INFORMATION TO USERS

This material was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the original submitted.

The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or patterns which may appear on this reproduction.

1. The sign or "target" for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting thru an image and duplicating adjacent pages to insure you complete continuity.

2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a large round black mark, it is an indication that the photographer suspected that the copy may have moved during exposure and thus cause a blurred image. You will find a good image of the page in the adjacent frame.

3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., was part of the material being photographed the photographer followed a definite method in "sectioning" the material. It is customary to begin photoing at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue photoing from left to right in equal sections with a small overlap. If necessary, sectioning is continued again — beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete.

4. The majority of users indicate that the textual content is of greatest value, however, a somewhat higher quality reproduction could be made from "photographs" if essential to the understanding of the dissertation. Silver prints of "photographs" may be ordered at additional charge by writing the Order Department, giving the catalog number, title, author and specific pages you wish reproduced.

5. PLEASE NOTE: Some pages may have indistinct print. Filmed as received.

Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. MASTERS THESIS M-6200

PFISTER, Harold Francis, 1947- ROBERT MORRIS, ISAAC WARE, AND JOHN GWYNN: STUDIES IN ENGLISH ARCHITECTURAL THEORY, 1715-1759.

University of Delaware, M.A., 1974 Fine Arts

Xerox University Microfilms,Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106

© 1974

HAROLD FRANCIS PFISTER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ftCSERT MORRIS , ISAAC WAK2, AI-'iD JOHN GWYivN:

STUDIES IN Eir.'iuT.SH /.KCrJlTSCTOllAL THSCA1,

AY

Harold Francis Pfisfrr

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of tea University o f D 3 laware in partial fulfillm ent of the requirements for the degr©? of Master of Arts in 3arly American Culture,.

May, 197-

Copyright ilavold Francis Pfistor 19?'4

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. R033RT MORRIS, ISAAC WARM, AND JOHN GWYNN:

STUDIES IN ENGLISH ARCHITECTURAL THEORY, 1715-1759

3Y

Harold Francis Pfister

Approved Professtu 4 in charge of thesis on behalf of the Advisory Committee

Approved Coorainatorydi the Pro ararn■r.nur iar±y .amerxcan Culture

Approved Dean of the College o Studies

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dr. George 3. Tatum has been a conscientious and astute

advisor during the course of preparation. The staff of the Henry

Francis DuPont Winterthur >:useun Library, and p a rticu la rly those in

the Rare Books Division, have been of cordial assistance throughout

the process of my research. Dr. Frank H. Sommer has given generously

of his time and friendly advice to help a neophyte in a suoject area

that has long been one aspect of his own research activities. I am

indebted to them all. It is a source of sincere regret that Professo

Rudolf l/ittkower1s posthumously published book, Palladio and English

Palladianism, was not available at the time of this writing. Its

contents would undoubtedly have been invaluable in clarifying many

of the issues raised by my own limited approach. But the learning

process is never completed; if the beginnings of knowledge in these

pages reflect to any degree the profound quality of the examples set

by V/ittkower, Sunmerson, Ackerman, and others, I am well content.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... iii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER OMR SHAFTBS3URY AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ARCHITECTURAL THOUGHT ...... 27

CHAPTER TWO TIE IDEA OF THE WHOLE...... 50

CHAPTER THREE 1 Hxi* x1 OROr* Or 1 xiTi I.D&A • iii* <1 HUSI.-vSi'*...... (\

CHAPTER FOUR THE A PPE3K SH 3IO N OF BEAUTY AMD THE EDUCATION OF T A S T E ...... 8 3

CHAPTER FIFE Tni. Cr I HE P j^ACi!......

CHAPTER SIX NATURAL AFFECTION: MORAL ARCHITECTURE OF THE INDIVIDUAL AMD SOCIETY., i '/A

CHAPTER SEVEN THE STATE OF THE ARTS IN BRITAIN ...... 1 5 3

CHAPTER EIGHT CjJA juLHC a TIC i^ A:mD CONCLUSIONS ...... 1 ^3

CHAPTER NINE REMARKS ON THEORY IN AMERICA ...... 1 7 6

A I I oT 01 >iOAKS GONoULI

-IV-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ORIGINS OF THE STUDY

The idea for this study grew out of a survey of architectural

literature available in America before the Revolution. The books to be

read, in many cases, were products of the first half of the eighteenth

century, a period long recognized by historians of English architecture

as being of particular importance for the character of its buildings and

numerous a rch itectu ra l publications."' P o lit ic a lly , the years 1 ? i ?60

are considered a period of Whig supremacy in England; architecturally,

they are frequently characterized as a "rule" or "dictatorship" of the

taste called neo-Palladianism, advocated most influentially by Richard

Boyle, Third Earl of Burlington (1 69A-I7 5 3), and instanced most clearly

in the large country houses built during the "extraordinary boom" that

followed the most important English architectural publications of

Taken togeth er, the houses and lite r a tu r e are ample evidence o f a wide­

spread popular interest in architectural matters, but Lord Burlington

is personally placed at the- center of the picture with considerable

justification.3 By virtue of his own designs, his purposeful employment

of protege artists and his deliberate, propagandistic patronage and pub­

lic a tio n o f the printed book, Burlingtonrs name has become synonymous

with English neo-palladianism .The dedication of James Ralph's A New

and Critical Review of the. Public Buildings. Statues and Ornaments. in

- 1-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and about London and Westminster (London: 173^)s indicates the position

held by Boyle:

You, my Lord, have, in a manner, a natural right to a ll aeknowldegements of this kind; ‘tis owing to you that taste and elegance are so much the fashion, and so well understood; your example has given a sanction to science; and even the vanity of being like you, has made as many corn/arts to its cause, as a thorough love, and veneration for its excellencies,5

Critical studies of the period have dealt more fully with the

evident quality of Burlington's influence than the particulars of his

personal historical character. The tendency ms been to generalise his

age and its architectural style into a monolithic whole, identified by

grim sobriety, humorless pomposity, and an abject, doctrinaire servility £ before the specter of the authority of "the ancients," Some scholars

suggest that this critical disapproval of neo-Paliadianism among late

nineteenth and earlier twentieth-century historians was less an abhor­

rence of austere formalism than "the antipathy of . . . proud profession-

a ls to a movement led by men not only amateurs but a r isto c r a tic , ' But,

even where reactions are more favorable, the generalizations are seldom

more s a tis fa c to r y , John Steegman's The Rule o f Taste from George I_ to

George V contains the following passage, almost every single implication

of which is misleading, as the body of this thesis w ill demonstrate:

The new century was to show a new spirit, the spirit of order; the reason, not the heart, was to govern man in a ll his works, for there had been enough exuberance and excitem ent; i t was time to check th a t now, to retard if possible the rate of production in order to heighten the standard of achievement. Man felt that he was begin­ ning to grow out of his Renaissance youth, and that it was time for him to begin collecting and arranging the experi­ ences of his adolescence, and from them to formulate

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. rules that night enable him to live in future as a qualified Citizen of the ’World .3

In an attempt to probe beneath the placid superficialities of such

generalizing criticism and history, this thesis consists of a series of

comparative analyses, each of which deals objectively with a major aspect

of architectural theory as published in the books written by the circle

of architects around Lord Burlington, The Sari himself is not known to

have written anything of theoretical significance for publication, but

Robert Morris (dates unknown), Isaac Ware (d. 1?66), and John Gvrynn

(d, 1?36), produced several titles of importance to such a study,^

Morris attempted "a literary and philosophical treatment of architec­

ture " which Reginald 31cmfield critically condemned “from either point

.. J A of view . , , {as}worthless, 1 John Summerson, le s s prejudiced, recog­

nizes Morris as "almost the only contemporary theoretical writer" and

"by no means a bigoted Palladium," in spite of his close relationship

to Lord Pembroke (one of the most important Pallaaian patrons) through 1 1 his architect-cousin, Roger Morris. While John Gloag prefers to stress

the conservative aspects of Morris 1 theory Emil Kaufmann describes him

as "gifted with an inventive mind," anticipating Soane in some of Ms

designs, and a neglected author of the radical reform of architecture

finally developed only at the century’s end in revolutionary France . 12

Ware, a p racticin g a rch itect and one o f the c lo s e s t o f Burlington’s

disciples in his field, described the purpose of his monumental A

Complete Body o f A rchitecture as being "to in stru ct rather than amuse;

in which nothing w ill be omitted that is elegant or great; but the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. principal regard w ill be shown to what is necessary and useful."^3

This comprehensive book is s till considered to contain "the quintes­

sence of the architectural doctrines embodied in a ll eighteenth-

century work of the conventional type.11^ Nevertheless, by 1756, Ware*

views bore more relation to architecture in the fifty years prior to

their publication than to future English building that would develop

under the influence of William Chambers * A Treatise on Civil Architec­

ture (1759). E ileen Karris has said th at Chambers' T reatise was not

patterned a fte r Ware’s e a r lie r book and John Summerson describ es i t

as inaugurating a new phase of architectural literature. ^

Finally, Gwynn is closely coupled with Morris, especially in

his earlier writings on harmony and emotion in landscape, and later in

a conservative nostalgia for the systematic doctrines of the earlier

years of the centuryHis anonymously published poem, The Art o f

Architecture. patterned after Horace's De Arte Poetlea, is a handy

cross-index in verse to the major tenets of Burlingtonian classicism.

The works o f M orris, Ware, and Gwynn, when ca refu lly read,

invoke a fourth author, whose thought and influence constitute the

keystone of this paper’s construction. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third

Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)» is briefly quoted by both Morris and

Gwynn on several occasions, but beyond the specific citations, it is

the hypothesis of the present work that Shaftesbury’s philosophy is a

source of the general orientation of theory in Morris, Gwynn, and (less

obviously) Ware, and an important aid to understanding the quality and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 5-

1 ? character of their views and work as a whole. ' The idea is not a new

one, but none of the authors who have noted the relationship between

Burlingtonian theory and Shaftesbury*s philosophy have set forth ex­

p licit, point-by-point, explanations or detailed investigations of the

relationships involved. B. Sprague Allen, for one, understood, the

special character of the "coincidence" by virtue of which an unpre­

cedented enthusiasm for the arts and seminal philosophy of moral aesthetics

jointly defined so much of early eighteenth-century English culture,

but the suggestiveness of her analysis is seriously limited by insis­

tent literary criticisms and culture-bound judgments of another era's

philosophy and architectural theory.^ Christopher Hussey has written

more recen tly and im p a rtia lly th a t Shaftesbury’s w r itin g s, which

"became to a large extent the social philosophy of the Whig party,"

provide "an indispensable clue to understanding" the quality of the

transitions, social and aesthetic, which underlie the Burlingtonian 1 b phenomenon. 7

THE QUESTION OF BOOKS

My topic, then, is one of books and ideas. But the study is not

bibliographic, and its character involves limitations and problems which

are perhaps best explained at the outset. The development and exporta­

tion of Burlingtonian Palladianism from London via books is a fact re­

peatedly acknowledged in studies of English and American architectural

history. To take a representative example, Fiske Kimball wrote about

the "academic" s ty le th a t

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the means o f i t 3 ad opt 3. on, as any widespread matter, and of its subsequent transformations, were the same in both the [colonies and provincial Englanoj— the books, so characteristic of the period 5 which made its forms universally accessible to inte 113,gent work- men and even laymen,

Although books had been used since Alberti*s De_ Rs Aediflcatorla (1st

ed., 1485) to propagate the principles of Renaissance and Mannerist

art and are justifiably identified as critical to the entire history of

the Renaissance and Mannerist traditions in architecture, there is a

particular potency to their content as well as the density of their

numbers in the eighteenth century , 21 Martin Briggs even suggests that

the number of books written by architects to promote their own careers

and profitably capitalize on the general public interest in the field is

"on the whole, the most remarkable feature of this somewhat pedantic

p eriod . " 22

The circumstances and conditions of its production must frustrate

the over-ambitious analyst who is determined to bring order and clarity

to this extraordinary literature. Besides its bulk, its content is fre­

quently either anecdotal or repetitive. The sources of ideas and atti­

tudes are only occasionally acknowledged. Pretentions to comprehensive

and definitive status are all too often served only by great length or

vehemence of expression. Lawrence Lipking brilliantly considers the

problems of eighteenth-century literature on the arts and, among other

invaluable conclusions, notes the unhappy effect on authors of the di­

versity and divergences among the period's paying audiences:

But whether the strain of speaking to mixed audiences and defending mixed values appears on the surface or in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. underlying tensions, it leaves its trace on every work. The problematical forms of the first histories of the arts tell their own sory: they stretched and buckled with the fatigue of responding to too many demands. ^

Nevertheless# it is important to und.ersts.nd these books# what­

ever audiences they found more than two hundred years ago, because

they are direct impulses across that span of time from a great center of

architectural activity and achievement. If they are more general and

confusing, as a group, than the unpublished manuscripts of a major

architect of the day might be, they may be that much more valuable an

index to the inevitable m ultiplicity and internal workings of the broad-

er culture. The study of the books, for instance, is important to an

understanding of the "pressure" of a "new architectural discipline" that

separated the traditional craftsmen and increasingly professionalized

architects; paradoxically, as the instruments of orthodox doctrine (the

aristocrat and professional's domain) books on architecture were also

the instruments of a defensive self-improvement among provincial workers

who were w illing and able to adapt in order to survive beyond the mid- pa point of the century. In addition, the dominance of architectural

literature may well have had a strong influence on the ultimate physical

character or artistic quality of structures raised from its pages. Sir

Roger Pratt gave early warning to those who imagined that satisfactory

architecture was merely a matter of lines on paper, and modem scholars

have suggested that the successful spread of Palladianism via books de­

pended on crucial affinities in quality between the original style and A (f the two-dimensional illustrations which popularized it.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 8 -

The study of architectural literature , as opposed to extant

monuments or documents which can share at least the coherence of a single

architect's biography, is further complicated by the selection of theo­

retical content for emphasis. (See below, "The Question of Theory.")

All in a ll, the advice of the nineteenth-century architect, Louis H.

Sullivan might have been enough to prevent the attempt to know, and,

beyond knowing, to understand this field:

. . „ books, generally speaking, are composed mainly of sophistries, assumptions, borrowings, stealings, inadequate representations or positive perversions of truth{by author^) too frequently . . . posing, masquerading or ambuscading.

But nothing is gained by a passive acceptance of the traditional con­

demnation o f these works as crude, immature or u n in terestin g , and once

again Lipkin's insight is encouraging:

. . „ eighteenth-century critics of the arts learned a better conception of maturity, a conception based hot upon rejecting the past but upon discovering its continuity with the present. Exploring history, they found their own inheritance — as we do, exploring them. The major texts have left a legacy that can be appre­ ciated only when we recollect that before their time no standards existed by which to measure them.2?

THE QUESTION OF THEORY

At first glance, it might seem that the Burlingtcnians produced

no real architectural theory, especially if one's view is limited to

pattern books or even Burlington's own handsome publication, Fabbriche

antiche (1728) and comparable collections by Ware, Morris, William Kent,

and others. Summerson is willing to conclude that although the archi­

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 9-

tecture .was dominated by intellectual values* "the literature of the pQ Palladian movement produced no treatise of any depth or importance.

Such a judgment is only defensible if the individual books are considered

out of context, i.e . in isolation from the importance of Shaftesbury, and

with tacit agreement on physically demonstrable uses as the criteria of

importance.

Summerson is too fine an architectural scholar to imply, however,

that the mediocrity of the literature vitiates the interest or signifi­

cance of the questions involved in an investigation of theoretical

precincts. Nor does he leave such questions wholly unanswered:

Why, and under what inspiration, did these people seek so energetically the diversion of English taste from the French, Dutch, and Baroque models o f 'Wren, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh and Archer? The motive probably has some connexion with that search for absolutes with which the French Academy had for many years been concerned and which had given rise to much painful argument between "ancients" and "moderns" . . . Those quarrels, by 1710, had become qu iescen t in France, but the search for absolutes was open to anybody to resume and in England it had some flavour of novelty. . . . More­ over, the dawning philosophy o f Whiggism was extremely propitious to a thesis which embraced, at one and the same time, a devotion to antiquity, a flexibility authorized jointly by Palladio and common sense, and a strong national loyalty in the figure of Inigo Jones.

The importance of assessing and evaluating the intentions and aspira­

tions which bring into being an individual architectural monument,

or a series of related monuments, must be obvious. The approach is

doubly valid ’whenever an artist works with specific meanings, in order

to communicate a general point of view, Wittkower has hinted broadly

at this kind of richness beneath the surface of Burlington's own work:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 10-

» o . something happened here which is as important today as it ever was — and w ill be so long as archi­ tects have their own problems and ours to solve. Burlington approached his task not from a purely pragmatic point of view, but brought to bear upon it the convictions of his life, his ideals and be­ liefs — in short? everything he stood for, and all he most valued in l i f e .30

The search for a core of meaning, as illustrated by the above-

quoted passages, makes possible the brilliant sort of analysis employed

by Nikolaus Pevsner in his book. The Enrrlishness of English Art, With a

highly personal synthesis, Pevsner can deepen our perception and enjoy­

ment of English art by positing the existence of a national "disposition

in favour of narrative , , . fwhichjis evocative, not strictly aesthetic"

in effect.^ Joseph Rykwert's extensive essay, On Adam1s House in

Paradise, makes the related point of highly effective symbolism in the

several continental as well as English instances of theory about the

first human shelter, a topic never more important than during the

eighteenth century. Rykwert accepts the distinction of a paleontologist

between the conceptual as opposed to physical differences that set apart

human dwelling places from animal habitations, concluding:

It is the difference of conception, the attachment of meaning to his task, that distinguishes man's first attempts in that direction from those of the instinctually driven beasts.32

Admittedly, it is not always easy or wise to separate the values

of intention from the character of form. Each must be understood in the

light of the other, their relationship being balanced as delicately as

possible. Does Wittkower's analysis of the "new meaning" of Italian

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 11-

formal motives in the unprecedented contexts of Burlingtonian design

necessarily affect our evaluation of Ware’s theory? I believe so. No

better procedural model exists than Kaufnann's impressive studies of

architectural form, many of the most salient points of which, are fashion­

ed and emphasised in the raking lights of the early century's architec­

tu r a l th e o r ie s .33

The questions, however, remain: wa 3 there a theory of Burlington-

ian-Palladianism and of what importance was it to those who bore respon­

s i b i l i t y for the movement as we know it? The answers l i e in the l i t e r ­

ature as well as the buildings. Sir Henry Wotton's Tha_ Elements of

Architecture (162*0, one of the first books in English to deal with the

theory of regular rules in the art, met a laconic response from John

Chamberlain:

He hath set out lately a book of architecture which I have not leisure to read but hear it reasonably commended, though a t f i r s t I thought he had busied himself to little purpose to build castles in the a i r . 3^

Although Wotton is as frequently pragmatic as theoretical and Chamberlain's

notable spirit of practicality would persist to flower in dozens of

pattem-books and instructional manuals, the eighteenth century is still

considered to have "teemed with discussion of artistic theories."33

Theory had a definite role to play in the elevation of architecture

from craft sk ill to art, an important feature of the ambitions of Inigo

Jones in the seventeenth century and his achievements as appreciated

by the Burlingtonians.3^ In fact, Jones himself probably intended to

write a treatise.3?

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 12-

Stutchbury overstates the case with the assertion that "the

appeal of the cult of Palladio to the Protestant Whig majority . . .

depended upon the P latonic b a sis o f Palladian dogma," but Summerson, who

denies the existence of an important or cogent corpus of theory, is

willing to speculate that one of Morris* illustrations in the Defense

of Ancient Architecture ( 1728) became an important prototype fo r im ita­

tion largely because it "was given a philosophical exegesis" in the

accompanying text. When consideration is extended to include the

Earl of Shaftesbury, the importance of theory or philosophy in the his­

tory of the neo-Palladian style becomes inescapaole. A recent critic

has written of this point:

According to Shaftesbury, the creative mind grasps a p attern , a coherent "whole" which gives meaning to the p a rticu lar fa c ts . Facts have no meaning in is o la tio n , only in relation. "Facts unably related, though with the greates sincerity and good faith, may prove the worst so rt o f d e c e it; and mere l i e s , ju d icio u sly composed, can teach us the truth of things beyond any other manner.39

It thus appears that Shaftesbury himself, ancljthcse most influenced by

his thought, would advise us to survey the history of their age with

full respect for the weight and nature of its philosophies. Following

that advice, we can co-ordinate Brett's comprehensive analysis of the

Earl's philosophy with Uphaus' conclusion:

. . . to invoke such terminology as "neo~classic" or "pre-Romantic" and rest assured with these catagories cripples Shaftesbury's ideas. The contrary strands are too evident. At best we may conclude he is either both . . . or neither. . . . Shaftesbury's . . . lasting concern is with creation, or totality of experience . ^ 0

We may go further from the base of theory, beyond quotations or formal

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 13-

literary and architectural analyses to a genuine understanding of the

building style dubbed by Fiske Kimball as "romantic classicism"; we may

re-compute orthodox and time-honored commonplaces of architectural history

employing this new factor in a longer, more complex equation to achieve |iii a result of finer precision . 4,1

NOTES ON METHOD

Having explained the origin and outlined the scope of this study,

it remains to complete this introductory section with a few voids on the

assumptions that underlie its methods. The difficult quality of the

primary literature and the vast extent of potential secondary resources

present a real challenge. Lipking describes the difficulties very well:

The works that ordered the arts, works themselves so uncertain in method, ra ise problems o f method to an acute degree. They do not offer complete structures of thought so much as a vast indeterminate conversation, and their opinions, often provoked by enemies or borrowed from friends, resist systematic formulation. Works so irregular, so idiosyncratic, challenge the h isto ria n o f id eas to find a clea r way o f h is own. S h a ll he look for patterns of history, or for the truth about particular men? Shall he trace the progress of ideas from age to age and work to work, or shall he mark the peculiar integrity of each work in its own time and i t s own termsJ ^ 2

This thesis has as its purpose the suggestion of a previously unrecog­

nized or underestimated pattern in the history of ideas, with attention

focused on a restricted time-period, but with frequent notice of re­

lationships over an extended time-period. The risk of distorting an

idea by removing it from an original context for purposes of comparison

in tentative, didactic constructions is acknowledged. J The value o f the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 14-

results w ill be presumed sufficient to justify the r3.sk.

The processes involved are by no means in f a llib le . On the con­

trary, there exists a double-edged potential of error: to imagine that

the presence of a book in a documented library, for instance, consti­

tutes incontrovertible evidence of its usage, let alone effective in­

fluence, or similarly to insist that vague likenesses between published

designs and architectural details in a particular building can reason­

ably be pumped up into "explanations" of alleged sources, is to miss the

mark. In certain cases, the matching of motives in objects and publish­

ed sources may illuminate investigations tangential to the direct analy­

sis of the actual forms.^ In other cases, the benefits remain doubt­

ful. A critic of the traditional comparative appx-oach writes:

But the dangers in such a method are enormous; it often more beclouds the origin and nature of a work of art than clarifies it. By reducing the role of the creative artist to that of a sort of mechanical adding machine, and the art work to an arithmetical sum . . . this whole system of art history has gone far to produce th at o fte n complete failure to understand the artist as creator which so frequently characterizes the scholar, the connoisseur, and the museum curator. Of course no artist works in a vacuum, campletely inde­ pendent o f predecessors and contemporaries. But in a consideration of an artist’s work what is truly im­ portant is not its similarity to sources or prototypes, but its difference from them. There is another danger latent in trie usual method. Certain forms and ways of designing are, as it were, current and generally accepted words in the language of art at any given time. They are known to every p r a c titio n e r , and used by each as he pleases. They exist in book illustrations of the time also. Yet, because they are shown in the books, one can scarcely call the book illustrations their "sources"; it is perhaps the other way around.

In the tracing of intellectual patterns, problems of analysis similar

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 15-

to those of dealing with formal motives are -undeniably encountered*

Ernst Gombrich and George Kubler have studied the h isto r ia n 's

dilemma, and my approach is designed to benefit from their profound

learn in g. From Gombrich I have noted th at the f a lla c ie s o f a G eistee -

geschichte do not prove or disprove the reality of "such a thing as a

mental climate, a pervasive attitude in periods or societies," and.that

one must legitimately ask "in each individual case how far a stylistic

change may be used as an index to changed psychological attitudes, and

what exactly such a correlation would have to imply. While no

culture may be napped in its entirety, no element of a culture may be

f u lly understood in is o la tio n from a l l others; Gombrich defined the

need for history beyond the economic and political, a definition and

exploration of "clusters of cultural resonances" which echo through

tim ec^ Kubler has suggested that the artist's achievement is necessar­

ily linked to "the shape of time1' prior to its formulation, and can be

understood, therefore, only in a pattern of sequence (which is not to

be confused with simplistic systems of origins and sources, or direct

influential causes and inescapable effects):

. . . the artist is not a free agent obeying only his free w i l l . His situ a tio n i s r ig id ly bound by a chain of prior events. The conditions imposed by these prior events require of him either that he follow obediently in the path of tradition, or that he rebel against the tradition. In either case, bis decision is not a free one: it is dictated by prior events of which he senses only dimly and indirectly the overpowering urgency, and by his own congenital peculiarities of temperament.'

Establishing chronological order is not enough, for absolute chronology merely arranges the moments of time in their own sidereal succession. The perceptual problem

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 16.

confronting the historian has always been to find the beginning and the end of threads of happening.^

Gombrich's term is cultural resonances; Kubler speaks of "cul­

tural bundles" which are "variegated fibrous lengths of happening" (e.g.

the happening o f a ''prime object" and the subsequent r ep lic a tio n s o f i t s

form through a given period). The bundling together of the strands of

simultaneous occurrences into a cultural whole of some coherence is as

much a matter of chance as is the length of each fibre* and the bundles

are not to be understood purely through the material evidence of their

existence (i.e. the object), nor as a question of meaning divorced from

such evidence.' Rather, says Kubler;

The task of the present generation is to construct a history of things that w ill do justice both to meaning and being, both to the plan and to the fulness of ex­ istence, both to the scheme and to the thing. This purpose raises the familiar existential dilemma between meaning and being. We are discovering little by little a l l over again th at what a thing means i s not more important than what it is, that expression and form are equivalent challenges to the historian; and that to neglect either meaning or being, either essence or existence, deforms our comprehension of both.

D escribing the in t e lle c t u a l d ifferen ces between Bentham and

Coleridge, Basil VJilley contrasts the questions "is it true" and "what

is the meaning of it?"5° I shall deal with several questions that have

to do with meaning, conscientiously formulated and pursued toward

solutions with what Bernard Bailyn has called the historian's instinct

that the elements of (the historian's)world might not have existed at a ll for others, might in fact have been inconceivable to them, and-that the real task is to describe the dawning of ideas and the creation of forms — surprising, strange, and awkward then, however familiar

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 17-

they m y have become sin ce ~ in response to the changing of circumstance .51

. This study is conceived, therefore, as a response to a pervasive

orientation toward object history and biographical exposition, particu­

larly among historians of American architecture, as well as the generali­

ties of traditional analysis which have gradually deadened our capacity

for surprise and thus our curiosity in the on-going investigation of

Anglo-American architectural history. Voltaire has offered the brief,

but pertinent, advice:

A historian has many duties. Allow me to remind you here of two which are of some importance. The first is not to slander; the second is not to b o r e . 52

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 18 -

NOTES

"'See Helen Park, A List of Architectural Books Available in America Before the RevolutiorTTLos Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, Inc,, 1973), for specific data. The Park list, which first appeared in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 20, No. 3 (October, 19ST77115-30* is a basic and invaluable reference tool, especially in its revised and expanded form.

^John Summerson, A rchitecture in B rita in , 1520-1830 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958), p. 13?. Note that Summerson is willing to go so far as to say that "the(Burlingtonian influence}, , . became impressed on the whole output of English building." For the building boom statis­ tics and suggestions as to the boom's relationship to political and pub­ lis h in g h isto ry see John Summerson, "The C la ssica l Countxy House in Eighteenth-Century England," .Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, CV'I (July, 1959), 539-87.

^Referring collectively to aristocratic amateurs and then the general public, Martin S. Briggs says that "they encouraged research into the monuments of antiquity and published the results at their own cost, , . . hardly any architect of the eighteenth century escaped the attacks of some bitter satirist attached to a rival faction. At that period it could never be said that architecture was not a matter of general interest," See The Architect in History (Oxford; Oxford Unver- sity Press, 1927), pp. 293-9. Burlington himself is no longer thought to have been respon sib le for Campbell* s Vitruvius Britannicus or L eoni's edition of Palladio, both of which probably stimulated and encouraged his own inter-est and involvement with architecture.

^"lt would be difficult to over-emphasize Burlington’s role as an arbiter of eighteenth-century architectural fashion." Frank L, Jenkins, A rch itect and Patron (London: Oxford U niversity P ress, 19^1), p. 72, The classic proof of Burlington’s personal architectural activi­ ties and significance, to date, is Fiske Kimball, "Burlington Architec- tus," The Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, XXXIV, No. 20*1 October, 192777*675-93; and XXXV, Ho. T \HovemberV T92?7, 1^-16, The late Rudolf Wittkower was preparing a biography of Boyle at the time of his death. That work, undoubtedly, would clarify the Earl’s status vis-a-vis the embryonic concepts of architectural professionalism in the early eighteenth century. For a helpful general study of the period’s extraordinary patronage, see James Lees-Kilne, The Saris of Creation (New York: London House & Maxwell, 19&3).

^Ralph, A Hew and Critical Review of the Public Buildings. Statu e s , and Ornaments. in and about London and Westminster (London: v m 7 the Dedication.

^3. Sprague Allen, Tides in English Taste. 1619-1800 (New York: Rowman and L ittlefield, Inc., 19 8 9}'* pp. 69-70. I do not mean to imply,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 19-

however, that one should overlook or minimize the spirit of satire as an important feature of the age, as well.

^Howard E. Stutchbury, The Architecture of Colen Campbell (Cambridge j Harvard U niversity Pres sT 'T ^ tTT p. xv.

®John Steegman, The Rule o f Taste (London: MacMillan and Co,, Ltd,, 1952), p. 2.

^Morris wrote: An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture (1728); Lectures on Architecture (1736); The Modern Eu.ilderTs Assistant (1747); Rural Archi tectnre*T l 750); The Architectural Remembrancer (1751)» Architecture Improved (1755)* and Select Architecture Tl755)» of which the first two are most important for theory. Ware's publications in­ cluded : A Complete Body of Architecture, traditionally cataloged with a first edition (possibly incomplete) of c. 17352 and a b etter known second edition of 175&* but increasingly accepted by authorities such as Helen Park and Rudolf Wittkower as f i r s t published in 1756; The Plans, elevations, chimney-pieces, and ceilings of Houghton . . . (1735); and Designs o f Inigo Jones and Others*TT735?)« o f which only the f i r s t con­ cerns theory. Ware also produced the most scrupulous translation of Palladio's Qrtatt.ro Libri at Burlington's request in 1733. Gwynn wrote The Art of Architecture (1742) anonymously according to most authorities, but David Foxon, in th e catalog o f Harvax-d U n iv ersity 's Houghton L ibrary, attributes it to Robert Morris without explanation, Gwynn also wrote An Essay on Design (1749), and London and 'Westminster Improved (1?66). In addition, a book titled An Essay upon Harmony, as it relates chiefly to situation and building (1734?") has been ascribed in a 1739 edition to Morris by some readers but to Gwynn by others. See below, "The Genius o f th e Place," In c ita tio n s and prose quotations s p e llin g and punctu­ ations have been modernized for the reader's convenience.

"Reginald Blomfield, A History of Renaissance Architecture in England. 1500-1300 (London: George B ell and Sons, 1897), p. 315.

^Summerson, Architecture in Britain, pp. 208 and 209.

^John Gloag, The English Tradition in Architecture (New York: Barnes & Noble, I n c ., 19b3T, p .’" 104; and Emil Kaufmann, A rchitecture, in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard U niversity P ress, 1955), PP. 22 and 2 8.

Complete Body of Architecture (London: 1768), A ll subse­ quent reference and quotations are taken from the 1768 edition, availa­ ble in a Gregg International Publishers 1971 reprint edition.

"*\aufmann» p. 9.

"l^Eileen Harris, "The Treatise on Civil Architecture," Sir William Chambers. Knight of the Polar Star, by John Harris (University

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 20-

Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970), p. 130* and Suimnerson, A rchitecture in 3 r lta in . p, 210.

^Allen, p. 89. Jenkins, on p. 77 of Architect and Patron, says that Gwynn was "essentially a conservative; looking back regretfully to the hey-day of the Palladians, he found, for instance, the new-fangled ideas of Robert Adam . . » quite incomprehensible." Gwynn*s "con­ servatism" is evident in his use of Jonathan Richardson*s thought; see below, "The State of the Arts in Britain,"

^ ?See, for instance, Robert Morris, Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture, p, 2.6 , where the "late author" quoted is Shaftesbury, or GwynnTs Essay on Design, pp. iii»iv and iv. See also the title-sheet of the Essay upon Harmony for direct and acknowledged quotation from Shaftesbury8"s well-known Characteristics (1711). Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning Design and A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Choice of Hercules*'Tboth written c. 1712 but not published in England until 17*32 and 1713, respectively) are other important sources for his aesthetics; see Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters. Ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity P ress, T9147I

l 8A llen , pp. 84-, 8 0, 8 8, and. 90. On p. 90, Allen concludes: "Surely it was not by chance that the popularity of Shaftesbury's ideas was contemporaneous with an interest in architecture, gardening, painting, and sculpture such as had never before been known in England. , . .^Shaftesbury*sjlofty conception of taste . . . gave the arts a new dignity, sanctioned their pursuit with greater seriousness, attach­ ed a sp ir itu a l v a lid ity to the enjoyment o f harmony, proportion, and symmetry, and increased the prestige of the virtuoso. On the other hand, the preoccupation with the arts, especially with classic archi­ tectu re where problems o f symmetry and proportion were m atters o f in ­ cessant concern, undoubtedly fostered, in turn, an interest in Shaftes­ bury's philosophy, aided in the sympathetic interpretation of his ideas, and gave them a wider currency than they would have otherwise secured."

^ 9"The career of William Kent and the popularity of Palladian arch itectu re become much more in t e llig ib le when seen as r e fle c tio n s o f Shaftesbury's romantic classicism in the field of philosophy." Christo­ pher Hussey, "introduction," The Work of Vfilliam Kent, by Margaret Jourdain (London: Country L ife Limited, 19^§7, pp. TS-17. The idea i s also noted in Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (New York: Random House, 1965)7 p p 7142-3, and Kerry Downes, Hawksmoor (London: A. Zwemmer L td ., 19&9), PP. 33 and. 36 .

2®Fiske Kimball, "Architecture in the History of the Colonies and of the Republic," The American Historical Review. XXVII (October, 1921, to Ju ly, 1922), 55. See a lso John Summerson, Georgian London (New York: Praeger P u blishers, 19&2), pp. 72-3.

21For lite r a tu r e as a means o f imposing an "aristocratic"

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 21-

Renaissance style on less artificial vernacular expressions in art, see Frank Jenkins, Architect and Patron, pp. 9-10, and W.E. Crompton * "The Renaissance as an Aristocratic Expression," The Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. 32 (December, 192^-), 66-9. On the history of the architectural books as a genre, Ernest Allen Connally's Printed Books on Architecture (University of Illin ois Press: 19b0)r. is a helpful essay. On p. 1, Connally says: "The history of the printed book on architecture from its origins, in Italy of the late fifteenth century, down to the first American publications, late in the eighteenth century, corresponds to the classical tradition in architecture. Indeed the books of these three centuries are the literature supporting that tradition,"

223riggs, The Architect in History, p. 321.

^-^Lawrence Linking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 18-19.

2i*See H.M. Colvin, A Biogratdilcal Dictionary of English Archi­ t e c t s . 1660-18^-0 (Cambridge: Harvard U niversity P ress, 195^)* PP. 8 -9 .

2-5fioger Pratt, The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt, Ed. R.T. Gunther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 23-4-, and James S. Ackerman, Palladio (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 73.

2^Louis H. Sullivan, "The Toung Man in Architecture," (1900)* Testament of Stone. Ed. Maurice English (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1963 ) , p. 87.

