth-century Holland’, Netherlands Year- 60. Ibid. Van Pelt noted that John Donne, the Eng- Ooghentroost’, in Lieke Stelling, Harald Hendrix, book for History of Art/ Nederlands Kunsthistorisch lish poet whom Huygens admired, had also and Todd Richardson (eds), The Turn of the Soul: Jaarboek Online, 54/1, 2003, pp. 334–68. employed the imagery of the body as the path Representations of Religious Conversion in Early 49. Walker, ‘Composing the passions in Rubens’ through Creation to God in his Hymne to God my Modern Art and Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2012), Hunting Scenes’, pp. 109–24; Heinen, ‘Huygens, God, in my sickness and in his Devotions upon pp. 225–246. Rubens and Medusa’, pp. 151–76. Emergent Occasions (c. 1623). 73. For detailed interpretations of the orchard and the 50. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 62. 61. Weststeijn, The Visible World, p. 40. house, see Van Pelt, ‘Man and Cosmos’, pp. 159– 51. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An 62. Van Pelt, ‘Man and cosmos’, pp. 157–158. Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age 63. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 2099–2101, cited in 74. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 142–7. (New York, 1987), p. 293; Kees Schmidt, ‘Hollands P. Davidson and A. van der Weel eds and 75. Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (Lon- buitenleven in de zeventiende eeuw’, Amsterdams trans., A Selection of the Poems of Sir Constantijn don: John Bill, 1624), p.55; Huygens, Hofwijck, Sociologisch Tijdschrift 4 (1977–78), pp. 434–49, 5 Huygens (1596–1687) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam line 362–6. (1978–79), pp. 91–109, cited in Willemien De University Press, 1996), p.137. All citations of 76. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 367–8. Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized: Constan- the Hofwijck poem are from this source, unless 77. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, p.255; Huygens, tijn Huygens’ Hofwijck’, in John Dixon Hunt (ed), otherwise stated. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines Hofwijck, lines 89–90, 1005. The Dutch Garden in the Seventeenth Century 2329–2300, cited in De Vries, ‘The Country 78. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, pp. 254, 259. (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990), p.84. Estate Immortalized’, p. 95. 79. Ibid., 255. Cf. Kuitert, ‘Japanese robes’, p.164. 52. An epitome of harmonious classicism of the High 64. On Lipsius and the garden, see Mark Morford, 80. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 1001–4, cited in Kuitert, Renaissance, The Vitruvian Man (1492) was created ‘The Stoic garden’, The Journal of Garden History, ‘Japanese robes’, p.165. by Leonardo da Vinci as a study of the proportions of 7/2, 1987, pp. 151–75. 81. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 148–9. the human body as described by the Roman architect 65. Morford’s Stoics and Neo-Stoics investigated Lip- 82. Gail Kern Paster, Humouring the Body: Emotions Vitruvius (c. 78–10 BCE). For a detailed discussion, sius’s humanist circle in the Netherlands, whereas and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University see Robert van Pelt, ‘Man and cosmos in Huygens’ McCrea’s Constant minds explored his impact in of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 18, 19, 4. th Hofwijck’, Art History, 4/2, 1981, pp. 153–4. England. See also note 38. 83. This theme continues into the 18 century, see 53. See Wouter Kuyper, ‘Jacob van Campen and 66. Jan Waszink, ‘Introduction’, in Justus Lipsius, Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape, p.48. Constantine Huygens as Inspirers of the Classicist Politica: Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction, 84. B.F. Nellist, ‘Donne’s “Storm” and “Calm” and Era’, in Dutch Classicist Architecture: A Survey of edited by Jan Waszink, (Assen: Royal van Gor- the descriptive tradition’, The Modern Language Dutch Architecture, Gardens and Anglo-Dutch cum, 2004), p. 6. Review, 59/4, 1964, pp. 511–15. 305 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang 85. Davidson and Van der Weel, A Selection of the 107. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 181–200, cited in De 123. De Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, Poems of Sir Constantijn Huygens, pp. 258–59. Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, p.89. p. 97. 86. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 380–2. 108. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, p.258. 124. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p. 128. English 87. Nellist, ‘Donne’s “Storm” and “Calm” and the 109. Ibid. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 826–27: ‘Tot in het translation from Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. J.D. Duff descriptive tradition’, p. 515; Skouen, ‘The rhetoric noorder silt sijn’ golven, ben ick baes.| Dat heet (London: 1928), Book II, line 380. of passion in Donne’s holy sonnets’, pp. 174–5, ick over-sien’. 125. A similar point was also preached by the Calvi- 180–4. 110. Ibid. nists, and was much in Huygens’ mind. See De 88. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 394–400. 111. T. B. Macaulay, Essays, Critical and Miscellaneous Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, p.97. 89. Van Pelt, ‘Man and Cosmos’, p.167. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1869). 126. When Sidney visited Leiden in 1586, Lipsius 90. Ibid., p.163. 112. See Jones, The Epicurean Tradition, chap. 8. See dedicated his writings to him in a special spiritual 91. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 330–332, cited in Van also note 38. setting, see Bachrach, Huygens and Britain, p. 106. Pelt, ‘Man and Cosmos’, p.163. 113. Cited in Letizia A. Panizza, ‘Stoic psychotherapy The reputed leaders of the ‘Sidney alliance’ are 92. De Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Petrach’s de the Earl of Leicester, Sidney, the Earl of Essex pp. 85–8. remediis’ in M. J. Osler (ed) Atoms, Pneuma and and the Earl of Pembroke, see Julie Crawford, 93. Cited in ibid., p. 85. Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production 94. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, p. 255. Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Uni- 95. Jardine, Going Dutch, p. 215. Press, 1991), p.46. versity Press, 2014), pp. 8–9. 96. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 1161–2, cited in Bakker, 114. See Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: 127. Crawford, Mediatrix, pp. 8, 130. Landscape and Religion, p.255. Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: 128. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.127. 97. Ibid., lines 1168–74, cited in Bakker, Landscape University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 129. A protégé of the Countess from 1607–17, John and Religion, p.255. 115. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.86. Donne dedicated a series of verse letters to his 98. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, pp. 247–73. 116. H. E. Woodbridge, Sir William Temple: The Man patroness. For the Donne-Bedford relation, see 99. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, p.250; Weststeijn, and His Work (London: Oxford University Press, Crawford, Mediatrix, chap. 4 and especially pp. - The Visible World, p.107. 1940), pp. 204–6. 147–48, in which the poem, entitled ‘Reason is 100. Huygens, Ooghentroost, cited in Weststeijn, The 117. Reydams-Schils, The Roman Stoics, p.102. our Soules left hand’, is discussed. Visible World, p.83. 118. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.75; Temple, 130. Ibid., p.147; Nellist, ‘Donne’s “Storm” and 101. Gombrich, ‘The Renaissance Theory of Art and ‘Of Popular Discontents’, in The Works of Sir “Calm” and the descriptive tradition’. the Rise of Landscape’, pp. 110–12. William Temple, Bart. 4 vols (London: 131. Cited in Crawford, Mediatrix, p. 51. 102. Ibid., p.120. G.P. Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing J. Brotherton, 1814), III, p.32. Hereafter abbre- 132. Ibid., p.148. the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge, Buildinge. viated as Works. See also Isaac Kramnick, ‘Skepti- 133. The battle in Bohemia was between Protestant trans. Richard Haydock (Oxford, 1598). cism in English political thought: From Temple subjects who rallied behind James I’s daughter 103. Cited in Bachrach, Huygens and Britain, p.143. to Burke’, Studies in Burke and his Time, 12/1, (Elizabeth Stuart) and son-in-law, the Electress 104. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The 1971, p.1647. and Elector Palatine, as the rightful holders of theatre of the Stuart Court (London: Sotheby Parke 119. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.130. the throne of Bohemia, and the Habsburgs, who Bernet, 1973), vol.1, p.39. On the close relation 120. Strong, Renaissance Gardens in England, pp. 139– had appointed their own (Catholic) ruler. Both th between stage designs and gardens in 17 -century 47; Sally Jeffery, ‘The formal gardens at Moor supporting the Palatinate, Bedford and Huygens England, see Hunt, Garden and Grove, pp. 59–72, Park in the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen- were in close contact with Elizabeth Stuart when 110–19. turies’, Garden History, 42/2, 2014, 157–77. she took refuge in The Hague in the 1620s. See 105. Nadine Akkerman, ‘Cupido en de Eerste Konin- 121. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p. 127. ibid., p.155; Akkerman, ‘Cupido en de Eerste gin in Den Haag: Constantijn Huygens en Eliza- 122. Cited in Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ‘The Stoic Koningin in Den Haag’. beth Stuart.’ De Zeventiende Eeuw, 25/2, 2010, synthesis of the idea of natural law in man: Four 134. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, pp.128–130. pp. 73–96. themes’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 35/1, 1974, 135. According to Lazzaro’s study, the grove at Villa 106. De Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, p.88. p. 8. Lante evokes an earthly paradise in the remote 306 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ time of the Golden Age. By contrast, the garden similar jardinières, which are decorated with 155. Ibid., p.282. represents the glorious classical past born again in scenes adapted from both The Romance of the 156. Ibid., p.178. the present time. See The Italian Renaissance Gar- Western Wing and The Romance of the Three King- 157. Ibid., p.286. den, pp. 243–69. doms. See Ayers, Chinese and Japanese works of art, 158. Ibid., p.336. 136. All citations in this paragraph are from Temple, p. 136. 159. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.131. ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, pp. 128–30, unless other- 168. Ji Cheng, The Craft of Gardens, trans. Alison 160. Ibid., p.132. wise noted. Hardie (New York: Better Link, 2012), p. 45. 161. For a brief introduction, see Robert Finlay, The 137. Strong, Renaissance Gardens, p.18. 169. Bakker, ‘Schilderachtig’, p.154. Needless to say, Chi- Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History 138. Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape, p.36. nese cosmology is not identical with the European (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 139. Strong, Renaissance Gardens, p. 141. notion of nature as variety and vitality that under- pp. 258–75. See also J. van Campen and T. Eliens 140. Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden, p.110. pins northern landscape paintings. But the seeming (eds.), Chinese and Japanese Porcelain for the Dutch 141. Cited in Chris Fitter, Poetry, Space, Landscape: parallels did produce landscape images with similar Golden Age (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2014). Toward a New Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge effects of variety and contrast in both traditions. 162. Kuitert, ‘Japanese robes’, pp. 166–169. th University Press, 2008), p.243. 170. For a full discussion of this 17 -century term and 163. See Saskia Beranek, ‘Strategies of Display in the th 142. Strong, Renaissance Gardens, p.178. its relation to the 18 -century term ‘picturesque’, Galleries of Amalia van Solms,’ Journal of Histor- 143. Walter Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals (London: see Ibid. ians of Netherlandish Art 9:2 (Summer 2017), p. 4; Henry Herringman, 1656), p.22; Temple, ‘Gardens 171. Huygens, Ooghentroost. Cited in Bakker, ‘Schilderach- Veronica P. M. Baker-Smith, A Life of Anne of of Epicurus’, p. 88. Charleton’s text is largely based tig’, p.153. The lines expressed sarcasm, as Huygens Hanover, Princess Royal (Leiden: Brill, 1995), p. 92. on the French philosopher, Pierre Gassendi’s De considered the painter to be only a humble imitator 164. For princesses of Orange’s collections, see e.g. Vita et Moribus Epicuri (Lyons: G. Barbier, 1647). of nature as the 'vitality, variety and naturalness' Beranek, ‘Strategies of display’; Campen and 144. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.87. created by God. Eliens, Chinese and Japanese Porcelain. 145. Temple, ‘Of the Excesses of Grief’, Works, III, 172. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, p.255. 165. For a vivid study of Huygens’ plea to Mary II for the pp. 523–4. 173. Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture, revised and preservation of a lacquer screen, see Willemijn van 146. Temple, ‘Heads Designed for an Essay upon the expanded edition (Chicago: The University of Noord, ‘The “Unhappie Ruines” of Princess Mary Different Conditions of Life and Fortune’, in Chicago Press, 1981), p.18. II’s lacquer screen: Sir Constantijn Huygens’s plea to Works, III, p.535. 174. This letter is one of the more than forty extant preserve a Chinese work of art, 1685–86’, Thijs 147. See, e.g., Pender, ‘Rhetoric, grief, and the ima- letters from Huygens to Henri de Beringhen (- Westeijn (ed), Foreign Devils and Philosophers: Cultural gination’; Skouen, ‘The rhetoric of passion in 1603–92), a valet close to Louis XIV, cited in encounters between the Chinese, the Dutch, and other Donne’s holy sonnets’. Kuitert, ‘Japanese robes’, p.166. Europeans, 1590–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 148. Jackson, ‘The Use of the Passions’, p.201. 175. Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay pp. 148–204. 149. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1632 ed.) (London: Murray, 1961), p.149; Eugenia Zuroski 166. John Ayers, Chinese and Japanese works of art in the vol.2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.73. Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London: Royal Cf. Strong, Renaissance Gardens in England, p. 216. the Prehistory of Orientalism (New York: Oxford Collection Trust, 2016), pp. 138–9. 150. Temple, ‘On Health and Long Life’, Works, III, University Press, 2013), pp. 75–7. 167. Adapting from woodblock illustrations of popular p.308. 176. Cited in Katrina Grant, ‘“To Make Them Gaze in novels is a common decorating strategy of Jing- 151. Clara Marburg, Sir William Temple: A Seventeenth Wonder”: Emotional Responses to Stage Scenery dezhen porcelain in the seventeenth century. See Century ‘Libertin’ (New Haven: Yale University in Seventeenth-Century Opera’, in Beaven and Stephen Little, ‘Narrative themes and woodblock Press, 1932), pp. 2–3. Ndalianis (eds), Emotion and the Seduction of the prints in the decoration of seventeenth-century 152. Temple, ‘Memoirs: The third part’, Works, I, p. 569. Senses, Baroque to Neo-Baroque (Kalamazoo: Medie- Chinese porcelain’, in Michael Butler, Margaret 153. Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, p.283; F. Michael Krouse, val Institute Publications, 2018), p.85. Medley, and Stephen Little, Seventeenth-century th ‘Plato and Sidney’s Defence of Poesie’, Comparative 177. Michael E. Yonan further suggests that the 17 - Chinese porcelain from the Butler family collection Literature, 6/ 2, 1954, p.144. century porcelain cabinets are concerned with an (Alexandria: International Art Services, 1990). In 154. Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, p.294. educational programme for royal subjects. Yonan, Mary II’s collection, there are another four 307 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang ‘Igneous Architecture: Porcelain, Natural Philo- 181. Sinarum Scientia Politico-Moralis, a Latin translation of translations, vol.1, ed. John Minford and Joseph S. sophy, and the Rococo cabinet chinois’, in Alden of Zhongyong by Prospero Intorcetta was pub- M. Lau [New York: Columbia University Press, Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan (eds), The lished in two halves in Guangzhou in 1667 and 2000], p.607), yuxing 娱性 (‘easing the heart’, see cultural aesthetics of eighteenth-century porcelain Goa in 1669 respectively. Intorcetta’s translation Bo Juyi [772–846], ‘Planting Bamboos’, in ibid., (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 65–85. was incorporated in Relations de divers voyages p. 873), and yiqing yuexing 怡情悅性 (‘cheering th 178. The scholar motif in 17 -century Chinese porcelain curieux (1672–73) produced by Melchisédech the heart and composing the mind’, see Cao Xue- has been well-recognised, see, e.g. Julia Curtis, Chi- Thévenot. Christiaan Huygens, the second son qin [1715–1763], The Story of the Stone: A Chinese nese porcelains of the seventeenth century: Landscapes, of Constantijn, contributed to Relations de divers novel, vol.1, trans. David Hawkes [London: Pen- scholars’ motifs and narratives, Exhibition Catalog voyages curieux. See Trude Dijkstra and Thijs guin Books, 1973], p.325). (New York: China Institute Gallery, 1995); Sarah Weststeijn, ‘Constructing Confucius in the Low 187. For example, Martino Martini’s The Conquest of Fayen Scarlett, ‘The Chinese scholar pattern: Style, Countries’, De Zeventiende Eeuw, 32/2, 2016, the Great and most Renowned Empire of China by the merchant identity, and the English imagination’, pp. 145–6. Invasion of the Tartars (1654), Alvarez Semedo’s Ceramics in America, 2011. http://www.chipstone. 182. P. Couplet, I. da Costa, P. Intorcetta, et al. Con- History of that Great and Renowned Monarchy of org/issue.php/12/Ceramics-in-America-2011 fucius Sinarum Philosophus (Paris: Horthemels, 1687). China (1655), and Athanasius Kircher’s China (accessed 17 June 2021). In the Confucian tradition, This Latin translation consists of three (Daxue, Illustrata (1667). scholars are also officials, or officials-to-be (pending Zhongyong, and Lunyu) of the Four Books of Con- 188. Temple, ‘Heroic Virtue’, pp.183–4; Gottfried their passing the civil exams). The same person may fucian classics. Temple, ‘Heroic Virtue’, p.176. Wilhelm Leibniz, Novissima Sinica or Latest News be represented in both identities in paintings on 183. [Anonymous], The Morals of Confucius (London, from China (1699), cited in Honour, Chinoiserie, porcelain, as in the case of Mary II’s jardinière. 1691), p.68. p. 16. A pair of Jingdezhen porcelain bottles (cat. 184. A.H. Rowbotham, ‘The impact of Confucianism 189. Temple, ‘Heroic Virtue’, p. 183. 239–240) mounted in gilt bronze, dated 1635–45, on seventeenth century Europe’, The Far Eastern 190. Temple, An Essay upon the Original and Nature of also in the royal collection of H.M. Queen is another Quarterly, 4/3, 1945, p.229. See also Francois Ber- Government, in Works (1751), vol. I, pp. 104–5. example. Cat. 239 shows a scholar on a terrace, with nier, Confucius ou La science des princes, introduction Temple recognised those prominent women who trees and rocks. Cat. 240 shows him in a landscape and notes by Sylvie Taussig, sinological note by were active in the political life, such as the Coun- setting, dressed as an official with a gui (an emblem of Thierry Meynard (Paris, 2015 [1688]), pp. 154–5. tess of Bedford, Amalia von Solms and Mary II, office). Ayres, Chinese and Japanese Ceramics, vol.1, 185. Temple, ‘Ancient and Modern Learning’, in Mis- all of whom he held in high esteem. p. 174. cellanea: The Second Part, pp. 24–5: ‘whoever 191. Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, p. 336. 179. Temple, ‘Heroic Virtue’, in Miscellanea. The Sec- observes the account given of the ancient Indian 192. Temple’s idea of sharawadgi was to be developed ond Part. pp. 177–8. and Chinese learning and opinions, will easily by his followers — the Opposition to Robert 180. This idea appears in chapter 1 of Zhongyong (Doctrine find among them the seeds of all these Grecian Walpole, a circle led by Lord Bolingbroke of the Mean) by Zisi, the second Book of the Four productions and institutions.’ He specifies Epi- including figures such as Alexander Pope. They Books, the core of the Confucian canon. For an curean tranquillity as one example. continued to play upon the association between English translation of Zhongyong, see Wing-tsit 186. For the scholar-official group in China, gardens, virtuous Chinese scholar-officials and Chinese Chan, A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy (Prince- like poems and painting, were an aid to cultivate gardens to criticise the perceived corruption of ton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 98. This the emotions towards tranquillity. This basic con- the Walpolean government. See Robert Batche- idea was developed by later Confucianists and Neo- cept is evidenced in a number of expressions com- lor, ‘Concealing the Bounds: Imagining the Brit- Confucianists such as Mencius and Zhu Xi. See monly found in landscape treatises, garden records ish Nation through China’, in Felicity Nussbaum On-Cho Ng, ‘Is emotion (qing) the source of and poems: e.g. liqi 理氣 (‘regulating the vital (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, a Confucian antinomy?’ Journal of Chinese Philoso- energy’, see Zong Bing [375–443], ‘On Landscape MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), phy, 25/2, 1998, pp. 169–90. Painting’, in Classical Chinese Literature: An anthology pp. 79–92. ORCID Yue Zhuang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0026-5426 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes Taylor & Francis

Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity

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Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity

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Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity yue zhuang Kuitert has highlighted the Dutch dimension and the role played by the Introduction applied arts in the cross-cultural interaction underpinning the emergence of Sir William Temple (1628–1699), the eminent English ambassador to the the English garden. Kuitert notes Temple’s special garden friendship with Sir Dutch Republic and a widely read essayist, famously used the term ‘shar- Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), the Dutch poet, secretary to the stad- awadgi’ (beauty without an apparent order) to describe the layout of Chinese holder, and an Anglophile. Temple, during his ambassadorships to The gardens in his essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’: Hague in the 1660s–1670s, visited Huygens’ garden estate, Hofwijck, at Voorburg, many times. In a letter to Temple in 1682, Huygens addressed Among us, the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly, in some his younger friend as ancien Hofwijcquiste (‘old Hofwijckist’), a kindred spirit certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees who shared his garden pleasures over many years. Huygens further granted ranged so, as to answer one another, and at exact Distances. The Chineses scorn Temple the privilege of visiting Hofwijck any time he

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Abstract

Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity yue zhuang Kuitert has highlighted the Dutch dimension and the role played by the Introduction applied arts in the cross-cultural interaction underpinning the emergence of Sir William Temple (1628–1699), the eminent English ambassador to the the English garden. Kuitert notes Temple’s special garden friendship with Sir Dutch Republic and a widely read essayist, famously used the term ‘shar- Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), the Dutch poet, secretary to the stad- awadgi’ (beauty without an apparent order) to describe the layout of Chinese holder, and an Anglophile. Temple, during his ambassadorships to The gardens in his essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’: Hague in the 1660s–1670s, visited Huygens’ garden estate, Hofwijck, at Voorburg, many times. In a letter to Temple in 1682, Huygens addressed Among us, the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly, in some his younger friend as ancien Hofwijcquiste (‘old Hofwijckist’), a kindred spirit certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees who shared his garden pleasures over many years. Huygens further granted ranged so, as to answer one another, and at exact Distances. The Chineses scorn Temple the privilege of visiting Hofwijck any time he wished after his death. this way of Planting, and say a Boy that can tell an hundred, may plant Walks of Notwithstanding its geometrical layout, the Hofwijck garden featured Trees in strait Lines, and over against one another, and to what Length and Extent He pleases. But their greatest reach of Imagination, is employed in informal tree planting in blocks. These blocks of wilderness within Hofwijck’s contriving Figures, where the Beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but regularity, Kuitert asserts, owed to ‘intelligence from Japan’ — namely the without any order or disposition of parts, that shall be commonly or easily irregular pattern design of the symmetrical frame of the Japanese kimono, observ’d. And though we have hardly any Notion of this sort of Beauty, yet then fashionable in the Netherlands. Kuitert thus attributes the source of they have a particular Word to express it; and where they find it hit their Eye at inspiration for sharawadgi and Temple’s irregular gardening at Moor Park in first sight, they say the Sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression Surrey to Huygens’ Hofwijck, and in turn, to Japanese clothing, without also of Esteem. considering Temple’s explicit references to porcelain and lacquer screens — both were arriving in Europe from China in far greater quantities. But a more Later in the early decades of the eighteenth century, Temple’s comments on immediate issue in Kuitert’s argument, an issue that has been long-standing in sharawadgi were repeatedly evoked in the English campaign for a new, irre- scholars’ arguments supporting an influence of the Far East on the European gular or naturalistic style of gardening. The significance of sharawadgi for garden aesthetic, is that he considers the role of the Far East in enabling ‘the English gardening has been the theme of numerous modern scholarly seventeenth-century departure from the fixed frames of Renaissance papers — some advocate it, others reject it. In a recent examination, Wybe 288 issn 1460-1176 # 2022 the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. vol. 41, no. 4 https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.2017682 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ classicism towards a more enlightened understanding, including the birth of hand, and the tradition of Christian optimism, on the other. A psychological a picturesque taste in landscape art.’ dimension features in both traditions. Aristotle states in his Rhetoric, ‘Change Like many previous scholars, Kuitert narrowly identifies Renaissance classi- in all things is sweet.’ Cicero associates varied events in a plot line with cism with the principles of geometry and harmonic proportion as reason and pleasure. This principle of variety is based on the notion that the human cosmic order. This harmonious classicism of the High Renaissance had its mind is naturally pleased with change. Developing Aristotelian psychology th th 13 influence on 17 –18 -century aesthetic doctrines, but its importance was not and classical rhetoric, Renaissance humanists believed that when the mind so dominant as to exclude other aspects of humanist engagement with the classical (understanding) was supplied with ‘a varietie of objects whereon to worke’, it tradition — literature, rhetoric, art and philosophy — in the early modern period, was possessed with ‘a strong delight’, or heated ‘motions’ of the senses and with all of which gardening was associated. The principles of variety and contrast, passions. The mission of poetry or rhetoric, for those political humanists, th 22 widely applied in 17 -century poems, landscape paintings and gardens, merit was to instruct virtues through delight. A variety of images therefore were 14 th attention. In the 17 -century context where there was increasing recognition more powerful than didactic reasoning because they were capable of moving 15 23 of the passions as being an integral part of human nature, the principles of readers to ‘well-doing’ and to improve the world. This view was strongly variety and contrast worked on the reader or viewer’s senses and passions. As propagated in works such as the Defence of Poesie (1595) by the eminent writer leading European statesmen, both Huygens and Temple were educated in the and statesman, Sir Philip Sidney. Both Huygens and Temple deeply admired 16 25 political humanist tradition and cultivated a virtuoso taste for gardens. For both and agreed with Sidney’s view. Just as variety characterised Sidney’s popular Huygens and Temple, as I shall argue, appreciating images of variety and con- pastoral romance Arcadia and produced the passions, so it characterised trast — whether in poetry and painting, or gardens and the applied arts — was Huygens’s and Temple’s own garden descriptions with a similar effect. a poetic technique to temper their passions to achieve a humanist ideal — neo- On the other hand, the tradition of Christian optimism supplies the th Stoic and Epicurean tranquillity. principle of variety with more vitality and promotes its application in 17 - This technique, it may be suggested, was an important, yet hitherto over- century creative expressions concerning natural scenery. Consisting of looked, cultural framework within which the European cultural elite received a complex of ideas which were common in Christian, Neoplatonic, Stoic the Asian aesthetic with their structural pattern seemingly also emphasising and Calvinist thoughts, Christian optimism holds that God made the world variety and contrast. Evoking contrary passions in the reader or viewer, literature, a beautiful dwelling place for man by making it diverse. With growing rhetoric, and artworks that embody variety and contrast had an effect on the mind interest in the study of the visible, material world, Dutch and Flemish painters th th akin to the effect of sharawadgi, described by Lovejoy as ‘irregularity, asymmetry, in the 16 –17 centuries painted landscapes in praise of God’s grace, with its variety, [and] surprise’. Probing into the intersections among gardens, rhetoric, all-encompassing harmony of unity and multiplicity, yet not without con- psychology, philosophy and the applied arts in the global early modern period, tingencies and imperfections. we may go beyond the impasse of debate surrounding an oversimplifying ques- As an extension of the principle of variety, late Renaissance humanists tion — ‘did the East influence the West?’ and produce new observations on showed an increasing taste for ‘contrast’. With the influence of Neoplaton- political humanist gardens and their reception of Asian designs. ism and Stoicism, Richard Ashley, for example, in his Of the interchangeable course or variety of things in the whole world, translated in 1594 from the French of Louis Le Roy, observed the world order being ‘maintyned by countraries’; ‘in like manner is the Earth, and euery other thing is the world tempered and The principles of variety and contrast 30 conserued by things of dislike and contrarie qualitie.’ In northern landscape th With its common appeal to critics, writers and artists in the 17 century, the paintings, mountains stand in opposition to valleys, as light is in contrast to principle of variety is found in the classical rhetorical tradition, on the one darkness. Man’s body was equally dominated with its contrary humours and 289 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang passions, an ancient concept that remained alive and well in the suffering and unprecedented possibilities for individuals. Following the teach- Renaissance. Excessive and unbridled passions were understood to be harm- ing of Lipsius’ interpretation of Seneca and Cicero, these political humanists 32 44 ful in daily life. Despite overt claims for the primacy of reason at the time, such as Huygens, ‘the Constanter’, and Temple who celebrated ‘tranquillity many writers, artists and patrons believed that the passions could only be of mind’ considered that reason (practical reason) was not opposed to controlled or tempered by other passions, which they aimed to achieve passion, but only sprang forth from a tranquil disposition or ‘an even balance’ through mood-alternating techniques such as reading poetry and viewing of the mind. This enabled one to find the golden mean — making prudent 34 47 paintings. Developed in tandem with poetry and painting, Renaissance decisions in political affairs, as necessitated by their duties as courtiers. Being gardens, which were typically composed of a regular garden and an irregular ‘virtuosi’ or ‘liefhebbers’ (lovers of art) themselves, these political humanists grove, had similar functions. Whereas the regular garden was often asso- habitually engaged with literature, poetry and art at their leisure as ciated with ‘joy and delight’, the grove or wilderness, evoked ‘solitary a productive and virtuous diversion, which helped them practice the mas- 36 49 reverence’. With the balance between the wilderness and the regular gar- tery of the passions prompted by real-life experiences, or ‘emotional horti- den, the overall design reflects the harmony of the universe, just as the human culture’, to borrow Richard Tuck’s phrase. In this light, their approach to passions are balanced and at peace in the soul. gardens with features of variety and contrast, may not have been merely for indulgence in sensuous pleasure or status symbols and ‘conspicuous consump- tion’, as some have assumed. But rather, these may be seen as a mechanism Tempering the passions to achieve neo-Stoic and Epicurean tranquillity for cultivating their emotional disposition to achieve neo-Stoic constancy or Epicurean tranquillity. While their country estate would allow them to be at The emphasis on cultivating a calm, balanced disposition by tempering the th a distance from the court under uncertain and at times dangerous circum- passions to achieve the golden mean manifests the eclectic nature of 17 - stances, the cultivation of this inner fortress of tranquillity in a garden would century psychology and philosophy. Absorbing themes from Aristotle’s contribute to the regulation of stress and thus to their mental strength to hold moderation and the golden mean to the Stoic therapy of emotions, this up to their values and stay involved in public life. emphasis was particularly associated with neo-Stoicism and Epicureanism. This mechanism of gardens as a poetic and psychological technique for Both the (neo-)Stoics and the Epicureans regarded the attainment of apatheia achieving tranquillity in an active life has hitherto been overlooked in the or ataraxia (both meaning ‘free from disturbances’) as the way of living a good th context of 17 -century Dutch and English gardens. Moreover, I shall life. Quite contrary to the typical view held by early Stoics that the passions contend that this mechanism functioned as a framework within which were all negative and must be conquered by reason, the Flemish neo-Stoic Huygens and Temple perceived the Asian aesthetic of gardens and land- philosopher, Justus Lipsius, in his De Constantia (1584), following Cicero, scapes and Temple coined his term sharawadgi. Despite, or because of, the shifted the rigid reading of Stoic apatheia as ‘eliminating passions’ to ‘good seeming foreignness, images of Asian gardens and landscapes could appeal passions’ (eupatheiai), or constancy. Resting on an even balance of the to the European humanists through the lens of the principles of variety and passions, ‘constancy’ of the mind is ‘an immovable strength of the minde, contrast. The irregular design from Asia may be less an ‘other’ than an neither lifted up, or pressed down with external accidents.’ Constancy is ingenious device or exemplar that was located comfortably within the thus close to the Epicurean ataraxia, or ‘tranquillity of mind’ as the neo- European cultural framework of caring for the passions. Temple’s shara- Epicurean philosopher Pierre Gassendi described: it is the tranquil motion of wadgi, it may be supposed, is not separate from his perception of the the mind in balance, ‘moved neither by exultant joy, nor depressed sorrow’. parallels between neo-Stoic and Epicurean tranquillity and the Confucian This disposition of inner calm, it is worth noting, was an ideal sought after th 43 discourse on the passions, and between European humanist and Chinese by humanists active in the 17 -century political arena, where the momen- forms of government based on virtue. tous events of the reformation, iconoclasm and wars created both terrible 290 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ To make this argument, I shall first, in the following, present a close reading of Huygens’ and Temple’s garden descriptions — Huygens on Hof- wijck and Temple on Moor Park (not the estate in Surrey, which he was only to purchase later in 1685, but the Moor Park at Hertfordshire, created by Lucy Harington Russell (1580–1627) the Countess of Bedford, which he described in the Epicurean garden essay preceding the account of sharawadgi). Both gardens shared kinship with Italianate gardens having a mostly regular layout, but neither writer followed the rules of harmonious classicism exclu- sively to identify geometry and harmonic proportions with reason. Instead, they both showed an understanding that (practical) reason, as an ability to keep to the golden mean, only emerged from a tranquil disposition where the passions are in balance — as in neo-Stoic constancy and Epicurean tranquil- lity. Such a tranquil disposition was cultivated in a guided stroll through the garden, where a series of programmed images of variety and contrast were encountered. Temple and Huygens’ garden stroll, raising and allaying the passions so as to achieve a tranquil balance, accustomed them to sharawadgi- like Asian designs in porcelain, lacquer screens and kimonos, where similar structural patterns of variety and contrast are displayed. figure 1. Hofwijck (dated 1653), by Constantijn Huygens and an unknown engraver. Courtesy: Huygens’ Hofwijck, Voorburg. Reuse not permitted. Huygens and Hofwijck out, Huygens was mediating between classical theory and the old concept Hofwijck was built as a country residence in 1640–1642 on a lot of land of imitatio naturae, by which he meant the study and artistic imitation of in Voorburg near The Hague. As the name’s double meaning indicates — nature as variety and vitality. The unorthodox application of the Vitru- both ‘a house with a garden’ and to ‘avoid the court’ — it was a place for vian man in the layout of a garden rather than as a building’s façade the secretary to the stadholder to take a quick refuge from the bustling expressed this mediation — a matter to which we shall return. And court of political affairs in The Hague. Like contemporary Dutch and unlike most contemporary Dutch gardens, which featured elaborate and European gardens in general, the estate of Hofwijck has a regular layout, decorative knots, bosquets and parterres with flower-beds organized into consisting of woods, an orchard and a square with a house (figure 1). The mathematical order, the glory of Hofwijck was its trees. As Kuitert has proportions of the three-part garden models on that of the ‘Vitruvian’ noted, the trees were planted informally in blocks in the woods, the man: the woods (the lower garden) constitute the lower part of the body; orchard and near the house. This contrasting effect is captured in a set the orchard (the upper garden) represents the breast; and the small house of illustrations which Huygens included in his 1653 publication about the the head. This feature may easily be taken as evidence of Huygens’ estate, a poem entitled Hofwijck. With almost 3000 lines, Hofwijck is one commitment to the classicism of the High Renaissance. The then new of the earliest and longest country house poems in the Netherlands. In tendency for classicism in Dutch architecture was already reflected in the poem, Huygens guided his imagined visitors on a stroll along a path Huygens’ house built in the 1630s. Yet Huygens was not through the plan of the Vitruvian man. a wholehearted classicist. At Hofwijck, as Boudewijn Bakker pointed 291 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang The stroll started from the woods, proceeded to the orchard and ended at disordered passions towards a tranquil balance and constancy. Such inner the house on the surrounding moat. The tripartite structure of the garden is calm was not pursued without reference to outward circumstances. Rather, as mirrored in the structure of the poem. Following Italian precedents, early Lipsius argued in Politicorum sive Civilis doctrinae libri sex (Six Books on Politics or modern country houses or villas in England and the Netherlands commonly Civil Doctrine, 1589), inner calm is an active achievement of the will, a way to consisted of a garden (in a regular shape) and a grove (mostly free-form), as in survive civil war and other extreme forms of political difficulty through active the case of Moor Park in Hertfordshire, recollected by Temple. And as in engagement in public life. This neo-Stoic belief underlines Huygens’ com- Moor Park, a typical itinerary through these villas would be from the garden mitment as a devoted civil servant — he was the secretary to the stadholder to the grove. This is apparently not the case in Hofwijck, where all three parts Frederik Hendrik, a position which he continued to hold under William II of the estate, organised into an anthropomorphic body, were regular in their and William III. As the editors of his poems noted, ‘few servants of any state layout. Robert van Pelt argued that the particular itinerary in Hofwijck was can have performed their duties for so long, or with such exemplary fidelity: a progression through the Neoplatonic universe, from the terrestrial to the living his name, Constanter.’ celestial and empyrean worlds, which corresponds to a journey through the Yet the neo-Stoic garden does not have to be tranquil all the time, for microcosm of the human: Body, Soul, and Mind. The application of the training a constant mind and tranquil heart requires exposure to strong or Vitruvian man was therefore a signifier for the idea of the body as the path even violent passions as one experiences in real life. Aside from the peaceful through Creation to God. garden, Lipsius’s De Constantia also features ‘let showres, thunders, light- Offering an apparently coherent scheme for Huygens’ mind and garden, eninges, and tempestes fall round about thee, thou shalt crie boldlie with Van Pelt’s reading has evident merit. But this Neoplatonist reading may be a loude voyce, I lie at rest amid the waves.’ Lipsius’ constancy thus th too clean-cut to fit an eclectic mind typical of a 17 -century European provided a way of compromising with the Augustinian emphasis on experi- humanist like Huygens’, and his many-sided poem, Hofwijck. As Thijs West- encing the passions, an emphasis central to Huygens’ Calvinist belief. The steijn has noted, for the early modern period, it is not always possible to combined form of Stoicism and Augustinism as an intellectual framework distinguish rigidly between the lines of argument denoted by terms such as was by no means singular, but was commonly observed amongst Renais- 61 71 Stoicism, Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism. This eclectic nature is imme- sance humanists. Huygens’ earlier poem Ooghentroost (Ocular Consolation, diately reflected in the intensive quotations of classical authors in Huygens’ 1647), as has been shown, also combined Stoic consolatory writing and poem, especially those by Seneca, among which the use of Stoic consolatory Augustine’s thoughts on grace. This way we are allowed to consider topoi is evident. Hofwijck is indeed therapeutic for Huygens: ‘Here do Huygens’ emphasis of contrary passions (pleasure and pain), an emphasis I flee for refuge, sheltered here and cool, | …. A haven now and then from which mainly lies in the journey through the woods (the body), as a neo- stormy winds at Court | Whereby the soul’s refreshed, the body is restored’. Stoic process of cultivation in order to achieve constancy or tranquillity. Huygens’ experience thus echoes what Lipsius described as living in a garden This tranquillity in the soul, or the heart (the breast), is symbolised by the in the beginning of the second part of his De Constantia: ‘tranquillity, seclu- orchard, where images of balance and harmony dominate, as shown in the sion, meditation … and all of that in a relaxed manner, without effort.’ The poem. Through the ultimate movement from the orchard towards the Flemish philosopher’s neo-Stoicism was a shaping influence on his contem- house, a symbol of divine mind, the Stoic’s tranquil soul seems to embrace th 65 73 porary and 17 -century intellectuals. The very name Constanter [Constan- God’s grace in Augustine’s vision. tijn] reveals Huygens as a like-minded man, whose endorsement of Lipsius’ Focusing on the use of the principles of variety and contrast to manage the teaching is evidenced by his acquisition of a large collection of manuscripts passions towards tranquillity, I shall confine the following analysis to the and annotated books which Lipsius had left at Leiden University. For the woods or the lower garden of Hofwijck and correspondingly the first third neo-Stoics, the garden is a refuge where one can recompose or heal (about 1000 lines) of Huygens’ long poem, Hofwijck. Guiding his guests 292 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ through the beautiful trees he cultivated, the poet’s pleasure is deemed at once At Hofwijck, where the land was typically flat and empty, void of hills and human and rational: valleys, it was only rational (in the sense of being practical) to layout the garden geometrically. More nuanced demonstration of reason or the golden Don’t ask me for its size in roods or feet—but stand mean applied in the design is illustrated in the balance between the tameness At one end and you see no ending to the trees, and wilderness of the trees: The end is quite far off where eyes discern no end. This the tame wilderness of wild civility; Too tame would be too formal here; too wild, too coarse, Or so I call the wood, as Reason I love well So that which lies between can satisfy us best. And love the balance of the Golden Mean … But the tameness and wilderness of the trees are also images of the passions. ‘Reason’ thus is not represented primarily by the geometrical forms of the Understanding that the passions had more than an analogical relation to liquid estate imitating a human body, nor by the fine proportions of the house. states and forces of nature (thanks to their close functional relation to the four Indeed, on this anthropomorphism, Huygens merely noted ‘that shape is humours), early modern writers commonly describe the passions as ‘winds God’s own work and it is therefore good’, without identifying the shape and waves of the body’. Conversely, the variety of landscapes also matched with ‘reason’. Huygens would certainly have known that the English author the sense of change and variety in the human passions and soul. The and diplomat, Henry Wotton, a senior friend of his, had credited architects imagery of storms, for example, features in John Donne’s verse letters as an by virtue of using the system of harmonic proportions as ‘a Diver into example of life under the free sway of the passions. Holding the highest Causes and into the Mysteries of Proportion,’ to which Huygens alluded respect for the English poet, Huygens had translated nineteen of Donne’s in Hofwijck. However, to Huygens, the architect ‘wins not every time’ ‘in poems into Dutch in the 1630s. In Hofwijck, Huygens echoed Donne’s such a lottery’, ‘[a]nd draws blank all too often.’ In writing so, Huygens analogy, ‘we search the still and green depths of my waves, | My moving was, as Bakker pointed out, more consonant with his younger, sceptical self, sea of leaves, which we hear clamouring | and moving still above us’. when he had little interest in classicism and saw a world in terms of Clamouring passions may be disturbing, yet for Huygens, as for Donne, contingencies, not universalities. The mid-aged Huygens was more they were not to be exterminated, but rather balanced, for passions were accepting of classicism (universalities) as the organising principle, but humanity the marks of man’s humanity. As Huygens, the Dutch poet, recognised: remained firmly as the organic centre of creation. Made in ‘God’s image and … we are sober and extravagant by turns. likeness’, Hofwijck mirrored nature as variety and vitality, as conceptualised in Even the gravest man is human flesh and blood, the northern Renaissance tradition, but seen through the Vitruvian eyes of And moves, as all do, like the ebbing, flooding waters: geometry. To find the golden mean between universality and humanity, rules Our gravity still seeks a balanced levity. and real life, geometry and variety, Huygens trusted practical reason, the This is my observation, my reading and my thought, We are in truth no angels, Reason does its best prudent sense of judgment, rather than any theoretical rules applied by force. But fickleness is not the last thing to affect us. That is why he could endorse a design based on disordered elements as in a Japanese robe to be applied in garden designs, but only in such topographies Thus, the Vitruvian man at Hofwijck is indeed to be taken literally — not that were not blank and where asymmetry would provide a satisfying merely as a model of ideal proportions, but as a body of flesh and blood, solution. As he wrote: humours and passions (figure 2). Van Pelt was right to point out that Huy- gens’ Vitruvian man parallels Donne’s image of the body of Christ as the path Tailors (Planters) mending older works I can accept with mercy, through Creation to God. Yet unlike Van Pelt’s exclusive Neoplatonic But I see no way to pardon cutters of new cloth. reading of Hofwijck — in which woods were an image of a chaotic world, My sheet was still a whole, and I would be an astigmatic fool, and man living in such a world, depending upon his senses, was ‘blind’, at If I would cut it up in pieces after a senile plan. 293 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang in the poem, variety was a guiding principle in the design of the woods. Composed of as many species of trees as possible, the woods acquired both visual beauty and utility. A medley of varieties (poplars, birches, etc.), these trees framed views, providing elegant markers along the walks and avenues. As there were digressions in the poem to avoid monotony and enrich pleasure, Huygens in the design of the woods also included some curved paths, deviating now and then from straight lines. ‘Let us turn to right or left: or do the curves disturb | That which this world now disapproves, but times of old preferred?’ Even though our reason tells us that straight is preferable to curved, curved ‘also has its virtues’: the bends in a long path prevent boredom, and where a straight path would seem too short, a winding route will make it longer. The principle of variety in the discourse on natural scenery and landscape paintings exerted similar influence on Huygens’ garden design. Having had the privilege of taking lessons in miniature painting from his famous uncle, Jacob Hoefnagel, Huygens matured into an influential lover of northern Renaissance landscapes and discussed both landscape and painting countless times in his many writings. In those depictions of landscape such as by figure 2. Bird’s-eye view of Hofwijck (detail of figure 1). Consisted of trees throughout, the Vitruvian man, indicated by Orange lines, is a body of the passions. Courtesy of Huygens’ Hofwijck, Voorburg. Reuse not permitted. Hofwijck, Hugyens was capable of tempering the passions and finding calm in the midst of turmoil. In search of ‘the still and green depths of my waves’, he moved through the woods (both physically and literarily), in which variety and contrast were the prevalent principles: Man remains always Man; he accepts judgments ripe and immature and sensuous pleasures, young or old; how diverse we may be Change gives us pleasure, and stability yields pain. As noted earlier, changes or the quality of variety capable of producing pleasure, are long-standing themes in the rhetorical tradition. The rules of rhetoric were consciously deployed in the composition of Hofwijck, as Will- emien B. De Vries demonstrates in his analysis of the poem. Huygens himself also declared in his autobiography that ‘among all the things rhetoric offers, is there a single thing that is more important than the ability to present figure 3. Jacques de Gheyn, Landscape with the Temptation of Christ. Rijksprenten- the separate elements in the right order and in a pleasing composition?’ As kabinet, Inv. No. RP-P-OB-5714, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Public domain). 294 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ Jacques de Gheyn (figure 3), Huygens saw the world — with all its variety in the Neoplatonic Stuart masques, where the main contrast is found and vitality, as well as all its imperfections and coincidences — the literal between woods and garden, or chaotic reality and Edenic order, at Hof- manifestation of God’s power, whereas witnessing ‘free, fresh, and lively’ wijck, in the woods alone, the contrary passions of pleasure and pain, peace drawing was an education to the soul. Huygens wrote: and war or suffering, as well as the contrast between light and darkness, are all violently blended together. Huygens described the beauty of the stately [One can] succinctly but tellingly describe painting, the education of the eyes, avenues, planted with oaks, evoking pleasures, which were then disturbed the full sister of poetry, as the art of seeing. I truly regard those who are not by unexpected associations with war and destruction: lines 181–200 recall adept in this scarcely as complete persons. I call them blind people, who look movingly the Low Countries’ struggle for freedom in the Eighty-Years’ no differently at the sky, the sea or the earth than do their cattle that they let 100 War against Spain; in lines 499–502 and 1235–40 he summarily condemned graze with their heads down. They look at those things without seeing them. the Civil War in England, upon which he maintained a position of consistent if strained civility to both sides. Whilst the thought that these In this kind of painterly viewing, contrary elements (e.g. hills and dales, river trees would flourish in a hundred years and would be the financial source and sun) in landscapes and landscapes of contrary moods were perceived to for his descendants gave the poet reassurance and pleasure, anxiety about affect the passions in opposite ways. The value placed on the mood of future wars never stayed away: he warned his children that they should not a painting with landscape may be traced back to Leonardo da Vinci and uproot these trees, only with the exception of an intervening war. As Alberti. In the same vein, the Italian art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo a neo-Stoic as well as a Calvinist, Huygens knew all too well that on this divided landscapes into chief categories according to their moods such as earth a garden of Eden was not possible. Rather pleasure and pain, love and ‘places of delight’ and ‘sinister dens’ in his artistic treatise. Huygens death, peace and war were the real conditions of life that we should enjoy owned a copy of the English translation of Lomazzo’s treatise. Such con- and endure. To do so, a mastery of the passions to achieve tranquillity, to trast representing natural forces controlled or untamed was visualised in Stuart remain calm in every situation, is fundamental. court masques through Inigo Jones’ stage design: stormy seas and dark forests As the highlight of the lower garden, a panorama was attained by ascend- representing untamed nature, whereas cultivated gardens and elegant villas ing a watch tower on top of a hill in the centre of the woods. The tower implying earthy and cosmic harmony. An admirer of English court culture, replaced an obelisk that was dedicated to Huygens’ happy years with his the young Huygens was mesmerised by the Jacobean masques during his wife. As Bakker noted, at first this ascension appears to be about the sensual diplomatic embassies to England in 1621–1622, and later was commissioned joy of simply looking out over the tree-tops at ‘Holland’s best parts’ — for to write a masque for Elizabeth Stuart (the Electress Palatine) who took her the view encompasses village, city, palace and church, as well as fields, refuge in The Hague. When Huygens came to create Hofwijck, he was at woods, hills and the sea. But by way of a pun on the word overzien a point in his life when the bright outlook turned grimmer: he had suffered (meaning ‘to command a view of’ as well as ‘to supervise’), this panoramic the loss of his beloved wife, Suzanna, who died in 1637; the outbreak of the view takes on political and territorial connotations: ‘I am master up to the English civil war in 1641 involved him in an extremely difficult position, waves in the northern brine. | I call that over-seeing.’ Yet the ‘master[ing] negotiating between the pro-Parliamentarian States and English friends like up to the waves’ may also be an allusion to the mastery of his own passions — the Queen Henrietta Maria begging him to use his influence. The undulating to ‘the still and green depths of my waves’; or like the rocky watch tower, happiness and sorrow, peace and war, would have prompted him to experi- standing firmly against the attacks from turbulent political situations. Unlike ment with the principle of contrast in his landscaping and garden design at the men who governed the country from The Hague, ‘whose view was Hofwijck as a strategy for emotional modulation. obscured by clouds of political woes’, and whose passions were uneven, Both spatial and emotive contrasts were dominant in the narrative of the Huygens could enjoy the lively view of ‘the visible world’ with its vitality first part of Huygens’ poem, that is, the journey through the woods. Unlike 295 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang and variety. It was such dynamic viewing and strolling through the woods — to calm the ‘restlessness of minds and thought’ of the public, which Temple that tempered his passions to achieve tranquillity and to grasp the golden perceived to be the root of discontent in England in the middle 1680s. mean. In the later years, Huygens never quite recovered the assured position Huygens’ Hofwijck was certainly very close to Temple’s heart. But when of mutual trust and respect which he had formerly held at court. Never- he later came to recall the perfect gardens he had ever seen ‘whether at home theless, he continued to be the capable civil servant who performed his duty or abroad’, a seemingly very different garden was deemed the ‘sweetest for six decades. place’. That garden was at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, created from 1617–1627 by Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford. Garden histor- ians conventionally treated the Countess’ Moor Park as a typical luxurious Italianate garden, with a sophisticated terrace system, elaborate parterres, Temple and Moor Park fountains, statues and a grotto (figure 4). th All these elements were extremely costly, which would confirm the Countess’ The reputation of Sir William Temple suffered severely from the 19 -century reputation as being extravagant, and would contrast with the sombre and ‘natur- historian Thomas Macaulay’s Whiggish account. The latter’s accusation alistic’ appearance of Huygens’ Hofwijck. Yet that extravagance was surely not regarding Temple’s sensuous epicureanism seems to be confirmed by the very what Temple perceived of the garden. Temple defended the Countess by stating title of Temple’s own essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’. The philosophy of that ‘greater Sums may be thrown away without effect or Honour, if there want Epicureanism also appears to contradict Huygens’ austere Stoicism and Calvin- Sense in proportion to Mony, or if Nature be not followed, which I take to be the ism. Yet as discussed earlier, constancy, the cardinal virtue of neo-Stoicism was great Rule in this.’ To live according to nature is taught by many philosophers closely linked to ataraxia (tranquillity of mind), that is, the highest pleasure held including both the Stoics and Epicureans. Often this maxim is taken as living a life by Epicureanism. Seneca drew from Epicurus to define tranquillitas as an of ascetic discipline. Yet this is not the view of Epicurus and Seneca. Epicurus abiding stability of mind (‘stabilem animi sedem’). The extent to which the th recommended one to ‘avoid all pain.’ Seneca, renowned for his affluence, said: ‘At two schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism mingled in 17 century England has our birth, nature made us teachable, and gave us reason, not perfect, but capable of been well documented. In his garden essay, Temple made it clear that ‘the being perfected.’ It is therefore, ‘unnatural’, not to use good gifts as Heaven may difference between these two seems not easily discovered’: ‘the most reasonable have placed at our disposal to develop the potentialities of ours and others. Temple of the Stoics made the pleasure of virtue to be the greatest happiness, and the best would have certainly known that Huygens had brought in Seneca and the neo- of the Epicureans made the greatest pleasure to consist in virtue.’ Huygens Stoical golden mean in the margin of Hofwijck to justify the propriety of his own would be such a Stoic to Temple, as he credited Huygens with being the happiest acts of building the country estate. In his garden essay, Temple echoed Huygens man he knew — with health, longevity and free from disturbances. with a quotation of Lucan’s lines in Pharsalia — describing the character of the Like his fellow statesman in Holland, Temple was strongly committed to austere Cato — ‘Servare Modum, finemq; tueri, | Naturamq; sequi’. (To observe a public life and was esteemed for his wisdom and prudence. To contain the moderation and hold fast to the limit, to follow nature.) The point of following ambitions of Louis XIV, he twice negotiated peace and alliance between England nature therefore is not to stick to dogmatism, but to use practical reason to find the and Holland in 1668 and in 1674. To reinforce the Anglo-Dutch alliance, he played narrow path toward responsible spending. a key role in arranging the marriage of William of Orange (William III) and th Neo-Stoicism was popular in England from the late 16 century, especially Princess Mary of England (Mary II). His early retirement was only forced by within the circle of Sir Philip Sidney and his alliance. The Countess of extreme circumstances: vehement party division over the Exclusion Crisis and Bedford, a kinswoman to Sidney (her grandmother was Mary Sidney, Sir his efforts to unite the king and parliament being betrayed by the frivolous Charles Philip’s sister) and a spokesperson of the Sidney alliance during the 1610s– II. Despite his withdrawal, Temple’s writings continued to be public-oriented 1620s, continued to patronise neo-Stoic works: she was the dedicatee of John — a practice firmly in line with Seneca and Cicero, as well as Lipsius and Sidney 296 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ Sidney’s secretary), Temple sympathised with their neo-Stoic leaning — to achieve constancy as an aid in public life and keep to their values (limited monarchy — the monarch’s will is curbed by the aristocracy’s counsel). For Temple, the Countess may have been a model neo-Stoic, as he deliberately evoked the poem of John Donne, who configured the Countess as a keeper of a ‘Stoick’s heart’, a ‘rock’ that no ‘wave’ could undermine. The Stoick’s heart is the location for mastering the passions, whilst the imagery of the rock amidst the sea signifies the immovable inner strength of constancy or tranquillity. This imagery had earlier been applied to heroes in Sidney’s Arcadia in which constancy is one of the key values — ‘it is a mind well trained and long exercised in virtue … doth not easily change any course it once undertakes.’ For the alliance, like Sidney writing Arcadia from Wilton House, the posture of neo-Stoic withdrawal and cultivation of constancy at a critical ‘country’ distance from the court provided them with the mental strength to maintain a discourse on the critique of the court, against encroach- ing monarchical absolutism — either domestic or foreign. Whilst retreating to Moor Park, the Countess played a key role in promoting the cause of the Palatinate in Bohemia against the Habsburgs, a cause which she shared with Huygens. Assuming a political withdrawal himself at Sheen against Charles II’s arbitrariness and party factions, Temple’s recollection of Moor Park as ‘the sweetest place’ and the Countess as ‘among the greatest wits of her time’, thus, may not be separate from his appreciation of the neo-Stoic constancy or tranquillity embodied by the Countess. And we may not be too far from the truth in considering that the shared neo-Stoic and Epicurean ethos allowed Temple to recommend Moor Park as an exemplar garden in an Epicurean garden essay extolling tranquillity. Temple described in detail the layout of the Hertfordshire Moor Park in his Epicurean essay. As mentioned earlier, Temple, like Huygens, also used a stroll through the estate as the ordering principle. But Temple’s description figure 4. Diagram of the layout of the Countess of Bedford’s Moor Park in Hertfordshire, moves in contrary motion to that of Huygens’: the former walking from the adapted from Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames and house to the garden and thence to the orchard and the wilderness. This Hudson, 1979), p.145. Reuse not permitted. itinerary is similar to those in some Renaissance Italian villas such as Villa Lante in Bagnaia, which consisted of a garden and a grove. As no writing Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays and Arthur Gorges’ 1614 on Moor Park by the Countess and her close circle was found, and there was translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, which Temple quoted by no coincidence. little physical trace of the garden, it is difficult to pin down a specific scheme A descendent from an associate of the alliance (Temple’s grandfather was of Moor Park at its conception. But Temple’s description certainly speaks for 297 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang his perception of the Countess’ garden. Conversant with a promoter of each of the eight statues and the two fountains, explaining their mythological empirical investigation like Francis Bacon, Temple highlighted the varied and theological themes. Is this because of Temple’s ‘indolence’, or rather and ever changing imagery on the stroll throughout the entire garden, because what matters for him is already there in his account — namely the pointing directly to a psychological experience. features of variety and contrast on this stroll, which are all highlighted with Following Temple on his stroll, one stepped out of the Countess' house, nuance? experiencing a first major change of space, from inside to outside. The Early modern garden visitors were sensitised to diverse spaces and contrasting terrace was spacious, a gravel walk, three-hundred paces long. As Roy Strong scenes to which they correspond with different moods or passions. In Italian has noted, as a high spot, here one would have a panoramic view of the villas, as already mentioned, it was a commonplace that a garden was associated landscape in the far distance. Back on the terrace, there were laurels at the with joy and a wood inspired solitary reverence; quick transitions provoking border and orange trees further away. The descent to the parterre marked surprise were also practised: Alberti recommended that a high spot be created in the second major change of space. In contrast to the spaciousness of the the garden where a splendid prospect of fields, woods and streams would terrace, and the panoramic landscape of the countryside of Hertfordshire, suddenly be revealed, an effect materialised in many villas such as Villa here one’s senses were stimulated by a greater variety of art forms, sounds and D’Este. In England, such literary gardens as the lodge of Basilius, Sidney’s scents yielded by statues, fountains, and the quarters of a parterre. On both king of Arcadia and Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ offered a surrounding ‘being sides of the parterre were double layered cloisters: on the low level were diversified between hills and dales’, ‘The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing ‘walks of shade’, contrasted by airy walks on the upper level. The cloister space.’ In real gardens such as Sir John Danvers’ Chelsea House, panoramic facing south was covered with vines, the other facing north, with myrtles. At views of the Thames and the countryside of Surrey brought delight to guests in the end of the terrace-walk were two summer-houses, which were likely used the dining hall, whereas a transition from the ‘gay Paradise [garden] into the as galleries according to the convention of the time. The descent from the darksome, deep vault [grotto]’ would affect one with ‘a kind of Religious parterre into the lower garden indicated another change of space, where fruit horror’. And more generally parterre gardens would evoke pleasure and dispel trees ranged about the several quarters of a shady wilderness. The walks here grief, whereas summer houses and cloisters were the places where one might seek were all green, and the grotto under the staircase embellished with a variety of tranquil solitude. Thus as Temple strolled through Moor Park, from a sunny, figures of shell rock-work, fountains and water-works. On the other side of open terrace to a shaded, private grove; from the airy walks to ‘walks of shade’ in the house, there was another garden of all greens, ‘very wild, shady, and the double layered cloisters; from a view of the ordered parterre to the rough adorned with rock-work and fountains’; the location of this wilderness would wilderness, the passions would be shifting from cheerfulness towards meditation, have been on the extension of the lower garden, had there not been from joy to solitary reverence. a common way going through the park. The management of the passions was central to Temple’s Epicureanism, the core In Temple’s description, the measurement of the aesthetic or a garden’s teaching of which was understood as ‘tranquillity of mind and indolence [health] of capacity to please is not determined by whether its overall layout appears body’. A Montaignian sceptic, Temple had little trust in the power of reason (as regular or not (although like Huygens, Temple recommended regular shapes); didactic reasoning) for controlling the passions and bringing tranquillity. He rather, it depends on to what extent the garden affords a rich variety that opened his garden essay with a charge of reason itself making men restless; it was stimulates the pleasure of the senses of visitors on their stroll, and whether it ironic that reason must again be called in to ‘allay those disorders which itself had affords contrasts that keep the passions balanced. Notably, Temple’s descrip- raised, to cure its own wounds.’ Since we cannot escape the pursuit of passions tion does not include details about ornaments such as the pattern of the in this needy, uncertain life, Temple claims, so we should divert ourselves as well parterres or the hydraulic machinery in the grotto installed by Isaac de as we might. Whilst some may turn to drink or play, love or business, ‘the Caus. Nor are there, as often was the case at the time, descriptions of imaginations of the witty and the wise’ find out ways ‘how to revive [the 298 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ imagination] with pleasure, or relieve it with diversions; how to compose it with frames and fabrics out of nothing, which strike with wonder and with pleasure 145 155 ease and settle it with safety’. Such is Temple’s belief in an art of living, that the eyes and imaginations of those who behold them.’ In accordance with ‘men should temper these passions one with another; according to what by age or his appreciation of varied and contrasting scenes in the garden, Temple condition, they are most subject.’ Temple’s idea was a commonplace found in extoled the power of poetry in moving the passions. ‘Upon the reading or a range of early modern philosophical writings and treatises on the passions. hearing of some excellent pieces of poetry’, ‘so many more should feel such Robert Burton, for example, in Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) suggests the indu- turns or curdling of their blood.’ And true poetry ‘may have the force to cing of a passion opposite to the disturbing one in order to restore a balance in the raise passions and to allay them, to change and to extinguish them, to temper 148 157 passions of the mind. It is notable that Burton included gardens as antidotes to joy and grief, to raise love and fear’. Such an effect, Temple proposed, th melancholy, a mood of depression which many 17 -century Englishman simul- would rebalance the ‘unequal humours’ and healing ‘inconstant passions’ of taneously suffered from and cultivated: ‘To walke amongst Orchards, Gardens, the English people, a people who were not only affected by the uncertain Bowres, Mounts and Arbors, artificiall wildernesses, greene thickets, Arches, weather, but who also had suffered from great civil and political uncertainty 149 158 Groves, Lawnes, Rivulets, Fountains and such like pleasant places’. Temple during the past fifty years. Aiming to provide a model for his landed readers both as a youth and during his intense political career suffered from sudden fits of to lay out their own gardens, Temple would be minded that the garden was ‘the spleen’. In an essay ‘On Health and Long Life’, he remarked that ‘fear, and a therapy for the passions that would calm their ‘heads and hearts’ and achieve regret, and melancholy apprehensions, which are the usual effects of the Spleen, tranquillity, thus reforming the morals of society. with the distractions, disquiets, or at least intranquillity they occasion, are the worst accidents that can attend any diseases’. Thus, gardens with their diverse and contrasting scenes, such as Moor Park, were Temple’s favourite diversion. In Sharawadgi his modest estate at Sheen, his sister, Lady Giffard, tells us, he was extremely sensible to the arrangement of his garden, bought as many pictures and statues as In his Epicurean garden essay, Temple’s description of the Countess’ Moor his moderate fortune would permit, and enjoyed ‘scenes he had made pleasant Park immediately preceded his brief account of Chinese sharawadgi, the about him in his garden & House.’ The varied and contrasting scenes at his ‘wholly irregular’ manner to lay out a garden. Naturally, the emphasis in own Moor Park in Surrey, made in memory of the Countess’ garden, such as the description of Moor Park on the imagery of variety and contrast being a regular parterre and a wilderness, serpentine paths and waterways versus an encountered on the stroll and its effects on the passions may frame his elongated recess cut in the hill, thus may similarly be understood as a way of perception and conception of sharawadgi. To Temple, the Chinese visual ‘mending [the] self’ through tempering the passions. form of sharawadgi would feature a structural pattern of variety and contrast Such psychological garden sensibility conforms perfectly with Temple’s not dissimilar to that of the European gardens. Because of its obvious foreign- view and critiques of poetry, as expressed in his essay, ‘Of Poetry’, published ness, that pattern would lead to a greater effect on the senses and passions than in the same volume as the garden essay. Echoing Philip Sidney in his Defence the European norm such as Moor Park. of Poesie, Temple could not allow poetry ‘to be more divine in its effects than Examples of sharawadgi, Temple advises us, may be found in ‘the best in its causes, nor any operations produced by it to be more than purely Indian Gowns, or the painting upon their best Skreens or Purcellans’. As natural.’ To write poetry, one is required to have great imagination and novel and polite goods, these Asian applied arts were pouring into Europe in practical reason arising from inner tranquillity: ‘there must be a great agitation vast quantities through European-Chinese trade. With their East India Com- th of mind to invent, a great calm to judge and correct.’ Temple indeed pany being a leader in this trade in the 17 century, the Dutch nobility, prior considered gardeners as being like the Greek poets and artists, whose vocation to their counterparts in England, enjoyed possession and consumption of was to contrive images to play upon the passions: ‘[they] raise admirable these objects. Temple whilst in The Hague had himself painted in 299 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang 162 167 a portrait, wearing a Japanese gown, following the Dutch fashion. As for Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In the upper centre of figure 5(a) is porcelain and lacquer screens, the House of Orange was among their most a landscape in a fan shape: a scholar accompanied by his servant is strolling prominent collectors. A frequent visitor at the Dutch Palace of Huis ten along the bank of a river; on the right are two crossed pine trees, their slender Bosch, Temple would certainly have been impressed by the porcelain and curvy shapes contrasted with the rocky cliffs emerging out of the river on collections and lacquer rooms assembled by the princesses of Orange, from the left; some bushes dash here and there, with hills in the far background — Amalia van Solms to Mary II. (Most of these Asian items, as with other all in a free manner. Another panel on the same jardinière (figure 5(b)) shows European artworks, would have been sourced by Huygens who advised on a pavilion in a garden setting, where several official and warrior figures and artistic and cultural matters for the House of Orange. ) The collection noble women are at a gathering. Multiple linear elements constituting the brought by Mary II to England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was pavilion, its interior furniture and a terrace are balanced with a dynamism of to form a sensation in Temple’s home country. Looking at Mary II’s collec- two tall plantain trees in the garden and bulky rocks surrounding the pavilion. tion may therefore shed light on Temple’s concept of sharawadgi. At the bottom left of figure 5(b) is a circular panel, showing a scholar seated in A Jingdezhen porcelain jardinière (figure 5(a,b)) is one such example from a garden, attended by servants; above his head is a tree shelter, with a solitary, the collection. Painted around the side are eight variously shaped panels, stupendous Taihu rock in the foreground. The affinity between these garden showing varied scenes of landscapes, gardens, and a camping site. These scenes and landscape scenes is that they all consist of naturalistic elements of asym- would form a narrative, possibly adapted from woodblock illustrations of The metrically planted trees and rocks, emphasising variety and contrast. To figure 5. (a, b). A Jingdezhen porcelain jardinière showing multiple landscape and garden views in separate panels. Dated 1660–90. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021. Reuse not permitted. 300 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ educated Chinese eyes, this affinity represents a common Chinese aesthetic demonstrated a similar approach. Describing patterns of sharawadgi which ‘strike principle, namely that the craftsmanship of heaven or nature, as shown in the eye’ and ‘hit their eye’, ‘without any order or disposition of parts, that shall be landscapes, should be followed when creating a garden. Or, as a Ming treatise commonly or easily observ’d’, his appreciation of Chinese garden designs was The Craft of Gardens (1631) summarises, ‘sui you ren zuo, wan zi tian kai’ (雖由 close to what he perceived in ancient Greek artworks which, as cited earlier, 人作,宛自天開 ), meaning ‘though man-made, as if created by nature.’ ‘strike with wonder and with pleasure the eyes and imaginations of those who The Chinese cosmos is conceptualised as consisting of yin-yang energies (qi) behold them.’ Wonder, surprise, or ‘a frisson of exotic delight’ were often used th which, in their constant movement and transformation, nurture ten thousand by 17 -century Europeans to describe their emotional status when encountering things. To achieve the effect of being created as if by nature as ongoing Asian objects. And as René Descartes, Huygens' friend, related, ‘Wonder is the processes, Chinese garden designers commonly deploy varied elements of first of all the passions. It has no opposite, because if the object presented has rocks, plants, earth and water to simulate topography as a miniature cosmos nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it th 176 with contrasting elements and constant changes. To 17 -century European without passion.’ Robert Burton also noted that wonder can exhilarate the humanist eyes like Temple’s, Chinese imagery of variety and contrast with passions, thus restore the mind to balance from alienation and despair. The fact elements of nature on their applied arts would have struck structural resem- that Asian applied arts were so highly sought after by the European cultural elite, blances to the landscapes of a wide range of Dutch artists such as Jacques de therefore, may not be separate from their preoccupation with the productive Gheyn, Hendrick Avercamp, and Esaias van de Velde — and Huygens diversion and tempering of their passions, rather than merely as a pastime and himself, for whom imitating nature as vitality and variety, was key in land- the display of their royal status, as often assumed. Temple, who was accustomed scape paintings. The Dutch indeed had a word to express the liveliness to use painting and statues as well as strolling through the garden to temper his and diversity that one found in nature, ‘schilderachtig’ (or ‘as if it were a passions, would naturally be intrigued by the Chinese imagery of sharawadgi's painting’), which Huygens used in his poem: capacity to modulate emotions. Temple would have also been struck by the Chinese scholar-official figures Go stroll with them through woods and hills and dales, That, they say, is frequenting the landscape and garden scenes on Chinese export porcelain at the a schilderachtig view. Methinks they are saying: God makes ingenious copies time. As illustrated in the jardinière (figure 5) — the scholar-official is either Of our originals. strolling in the landscape, or seated in the garden or a pavilion — all appear to be The same term was also used by the Dutch to describe the attractiveness they serene and tranquil. Such images would have confirmed Temple’s conviction found in curious and exotic articles like the Japanese kimono. Bakker has pointed that the learned Chinese have achieved perfection of body and mind, following out that Huygens’ casual reference to the Japanese in Hofwijck was closely their sage, Confucius’ teaching. The basis of Confucian moral cultivation is connected to the poet’s early endorsement of nature as vitality and variety, rather the concept of harmonising the passions (qing 情 ) to achieve tranquillity — 172 th than as a mathematically conceived order. To be sure, 17 -century humanists a status not void of emotions, but achieving a dynamic equilibrium and did not and needed not understand the seemingly parallel notions of imitatio harmony (zhonghe 中和 ), so that one can keep to the path of the Mean naturae and wan zi tian kai. As a general rule of cross-cultural contact, recipients (zhongyong zhi dao 中庸之道 ). This concept of the Confucian Mean, similar would locate the other cultures within the symbolic framework of their own or to the Aristotelian and Stoic golden mean, was made available to Europeans the observing culture. Huygens noted in a letter to a friend that the Japanese through various versions of Jesuit translations of the Confucian classics such as robe was ‘one of the most agreeable personal things that I know and to which the Sinarum Scientia Politico-Moralis (1669), which would have been known to 174 181 free flow of a joyful hymn on marriage should be given’, thus revealing his Huygens ; and Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687), to which Temple expli- approach to Asian applied arts centring on the senses and passions — and it was citly referred. In an abridged, English version of Confucius Sinarum Philoso- serene, good passions comparable to a joyful hymn on marriage. Temple phus appearing under the title of The Morals of Confucius (1691), we read: 301 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang Confucius Teaches … he continually watches over … the most secret motion of disposition as an aid to an active life, this essay shows the previously neglected his heart, always square himself according to this just Mean … the wicked being common approach in the early modern political humanist tradition — tempering not restrain’d, neither by Fear, Modesty, … their extravagant Passions do always the passions to achieve tranquillity, an approach which was also applied in the carry them into Extreams. reception of Asian designs of sharawadgi. Developing in tandem with the rhetoric and poetical arts of the time, gardens like Hofwijck and Moor Park in Hertford- Such discussion struck an Epicurean such as François Bernier, a correspondent with shire played a role in the management of the passions to achieve tranquillity, Temple, who translated the Jesuit Latin version of Confucian classics into French, 184 providing mental strength for the garden owners to be active in their public life as being very similar to the teaching of the European political humanists. Temple while maintaining their values. The parallels between the European and Chinese himself went even further noting that the Epicurean emphasis on tranquillity with 185 concepts — from notions of tranquillity and zhonghe, to imitating nature as balanced passions was derived from ancient Chinese learning. Surely Temple vitality and variety and wanzi tian kan, demonstrate that the early modern would have been able to project the European neo-Stoic and Epicurean approach aesthetics of Europe and the Far East did not have to be treated as binaries, as to the garden — as a technique to temper the passions — on to his perception of they often have been in modern times. Rather, such parallels facilitated the sharawadgi in Chinese gardens and landscapes where the figure of a Chinese scholar- 186 European humanists to locate incoming Asian designs like sharawadgi within official strolls while displaying an air of tranquillity. 187 their own cultural framework of managing the passions to achieve tranquillity Based on Jesuit writings, Temple was amongst the early European free- as an aid in public life. Despite the apparent difference in their layouts, both the thinkers who propagated the discourse that China was governed by irregular imagery of Chinese gardens and the regular European gardens con- a philosopher-king who sought the counsel of the wise and learned scholar- formed with the structural pattern of variety and contrast, and were perceived officials — an ideal form of government which secured ‘public tranquillity’ for 188 against a similar philosophical soil for neo-Stoic-Epicurean and Confucian emo- China. In accordance with the Jesuits in his description of the Chinese tional horticulture. They brought forth similar emotive effects — cultivating government in the same volume as the Epicurean garden essay, Temple lauded 189 tranquillity, the achievement of which, as Temple perceived, would provide the the Chinese scholar-officials for their virtue and prudence. To Temple, there th English ruling class of the 17 century with a reliable psychological foundation, were no best forms of government. Instead, the ‘best Governments’ were those 190 so that the English government could be, like the Chinese, constituted with good ‘where the best Men govern’. The virtuous Chinese scholar-officials he read people who govern well. in the Jesuits’ writings would naturally, in his mind, have been visualised as those tranquil Chinese scholar-official figures strolling through the scenery of variety and contrast on a Chinese object. Cultivating ‘tranquillity of mind’ in his own garden, Temple would have surely identified himself with such Acknowledgements Chinese scholar-officials, and would have perceived many of the English ruling This work was supported by EU FP -People Marie Curie Actions under class as their polar opposites — troubled with restless and inconstant passions. Career Integration Grant [631798] (“Entangled histories of ‘Nature’ in the The evocation of sharawadgi would therefore be appropriate to support his idea landscape discourses of early modern China and Europe”) and The Lever- of laying out a garden as a poetic technique to temper the passions to achieve hulme Trust under Research Fellowship [RF-2016-215\5] (“Cultivating tranquillity, the status of having a virtuous mind that would aid Englishmen to happiness: Sir William Temple, Confucianism and the English landscape exercise prudent judgment in their public life. garden”). The author gratefully acknowledges the help and comments of many individuals in the preparation of this essay, including Michael Charles- Conclusion worth, Laurent Châtel, Emile de Bruijn, Mark Dorrian, Jonathan Israel, By probing into the principles of variety and contrast in both rhetoric and the arts, Ullrich Langer, Willemijn van Noord, Philippa Potts, Qiheng Wang and as well as the neo-Stoic and Epicurean emphasis on cultivating a tranquil inner Thijs Weststeijn. 302 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Exeter, Disclosure statement Exeter, UK No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). ORCID Yue Zhuang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0026-5426 NOTES 1. See Samuel H. Monk, ‘Introduction’, in S.H. Monk Imagination, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: The John Hopkins (ed), Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple Pennsylvania Press, 1996 [1986]), pp. 83–9. University Press, 1976); David Jacques, ‘On the th th (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 15. Many 16 -17 century philosophers no longer trea- Supposed Chineseness of the English Landscape Gar- 1963), pp. vii–xlii; Richard Faber, The Brave Courtier: ted the passions as largely perturbations of the soul den’, Garden History, 18/1, 1990, pp. 180–91. Sir William Temple (London: Faber & Faber, 1983). whose existence bespoke abnormal and unnatural 6. Wybe Kuitert, ‘Japanese robes, sharawadgi, and the 2. For debates over the origin of the term, see Ciaran states of mind. Rather, the passions came to equal landscape discourse of Sir William Temple and Con- Murray’s Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature or to exceed reason as elements defining human stantijn Huygens’, Garden History, 41/2, 2013, (Bethesda: International Scholars Publication, 1999), nature. See Maureen Flynn, ‘Taming anger’s daugh- pp. 157–176. pp. 34, 37; Shimada Takau, ‘Is “Sharawadgi” ters: new treatment for emotional problems in 7. Ibid., p.168. See also Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: Derived from the Japanese Word “Sorowaji”?’ The Renaissance Spain’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51/3, How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (London: Review of English Studies, 191/48, 1997, pp. 350–352. 1988, pp. 864–86; Dean T. Mace, ‘Dryden’s dialogue Harper Perennial, 2008), p.217. 3. Sir William Temple, ‘Upon the Gardens of Epi- on drama’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti- 8. Letters from Huygens to Temple dated 2 June 1682. curus, or of Gardening in the Year 1685’, in tutes, 25/1/2, 1962, pp. 87–112. Letter 7188, in J.A. Worp (ed), De Briefwisseling van Miscellanea: The Second Part (London: Ri. and 16. Political humanism may be described as an amalgam Constantijn Huygens (1608–1687), Zesde Deel 1663–87 Ra. Simpson, 1690), pp. 131–32. of a Florentine philosophy of political engagement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1917), p.442, cited in 4. These include Joseph Addison (1672–1719)’s ‘The and active life with older chivalric ideas about the Jardine, Going Dutch, p.217; see also Kuitert, ‘Japa- Pleasure of Imagination’, The Spectator (1712), in relationship between a monarch and the aristocracy, nese Robes’, p.168. Richard Steele and Addison, The Spectator, ed. see F.J. Levy, ‘Francis Bacon and the style of politics’, 9. Ibid., pp. 158, 166–68. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, English Literary Renaissance, 16/1, 1986, pp. 102–3. 10. See text surrounding reference marks 161–165. 1965), 3: 552 and Alexander Pope (1688–1774), 17. Lovejoy, ‘The Chinese origin of a romanticism’, p. 2. 11. Kuitert, ‘Japanese Robes’, p.157. Epistle IV. To Richard Boyle, Early of Burlington, in 18. Ogden, ‘The principles of variety and contrast’; 12. E.g., Lovejoy, ‘The Chinese origin of John Butt (ed) The Poems of Alexander Pope (New Ullrich Langer, ‘Pleasure as unconstrained move- a romanticism’, pp. 1–2. Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 586–95. ment’, French Studies, 65/1, 2010, pp. 13–25. 5. The advocating voices include, for example, Arthur 19. Aristotle cited this from Euripides with 13. For a few good examples, see ibid. O. Lovejoy, ‘The Chinese origin of a romanticism’, a pejorative note, see Langer, ‘Pleasure as uncon- 14. H. V. S. Ogden, ‘The principles of variety and con- th The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 32/1, strained movement’, p.18. trast in 17 -century aesthetics and Milton’s poetry’, 1933, pp. 1–20; Yu Liu, ‘Tapping into a different 20. Cicero, Ad familiares 5.12, cited in ibid. Journal of the History of Ideas, 10/2, 1949, pp. 159–82; cultural tradition: Sir William Temple’s Aesthetic 21. Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Facul- K. Claire Pace, ‘ “Strong Contraries … Happy Dis- Innovations’, The European Legacy: Toward New Para- ties of the Soule (London: Robert Bostock, 1640), cord”: Some eighteenth-century discussions about digms, 15/3, 2010, pp. 301–15. The opposing views p.18. landscape’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 40/1, 1979, are seen in, e.g. John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the 22. Brian Vickers, ‘Philosophy and Humanistic Disci- pp. 141–55; John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the plines: Rhetoric and Poetics’, in C.B. Schmitt, The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English 303 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang Q. Skinner, et al. (eds) The Cambridge History of 38. For a discussion of the innovative ways the English an important part of the shift from late Renaissance Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, authors interpreted Aristotle’s golden mean and styles to Baroque styles in architecture and painting. 1988), p.718. moderation, see Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean Ogden purposely avoided the use of the term ‘bar- 23. Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie (1595); cited in in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Prince- oque’, considering it safer and more effective to use ibid., p.737. ton University Press, 2002). For the influence of Stoic the terms recognised and used by the critics and poets 24. Sidney synthesised and developed from the theories therapy of the emotions in the early modern period, of the period being studied. I follow his precedent. of both Horace and Julius Scaliger. See Blair Wor- see M. J. Osler ed., Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility: 30. Cited in ibid., pp. 167–76, where more examples den, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought (Cam- are included. Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On the 31. Ibid. See also Stanley W. Jackson, ‘The Use of Press, 1996), pp. 3–22; Gavin Alexander, ‘The clas- impact of neo-Stoicism in Holland and England from the Passions’, in Care of the Psyche: A History of th th sics in literary criticism’, in Patrick Cheney and the late 16 to 17 century, see Mark Morford, Stoics Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale Univer- Philip Hardie (eds), The Oxford History of Classical and Neo-Stoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Prin- sity Press, 1999), pp. 201–15. Reception in English Literature, vol. 2: 1558–1660 ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); and 32. For an overview of this, see Susan James, ‘Rea- (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 94. Adriana McCrea, Constant minds: Political Virtue and son, the passions, and the good life’, in The Cam- 25. See A.G.H. Bachrach, Sir Constantine Huygens and the Lipsian Paradigm in England, 1584–1650 (Toronto: bridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy, ed. Britain: 1596–1687: A Pattern of Cultural Exchange, University of Toronto Press, 1997). For a brief Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: vol.1 1596–1619 (Leiden: At the University Press, account of Epicureanism and its development in Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.1359. 1962), p.106; William Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, in seventeenth-century England, see Howard Jones, 33. Ibid., pp. 1380–1. Miscellanea: The Second Part, p.311. The Epicurean Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992), 34. Stephen Pender, ‘Rhetoric, grief, and the imagina- 26. Jacqueline T. Miller, ‘The Passion Signified: Imi- chap. 8. See also, Osler, Atoms, Pneuma, and tion’, Philosophy & Rhetoric, 43/1, 2010, pp. 54–85; tation and the construction of emotions in Sidney Tranquillity. Tina Skouen, ‘The rhetoric of passion in Donne’s and Wroth’, Criticism, 43/4, 2001, p.407. 39. Gisela Striker, ‘Ataraxia: Happiness as tranquil- holy sonnets’, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of 27. See Ogden, ‘The principles of variety and con- lity’, The Monist, 73/1, 1990, pp. 97–110. Rhetoric, 27/2, 2009, pp. 159–88. Suzanne Walker, trast’, pp.160–3, with several examples including 40. See Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism ‘Composing the passions in Rubens’ Hunting an essay called ‘Theologia ruris, sive Schola & and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Prin- Scenes’, in The Passions in the Arts of the Early Modern scala naturae’, which appeared as an appendix to ceton: Princeton University Press), pp. 6, 59–60, 70. Netherlands. ed. Stephanie S. Dickey and Herman G. Ashwell’s The History of Hai Eb’n Yockdan, an 41. Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. John Roodenburg (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 109–24; Indian Prince: or, the Self-Taught Philosopher (1686). Stradling (London: Printed by Richard Johnes, Ulrich Heinen, ‘Huygens, Rubens and Medusa: The term Christian optimism was first discussed 1595), p.8. Reflecting the Passions in Paintings, with Some by Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: 42. Cited in Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Free- Considerations of Neuroscience in Art History’, in A Study of the history of an idea (Cambridge, MA: dom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor- ibid., 151–76. See also E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Harvard University Press, 1936), chapters 2–3. nell University Press, 1996), p.72. Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Land- 28. See Boudewijn Bakker, Landscape and Religion: From 43. Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, scape’, Norm and Form (London, 1966; 2nd ed., 1971), Van Eyck to Rembrandt, trans. Diane Webb (Abing- 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University pp. 107–21. don: Routledge, 2016), p.255. See also Thijs West- Press, 1993), pp. xiv, 7–9, 52–4. 35. Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden steijn, The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art 44. See Davidson and Van der Weel, A Selection of the (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Poems of Sir Constantijn Huygens, p.45. Hunt, Garden and Grove, pp.110–19. Golden Age, trans. Beverley Jackson and Lynne 45. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p. 88. 36. Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden, pp.120, 123, Richards (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 46. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p.54; Lipsius, Two th 2008). Bookes of Constancie, pp. 14, 15–6. In his Politicorum 37. A wide range of 17 -century works of meditative 29. Ogden, ‘The principles of variety and contrast’, pp. - sive Civilis doctrinae libri sex (Six Books on Politics or nature reflect this emphasis. See Skouen, ‘The 173–74 noted that this change was often regarded as Civil Doctrine, 1589), a sequel to De Constantia, rhetoric of passion’, pp. 174–5. 304 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ a ruler’s prudence in actual practice is emphasised Architectural Relations from 1625 to 1700 (Delft: 67. Morford, ‘The Stoic Garden’; see also his discussion throughout. See Justus Lipsius, Politica: Six Books of Delft University Press, 1980), pp. 57–82. of Rubens’ garden in Stoics and Neo-Stoics, Politics or Political Instruction, edited by Jan Waszink 54. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, pp. 248, 255. On pp. 189–94. (Assen: Royal van Gorcum, 2004). imitatio naturae, see Anthony J. Close, ‘Philosophical 68. Ibid. 47. For a discussion of the mean being related to pru- Theories of Art and Nature in Classical Antiquity’, 69. Davidson and Van der Weel, A Selection of the dence, see Scodel, Excess and the Mean, pp. 3–4. Journal of the History of Ideas, 32/2, 1971, pp. 163–84; Poems of Sir Constantijn Huygens, p.45. 48. For a study of this subject in the English context, see and Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge: 70. Lipsius, Two bookes of constancie, p.84. Kim Sloan, A noble art: Amateur artists and drawing Cambridge University Press, 1995). 71. William J. Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Human- masters c. 1600–1800, catalogue exhibition (London: 55. Ibid., p.165. ism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance British Museum, 2000); and Ann Bermingham, 56. Kuitert, ‘Japanese robes’, p.161. Thought’, in Heiko A. Oberman and Thomas Learning to draw: Studies in the cultural history of 57. Constantijn Huygens, Vitaulium. Hofwyck. Hof- A. Brady, Jr. (eds) Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of a polite and useful art (New Haven: Yale University stede Vanden Herre van Zuylichem Onder Voorburgh the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Press, 2000); in the Dutch context, see Michael (The Hague, 1653). Transformations (Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 3–60. Zell, ‘A leisurely and virtuous pursuit: Amateur 58. De Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, p.86. 72. Lise Gosseye, ‘Salutary Reading: Conversion and artists, Rembrandt, and landscape representation 59. Van Pelt, ‘Man and cosmos’, pp. 162–168. Calvinist Humanism in Constantijn Huygens’ in seventeenth-century Holland’, Netherlands Year- 60. Ibid. Van Pelt noted that John Donne, the Eng- Ooghentroost’, in Lieke Stelling, Harald Hendrix, book for History of Art/ Nederlands Kunsthistorisch lish poet whom Huygens admired, had also and Todd Richardson (eds), The Turn of the Soul: Jaarboek Online, 54/1, 2003, pp. 334–68. employed the imagery of the body as the path Representations of Religious Conversion in Early 49. Walker, ‘Composing the passions in Rubens’ through Creation to God in his Hymne to God my Modern Art and Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2012), Hunting Scenes’, pp. 109–24; Heinen, ‘Huygens, God, in my sickness and in his Devotions upon pp. 225–246. Rubens and Medusa’, pp. 151–76. Emergent Occasions (c. 1623). 73. For detailed interpretations of the orchard and the 50. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 62. 61. Weststeijn, The Visible World, p. 40. house, see Van Pelt, ‘Man and Cosmos’, pp. 159– 51. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An 62. Van Pelt, ‘Man and cosmos’, pp. 157–158. Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age 63. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 2099–2101, cited in 74. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 142–7. (New York, 1987), p. 293; Kees Schmidt, ‘Hollands P. Davidson and A. van der Weel eds and 75. Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (Lon- buitenleven in de zeventiende eeuw’, Amsterdams trans., A Selection of the Poems of Sir Constantijn don: John Bill, 1624), p.55; Huygens, Hofwijck, Sociologisch Tijdschrift 4 (1977–78), pp. 434–49, 5 Huygens (1596–1687) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam line 362–6. (1978–79), pp. 91–109, cited in Willemien De University Press, 1996), p.137. All citations of 76. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 367–8. Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized: Constan- the Hofwijck poem are from this source, unless 77. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, p.255; Huygens, tijn Huygens’ Hofwijck’, in John Dixon Hunt (ed), otherwise stated. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines Hofwijck, lines 89–90, 1005. The Dutch Garden in the Seventeenth Century 2329–2300, cited in De Vries, ‘The Country 78. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, pp. 254, 259. (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990), p.84. Estate Immortalized’, p. 95. 79. Ibid., 255. Cf. Kuitert, ‘Japanese robes’, p.164. 52. An epitome of harmonious classicism of the High 64. On Lipsius and the garden, see Mark Morford, 80. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 1001–4, cited in Kuitert, Renaissance, The Vitruvian Man (1492) was created ‘The Stoic garden’, The Journal of Garden History, ‘Japanese robes’, p.165. by Leonardo da Vinci as a study of the proportions of 7/2, 1987, pp. 151–75. 81. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 148–9. the human body as described by the Roman architect 65. Morford’s Stoics and Neo-Stoics investigated Lip- 82. Gail Kern Paster, Humouring the Body: Emotions Vitruvius (c. 78–10 BCE). For a detailed discussion, sius’s humanist circle in the Netherlands, whereas and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University see Robert van Pelt, ‘Man and cosmos in Huygens’ McCrea’s Constant minds explored his impact in of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 18, 19, 4. th Hofwijck’, Art History, 4/2, 1981, pp. 153–4. England. See also note 38. 83. This theme continues into the 18 century, see 53. See Wouter Kuyper, ‘Jacob van Campen and 66. Jan Waszink, ‘Introduction’, in Justus Lipsius, Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape, p.48. Constantine Huygens as Inspirers of the Classicist Politica: Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction, 84. B.F. Nellist, ‘Donne’s “Storm” and “Calm” and Era’, in Dutch Classicist Architecture: A Survey of edited by Jan Waszink, (Assen: Royal van Gor- the descriptive tradition’, The Modern Language Dutch Architecture, Gardens and Anglo-Dutch cum, 2004), p. 6. Review, 59/4, 1964, pp. 511–15. 305 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang 85. Davidson and Van der Weel, A Selection of the 107. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 181–200, cited in De 123. De Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, Poems of Sir Constantijn Huygens, pp. 258–59. Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, p.89. p. 97. 86. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 380–2. 108. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, p.258. 124. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p. 128. English 87. Nellist, ‘Donne’s “Storm” and “Calm” and the 109. Ibid. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 826–27: ‘Tot in het translation from Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. J.D. Duff descriptive tradition’, p. 515; Skouen, ‘The rhetoric noorder silt sijn’ golven, ben ick baes.| Dat heet (London: 1928), Book II, line 380. of passion in Donne’s holy sonnets’, pp. 174–5, ick over-sien’. 125. A similar point was also preached by the Calvi- 180–4. 110. Ibid. nists, and was much in Huygens’ mind. See De 88. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 394–400. 111. T. B. Macaulay, Essays, Critical and Miscellaneous Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, p.97. 89. Van Pelt, ‘Man and Cosmos’, p.167. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1869). 126. When Sidney visited Leiden in 1586, Lipsius 90. Ibid., p.163. 112. See Jones, The Epicurean Tradition, chap. 8. See dedicated his writings to him in a special spiritual 91. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 330–332, cited in Van also note 38. setting, see Bachrach, Huygens and Britain, p. 106. Pelt, ‘Man and Cosmos’, p.163. 113. Cited in Letizia A. Panizza, ‘Stoic psychotherapy The reputed leaders of the ‘Sidney alliance’ are 92. De Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Petrach’s de the Earl of Leicester, Sidney, the Earl of Essex pp. 85–8. remediis’ in M. J. Osler (ed) Atoms, Pneuma and and the Earl of Pembroke, see Julie Crawford, 93. Cited in ibid., p. 85. Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production 94. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, p. 255. Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Uni- 95. Jardine, Going Dutch, p. 215. Press, 1991), p.46. versity Press, 2014), pp. 8–9. 96. Huygens, Hofwijck, lines 1161–2, cited in Bakker, 114. See Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: 127. Crawford, Mediatrix, pp. 8, 130. Landscape and Religion, p.255. Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: 128. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.127. 97. Ibid., lines 1168–74, cited in Bakker, Landscape University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 129. A protégé of the Countess from 1607–17, John and Religion, p.255. 115. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.86. Donne dedicated a series of verse letters to his 98. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, pp. 247–73. 116. H. E. Woodbridge, Sir William Temple: The Man patroness. For the Donne-Bedford relation, see 99. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, p.250; Weststeijn, and His Work (London: Oxford University Press, Crawford, Mediatrix, chap. 4 and especially pp. - The Visible World, p.107. 1940), pp. 204–6. 147–48, in which the poem, entitled ‘Reason is 100. Huygens, Ooghentroost, cited in Weststeijn, The 117. Reydams-Schils, The Roman Stoics, p.102. our Soules left hand’, is discussed. Visible World, p.83. 118. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.75; Temple, 130. Ibid., p.147; Nellist, ‘Donne’s “Storm” and 101. Gombrich, ‘The Renaissance Theory of Art and ‘Of Popular Discontents’, in The Works of Sir “Calm” and the descriptive tradition’. the Rise of Landscape’, pp. 110–12. William Temple, Bart. 4 vols (London: 131. Cited in Crawford, Mediatrix, p. 51. 102. Ibid., p.120. G.P. Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing J. Brotherton, 1814), III, p.32. Hereafter abbre- 132. Ibid., p.148. the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge, Buildinge. viated as Works. See also Isaac Kramnick, ‘Skepti- 133. The battle in Bohemia was between Protestant trans. Richard Haydock (Oxford, 1598). cism in English political thought: From Temple subjects who rallied behind James I’s daughter 103. Cited in Bachrach, Huygens and Britain, p.143. to Burke’, Studies in Burke and his Time, 12/1, (Elizabeth Stuart) and son-in-law, the Electress 104. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The 1971, p.1647. and Elector Palatine, as the rightful holders of theatre of the Stuart Court (London: Sotheby Parke 119. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.130. the throne of Bohemia, and the Habsburgs, who Bernet, 1973), vol.1, p.39. On the close relation 120. Strong, Renaissance Gardens in England, pp. 139– had appointed their own (Catholic) ruler. Both th between stage designs and gardens in 17 -century 47; Sally Jeffery, ‘The formal gardens at Moor supporting the Palatinate, Bedford and Huygens England, see Hunt, Garden and Grove, pp. 59–72, Park in the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen- were in close contact with Elizabeth Stuart when 110–19. turies’, Garden History, 42/2, 2014, 157–77. she took refuge in The Hague in the 1620s. See 105. Nadine Akkerman, ‘Cupido en de Eerste Konin- 121. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p. 127. ibid., p.155; Akkerman, ‘Cupido en de Eerste gin in Den Haag: Constantijn Huygens en Eliza- 122. Cited in Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ‘The Stoic Koningin in Den Haag’. beth Stuart.’ De Zeventiende Eeuw, 25/2, 2010, synthesis of the idea of natural law in man: Four 134. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, pp.128–130. pp. 73–96. themes’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 35/1, 1974, 135. According to Lazzaro’s study, the grove at Villa 106. De Vries, ‘The Country Estate Immortalized’, p.88. p. 8. Lante evokes an earthly paradise in the remote 306 temple, huygens and ‘sharawadgi’ time of the Golden Age. By contrast, the garden similar jardinières, which are decorated with 155. Ibid., p.282. represents the glorious classical past born again in scenes adapted from both The Romance of the 156. Ibid., p.178. the present time. See The Italian Renaissance Gar- Western Wing and The Romance of the Three King- 157. Ibid., p.286. den, pp. 243–69. doms. See Ayers, Chinese and Japanese works of art, 158. Ibid., p.336. 136. All citations in this paragraph are from Temple, p. 136. 159. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.131. ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, pp. 128–30, unless other- 168. Ji Cheng, The Craft of Gardens, trans. Alison 160. Ibid., p.132. wise noted. Hardie (New York: Better Link, 2012), p. 45. 161. For a brief introduction, see Robert Finlay, The 137. Strong, Renaissance Gardens, p.18. 169. Bakker, ‘Schilderachtig’, p.154. Needless to say, Chi- Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History 138. Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape, p.36. nese cosmology is not identical with the European (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 139. Strong, Renaissance Gardens, p. 141. notion of nature as variety and vitality that under- pp. 258–75. See also J. van Campen and T. Eliens 140. Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden, p.110. pins northern landscape paintings. But the seeming (eds.), Chinese and Japanese Porcelain for the Dutch 141. Cited in Chris Fitter, Poetry, Space, Landscape: parallels did produce landscape images with similar Golden Age (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2014). Toward a New Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge effects of variety and contrast in both traditions. 162. Kuitert, ‘Japanese robes’, pp. 166–169. th University Press, 2008), p.243. 170. For a full discussion of this 17 -century term and 163. See Saskia Beranek, ‘Strategies of Display in the th 142. Strong, Renaissance Gardens, p.178. its relation to the 18 -century term ‘picturesque’, Galleries of Amalia van Solms,’ Journal of Histor- 143. Walter Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals (London: see Ibid. ians of Netherlandish Art 9:2 (Summer 2017), p. 4; Henry Herringman, 1656), p.22; Temple, ‘Gardens 171. Huygens, Ooghentroost. Cited in Bakker, ‘Schilderach- Veronica P. M. Baker-Smith, A Life of Anne of of Epicurus’, p. 88. Charleton’s text is largely based tig’, p.153. The lines expressed sarcasm, as Huygens Hanover, Princess Royal (Leiden: Brill, 1995), p. 92. on the French philosopher, Pierre Gassendi’s De considered the painter to be only a humble imitator 164. For princesses of Orange’s collections, see e.g. Vita et Moribus Epicuri (Lyons: G. Barbier, 1647). of nature as the 'vitality, variety and naturalness' Beranek, ‘Strategies of display’; Campen and 144. Temple, ‘Gardens of Epicurus’, p.87. created by God. Eliens, Chinese and Japanese Porcelain. 145. Temple, ‘Of the Excesses of Grief’, Works, III, 172. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, p.255. 165. For a vivid study of Huygens’ plea to Mary II for the pp. 523–4. 173. Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture, revised and preservation of a lacquer screen, see Willemijn van 146. Temple, ‘Heads Designed for an Essay upon the expanded edition (Chicago: The University of Noord, ‘The “Unhappie Ruines” of Princess Mary Different Conditions of Life and Fortune’, in Chicago Press, 1981), p.18. II’s lacquer screen: Sir Constantijn Huygens’s plea to Works, III, p.535. 174. This letter is one of the more than forty extant preserve a Chinese work of art, 1685–86’, Thijs 147. See, e.g., Pender, ‘Rhetoric, grief, and the ima- letters from Huygens to Henri de Beringhen (- Westeijn (ed), Foreign Devils and Philosophers: Cultural gination’; Skouen, ‘The rhetoric of passion in 1603–92), a valet close to Louis XIV, cited in encounters between the Chinese, the Dutch, and other Donne’s holy sonnets’. Kuitert, ‘Japanese robes’, p.166. Europeans, 1590–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 148. Jackson, ‘The Use of the Passions’, p.201. 175. Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay pp. 148–204. 149. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1632 ed.) (London: Murray, 1961), p.149; Eugenia Zuroski 166. John Ayers, Chinese and Japanese works of art in the vol.2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.73. Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London: Royal Cf. Strong, Renaissance Gardens in England, p. 216. the Prehistory of Orientalism (New York: Oxford Collection Trust, 2016), pp. 138–9. 150. Temple, ‘On Health and Long Life’, Works, III, University Press, 2013), pp. 75–7. 167. Adapting from woodblock illustrations of popular p.308. 176. Cited in Katrina Grant, ‘“To Make Them Gaze in novels is a common decorating strategy of Jing- 151. Clara Marburg, Sir William Temple: A Seventeenth Wonder”: Emotional Responses to Stage Scenery dezhen porcelain in the seventeenth century. See Century ‘Libertin’ (New Haven: Yale University in Seventeenth-Century Opera’, in Beaven and Stephen Little, ‘Narrative themes and woodblock Press, 1932), pp. 2–3. Ndalianis (eds), Emotion and the Seduction of the prints in the decoration of seventeenth-century 152. Temple, ‘Memoirs: The third part’, Works, I, p. 569. Senses, Baroque to Neo-Baroque (Kalamazoo: Medie- Chinese porcelain’, in Michael Butler, Margaret 153. Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, p.283; F. Michael Krouse, val Institute Publications, 2018), p.85. Medley, and Stephen Little, Seventeenth-century th ‘Plato and Sidney’s Defence of Poesie’, Comparative 177. Michael E. Yonan further suggests that the 17 - Chinese porcelain from the Butler family collection Literature, 6/ 2, 1954, p.144. century porcelain cabinets are concerned with an (Alexandria: International Art Services, 1990). In 154. Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, p.294. educational programme for royal subjects. Yonan, Mary II’s collection, there are another four 307 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: zhuang ‘Igneous Architecture: Porcelain, Natural Philo- 181. Sinarum Scientia Politico-Moralis, a Latin translation of translations, vol.1, ed. John Minford and Joseph S. sophy, and the Rococo cabinet chinois’, in Alden of Zhongyong by Prospero Intorcetta was pub- M. Lau [New York: Columbia University Press, Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan (eds), The lished in two halves in Guangzhou in 1667 and 2000], p.607), yuxing 娱性 (‘easing the heart’, see cultural aesthetics of eighteenth-century porcelain Goa in 1669 respectively. Intorcetta’s translation Bo Juyi [772–846], ‘Planting Bamboos’, in ibid., (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 65–85. was incorporated in Relations de divers voyages p. 873), and yiqing yuexing 怡情悅性 (‘cheering th 178. The scholar motif in 17 -century Chinese porcelain curieux (1672–73) produced by Melchisédech the heart and composing the mind’, see Cao Xue- has been well-recognised, see, e.g. Julia Curtis, Chi- Thévenot. Christiaan Huygens, the second son qin [1715–1763], The Story of the Stone: A Chinese nese porcelains of the seventeenth century: Landscapes, of Constantijn, contributed to Relations de divers novel, vol.1, trans. David Hawkes [London: Pen- scholars’ motifs and narratives, Exhibition Catalog voyages curieux. See Trude Dijkstra and Thijs guin Books, 1973], p.325). (New York: China Institute Gallery, 1995); Sarah Weststeijn, ‘Constructing Confucius in the Low 187. For example, Martino Martini’s The Conquest of Fayen Scarlett, ‘The Chinese scholar pattern: Style, Countries’, De Zeventiende Eeuw, 32/2, 2016, the Great and most Renowned Empire of China by the merchant identity, and the English imagination’, pp. 145–6. Invasion of the Tartars (1654), Alvarez Semedo’s Ceramics in America, 2011. http://www.chipstone. 182. P. Couplet, I. da Costa, P. Intorcetta, et al. Con- History of that Great and Renowned Monarchy of org/issue.php/12/Ceramics-in-America-2011 fucius Sinarum Philosophus (Paris: Horthemels, 1687). China (1655), and Athanasius Kircher’s China (accessed 17 June 2021). In the Confucian tradition, This Latin translation consists of three (Daxue, Illustrata (1667). scholars are also officials, or officials-to-be (pending Zhongyong, and Lunyu) of the Four Books of Con- 188. Temple, ‘Heroic Virtue’, pp.183–4; Gottfried their passing the civil exams). The same person may fucian classics. Temple, ‘Heroic Virtue’, p.176. Wilhelm Leibniz, Novissima Sinica or Latest News be represented in both identities in paintings on 183. [Anonymous], The Morals of Confucius (London, from China (1699), cited in Honour, Chinoiserie, porcelain, as in the case of Mary II’s jardinière. 1691), p.68. p. 16. A pair of Jingdezhen porcelain bottles (cat. 184. A.H. Rowbotham, ‘The impact of Confucianism 189. Temple, ‘Heroic Virtue’, p. 183. 239–240) mounted in gilt bronze, dated 1635–45, on seventeenth century Europe’, The Far Eastern 190. Temple, An Essay upon the Original and Nature of also in the royal collection of H.M. Queen is another Quarterly, 4/3, 1945, p.229. See also Francois Ber- Government, in Works (1751), vol. I, pp. 104–5. example. Cat. 239 shows a scholar on a terrace, with nier, Confucius ou La science des princes, introduction Temple recognised those prominent women who trees and rocks. Cat. 240 shows him in a landscape and notes by Sylvie Taussig, sinological note by were active in the political life, such as the Coun- setting, dressed as an official with a gui (an emblem of Thierry Meynard (Paris, 2015 [1688]), pp. 154–5. tess of Bedford, Amalia von Solms and Mary II, office). Ayres, Chinese and Japanese Ceramics, vol.1, 185. Temple, ‘Ancient and Modern Learning’, in Mis- all of whom he held in high esteem. p. 174. cellanea: The Second Part, pp. 24–5: ‘whoever 191. Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, p. 336. 179. Temple, ‘Heroic Virtue’, in Miscellanea. The Sec- observes the account given of the ancient Indian 192. Temple’s idea of sharawadgi was to be developed ond Part. pp. 177–8. and Chinese learning and opinions, will easily by his followers — the Opposition to Robert 180. This idea appears in chapter 1 of Zhongyong (Doctrine find among them the seeds of all these Grecian Walpole, a circle led by Lord Bolingbroke of the Mean) by Zisi, the second Book of the Four productions and institutions.’ He specifies Epi- including figures such as Alexander Pope. They Books, the core of the Confucian canon. For an curean tranquillity as one example. continued to play upon the association between English translation of Zhongyong, see Wing-tsit 186. For the scholar-official group in China, gardens, virtuous Chinese scholar-officials and Chinese Chan, A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy (Prince- like poems and painting, were an aid to cultivate gardens to criticise the perceived corruption of ton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 98. This the emotions towards tranquillity. This basic con- the Walpolean government. See Robert Batche- idea was developed by later Confucianists and Neo- cept is evidenced in a number of expressions com- lor, ‘Concealing the Bounds: Imagining the Brit- Confucianists such as Mencius and Zhu Xi. See monly found in landscape treatises, garden records ish Nation through China’, in Felicity Nussbaum On-Cho Ng, ‘Is emotion (qing) the source of and poems: e.g. liqi 理氣 (‘regulating the vital (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, a Confucian antinomy?’ Journal of Chinese Philoso- energy’, see Zong Bing [375–443], ‘On Landscape MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), phy, 25/2, 1998, pp. 169–90. Painting’, in Classical Chinese Literature: An anthology pp. 79–92. ORCID Yue Zhuang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0026-5426

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Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes – Taylor & Francis

Published: Oct 2, 2021

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