^Lipking, p. 20.

^ Architecture in Britain, p. 208.

2^Ibid. « p. 189. In the same context, Summerson shows an aware­ ness that the value of a philosophy or style, while not necessarily apparent to subsequent ages, may well be illustrative of clustered cul­ tural factors deserving of careful scrutiny. In reference to the Pal­ ladian house-type, on p. 191, he writes: 11. . . i t was successful be­ cause it was exactly suited ‘to the temper of the age. To us now it may seem pompous and a r t i f i c i a l , but to the Whig mind o f the 1720*s i t was a good expression of that moderation, that resistance to 1 fancy and 'enthusiasm1, that balanced combination of the useful and the beautiful, of prosperity and good breeding which was its id eal."

30Rudoif Wittkower, "Burlington and His Work in York," Studies in Architectural History. Ed. William A. Singleton (London: St. Anthony's Press," 195^), pp.”64-6.

31Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (London: The Architectural Press, 195°), p. 29. Others of Pevsner s distilled

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ••22**

essences of Englistaess, (moderation or compromise, the additive ap­ proach to space, illogicality, a smug chauvinism or disinterest in 'foreign" ways, etc.) could be soundly illustrated by extensive excerpts from the neo-Palladian literature.

32Joseph Rykwert, On Adam*s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural HistoryTNew York: The Museum of Modern A rt, 1972 ), p. 22. Explaining the meaning of the hut, Rykwert says: ". . .1 must postulate a house for Adam in Paradise Not as a shelter against the weather, but as a volume which he could interpret in terms of his own body and which yet was an exposition of the paradisal plan, and therefore established him at the center of it," (p. 90). The eighteenth-century discussions may, in fact, be focused within the continuity of such a concern. "Eighteenth century writers, so exorcised about the origins of speech, had seen the origin of human achievement either in a peculiar kind of inference from the data of experience or, sometimes, as the by-product of the shock of terror, 'which led them to discuss, when they came to discuss' the higher stages of civilizationj what was positive and necessary, what arbitrary and capricious: what is implied in following nature and/or reason, and how far these two were continuous. These ideas transformed ancient ideas , ' 1 (p. 191).

33see above, note 1 2 , for the distinction proposed between Robert Morris' theory and designs; also Architecture in the Age of Reason, p. 13, for tho non-Palladian quality of some of Burlington's own work.

^Letter, John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, April 10, 162 ^, quoted by Frederick Hard, ed., in "introduction," The Elements of Architecture (1 6 2 4) by S ir Henry Wotton (C h a r lo ttesv ille : The University of Virginia Press, 19^3), P. xlvi.

3-7john IV. Draper, "Eighteenth Century English Aesthetics: A Bibliography, " Anglistische Forschungsn (Heidelberg, 1931), P» 5. Alberti's qualifications of the architect had included "thought and invention" as well as "a thorough insight into the noblest and most curious Sciences." See The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti in Ten Books. Trans. James L eoniT lonaon: 1 ?2&), the Preface. W ittkower's assessment of Inigo Jones pivots on the importance of theory to that architect's work. He says: "l am convinced . . . thatQones^inte1- lectual pursuits and his work as an architect are indivisible"; "£Jones;J metaphysical belief (in the universal efficacy of numbers], I submit, accounts for the seriousness and vitality of his classicism." "Inigo Jones, Architect and Man of Letters," The Journal of the Royal Insti­ tute of British Architects. LX (January, 1953)T 83 and 88. In John Evelyn's' Account of Architects and Architecture, appended to his translation (1st ed., Tc 6h) of Roland Preart's A Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern . . . (1723 ed.) the Westminster Chapel of Heray VII is contrasted to Jones Whitehall Banqueting House with the question, "which of the two manners strikes the understanding as well

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -2 3 .

as the eya with more majesty, and solemn greatness ..." (p. 1 0 , my emphasis).

3^Colvin, p. 11, and Jenkins, pp. 40-1.

3?Jenkins, p. 43.

38stutchbury, The Architecture o f Col en Campbell, pp. 8-9 ( and Summerson, "The C la ssic a l Country House . . . -ir p. 573. I t i s not in ­ evitable, after all, that the Platonic character of Palladian design was appreciated even in sixteenth-century Vicenza as fully as by so distinguished a scholar as Vfittkower.

39shaftesbury as quoted by Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury*s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1967)T~P. 42. For a survey of similar views on the philosophy of history during the eighteenth century see Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven and London: Tale University Press, 1932), Chapter III, "The New History: Philosophy Teaching by Example." Par­ ticularly effective are the following lines that Becker quotes from Grimm (p. 91), written nearer mid-century than Shaftesbury 1s: "All the weight of our historians consists in a dull and pedantic discussion of facts which are commonly as unimportant as they are uncertain and dis­ puted, and a ll their talent in refuting each other with a certain show of success. . . . History must be written by philosophers, whatever our pedants say."

^Robert W. Uphaus, "Shaftesbury on Art: Trie Rhapsodic Aesthetic," The Journal o f A esth etics and Art C riticism , XXVII, No. 3 (Spring, 19&?)» 347. Brett writes! IT0nce the supremacy of reason was questioned, it became inevitable that thought should oscillate uneasily between the claims of the reason and the emotions. Shaftesbury's philosophy was an attempt to give due satisfaction to man's emotional needs while ac­ knowledging the sovereignty of reason. . . . Shaftesbury had the vision of a society In which artistic enterprise and political endeavour would encourage and strengthen each other in devotion to a common purpose; in which 'manners* and ‘taste* would be more than conventional sh ib b oleth s, or personal p reju d ices, and would issu e from a love o f beauty and good­ n ess. He b elieved th a t emotion could liv e in f r u it f u l and happy mar- liage with reason." The Third Sari of Shaftesbury: A Study of Eigh­ teen th Century L ite ray/’ Theory (London: Hutchinson House, 1951), PP. 222- 3.

^ 1 have in mind the follow ing passages from Kimball and Hussey: "Romantic c la ssic ism , lik e romantic medievalism, had begun w ith an in ­ ner contradiction. The deep current of the romantic movement in art was a demand for artistic creation, which in this connection was first de­ manded and best expressed, just before the prophetic works, by Shaftes­ bury, whose whole thought foreshadows the romantic trend: To copy what has gone before can be o f no use. . . . To work o r ig in a lly , and in a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -24-

manner create each time anew, must be a matter of pressing weight . 1 Yet the superficial manifestation of the movement in architecture was derivative of the historical interest called forth by the romantic s p ir it , and was thus embodied in more and more accurate copies o f the antique as the antique became b etter known through h is to r ic a l and arch eological research." Fiske Kimball, "Romantic C lassicism in Arch­ itecture," Gazette des Beaux Arts. 25 (February, 1944), 112-13. "But if the classical revival by Burlington* s Palladians was thus in­ spired by Shaftesbury's aesthetic moralising, then the whole basis of eighteenth-century classical architecture is shown to be fundamentally sentimental. Nowadays classical implies the antithesis of romantic; a rational, logical, finite conception, founded, as regards architecture, on subtle but ascertained and definite mathematical ratios. Yet to Shaftesbury, and no less, apparently, to the Burlingtonians, classical signified mainly the accurate reproduction of those buildings, or parts of buildings, that dated undoubtedly from Roman times, and which con­ sequently were associated with the scenes and ideas of classical an­ tiquity. It was the sentiment and virtues associated with classical architecture, more than its objective formal qualities, that aroused their enthusiasm. . . . English Palladian classicism was essentially associative, subjective, in fact, Ruskinian romanticism in reverse." Christopher Hussey, "introduction," The 'fork of William Kent, p. 20, Hussey's point is slightly exaggerated. The effect of Shaftesbury's influence can hardly have been in associations so specific and is more likely to be seen in a general quality of enthusiasm inextricably in­ volved in the celebration of rationality. Kimball's quotation should be sufficient to qualify Hussey's assumption about "accurate repro­ duction" for the present. The basic conclusion, however, that senti­ ment is inevitably present in the finest architecture of the Augustan age in Britain, is sound.

42Lipking, P» 5. See also Jerome Stolnitz, "On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modem Aesthetic Theory," Philosophical Quarterly. XI (April, 19°1), 100, on the rambling, discursive, and admittedly unsystematic nature of Shaftesbury's work "for which critical analysis is impertinent."

forceful statement of the dangers inherent in the approach I have taken is provided by "waiter J. Hippie, The Beautiful. The Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: The Southern Illinois University Press, 195?7, p. 4: "A more subtle undermining of the logical integrity of texts results, it seems to me, from the almost universal practice of treating a 'topic' as it appears in one or several authors. 'When a writer's pronouncements on the picturesque, or the use of figurative language, or the cultiva­ tion of taste, or the relation of judgment to genius (or whatever it may be) are picked out of his books and.ranged alongside the pronounce­ ments of his predecessors and successors, not only is the precise meaning lost, but the opinions usually come to seem shallow and w itless. One comes away from a r t ic le s or books about w riters who were, in th e ir

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ■25-

day, reckoned as impressive thinkers convinced that tous les hommes sont fous. The opinions even of Aristotle and Hume, so reported, are such as any sophomore would r e je c t w ith scorn. The great d ifferen ce between the judgments of a good writer and those of everyman lies in the circumstance that in one case the opinions are supported by ar­ guments and have a systematic connection with opinions on other topics. The philosophic value of a thought is a function of its context, and can be estimated only in its context." Hippie must allow that, aside from qualitative evaluations of particular philosophies as a whole, the juxtaposition of ideas produced by minis of different natures and cultures is not without value. This study is meant to suggest pre­ cisely by means of such juxtapositions the context necessary for a morer accurate assessment of the philosophies and theories of Morris, Ware, and Gwynn. It should further be noted that the ‘''topics" around which the paper is structured emerged from the literature quite natur­ ally as the recurrent themes which were developed independently by the authors; they are not arbitrary or artificial concepts read, into the most convenient passages.

^■*See, for instance, Charles Hummel, "The Influences of English Design Books upon the Philadelphia Cabinetmaker, 1760-1780," M.A. Thesis University of Delaware 1955. where the author's subject is a specifically imitative aspect of the history of decorative arts, or Fiske Kimball, "The Colonial Amateurs and Their Models: Peter Harrison," Architecture., LEII (June, 192o), 155-60, and LEV (Ju ly, 1926), 185-9, where the probable use of design books is introduced to discredit the theories of Harrison's having been trained in England. The inventory of Harrison's design books is to be found in Carl Bridenbaugh, Peter Harrison, First American Architect. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), PP. 103-70.

^Talbot Hamlin, Review of Mr. Samuel Mclntire . . , by Fiske Kimball, Art Bulletin, XXIII, No. 1 (March, 1941), 89. Kimball's use of the technique which Hamlin questions is almost obsessive. For other valid cautions on .the haphazard tracing of influences via literature, see Becker, The Heavenly City, pp. 72-3, and Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, p. 18 o .

46srnst Gombrich, Review of The Social History of Art by Arnold Hauser, The Art Bulletin, XXXV, No. 1 (1953)»~P« 32.

^George Kubler, The Shane o f Time: Remarks on the H istory o f Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962),' pp. 50 and 70.

^3lbid. . p. 126 . Kaufmann on Morris (see above, notes 12 and 33) and Lipking on Reynolds ("Only a knowledge of the whole, of circum­ stances and precedents and conditions, could make his system of rules intelligible.") in The Ordering of the Arts, p. 6 3 , are good examples of the value of the Gombrich-Kubler approach.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 26-

50Basil W illey, The Eighteenth-Century Background (London: Chatto and Winders, 195377”PP. 242-3.

^Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 196 0),?. 10,

^Voltaire as quoted by Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)o P» 222.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SHAFTESBURY AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ARCHITECTURAL THOUGHT

Entire volumes have been devoted to the subject of Lord

Shaftesbury's philosophy, and the citations found in the appended bib­

liography are by no means comprehensive. Much of the recent literature

has been stimulated by an apparent disinterest or underestimation among

English-speaking scholars as opposed to the higher esteem in which

Cooper has come to be held by several Germans (especially Wilhelm

Windelband and Ernst Cassirer), Before the poles of contemporary

criticism are mapped, however, it must be understood that the breadth

of the Earl's influence is beyond doubt among scholars dealing with

eighteenth-century intellectual history, B, Sprague Allen, one of

those who first suggested a relationship between Shaftesbury and the

Burlingtonians, said that his philosophy "enjoyed the greatest vogue

in the eighteenth-century, elicited refutations, and stirred up con­

troversy."^ Stanley Grean presents Shaftesbury as part of a widespread

but not always inter-conn ected or coherent movement o f the seventeenth

and eighteenth'-.centuries, "a movement to recover the joy in relig io n "

th a t a lso had to do w ith Spinozism, Hasidism, the Cambridge P la to n ists

and English latitudinarians. Most authorities agree that Shaftesbury

was prim arily m otivated to respond to Hobbes and Locke in an inform al,

non-scholarly manner on the general subjects of man's nature and morality.

-2 7 -

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -28-

Whatever the differences in their readings of his central doctrines,

few students of Shaftesbury would completely disallow Edward Kalins'

conclusions as to their influence:

(Shaftesbury'J] essential trust in man's goodness, and , . . belief in the certain rightness of passion before reason helped to penetrate the chilled air of Locke's cold reasoning. . . . This is the future philosophic direction of the century, away from the world of the undervalued imagination of Locke; though his reasonableness lives on in Addison and Thomson, But they also have the compassionate and benevolent sympathy of Shaftesbury, as well as his measured Entlnzsiasm.

In placing Man f i r s t and Nature' s harmony and order as a means to h is a tta in in g V irtue, Shaftesbury s ta te s one of the themes which were constantly repeated through­ out the century.3

The controversy which in itially greeted the Characterj.stics in large

part had to do with the author's unconventional attitudes toward es­

tablished religion, and one writer has suggested that the posthumous

popularity which followed the earlier reactions to the work was a re­

flection of the diminished authority of the church at the accession of

George I.**’ Oddly, Shaftesbury is now believed to have had little

influence in France until 17^5, but to have been the source of a major

new moral and sentimental content in English letters and "more generally

known" there at mid-century than "any other English philosopher except

Locke,While the new "sentiment" from the beginning had to contend

with rationalism and empiricism in England, C.A. Moore points out that

it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that Rousseau's

example made clear to the English "the revolutionary possibilities of

sentimental benevolence, which had escaped Shaftesbury," and, thereby,

helped to terminate his influence there,^

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -2 9 -

But whatever the vicissitudes of his critical fortunes, Shaftes­

bury is of enduring importance; he has been named as the first English

philosopher

for whom the problem of aesthetic form becomes an all-embracing and fundamental problem, as he is also the first in whose writings the concept of artistic genius attains universal significance.'’

Seen as such, his heritage is fundamentally differentiated from the

other two great English traditions of his day, logical analysis and

empirical observation, neither of which could endow the question of

creative genius with the content and importance it attains in the Q framework of intuitional aesthetics. To quote Ernst Cassirer:

, , , the psychology of empiricism, with all its exactness of observation and subtlety of analysis, does not' go beyond the sphere of receptivity, and . . . possesses the tendency to transform a ll psychic spontaneity into receptivity. Such an approach has no Instrument to cope with the creative process. Aesthetics could develop only irhere a stern opponent of psychological sensualism arose, where not merely a philosophy of impression, but a philosophy of ex­ pression, was in request; and where the idea was no longer looked upon, as in Hume, as the mere effect and copy of sense impression, but as itself something original and independent. This transition is repre­ sented by Shaftesbury, For he seeks the beautiful not in the realm of the finished product, but in the activity, in the creative principle of the forming p ro cess.9

Shaftesbury's distinctive concern with creative genius or,

more generally, man as creator, is clearly in evidence throughout

the discussions of two representative aspects of his philosophy which

have been initiated by modern scholars. The first discussion has as

its subject enthusiasm as a condition of creativity or pre-requisite

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -30-

for genius (see below, "The Force of the Idea; Enthusiasm"), The second

has to do with the objects of enthusiasm, or wise love, and can be

approached through the notion of a close analogy between aesthetic and

moral perceptions and v a lu es.

The Letter Concerning Enthusiasm in Characteristics had its

ostensible origins in a specific religious controversy, and much of its

content was conceived as a reproof, gentle in its wit but provocative

in its scope, of the English religious establishment. The word enthusi­

asm is lifted from the then-current context cf religious extremism or

fanaticism and rehabilitated in the course of the Letter, Interwoven

with his pleas for tolerance and freedom of expression for the non­

conformist enthusiast, Shaftesbury ultimately achieves, at the end of

the Letter, a unified statement on the positive nature of enthusiasm as

a universal human passion. In the Miscellaneous Reflections segment

of the Characteristics. he describes his own final position:

So far is he from degrading enthusiasm or disclaiming it in himself, that he looks on this passion, simply considered, as the most natural, and its object as the justest in the world. Even virtue itself he takes to be no other than a noble enthusiasm justly directed and regulated by that high standard which he supposes in the nature of things . 10

According to Shaftesbury, the critical factor here is the "high

standard" which directs and regulates enthusiasm, because the dif­

ficulty in discerning the difference between true enthusiasm (which

he believed to be a kind of divine inspiration) and the pernicious

false enthusiasm (or self-delusion) is enormous. The enthusiast must

be armed with tolerance, profound knowledge of himself and a sober,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. .. o -31-

unbiased, well-balanced spirit and intelligence. Before attempting

to judge real and false enthusiasm in others or ourselves, Shaftesbury

characteristically advised the reader that "we must antecedently judge

our own spirit . . . whether it be fit to judge at all."^ Ther;; is

nothing in his concept of true enthusiasm which contradicts the. neces­

sity of rules for guidance. To the contrary, whether in art or morals,

the finest achievements exemplify the soundest rational judgment while 1 ? embodying the power of true enthusiasm. Without guidance and proper

direction, this powerful force can be perverted easily into fanaticism

or superstition. Enthusiasm is thus a kind of energy never far below

the surface of Shaftesbury's thought. Together with love (an extremely

close association) it has a central importance, too frequently over-

looked in some surveys of the Earl's philosophy.^ As a modem critic

summarizes:

We have seen then that for Shaftesbury true enthusiasm was a state of being in which man was inspired by the Divine and raised beyond his ordinary capacities. . . . A ll true greatness, according to Shaftesbury, whether in "heroes, statesmen, ooets, , . . even philosophers," is the product of some !lnobie enthusiasm. 1 Yet enthusiasm is not restricted to great men or to special occasions-; it belongs to common experience. It is whatever makes men seek something beyond mere animal satisfaction. 1^

Shaftesbury's most widely quoted idea is probably that of a

"moral sense." To historians of aesthetics, however, his concept of an

aesthetic sense frequently seems as important as the moral; the question

of the exact character of their relationship (if the two are distinct,

in the first place) or the possibility of their identity is a source

of confusion and contention among scholars. Any Christian classicist

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -32-

might be expected to associate the beautiful with the good and moral,

and Shaftesbury was no exception,^ Bate has pointed to the "classical

and Renaissance conception of the poet as a teacher of moral excellence"

as a logical result of the classicists 1 attitude, and the model should

be kept in mind when reading Shaftesbury.^ The Implication, of course,

is that, for Shaftesbury, in order to teach goodness, a poet (or artist)

must himself know .goodness and be good; he must know the universal and

unchanging characteristics of his fellow men, their aspirations, manners,

and so forth (i.e. he must show precisely the same sort of judgment

that was cited as a necessary feature of true enthusiasm). Since

Shaftesbury does not distinguish the moral and aesthetic senses either

importantly or consistently, but uses the terms almost interchangeably,

i t i s a commonplace paraphrase o f h is doctrine th at the a rt o f the

virtuoso leads to the science of virtue:

And thus the sense of inward numbers, the knowledge and practice of the social virtues, and the familiarity and favour of the moral graces, are essential to the character of a deserving artist and just favourite of the Muses. Thus are the A rts and V irtues mutually friends; and thus the science of virtuosi and that „ of virtue itself become, in a manner, one and the same.

Grean exp lain s the Shaftesburyan r e la tio n o f a e sth e tic s and virtu e in

a helpful passage:

An action is "right" if it is appropriate to the context in which it occurs. The appreciation of its appropriate­ n ess i s not only "moral" in so fa r as i t in volves a recog­ nition of its rightness, but it is "aesthetic" in so far as' it includes an element of sheer satisfaction in its proportionateness. Moral form is also aesthetic form, and the true enjoyment of the one entails the enjoyment of the other.

Shaftesbury makes a particularly effective use of the parallel between

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -33-

aesthetics and morals in his description of a young man's actual moral

degeneracy via the highly visible accoutrements of a life lived in

servitude to "fashion" (i.e. the antithesis of "true taste"):

The elegance of(the young man's) fancy may have made him overlook the worth of inward character and pro­ portion: and the love of grandeur and magnificence* wrong turned, may have possessed his imagination overstrongly with such things as frontispieces, parterres, equipages . . .^9

The artist, therefore, bears a grave responsibility. He must ele­

vate his work above the foibles of the pseudo-virtuosi (such as the

more mindless of the antiquarians) and philosophise carefully for 20 his own and his audience's moral sake.

A famous metaphor from Advice to an Author in the Character­

istics provides the ammunition for modem critics on both sides of the

debate over the basic character of the Earl's entire philosophy and

reinforces the depth of his interest in man as a creative being:

But for the man who tru ly and in a ju st sense deserves the name of poet, and who as a real master or architect in the kind, can describe both men and manners, and give to an a ction i t s ju st body and proportions, he w i l l be found, if I mistake not, a very different creature. Such a poet is indeed a second Maker; a just Prometheus under Jove^ Like that sovereign artist or universal plastic nature he forms a whole, coherent and proportioned in itself, with due subjection and subordinancy of con­ stituent parts. He notes the boundaries of the passions, and knows th eir exact tones and measures; by which he justly represents them, marks the sublime of sentiments and a c tio n , and d istin g u ish es the b ea u tifu l from the deformed, the amiable from the odious. The moral artist who can thus imitate the Creator, and is thus knowing in the inward form and structure of his fellow creatures, w ill hardly, I presume, be found unknowing in himself, or a t a lo s s in those numbers which make the harmony o f a mind. 2 ^

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. To some critics and scholars, Shaftesbury appears to be making intricate

use of an extended analogy between a superior moral and a secondary

aesthetic sense rather than proposing an identity between them . 22 Their

arguments, taken together with Shaftesbury’s own brief declarations of

purpose, are impressive, if not conclusive. In a letter to his close

friend. Sir John Cropley, the Earl seemed to equate the interests: "My

charges turn wholly, as you see, towards the raising of art and improve­

ment of virtue in the living, and in posterity to come."2^ But those

lines are in reference to the most aesthetically oriented of all his

works, the Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment

of Hercules and A letter Concerning Design. In the Miscellaneous

Reflections, however, he admits that his own purpose in Advice to an

Author was not obvious: "His pretense has been to advise author and.

polish styles, but his aim has been to correct manners and regular (sic)

lives. Again, within the arguments of the Letter on Design, his goal

is briefly clear to the careful reader.

And.when our humour turns us to c lu tiv a te these designing arts,our genius, I am persuaded, w ill naturally carry us over the slighter amusements, and lead us to that higher, more serious, and noble part of imitation, which relates to history, human nature, and the chief degree or order of beauty; I mean that of the rational life, distinct from the merely vege­ table and sensible.^5

I would not suggest that Shaftesbury’s aesthetics can have no

importance beyond their didactic employment in his moral philosophy.

Because his effective influence can be interpreted as consisting more

of the impact of the aesthetic sections of his work than the ethical

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -35-

or moral, it is vital to comprehend the complexity of the relationship

between the two fields. In attempting to do so one is inclined to

accept the thrust of Ernest Albee * s review of Second Characters:

Shaftesbury's genius lay in the direction of ethical appreciation and tentative construction; on the one hand, while his ideas of art were by no means conventional, they were so circumscribed by the prevailing neo-classical misconceptions and so complicated with, if not fatally vitiated by, moralistic prepossessions, that one is likely to feel, after reading his aesthetic writings, that the problem of the true relation between morality and art is as far as ever from being s o l v e d . 2°

Modern critics have generally split into two groups on this

issue, with a few major footnotes to both arguments coming from indi­

viduals whose interests in the subject are relatively specialized.

Happily, it is not necessary to settle here, once and for all, the

questions of interpretation raised by both factions. Robert W. Uphaus

has wisely said of the recent literature; "if these articles establish

anything, it is that Shaftesbury is a roan not to be easily catagorized.

Yet he is a man of his age ~ if, that is, we grant the existence of

contrary strands of thought in a historical age.

Ernst Cassirer composed his appreciation of Shaftesbury around pO the central concept of intuitional aesthetics. To Cassirer, the point

of greatest significance lies in Shaftesbury's handling of questions of

artistic creativity, the intellectual processes of forming and becoming

as means to the experience of Divine reality. His interpretive emphasis

is heavily settled on the Platonic and mystical aspects of Shaftesbury’s

w r itin g s.

. . . r e a l access to the realm o f form . . . does not

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. spring from the force of desire as a direct reaction but from the force of pure contemplation, which is free of all desire for possession and of any act of direct seizure of the object. In this faculty of pure contemplation and of a pleasure which is not motivated by any ''interest" Shaftesbury finds the fundamental force behind a ll artistic creation. By vii*tue of this force man realizes his true self and partakes of the highest, indeed the only happi­ ness of which he is capable. . . . Shaftesbury seeks the true theodicy, the ultimate justification of existence, not in the sphere of joy and sorrow but in that of the free inner activity of forming according to a purely intellectual prototype and archetype. This Promethean activity, which leaves a ll mere enjoyment behind, which is indeed incommensurable with a ll pleasure., reveals to us the true divinity of man, and thereby the divinity of the universe.29

Cassirer1s reading of Shaftesbury leads to an ego concept which makes

possible and, in turn, depends upon, the mystical union of "the world

w ith in and the world w ith o u t."3® The forming o f beauty and the experi­

ence of beauty, in the properly developed ego, provide

immediate insight into the fundamental form and meaning o f the cosmos, in which we comprehend the "universal Genius" through intuition and sympathy. Shaftesbury’s conception of truth Implies this 'nature in the subject" rather than the mere o b je c tiv ity o f fa c ts and th in g s, and makes i t the norm of beauty.31

The argument, of course, is far too complex to be grasped from such

brief summations, but Cassirer’s concentration on mystical qualities

of creative activity relates very conveniently to the usual appraisal

of Shaftesbury as an early champion of individual sentiment as the

source and judgmental criterion of aesthetic form.Jerome S to ln its ,

while admitting the predominantly ethical orientation of Shaftesbury's

intentions as an author, nevertheless insists, with Cassirer, that

"the whole impulse and bent of Shaftesbury's thought, from the very

beginning, was toward the aesthetic.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -37-

A second group of scholars rejects the more abstruse interpreta-

tions of a Platonic mysticism as misunderstandings of a basically rhe­

torical use of rhapsody in The Moralists. These authorities, in part

on the basis of scrutiny of unpublished Shaftesbury materials, make a

strong case for a Stoic rather than Platonic basis beneath Shaftesbury's

thought. Esther Tiffany defined an important difference between the

E arl and the Cambridge n eo -P la to n ists which serves as a challenge to

C assirer:

They, as their name implies, are primarily Platonists and neo-Platonists. Their phraseology and their symbolism in general belong to the neo-Platonic conception of the One, and the spiritual end of the individual as absorption in the One. The One is a unity in which multiplicity is ultimately sunk. The prevailing symbolism of Shaftesbury, on the other hand, is that of the Stoic whole, and of harmony, in the sense of the cooperation of the individual with the whole. A man becomes part of the whole by subordinating himself to it, becoming like it. His habit­ ual conception of the universal order is one in which there is ‘nothing but what contributes to the perfection of the whole."3^

Tiffany rejects the suggested dominance of intuitional aesthetic con­

cerns and re-asserts the importance of the ethical themes to Shaftes­

bury's thought in general . 35

In support of Tiffany, other scholars have pointed to the Earl's

recurrent emphasis on the necessary rule of reason and disciplined

judgment over fancy. The artist's act of creation is seen as rational

and fu ll of understanding: he creates a whole, the balance and coher­

ence of which demonstrates his own comprehension of the greater Whole,

the original Creation, whereof his activities are a part. Shorn of

esoteric Plotinian associations, Shaftesbury's famous phrase likening

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -38-

the artist to a second Maker is to be properly regarded as only a part

of the extended analogy between moral and aesthetic integrity, rather

than as a mystical uniting of the one and the other. ^ As the artist

must be moral to create in accord with truth and beauty, so every nan

may be an artist, making his own life a thing of beauty through moral

wisdom. The experience of beauty, according to these authorities, is not

a mystical sense of identification with the divine or a mystical intuition of the secret of nature and the uni­ verse, but instead the attainment of the stoic ideal of freedom from the passions and low interests together with reconcilement to the order of the universe, harmony w ith nature and frien d sh ip w ith both God and man. I t is not suggested that the Platonic and Stoic philosophies are anti-thetical. Indeed Shaftesbury regards the one as an outgrowth of the other. Yet in the Characteristics is found the stoic teaching of individual adjustment to the universe as a harmonious whole composed of cooperating subordinate elements, rather than the neo-platonic idea of the One as a mystic entity with which the individual seeks to incorporate himself in an effort to blot out a ll distinction between the one and the many.37

It is not necessary to deny the importance of Shaftesbury's aesthetics,

especially as a factor in the gauging of his influence on subsequent

English literature, in thus questioning Cassirer and his followers.

The point, rather, is whether or not the Earl intended for the aesthetic

to constitute an end in itself. Aldridge concludes, to the contrary,

"that the esthetic elements which appear in the Characteristics are

introduced primarily to support an ethical theory," and, again: "The

concept of taste in the arts is not expressed for its own sake, but

primarily to provide an analogy for developing the concept of a standard

in moral conduct."-^ To some readers, Shaftesbury's larger purpose

was more clearly the proof of God's existence, and his system a kind of

"humanistic deism" rather than a revolutionary aesthetic.39

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -39-

In terms of a relationship between Shaftesbury and the Burling-

tonians, it w ill be convenient to pursue a course mid-way between the

interesting extremes of Cassirer and Tiffany. Ethical and moral con­

tent may be postulated as primary without denying the independent sig­

nificance of a pure aesthetic. In part, this is possible because cf

the suggestive contradictions in the Earl's works which are never fully

resolved. Aldridge has pointed out, for Instance, the confusion that

inevitably results from Shaftesbury's failure to distinguish satisfac­

t o r ily h is famous "moral sense," which appears to be immediate or in ­

tuitive, from the lesser affections and fancies which he says are con-

stantly in need of review and correction by a disciplined reason.

For present purposes, the Earl's intimate familiarity with a broad

range of philosophical sources and their pervasive influence in his

intellectual deve3x»pment are more important than specific identifica­

tions of Stoic or Platonic patterns. Considering his works as a whole,

Grean points out correctly that, for Shaftesbury

taste is the activity of judgment as a unity of reason and feeling; it is a response of the whole person to a moral or aesthetic object. Thus, it is susceptible to distortion either through intellectual or emotional failure. Shaftesbury's doctrine of taste is not a plea for emotional subjectivism or relativism. Good taste requires both the consistent employment of the intellect and the harmonious exercise o f the a ff e c tio n s .^

Brett adds:

The decline of classical authority had left a vacuum which had to be filled , and if the new mechanical philosophy were not to take its place, some more satisfactory sub­ stitute had to be found. It was not that Shaftesbury wished to provide a systematic aesthetics, but simply that he wanted a comprehensive philosophy which took into account and explained man's desire to create and enjoy

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -40-

art; a philosophy which took literature seriously and which would provide a standard of judgment. This philosophy would have to comprehend the whole o f man’ s life and provide a basis for religion, society and morals as well as art.^

We shall see that such a philosophy can be defined as comprehensive

enough to explain otherwise obscure aspects of English architectural

literature, as well,

Two secondary points of recent interpretation are worthy of

final notice. Jerome Stolnitz has demonstrated that much of Shaftes­

bury's significance for modern philosophy is to be found in the concept

of disinterested perception which makes possible the formal definitions

of aesthetic as an independent discipline. On the other hand, disinter­

ested perception, as Stolnitz presents it, immediately excludes from

consideration a ll the traditional and moralistic values which were so

important to Shaftesbury. In this context, Shaftesbury's insistent

metaphysics and his retreat to' rules of beauty are retrogressive.

Here, as on the question of setting limits to the area o f the a e sth e tic , Shaftesbury i s in the unhappy predica­ ment of the conservative who ■ ees the revolutionary consequences of bis own discovery. With the introduction of the concept of "aesthetic perception", the spectator's reaction takes on a significance of evaluation which it had never possessed b efore. The good old days, when aesthetic value is calculated "by rule and line", are now numbered. Shaftesbury invoked neo-classicism to arrest the ferment created by his own concept, but this was a losing cause. Increasingly after his time, it is held that appeal to felt aesthetic experience is indis­ pensable in establishing the value judgment. Shaftesbury saw just two alternatives: either evaluation by rules or else a vitiating subjectivism. . . . In bringing to light the distinctive nature of aesthetic perception and in his account of it, Shaftesbury is a thinker of very great originality and considerable power. However, he does not go far enough. Partly because he is not a systematic

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -41-

thinker; p artly because he has not been wearied away from the old ways of thinking in aesthetics. But those who were to come a fte r and who created modern a e s th e tic s, follow ed the lead which Shaftesbury had g iv en .^3

It should be noted that if, as we are assuming, ethical and moral con­

cerns were uppermost in Shaftesbury's mind, he could hardly have been

expected to pursue the most radical implications of an analogous theory

of aesthetics, even if he recognized them, which is doubtful. Nor would

he have been likely to accept an independent aesthetic with a psychology

or subjectivity that could stand apart from the larger ethical-moral

.whole. His conservative characteristics of criticism are thus wholly

predictable.

Historians of the sublime customarily refer to Shaftesbury as a

major early advocate of the appreciation of wild and unimproved nature.

As Cassirer says: "A powerful current of new feeling for nature flows

from this source into the intellectual history of the eighteenth century."^

The locus classicus is Philocles' concession to Thsocles in The Moralists:

Your genius, the genius of the place, and the Great Genius have at last prevailed. I shall no longer resist the passion growing in me for things of a natural kind, where neither art nor the conceit or caprice of man has spoiled their genuine order by breaking in upon that primitive state. Even the rude rocks, the mossy caverns, the irregular unwrought grottos and broken falls of waters, with all the horrid graces of the wilderness it­ self, as representing Nature more, w ill be the more en­ gaging, and appear with a magnificence beyond the formal mockery of princely gardens.^3

It is a mistake, however, to imagine that Shaftesbury simply presents

am independent aesthetic appreciation of variety in the visual charac­

ter of nature, because his point is that a profound order underlies

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -42-

a ll such apparent disorder. A universal concord is established on the

"contrarieties" of superior and inferior natural forms. Error is pos­

sible in the confused or incomplete perception of nature by man, but

Shaftesbury's "Whole," by d e fin itio n , precludes any error-by "Nature"

herself. He concludes: "i deny she errs; and when she seems most ig­

norant or perverse in her productions, I assert her even then as wise

and provident as in her goodliest works.The idea of the Whole is

the first theme of theory on which we shall examine Shaftesbury together

with Robert Morris, Isaac Ware and John Gwynn.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. NOTES

^Tides in English Taste, p. 84.

^Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, p. 31 •

^Edward Malins# English Landscaping and Literature. 1660-1840 (London: Oxford University Press, 19bo), pp. 20 and 21. Malins 1 empha- sis is on Shaftesbury as a source of sentiment as opposed to pure ration­ ality, an interpretation which is open to dispute, as w ill become clear below. Malins also repeats a frequently cited influence of Shaftesbury on Pope, which is-intelligently and importantly qualified by C.A. Moore, "Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England, 1700-17&0," Publications o f the Modern Language A ssociation o f America. XXXI (191 6 ) , 3^2-51 KooreTs article is helpful as an index to the other orthodox characteri­ zations of Shaftesbury s literary influence, as well. For his classical and more immediate English sources, and the thesis that "Shaftesbury seems to have written rather to controvert current opinions(i.e. Locke and Hobbes}and practices than to enunciate wholly new ideas on obscure su b je c ts , 1 see William E. Aiderson, "The Significance of Shaftesbury in English Speculation," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. XXXVIII (1923), 175-95. It is not possible, however, to d evise a complete opp osition between Hobbes and Shaftesbury on the im­ portance of passion or imagination, as is pointed out in the discussion o f Kobbes as a p ossib le in flu en ce on Hawksmoor in Downes, Hawksmoor, pp. 44-6. Probably the major difference, for modern scholars, is that Shaftesbury shows no interest in psychology, reacting more to the logi­ cal specifics of Hobbes' doctrines than to the importance of their psychological character. Downes says of Kobbes: 'He applied the new mettods to psychology, and arrived at a new emphasis on the emotions and the Fancy at the same time that rationalist thinkers and critics in France were rejecting them altogether. As important as what he said about these things is the fact that he said it at all. The psychology of the imagination and the idea that works of art should play upon the emotions were not invented in the nineteenth or twentieth century; they had already been discussed by Hobbes*" Ibid. , p. 47.

^foore, "Shaftesbury and the E th ical Poets . . ."p. 273*

^Tbid. , p. 277, and Gabriel Bono, "La Culture et la Civilisation Britanniques devant 1*opinion Francaise de la Paix d'Utrecht aux Lettres Philosophiques.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. N.S. 3 8 , Part I (1943), 79.

^Moore, "Shaftesbury and the E th ical Poets . . ."p. 322: "Rousseau was indirectly responsible also for the sudden termination of Shaftesbury's long ascendancy: when the English perceived the revo­ lutionary possibilities of sentimental benevolence . . . their distrust extended to the comparatively innocuous doctrine of the Characteristics.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. _JiA_ ■ r I I "

Between 1711 and 1790 it commanded eleven English editions; after 1790 no new e d itio n appeared for a century . 11 Alderson also notes the re­ lationship between Shaftesbury and much of later French thought: “in some cases, the new seeds^rom France}, because of their virulence, took root and grew where formerly similar life[I,e. Shaftesbury]had been choked out by the more vigorous plants of rationalism; in other cases, the French influence was simply the sunshine and the showers which hastened the maturity and fruition of a tropical growth of emotionalism, individualism, and radicalism," (pp. 190-1). Note that Moore stresses the effective termination of Shaftesbury's influence via Rousseau circa 1790 while Alderson treats the influence of Rousseau as a sort of revi­ val of the basic character of his work. For Shaftesbury's .important in flu en ce in Germany, see C assirer, The Philosophy o f the Enlightenment. P. 85.

?Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England. Trans. James P. Pettegrove (Edinburgh & London: Thomas Nelson and Sons L td ., 1953). P. 166.

8Ib id .

%bid.. p. 197.

^Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Character­ i s t i c s o f Ken. Manners. Opinions. Times (1711. 1st ed.; Indianapolis: The Bobbs Merrill Company, Inc., 19^0 II. 176. A.ldridge is correct to conclude that "in the last section [Shaftesbury! shows the resemblance between inspiration and enthusiasm — in its salutary manifestation linked with the universal desire for creation and self-expression. He makes the reader's mind go a progress from dis pproval to acceptance, from contempt to understanding." Alfred Cwen Aldridge, "Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. N.5. 41, Part 2 (1951), 317.

11Ibid.. I, 39.

I^Grean says: "Shaftesbury did not consider this approach to contradict his adherence to the rules of art; the rules were necessary guides whether in art or morality. Nevertheless, neither great art . . . nor the highest morality could be attained merely by a pedantic adher­ ence to such rules. . . , There is always a power of enthusiasm which defies reductive analysisJ^n such cases}." Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics. pp. 256-7.

1 %bid. . p. 19.

1^1 b id . . p. 31 .

15"To the classicist . . . any rational evaluation of the beautiful was, in the widest application of the word, a moral one, which

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Jf5-

simultaneously transcended and gauged or controlled the worth of strict­ ly aesthetic feelings or reactions." Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises o f Taste (Cambridge: Harvard U n iversity P ress, 19^W, p. 4. Bate's' subject and title require a word about definitions of such terns as classical, neo-classical, classicist, etc. I have left such terms in original contexts without explanatory or qualifying n otes when they occur in qu otation s. My own use o f them i s purposely vague but, in general, refers to the conscious selection and theoreti­ cally consistent employment during the first half of the century of the familiar forms that Summerson calls "the classical language of archi­ tecture." I, am fully aware of the niceties of definition that such usage obscures, but my purpose is to speak with relative ease of the broad tradition which the individual architects felt they shared in common rather than to impose a system of differentiations, however valid, that is designed by modem critics and analysts with the benefits of h is to r ic a l d istan ce and h in d sigh t.

^ b id . The older literature of architecture is not without suggestions as to the moral character required of the artist. Alberti, for instance, described architecture as depending upon the sound judg­ ment, strong sense and thorough experience of the architect, for 'it is the business of architecture, and indeed its highest praise, to judge rightly what is fit and decent," The generality of his terms, in this context, is not misleading. See The Architecture of Leon Battista A lb e r ti, p. 95. John Shutels The F ir st and Chief Grounds o f A rchitec­ ture. . . ( 156 3 ), included this discussion of an architect1!; need for philosophy^ "it belongeth also to an architect, to have sight in philoso­ phy, which teaching to be of noble courage as Vitruvius saith, and also gentle, courteous, faithful and modest, not given to avarice and filthy lucre, as not to be troubled or corrupted with rewards or gifts, but with gravity and sageness to conceive all honor and dignity in all things conserving his good name and estimation" (sig. B iii).

^Shaftesbury, Characteristics, I, 217. Gwynn read the same idea in Voltaire and cites the virtues of virtuosoship in his Preface to An Essay on Design (17^9). James Ralph also took up the theme in his Review of Public; Buildings (Second edition, 173^): "&■ S°°d taste is the heightener of every science, and the polish of every virtue: 1tis the improvement of pleasure, and the test of merit. 3y this we enlarge the circle of enjoyment and refine upon happiness. It enables us to distinguish beauty, wherever we find it, and detect error in all its disguises. It obliges us to behave with decency and elegance, and quickens our attention to the good qualities of others: In a word, 'tis the assemblage of a ll propriety, and the center of a ll that's amiable" (pp. ii-iii).

^Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, p. 250.

^^Characteristics. II, 262 - 3 .

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -46-

2®". . . the defects of philosophy and those of virtuosoship are of the same nature. Nothing can be more dangerous than a wrong choice or misapplication in these affairs. . . . To philosophise, in a just signification, is but to carry good breeding a step higher. For the accomplishment of breeding is , to learn whatever is decent in com­ pany or beautiful in arts; and the sum of philosophy is, to learn what is just in society and beautiful in Nature and the order of the world." Shaftesbury, Characteristics. II, 255.

21I b id .. I , 135-6.

22Esther Tiffany, "Shaftesbury as Stoic," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. XXXVIII (1923), P. ° 6 5 » and Aldridge, ‘Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto," p. 337.

^Quoted by Benjamin Rand, ed.. Second Characters: or the Language o f Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity P ress, 191*07' p. x i i i .

^Characteristics. II, 272.

2^Second Characters, pp. 20-1.

^^Ernest Albee, Review of Second Characters. Ed, Benjamin Rand, Philosophical Review, XXV (1916), 1 8 3 .

2?Robert W. Uphaus, "Shaftesbury on Art: The Rhapsodic Aesthetic," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXVII, No. 3 (Spring, 196?), 3*H.

2^'|3haftesburj3 founds a philosophy in which aesthetics not only represents a systematic province but occupies the central position of the whole intellectual structure." Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. p. 152.

2^Ibid.. p. 152. Cassirer's interpretation of Shaftesbury's "imitative'1'' "art makes the p oin t even more clea rly : "Art i s not im ita tio n in the sense that it is content with the surface of things and with their mere appearance, and that it attempts to copy these things as faithfully as possible. Artistic 'imitation' belongs to another sphere and, so to speak, to another dimension; it imitates not merely the product, but the act of producing, not that which has become, but the process o f becoming. The a b ility to immerse i t s e l f in th is pro­ cess and to contemplate it from this standpoint is, according to Shaftes­ bury, the real nature and mystery of genius" (p. 317).

3°lbid., p. 314 .

31 Ibid.. p. 327.

32Bate, From Classic to Romantic. p. 51. For a point of relation

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. J»7-

to British associationism and romanticism as well, see p. 128: "Ey en­ couraging aesthetics to take the subjective activity of the mind as the starting point of any investigation, British associationism opened the door even more widely for an inevitable individualistic relativism. But notice should be taken of Edgar Wind's terse criticism of over­ romanticized ideas about Shaftesbury's theory of artistic creation: "The best way to correct the romantic distortion is to study Shaftes­ bury' s patronage of contemporary arts. He did not conceive of the artist as a genius responsible only to his own inspiration, but he treated him as a manual executant who carries cut in visible materials the ideas dictated to him by the philosopher." See Edgar Wind, "Shaftesbury as a Patron of Art," The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, II (1938-9), 185-8. Wind does not address himself, however, to the problem of the philosopher's inspiration as a potential source of art.

33Jerome Stolnitz, "On the Origins of Aesthetic Disinterested­ ness," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. ’Winter, 19&1, p. 133. Accepting, for the moment, Cassirer^ point of view, we should note that Shaftesbury as aesthetician is boldly opposed, to cite one ex­ ample, by Hogarth in his Analysis of Beauty (1?53)» of which Joseph Burke says: "Moreover, i t i s the f i r s t work In European lite r a tu r e to make formal values both the starting point and basis of a whole aesthetic theory. It is a cardinal post Renaissance aesthetic treatise, a novel and original attempt to define beauty in empirical terms." "introdue- tion," The Analysis of Beauty. Ed. Joseph Burks (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1955*17 P. wlvii. Hogarth is cited because Ms work is seen by WIttkower as a coup de grace to the philosophical ideal of identical or analogous musical and visual harmonies as discussed in "The Idea of the Whole," below.

3^sther Tiffany, "Shaftesbury as Stoic," pp. 6^-5.

35For instance, she opposes to a simplistic identity of beauty and truth in a mystical moment of aesthetic intuition a more comp3.ex relationship: "The truth which is Shaftesbury's beauty is the oneness and rightness of the universe, for the good of which all the parts, in­ cluding man, e x is t . There are two asp ects to th is tru th . The f i r s t . . . is the essential nature of things perceived by man. The second relates to man's own function , his fulfilling of his part in the order of the whole. In this connection, the term used is goodness, or virtue. The beauty, or the v ir tu e , to be achieved by man i s the management o f h is life for the good of the whole . . . by developing whatever affections and activities make for the good of the whola, and eliminating whatever of them make against it. This is a distinctly Stoic conception. It differs from that of Aristotle in being the regulation or adjustment rather than the mean of qualities, a conception developed by Henry More in his Account of Virtue. It differs from Plato and Plotinus in that it makes the social aspect of self-mastery the man's direct relation to the Whole, with a ll that the term implies. His individual satis­ faction rests upon the satisfaction of the whole, into harmony with

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -48-

whose ends he has brought himself. This social relation contrasts alike with the Platonic idea of civic expediency mingled with personal satis­ faction, and with the Plotinian union with the One, which latter . . . i s the d istin g u ish in g featu re o f the Cambridge P la to n ist group." I b id . . p . 659. And on Plotinian contemplation, close to Cassirer’s interpre­ tation of Shaftesbury, she says: "... where Plotinus does dwell upon th e symmetry and the appearance o f cooperation o f parts in an object of beauty, the connotation of these qualities is intellectual rather than the active cooperation — nerhaps we might say the functional relation implied in Shaftesbury1s use of the terms" (p. 0 6 0 ).

3^Aldridge, "Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto," p. 3^0-

3?ibid.. p. 341.

3^1bid. . pp. 332 and 335 . It is perhaps from the shelter of this school, as opposed to Cassirer’s, that Steegraan, referring to Second Characters« offers his provocatively simplistic diagnosis of ^Shaftesbury as a formulator of the laws of Taste rather than as the philosopher. What we notice, and it is of course- an Augustan character­ istic, is that the highest form of art is that which approximates most closely to the Ideal, the Perfect, the Correct. The concept that Genius is creative was not in hi 3 philosophy , 11 John Steegman, "Shaftesbury’s Second Characters." The College Art Journal, 9» No. 3 (Spring, 1950)* p. 2 6 3 . The statement is indicative of the range of quality in analysis and diversity of opinion stimulated by the diffuseness and complexity of Shaftesbury’s writings.

39"Shaftesbury entered the literary world with his principle that the existence of God could be proved on moral grounds and that this was a higher principle than any material revelation on which to worship him." Aldridge, 'Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto,” p. 302.

% b i d .. p. 336 .

^Grean, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, p. 209.

^2Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, p. 99.

^3Jerome S t o ln itz , "On the S ign ifican ce o f Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory," The Philosophical Quarterly. XI (April, 1961), 99 and 1 1 3 .

^ The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. p. 8 5.

^characteristics. II, 125.

**%bid. . II, 22. Esther Tiffany denies that there is any major evidence of Shaftesbury himself finding philosophical inspiration in nature, whatever his influence may have been on others, even as late as

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Wordsworth, through the Moralists rhapsody. She implies that the s u b ­ ject had no intrinsic interest or merit for the Earl beyond its use­ fulness as an instructive device, leading the reader to more profound ethical and moral ideas. See "Shaftesbury as Stoic," pp. 651 and 66 i .

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE IDEA. OF THE WHOLE

It is all too easy to dismiss Robert Morris as an eccentric

crank, never bothering to determine which features of his admittedly

abstruse theory (if any) are of interest for reasons other than their

eccentricity. If his phrasings and ideas are seldom very clear, his

expressive earnestness bespeaks at least a consistent sincerity, and,

on occasion, estimable intellectual depth. Morris wrote about archi­

tecture for a number of reasons, but one of the most basic was his be­

lie f that "it opens the mind to vast conceptions."^ He was certainly

a formalist of conservative theoretical bent yet rarely content to deal

with architectural matters in a purely pragmatic or routine way. In­

stead, he conjoins utilitarian systems of room proportion with broadly

discursive interpretations of architecture in relation to natural order,

human spirit, and experience of the. Divine. His tone is generally

more religious, even zealous, than either Gwynn or Ware 1s , and his

numerous attempts at rhapsody suggest an association with the senti­

mental influence traced by later critics to Shaftesbury's example.

Morris' theory includes the important and revealing idea that

there exists a divine architecture of intellect which is observed within

the forms of natural architecture (i.e. the physical reality around us)

-50-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -51-

and related to the architecture made by men. Accordingly, Morris

never hesitates to drive home a point of practical architectural phil­

osophy with a soliloquy on the law of nature which endows it with per­

manent and universal validity. In fact, the relationship sometimes

seems reversed, with the value of architectural theory being its ex­

emplary character as an introduction to higher truths of natural phil-

osophy. Morris is thus concerned with architectural equivalents of

the principles of natural order. His faith in a universal system, a

proportioned and balanced whole of existence, is what enlivens his

approach to architectural design. His search is for the "universal

knowledge of order" which he sees as attainable and the only source of

truly free creativity:

Minds filled with ideas truly great and noble w ill pro­ duce nothing but what in effect is sublime. . . . 'Tis those only to whom Nature lias been propitious, and en­ dow'd with a more clear judgment to discern the true and essential beauties of order, and that it consists not in the separation of members, but rather results from the summetry and oeconomy o f the whole, in the jo in t union and concordance o f them a l l , agreeably centred and united in the appearance of one distinct body; which produces the most visible harmony, and in­ fuses itself even to the souls of those whose ideas are open'd with the real knowledge of beauty and art, and judging what is worthy esteem, and to be'term d time architecture or order in all its beauties ordain d by the original institutes of it.3

Morris saw no chaos in the world; the lesson of nature was that rules,

based on a few principles, could generate systems of permanence and

versatility. The operations of such principles could be observed by

anyone for himself, even if some were not yet fully understood.

The b est remembered o f Morris' ru les i s the proposition o f

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seven harmonic architectural proportions, which he likened to musical

theory. Morris was by no means the first to claim a correspondence

between audible, mathematical, and visual (or spatial) harmonies of

proportion.^ The idea has a long tradition of its own, and Palladio

is only the most influential of several European philcscpher-archi-

tects to have struggled with it before it was recognized and dismissed

as a fallacy.^ Morris 1 derivative eighteenth-century version is saved

from being ridiculous, however, by the relation it bears to his over­

arching belief in the idea of an ordered nature, which made it seem so

eminently reasonable a deduction. In his mind, the proposition's

proof was elementary:

I have now by examples shewn, that proportion is abso­ lutely necessary in the performance of every design, and beauty i s founded on i t , and both are dependent upon the unerring laws of Nature.. . . and the joint unity and concordance of the whole assembled together artfully is the care of the judicious architect.®

The formulation of such doctrinaire systems of architectural principles,

however far-fetched they may appear to later analysts, was a natural

and appropriate activity for an architect whose thought was perpetually

directed in search of relationships to unify and explain the disparate

data of existence. Morris himself described the broad purposes of his

theories in verse:

To trace the mazes of this mystic world, The form, the motion of this terrene sphere, The secret springs which guide its course, And a ll the vegetative tribes preserve; The more amazing structure o f ourselves; Or the celestial orbs ’which move above: There let the great imagination dwell, And, with the planets, roll through endless space.'

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -53-

The author of An 5ssay Upon Harmony has not been identified to

general satisfaction. The British Museum Catalogue lists the book as

probably written by Morris and Rudolf Wittkower, accepting its date as

1739» has agreed the Morris was responsible. The Morris entry in the

Dictionary of National Biography, on the other hand, cites an earlier

edition of 173^ and suggests that the author was John Gwynn, since the

title is listed among his works in an advertisement at the end of his

Qualifications and Duty of a Surveyor (1752).® It is currently less

important to know whether Gwynn or Morris was the author than to appre­

ciate the volume as an extension of the same kind of argument from

nature employed by Morris elsewhere . 7 In the Bssay. as in Morris,

harmony and proportion are deduced as truths of natural order, forces

of coherence within the system of the whole. Harmony itself is dis­

cussed at some length as tripartite, with "ideal harmony" being a mental

state, a perception or realization, which is the result of contemplation

of noble abstractions. "Oral harmony," as in music, is nicely described

as

the just connection, analogy, and agreement of sounds, the sympathetic concurrence of the parts in concert to each other, the variety, and changes, and symphony, of notes and tones, their rising and falling in due dis­ tance and proportion, in strength and appropriation, or in language, eloquence, or rhetoric . 10

"Ocular harmony" is the idea's third dimension and "the most pleasing

and extensive." Its sources in nature are either inanimate (e.g.,

"prospects") or animate forms (e.g ., the human figure) to which the

soul is drawn by a secret sympathy. Art may also be considered to pro­

duce and depend upon such visual harmony, but only in imitation of the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -5^-

models provided by nature:

The harmony and symmetry I intend to speak o f i s a compound of art and nature. . . . It is the nice assemblage and conjunction of things applicable and appropriate to each other: it is the affinity of each part to the whole.-' '

It should also be noted that whoever the author of the Essay was, he

prominently quoted on his own title page Shaftesbury's comparison from

the Characteristics between the discord of a heap of sand or stones and

the harmony inherent in "the regular and uniform pile of some noble

a r c h ite c t . 11

Gwynn is accepted as the author of the poem The Art of Archi­

tecture (174-2) and An Essay on Design (174-9) both of which express a

philosophy of the whole and harmony consistent with the theories be­

hind the Essay Upon Harmony. In The Art of Architecture. for instance,

Gwynn solicits the endorsement and support of Burlington, Stanhope,

and Pembroke as exemplary patrons:

Be friend to Science {i.e. architecture] fix'd on Nature's laws. On that alone, on Nature's perfect plan, I form my system, as I first began.

An architect must think seriously and at length, mastering the contours

of natural philosophy and conscientiously exploring even those minor

tributaries to systematic wisdom whose relevance may appear to be

minimal.^ The significance of these ideas to Gwynn is clearly indi­

cated in an important, and characteristically defensive, passage from

the Essay on Design:

The notion of beauty is[not}. . . a vague, imaginary conceit, but the result of a systematic knowledge,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -55-

founded on truth and Nature. The artist, it is allowed, seldom or never, in execution, comes up fu lly to h is own ideas: That would be too much for man, and too near an approach to that perfection in Nature which art endeavours only to imitate: But the more elevated the ideas are, the more excellent w ill the performance be, if, with ele­ vation of sentiment, there be at the same time a true knowledge of harmony and proportion. This is a r t . ^3

It would be a mistaken and futile exercise to search through

Isaac Ware for similarly straightforward advocacy of philosophical

values or even for a specific discussion of an idea apart from the

tra d itio n s o f u t i l i t y . There are moments when Ware d ig resses and comes

close to an expression or justification of pure theory, but those mo­

ments are rare exceptions. On the other hand, the entire ptirpose of

The Complete Book of Architecture was to articulate and systematize

the whole of architectural knowledge in formulations condensed for

convenience. 'Ware's guiding principles are completeness of content and

systematic procedure in methodology. It is therefore possible to weigh

his book, in its entirety, as evidence of a faith in rational order

comparable to the more esoterically phrased deliberations of Morris and

Gwynn.

When Gwynn and Morris debate the philosophical value and artis­

tic means of achieving an effectual harmony between structure and site,

for instance, Ware simply lectures his readers:

. . . a large house, where there is ground, was never built without the thought of a garden at the same time; and as we have on a ll occasions advised our artist to have the whole of his work in his eye together, we shall remind him here th at the compass o f the ground should be porportioned to the plan of the building; its arrangement and disposition to the character of the edifice,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. accompanying it in magnificence as in sim plicity.^

In a rch itectu ra l problems vrhich seem fa rth est removed from

theoretical abstraction, Ware's determination to achieve an orderly

thoroughness, almost an obsession, bespeaks an intellectual orienta­

tion that could have found expression, although it did not, in terms

lik e those o f Gwynn's choosing. Explaining h is lengthy d iscu ssio n s o f

the properties and characters of building materials, a kind of natural

philosophy in the eighteenth century, 'Ware writes:

We are sensible that among the persons of distinction, who amuse themselves with the study of architecture, some of whom have done a great deal of honour both to them­ selves and the science by their progress in it, a consider­ ation of these things which are only subservient to the great objects of their designs, w ill be looked upon as too mean and trivial; but those designs can never be fulfilled, nor those great objects raised to their per­ fection, without some person who has sk ill and integrity be deputed to look after them. As to the professed architect, though the science be a very noble and exalted one, he must not be above stooping these which are its most minute considerations. We admit that there is as much room for genius in architecture as in writing, and that it may be as much displayed in a great building as an heroic poem; but in order to do this, the attention we have advised to little things is a necessary step, without which the others cannot be taken. It is the foundation, an error in which undermines the whole super­ structure . ‘ 5

To take one specific example, it Is the caution and care with which the

sand and lime and water are s e le c te d , the in te llig e n c e and experience

with which they are mixed, in short, the critical details which deter­

mine the quality of mortar, according to Ware. Mortar, a man-made

material, is a sub-system of nature, which can be made stable and en­

during or, through ignorance, chaotic and insecure. The mortar system,

good or ill, is necessary as the cohesive agent within the larger

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -57-

masonry system of an edifice, itself yet another system. The "effect

of the air," a force of nature, w ill either support the system of just

composition and harden it, thus uniting the bricks or stones, or reduce

the u n sta b le, mal-proportioned mix to powder "and destroy everything

about it," Apparently a pedantic over-elaboration of a simple point of

common sense, ’-fare's discourse on mortar can be read as a metaphor of

experience and knowledge.

An orthodox attachment to classical architectural forms was by

no means the extent of Ware's involvement with "the ancients." His

thoroughness led him to the re-discovery of a design philosophy which

he stressed repeatedly in specific applications for his reader's benefit:

It is in this the ancient architects are found, by all that remains of them, to have been most particularly excellent: they formed at once an idea of the whole structure they designed, and of a ll its apartments, and it is evident they throughout kept that general idea always in remembrance. I t i s hence we see such a perfect harmony in all their works, and from this . . . arose those several variations in their larger parts: these, and the least, in all their works, are perfectly suited to one another.

The character o f the whole must be comprehended before the sub-systems

of its constituent features may be arranged and assembled in proper

order. The relation of structure and site has already been mentioned

but Ware's methodical procedures extend the principle into the relation­

ship between rooms and then in to the arrangement o f separate elem ents

within a single room.^ Another pragmatic design authority, Sir Roger

Pratt, believed at an earlier date that certain classical room pro­

portions were effective and pleasing because the "truth of the thing

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -58-

is that at the entrance into the room your eye sees the whole as it

were at one cast."**® 3ut Ware goes further; there must be an order,

a hierarchy of the different elements within the room, just as nature

contains measurable inferiorities and superiorities within its general

order. The room cornice is most important, the door-ways are next, and

the chimney-piece holds the third rank. Thus, choices of decorative

d e t a il are rendered lo g ic a l and c o n sisten t and the room i t s e l f an in ­

tellectually systematized, if not quite organic (in the modern sense of

the word) whole.^ Similarly, exterior features must be properly inte­

grated into the whole fabric; windows, doors, gate-ways, mouldings,

cornices, pediments, pilasters, and columns are naturally diverse, but

their character and arrangements may represent a designed unity. As

'Ware put i t :

It is possible that the parts of an edifice, though dif­ ferent in themselves, may correspond very well with one another: the only objection would be the variation made too great, or the transition too sudden. This must be avoided, and under that limitation a ll w ill be agreeable; and he who shall be able to introduce this into his own design, w ill find he has united the seeming contradictions; there w ill be variety in the parts, and yet uniformity in the whole . ^

From such examples it is clear that 'ware’s philosophy is what one might

expect from an architect-builder traditionally supposed to have been a

fortunate chimney-sweep1s boy who was offered the privileges and op­

portunities of Lord Burlington’s patronage. It is the philosophy of

a conscientious craftsman, addressed with some deference to a wide

readership, but expressed with the well-schooled authority of experience.

What a ll these men were talking around and about is really a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -59-

model of a comprehensive and comprehensible whole of existence and

knowledge, in which every element has an individually measured status

as well as a dynamic relation to every other element. Morris and Gwynn,

concentrating their sensitivities and artistic expressions on the

"natural” evidence o f harmony and proportion, and Via re , who i s cease­

lessly attentive to minute details of design in an easy confidence of

their profound significance, a ll meet at the drafting-table to pour

their energies into the abstract and intellectualized schemes of archi­

tectural symbolism, eventually refining their considerations to the

relative purity of "the Orders."

Their discussions were obviously not without precedent in archi­

tectural literature antedating Shaftesbury. An occasionally explicit

reference to the Sari or one of his works and the frequent use of Pope's

lines for extra effect do not diminish the broad relevance and potential

applicability of Palladio and other older sources to this theme. Those

sufficiently interested to write architectural theory of their own

would undoubtedly have read the Palladian doctrine:

. . . architecture, as all the other arts, being grounded upon rules taken from imitation of Nature, admits of nothing that is contrary, or foreign, to that order which Nature has prescribed to a ll things .^

This is a point of theory which, in the best of modem criticism of

Palladio, has been acknowledged to be of central importance in his

work. Walter Jackson Bate's discussion of the concept of universal or­

der as a feature of the classical and humanist attitudes toward art is

just one indication that its ramifications were hardly to be limited

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 6 o ~

to architecture.*^ Rudolf V/ittkower, writing architectural history of

the finest and broadest sort, suggests that

. . . it would not be difficult to show that all higher c iv iliz a tio n s b elieved in an order based on numbers and relations of numbers, and that they sought and established a harmony, often a fa n c ifu l and m ystical one, between u n iversal and cosmic concepts and the l i f e o f man. As long as monumental art and architecture were devoted to religious, ritual, cosmological and magical purposes — in a word, as long as their content was metaphysical, they had to be expressive of this order and harmony,^'

Wittkower's analysis leaves Shaftesbury’s metaphysical aestheticism

as a highly plausible source of direct and effective influence in the

arena of architectural theory. It is a fact, in the sciences, in the

arts, and in moral philosophy, that the specialized traditions of a

common heritage were developed independently in parallel directions,

The flavor and quality of the cultural fruits of the eighteenth century

must depend to some extent on the successful cross-fertilization of the

maturing disciplines.^

The idea of the whole was a cornerstone of Shaftesbury's

philosophy. His work is permeated with the sense of a system which is

orderly and inclusive of all aspects of existence, a totality of pro­

found benevolence. Each element of nature is inextricably related to

every other, and explanations or comprehension of the particular can

only be achieved through an understanding of the whole. The idea is

repeatedly expressed throughout the Characteristics but never more

clearly than in the Moralists dialogue, where the subject is Nature's

apparent disorder:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 61-

Can you induce yourself ever to believe or think that where there are parts so variously united, and conspiring fitly within themselves, the whole itself should have neither union nor coherence; and where inferiour and private natures are often found so perfect, the universal one should want perfection, and be esteemed like what­ soever can be thought of, most monstrous, rude, and im perfect?

Nothing surely is more strongly imprinted on our minds or more closely interwoven with our souls, than the idea or sense of order and proportion, ' Kence a ll the force of numbers, and those powerful arts founded on their management and u se. VJhat a d ifferen ce there i s between harmony and discord! cadency and convulsion! What a d ifferen ce between composed and orderly motion, and th at which is ungoverned and accidental! between the regular and uniform pile of some noble architect, and a heap o f sand or stones 1 between an organized body, and a mist or cloud, driven by the wind! . . . Whatever things have order, the same have unity of design, and concur in one; are parts constituent of one whole, or are, in themselves, entire systems. Such is a tree, with all its branches; an animal, w ith a l l i t s members; an e d ific e , w ith a l l its exterior and interior ornaments.

Here then i s our main subject in s is te d on, that n eith er man nor any other animal, though ever so complete a system of parts as to all within, can be allowed in the same manner complete as to a l l w ithout, but must be con­ sidered as having a further relation abroad to the system o f h is kind. Sc even th is system, o f h is kind to the animal system, this to the world (our earth), and tliis again to the bigger world anq, to the universe. All things in this world are united . 20

This philosophical attitude has long been recognized as having impor­

tant expressions in literature, with Pope’s 5ssay on Han (written 1730-

32 and published 1733-3*0 being a usual example. Its implications for

architectural thinkers as well are now apparent. Shaftesbury's vision

o f order en ta iled a love o f symmetry and harmony, a fe e lin g fo r propor­

tion (or more generally, mathematical principles) which is closely akin

to the ideal of natural affection that underlies his whole scheme of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 62-

raoral philosophy. ^ Since the moralist and artist are both at work

within a system, as parts of that system, the choices made by each, the

creative decisions taken by them in the fashioning of their personal

achievements, must be judged by the degree to which they are- integrated

with the truths of the larger systems around them.“ The artist s

natural affection for order w ill require of him the judicious subordi­

nation of dissimilar elements to attain in his work the repose and unity

of a successful whole; in a work of art, Shaftesbury insists that every

individual element be shaped and fitted so as to contribute to the im­

mediate and dominant impact of the single and primary concept.^ It is

im possible to a c t, a r ch ite ctu r a lly or otherw ise, in a vacuum, ( i . e .

apart from a system) or w ithout r e s u lts fo r the good or i l l o f the

system. The artist must therefore have an understanding of the relation­

ships between parts and the whole in order to express successfully his

best intentions. It is ironic that Burlingtonian Palladianism, while

adhering theoretically to the idea of the whole, actually produced

buildings in which the concentration of attention on specific, individual

features was often so intense that the larger composition failed to

achieve an effective formal unity.^

A disparity between theory and practice discredits neither

in the mind and eye o f the h isto ria n who would understand the true

character of the age. The quirky limitations of achieved reality need

not diminish the validity of expressed philosophy. Shaftesbury himself

was w e ll aware th a t h is ideas o f inner numbers and the in c lu siv e , bene­

volent V/hole would appear esoteric and frivolous to his critics. It is

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a measure of his enthusiasm for those ideas that he anticipated such

criticism without abandoning his view. Instead, he returns the charge

and challenges h is c r it ic s to deny th at

Everyone is a virtuoso of a higher or lower degree. Every­ one pursues a Grace and courts a Venus o f one kind or another. . . . They who refuse to give it scope in the nobler subjects of a rational and moral kind w ill find its prevalency elsewhere in an inferior order of things. They who overlook the main springs of action, and despise the thought o f numbers and proportion in a l i f e a t large w ill, in the mean particulars of it, be no less taken up and engaged, as either in the study of common arts, or in the care and culture of mere mechanic beauties. The models of houses, buildings, and their accompanying ornaments; the plans of gardens, and their compartments; the ordering of walks, plantations, avenues; and a thousand other symmetries, w ill succeed in the room of that happier and higher symmetry and order o f a mind.^

Shaftesbury steadfastly held to his right to theorize and accepted the

responsibility for a philosophy that poised at the lim its of wisdom,

on the brink of sophistry. His conviction is evident as he dismisses

empiricist reservations in a brief passage as radical and fine as any

in h is work:

Our passions and affections are known to us. They are certain, whatever the objects may be on which they are employed. Nor is it of any concern to our argument how these exterior objects stand: 7/he the r they are realities or mere illu s io n s ; whether we wake or dream. For i l l dreams w i l l be equally distu rb ing; and a good dream ( i f life be nothing else) w ill be as easily and happily passed. In this dream of life, therefore, our demon­ str a tio n s have the sane force; our balance and economy hold good, and our obligation to virtue is in every respect the sane.3“

The enthusiasm which makes such a statement possible now appears, in

its own right, as another theme of theory worthy of investigation.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. NOTES

^Robert Morris, An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture (London, 1723), p. 2. In Lectures on Architecture he wrote: ilArchi- tecturs is that great extensive art that is capable of furnishing the mind with a multitude of pleasing themes; It is not confin'd in a narrow orb" (p. 224),

.^Bssay in Defense of Ancient Architecture. p. 1: "The most exalted happiness of a manT life consists in the satisfaction arising from a contemplation of the hand of God, so clearly display'd in the visible natural works of creation . . , and from art, in imitation of this super natural power, from which flows a sensibility and divine admiration of that power, whose beautiful operations adorn every part of the universe with natural, as well as artificial, architecture,"

3lbid. , p. 18.

%!orris‘ position is stated in Lecture VI of the Lectures on Architecture. See Wotton, Elements of Architecture, op. 53-4, for an earlier English-language discussion. Vitruvius, of course, was an available antique source (Book V, Chapter IV). In the Preface to the Lectures, however, Morris writes specifically that "the first hint I r ec e iv d o f the harmonic proportions" came from Lambert Hermanson Ten Kate's Beau Ideal (1724), translated by J, C. Le Blon in 1732 and re­ published in London, 17&9, as Ideal Beauty in Painting and Sculpture . . . TenKate's ideas included the musical justifications of harmonic pro­ portions: ", . . the difference of these heads are found to be exactly in the same harmonic proportion as the intervals of the tones of music; that is, the genteel head of the tall statue to that of the middling as 3 to 9 , the same as the tone major. ..." Ideal Beauty, p. A3, The same book was read with interest by Hogarth, who found Ten Kate's reliance on the "jjie ne scai quoi" tradition and the musical argument to be utterly unconvincing. Hogarth's disappointment is recorded in the very different result of his own pursuit of the secret of harmonic proportions, The Analysis of Beauty (1st ed. 1753; rpt. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1955)f p. 14. See also the discussion of Morris under "The Apprehension of Beauty and the Education of Taste," below.

5v/ittkower, "Principles of Palladio's Architecture," Architec­ tural Principles in the Age of Humanism, pp. 57-1 GO.

^Lectures on Architecture, p. 220.

7lbid. , p. 200. Two other representative quotations from Lecture VII reinforce the point, "if we sink lower into the animal creation, we shall find the same proportions and order preserv'd through the whole race of beings; and even the vegetative tribe, in their several classes, spring from the same uniform and exact rules;

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and their proportions insensibly strike the imagination by some sympa­ thising secret, which, perhaps, futurity only can unravel. Hen, from the repeated instances of order in Nature, undoubtedly, first found . . the necessity of performing everything by stated rules, . . , From hence the study of arts and sciences necessarily sprung; more par­ ticularly those branches which are dependent on the mathematics, such as music, sculpture, painting, architecture, and the like; all being dependent upon such rules and proportions which are the dictates of Nature, and infallibly please the imagination; especially in archi­ tecture," Lectures on Architecture, pp. 102-3. Note particularly that the study of arts (and that obviously includes such books as Morris' own) necessarily springs "from the repeated instances of order in Nature." And again, on Nature's persuasive evidence: " if we immerse our id eas in to the in f in it e tr a c t o f unbounded space, and w ith the imagination paint out the numberless multitudes of planets, or little worlds, regularly revolving round their destin'd orbs; if we consider with what wondrous sk ill and exactness they perform their revolutions, and how harmoniously they are whirl'd by their eccentric and concentric motions, into their proper tracks of revolution, if we imagine the exact proportion, distance or use of every one of them, we must feel emanations of the harmony of Nature diffus'd in us; and must immediately acknowledge the necessity of proportion in the preservation of the whole economy o f the universe. Were the p lan ets to move ir re g u la rly , without stated laws or order, a ll things would soon jumble into original Chaos." Lectures on Architecture, pp. 101-2.

' ®The V/ittkower reference can be found in "La Letteratura Pal- ladiana in Inghilterra," Bollsttino del Centro Internationale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio. VII Parte II (19&5)» 1 . For the Dictionary1 s~ probable source concerning the 173^ edition of An Essay Upon Harmony see "The Genius of the Place," below, note 20.

^The Preface, for instance, quotes Pope: "in a ll let Nature never be forgot."

^An Essay Upon Harmony, p. 8.

11Ibid. . pp. 12- 13 .

^ ^John Gwynn, The Art of Architecture. p. 32: "He that intends an Architect to be,/ Must seriously deliberate, like me;/ Those things which seem of little consequence,/ And slight and trivial; knoxf; you some time hence,/ When you are made ridiculous; w ill find,/ They are important, and instruct the mind."

^ \ n Essay on Design, pp. 18-20.

^^*Isaac Ware, A Complete Body of Architecture (London, 1768), P. 636 .

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. _ 6 6 _

15Ibid., p. 91* The comparison with Gwynn (note 12, above) i s c le a r .

1 ^Ebid.. p. 294.

^Ibid. , On p. 33 6 , Ware discusses the planning of minor rooms in a house: The whole that relates to lobbies, and entrances from room to room, and among the rooms above stairs, is that they be made as spacious as proportion requires, without hurting the shape or dimen­ sions of the rooms; and that they have due light; these are points never to be attained unless the construction of these places of inter­ course be projected at the same time Xvrith the rooms, and there be the design of them, kept in mind while the rest is under consideration* The student may be assured that he w ill never execute that design well which he contrives by piece-meal. All must be planned together, and every part regulated upon a just idea of the whole." On p. 4?7, his topic is the ornamental articulation of a single room: "The architect may very frequently design an elegant side of a room, which yet may be improper for the place, or disagreeable to the rest of the ornaments. The remedy for th is i s to reduce no part in to p r a c tic e , t i l l he lias upon paper designed the whole together. Architecture is not the only art in which men have run into this error; and it is indeed the common mistake of young men, whose fancy is at its height while judgment is in its infancy. We see, in the works of some indifferent poets and orators, passages that would have been worth a place in the writings of the greatest, had they been applied and introduced properly; had they been of a piece with the rest, and a part of the whole: but as they stand they are detached sentences, which no man of judgment ever admired, because such have an universal rule, that nothing can be elegant 'which is not proper: it is so in architecture . 11

^®R. T. Gunther, The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923)7 p. 65. ~

""'9a Complete 3ody of Architecture, pp. 482-3*

2^1b id *, p. 306 . In typically specific applications of the principle, Ware writes about the necessary plainness of the attic story in an ornate design: "Every part is to be made correspondent to the whole in such an elegant structure as we are here describing, with the most nice regard to propriety; this is a general rule; but let the architect beware it does not mislead him on some occasions. Though every part is to be adapted, every part is not to be equally ornamented; and that which might be correspondent to the whole in a general sense, may yet be out of its place." Ibid. . p. 333. On p. 428 he explains the rationale behind the design for a gate in the walls connecting a central block and flanking structures: "... they must be so orna­ mented that the whole may have reference to the principle building; th is i s what w i l l render them parts o f the structure; the common method o f doing these th in gs a t random, makes them seem lik e p ieces stuck upon

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -67-

it. The front wall being rustic, and the upper story having columns, both must be introduced here; we have spoke before upon the use of rustic columns, and condemned them, but there are instances, as we have there said, where they may be admitted; and this is one. , . , An order is to be employed to them corresponding with the order above; and rustic is to be admitted to give a resemblance with the wall of the lower stcry; thus all w ill be of a piece, and the gate w ill be plainly a regular part of the structure."

21Andrea Palladio, The Architecture of Andrea Palladio. Trans. Nicholas Dubois, (London, 1?15)» p. 35.

^%or an example, see James S. Ackerman, P alladio (Baltim ore: Penguin Books, 19^6 ): "... the essential is a sense of order, of the relationship of parts among themselves and to the whole" inherited by Palladio from earlier theoreticians but "reformulated in a way that d istils the Renaissance" (p. 19). Ackerman expands the point: " P alladio's Humanist tra in in g taught him th at the supreme and lo g ic a l Order that permeates all of God's creations should be 'imitated' in the creations of men. The imitation of nature was quite the opposite of copying what one sees around; it was a search for abstract prin­ ciples. Palladio's view of architecture as natural philosophy helps to explain unique qualities in his design, especialD.y a subtlety of proportion, composition and equilibrium that have been praised through the centuries but seldom examined critically" (p. 169).

^ 3 ate, From Classic to Romantic. p. 13. In reference to a classical idea of universal order, Bate says: "... the very, nature of the universal, in its transcendance and control over the accidental and specific, exemplifies order and harmony; and the living exhibition of order and the persuasive infiltration of it into nan's moral and mental character are both a vital aspect of the means by which art simultaneously 'delights and teaches,' and also an end for which it performs these functions. It is ethical in furnishing both the pro­ cess and the aim." There follows an exemplary discussion of the im­ portance of music as defined by Plato. For other indications of non- architectural applications, see Willey, The Eighteenth Century Back­ ground . from which the following quotations are taken: for what had science revealed? Everywhere design, order, and law, where hitherto there had been chaos. Whether one contemplated the infinitely great through the optic glass of the Tuscan artist, or the infinitely little through the microscope of Malpighi, one received at every turn new assurance that a ll was 'according to the Ordainer of order and mystical mathematicks of the city of heaven " 1 (p. 5 ). "ho matter how closely we pry into Mature, the evidence a ll repeats the same tale. Had Pliny looked through one of our microscopes, and seen the animalculae in a drop of water, how would he have been 'rapt into an Extasie of Astonish­ ment and Admiration'? The study of Nature is the true 'preparative to Divinity.'" (In re: John Ray's 1691 Wisdom of God in the Creation) Ib id . , p. 36 .

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 6 8 -

^Rudolf VJittkower, "Systems of Proportion." Architects Yearbook, V , 9 .

^Architectural specialists, for instance, can be placed in a progression from Vitruvius' harmonics through Alberti and Palladio, as noted, to Shute, thence Jones and others, but by the first half of the eighteenth century in England Shaftesbury* s thinking could certainly have had an affect on and given added impetus to congenial tendencies of architectural theory.

26shaftesbury, Characteristics. I I , 6 2 , 6 3 , and &(-. The point is accepted as central to Shaftesbury s work by his modern criticsj of whom Stolnitz is among the most perceptive. For Stolnitz the Earl s aesthetic is of limited importance largely because of his persistent metaphysics: ", . . it is Idealistic, perhaps pantheistic; it makes out the world to be an ordered, telic unity in which evil is only illusoiy; and it defies empirical scrutiny. In a word, it is pre­ cisely the sort of construction which has generally been least congenial to the British temper." Stolnitz, "On the Significance of Lord Shaftes­ bury in Modern Aesthetic Theory," p. 93. On p. 10^ of the same article, he exp lain s: " it i s , I believe, more illuminating if we take Shaftes­ bury to be saying something like, ’Harmony is all there really is.' Faithful to its idealist forebears, his philosophy is essentially a celebration of the surpassing goodness of the world-order. To one who is gripped by the vision ... . the whole question of the relation be­ tween the various catagories of value must seem faintly silly and ir­ relevant. . . . To one who sees synoptically and therefore clearly, they fragment or rslativize the pervasive goodness of tilings. The great and general ONE of the world' . . . is indivisible and ultimately, one supposes, ineffable. That is why so much of Shaftesbury, and the Idealist tradition generally, consists in an infuriatingly long string of identities — 'beauty-is-goodness-is-truth-is-reality-is-etc.' "

2 '7". . . the original satisfaction can be no other than what r e su lts from the love o f tru th , proportion, order and symmetry in the things without, . . . 'A natural joy in the contemplation of those numbers, that harmony, proportion, and concord which supports the universal nature, and is essential in the constitution and form of every particular species or order of beings.'" Characteristics, I , 2 9 6.

^As Aldridge puts it: "The identical relationship in which morality and esthetics stand in regard to order and the whole is seen in The Moralists. The whole is a system established upon order and held together by a social cohesive force. Morals and the arts are founded upon a perception or sense of order and proportion as it is reflected in all of its subsidiary elements," "Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto," p. 3^1.

29"in sh o rt, we are to carry th is remembrance s t i l l along w ith us, 'that the fewer the objects are, besides those which are absolutely

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. necessary in a piece, the easier it is for the eye, by one simple act and in one view , to comprehend the sum or whole . 1 The m u ltip lica tio n of subjects, though subaltern, renders the subordination more difficult to execute in the ordinance or composition of a work. And if the sub­ ordination be not p e r fe c t, the order (which makes the beauty) remains imperfect. Now the subordination can never be perfect, except 'when the ordinance is such, that the eye not only runs over with ease the several parts of the design (reducing s till its view each moment on the principal subject on which a ll turns), but when the same eye, with­ out the least detainment in any of the particular parts, and resting, as it were, immovable in the middle, or centre of the tablature, may see at once, in an agreeable and perfect correspondency, a ll which is there exhibited to. the s ig h t . 111 A Notion of the Historical Draught of Hercules. Second Characters, p. 5^ Gf. bare, note 1o, above.

^Jittkower's analytical term is a "staccato quality" of compo­ s it io n , which i s accepted and am plified by Summerson, A rchitecture in B rita in . pp. 196-7. Kent's Horse Guards i s known to have been c r it ic ­ ized because its individual elements seemed unrelated and frustrated observers' attempts to see and understand the building as a coherent whole.

-^Characteristics. I, 92. This passage is additional evidence of the predominant concern of Shaftesbury with the "higher symmetry" of a moral intelligence as opposed to the "mean particulars" of a e s th e tic s 'in "common arts" and "mechanic b eau ties." As such, i t i s also an excellent example of his thesis that a reader's considerations can be d irected through and lif t e d from popular a e sth e tic to p ics to more profound ones by a wise and skillful author. A comparison of Shaftesbury's concern with "main springs of action" and Morris' "secret springs" (above, p. 5 2) is of additional interest.

^ Characteristics. I, 336-7. Cassirer says: ". . . it is for us to determine the quality and value we would give to existence. Con­ templation of the order governing things gives rise to that religious feeling which elevates us far above all mere desire for happiness. It teaches us to desire the whole rather than the part, and to affirm the whole for its own sake, not for ours." The Platonic Renaissance in England. p. 186. Among the modern c r i t i c s , Grean has pointed out that Shaftesbury's theory of interlocking functional systems has important precedent in Richard Cumberland's 1 67?, De_ leribus naturae and Aldridge provides a helpful summary that is only slightly slanted to the inter­ ests of those who read Shaftesbury as a Stoic. See Grean, "Self-Inter­ est and Public Interest in Shaftesbury's Philosophy," Journal of the History of Philosophy. II (April, 19&0, 4-1; and Aldridge'j "Shaftes- bury and the Deist Manifesto," from which these last remarks are taken: "The principle of unity as an infallible sign of order is Shaftesbury's sovereign proof of the goodness of providence. In a ll phases of Shaftesbury1s thought, in ethics, in literary theory, in formal esthe­ tics, and in teleology, his fundamental principle is the uniting scheme,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -70-

the symbol of the union of all parts within the whole" (p. 3 2 5 ). "... we understand that if all the parts of the universe are not united into one system, there can be inferred no order, proportion or design, but if a ll parts are united, 'then is the whole a system com­ plete, according to one simple, consistent, and uniform design.' when we examine the universe we realize that none of its parts are inde­ pendent, but all are united and related to the system. The earth, plants, animals and elements are all related and interdependent, as are the world, the planets and the sun, and all show the 'order, union, and coherence of the whole " 1 (p. 325 ).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER THREE

THE FORCE OF THE IDEA: ENTHUSIASM

The intellect of the eighteenth century was generated from the

achievements of the seventeenth without a radical break or change in

direction. Shaftesbury's philosophy is fully representative of both

periods in its reliance upon a concept of unity which is a prerequisite

4 of the idea of systematic, rational order. The eighteenth century is

traditionally considered as an age of reason, but rationalist ascendancy

had begun with the seventeenth century's development of the natural

sciences, which became seductive models for a ll knowledge, and it should

likewise be remembered of the later period that reason's reign was

never universal, never completely unchallenged by champions of the ir­

rational, or without an element of passion. One of the most brilliant

scholars to survey the subject has quoted D'Alembert, the Encyclopediast,

on the spirit of the time:

. . . the discovery and ap p lication o f a new method o f philosophizing, the kind of enthusiasm which accompanies discoveries, a certain exaltation of ideas which the spectacle of the universe produces in us . . . have brought about a lively fermentation of minds. Spreading through­ out nature in all directions, this fermentation has swept with a sort of violence everything before it which stood in its way, like a river which has burst its dams. . . . Thus, from the principles of the secular sciences to the foundations of religious revelation, from metaphysics to matters of taste, from music to morals, from the scholastic disputes of theologians to matters of commerce, from natural law to the arbitrary laws of nations . . .

-71-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -72-

eve rything has been discussed, analyzed, or at least mentioned , 2

Architectural literature in England, clearly, reflects all of this: the

idea of the whole and a faith in rational order within which the mind

remains free, the methodological precedents of the natural sciences and

the increasing frequency of defensive (even violent) reactions to the

opposition posed by thinkers considered either unorthodox or heretical.

The emotions beneath the rational surface of the age were un­

doubtedly of a religious nature, and their collective force was directed

toward the accomplishment of goals which cannot be defined utterly apart

from traditional religious concerns, Cassirer agrees:

This era is permeated by genuine creative feeling and an unquestionable faith in the reformation of the world. And just such a reformation is now expected of religion. A ll apparent opposition to religion which we meet in this age should not blind us to the fact that all in­ tellectual problems are fused with religious problems, and th at the former fin d th e ir constant and deepest inspiration in the latter. The more insufficient one finds previous religious answers to basic questions of knowledge and m orality, the more in ten siv e and passionate become these qu estion s th em selves.3

In ad d ition to the s p e c ific phenomenon in r e lig io u s h isto r y ,

enthusiasm, as I shall use the term, is therefore an implicit feature

of the age which concerns us; a conviction which reinforces and upholds

the systematic constructions, a faith in the characters of their in­

dividual members, and the principles of their assemblage, a force of

effectiveness in their articulation and communication. As an explicit

and specific philosophical concept, according to Cassirer, Shaftesbury's

enthusiasm can be traced to love, the Platonic Eros, which seemed to the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cambridge n eo -P la to n ists (and so to Shaftesbury) "to hold the world

togeth er a t i t s core."**' A proper, lovin g r ela tio n sh ip to nature, " 3 .

natural, primal sympathy of the individual for the Whole," is, for

Cassirer and his followers, as the only means to a comprehension of

existence, a central feature of Shaftesbury’s ethics and aesthetics.^

This connection of nature and sentiment has traditionally been used to

place Shaftesbury -among the early prophets of the Sublime and Picturesque.

Together with Edmund Burke, the Earl is believed by certain modern

critics to have understood the differences in emotional character which

define the experience of the Sublime as distinct from that of the

3eautiful. But thei*e exist irrevocable and irreconcileable differences

between Burke and the so rt o f a rch itectu ra l theory which Shaftesbury's

effective example encouraged. Much as Hogarth had scorned the argu­

ment of musical proportions as an obvious fallacy in the publication

of another fallacy that he happened to prefer, Burke dismisses the

famous Vitruvian figure with an argument that takes common sense so far

as to betray a complete misunderstanding or in a b ility to comprehend the 7 nature and purposes of a ll architectural symbolism. Enthusiasm xs cer­

tainly to be found in both Burke and the Burlingtonians, but more so

in the divergence of their sympathies than in any concept of the sub­

lime they may have jointly shared with Shaftesbury.

The triumph of Burlingtonian Palladianism has usually been re­

presented as a total victory and its subsequent influence as an oppres­

sively effective dictatorship of orthodoxy. In fact, the style faced

constant competition for acceptance and employment, the principles of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -74-

its orthodoxy having hardly been formulated and regularized before

their advocates encountered overt resistance. This state of affairs

must be kept in mind in order to evaluate properly the extreme instances

of doctrinaire rigidity which a recent scholar has read correctly as

"voiced in a spirit of defense rather than of complete confidence."^

It should further be understood that principles of design derived from

Italian precedents and codified in treatises more or less Italianat 9. in

form aroused a native conservatism and characteristic English dislike

of "foreign" w a y s . 9 Once the means of Burlingtonian influence had been

established, it is not surprising that the original enthusiasm for re­

form was re-channelled into a different but related spirit, zealously

defensive and protective of the new orthodoxy.^ A real fear of deca­

dence beyond salvation, of the impending deterioration of culture and

final loss of the traditions of classical art, were frequently cited

reasons for publication in the Burlingtonian architectural volumes.

Castell’s letter of dedication to Burlington in The Villas of the

Ancients (1728) boldly placed the Earl above the ancients: "They culti­

vated arts while they yet flourished in their glory, but you give them

new l i f e when they langu ish, and even rescue them from decay and ob­

livion." In the same spirit, James Leoni attached a few of his own

designs to his 1726 edition of Alberti:

Oh how much has regularity and decency in this noble a r t given way. to caprice! The antique proportions measured and approved by our great masters are either forgotten or neglected by the moderns.^

A diplomatic Italian, Leoni astutely employed the phrase "our great

masters" as an Englishman might have done, and reinforces the point

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -75-

la ter in the passage with the politic observation: "The English nation

need no foreign examples in the perfection of architecture."^

No writer of theory is more clearly an architectural enthusiast,

in every sense of that term so far stipulated, than Robert Morris. His

Defense of Ancient Architecture was indeed a spirited defense of the

classical heritage, as he understood it, against the enemies that he

saw a l l around. D escribing the power o f the a n t i- c la s s ic is t s he so

feared in 1728, Morris wrote:

We cannot but expect they are as capable of giving {civilization^ as total an overthrew, as it received from the barbarous Goths and Vandals, whose proceed­ in gs but too much resemble the unhappy p ractices o f our present enemies to the rules of the ancients. 13

Morris* tragic history of architecture is a series of "eruptions and

inundations" (i.e. upheavals of the natural and social order) which

hasten the unravelling of culture when allowed to pervert the very per­

ception of order and beauty:

. . . the original beauty of order decays; that visible and unbounded ex ten t, th a t nobleness and grandeur, th at sweetness and harmony in the composition of ancient archi­ tecture is so unregarded by our modern builders that de­ form ity i s by them deem'd regu larity; disproportion i s styled completeness; a lumpish solidity, airiness; in a word, they are such bigots to their own unwarrantable selfish opinions, that they can't discern light from darkness, truth from falsehood, nor the beauteous paths which point out the true and undoubted way to attain a competent knowledge o f sound b u ild in g . 1^

Willfulness and ignorance are hearty foes, but Morris phrased his in­

dictments in a way that also conjured up an implacable, demonic opponent

whose destructive activities were incessant. A clear instance of such

rhetoric comes in a description of the Doric entablature which he used

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. as the occasion for a lengthy fable of Novelty’s rape of unguarded

Virtue's soft "and effeminate breast."'*'’

But much of Morris’ theory was written with a more positive and

constructive attitude. In a passage on the inspirations to noble con­

templation that exist in the natural beauties of an imaginary site for

a retreat, he reveals a blend of intellectual and emotional associations

that collectively constitute a typical quality of his architectural

enthusiasms

It is here, in the cooler hours of reflection, a man might retire to contemplate the important themes of human life; recluse from gay fancies, he might secret himself, not envying the more external grandeur of power, or despising the humbler, or lower class of beings, to whom Providence or Fortune hath been less auspicious. In the silent recesses of life, are more noble and felicitous ideas, and which more immediately concern our attention. A man, whose genius leads him to study architecture, may see in the vicissitudes and changes it has undergone, what revolutions of opposing fates have been in the world; how the materials, which have been apply'd to erect noble and magnificent buildings, palaces, &c. to immortalize the name of the founder, are now crumbling into dust, and perhaps a few years more may to t a lly an n ih ilate them: How many populous cities, which once were the nursery of learning . . . are now no more, and even their names scarce transmitted to us. . . . He may also consider himself as the off­ spring of parents which he can trace but a few genera­ tio n s back . . . and look forward, and consider the in ­ f in it e numbers which may derive th eir being from him­ self. . . . I say, such reflections as these are al- . ^ ways a noble and pleasing theme for a speculative mind.

And architecture in the abstract elicited the single most effective and

appealing expression of sentiment in a ll his work:

If we reflect on the beautiful grandeur, and inex­ pressible magnificence, of many of those never-dying works of ancient Greece . , . we cannot value or esteem Architecture too much; its beauties, in spite of devouring

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -77-

time, w ill still charm us; the gay, the glittering image, shines with gleaming rays of light on the sev era l passions o f the mind; according to the sym­ metry and d isp o sitio n o f th e ir works, we behold them with admiration, and they soften us into unutterable p le a s u r e .^

Morris tries to describe the positive sensation of enthusiasm in a

criticism of the Corinthian order, which he says directly touches the

souls of those who can appreciate its perfection-in-completeness. The

mechanics of this effect he imagined to be secrets of sympathy not yet

completely deciphered, but the effect itself is felt as "an inward joy

(of the mind], , , a cheerfulness and delight through all its faculties,"^

A similar sympathy of the soul with scenes of natural beauty

figures importantly in An Essay Upon Harmony, which we have said may

be Gwynn's work.^^ The Essay i s provocative evidence o f the r e la tio n ­

ship which Pevsner, among others, has suggested between Shaftesbury's o n literary influence and the progress of the Picturesque. That suggestion:’

is especially convenient in that it links a theoretical priority for

enthusiasm or sentimental intensity which is in Pevsner's view atypical

of the general English cultural pattern and the artistic achievement p1 usually accepted as one of England's greatest, i.e . the landscape garden.

Morris' Lectures on A rchitecture show him to have shared Gwynn's under­

standing of the appeal of landscape, and there are a number of instances

in The Complete 3ody of Architecture where even the prosaic Isaac Ware Op d e ta ils the pleasures o f a p r e ttily composed scene.

I have previously said that Shaftesbury himself certainly did

not intend his rhapsody in The Moralists to be a monument in the history

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 7 8 -

of the Picturesque. His concern perpetually transcended the specific

and incidental and his concept of enthusiasm is not to be understood

as lim ited to the fe s tiv e or sombre moods o f a landscape:

For there is a fair and plausible enthusiasm, a reason­ able ecstasy and transport allowed to other subjects, such as architecture, painting, music: and shall it be exploded here? . . . Is it so preposterous to bring th a t enthusiasm h ith er, and tran sfer i t from those secondary and scanty objects to this original and com­ prehensive o n e ? ^3

Thus Morris, in his devotion to architectural theory as a means to

noble thought, seems to have shared Shaftesbury's sense of enthusiasm

most closely. As an apostle of architectural harmonics, Morris* gospel

was actually that of a divine order and the zeal of his missionary's

spirit a gauge of the depth and character of his conviction. Shaftes­

bury himself defined the relationship between an enthusiast's love

of harmony and proportion as properties of order and a higher, moral

v ir tu e :

This too is certain, that the admiration and love of order, harmony, and proportion, in whatever kind, is naturally improving to the temper, advantageous to social affection, and highly assistant to virtue, which is itself no other than the love of order and beauty in society. In the meanest subjects of the world, the appearance o f order gains upon the mind and draws the affection towards it. But if the order of the world itself appears just and beautiful, the admira­ tion and esteem of order must run higher, and the ele­ gant passion or love of beauty, which is so advan­ tageous to virtue, must be the more improved by its exercise in so ample and magnificent a subject. For 'tis impossible that such a divine order should be contemplated without ecstasy and rapture, since in the common subjects of science and the liberal arts, whatever is according to just harmony and proportion is so transporting to. jthose who have any knowledge or practice in the kind .^ 4

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 7 9 -

In the arts, specifically, enthusiasm as inspiration is an essential

feature of Shaftesbury's system.^ 3ut if the force and vitality of a

creative achievement reside in an evident quality of enthusiasm, the

guidance and direction of creative energies are fully as critical in the

final result. The value of guidance (i.e. the rules) is the subject

of the next chapter. For Shaftesbury the desired effects of a. philo­

sophy remained basically spiritual; he had no patience with either the

useless vagaries of specious emotionalism or the arid relativities of

heartless intellectualism. Advising 3ritish authors of a crucial

priority in the improvement of their artistry, he wrote:

They should add the wisdom o f the heart to the task and exercise of the brain, in order to bring proportion and beauty in to th e ir works . 26

I have said that in aesthetic judgments Shaftesbury never relinquished

or limited his right to philosophize, and it should now be apparent that

the "true enthusiasm" of his tradition is a part of the "true philosophy"

which he was at such pains to justify and productively employ. He wrote

with great feeling about the worth of such philosophy:

Of this, says one, I have clear ideas. Of this, says the other, I can be certain. And what say I if in the whole matter there be no certainty at all? For mathe­ maticians are divided, and mechanics proceed as well upon one hypothesis as on the other. My mind, I am satisfied, w ill proceed either way alike, for it is concerned on neither side. . . . "Philosophers, let me hear concerning life what the right notion is, and what I am to stand to upon occasion; th at I may n o t, when life seems retiring, or has run itself out to the very dregs, cry vanity; condemn the world and at the same time complain that life is short and passing." For why so short indeed if not found sweet? Why do I com­ plain both ways? Is vanity, mere vanity, a happiness? Or can misery pass away too soon? This is of moment to me to examine. This is worth my while. If on the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -So­

other side, I cannot rind the agreement or disagree­ ment, of my ideas in this place, if I can come to nothing certain here, what is all the rest to me? what signifies i t how I came by my ideas or how compound them. . . . If I have a right idea of Life . . . teach me how I may preserve this idea. . . . Teach me how I came by such an opinion of worth and virtue. . . . If this be the subject of the philosophical art, I readily apply to i t and embrace the study.

The student of Burlingtonian Palladianism is iLl-advissd indeed

to evaluate apparently sterile or derivative forms of architectural

expression without acknowledging the philosophical warmth which

originally invigorated them. The power of Shaftesbury's expression

seems at least as reasonable a precedent for the architectural prose

o f M orris, Gvynn, and Ware as for the b etter known and more highly

prized poetry of Pope, and therefore may be postulated as a bond Op between them.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -81-

K0T3S

Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlirrhtcnnsnt. pp. 22-31 "o . . i f we compare the thought o f the eighteenth century w ith th at of the seventeenth, there is no real chasm anywhere separating the two periods. The new ideal of knowledge develops steadily and consistently from the presuppositions which the logic and theory of the seventeenth century — especially in the works of Descartes and Leibniz — had es­ tablished. The difference in the mode of thinking doss not mean a radi­ cal transformation; it amounts merely to a shifting of emphasis. The emphasis i s con stan tly moving from the general to the p a rticu la r, from p rin cip les to phenomena. But the basic assumption remains; that i s the assumption that between the two realms of thought there is no opposition, but rather complete correlation. . . . The self-confidence of reason is nowhere shaken. The rationalistic postulate of unity dominates the minds of the age. The concept of unity and that of science are mutually dependant. . . . With the advent of the eighteenth century the absolutism of the unity principle seems to lose its grip and accept some limita­ tions and concessions. But these modifications do not touch the core of thought itself. For the' function of unification continues to be recog­ nized as the basic role of reason. Rational order and the control of the data of experience are not possible without strict unification . 11

2Ibid., pp. ^6-7, quoting D'Alembert's Elements de PhilosooMe (1759).

3lbid. . p. 136 , According to Cassirer (p. 1.52), the major eighteenth century problems of law and aesthetics are both to be under­ stood in the larger context of theodicy.

Cassirer's critical bias, already indicated, should be recalled. The point i s raised in h is d iscu ssio n o f the Cambridge n eo-P laton ists' attitudes toward nature: "They do not seek dominion: they seek a know­ ledge of that which holds the world together at its core. And they find this bond, not in power, but in love, in the Platonic Ercs. Out of this attitude develops that enthusiasm which Shaftesbury calls the source of all genuine philosophy. To the so-called practical ideals of empiricism, to the norm of mere u tility, he opposes enthusiasm. The chain of means and ends, must be broken, if we would rise to free in­ tuition of the universe. In knowledge, morality and art, this demand must be satisfied. . , . The aim of science should not be to dissect nature in order the better to reduce it to human control; it should be to see and understand nature as a whole through active devotion. It is the power of this devotion, not that of a forced conquest, which holds the key to nature." Ibid. . p. 192.

^Stanley urean's is a representative interpretation: "The Supreme Intelligence has so ordered nature that when an individual works for the good of the whole, he is at the same time working for

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 8 2 -

his own welfare and happiness. As Shaftesbury himself tells us in The Moralists, such a conception of the cosmos- must be the product of en­ thusiasm in which the mind is ’taken up in vision 1 by that which is more than i t s e l f . I t i s not simply a gen eralization drawn from experi­ ence, but it is a product of a synthesizing faith which gives coherence and form to experience." See "Self-Interest and Public Interest in Shaftesbury's Philosophy," Journal of the History of Philosophy. JJ. (A p ril, 196'+), h-5.

^Cassirer describes Shaftesbury1s ideas of beauty and sublimity as follows: ''Not only the inner freedom of man from the objects of nature and from the power of destiny is expressed in the sense of the sublime but the sense releases the individual from a thousand ties to which he is subject as a member of a community and of the social and civil order. In the experience of the sublime all these barriers must vanish; the individual must stand on his own feet and assert himself in his independence and originality against the universe, both physical and s o c ia l. Burke exp ressly poin ts out th a t there are two basic im­ pulses in man; the one urges him to preserve his own being, the other to live in society. The sense of the sublime is based on the former; the sense of the beautiful on the latter. The beautiful unites, the sublime isolates; the one civilizes by teaching the proper forms of intercourse and by refining morals, the other penetrates to the depth of our being and reveals these depths to us for the first time. There is no other aesthetic experience of man that gives him so much self- confidence and courage to be original as the impression of the sublime. Ibid. , p. 330. See also Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Idea of the Sublime and Beautiful ^1757)» Boulton, ^London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), pp. lx v i- lx v ii.

Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 1 00 and 101: "i know that it has been said long sin c e , and echoed backward and forward from one w riter to another a thousand times, that the proportions of buildings have been taken from those of the human body. To make this forced analogy com­ plete, they represent a nan with his arms raised and extended at full length, and then describe a sort of square, as it is formed by passing lines along the extremities of this strange figure. But it appears very clearly to me, that the human figure never supplied the architect with any of his ideas. For in the first place, men are very rarely seen in this strained posture, it is not natural to them; neither is it at a ll becoming. Secondly, the view of the human figure, so dis­ posed, does not naturally suggest the idea of a square, but rather of cross. . . . Thirdly several buildings are by no means of the form of that particular square, which are not withstanding planned by the best architects, and produce an effect altogether as good, and perhaps a better. And certainly nothing could be more unaccountably whimsical, than for an architect to model his performance by the human figure, since no two things can have less resemblance or analogy than a man, and a house or temple; do we need to observe, that their purposes are entirely different? What I am apt to suspect is this: that these

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -33-

analogies were devised to give a credit to the works of art, by show­ ing a conformity between them and the noblest works of nature, not that the latter served at all to supply hints for the perfection of the former . 11 "I shall consider the effects of custom . . . and a tterwards the idea of fitness; since if proportion does not operate by a natural power attending some measures, it must be either by custom, or the idea of utility; there is no other way." Custom and utility have definite acknowledgements from Morris, Ware and Gwynn, but not to the exclusion of all other considerations.

®3ate, From Classic to Romantic, p. 4-5.

% helpful di scussion of this point is found in Allen's Tides in English Taste. Allen refers to widespread satires of the building craze, the classical style, and Burlington himself to reprove the myth of an unanimity of taste. On p. 113 she writes: "As we have seen, immense as was the vogue of classical architecture, and revolutionary as was its influence, it had almost from the outset its unsparing critics who, satirizing it in prints, plays, poems, and' periodical essays, were, it is plain, as aware of its shortcomings as architectural historians of our own day." On the origins and quality of such criticism, Allen says: "A moderate degree of resentment or at least of sentimental regret affected the attitude toward Italian classicism. Englishmen of con­ genital conservatism in whom the consciousness of the national habits was strong deplored that the revolution in architecture entailed a revolution in social customs traditional among the English." "Satirists also ridiculed classicism simply because it was an importation from the Continent, They laughed at it as a taste which the Englishman brought back from h is grand tour along w ith h is preference for French cooking, foreign servants, Lyons silk, French fashions and French furniture. They expressed, indeed, that distrust of the foreigner and his ways which in England almost attains the significance of an historic attitude" (pp. 97 arid 9S). A different calibre of resistance can be instanced with Hawksmoor, who argued, like 3urke, that empirical factors of ex­ perience and experiment were of vital importance and that unencumbered, uninhibited reason was the liberated alternative to the oppressive whimsies of a virtuoso's taste, however educated and inspired that taste might be. See Downes, Hawksmoor. pp. 4-1-2,

10 ^ i 1 Sir William Chambers was to feel the classicist s rod of cor­ rection as a result of his publication of design novelties in the orien­ tal style. He described the criticisms of that book as follows: "Every new system naturally meets with opposition; when the monster Novelty appears, a ll parties, alarmed at the danger, unite to raise a clamour: each cavils at what it doth not like, or doth not comprehend, t ill the whole project i s pulled to p ie c es, and the projector stands plumed o f every feather; not only robbed of the praise due to his labour and good intentions, but, like a common enemey, branded with scorn and abuse. In the first hurry of criticism, every deviation is accounted an error; every singularity an extravagence; every difficulty a visionary's dream:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -34-

warm with resentment, biassed by interests and prejudices, the angry champions o f the o id , ra rely shew mercy to the new; which i s almost always in v id io u sly considered, and too o ften u n ju stly condemned." A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London; W. Griffin, 1772), p. 111. On the other hand, in Chapter 2b of A Complete Body of Architecture, Isaac Ware proves that the degree of hostility expressed toward a^man- ner" (in this case, the French rococo) was more or less consciously set according to the relative threat which its vogue appeared to pre­ sent to the dominance of the approved style. V/are finally decided that the rococo was no longer likely to "swamp" Britain and might therefore be studied and employed, under specific conditions, with a minimal risk, even though he had previously disapproved of it entirely.

^James Leoni, The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti. (London, 1726), Appendix, latter to the Reader.

^Ibid. The attitude was not exclusive to the English; a simi­ lar fear of decadence has been ascribed to Abbe Laugier, who was writing theory a t the same tim e in France. See Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier. and Eighteenth Century'- French Theory (London: A. Zwemmer Ltd., 19-2 ), p. 59.

^ -fessay in Defense of Ancient Architecture, p. iv.

Iijlbid.. p. 13 .

15ibld. , p. 49: "Had it {novelty} boldly and voluntarily proceeded or visibly and openly at once appear'd, it could never have made the least impression upon the minds of even the generality of susceptible mankind; for by being appriz'd of its encroachments, they would have been able, by a defensive posture, to have maintain d order s till in that purity and beauty, which was instituted by the discerning part of mankind, who first gave architecture her original, perfections: but, alas! little incursions made open a way for greater, and small beginnings took th e ir d esired e ffe c t upon an unguarded v ir tu e , and when, perhaps, le a s t suspecting such rude attempts from even the most prejudic'd minds. The theft of one small member, with the addition of another disproportion­ ate one, seem'd but of little importance to the assistance of its ene­ mies, but that enlarged a way for greater, ana more unhappy consequences which follow'd: for then, being unregarded, a foundation was laid for all the pillaging and destroying it, as it were of almost all its beau­ teous ornaments. '

^^Lectures on Architecture, pp. 169-70. The associative char­ acter of "romantic classicism has already been indicated. Morris' passage obviously supports Lees-Milne's judgment: "Both English Palladian country houses and gardens were therefore no less associative and tra­ ditional than strictly mathematical and purist, which they are generally held to be." Earls of Creation (New York: London House & Maxwell, 1963), p. 16 .

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ^7Lectures on Architecture, pp.36- 7 .

**^Sssay in Defense of Ancient Architecture, p. 67.

1'%n Essay Upon Harmony, p. 9: "The soul by sympathy to scenes of perfect beauty, of proportion and elegance, is insensibly drawn and a ttracted ; the murmuring r iv u le ts , th e s ile n t grove, the verdant meads, th e p a rti-co lo u r!d g a ie tie s o f Nature, have th eir charms which harmoni­ ously please." This passage implies, however, an interest in the physi cal or sensual qualities of an object or view and in the psychology of association which becomes explicit in later pages: "Thus, from the dif­ ferent aspect, figure, or texture of objects, we feel within us a sym­ pathetic force; a power which plays upon the affections or passions of the soul; a magnetic charm, which gives pleasure to our senses; what­ ever harmonick virtue there is in the form, proportion or beauty of objects, we catch the impression insensibly; we are vivid, gay, joyous, or more calm and sedate, according to the variety of objects, or simi­ lar with the gloom, or solitude, of the spot" (p. 19). Again, on p„ 22 "3eauties of situation have some influential force over the faculties o f the soul: in a s ile n t gloom o f wood . . . the mind o f man i s turn’d within himself, we feel something of a divinity glide upon our senses, when alone in these still retreats; these contemplative solitudes," The Essay, therefore, while written in terms which the precedent of Shaftesbury’s own discussion of enthusiasm makes meaningful^ goes beyond the Earl (or not as far as he does, depending on one s point of view) in a romantic enthusiasm for objects which affect the spirit via the senses. Shaftesbury1s enthusiasm always remained above and beyond mere pleasure.

^"Shaftesbury1s enthusiasm is new. 1Rubenlsme, 1 as it were, as against the ’Poussinisme’ of Soileau. And — more importantly s till the application to architecture is new. It provides a first answer to one of the fundamental problems of the English eighteenth century. Shaftesbury’s argument makes it possible to understand how ’regular and uniform’ buildings co-exist 'with the ‘horrid Graces of the Wilder­ n e ss . " 1 Nikolaus Pevsner, "The Genesis of the Picturesque," Architec­ tural Review. XCVI (November, 19^ ), 1^1.

Compare, fo r in sta n ce, the Shaftesbury-C assirer emphasis on creative genius with Pevsner’s conclusions on English art: "... in d i­ vidual genius can flourish in reformed, as vigorously as in unreformed, countries. But in England it did not. That in my opinion is due to the growing importance in the national character of practical sense, of reason, and also of tolerance, what English character gained of tolerance and fair play, she lost of that fanaticism or at least that intensity which alone can bring forth the very greatest in art." The Snglishness of English Art. p, 192.

22one of Morris' verse passages included these lines: "North­ ward I'd choose a wild, or barren heath;/ Or else a prospect to some

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 8 6 -

distant sea;/ Or else a group of vast and steepy h ills,/ Whose craggy summits , with their distant views,/ Alternate risings, and their d iff 1 rent shades,/ Shifting in various .forms from h ill to h ill,/ A wild, romantic prospect would create." Lectures on Architectur-:.. p. 190. Ware's advice on the planning of small working farms is explicitly picturesque, but nonetheless salted with inevitable pragmatism: "if a proper spot were chosen, it is not easy to conceive anything more agreeable than such a construction might be made. We w ill suppose the advantage of the ground so taken that the house should stand on the brow o f a sm all h ill; from th is there should be a gradual descent to a brook whence the ground rose on the other side again, though to a less height. The farm might be situated just on the other side the brook; a fine lawn might lead down to the water, and a bridge over that directly to the farm-yard. The cattle would thus have the ad­ vantage of the water, the family would also have it in abundance for a l l th eir o ccasion s, and the whole d isp o sitio n o f the farm would seem as a picture, viewed from the house. The cattle sprinkled upon the hilly pastures would afford a prospect vastly beyond that of deer in a barren park, and the successive labours of the farm, the hay-making and harvest-work, while they were a ll performed in this manner, under the master's eye, would give an everlasting variety." A Complete Body of Architecture, p. 352.

^Characteristics, II, 129.

2/*Ibid„. I, 279.

?-5lbid., I, 36-7; "No poet . . . can do anything great in his own way without the imagination or supposition of a divine presence, which may raise him to some degree of this passion we are speaking of. Even the cold Lucretius makes use of in sp ira tio n , when he w rites against it."

26Ibid., I, 180. I have already cited Brett's analysis of Shaftesbury 1 s_hope for a marriage o f emotion and reason. I t might also be pointed out that Ackerman has suggested that the best approach to Palladio's architecture is to be predicated on rationality and ro­ mance or passion as dual, possibly even complementary, aspects of clas­ sicism rather than diametrically opposed tendencies frozen in the polarities of "classic" and "romantic" period characterizations, See ^-s Palladio. p. 184.

^characteristics. I, 19&.

^Pope's Temole of Fame (written in 1711, published in 1715) illustrates the poetry of an architectural enthusiast's vision very handily. Of particular interest is the emphasis on color and motion in a context of architectural elements usually characterized as cold and static. It may well be that Pope is simply more successful in his poetic distillation of Baroque and Picturesque design traits than any

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -87-

single architect had been in the design and construction of an actual building. My point is merely that there existed a common meeting ground in Shaftesbury and his tradition as practiced by Burlington, where Augustan architects and poets of various merits might be understood to have shared something of the best in each other's achievements. The a lta r w ith in the Temple o f Fame i s described by Pops as follow s (lin e s 2^4-65): "These massie columns in a circle rise,/ O'er which a pompous Dome invades the Skies:/ Scarce to the Top I stretch'd my aking Sight;/ So large it spread, and swell'd to such a height./ Full in the midst, proud Fame's Imperial Seat/ With jewels blaz'd, magnificently great;/ The vivid Emeralds there revive the Eye;/ The flaming Rubies shew their sanguine Dye;/ Bright azure Rays from lively Saphirs stream,/ And lucid Amber casts a Golden Gleam./ With various colour'd light the Pavement shone,/ And a ll on fire appear'd the glowing Throne./ The Dome's high arch r e f le c t s the mingled B la z e ,/ And forms a Rainbow of alternate rays./ When on the Goddess first I cast my Sight,/ Scarce seem'd her Stature of a Cubit's height,/ But swelled to larger Size, the more I gazed,/ T ill to the Roof her tow'ring Front she rais'd./ With her the Temple ev'ry Moment grew,/ And ampler Vista's open'd to my View,/ Upward the Columns shoot, the Roofs ascend,/ And Arches widen and long lies extend."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE APPREHENSION OF BEAUTY AND THE EDUCATION OF TASTE SHAFTESBURY: A TENSION OF RULES AND COMMON SENSE

According to Shaftesbury, beauty exists in three degrees. First,

there is the beauty of forms that are fashioned by man or nature but

remain inanimate. Second, there is the beauty of "forms which form"

(i.e. have intelligence and action); thirdly, there is the beauty of

"that which fashions even minds themselves, contains in itself a ll the

beauties fashioned by those minds, and is consequently the principle,

source, and fountain of a ll beauty."^

Architecture is of the lowest level and man inhabits the second,

but whatever beauty exists in either is ultimately derived from the

third and highest; the presence of any and all beauty is immediately

recognized or apprehended.^ As a teaching example, Shaftesbury cited

the "natural" attraction of simple and regular geometric forms:

Why is the sphere or globe, the cylinder and obelisk preferred; and the irregular figures in respect of these rejected and despised? . . . there is in certain figures a natural beauty which the eye finds as soon as the ob­ ject is presented to it. Is there then . . . a natural beauty of figures? and is there not as natural a one of actions?3

At different points in the Characteristics. Shaftesbury listed the

properties of the immediately-perceived and intuitively understood

natural beauty: harmony in proportions (which implies a regularity

-SB-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -89-

of form), and an adaptability to "activity and use."**' Since the Earl's

relation of beauty and truth has already been noted, the additional

factor of honesty may be listed in the equation of natural beauty:

And thus, after a ll, the most natural tieauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of a face; and true pro­ portions the beauty of architecture; as true measures that of harmony and music. In poetry, which is all fable, truth is still the perfection. And whoever is scholar enough to read th e ancient- philosopher, or h is modern c o p y ists, upon the nature o f a dramatic and eo ic poem, w ill easily understand this account of t r u t h . 5

Obviously, Shaftesbury was not referring to beauty as a physical feature

of matter or a stimulus of the senses. His concept of beauty was much

more that of an idea, an intellectual rightness, recognized and appreci­

ated in a purely mental experience. His statement of the concept, from

the dialogue in The -foralists. is as follows:

"That the beautiful, the fair, the comely, were never in the matter, but in the art and design; never in body it­ self, but in the form or forming power," Does not the beautiful form confess this, and speak the beauty of the design whenever it strikes you? What is it but the design which strikes? What is it you admire but mind, or the effect of mind? *Tis mind alone which forms. All which is void of mind is horrid, and matter formless is deformity itself . 6

But i f beauty i s to be found in the forming power o f mind,

Shaftesbury1s emphasis on the importance of "true enthusiasm" is not

to be forgotten. One recent critic has interpreted the Earl's implied

criticism of Christopher Wren in the Letter Concerning Design as a

rejection of intellectuality uninspired by enthusiasm, a displeasure

with architectural exercise in geometry that showed no portion of "a

grace and beauty th a t go beyond mere r u le s ." '7 Shaftesbury's defense of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 9 0 -

enthusiasra ended with a call to "true philosophy," and the value he

places on the contributions of enthusiasm to artistic achievement simi­

larly implies the importance of larger philosophical values to the works

of the artist and the critic. Although he treated aesthetic taste as

analogous to moral taste, and the apprehension of beauty as a kind of

equivalent or model of the "moral sense," Shaftesbury repreatedly stres­

ses the need to educate each taste, thereby developing the allied sense

to its full natural potential. This educational process inevitably

implied standards and rules, whose character and value had to be philo­

sophically justified:

Now a taste or judgment, 'tis supposed, can hardly cone ready formed with us into the world. Use, practice, and culture must precede the understanding and wit of such an advanced size and growth as this. A legitimate and just taste can neither be begotten, made, conceived or produced without the antecedent labour and pains of c r itic ism . 8

Enthusiasm, then, stimulates the creative fancy or imagination, but a

philosophical judgment, based on long study and intimate familiarity

with the "rules of art," makes possible the fullest and most effective

expressions of such enthusiasm.^ The critic is of particular importance

and serv ice in th is scheme because he i s supposed to be a student o f

both enthusiasm and judgment; his ranks are the first and best line of

defense against the dangers of a "false relish." Shaftesbury spoke

plainly on the role of critics:

. . . we presume not only to defend the cause of critics, but to declare open war against those indolent supine authors, performers, readers, auditors, actors or spectators who, making their humour alone the rule of what is beautiful and agreeable, and having no account to give of such their humour or odd fancy, reject the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 9 1 -

criticising or examining art, by which alone they are able to discover the true beauty and worth of every o b ject.

Shaftesbury intended no relativity of artistic values under any

circumstances. In fact, he says that, if necessary, those in whom judg­

ment is most developed and true enthusiasm most active should endeavour

to re-direct the erring public, taking for their inspiration the ex­

amples set by those courageous ancients who achieved immortality by ad­

hering to their own standards and converting audiences to their point

o f v iow .^ Lawrence Lipking has shown th at the Shaftesburyan idea o f

"true criticism" was subsequently taken up and developed by the Sari1s

nephew, James Harris, but th a t, on the whole, the id e a l was fated to

remain unrealized. As to why this should have been the case, Lipking

sa y s:

The leap from catagories and p rin cip les to p articular judgments proved to be beyond the range of the generality of English aestheticians. The most rigorous philosophers remained amateurs of letters, and the literary men whose scope was greatest, Johnson and Goldsmith and Gray and Thomas Warton, resisted the urge to systematize their knowledge into a theory. Thus the "idea of true Criticism" remained a chimera . 12

The importance of rules and Shaftesbury's insistence on a

philosophically grounded approach to design in general must, however,

be qualified by his freely expressed aversion to unbalanced pedantry:

"The most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system."^ Un­

doubtedly, this attitude severely limits the likelihood of a parallel

between the Earl's intentions and much of the more ambitious and

specialized architectural literature.^ As has been noted, Shaftesbury

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 9 2 -

produced a philosophy which was more suggestive in its breadth and

idiom than consistent or rigorous in its expression. His attitude

undoubtedly had less in common with esoteric architectural etymologies

and related scholarship than with Addison’s ridicule of "Sir Nicholas

Gimcrack," the fictional fool of a would-be virtuoso, and Pope's despair

of "imitating fools" who would proudly and stupidly "starve by rules

of art" that Burlington had established, but they would never understandJ5

In the end, then, there does remain an unresolved tension in Shaftes- 1 6 bury s writing between theoretical and'practical wisdom. He enjoined

the artist to be a philosopher, simultaneously possessed of enthusiasm

(gen iu s) th at makes ru les irrelev a n t and cen so ria l judgment which i s

rational and systematized. Perceiving beauty spontaneously, the artist

must nevertheless labor incessantly to refine and educate the taste

which is the fruit of his aesthetic sense. The problematic character

of this formula was neither denied nor minimized by the Earl, himself:

Of a ll philosophy, therefore, how absolute!;/ the most disagreeable must that appear which goes upon no es­ tablished hypothesis, nor presents us with any flattering scheme, talks only of probabilities, suspense of judgment, inquiry, search and caution not to be imposed on or deceived? 7

WARE: DOGMA. AND PRAGMATISM, PROPRIETY AND LIBERTY

As we might expect, Isaac Ware's preoccupation with practical

wisdom saves him much of the Earl's trouble, but Ware's encyclopedic

scope of instruction, his precise methodology and his avowed principles

of "propriety" have earned his book the historical reputation of arche- 1 Q typical Burlingtonian dogmatism.' As an architect seeking to instruct

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. other architects, Ware probably considered himself an heir of Alberti,

who had written that educated builders "must without doubt be directed

by some sure ru3.es of art and proportion."^ His was the book for

which John Evelyn had called a century earlier in his Account of Archi­

tects and Architecture:

. . . some more entire treatise of the whole art than is yet extant among us, and to be delivered by some in­ dustrious person who shall oblige the nation with a thorough examination of what has already been written . . . and advance upon the p rin cip les already e sta b lish e d , and not so acquiesce in them as if there were a non ultra engraven uoon our columns like those of Hercules, after which there remained no more to be discovered. u

It is important to note that Evelyn did not ask for an uncritical or

unimaginative recitation of rules for their own sake; by the second half

of the eighteenth century William Chambers could boldly proclaim his

own intention to "avoid an unnecessary increase of rules, in a science

already too much encumbered with them. If V/are did not go as far as

Chambers, he met Evelyn's challenge conscientiously. His discussion of

the five orders, for instance, comes under the heading of architectural

ornament and explicitly acknowledges that "very great and elegant edi- oo fices may be raised without any use of these."' Although Ware- s sense

o f propriety led him to r e je c t modern composed orders as w him sical, he

did not deny that a wholly new order could be invented:

As this is altogether a matter of taste and genius, there is however no reason to say another order should not be invented. It is indeed not wanted in the regu­ larity of buildings, but it would give variety. It is not out of the compass of imagination, and it is worthy attempting. But he who shall set about it must first be a perfect master of the design of every part and propor­ tion of the others, and then while he imitates the plan upon which those went who formed them, let him avoid

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. their ornaments and proportions. If anything is pro­ posed new on this head, let it be new absolutely; and he who shall happily follow the steps of the old Greeks w ill deserve to share their reputation. . . . Some true architect, inspired with the full spirit of the science, may rise and strike out to us a beauty the ancients never found; for it is in the canpass of nature not yet exhausted

Obviously, for Hare, as for Shaftesbury before him, architectural

"genius" was more a complement than a satisfactory alternative to

a I i knowledge of the rules of building. "The common practice is but the

labour of the hand," but Vvare felt that architectural art was more

properly an "employment o f the mind," and therefore to be based upon

rational methods without being circumscribed by traditional rules and

previously formulated systems.^

Ware's attitude toward the partnership of genius (or imagination

or fancy) and judgment that is the product of a thorough knowledge of

the rules is nowhere clearer than in his explication of the principles

of utility and convenience. He addressed the problem of designing

buildings that are not intended to display the grammar of any order

with almost a tone of relief at escaping such formal conventions:

. . . for, there being no rule established, all is open to genius: and a pregnant fancy, restrained by judgment, may be for ever inventing something new, both in the elevation and the distribution of the parts (i.e. the plan}. It is indeed principally in __ these plain buildings the genius is to be indulged.

A true taste is therefore inseparable from the rules but only "finished

by a true and just idea" of architecture which cannot be attained by

even the most encyclopedic knowledge of "what others have said."

Ware's idea of architecture had basically to do, among other things,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 9 5 -

with rational significance as a content of form. A revealing clue to

this is provided in his often-cited diatribe against the French rococo

(which he had been prevailed upon to employ in Lord Chesterfield*s

house):

It is our misfortune to see at this time an unmeaning scrawl (of C-scroll forms] inverted, turned, and hooked togeth er, take place o f Greek and Roman elegan ce, even in our most expensive decorations. This is not be­ cause' the possessor thinks there is or can be elegance in such fond, weak, ill-jointed and unmeaning figures: it is usually because it is French; and fashion commands th a t whatever i s French i s to be admired as fin e: the two words (so low are Britons sunk) mean the same thing! Let us propose against this poor unmeaning fantastic figuring, the plain manly noble orders, which dignify the Roman structures, and have preserved, more than two thousand yea rs, the Greek remains, even in the countries of barbarians . ^9

Using the word "unmeaning" three times in this brief passage, Ware made

clear his critical preference for forms which can be rationally explain­

ed and reasonably seen to refer to each other. Almost every syllable

of the classical architectural vocabulary had long since been identified,

named, d efin ed , and given a tr a d itio n o f orig in and con text. The re­

jection of rococo, or Chinese, or Gothic designs in Ware's text was

therefore not an irrational and irritating stylistic narrow-mindedness

so much as a conditioned adherence to a philosophy of form, the achieve­

ment of which had required painstaking intellectual effort, and which 30 could not account for or value apparently meaningless design.

Furthermore, Ware understood fu ll well that the meaning of a

term can be shaded and inflected by its context, which is to say that

selective infractions of good classical grammar might be justified by

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the unusually powerful expressions which result: * . there is some­

tim es, in the way o f the p erfect a r ch ite ct, a manner o f making things

beautiful that sire liable to objections. Ornamentally placed orders

across a housefront may be properly handled differently than those which

actually carry a portico roof; similarly, "fancy" may be allowed a

liberty in the decoration of room interiors that would be wholly im-

proper on exterior elevations.^ Although Ware was codifying the tra­

ditional rules of good architecture, he insists that "we are not found­

ing our rules upon what is executed, but what should be; not upon cus­

tom, but reason."33 There is thus an important relativism of spirit

which no reader or critic of Ware should be allowed to overlook or

forget. I have cited previously his willingness to study and deal with

the rococo, once the style seemed less of a "threat," and. it should be

noted that his dismissal of "gothick" (distinguished by "its ornaments

being whimsical and its profiles incorrect") included the judgment that

"in a gothick cathedral we see many defects, but at the same time we

see something very great.

There was room in Ware's "dogma" for criticism of Palladio,

too. Time and again Ware referred to the Vicentine master as one of

the b est a v a ila b le modern guides on a particular point only to add the

caution that antiquity has provided plenty of contradictory precedents

whose authority is unimpeachable.

The single proportions described by Palladio are too narrow and too s t r ic t a confinement. They are u sefu l in the highest degree to the common architect, and th erefore we s h a ll on every occasion d e liv e r them; and as they are the best [of the modern} that have been

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 9 7 -

established, we shall deliver them only; but to enlarge the view for the bolder spirit, we shall on each occasion deliver also the practice of the ancients in its extent.35

In at least one instance, Ware even provided an outright censure of a

published Palladian prototype for a Doric frieze.3^

Returning to h is theme o f genius and judgment., Ware derived

a specific lesson from the documented diversity of ancient practicer

an educated taste should take its inspiration from the ancients' balance

of coherence and regularity with innovation and individuality. Such a

ta ste i s far removed from the d u ll secu rity o f a small-minded c o p y ist's

mechanical reverence. Upon analysis, said Ware, the rational student

of antique forms was forced to conclude that some of their details

"were the result of fancy," a wisely and we 11-exploited poetic liberty,

rather than consistent and purposefully calculated variations in a rigid

and comprehensive system of proportions. 'Ware therefore enjoined the

young architect to cultivate a sense of originality by increasing his

familiarity with the variety of antique precedent:

. . . let him understand the dignity of his profession and consider the architect as a person whose genius is not to be tied down by laws established by any one man, however great or judicious, but to expatiate through a ll those roads of freedom which the ancient masters have travelled before him.37

F in a lly , in remembrance o f Longinus' advice to orators, ’Ware lik ew ise

directed the respectful architectural student to imagine himself in

the company of the masters of his art:

. . . let him consider well the occasion, and ask him­ self, what would Palladio have done in such a circum­ stance? 'When he has fin ish ed , l e t him demand, what would Vitruvius say were he present to examine this? . . .

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 9 8 -

He must have indeed a cold imagination, who could design meanly or incorrectly when he supposed himself acting in the spirit of that reverend modern, or appealing to the judgment of that judicious ancient , 38

MORRIS: TIE PLEASURES OF THEORETICAL SPECULATION

Robert Morris was no less capable than Ware of presenting

a rule or precept -which, removed from con text, appears r ig id and r i ­

diculous to modern readers, but Morris dealt more frequently than 'Ware

with the larger ideas of theory that generate such doctrinaire pro­

grams. He was happier with problems of definition than 'Ware and less

consistently committed to the provision of comprehensive practical

guidance. Morris, for instance, named purity and simplicity as dis­

tinct and fundamental principles of his philosophy of form. Ware said

that simple buildings were a neglected and potentially stimulating to

architectural imagination, but Morris was concerned to name and des­

cribe the principles according to which the challenge is perceived and

met. He wrote: "By purity, I mean, free from being corrupted, exact­

ness and unmixedness; and by simplicity, plainness, and without dis­

guise. "39 xt is true that the terms were never evolved to a much finer

precision, but the naming of the ideas and the implied importance of

their definitions is typical of Morris as a theorist. The obvious use

of such discussions to an architect of the eighteenth century lies in

the development of his consciousness as to the nature of his profes­

sion’s intellectual techniques and concerns, rather than material

tj. 0 assistance with building problems of everyday practice.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 9 9 -

In a partial definition of beauty, Morris wrote that it depended

upon the ordered disposition of a variety of forms,^ The variety of

forms is ultimately a question of the free play (within explicit bounds-,

of course) of artistic design, i.e . the exercise of whatever "natural

genius" the architect may have. The idea of ordered disposition, on

the other hand, is more ethereal, less material in its operations, more

in the way of a recognition of the system which provides the rules that

the architect must follow and less involved with originality or inven­

tion. Regularity and proportion, with their legions of attendant rules,

were Morris' stated means to the end of ordered disposition. It is

this pattern of theory that Morris interwove with music, as previously

noted, and extended even so far as a rule of harmonic proportion be­

tween room siae and fenestration surfaces:

Regularity and proportion are the fine parts of archi­ te c tu r e, and these are perform’d by stated r u le s, handed down to us by the care and vigilance of preceding ages, to whom we owe a ll our knowledge, as well historical as architectural. I say buildings are to be perform'd by stated rules, as the several parts of music in concert are; in which, if one instrument is illy tuned, or in a different key, it immediately creates a jarring and dis­ cord, which is not to be remedied without setting aside that instrument, or putting it in a proper key with the rest: the same rules perfect architecture, and are essentially necessary in its performance .^ 2

From his theory of the character of beauty, Morris reached a

position quite close to both Shaftesbury and Mare: good design (the

means to achievement o f beauty) depends upon both natural genius and

extensive cultivation of taste, the latter to be pursued via familiar­

ity with the best possible didactic examples.^ The cultivation of genius

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -100-

is not a mere acquisition of superficial learning; for Korris it is the

uttermost possible fulfillment of a man’s individual character and a

source of pleasure,, as w ell.^

Architectural design as discussed by Morris and Ware could never

have been limited to the minutiae of the five orders; such knowledge

was "only the entrance, the first branches of the art" which itself

depends on a more valuable ability to "appropriate the several parts to

u se, and make them have an a f f in it y w ith the whole, The importance

that Morris placed on rules stems from their value as aids to judgment

and the foundations of opinions which can rise above the incidental,

transient, and personal to become a kind of common currency of intel­

lectual exchange. Appearances to the contrary, Morris did not intend

to trap himself or others in the bogs of pedantry. He said of rules,

per s e ;

I do not set them down for absolute, but if they are practicable they may be useful. Our judgments vary much in the most common opinions; and if there should be different sentiments about the improvement and refining so noble and extensive an art as architecture, yet it is certain, where rules are the guide to our judgment such opinions are built upon the most solid and lasting foundation. °

As an example of complete success in the difficult balancing of genius

and rules Morris pointed with pride and florid praise to Inigo Jones,

His tribute to that architect is a concise manifesto of many of his

major points of theory:

But not out of due time arose that ever-renowned pro­ fessor, who traced back a ll the pleasing paths of an­ tiquity in architecture, with all the care and indus­ trious vigilance that was possible to give him any ideas

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 101-

more conducive to pleasure and beauty in the survey, in which his imagination surpass'd even a description, his judgment arriv’d to the most elevated height of perfect­ ness, his soul being aptly fram'd for the reception of a ll those noble sciences and beauties of the mind, which human nature can be capable of receiving: He had in him­ self something peculiar, a fine manner of introducing those masterstrokes of art, which are the more beautiful and pleasing, as they most resemble nature in the design and execution; in short, he has left such lively repre­ sen tation s o f a sublime genius th at none amongst the worthy but acknowledge him to be an example fit for our imitation, and guide to lead us through the unerring rules of ancient architecture: I mean, the 3ritish Palladio, Inigo Jones .W

Although Morris' modern reputation rests more on his books than

executed designs,_he was hot so self-impressed with the seriousness of

h is educational undertakings as to be unaware o f the lim ita tio n s and

short-ccmings of architectural literature as a genre. The Architectural

Remembrancer contains a satire on advertisements for builder's books

that is still amusing today. But Morris had an abiding faith in the

efficacy and virtue of well-conceived architectural writing that re­

deemed the rid icu lo u s extremes reached by le s s thoughtful authors.

Comparing the first-h an d experience o f a building w ith a w ritten d is ­

cussion illustrated by plans and elevations, he reveals again the im­

portant intellectual bias that we have deduced from other passages:

The eye can only survey, and is confined to a narrow limit: whereas the ideas conceiv'd by a lively des­ cription, or a bare representation, imprint on the mind a lasting impression: For if the inspection be genuine and true, if supported by rational arguments, by natural allusions, and the concurrence of self-evident proofs,^ the impression is stronger by far than an ocular view.

It was Morris' faith in the book as a didactic device that accounted

for his publication of designs in Moorish, Muscovite, or other arcane

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. manners as negative teaching examples, straw-men easily disposed of in

his propaganda war against whimsical novelty.-*®

Much of Morris1 attention was devoted to the "dress" or

ornament of the building fabric, since in such designs an architect was

"to show his skill" most obviously. Decorum remained his fundamental

guide, with due attention to the previously indicated virtues of sim­

plicity and purity.-^ Dress must not interfere with or stand apart from

the coherence of the structure's general order, i.e . the propriety of

structured relationships between its individually varied elements. Once

again, in the end, nature's model was supposed by Morris to be inviol­

able and self-evident. The pure theory is familiar by now:

. . . this is the most difficult part of architecture, so to dispose of ornaments as to fill up useless vacuities, and to give a proper alleviation to the eye as it passes from space to space, preserving an analogy through the keeping of the whole design, and so filling and decorating the vacancies, as not to crowd and incumber the parts with superfluous dress or ornament. Beauty and propor­ tion are inseparable, for which reason beauty is always center'd in proportion, and proportion is ever beautiful; therefore, in Nature, there are stated laws, whereby they are form'd: but when we deviate from Nature, the farther we recede, the more remote we are from elegance, because Nature is constant in invariable in her production, and admits of nothing to make her pleasing or beautiful but proportion and harmony.' In a rch itectu re, th erefore ru les are to be made tise o f, which when observed by an arch i­ tect, his fancy, or genius, w ill give a proper contrast to a design,52

As for true criticism, Morris developed the idea with interest

and a certain originality of emphasis. His reaction to the well-known

Review of Public Buildings, now ascribed to James Ralph, is that opinions

were of little value without rational explanations of the final judgment.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -103-

A true critic, he said, had better consider the artist*s intentions,

the ru les and methods o f h is approach, and then the " resu lt o f the

whole piece," Interestingly, Morris placed considerable importance

on the integrity of the design as an expression of the artist*s origin­

ality: it should be "genuine and free from theft." He who seeks to

pass judgment on another man's creation must understand the art as well

as the artist does. Shaftesbury's challenge, to make ourselves fit to

judge, is still in force.^

GWYNN: GENIUS AND GUIDANCE

If the persistent reader turns to Gwynn on the subjects of beauty

and taste he finds correspondence, in the main, to the broad strokes

sketched from the p o sitio n s o f Shaftesbury, Ware, and M orris, but he

also finds a revealing, heightened sense of ambivalence, probably

descendant of Shaftesbury's unresolved tension between theoretical and

practical wisdom. Assuming for the moment that Gwynn wrote An Essay

Upon Harmony (173^), his discussion of the apprehension of beauty by

a secret response of sympathetic imagination to a natural harmony could

hardly have been in closer accord with Morris:

The harmony o f Nature c o n sists in proportion, and our bodies are organized to tally with those graces that Nature produceth; to sympathize with them, and be charm d with the melody of their texture; the eye is insensibly a ttracted to thorn, as the ear i s w ith music, and what­ ever thus immediately strikes the imagination must have some beauties in it, which are in some measure analogous to that agreeable composition which is con­ sistent with true harmony.55

In The Art of Architecture (17^2), Gwynn set forth a conventional

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 0 4 -

defense of rules as a source of propriety and validity in design. The

survival of antique forms and the renewed use of intellectual systems

presumed to underlie those forms is taken by him as evidence of their

"natural" authority. A functionalism not ’inlike Ware's is a source of

that authority, according to Gwynn:

Why, then, should Artists challenge future Praise, When Tine devours their Works so many ways? But Use has r a is'd the Greek and Roman R ules, And vanish'd Gothick Practice from the Schools. Use is the .fudge. the Law, the Rule of Things, ^ Whence Arts arose; and whence the Science springs.-'1''

While rules were thought to be essential for artistic guidance, no one

particular system could be comprehensive and correct without exception.

For that reason Gwynn stressed that the rules themselves were merely

the outcome of the on-going interactions of mind and nature:

But how to appropriate, to embellish s till J u stly the Space to decorate and f i l l , To give proportion’d Beauty to each Part, To make the whole subservient to the .Art: The Inborn-Traces of the Mind pursue, For Nature teaches how to find the Clue.2'

Both The Art of Architecture and An 5ssay ~Joon Harmony implied the pro­

priety of decorum, with a building's size, character of use, and site

each suggesting (or requiring) a specific character of decoration or

dress.In fact, it was an alleged violation of the decorum principle

that gave Gwynn ca.use to employ ’Ware's favorite critical adjective:

In H—k—r; V—b—'s very Soul you trace, The same unmeaning D ress, in every Place; The same wild Heap of inconsistent Things: From whence the Prison, or the Palace springs . ^

Toward the end of the poem, Gwynn encouraged the vrriting of treatises

to provide a corpus of correct theory for the general education and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 0 5 -

improvemer.t of taste. If the formulation of orthodoxy cannot, in

itself, produce architectural genius, it can at least preserve "the

low est and d u lle s t mind which attends" to i t s precepts "from those

absurdities which genius, without the same knowledge, * may fa ll into," It 60

Gwynn's basically conservative attitude is clear in these lines, which

sound rather less adventurous than either Ware or Morris:

To tread unbeaten Paths, be Lofty still; Keep up the strength, the Dignity, and Force Of stated Rules; let those direct your Course, *Tis better to pursue the Rule that's known, Than trust to an Invention of your own. But then, be sure your choice direct you right; Vary, but keep the Original in sight. 1

On the other hand, innovation and genius were not finally un­

recognized by Gwynn or less important in his works than in those of

Morris or 'Ware. In An 5ssay on Design (1 ?h9) Gwynn defined his sub­

ject as something apart from the mechanical skills of drawing (which

might be taught); design as he considers and values it is instead a

"supreme inventive art . . . abstractly considered." In some ways

the most literary of our three architectural authors, Gwynn associated

design and lite r a r y genius as follow s:

But Design is the child of genius, and cannot be wholly infused [i.e. taught[: the principle of it must exist in the soul, and can be called forth only by education, and improved by p ra ctice. Thus the art o f numbers may be attained by the ear; the knowledge of bodies, properties, facts, events, and fables, by reading; but the vis poetica. which distinguishes the bard from the journalist, or ver- sifyer, must be the gift of heaven. Neither this poetic energy, nor the inventive power.gf the designer, can be taught in schools or academies.

Seventeen years later, in London and Westminster Improved. Gwynn s till

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -10 6-

held that genius could never be attained merely by copy-book instruc­

tion, but his perspective on the topic and related matters seems to

have deepened and shifted significantly. He curiously grouped Wren,

Vanbrugh, and Thornhill with Jones and 3urlington on the grounds that

they

were all men of a liberal education, well versed in the elements of science, and therefore knew something more than the scoring of straight lines; they had, if I may so express it, the seeds of invention in them, and were not mere com pilers from books, lik e many o f the present age, who are no more than mere mechanical architects, totally ignorant of every branch of learning proper to lead them into the knowledge of design. 3

In his last architectural book,.Gwynn left the definite impression that

the movement begun by Burlington and the others in the names of Palladio

and Jones was out of control, pursuing its own direction with an in­

dependent and unwholesome energy. Its guiding principles of philosophy

and style, established with such earnestness, have lost the flexibility

and agility of their youth. Gwynn implied that, with the accumulated

authority gained from years of prominence, conventional rules were being

allowed to repress the very mental vitality from which they originally

had sprung. With some bitterness, Gwynn wrote:

. . . let the present taste of architecture be considered impartially, and it w ill be found that nothing is left for invention, nothing for improvement; the models of Greece and Rome are the standards of English architecture, unalterably fix'd as such 0 . . . I t would be oonsidered by a person of virtu, as little else than blasphemy, to propose the least innovation, though convenience and propriety are sacrificed.

This is an important change of attitude in the man who had cheerfully

consigned the enemies of "true taste" to the flaming pits of Hell in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -107-

the last lines of The Art of Architecture and, as such, is a problem

deserving of further research. For now, one can speculate that Gwynn

might have felt left behind in an increasingly specialized and profes­

sionalized architectural world. His literate tributes to amateur

practitioners and their theories were fast becoming the relics of another

genera.tion; the business of patronage had developed to the point that

an English builder stood little chance (according to Gwynn) against

the pompous, self-promoting showmen who relied on the prestige of their

Italian journeys to compensate a lack of true design talent. Gwynn

utterly rejected the fad for travelled architects, and defended the

old formula of tasteful innovation within agreed-upon limitations. At

one point, the extent of his alienation is made clear by the forced

explanation that he was not attacking the principles of antique archi­

tecture (by which he presumably meant the principles of Morris, Ware,

and other Burlingtonians) but instead the fad for copies of the

antique that left no room for native expression.^ Perhaps a man of

letters as much as architecture, Gwynn finally appealed to the prece­

dent of England's literary genius in the hope that architectural

taste could be revived by its inspiration:

If Shakespeare had been fettered by the rules of the ancients, his plays would have been more correct, but they would have been proportionably insipid, and the poetical wanderings of that great author abundantly ■ recompense the want of attention to the rules of the ancient dramatic writers.

It bears reiteration that the patterns traced from Shaftesbury

through Burlingtonian architectural theory did not evolve in a vacuum.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 0 3 -

If, as Steegman has said, the effect of Shaftesbury's philosophy of

aesthetics was to stimulate conscious reasoning in art theory and thus

generate "rules of art," that chain of events was surely linked to other

strands of English and contemporaneous continental culture. 67' Pevsner

has suggested that .the Palladian revival was characteristic of much that

is fundamental in the quality of English art, but surely the lengths to

which the systematization of rules was carried by Morris or Ware (and

later by those against whom Gwynn turned) ran counter to another part

of the English character and may be of some importance to the historian's

understanding of the appeal of chinoiserie. the rococo, and gothic revi­

val.^® Downes has shown th a t .H^'ksmaer, for example, was an E nglish

architect who disapproved of the rule-bound precedent of the seventeenth-

century French Academy that was indirectly to prove so powerful in

eighteenth-century England.^ Aside from the frequent classical in­

spiration and varying emotional intensities of its content, the archi­

tectural literature so far surveyed clearly must be acknowledged as, in

part, the product of a sequence of thought reaching back to Descartes.?^

It may also be considered collectively as the first conscious formu­

lation of a point of view that would persist in the English-speaking

world (and sometimes effectively dominate its architectural expression)

until our own time.^

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 0 9 -

NOTES

1Characteristics. II, 1 33 .

2Ib id .: "Th srefore whatever beauty appears in our second order of forms, or whatever is derived or produced from thence, all this is em inently, p r in c ip a lly , and o r ig in a lly in th is la s t order o f supreme and sovereign beauty. . . . Thus architecture, music, and all which is of human invention, resolves itself into this last order.”

2rbid.. II, 137. Traditional architectural literature contained at least one similar albeit not specifically ethical idea, which makes an interesting comparison: "But the judgment which you make that a thing i s b e a u tifu l, does not proceed from mere opin ion, but from a secret argument and discourse implanted in the mind itself; which plainly ap­ pears to be so from this, that no man behold anything ugly or deformed without an immediate hatred and abhorrence." Ison Battista Alberti, The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti (London, 1726), p. 8h,

^Ib id . . I I , 267. '“Tis impossible we can advance the least in any relish or taste of outward symmetry and order, without acknowledging that the proportionate and regular state is the truly prosperous and natural in every subject. The same features which make deformity create incommodiousness and disease. And the same shapes and proportions which make beauty afford advantage by adapting to activity and use. Even in the imitative or designing arts . . . the truth or beauty of every figure or statue is measured from the perfection of Nature in her just adapting of every limb and proportion to the activity, strength, dexterity, life and vigour of the particular species or animal de­ signed. Thus beauty and truth are plainly joined with the notion of u tility and convenience, even in the apprehension of every ingenious artist, the architect, the statuary, or the painter." This is a fas­ cinating and frank admixture of "functional" elements within a meta­ physical "ideal" of beauty.

^Ebid. . I, 9^-. See Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlighten­ ment. p. 3 1 on beauty and truth in Shaftesbury.

^Tbid. . II, 132 . Stanley Grean, one of Cassirer's recent fol­ lowers, has provided a helpful interpretation of the implications of Shaftesbury's view: "Aesthetic appreciation is more than the grasping of an external unity, it is the apprehension by the mind of the inner organizing forces of an organic system. . . . For [Shaftesbury](as well as Cicero) beauty is an expression of mind, and the appreciation of beauty is the discovery of mind by mind." Shaftesbury s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, p. 25^. Grean1s bias is apparent, but there can be little argument about his emphasis on "an expression of mind." It is this character of Shaftesbury1s thought which can be related most obviously and easily to the discussions of design and genius in Morris,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 110-

Gwynn, and Ware, For another thoughtful interpretation, see Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, p. 142: :,Shaftesbury is not concerned . . . to proclaim the majesty of the natural order as laid bare' and explained by scientific laws. By beauty he does not mean a merely mechanical symmetry of parts related to a whole. The beauty of nature is of a higher kind than 'mere mechanic beauties' . . . Nature is beautiful not because it works according to scientific laws, but because it is the expression of mind." For Cassirer himself, Shaftesbury's original­ ity as a thinker rests on his creation of an aesthetic that stood apart from the classifications of objects that had typified most classical systems on the one hand and the interest in the psychology of percep­ tion which concerned the empiricists on the other. Rather than the created object or the perception-experience, the original creative process is what claims his attention; the understanding of that pro­ cess is of value, to Shaftesbury, as the.key to the formative forces which underlie and activate a ll nature and man, himself. See The Philosophy of the Enlight enment. p. 31 6 .

?Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, p. 193; "Shaftesbury1s main point is that he felt that{3/rerPs works} would stand condemned by 'national taste.' It was not that they were extravagant, but that they were exact, mathematical and conformable to a priori laws which had been prescribed by the scientists. Shaftesbury felt that architecture should be the reflection of men's feeling and sense, the expression of a balanced and sane outlook, not merely an exercise in solid geometry; a good building should display the same virtues as a good life — order, balance, and control, together with a grace and beauty that go beyond mere rules. All these can be regarded, of course, as classical virtues, but we should realize that they are not identical 'with scien­ tific values. Some writers have seen in the neo-classicism of this period merely the reflection of the growing scientific regard for con­ c ise and formal accuracy. There may be good grounds for this suggestion, but with Shaftesbury it was not so. The classicism which manifests itself in his appreciation of architecture and the other arts presup­ poses a humanity, a warmth and a graciousness th at form no part o f scientific exactitude." Whether or not 3rett is correct in this ex­ planation of Shaftesbury's references to Wren, the general view is sup­ ported by scholars who present v/ren as the empirically-spirited and stylistically impartial target of partisan Whig dogmatists (led by Shaftesbury) and others who themselves have found Wren's achievements limited by a certain lack of artistic inspiration. See Downes, Hawksmoor, p. 33, for the former and Summerson, "The Kind o f 'Wren," Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, In c. , 1 963 )",’ for the latter.

^Characteristics. II, 257. The same attitude is apparent in this passage, which indicates philosophy's value more specifically: "The horse alone can never make the horseman, nor limbs the wrestler or the dancer. No more can a genius alone make a poet, or good parts a writer in any considerable kind. The skill and grace of writing is

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 111-

foutvied, as our wise poet te ll us, in knowledge and good sense: and not barely in that knowledge which is to be learnt from common authors, or the general conversation of the world; but from those particular rules of art which philosophy alone exhibits." Ibid. . I, 127.

^Shaftesbury's Advice to an Author includes these pertinent lines: "Nor do we condemn {authors] on their want of wit or fancy, but of judgment and correctness, which can only be attained by thorough d ili­ gence, study, and impartial censure of themselves. 'Tis manners which is wanting. ‘Tis a due sentiment of morals which alone can make us knowing in order and proportion, and give us the just tone and measure of human passion." Characteristics. I, 181. Note the typical phrase, "sentiment of morals. Later in the same essay he returns to the theme: "... there can be no kind of writing which relates to men and manners where it is not necessary for the author to understand poetical and moral truth, the beauty of sentiments, the sublime of characters, and carry in his eye the model or exemplar of that natural grace which gives to every action its attendant charm. If he lias no eye or ear for these interior numbers, 'tis not likely he should be able to judge b e tter o f th a t ex terio r proportion and symmetry o f composition which constitutes a legitimate piece." Ibid. . I, 216 . And again, (I, 217): "If the artist knows not this Venus, these graces, nor was ever struck with the beauty, the decorum of this inward kind, he can neither paint advantageously after the life nor in a feigned subject where he has full, scope. For never can he, on these terms, represent merit and virtue, or mark deformity and blemish. Never can he with justice and time pro­ portion assign the boundaries of either part, or separate the distant characters. The schemes must be defective and the draughts confused where the standard is weakly established and the measure out of use."

"*°Ibid., II, 257i and, for another defense of critics, I, 153- The critical function is hinted at in Second Characters, on p. 6 1 : " it i s evident however from reason i t s e l f , as w ell as from h isto ry and experience, that nothing is more fatal, either to painting, architecture, or the other arts, than this false relish, which is governed rather by what immediately strikes the sense, than by what consequentially and by r e fle c tio n p leases the mind and s a t is f ie s the thought and reason."

^''ibid. , I, 172: "Had the early poets of Greece . . . compli­ mented their nation by complying with its first relish and appetite, they had not done their countrymen such service nor themselves such honour as vie find they did by conforming to truth and nature. The generous spirits who first surveyed the way had not always the world on their side, but soon drew after them the best judgments, and soon afterward, the world itself. They forced their way into it, and by weight of merit turned its judgment on their side. They formed their audience, polished the age, refined the public ear, and framed it right, that in return they might be rightly and lastingly applauded. Nor were they disappointed in their hope. The applause soon came and was lasting, for it was sound. They have justice done them at this day. They have

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 112-

survived their nation and live, though in a dead language. The more the age is enlightened, the more they shine. Their fame must neces­ sarily last as long as Letters, and posterity w ill ever own their merit.”

^Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth Century England, p. 103.

"*3ln fa c t, m is-d irected philosophy i s "somewhat worse than mere ignorance or idiotism." Characteristics. I, 189.

^An early example comes to mind in John Evelyn's definitions of architectural terms which surely go on at greater learned length than almost anyone would care to follow. Evelyn's verbose obsession with terminology smacks of an antiquarian bore's unfortunate ability to suf­ focate philosophical curiosity with a surfeit of trivia.' The defini­ tio n s formed an appendix to Evelyn's 1 66 h edition of Roland Freart's A Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern . . . and corona w ill serve as a representative example: "Corona is by some call d Supercilium, but rather I conceive Stilliciaium the drip (corona elu- collata vite) and with more reason, so the French larmier, goccio la- toio and ventale by the Italians to denote its double office of pro­ te c tin g both from water and wind: For th is reason lik ew ise have our Latin authors nam'd this broad plinth, menhum, a chin; because it car­ ries off the wet from falling on the rest of the entablature, as the prominency of that part in men's faces keeps the sweat of the brows, and other liq u id d is t il la t io n s , from tr ic k lin g in to the neck; and in imitation hereof the ancient potters invented the brimming of their vessels, by turning over some of the ductile matter when the work was on the wheel." See note 20, below,

"^^Shaftesbury's feelings are clear, even if their logical im­ plications are not: "i am persuaded that to be a virtuoso (so far as befits a gentleman) is a higher step towards the becoming a man of virtue and good sense than the being what in this age we call a scholar. For even rude Nature itself, in Its primitive simplicity, is a better guide to judgment than improved sophistry and pedantic learning. Characteristics. I, 21^-15. Addison's satire of Gimcrack appeared in The T a tler, No. 216 (August 2 o, 1710) and included the following in­ dictment of a tendency rejected in a spirit quite the parallel of Shaftesbury's toward "true philosophy": "Nature is fu ll of wonders; every atom i s a standing m iracle, and endowed w ith such q u a litie s , as could not be impressed on i t by a power and wisdom le s s than in f in it e . For this reason I would not discourage any searches that are made into the most minute and trivial parts of the creation. However, since the world abounds in the noblest fields of speculation, it is, methinks, the mark of a little genius to be wholly conversant among insects, reptiles, animalcules, and those trifling rarities that furnish cut the apartment of a virtuoso. There are some men whose heads are so oddly turned this way . . . they are utter strangers to the common occurences o f l i f e ." "Certainly the mind o f man, th at i s capable o f so

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 113-

rauch higher contemplations, should not be altogether fixed upon such mean and disproportioned objects. Observations of this kind are apt to make us serious upon trifles, by which means they expose philosophy to the ridicule of the witty and the contempt of the ignorant." The 'forks o f the Right Honourable Joseoh Addison (London: Henry G. Bohn, I I , 155 and 155-^» The Pope referen ces are from Moral E ssays. E p istle. to Lord Burlington, written in 1730-31, published in 1731, and frequent­ ly' cited in studies of the poet's place in the Burlington circle.

I^The same tension, in a different context, is pointed out by Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, pp. 12-13.

^ ^Characteristics. II, 9.

i^'Ve shall thus give him full and compleat directions for the beginning, carrying on, and finishing his work, whether it be small and p la in , or large and decorated; leading him from the construction o f the meanest private house, to that of the most superb public building; and shall instruct him to work in every part with propriety. . . . By these means we hope to lay down in one body the whole science of architecture, from its first rudiments to its utmost perfection; and that in a inanner which shall render every part of it intelligible to every reader." A Complete Bcd.y of Architecture, the Preface.

Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti, p. 3.

2°The Account is Evelyn's appendix to his edition of Freart's A Parallel of the_ Ancient Architecture with the Modern . . . (1664) and the quotation is taken from p. 5 of the 1723 edition. See note 14, above.

^Chambers, A Treatise on Civil Architecture. p. ff4.

22a Complete Body of Architecture, p. 127.

2 3lbid. . pp. 129-3°.

2^"To make the great architect there is required from nature as great and as true a genius as to make a consummate poet; and in the same manner, what is given by nature must be subjected and confined by rules; the greatest attempt it could make would be the inventing of a new order, and we have shown upon what p rin cip les th at i s alone to be done." Ibid,, p. 13°.

25I b id ., p. 632 .

2% tility and the appearance of use are specifically proposed as design principles in passages such as : no ornament should be admitted but what is reasonable; and nothing is reasonable which is not founded on some principle of use." A Complete Body of Architecture.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - n 4 -

P» 1 " • • • nor shall we fear to say that the art of building cannot be more grand than it is useful, nor its dignity a greater praise than its convenience , 11 Ibid., sig. a; and, "in architecture, every thing should at least wear the aspect of being intended for utility, for this reconciles the whole to reason." Ibid.. p. 5^5. Ware says that the dis­ position of a building’s elements, i.e. the placements of its rooms, is always to be managed with respect to convenience anci proportional beauties jointly, never one to the exclusion of the other. Convenience, in his usage, is akin to the traditional idea of decorum and "falls under the direction of fancy" while proportion, a question of rules, is of a "more strict concern." See A Complete Body of Architecture, pp. 293-^. Eileen Karris, using this and related dimensions of Ware s extrapola­ tions of the "propriety" principle has noted that William Chambers did not accept propriety or fitness as the solitary gau=-e of architectural values. Her point is made in reference to Chambers criticism of Laugier, whose "first English disciple" she names as Ware. See Eileen Karris, "The Treatise on C ivil Architecture," Sir William Chambers, Knight of the Polar Star, by John Harris (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970), p. 134. The question of Laugier's influence upon 'Ware needs much more extensive invest!Ration and necessarily in­ volves the establishment of a date for Ware s first edition (which, if it has been written, I have not seen published). Although Laugier is mentioned at several different places in the Complete Body text, I find Harris' reference more provocative than convincing; without- documented proofs one can only wonder at Herrmann's similar conclusion about the precedent o f L augier's E ssai (1753) Tor 'Ware's book, tr a d itio n ­ ally believed to have had an incomplete first edition almost twenty years earlier: "No doubt this was a book precious to(Waro]and one of which he was going to make f u ll u se. In fa c t, when w ritin g h is own treatise it was always within his reach." See laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory, p. 174.

27ibid. , p. 293. Ware's imagery is almost of Fancy as the fer­ tile but flighty bride of a stern, mature Judgment; the device is re­ peatedly used: "Often the wildest essays of the imagination are the most pleasing; but fancy must not be employed beyond her bounds: she may be allowed and encouraged to devise ornaments; but she must never be suffered to put them together; that is the business of a more sober faculty, the judgment. It requires taste as well as the other, but it also requires science. Experience of what is best, and a strict at­ tention to method, can alone set this matter on its proper footing. Youth may fancy and contrive ornaments, but it is the province of a more established period to settle or reject, to adopt or banish the several designs; and, when th at i s done, to form and regulate the whole." Ibid. , p. 430. This image recalls the marriage of emotion and intellect interpreted by 3rett as a goal of Shaftesbury's and is lent an amusing piquancy by the Builder's Dictionary (173*0 which was recommended in Ralph's Critical Review of Pub Lick Buildings ., . . and almost certainly 'Was known to Ware. The Dictionary defines arehi- tectonick" as follows: "That which builds a thing up regularly,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 115-

according to the nature and intentions of it. The term is usually applied to that plastic power, Spirit, or whatever else it be, which hatches the ova of females into living creatures, which is called the Architectonick Spirit; yet it is also applied to the chief overseer of buildings, or an architect." On p. 317 of A Complete Body of Archi­ tecture. Ware refers to "a late celebrated dictionary" which reference might be material evidence for a first publication date circa 1735 if the dictionary he meant was in fact that of 1734.

. . taste is something more delicate, and is to be added to knowledge; and it is this alone which can be allowed to judge im­ partially, and to determine freely, concerning the practice of this elegant and noble science." A Complete Body of Architecture. p. 3^5*

29ib id , . p. 447 . Compare the r ejec tio n o f "composed" orders (p. 129): ’'They call these composed orders; but they are, in the eye of reason and true taste, inferior to the simple. There was meaning and character in the invention of (the original five]: the best praise of the others is fancy: and they are generally to be charged with im­ propriety." It is difficult to see what John Harris means by calling Ware's attitudes toward the rococo "nonccmmital" in "Clues to the 'Frenchness' of Woodcote Park," Connoisseur. 14? (June, 19&1), 242.

3°For an exemplary rational explanation of classical motives, see A Complete 3ody of Architecture. p. 28, the discussion of pediment shapes.

31Ib id . . p. 390.

32ibid. , pp. 399 and 462.

33lbid. , p. 54.

3^Ibid. . pp. 19-20.

35lbid.. p. 143. Again, Ware is not without precedent, even in literature traditionally considered Burlingtonian in bias and therefore uncritical of Palladio. See the Translator's Preface to Leoni's The Architecture of Andrea Palladio (1715) for acknowledgment of the masterrs fallibility.

3%'bid. . p. 265,

37ibid. , pp. 151-2. Other passages amplify the theme: "The modem architects too strictly and scrupulously follow these ancients; they did not closely or servilely copy one another. They were conscious that beauty in any order was not restrained to an exact proportion of the parts: hence they indulged their genius in regulated flights, and from that liberty produced those several great works in the same order, which are a ll beautiful, though extremely different one from another.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. —116—

Ibid. , p. 131. "This may give us an idea of the difference between an cien t and modern a r ch ite cts: they restrained genius by rules; we pro­ pose working by rules in the place of genius; they were in every thing originals, we seem to establish it as a principle, that it is not need­ ful to invent in order to deserve praise." Ibid. . p. 131. "Let us be as bold as the ancients, but first let us be judicious. Let us .under­ stand how far we may vary, and then not fear to do it, , . . Both, pre­ cept and authority, taken in their general sense, admit of certain vari­ ations; and it is in the spirit of undertaking these, and the judgment of conducting such an undertaking, that the genius of an architect is to display itself." Ibid.„ p. 132.

•^Ibid,, p. 53^. It is ironic that Ware, who has come to re­ present the views of the Burlington "establishment'' should, in fact, have been criticized as unqualified for the scope of his work and un­ forgivably presumptuous in his free-spirited liberties with "the works of the most eminent architects." See the anonymous review in The Criti ­ c a l Beview. October, 1757 5 pp. 289-302, and November, 1757» PP. 420-31. In addition to accusing Ware of inferior literary style and the pompous codification of common sense knowledge, the reviewer sarcastically para­ phrased ’.fare's attitudes and presumptions: "But allowing that some of the ancient architects were too licentious, who is it that is to dis­ tinguish and point out those parts of their works which are truly worthy our im ita tio n , and to sp lic e them together in such a judicious manner as shall answer every purpose in building? Or, to use the words of our author, to prevent an architect’s making a design that shall be too free, or one that is cold and stiff? VJhy, this prodigy amongst us is no other than the infallible Mr. Isaac Ware, a gentleman of English growth, but of the most happy genius, and the most fertile invention; of the truest taste, and the most profound understanding; one who can make old Homer and our immortal Shakespeare, bend to his purpose, and attend him as lackeys in his wonderful undertaking" (p. 428).

39Robert Morris, Rural Architecture (London, 1750) t the Intro­ d u ction .

*^ t should be noted here that the simple and pure style which concerned 'Ware and Morris (more than i t has the modern h istorian s who usually interest themselves in plates with elaborate decorative detail) had been something of a Palladian discovery. It is this severe sort of design in Morris' plates which most fascinated Kaufmann, of course. Ackerman calls it a "stripped, cubistic style" personally re-discovered by Palladio in the ruins of Roman engineering. See his Palladio. p. 4 3 . Thus, the historian of form must expand the proverbial portico- cum-flanking-structures characterizations of Palladian precedent to make room for sometimes startling severity and geometricism, which definitely existed in Burlingtonian work (e.g. the facade of the Assembly Rooms at York, by Burlington, himself).

^Morris, An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture, p. xvi:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 117-

"Now beauty, I imagine to be founded, or chiefly to consist in the two principal or necessary rules, which are order in disposition, and vari­ ety in matter."

^Lectures on Architecture , p. 4-7. The rule for fenestration is to obtain the total window area by extracting the square root of the product of the room's height, width and breadth. This total surface figure is then divided by the number of individual units, the proportions of which are determined by the room size. Morris invented this system but not as an expression of creative genius. It is an extension of other rules of order, pushed to their logical lim its (or beyond them, depend­ ing on one's point of view). He explains that "the giving the proper light to a room by rule, has been, perhaps, the least thought of in the disposition of the internal part of a building; and as I esteem it a necessary part to be understood, I thought it incumbent uuon me to form some- rule, whereby the knowledge of it might be attain'd. 1 lectures on. Architecture. p. 110.

^ M orris, The A rch itectu ral Remembrancer (London, 1751the Preface. In the second of the Lectures on Architecture, Morris sub­ je c t i s "the n e c e ssity and u sefu ln ess o f learn in g, and the ob ligation s we lie under to endeavour to cultivate and improve the natural genius" (p. 17). He drives home the point on p. 18: "How unhappy is the fate of that man, whom Nature, in spite of a ll obstructions, has su.pp3i.ed with a fine genius, and yet wants the nice correction and care of art to cultivate and improve, to draw by degrees from the errors of ill- digested opinions imbib'd in minority."

^^The individual's natural genius is usually particular rather than universal: "As thorns do not produce thistles, so it is impossible for the man who has by nature the seeds of the mathematicks born with him, to be otherwise; and the great painter, the great architect, the fine geniuses, are so by Nature as well as art." Lectures on Archi­ tecture . p. 20. As for the pleasures of learning: Architecture is certainly . . . a pleasing, and extensive science; for by varying the modus, there w ill always spring new ideas, new scenes for the imagina­ tion to work upon; the fancy of the designer may be always entertain'd, and the different branches of architecture w ill furnish him with some­ thing of an amusement, which gratifies the eye as well as the under­ standing." Ibid., pp. 26-7.

if5ibid.. p. 30 .

^Ebid. . pp. 131-2. The passage continues with a typically en­ thusiastic emphasis on the apparent immortality and suggested univer­ sality of the ru3.es of architecture: "When I consider architecture in its utmost extent, and how many different designs may be compos'd from those few rules which I have laid down for the general proportions, it always gives me an agreeable pleasure in the reflection, to see from one small fabric new' embellishments, and rising to noble buildings and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -118-

palaces; and a ll performed by the same rules, the same analogous pro­ portions, must be a pleasing theme to employ the thoughts of a specu­ lative genius, ■'•hen I consider how many" successive ages of time have roll'd away since the art was perfected, and how noble actions of eminent persons have been transmitted to us by public buildings and monumental ornaments, and how future ages may view the works of our present wor­ thies in their palaces and seats of retirement: when I am led to such contemplations, it always gives me an unspeakable satisfaction.

^Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture, p. 24.

^The advertisem ent i s from The A rch itectu ral Remembrancer and reads as follows: “There is now in the press, and speedily w ill be published, A Treatise on Country Five-Barr'd Gates. Stiles and Wickets. elegant Pig-styes. beautiful Hen-houses, and delightful Cow-Cribs. superb Cart-Houses. magnificent Barn-Doors. varie gated Barn Racks and admirable Sheep-Folds; according to the Turkish and Persian Manner; a Work never (t ill now) attempted. To which are added, some Designs of Fly-Traps, 3ees Palaces, and Emmet Houses, in the Muscovite and Arabian Architecture; a ll adapted to the Latitude and Genius of England. The Whole entirely new, and inimitably designed in Two Parts, on Forty Pewter Plates, under the immediate Inspection of Don Gulielmus De Demi Je ne scai Quoi, Chief Architect to the Grand Signior, Originally printed in the Seraglio at Constantinople and now translated into English by Gemray Gymp. To be sold (only by Ebenezer Sly) at the Brazen Head near Temple 3ar."

ty^Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture. p. xxii.

5%ee, for instance, plates XIV, XV, and XVI in The Architec­ tu ra l Remembrancer. Of p late XVI Morris wrote: "As new w'nims are every day starting into being, I have placed this here, not as an example of beauty, or for imitation; it shows only how order and uniformity may be disguised by gaudy tinsel, introduced without consistency, or rules 11 (pp. xii-xiii).

^ Lectures on A rch itectu re, p. 115: ". . . he i s to adapt {the dress]to the magnitude, or situation of the building, always rather below profuseness, than to attempt it."

52I b id . . p. 122.

53lbid., the Preface. Morris sounds a great deal like Shaftes­ bury when he says th at the c r it ic who d is lik e s everything he sees i s showing an imperfection in his own character. He does, however, sup­ port Ralph's attempt to raise the reader's taste by the selection of specific illustrative examples, a method close to his own (as well as Shaftesbury's, as in the Hercules essay).

54gssay in Defense of Ancient Architecture. pp. xx-xxi: "A

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -119-

knowledge ought to be had of the subject itself, and the sciences or rules which have the minutest relation thereto; without a just regard to these and other accomplishments r eq u isite to form a conpleat judge, we may extend our rage to the most advanced height of censure, and be­ come not judges of the works of others, but most worthy the justice of being condemned ou rselv es. . . . A thorough examination i s necessary to give you a p erfect idea o f the good and bad ru les and method pre­ scrib'd, and an intelligible conceivement of the accomplishments, to complete a true judge of this kind of writing, or the endowments of the mind, requisite to form in the most elevated sense a perfect idea of the beauties of ancient architecture." The value which Morris places on originality as a character of mind is appealingly confessed in Lectures on Architecture, p. 93 '• "l love to strike out of a beaten path sometimes, only to walk the more easy, or at least to prevent distur­ bance from the busy multitude; and then I have more room for the imagi­ nation to work in, and perhaps, not a little pleasure in communicating my sentiments to friends without endangering their censure."

55An Essay Upon Harmony, p. 18. The passage continues: "The soul of man is so form’d by nature, that all objects, which are in themselves peculiarly beautiful, are only so many different sorts of harmony, fitted, by some sympathetic quality, to quadrate with the organs of our senses. The same graces in each object, do not equally affect all; which is owing to the different structure, the different texture, and composure of our minds."

56The Art of Architecture, p, 11.

5^1b id . , p. 12. "Appropriate" is a technical term used by Ware in Book IX of A Complete Body of Architecture to signigfy the minor and consistent adjustments or variations of an order's detailing in specific application as opposed to "accommodation," or the eighteenth-century license to deform an order to conform with the ’weaknesses of an other­ wise bad building. Pope, of course, had made a related point on nature's guidance in The Essay on Criticism, written c. 1709 and pub­ lish e d in 1711: "Learn hence for Ancient Rules a ju st Esteem ;/ To copy Nature is to copy Thera" (lines 139-^0).

58see below, "the Genius of the Place," and The Art of Archi­ tectu re . p. 16 ; "The Prison's Entrance, massy Chains declare,7 The loss of Freedom, to the Wretched there,/ Thus every Spot assumes a various Face;/ And Decoration varies with the Place."

59 lb id . . p. 15. Gwynn1s use o f "unmeaning" i s more s p e c ific and predictably iconographic, given his literary bias, than //are's, but the difference is not a critical one.

^Gwynn, An Essay on Design, p. 21. The call to published scholarship is as follows:""TrGive to the Roman Sciences their Due:/ And write, to whet that Appetite in you,/ Tell what the Duty of a Builder

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -120-

is ;/ Point out what's Right in Practice; what's amiss./ Shew where, and how, to decorate w ith S k i l l , / What Ornaments are ju s t, and what are i l l ./ Shew how the Judgment, should conduct the A rt,/ And where Judiciousness, directs the Part;/ Where proper Situation claims our Care;/ Where Rules should guide; and where most useful are." The Art of Architecture, p. 27.

^ The Art of Architecture, p. 1?. Compare Pope's 5ssay on Criticism;"TlBut tho1" the Ancients thus their Rules invade ,7*Tas Kings dispense with Laws Themselves have made)/ Moderns, beware! Or if you must offend/ Against the Precept, ne'er transgress its End,/ Let it be seldom, and compell'd by Need" (lines 161 - 5 ),

^John Gwynn, An Essay on Design (London, 17*1-9), pp. i- ii. The conventional quality of this theory is indicated by the fascinating Builder1s Dictionary (173^) which defined design, in part, as follows: ". . . if this is not in the genius, it is never to be learned; to be able to enter into this secret, the student must have great natural parts; a noble and fruitful imagination, a thorough insight and ac­ quaintance w ith beauty, and judgment sedate and cool enough to form a just and delicate taste. Without taste, even genius itself wanders blindfold, and spends itself in vain. Genius is, indeed, the first quality of the soul; but taste must be added, or we shall censure the wildness instead of admiring the beauty; we shall be dissatisfied with the irregularity, instead of bein=; pleased with the magnificence. But though genius cannot be learn d, it may be improved: And though the gift of designing is born with a man, it may be methodized by study and observation. 1 The parallels to Shaftesbury, bare, and Morris are obvious. These lines were repeated, practically verbatim, by Ralph in his widely-read Critical Review of Public Buildings . . . (pp. 60-1). Ralph's essay included arecommendation of the Dictionary as a key to the proper study of nature and antiquity's wisdom.

6 3john Gwynn, London and 'Westminster Improved (London, 1 7 6 6), p. 67. I t should be remembered th at th is volume appeared la te r than the bulk of the literature which has concerned us to this point; it is nevertheless of interest both for its quality as a document of eigh­ teenth-century thinking about urban planning and as evidence of the views held late in life by the presumed author of such representative Burlingtonian literature as The .Art of Architecture. In those later years, for instance, Gwynn penned plaintive lines of criticism, the effect of which is to recall Pope's warning to Burlington andMorris and Ware's p ra ises o f o r ig in a lity in design: "Almost everyone now, who can but make shift to draw neat lines, and is furnished with a few books to borrow from, sets up for an architect, his productions are dignified with the term invention, and, with many, pass current for such, though when examined by the judicious and discerning, they are found to be nothing else than servile imitations of what had been done before" (p. 6 7).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 121-

folbid.. pp. 6^-5.

65ibid., p. 6 5: "it is not hereby meant to decry or explode the established orders of Grecian or Homan architecture, and introduce whim, caprice, and gothicism in their stead, it is only intended to inforce this known truth, that it certainly requires taste and genius in the combination of the different orders to produce grandeur and elegance, and that with respect to the ornamental parts of architecture, they should be left entirely to the judgment of the designer, who ought al­ ways to consider the nature of the building, and the purpose for- which it is intended, without perpetually searching for antique ornaments, which might with great propriety be adapted to the buildings from which they are borrowed, but are terribly misapplied by some modern architects. fifi London and Westminster Improved, p, 67,

^Steegman, The Rule of Taste, p. xv.

^Pevsner, The Bnrrlishness of English Art. p. 9 6: ". . . i f the English took Palladio as their guiding star rather than the Baroque or Rococo, can a reason for this not also be found in the English qualities under discussion now?" On the other hand, if Palladianism drew part of its strength from English reasonableness, as Pevsner suggested, its more advanced and extreme prophets had to fight the force of a native i l ­ logicality: "The distaste of the English for carrying a thought or a system to i t s lo g ic a l extreme i s too fam iliar to need comment." Ib id . . pp. 83-9. See "Shaftesbury and Eighteenth Century Architectural Thought," above, note 6 . Bate also notes the "widespread" English antipathy to rules in From Classic to Romantic. p. if-5.

69Downes, Hawksmoor, p. 37. We shall discuss references to the French academies and their salutary cultural influence in "The State of the -Arts in Britain," below.

?°Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 279: "The course of seventeenth and eighteenth century aesthetics was thus in­ dicated once and for all. It is based on the idea that, as nature in a ll its manifestations is governed by certain principles, and as it is the highest task of knowledge to formulate these principles clearly and precisely, so also art, the rival of nature, is under the same obli­ gation, As there are universal and inviolable laws of nature, so there must be laws of the same kind and of the same importance for the imi­ tation of nature. And finally all these partial laws must fit into and be subordinate to one simple principle, an axiom of imitation in general. Bate makes a closely related point on the classicist's attitude toward art: "The importance of aesthetic rules, as they were evolved by seventeenth-century French criticism and reiterated in English neo- classicism, does not reside simply in the assistance they may render in the creation arid understanding of art: they are themselves a part, rath er, o f an in f a llib le and u n iversal ru le o f order, and are thus, as

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -122-

Charles Gildon wrote, among 'the Laws of Nature, which always act with uniformity, renews them incessantly, and gives them a perpetxtate Ex­ istence, " From Classic to Romantic, p. 27,

71 For the relation of "classical" theory to modern architecture in England, see Suromerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (Cambridge; The M.I.T. Press, 19oj")” Of particular interest is the discussion of the place of creativity and originality in design con­ fined to the formal phrases of architectural classicism. Summersen quotes Sir Edward Lutyens: "xt naans hard labour, hard thinking, over every line in a ll three dimensions and in every joint; and no stone can be allowed to slide. If you tackle it in this way, the Order belongs to you, and every strok e, being m entally handled, must become endowed with such poetry and artistry as God has given you. You alter one feature (which you have to, always), then every other feature has to sympathise and undergo some care and invention. Therefore it is no mean game, nor is it a game you can play lighteheartedly." Copying is, practically speaking, impossible, but "you cannot play originality with the Orders, They have to be so well digested that there is nothing but essence left, When right they are curiously lovely — unalterable as plant forms, . . . The perfection of the order is far nearer nature than anything produced on impulse or accident-wise" (pp. 19- 2 0 ),

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE GENIUS OF THE PIACS

I have already touched upon the subject of this chapter from

the perspective of enthusiasm as a factor of creative activity, but it

is also possible to proceed from Shaftesbury's influential attitude

toward nature to certain specialised architectural discussions in Ware,

Morris, and Gwynn, To establish a context, it is necessary to remember

that Shaftesbury's rhapsodic treatment of nature's beauties in The

Moralists was one of the most fertile sources of his influence, es­

pecially among literary types inclined to sentiment as a counter-balance

to the rigidity of "rational" rules of art. According to at least

one of the schools of modern Shaftesbury criticism , natural phenomena

for him were the symbols of a permanence which existed independently

of the natural world and man. Nature itself was not merely a static

set of material conditions, subject to physical principles of inter­

action, but rather a "plastic power," that acts upon and ceaselessly

shapes the physical world in accordance with the divine will,^ Nature

as a plastic power was thus the prototype for the forming-genius of a

true and moral artist, with the natural world providing a ll the proper

models for the exercise of his imitative invention.

The implications of such an idea for architecture in the eigh­

teenth century may not be immediately obvious, but, upon investigation,

-123-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 2 4 -

they appear to be inevitable. A builder must select a site, after all,

and his attitude toward and knowledge of nature must affect his choice.

In time, his reactions to nature may even be allowed to affect in pari

or w holly determine the manner in which he e rects a s p e c ific structure

on a particular site. In fact, this happens. Architectural literature

in England can be reasonably arranged to show a progression from the

level of coramon-sense and traditional guidance on the question of lo­

cating a structure to a conscious expression of interest in the charac­

te r and value o f "natural '1 forms and their proper relationship to created

architectural forms.

Vitruvius had devoted a chapter of his first book on architec­

ture to the choice of "healthy situations" and in the first two chap­

ters of the sixth book, addressed the necessary effects of climate and

site features on the structure to be raised. Alberti, not unexpectedly,

followed suit in chapters three through six of his first book, discus­

sing the qualities and evaluations of region, climate, etc. Palladio,

of course, dealt with "situation" in chapter twelve of Book Two, and, in

the footsteps of these masters, Colen Campbell troubled to observe the

"singularly roraantick" character of Claremont's setting in Surrey,

while Robert Castell insisted that Pliny's villas (themselves designed

for very different Italian sites) could be intelligently modified to O good service in British climes. Nor was interest in the question of

a building's setting limited among the English exclusively to archi­

te c tu r a l formulae; A llen c it e s Dr. Andrew 3oorde's Regyment or Dyetary

of Helth (1542) on the topic:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 2 5 -

A house favored with a "pulcruse prospect," he assures us, not only gratifies the tenant, but comforts and re­ joices the heart of the man who views it from a distance ~ a sentiment prompted by a genial social feeling that immediately engages our sympathy.3

Another related expression occurs in Sir Henry Wotton's The

Elements of Architecture ( 162*0. Wotton's cue undoubtedly cams from

Vitruvius, but his discussion is of particular interest because it

makes two separate p oin ts o f relevance to the la te r lite r a tu r e . In

general, the first is the proposition that he calls "the royalty of

sig h t," and the second has to do w ith a p ra ctica l v a ria tio n on the

ancient theme of decorum. After giving the reader his best advice

on site selection according to "physical," astrological, and "©economi­

cal" considerations, VJotton adds the factor of "optical" character:

Such as I mean concern the properties of a well chosen prospect; which I w ill call the royalty of sight. For there is a lordship (as it were) of the feet, wherein the master doth much joy when he walketh about the line of his own possessions: So there is a lordship likewise of the eye which being a ranging and imperious, and (I might say) an usurping sense; can endure no narrow circumscription;: but must be fed, both with extent and with variety.^

While Robert Morris had read and referred to at least Alberti and Pal­

ladio on the practical problems of site selection,3 this portion of

Wotton's treatise is related most directly and convincingly to Isaac

Ware, whose occasional explanations or endorsements of "picturesque"

planning principles have been previously noted.^ Ware considered the

site with the same thorough practicality that he applied to. the subject

of building materials. In justifying his extensive treatment of

materials he had also foHewed Wotton closely, both in the assertion

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 126-

such knowledge is not beneath an architect and then in the qualification

that the architect’s peculiar honor lies in the triumph of his idea

over the natural state of materials.^

Neither is the architect to ignore the garden, for he must de­

sign its structures and ornaments and must therefore understand and

appreciate the various characteristics of its different settings:

"Nothing is well that is not suited to its place.In Ware's relative­

ly brief section on garden design, his artist's attitude toward nature

was most explicitly set forth. The landscape ideal he postulated was

a sort of golden mean between "absolute wild nature and precise art";

his method, an arduous and reverent perfecting of prospects to prune

the incidental blemishes and reveal the inherent perfections of nature's

beauty more fully. When Ware came to characterise the English achieve­

ment in landscaping art, he did so in terms that are wholly compatible

with a Shaftesburyan sense of nature's plastic power and the imitative

character of moral artistry:

What we propose now in gardens is to collect the beauties of nature; to separate them from those rude views in which her blemishes are seen and to bring them nearer to the eye; to dispose them in the most pleasing order, and create an universal harmony among them: that every thing may be free, and nothing savage. . . . The philosophic mind is detained upon the construction of a flower; while the free fancy o f another turn i s charmed w ith h i l l and lawn, and slope and precipice. « ; . Every thing pleasing is thrown open, every thing disgustful is shut out, nor do we perceive the art, while we enjoy its effects. . . . What had so long ravished in the idea now appeared in the reality (my emphasis J.'

As u su a l, Pope's i s the b est remembered phrase: "Consult the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -127-

Genius of the Place in all . . » On the other hand, Sir William

Chambers, whose T reatise inaugurated a new era o f a rch itectu ra l lit e r a ­

ture and whose prominence followed and overshadowed Ware's , took a very

different attitude (with no apologies) in A Dissertation on Oriental

Gardening (1772). The book was an immediate source of controversy and

critical satire, perhaps in part because of the persistence of the

English attitude toward nature which Ivare had so characteristically

expressed,^

Wotton's second point of current relevance is one of social

decorum: "By no means, to build too near a great neighbor ."^2 Once

again, Ware did not hesitate to reactivate the principle in terms very

close to the original:

I have seen an advertisement in which, among other re­ commendations of a country house, there was inserted that it was not in the. neighborhood of a lord: this was an indecent reflection; but as the temper and character o f the next successor i s never to be known, i t i s not agreeable to be too near too much power. Such a situation i s compared by an elegan t w riter to that o f Mercury in the heavens, ever in combustion or obscurity from brighter beams than h is own.13

Decorum, in th is sen se, i s a p r a c tic a l wisdom o f s o c ia l p r o p r ie tie s, but

the term also applied to the overall size of the house (appropriate to

the status of the owner), the structure's disposition (appropriate to

its uses and the rules of art) and, finally, the dress or forms of

decoration and the s i t e . Morris and Gwynn, when they wrote to the

problems of the architectural artist in the situation of his work, con­

stantly referred to one or another of these multiple senses of decorum.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -128-

Within ths general theme of architecture as imitative of Nature

Morris consistently developed the idea that particular elements of

decoration were appropriate to the mood and character of a particular

location; that a conspicuously decorous propriety marked the most ex­

cellently designed relationship between the two. In the lectures on

Architecture he went so far as to give the character of the site first

consideration, ahead of any other factors:

I esteem situation so extensive a branch of architecture th a t no buildin g should be design'd to be erected without first considering the extent of prospect, hills, vales, &c. which expand or circle it; its avenues, pastures, and waters; a ll which furnish the architect with proper id e a s, and the modus must be sh ifted from one scene to another, as necessity requires.

I have said before th at Morris, considered as an en th u sia st, comes the

closest of our three authors to the character of Shaftesbury's own

thinking. It is therefore not surprising that the "genius of the

place" is most in evidence as an operative concept when Morris enthusi­

astically digresses from the relatively pure, architectural, dimensions

of "situation" to the theme of contemplation of Nature and Divinity

The artist, according to Morris, is a man of acute sensitivity to

Nature, a student and interpreter of her varying features and expres­

sions, a lover of her myriad reflections and single essence, VJhen he

sets out to create he w ill do so in homage to her, content to imitate

as profoundly as possible in the hope of understanding more fully the

thing that he loves. In describing the implications of different situ­

a tio n s for a rch itectu ra l d esign , M orris, as much as V/are, shewed

reverence fo r nature as a " p lastic power":

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -129-

All these the Architect must study well; 3e well inform'd, what Nature most requires To fit and tally Art in all these scenes; To give a greatness to the opening Lawn, And pleasing softness to the rural Glade. This is Art's Perfection well to know; And he who traceth best the different Climes, And most resembles Nature, in his Choice Of Just Proportion, Garnishing, and Dress, Appropriates Art most nobly to its Use. A Genius bora to penetrate so far, To trace the intricate Labyrinths of Art, And teach Mankind t* improve the glorious Thought, Let ev'ry Artist celebrate his Fame; His P ractice be Example to us A ll, , And He doth best, that best can Imitate.'

One of the most notable products of this tendency in Morris was his

eminently practical realization and description of the differences in

architecture for urban as opposed to rural settings. Given a small

city site of no particular character or scenic inspiration, he pro­

posed conscious rationalizations for the predominance of convenience and

economy over grandeur and related decorative concerns which were so

important in the country settingsJ^ In fact, the Preface to Rural

Architecture (1750) indicated that Morris had originally planned a two-

part work to deal with the separate questions of city and country

building before restricting himself to the latter topic.

An Essay Upon Harmony is , in general, concerned very importantly

w ith the character o f situ a tio n and i t s in flu en ce upon b u ild in g. Three

emotional classes of architecture (the grave, the jovial, and the charm­

ing) are identified by its author and associated with specific types of

landscape.”*® As with Morris, the building's site is to be the architect's

guide and inspiration:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 3 0 -

Whatever the magnitude or form requir'd in these designs., the architect must take Nature for his guide; let the spot direct him to the dress and ornaments, and in a great measure to the use and conveniencies, requisite for the proprietor.19

I f the author of the 5ssay cannot be identified beyond doubt, Vfyatt

Papworth's 1 863 biographical sketch of Gwynn did cite the first pubjic

appearance of the architect's name in a 1734 edition of the work . 20

Until the traditional willingness of authorities such as 31orafield

and Wittkower to accept the Essay's attribution to Morris is published

with extensive supporting documentation, I am inclined to think with 21 B. Sprague Allen that Gwynn probably wrote it under Morris' influence.

The viability of that conclusion appears to be strengthened by the

evident parallels between the Essay and The Art of Architecture, pre­

sumed by most to be the product of Gwynn's pen even though its title

page bears a "frontispiece" by Morris. On this particular subject of

situation, he advises in verse: "Form to each Clime, each Place, a

Modus still," and "Chuse the just Emblems for the Pile and Spot . " 22

It can thus be said that the preeminent theorists of Burling-

tonian Palladianism in England believed that correct architectural form

was to be properly related to and derived from the landscape (in its

role as Nature improved and appreciated) rather than artificially im­

posed upon it. It might further be suggested that the rationale behind

their arguments to that effect derived much of its force from atti­

tudes toward nature that had been inspired, in large part, by the in­

fluence of the Earl of Shaftesbury.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 3 1 -

NOTSS

^The school, of course, is that of Cassirer rather than Tiffany, Brett summarizes the view: "Shaftesbury believed that nature was created by the impress of the divine mind on unformed matter and that the na­ tu r a l phenomena are symbols in a world o f change o f an id e a l which i s eternal and changeless. The divine ideas are not, indeed, patterns in the sense that natural objects are mere copies of them; they have a perfection which lies beyond being and this world is only the inadequate expression of a greater glory which transcends this earthly life. The impress of divine ideas on matter is not like the impress of a seal on wax, however, for nature is something that grows and changes. It is wrong, in fact, to speak of nature as having been created. for it is always in the process of creation by the divine w ill. Shaftesbury adopts the principle of a plastic power, which animates the natural world and seeks to evolve from matter shapes and forms approximating ever more closely the divine ideas." The Third Bari of Shaftesbury, pp. 105-6. B rett d erives Shaftesbury's p o sitio n from the Cambridge neo-Platonists (Cudworth, in particular) and thence from the neo- P’latonic anima mundi; Ibid. . p. 25. See also Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in Bngland, p. 193s "Thus Shaftesbury, lik e the Cambridge thinkers, looks upon nature as essentially a plastic unity and a plastic power." Tiffany's view, indicated previously in "Shaftesbury and Eighteenth Century Architectural Thought," above, is very different. 3ut whether Cassirer and Brett are correct in their interpretation is not of critical importance here. The Earl's posthumous influence is accepted as a fact in the subsequent development of ideas toward nature and art. My immediate concern is to show the potential "cultural resonance" of that influence and architectural theories of situation. For this purpose, Brett's exegesis, although not beyond controversy among historians of philosophy, is a particularly convenient starting p oin t.

%or Campbell, see Vitruvius Bricannicus. Vol. Ill (London, 1731 e d .) , p. 8; for Castell, see The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated (London, 1728), p. 127.

^AUen, Tides in English Taste. p. 126 . For a discussion of architectural theory and a genial social feeling," see "Natural Affection: Moral Architecture of the Individual and Society," below.

^V/otton, The Elements of Architecture. p. 4.

•^Lectures on Architecture, pp. 6h-5.

^See above, "The Force of the Idea: Enthusiasm," note 22.

^Mare, A Complete Body o f A rchitecture. pp. 39 and ^0: . . i t cannot disgrace an architect, which so well becomes a philosopher, to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 3 2 -

look into the properties of stone and timber"; "it is the honour of the architect that the form triumph over the materials; in the former judgment and ta ste are sho>m, in the la tte r only expence . 11 Wotton had written: "Now, concerning the material part . . . surely it cannot dis­ grace an a r c h ite c t, which doth so w e ll become a philosopher, to look into the properties of stone and wood. . . . Nay to descend even lower even to examine sand and lime and clay (of a ll which things Vitruvius hath discoursed, without any daintiness, & the most of the new writers) I say though the speculative part of such knowledge be liberal. Yet to redeem this profession, and' my present pains from indignity; I must here remember that to choose and sort the materials, for every part of the fabric, is a duty more proper to a second superintendant . . . and in that place expressly distinguished from the architect, whose glory doth more consist in the assignment and idea of the whole work, and his truest ambition should be to make the fora, which is the nobler part (as it were) triumph over the matter . 11 The Elements of Architec­ ture . pp. 10- 1 2.

®’Vare, A Complete Body of Architecture. p. 637 .

9lb id . , p. 6 37 . The passage continues: "Every thing under such a hand w i l l have tru th , because every thing w ill rise from nature. We are to disclose her beauties, not to make any. . . . In all we do under this intention the freedom of nature must s till be in our eye; there is a wildness that exceeds all art; that gives the sweetness to nature, and th at must be held sacred. Though we hide i t in part, we must never banish it entirely; and the gi'eat delicacy w ill be to give the elegance of art without robbing 'what we adopt of that sweet simplicity which renders every thing rural pleasing" (p. 6 3 8 ). Such speculations are spiritually akin to Philocles 1 final realisation of the complexity of beauty (whether in nature or art) in The Moralists: "i perceive I am now obliged to go far in the pursuit of beauty, which lies very absconded and deep." See Characteristics. II, 130 .

^Pope, Moral Essays: Epistle to Lord Burlington. The Poems^of Alexander Pope. Ed. John Butt (NewHaven: Yale U niversity P ress, 19^37. lin e 57.

^ S ee Chambers, A D isserta tio n on O riental Gardening (London, 1772), p. 2 1 : "inanimate, simple nature, is too insipid for our pur­ poses: much i s expected from us; and th erefore, we have occasion for every aid that either art or nature can furnish. The scenery of a garden should differ as much from common nature as an heroic poem doth from a prose relation; and the gardeners, like poets, should give a loose to their imagination; and even fly beyond the bounds of truth, whenever it is necessary to elevate, to embellish, to en­ liven, or to add novelty to their subject."

1‘^The O Elements of Architecture, p. 5.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 3 3 -

13a Corn ole te Body of Architecture, p, 97. Ware's passage is almost verbatim; the elegant writer is Wotton.

1^Lectures on Architecture. Part II. p. vi. Morris re-states the principle on p. 1 jo] . . . it is to be observed that situation is in some measure to direct the architect how to apply his ornaments; making a r t, as i t were, an handmaid to Nature, by appropriating them to the spot on which the fabric is to be erected."

1-%ee "The Force of the Idea: Enthusiasm," note 1 6 , for archi­ tecture itse lf as the stimulus of profound speculation and compare these related lines from the Lectures on the comparable effect of a situ a tio n : "Here a- mind innocently employed by i t s s ta r ts and s a l.lie s, and its excursions into philosophic depths, by a propensity to solitude always meets with entertainment. Every sprig of grass may afford, a multitude of fine thoughts, to employ the imagination, and by a genius turn'd to microscopical speculations, a way is opened to entertain the fancy w ith unbounded r eflec tio n s" (p. 175).

1^Lectures on Architecture. pp. 185-6.

1 ?Ibid. . pp. 83 -t. He does allow, however, an exception for the peculiar urban grandeur of regular and coordinated areas such as Grosvenor Square.

1^An Essay Urjon Harmony, p. 31: " • . • these (three classes) are designed to be fitted, and appropriated, to the several scenes which art or Nature have produced, in different situations,"

19I b id .. p. 35 .

2®Wyatt Papworth, "John Gwynn, R .A ., A rch itect, A Biographical Sketch," The Builder. 21 (June 2?, 1863 ), p.

21 For the Wittkower reference, see "The Idea of the VJhole," above, especially note 8. Sir Reginald BlomfieU, A History of Renaissance A rchitecture in England (London: George B ell and Sons, 1897), P. 315. Allen s conclusion is stated in Tides in English Taste. II,

22rhe Art of Architecture, pp. 7 and 9. He also indicates an important ambivalence about his function, which suggests a revealing distinction between his architectural literature and the writings of the architects, Ware and Morris: "i am either . . . a poetical architect or an architectural poet," Ibid. . p. ii.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. NATURAL AFFECTION: KORAL ARCHITECTURE OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY

One of the major themes that run throughout the whole of

Shaftesbury's philosophy is what he describes as the natural concern

of man with his fellow creatures (i.e. the innate characteristic of

social affection which makes possible the creation of general social

systems and specific societal cultures composed of moral individuals).

In Shaftesbury's thinking, human society is a natural system of com­

munity, an inescapable condition of benevolent organisation in a well-

ordered universe. I have previously indicated Shaftesbury's historical

position of reaction to Hobbes and Locke; in an early passage of the

Characteristics. the Earl raised the question of a state of nature,

trying to disprove the proposition that "there can be naturally any

human state which is not social. I111 Some critics have suggested that

Shaftesbury's only viable option in escaping the implications of Hobbes'

theory was to postulate a "natural, primal sympathy of the individual

fo r the whole" which makes the n atural and moral worlds r a tio n a lly

comprehensible. Grean has w ritten:

In Shaftesbury's philosophy, such innate ideas as those of beauty, good, and God are essential aspects of his modelof man. To be a man means, by definition, to have the capacity for such id eas and to have rea lized them in some degree. Through his reason man becomes conscious of participating in successively larger communities which giye meaning to his individual life. Ultimately,

- 13 ^ -

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 3 5 -

this develops into an awareness of belonging to a cosmic community.3

As a member of the community, Shaftesbury thought, man must love it; the

welfare of the entire system inevitably affects his personal well-being,

and its peril or disorder poses for him threats of irrelevance a;sd

is o la tio n . As Pope expressed i t ; "Thus God and Nature lin k 'd the

gen'ral frame,/ And bade 5Jelf-love and social be the same.Such

concepts of natural law and refinements of ehtics cannot well be di­

vorced from considerations of early eighteenth-century English art

theory. V,re may therefore expect some reflection of Shaftesbury's

themes o f community and s o c ia l a ffe c tio n in Eurlingtonian a rch itectu ra l

literature.^

It must be admitted, however, that the depth and range of

Shaftesbury's thought -were never matched by Morris, Gwynn, or Vj'are.

Esther Tiffany has asserted, for instance, that Shaftesbury's concept

of natural affection was so complex as to imply, -under certain circum­

stances, the appropriateness of an action wholly unlike simple socia­

bility (such as the withdrawal of an individual from a particular

society in allegiance to a larger, more permanent community-entity).

Further, Tiffany noted that true natural affection, in Shaftesbury's

original usage, was only to be achieved as a moral ideal by the hard

and incessant labor of judiciously curbing the various petty (personal)

affections which may confuse almost any issue and cause a mistaken

choice of values or action. If such nuances of interpretation remain

controversial among well-informed modern scholars, the predictable

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pattern of Shaftesbury1s influence among eighteenth-century architec­

tural theorists had more to do with the superficially obvious aspects

of his discussion of a "moral kind of architecture," where the indi­

vidual's "inward fabric," or personality, was treated as something

like a builder's design. Every element of passion — energy, extension

of directed force — of support, and of weight and strength, was to

be properly related to every other and to the whole; in sum, a system

of balances and counter-balances quite analogous to a properly designed

architectural order.?

But Shaftesbury also moved toward a consideration of the

relationship between art and the public, which is to say the society,

as well as an idea of freedom under law. These were evident implications

of his theories of community as a natural state. Cassirer has called

the problems of law and the state, on the one hand, and the problem

of aesthetics, on the other, "fundamental motives" of increasing im­

portance through the whole course of the eighteenth century's intel­

lectual history, and the two motives are joined in Shaftesbury's Q work at this point. On the relationship of artist and "public"

Shaftesbury wrote:

In reality the people are no small parties in this cause. Nothing moves successfully without them. There can be no public, but where they are included. And without a public voice, knowingly guided and directed, _ there is nothing which can raise a true ambition in the artist; nothing which can exalt the genius of the workman, or make him emulous o f a fte r fame, and o f the approbation of his country, and of posterity. For with these he naturally, as a free man, must take part: in these he has a passionate concern, and interest, raised in him by the same genius of liberty, the same

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 3 7 -

laws and government, by which his property and the rewards o f h is pain and industry are secured to him, and to h is generation after him.9

In Shaftesbury’s view, the enlightenment of the public was

congenial to the development and improvement of the arts; "that reigning

liberty and high spirit of a people" who are able and accustomed to

judge for themselves in matters of a ll sorts, was, in fact, what he

4 A relied upon for the safety and future of virtue itself. * On another

occasion, however, Shaftesbury made it clear that his sanction 'was

extended to liberty as the individual's protection under the govern­

ment of laws in a civil state, rather than a tyranny by majority,

"where the mere people govern."^ I t thus comes as no surprise to

find Morris and Gwynn expressing themselves independently on the same

is s u e s .

Morris' Lectures on Architecture were read by their author to

"a society established for the improvement of arts and sciences," of

which he was apparently the founder-president as well as the first

(and perhaps the only) speaker. Not much is known of this society,

but i t met th ir ty -e ig h t years prior to the founding o f the Royal Academy,

and Morris, in the course of his irregularly offered lectures, left no

doubt as to his belief in the importance of such an organization among

those concerned with the arts. He began with a complete acceptance

of Shaftesbury's view:

Man is naturally design'd for a social being, and made for noble or useful purposes in the Creation; and if it i s not in h is power to improve others in knowledge, i t is an incumbent duty in him to endeavour to refine his

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -138-

own understanding, whereby he may be said to answer the end of his existence, in some measure, and in which sense I wish to be understood.12

The first lecture dealt with the advantage and "absolute neces­

sity" of societies in general for both the refinement of individual

knowledge and the progress of collective social improvement, an academic

theme w ith le g a l and governmental dimensions — p a r a lle lle d by S h aftes­

bury's — that remain relatively undeveloped,^ Morris believed that

such a community i s e s s e n tia l to the development o f the arts and, at

least in the case of architecture, that the art is supportive of the

growth and regular functioning of a particular society (as well as

civilization, as a whole ).^ Pointing to the example of the Royal

Society for proof of his argument, he had previously stated this

position in An 5ssay in Defense of Ancient Architecture:

Thus we find that the improvement of a ll sciences is chiefly dependent upon the assistance or ideas of a community, and th a t the sta te o f a l l scien ces in th eir infancy has been imperfect, and that no one has yet perfected the original foundation of his first sentiments in any art or science whatever, but each has or may have had improvements from a communication of our thoughts to each other; without which, human society would be useless, art would cease to be, and every man would fa ll short of the attainment of even a satisfactory; definition of these his first ideas of invention.

A learned society in which like-minded individuals communicate

for mutual benefit.is actually an ideal extension of the principle

of harmony which we have noted as central in Morris' thought. But

part of the Essay was written as a warning that the social ideal of

harmony was far from being realized, The symphony of English building

suffered because the architect's orchestra of craftsmen and builders

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 139-

was out of tune. Instead of each man playing his individual part in

harmony and in proper time with the others, specialists pursued their

mistaken ideas of private interests at the expense of the group. The

performance had become unbalanced and a im less, w ith a.d istu rb in g and

ultimately self-destructive mutilation of concord. Morris was writing

of the London building trades as a specialized society, but his point

is clearly within Shaftesbury’s tradition of concern for balance and

stability in the moral architecture of the individual’s personality

and a proper r ela tio n sh ip to the community o f h is fe llo w s. Scolding

profit-minded architects who failed to control their contractors and

chose to build cheaply for their own immediate financial gain, Morris

said:

What folly, what madness, or rather, what ignorance does it argue? for men thus to strive, net only to ruin each other, but likewise agree to destroy that science, which we shall never see perfected amongst us, but by everyone’s acting in his own calling. Those whom Nature has more particularly fitted for accomplished architects, ought to execute their office in another manner, not enhancing profit of this nature; but give every man, according to his calling, a free liberty to make that reasonable use of his business, which opportunity may offer to him. Then every man would endeavour to gain credit, as well as profit, in the execution of his part, that the whole might become a building worthy to be so call'd, by the soundness of the materials, the neatness of the perfor­ mances, and the beauty of the whole. . . . But instead we may as w e ll hope to see a l l men in general become practitioners of virtue, as practitioners of apcient architecture, or the rules of sound building.

Where Shaftesbury had opposed Hobbes and declared "Liberty" — as pro­

tection under law — to be the ideal social principle, Morris could

not be so sanguine. Morris’ view, given in the Essay, was colored

by his reaction to contemporary trends which he could not see except as

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 4 0 -

a conspiracy to destroy the balance of reason and the growth, of virtue.

To his mind, the "Law of Liberty" merely meant the tide of ignorance

and n ovelty "driving and bearing a l l the b e a u tifu l id eas o f knowledge

into the gulf of simplicity and error.

If the earlier Essay is unlike Shaftesbury on this point, Morris

emerges from the later Lectures in a spirit very close to Shaftesbury’s,

an instructor whose fundamental interest is the effectual communication

of truths that he thinks are essential to his audience's well-being.

As a teacher, Morris was at great pains first to find a suitable audience

(inventing his own society) and then to offer his materials, but this

time less emphatically than before; he designed the theoretical content

of the Lectures as an "entertaining amusement," deliberately structured 18 to win and hold the interest and attention of his gentlemen-listeners.

3oth Shaftesbury and Morris were contributors to a general

interest in and delight with the arts that scholars have long accepted

as a broad-based feature of English history under Whig government during

the first half of the eighteenth century. The conditions of a relative

domestic stability and sharply improved self-confidence in the inter­

national scene made it possible for VJhigs to welcome (with the obvious

qualifications), as Shaftesbury had done, "the increased liberty which

had accrued to the commoners, as the source of a great revival in the

arts.This general interest and anticipation of renewed activities

goes a long way to explain Morris’ insistent efforts to see tastes

educated and valid principles instituted among those dealing with

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. architecture. In the Essay he not only suggested that a government is

as sound as the quality of the public buildings it inspires, but even

"that the decay of the state and government of a kingdom is dependent

upon the decay of public buildings." And in his various references

to the history of architecture, he ties the fortunes of the art to the

origins and ultimate fates of a series of civilizations. Citing

Vitruvius, he says that architecture is the result of "a natural

association" among early men who, unlike other animals, were capable

"of forming an idea of what was beautiful and magnificent in the

universe" and were additionally favored by Nature with the physical

dexterity necessary for the execution of their ideas in actual construe-

tion. 21 From the refinements of the Greeks, says Morris, the Romans

learned their first lessons in the art and, in turn, were able to

perfect its practice. In both cultures, building was done socially —

i.e . with an eye to the prestige and responsibilities of patronage

in the public assertion and transmission of values both to contempor­

aries and to future generations . 22

M orris 1 didactic use of architectural history as a guide to the

history of western civilization had, in addition to Vitruvius, a rich

tradition of architectural literature on which to draw. Alberti had

written at length of architecture and engineering as the skills which

made possible colonization, settlement, transportation, trade, general

commerce, and in t e lle c tu a l exchanges.23 His preface to the Ten Books

as translated by Bartoli and Leoni was permeated by the sense of building

as a social act. According to Alberti, the architect should consider

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 4 2 -

"what manner o f man he would be thought . . . how much applause, p r o fit,

favour and fame among p o sterity he w ill gain when he executes h is work

as he ought. As for the patron, Alberti considered him ill-advised

either to flaunt his superiority over his neighbors with.toe grandiose

a scheme, or to allow himself to be outdone "in the ingenuitjT of con- O'? trivance, or elegance of taste. J Building, Alberti thought, must be

done within the extant systems of society, and the architect might not

n eg lect the e ffe c t s o f the community on his p ro ject, or vice versa, the

impact o f h is projected work on the community. Writing o f the arch i­

tect^ proper scope of ambition, Alberti said:

. . . it is necessary that you should be full of this persuasion, a ll the while you are meditating upon these things, that it w ill be a scandal to you, if as far as in you lies, you suffer any other building with the same expense or advantages to gain more praise and approba­ tion than your own. Nor is it sufficient in these cases to be only not desoised, unless you are highly commended, and then im itated.

Properly managed, Alberti's idea of architecture was to bring glory

as w e ll as beauty and serv ice to the community o f which the patron and

architect were members.^

Similarly, Palladio's preface to Book III, in the Leoni edition,

mentioned that in public buildings "princes have a most ample field to oO show the world the greatness of their souls." VJotton, in turn,

called every man's house "the theater of his hospitality," while Evelyn's

dedication of his translation of Freart de Chambray's Parallel of the

Ancient Architecture . . . credited Charles II with the encouragement

and revival of architecture as one of the sciences "next in order to

the well-being of a state" (after the support of religion and •

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 4 3 -

establishment of l a w s ) . Even into the nineteenth century, Englishmen

writing and reading about architecture were prepared to assume that

"the study and improvement of architecture, as a liberal science, seems

to have been the early care of every enlightened age, and of every

civilized country."-^

John Gwynn1 s writings on architecture and society were in no way

exceptional to this tradition. On the contrary, he dealt with every

aspect of the topic in a manner wholly representative of the attitudes

shared by Morris and Shaftesbury. According to Gwynn, the arts (in­

cluding architecture) come into being "when people once think of forming

large societies, with various degrees of subordination under any par­

ticular form of government . 11 ^ In addition to the expression of a

society's peculiar character and the embodying of its excellence, Gwynn

believed that the arts could be of real assistance in the original es­

tablishment of a society and, subsequently, the maintenance of its most

developed and stable state. Some of his most interesting passages deal

with the services which well-ordered arts can render to an established

social order. In particular, he urged that residential districts of a

city be zoned to maximize the good effects of examples set by the rich

for "useful and laborious people" while avoiding the unfortunate mixture

of men of business with "persons of quality" in areas suitable for

residence of the latter only.

Isaac 7/are, in the Complete 3ody of Architecture, also applied

the principles of an ordered art to the practical functioning of social

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hierarchies in his advice on the placement of service quarters in large

h ou seh old s,and the historian Basil Williams has discerned related mo­

tives in aspects of the period's history such as the founding of charity

schools:

The main object was, in fact, to establish social disci­ p lin e among the poor. . . . For underlying the su b scrib er's benevolence was generally the fixed determination to do nothing to break through the rigid class system and to keep the poor in their place,3 •

Of course the other side of this coin was a genuine sense of

civic pride and duty, an awareness of the responsibilities of patronage.

Gwynn explicitly stated the values of the public magnificence that en­

lightened patrons were obliged to underwrite: among them were the moral

encouragement of wholesome industry and invention and the political ad­

vantages accruing from the attraction of foreign interest, as well as

the increased profit of exchange in the market-place.^ The quality of

English patronage was of crucial importance to Gwynn because of his be­

lief in the dependence of the community's welfare on its arts, an idea

he shared with Morris. Gwynn*s argument was as follows:

. . . it must be allowed that public works of real magnifi­ cence , taste, elegance and utility, in a commercial city, are of the utmost consequence; they are not only of real use in point of splendour and convenience but as necessary to the community as h ealth and cloth in g to the human body, they are the great sources of invention and of ingenious employments, and are a neaps of stamping real value upon materials of every kind.3°

It is of not a little interest that very late in Ware's Complete Body

there is an actual criticism of Lord Burlington on this account; the

high wall in front of Burlington House, although an effective means to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 4 5 -

the enforcement of social class hierarchies, prevented the desirable

dissemination of the Earl's salutary influence via the impressive but

practically invisible examples of his own facade and arcade:

For what does the proprietor spend his fortune! for what the architect search over the stores-of ancient time, and tax his laboring genius for invention, bat that the' structure may be admired? . . . Who ever saw the regularity, the symmetry, and beauty, of the London house of that great ornament, as well as patron, of the science, the Lord Burlington? The friends and intimates of that great man; who could not be but few, because his judgment and his taste were delicate, and he lived in an age almost of barbarism. If a stranger pressed for the sight, a porter surlily denied him . ^

If architecture thus reflected and influenced the total quality

and state of a culture, it was also felt to be a guide to an ideal of

personal behaviour. 3. Sprage Allen suggests that the architectural

principles of symmetry, proportion, and decorum came to dominate the

"classicist's" entire code of etiquette and good breeding,-^ and

Lees-Kilne frankly deduces that "one and a ll learned from the Character­

i s t i c s th a t correct breeding and arch itectu re went hand in hand; that it 39 gentlemanliness was enhanced by an understanding of Palladianism.

This dimension of Shaftesbury's potential influence on Morris and Gwynn

in particular is important because they a ll addressed themselves to

the problem of the contemporary state of the arts in Britain, as we

s h a ll see in' the next chapter, and 3 r ita in under the Whigs i s generally

conceded to have seen the impetus of cultural leadership pass from a

powerful semi-public court center under the domination of a monarchical

personality to a succession of competitive, but private, individuals.^

Summerson has said of the neo-Palladian country houses that many were

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. undertaken by private individuals "with a view to success or as a

corollary of success in public life," i.e. with a definite relationship

to Whig politics in an era of very few ma.jor public projects.^ In the

next chapter we shall see the consequences of this state of affairs

as Shaftesbury, Morris, Gwynn, and ’Ware defined them.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 147-

NOTES

^Characteristics. II, 79.

^Cassirer, 'The Platonic Renaissance in England, p. 195s "if one would escape {riobbesj . . . there is nothing left but to go back to some form o f natural sympathy, and upon that as a b a sis and f i r s t datum, to found all conventional, social, and juridical order."

^Grean, Shaftesbury1s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, p. 4-3. Grean's point seems well supported by passages such as this, on proper human sentim ents, from C h a ra cteristics. I I , 294-5: "... he i s not only by Nature sociable within the limits of his own species or kind, but in a yet more generous and extensive manner. He is not only born to virtue, friendship, honesty and faith; but to religion, piety', adoration, and a generous surrender of his mind to whatever happens from th at Supreme Cause or order o f th in g s, which he acknowledges entirely just or perfect."

^Sssay on Man (written 1730-32; published 1733-34-), Epistle III lines 317-18.

^Students of Augustan literature have not had far to look. Pope’s Essay on Man, Epistle III, for instance, also includes these lines (14-7-50; 199-200): "Nor think, in Nature's State they blindly trod;/ The State of Nature was the reign of God:/ Self-love and social at her birth began,/ Union the bond of all things, and of Man . . . 1 and “Great Nature spoke; observant Man obey'd;/ Cities vie re built, Societies were made," See "Shaftesbury and Eighteenth Century Archi­ tectural Thought," above, note 3» for a reference to C.A. Moore on Shaftesbury and Pope.

^See Esther Tiffany, "Shaftesbury as Stoic," pp. 630-82.

^ C h aracteristics. I , 314- and 73. At the end o f h is Elements of Architecture (1024),Sir Henry Wotton had anticipated, the analogy in announcing "another work, which I have long devoted to the service of my country: namely, A Philosophical Survey of Education, which is indeed, a second building, or repairing of nature, and as I may term it, a kind of moral architecture 1 (p. 122).

^Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. p. 152.

^Letter Concerning Design, Second Characters, p. 22.

^ b id . . p. 23: "Nothing is so improving, nothing sc natural, so congenial to the Liberal arts, as that reigning liberty and high spirit of a people, which, from the habit of judging in the highest matters for themselves, makes them freely judge of other subjects, and enter thoroughly into the characters as well of men and-manners, as of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 kQ~

.the products or works of wen, in art and science." Shaftesbury's stand is again, in part, a reaction to Hobbes, of whom he wrote in Character­ i s t i c s . 1 , 6 1 : "The fright he took upon the sight of the then governing powers who unjustly assumed the authority of the people, gave him such an abhorrence of a ll popular government, and of the very notion of liberty, itself, that to extinguish it for ever, he recommends the very extinguishing of Letters, and exhorts princes not to spare so much as an ancient Roman or Greek historian. . . . Is not this in truth some­ what Gothic?" The passage bears an obvious relation to those quoted as evidence of Morris' early spirit of defense against decadence in the previous discussion of enthusiasm in architectural literature.

^ C h a ra cteristics. I I , 3^9: "For no people in a c i v i l sta te can possibly be free, when they are otherwise governed than by such laws as they themselves have constituted, or to which they have freely given their consent." 12 Lectures on Architecture. the Preface.

-^Ebid. , p. 2 : ", . . 1 shall in this lecture show you the absolute necessity and advantages of society in general, as they relate to the public or private welfare of the individual; both in respect 'to the preservation of rights and properties, and improvement of the in­ tellects of the mind."

1^Ebid. . p. 8.

^ %£. Fssay in Defense of Ancient Architecture. p. 6 . I have previously noted that rules of art were of value to Morris as a kind of currency of intellectual exchange; his emphasis upon "communication of our thoughts to each other" is typical. For the continental context of such thinking, see Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Cassirer discerns a pattern between D Alembert and the Sncyclopsdiasts, for whom "society is the vital air in which alone true science, true philosophy, and true art can thrive," and Boileau and Voltaire, under whose influence "sociability" (the means to genuine taste or knowledge) and the highest, most aesthetically influenced level of a particular society (e.g. court life) are linked and ensconced as models of "natural" civilizatipn. Referring especially to Boileau, Cassirer says that decorum superseded nature while convention replaced truth (p. 29*0. The inevitable reaction is instanced with Lessing ("if pomp and etiquette make machines out of men, it is the task of the poet to make men again out of these machines.") Cassirer concludes, on p. 2 9 6: "For the con­ fusion of social and aesthetic standards, of which classical theory had been guilty, was bound to lead to a joint historical destiny for them both. From the moment when the s o c ia l standards could no longer r e s is t the r isin g tid e o f c r itic ism , when th eir weak and questionable points began to appear, the aesthetic standards also could not help being loosened and fin a lly resolved a lto g e th e r ," The English were certainly not immune to the confusion of social and aesthetic standards,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 149-

but their character as a people, as Pevsner has suggested, nay have saved them from the extremes o f action and reaction reached on the contin en t, 16 An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture. pp. 107-8.

1?Ibid.. p. 28. 1R Toward the end of the in itial lecture, Morris reaffirms the rela tio n sh ip o f so cie ty and knowledge: "... Society is the basis of a ll knowledge, the.spring and source of arts and sciences which have' been propagated, improv'd, and handed down to us by succeeding ages." Lectures on Architecture, p. 13. As to his goals and responsibilities as the Society s first speaker, he says on p. 15: "I intend to publish (the lectures} for the service of such whose genius leads them to the study of architecture, or such branches which have an affinity to that science: and T shall interweave such remarks with it , as shall make i t an en tertain in g amusement to you in your more private retirem ents." Presumably, Morris is referring here to his intermittent rhapsodies, which were almost certainly encouraged by Shaftesbury's influence. I have previously noted (in "The Apprehension of Beauty and the Education of Taste," above) Morris' idea that- learning, beyond its necessity for the individual's sake and society's, should be a source of positive p leasu re.

^Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, p. 196. On conditions in general, see Williams, The '•.'hig Supremacy. 171 ^-1 ? 6 o (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 19&2), P. ^02: 'The political and social condition of England no doubt largely accounts for these phenomena (jn the arti|. The victories of Queen Anne's reign, after a centuiy of unrest and d issen sio n a t home and weakness abroad, had awakened the pride o f Englishmen in themselves and stimulated the expression of this pride. . . . * t The prosperity th at resu lted from secu rity a t home and from .valpole s peaceful development of the country's resources and foreign trade had perhaos even more to do with the particular forms this manifestation to o k .1'

^An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture. p. 9.

^Robert Morris, Rural Architecture (London, 1750)» the Intro­ du ction.

~ Sssay in Defense of Ancient Architecture. pp. vi-viii.

^The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti, the Preface: "The conclusion is, that for the service, security, honour and ornament of the public, we are exceedingly obliged to the architect; to whom, in time of leisure, we are indebted for tranquility, pleasure and health, in time of business for assistance and profit; and in both, for security and dignity. Let us not therefore deny that he ought to be prais'd and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 5 0 -

esteem'd, and to be allow’d a place, both for the wonderful and ravish­ ing beauty of his works, and for the necessity, serviceableness, and strength of the things he has invented, among the chief of those who have deserved honour and rewards from mankind." Alberti apparently- had an axe to grind in the matter of the architect's social status as an artist, but his claims involve heavy responsibilities to society as well as rewards from it.

2Zjlb id .. pp. 9^-5.

25lbid., p. 7 7.

2 ^Ibid. , p. 22.

2 ''Ibid«, the Preface: "3ut why need I mention not only how much benefit and delight, but how much glory too architecture has brought to nations which have cultivated it both at home and abroad? . . . Men of public spirits approve and rejoice when you have raised a fine wall or portico, and adorn'd it with portals, columns, and a handsome roof, knowing you have thereby not only served yourself, but them too, having, by this generous use of your wealth, gain'd an addition of great honour to yourself, your family, your descendants, and your city."

2^The Architecture of And, re a Palladio. Vol. I ll (London, 1718), p. 1 .

29y/otton, Elements of Architecture. p. 82; Roland Freart, A Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modem . . . , Trans. John Evelyn vLondon, 1723), Dedication.

3%phraim Chambers, Cyclopedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and S cien ces. (London, 1815), p. 9°.

3~*An Essay on Design, p. 2.

32see London and Westminster Improved, from which th ese passages are excerpted: In settling a plan of large streets for dwellings of the rich, it w ill be found necessary to allot smaller spaces contiguous, for the habitations of useful and laborious people, whose dependence on their superiours requires such a distribution; and by adhering to this principle a political advantage w ill result to the nation; as this intercourse stimulates their industry, improves their morals by example, and prevents any particular part from being the habitation of the in­ digent alone, to the great detriment of private property" (p. v iii). Concerning the proposal to widen Watling and Thames Streets, Gwynn argued: "What an alterati.on would be produced in respect to grandeur and u t i l i t y , how ea sy , safe and commodious would the conveyance o f goods and merchandise be rendered by it, and what a fine opportunity would thereby be given to erect dwelling houses for the wealthy merchants, who for. want of such conveniences are thrust out of the way of their

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 151-

business, and obliged to live in a part of the town entirely unsuitable to their interests in every respect; the body of merchants certainly are and ought to be, to the inferiour citizens, 'what the body of no­ bility are to the whole; the merchants are the opulent people of the city, and the greatest part of its inhabitants are entirely dependent upon them, indeed their dependence is mutual, for which reason it is plain their residence ought to be in the city, and consequently some e ffe c tu a l method should be pursued in order to accommodate them properly, and prevent as much as possible their mixing among persons of quality, whose manner o f liv in g and pursuits are t o t a lly unsuitable to men o f business" (p. 15).

33a Complete Body of Architecture. p. 413: "The upper servants are most wanted about the persons of the master and lady, and these we shall place in a basement story under the parlour floor; which is intended here as the principal apartment. They can be suffered here because they are cleanly and quiet; therefore there is convenience in having them near, and nothing disagreeable. On the other hand, the kitchen is hot, the sculleries are offensive, and the servants hall is noisy; these therefore we shall place in one of the wings. This is the conduct of reason; the housekeeper, the clerk of the kitchen, and other domestics of the like rank, w ill thus be separated from the rabble of the kitchen; they w ill be at quiet to discharge their several duties, and they w ill be ready to attend the master or lady. The others w ill be placed where they can perform their several offices also unmolested; and we shall yet lay them open to the inspection of the upper servants continually, and place them in readiness to attend the family."

3^/illiam s, The Whig Supremacy, p. 142.

35Gwynn, London and Westminster Improved, p. xiv„

36Ibid. . pp. 20-1. In T-he Art of Architecture Gwyr.n importunes both the architect and patron to employ their advantages in the service of the state-community: "The Architect, a3.1 Ranks of Men should know,/ And when, and where, to bid his Genius flow/ To swell the Rules fo r Majesty and S t a t e ,/ To equal a l l the Grandeur o f the G reat;/ To serve the use of Senators, or Kings,/ And be the Source, from whence a ll Science springs" (p. 27). "'Tis you, my Lord, who know your Judgment's Height;/ Your precepts, and Instructions, are of 'Weight;/ . Clear, and succinct, the lower Classes to teach,/ And oft, above the tow'ring Artists Reach;/ Where the jray Ornament you please to place,/ And where it gives a Majesty and Grace./ These are the Rules, w ill live future Days" (pp. 2S-9).

37 a Complete Body of Architecture, p. 624. I do not attribute this to Ware personally without reservation, since I hold unresolved doubts as to the authorship of certain later sections of the book, but the criticism lends an ironic echo to Pope's well known tribute and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 5 2 -

encouragement to Burlington as a patron in Moral Essays, Epistle IV; "You too proceed! make falling arts your care,/ Erect new, the old repair,/ Jones and Palladio to themselves restore,/ and be whate'er Vitruvius was before:/ T ill Kings call forth th’ Idea’s of your Mind,/ Proud to accomplish what such hands design’d '1 (lines 191-6).

3®Tides in English Taste, p. 91. Allen cites James Forrester's The Polite Philosopher . . . (173*0 and Chesterfield’s well-known letter to his son on the similarity between constructing one's own personal character and the noble facade for a sturdy edifice as examples.

^Lees-Milne, Earls of Creation, p. 15.

^Jenkins, Architect and Patron, p. 69: "England under the Whigs was essentially a land of individual enterprise, and Englishmen seem to have been more concerned with the building of private fortunes than with the construction of public buildings. . . . Never again, after 1715» was the Court to recapture its position in cultural leadership. Even the reign s o f George I I I and George IV were poor shadows compared with the glories — actual and promised — of the Stuart dynasty. Jiist as English trade and commerce found leadership in enterprising indi­ viduals, so English taste and patronage were henceforth given direction by men lik e Burlington, Pembroke, and Horace W alpole.” Howard Stutchburv accepts and employs the idea in assuming that Shaftesbury's ideas on art "may be taken as symptomatic of the rapidly developing feeling among architects against the Court works of William and Anne and for the founding of a new movement. This was to be expressive at once of the ’Whig supremacy so shortly to be confirmed, of support for the newly established Union and later for the House of Hanover, and the indepen­ dence of a wealthy Protestant merchant majority of the educated class." See The Architecture of Colen Campbell, p. 1.

^ "The Classical Country House in Eighteenth Century England," p. 5 ^ .

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE STATE OF THE ARTS IN BRITAIN

Basil Williams' description of the period 1714- 1?6 o in English

history leaves the impression of a "rare unity" and a pervasive cultural

stability. The class system, functioning with apparent efficacy, and

the legendary self-satifaction of Englishmen of every class made the

likelihood or desirability of radical change on any sort seem rather

minimal. But if it is true that "enthusiasm" was generally mistrusted

and common sense preferred, it is also true that enthusiasts of several

sorts were actively laying the foundations that would support the extra­

ordinary intellectual edifices of later decades. As Williams says:

In some respects it may seem a humdrum age, but its sta­ bility is not the stability of inertness, for, under cover o f i t s o r d erlin ess, ideas and movements were originated that found fuller expression in later years.

Our interest in this chapter is less with the achievements of British

arts as they are currently understood and appreciated to have been at

the beginning and middle of the century than with the contemporaneous

evaluations of their state and potential by Shaftesbury, Morris, Ware,

and Gwynn. The concern with the arts as an important feature of

English culture was shared by them all, but is particularly explicit

in the work of Shaftesbury and Gwynn.

I have already referred to Shaftesbury's mission of establishing

-153-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -15k.

a "true taste" and "true virtue" among his country-men; in the

Characteristics he noted that the job was made more difficult by the •

smugness and complacency of Englishmen who were reluctant to leave their

island — among the last of the European territories to be effectively

civilized — for the broadening experience of foreign travel.^ In­

effective civilization, of course, was meant the presence of Renaissance

cultural achievements and the Enlightenment. On the other hand, Shaftes­

bury saw England as a new world lead er, an in tei'n ation al champion o f

those virtues for which the Whigs stood at home and a worthy heir to

ancient Greece in the all-absorbing struggle against despotic tyrants

a b r o a d . ^ English arts, he thought, required only a concentrated period

of cultivation to bring forth blossoms as splendid as any grown by the

shores of the Mediterranean. In the Letter Concerning Design. Shaftes­

bury wrote:

That if we live to see a peace any way answerable to that generous spirit with which this war of the Spanish Succession was begun, and carried on, for our own liberty and that of Europe; the figure we are likely to make abroad, and the in­ crease of knowledge, industry and sense at home, w ill render Britain the principal seat of arts; and by her politeness and advantages in this, kind, w ill show evidently, how much she owes to those counsels, which taught her to exert herself so resolutely on behalf of the common cause, and that of . her own lib e r ty , and happy c o n stitu tio n , n ecessa rily included.

The competition, obviously, was with France; we shall see that

Gwynn, especially, was concerned with beating the French at their own

game in the field of the arts. In some instances French achievements

and methods are admitted to be of interest to the English, but almost

always the 3ritish reaction is conceived by Shaftesbury to be an inde­

pendent one, stimulated by, but intentionally different from, the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 5 5 -

Continental precedents. In music, for instance, Shaftesbury admitted

that English taste had not been as developed as the French, at least .

until Britain's independence and curiosity led her to a study of the

Italians, and the production of English works ultimately proclaimed as

second' to none, ^

In the matter of architecture, I have already noted the Earl’s

determined emphasis on the importance and valuable abilities of the

public in the role of patron; his position was evidentDy a defense of

the potential for public grandeur in which the actual public has as

much interest and influence in the product as any in-bred court or

despotic royal person. The never-to-be-realized projects which Shaftes­

bury mentioned with anticipation for Whitehall Palace and a Parliament

Building were thus of real and symbolic importance. They were expected

to demonstrate the mature English national taste, fully developed, and

the august vitality of the whole of English culture, as well. After

the embarrassments afforded by political in-fi:ghting for patronage,

the vicissitudes of court favoritism, and the b.unglings of mis-placed 6 incompetents, the English public, he hoped, would finally be served.

It would have been in Shaftesbury's political interests (and well within

the sophistication of his literary technique) to over-state the case for

a public patronage, but his picture of general interest in manners and

methods of building is probably not distorted beyond a ll reality.

Remembering D'Alembert on the exten t o f d iscu ssio n and debate th at any

topic of the day could inspire and Allen's evidence of popular satires

and literature dealing with building, we can at least believe part of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 156-

Shaftesbury's description of public reaction to architecture in England

while accepting his bias for its encouragement:

Almost every one now becomes concerned, and interests himself in such public structures. Even those pieces too are brought under the common censure, which, though raised by private men, are of such a grandeur and magnificence as to become national ornaments. The ordinary man may build his cottage, or the plain gentleman his country house according as he fancies: but when a great man b u ild s, he w i l l find l i t t l e quarter from the public, if instead of a beautiful pile, he r a is e s , a t a v a st expense, such a fa ls e and counter­ feit piece of magnificence, as can be justly arraigned for its deformity by so many knowing men in art, and by the whole people, who, in such a conjuncture readily follow their opinion,?

So confident was Shaftesbury of the quality of British achieve­

ment in the arts to date, of the sound character of public interest, and

of the nation's rich potential for future grandeur, that he rather

ca su a lly dism issed the question o f an academy to guide and shape these

developments. To his mind, a governmental office for the arts or a

national academy, on the model of the French, implied (at the least) O the risk of taste perverted and corrupted, as by a royal court , 0 The

English genius for the arts, he said, would almost certainly have suf­

ficient encouragement from the great men of noble name, private fortune

and effective influence, but whether or not such patronage was forth­

coming, he predicted the eventual triumph of British ingenuity:

For in our nation, upon the foot things stand, and as they are likely to continue, 'tis not difficult to fore­ see that improvements w ill be made in every a rt and scien ce. The Muses w i l l have th e ir turn, and w ith or without their Maecenases w ill grow in credit and esteem as they arrive to greater perfection and excel in every kind. There w ill arise such spirits as would have credited their court patrons had they found any so wise

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 5 7 -

as to have sought them out betim es, and contributed to their rising greatness.?

The relative merits of English architecture and design, especially

in comparison to French (and, to some extent, Italian) was a recurring

concern, beginning with Colen Campbell's expressed intention to revise

the low estimation of British building by the publication of views and

rational observations of its greatest monuments/® Modern critics have

tried to evaluate the potential and actual currents of influence between

the Continent and England in these years and a few of their conclusions

are relevant. Herrmann believes that Laugier's theory importantly

a ffected Ware, as previously noted, but he discounts a p o s s ib ilit y o f

English influence on Laugier for the simple reason that neither the

French nor the English recognized British achievements as more advanced

than the French in any respect. This is true despite the fact that

Voltaire wrote Burlington in 1729, telling the Earl of his admiration

fo r h is a rch itectu re. According to Herrmann, "nowhere in Europe were

there buildings that came so close to Laugier's ideal of simplicity and

structural integrity" as the early eighteenth century English neo-Pal-

ladian country houses. Nivertheless, Herrmann concludes — correctly,

no doubt ~ that most of the French would have been bored or shocked

by Vitruvius Britannicus/ ^ Kaufmann has agreed that, in retrospect,

English architects of the early eighteenth century were the most "pro­

gressive" in Europe; but he means prim arily the non-Palladians, Vanbrugh,

Hawksmoor, and others of that type. He calls these men — classifying

and including Robert Morris as an independently original theorist and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 5 8 -

designer — "forerunners of a deep-going reorientation of thinking"

th a t none o f them was - able su ccessfu lly to carry out on h is own, but

which presaged the more revolutionary qualities of the most advanced

French architecture at the century1s end .^2 David Irwin, writing about

the neo-classical period that saw the French radicalism fully developed,

says that English neo-classicism remained largely apolitical and inde­

pendent of Continental influences in its development.^ Late-century

neo-classicism in England should not be confused with the earlier

Burlingtonian Palladianism that did not survive far past mid-century.

But the prior, related movement — to reiterate the point — is generally

thought to have been similarly independent of contemporaneous Continental

developments, except insofar as French and Italian culture provided a

stimulus to critical and innovative reaction (as in the case of gardening

and landscape s t y l e s ) . ^

3ut to Morris it appeared that England was merely the most recent

protector of the heritage of the Mediterranean that had been dormant for

eleven hundred years before 3ru n ellesch i, A lb e r ti, Bramante (and even

Michelangelo) rediscovered it and gave it back to a waiting Europe.

Renaissance architecture, which Morris believed to be the essence of

ancient building practices, had first surfaced in England in the works

of Inigo Jones and then Christopher Wren.'*'’ Morris (together with Gwynn)

does not really maintain or pursue the criticisms of Wren that had been

im plicit in Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning Design; if the Burlingtonian

struggle for dominance necessitated the removal of 'Wren from the Office

o f Works, Burlingtonian theory as w ritten by M orris, Gwynn, and Ware, in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 5 9 -

general, accorded him the respect due to the most prominent successor

to Jones in the history of English architecture. But, as we have seer:

above, Morris 1 Essay is saturated with accusations that the English

were wilfully destroying the tradition of Jones and antiquity in a

demented fascination with novelty (best typified, one surmises, by

Hawksmoor, Archer, or Vanbrugh, as well as the later works of Wren,

h im self). In fa c t, he compared h is countrymen to Nero, seeking amuse­

ment in the picturesque conflagration of the ordered architectural,

landscape bequeathed them by their classical forebears. In 1728, the

sophistication of the continent, even with all its faluts and short­

comings, seemed to Morris a reproof of the "absurdity of our jEnglishJ

base and supine negligence and sloth." He could say of the comparison:

They appear to have a more advanc'd ta ste o f judgment in sound building than ourselves, a more beautiful idea of it; and above all. a just value and esteem for the excellency of order. 1°

While Morris played the radical, opposed to currently prevailing

tastes and rampant individualism, Isaac Ware was later capable of more

conservative alarm over the future of the arts in England and, as

already noted, only softened his attacks on the rococo, Chinese, or

gothic manners when their vogues appeared to have crested, leaving the

principles of "antique" architecture safe and intact. 3y the time he

published the Complete Body of Architecture. English taste seemed sounder

than the "frivolous" mannerism of French design which, in his view,

revealed a decadence of taste rather than an esteem for the excellency

of order. Late in the book, Ware advised his architect-readers that

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 16o_

"the world, i s in a sta te o f improved knowledge" and any man might be­

come an informed judge o f architectureHis book, itself, of course,

was a reflection of that state of affairs, meant to provide a compre­

hensive text for the sort of instruction a lucky individual might other­

wise have obtained in Morris 1 S ociety or an academy patterned on the

French. In fact, it was largely as a concession to the academic in­

terests of thoroughness and objectivity that Ware finally deigned to

study, one might say dissect, the flagging French rococo and give in-

1 structions for its employment under certain conditions.

When John Gwynn made his observations on the state of the arts

in Britain, in London and Westminster Improved. he began with an in­

teresting history that honored the English Gothic tradition as both

r a tio n a l and in t e llig e n t , but ca stig a ted Tudor forms as "mongrel"

hybrids of misbegotten Roman and Gothic parentage. In the later

years of his life , Gwynn believed that architectural reform in England

had become in e v ita b le when

novelty supplied the place of taste, and that wretched style of building which abounds in every part of the kingdom, and which universally prevailed in the reign of Elizabeth, took place of the more rational and elegant Gothic style. 9

He critically characterized Wren's taste in small buildings as "not

very good" but, most significantly, went so far as to try to restore

Vanbrugh's reputation. This is an absolute reversal of the criticism

o f Vanbrugh included in h is e a r lie r Art o f A rch itectu re; i f Vanbrugh's

system was not clear, Gwynn nevertheless asserts that he was not

unsystematic. And if his designs lacked elegance, his "ideas were great

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 161-

and noble," in retrospect.^® The point of this rather liberal-minded

h is to r ic a l sketch l i e s in the conclusion: England had become a modern

Rome and should encourage and employ her arts accordingly. Gwynn shares

Shaftesbury's faith in Imperial Britain:

The English are now what the Romans were of old, dis­ tinguished lik e them by power and opulence, and e x c e llin g a l l other nations in commerce and n avigation . Our wisdom is respected, our laws are envied, and our dominions are spread over a large part of the globe. Let us, therefore, no longer neglect to enjoy our superiority; let us employ our riches in the encouragement of ingenious labour by promoting the advancement of grandeur and elegance.21*

In his earlier writing, besides having been less charitable to

Vanbrugh, Gwynn had taken a slightly different view of English art.

Because, in his opinion, the genius of the Renaissance had only inter­

mittently inhabited the island and England's neighbors had therefore

been free to speak "contemptuously of her without reserve," the Essay

o p on Design included a spirited defense of native English accomplishments.

Setting out a reply to Voltaire's Life of Louis XIV. in. which the

four ages of great art had been listed as ancient Greece, classical

Rome, fifteenth-century Tuscany, and the Age of Louis XIV in France,

Gwynn marshalls Newton, Locke, and 3acon to meet Descartes and Male-

branche; in letters he points to Milton, Butler, Dryden, Waller, Otway,

Congreve, P rior, Rowe, and Pope as matches for Racine, C o rn eille, I-Ioliere,

and LaFontaine. He even proposed that Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson,

and Fletcher "show that England, under Elizabeth, was the first nation

that transplanted true taste from Italy.Elizabethan bu ild in g was

better left unmentioned, but an Englishman could s till claim priority

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 162-

Q ft for Inigo Jones over Mansart and Charles I before Louis XIV,

Furthermore, although the C ivil War had ended this English golden age,-

the English constitution and civic character insured a greater freedom

for genius than could ever exist under despotic rule in France. Gwynn

w rote:

vie became fr e e , w hile the French, w ith a l l th e ir r e fin e ­ ments, were daily sinking into slavery: Our genius, if less regular, when first redeemed from its shackles, than theirs, was more noble and sublime. It was indeed owing to our greater share of freedom, from the era wherein the Reformation was established, that we had such men as Bacon, Raleigh, Burleigh, Spenser, and Hooker, at a time when M, de Voltaire himself confesses his own countrymen to have been in the most profound i g n o r a n c e . ^5

In a spirit close to Shaftesbury's, Gwynn seems to be defending indi­

vidual and native English talents in the arts, while insisting on a

potential for development comparable or superior to any possessed by

the French, whose legendary achievements he was determined to see

surpassed.2^ But Gwynn differed from Shaftesbury, as Morris and

Ware undoubtedly 'would have, i f asked, in c a llin g for an academy

vxith which to hasten and sustain the rise of English prominence in

the arts. Gwynn believed that artists haphazardly trained in England

were deficient in rule, judgment, and method; that what the country

needed was an academy patterned closely along the lines set out by the

French, in order to develop the national genius and improve its culture

at every level. At the higher levels, if training and education in

the arts were included in university curricula, Gwynn foresaw an a ll-

important improvement in the quality of patronage. At the lower levels,

whole populations and entire regions, such as Scotland and V&les, could

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. be simultaneously encouraged and directed to raise their productivity

and increase the realm's commercial prosperity.^ Gwynn called for

formal education in the "polite arts" of design in the Essay on Design

and he repeated the c a ll in London and Westminster Improved, seventeen

years later. On this point, at least, his attitude remained constant:

As it w ill appear from the general intent of these reflections, that an union of learning and the polite arts is sincerely to be wished by every one who has the least affection for his country, so it is to be deplored that no step has yet been taken to promote such an union . 28

After an unsuccessful attempt to establish a Royal Academy of London

in 1755. Gwynn eventually became one of the first members of the Royal

Academy o f A rts, founded in 1 7 6 3 .^ 9

I t thus aTJpears. th a t, to varying degrees, Morris, Ware, and

Gwynn a ll shared the vision of England as a center of the arts which

Shaftesbury had set forth in his Letter Concerning Dssiren. Their

attitudes toward the architect and his society almost inevitably

produced a concern for the current and future conditions under which

individual English artists and patrons would be educated, trained and

otherwise prepared to express and reinforce the virtues and strengths

they believed to be inherent in British culture. Their concerns took

a p r a c tic a l turn, away from the moral philosophy th at preoccupied

Shaftesbury. The Earl had been able to sidestep the question of

formal academies, but M orris, Ware, and Gwynn, in the company o f th e ir

own and subsequent generations of practitioners, apparently saw only

the benefits of such an institutionalized approach and admitted no

doubts of its necessity and value.^

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 164-

NOTES

"^Williams, The Whig Supremacy, p. 1.

^Characteristics. II, 250-2.

3lbid. . I, 145: "We are now in an age where Liberty is once again in its ascendant. And we are ourselves the happy nation who not only enjoy i t at home, but by our greatness and power give l i f e and vigour to it abroad; and are the head and chief of the European League, founded on this common cause. Nor can it, I presume, be justly feared that we should lose this noble ardour, or faint under the glorious to il, though, like ancient Greece, we should for succeeding ages be contending with a foreign power, and endeavouring to reduce the exorbitancy of a Grand Monarch. 'Tis with us at present as with the Roman people in those ea rly days, when they wanted only repose from arms to apply themselves to the improvement of arts and sciences,"

^Second Characters. p. 20.

5 lb id .

^Ebid. , p. 21: "But I question whether our patience is like to hold much longer. The devastation for long committed in this kind, has made us begin to grow rude and clamorous at trie hearing o f a new palace spoilt, or a new design committed to some rash or impotent pre­ tender." Pope understood Shaftesbury's v isio n and hope for W hitehall as a symbol of British civilization. In Windsor Forest, describing the accomplishments and glories of Anne's reign, he had published in 1713: "Behold! th' ascending V illa 's on my S id e/ Project long Shadows o'er the Chrystal Tyde./ Behold! Augusta's glitt'ring Spires increase,/ And Temples rise, the beauteous Works of Peace./ I see, I see where two fair Cities bend/ Their ample Bow, a new White-Hall ascend!/ There mighty Nations shall inquire their Dorm,/ The World's great Oracle in Times to come;/ There Kings shall sue, and supplicant States be seen/ Once more to bend before a B ritish Queen" (lin e s 375-34).

^Second Characters. p. 22.

^Ibid. . p. 2 3 : ". . . since it is not the nature of a court (such as courts generally are) to improve, but rather corrupt a taste . . . Content therefore I am, my Lord, that Britain stands in this resect as she novr does Q-.e. without a ministry or academy of the arts), 1

^Characteristics. I , 141.

^Colen Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus. or the British Archi­ tect (London, 1715)» the Introduction.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ^The Voltaire letter is quoted by Herrmann in Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory, p. 170. The appraisal of English country houses is to be found on p. 166 of the same source.

^^Architecture in the Age o f Reason, pp. 28 and 31. Kauftaann’s interest is primarily in architectural form and it is therefore not surprising that his brilliantly structured sequences and patterns of analysis contradict one of the theoretical affinities projected in th is th e s is . They are n eith er more nor le s s su b jective and in te r ­ pretive than my own and the validity of one need not imply fallacy in the other.

^^David Irw in, English N eo cla ssica l A rt: S tid ie s in In sp iration and Taste (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 103 .

^ S ee Edward M alins, English Landscaping and L iterature (London: Oxford University Press, 19&6), p. 17. Although no mention o f i t is made by Morris, Ware, or Gwynn, a survival or revival of Palladian influence may be noted in several late seventeenth and early eighteenth century villas built near Vicenza and thus might have been a potential source of influence on Burlington and Kent early in the English movement The works of Preti, Calderari and Temanza are deserving; of further study in this connection. In print, however, Campbell s denunciation of 3ernini, Fontana, and Borromini in the Introduction to Vitruvius Britannicus set the tone of English disapproval toward Italian caprice. I am indebted to Dr. Frank Sommer for bringing this possibility to my attention.

1 ^An Sssa?r in Defense o f Ancient A rch itectu re. p. x i i .

^ ^jbid., p. 10.

^^A Complete Body o f A rch itectu re, p. 696.

l 3 Ib id . . p. 5 2 1.

I^Lond on and Westminster Improved. p. 35.

2^1 bid. . pp. 43-4. See above, "The Apprehension of 3eauty and Education of Taste," note 6 3 . Gwynn1s late-blooming sympathy for Vanbrugh may w e ll have had something to do w ith h is admiration fo r him as a man of letters: "who as a writer, was excelled by few, as an a rch itect condemned by everybody; perhaps i t was c h ie fly owing to his merit as an author that he was so ill treated as an artist." Ibid. . p . 44. Gwynn*s friendship with another man of letters, Dr. Johnson, i s w e ll known.

2^Ibid., p. xv.

^^Gwynn, An Essay on Design, p. 6.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 166 -

2-febid. . p. 12.

% bid. . p. 13: "We had our age before France, and it continued th r o 1 the latter part of Elizabeth down to the fatal Civil liar, when the frenzy of fanaticism excluded a ll that was just and beautiful."

25Ibid., p. 1fy. Pope’s Essay on Criticism (written c. 1709, published in 1711) made the same comparison: Thence Arts o’er a ll the Northern world advanee;/ But Critic Learning flourish’d most in France./ The Rules, a Nation born to serve, obeys,/ And Boileau s till in Right of Horace sways./ But we, brave Britons, Foreign Laws despis'd,/ And kept unconauer'd, and unciviliz'd,/Fierce for the Liberties of Wit, and bold,/ We s till defy'd the Romans, as of old. / Yet some there were, among the sounder Few/ Of those who less presum'd, and better knew/ Who durst assert the juster Ancient Cause,/ And here restor’d Wit's Fundamental Laws" (lines 712-22).

2^To which end he suggests that even the most legendary are not so impressive as sometimes thought: "... even in the arts of design, for which the encouragement of Louis XIV made the French most famous, I do not find in France a Raphael, a Michael Angelo, or a Palladio, among the native French. Their fine pieces of architecture were very few, and they too perhaps might suffer by a critical examination. The facade of the Louvre is not sufficient to create the character of a Nation." Essay on Design, p. 15. on London and Westminster Improved, pp. ?4~5. In the case of the Scots, Gwynn says they could be practically educated in. craft- s k i l l s and a s s is t in the development o f a domestic economy instead o f producing regular numbers o f over-educated em igrants. The Welsh, on the other hand, could be raised from their total ignorance and elevated, even by minimal amounts of such education, to positions of relatively enlightened industry of completely unprecedented productivity.

28Ibid.. p. 75. As str ik in g as Gwynn's statem ents appear to be, it should not be forgotten that Jonathan Richardson had earlier used very similar reasoning in the comparison of Greece and Rome with modern Britain as well as the enumeration of the practical benefits of an English art-industry to be stimulated by an academy in The Theory of Paintin'; (1715) and The Science o f a Connoisseur (1719). See The Works o f Hr. J onatban Ric hard son (London, 1773). no. 122, 2 6 7, and 277-3. Evelyn s Funifugiun would be another point of interesting comparison, w hile the 'great p r o fit s , and commodity o f the realm to be enhanced by the study and encouragement of the arts had even been mentioned by Shute in the "Letter unto the loving and friendly Reader" o f h is The F ir s t and Chief Grounds o f A rchitecture (London, 1563 ). ^Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of English Architects, p. 255.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 6 7 -

39: am aware that Shaftesbury is traditionally considered, on the evidence of the Characteristics. to have favored the establishment of an academy. See, for instance, V/.A. Eden, "introduction," Marble H ill House and i t s Owners. by Marie G. Draper (London: Greater London C ouncil, 1970), p. 1. I find the Letter Concerning Design, as quoted, to be important evidence of an interesting equivocation infrequently acknowledged in such accounts.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. QUALIFICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

This chapter is a collection of brief qualifications, reservations

and cautions that are necessary only because the focus of attention has

heretofore been so selective as to be potentially misleading to un­

suspecting readers whose familiarity with the context of the topic is

either new and minimal or venerable but fragmented. The concentration

upon literature produced by the Burlingtonian circle naturally led to

1715 as the chronological point of departure (assuming Shaftesbury's

influence to have been growing steadily from his death in 1 7 1 3 )* but

the discussions have consistently indicated that there existed a sig­

nificant and diverse tradition of architectural publication in England

long before Campbell and Leoni appeared on the scene. In fact, a full

understanding of the precedents for Shaftesbury and the Burlingtonians

would necessarily depend upon extensive treatments of classical phil­

osophy (beginning with Plato) and the subsequent, related architectural

writings of Vitruvius, Alberti, and Palladio, in addition to a number

of art theorists. Such treatments are not possible here, but I have

tried to indicate at least a few of the specific topics and broader

areas in which the relationship to these complex sources seemed par­

ticularly close or apparent.

-163-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I t must not be forgotten th a t, as A lb erti had drawn from V itruviu s,

so Palladio drew from Alberti, and that Palladio's book was a profoundly

rich source of influence totally independent of Shaftesbury's but in

many respects very like itJ Vittkower, from his study of Palladian

theory, has concluded that Palladio believed the practice of good archi­

tecture to be a moral obligation, a belief that could hardly be closer

to the effects of Shaftesbury's philosophy as I have defined them in

the work o f M orris, Ware, and Gwynn.^ Wittkower a lso acknowledges a

practical relationship between Palladian theory and the aspirations of

architects to the status of artists* the reinforcement of practical

techniques and traditions with principles that enjoyed the force and

prestige of the sciences,^ a dimension of Palladian precedent that

would have had a powerful appeal in early eighteenth-century England

during the early stirrings of architectural professionalism. James

Ackerman, on the other hand, str e sse s the sim p licity and common sense

that were inherent in Palladio's example, a strain of pragmatism that

he traces to Alvise Cornaro's Treatise on Architecture, as an important

influence upon the Vicentine quite independent of Trissino's "courtly

Humanism," and visibly embodied in the stripped, "cubist" masses of many i ^ of Palladio s most sparingly decorated structures.

Ackerman a lso notes the influence upon P alladio o f S e r lio 's

six richly illustrated books on architecture, and A.E. Santaniello's

introductory essay to the recent facsimile edition of these works makes

a strong argument for a hitherto underestimated importance of Serlio

in England well antedating the only English translation of his work

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -170-

in 1 6 1 1 .5 Santaniello's analysis of Serlio's book as a blend of tra­

ditional and empirical factors suggests a potential point of comparison

w ith the English :,s c ie n t is t -a r c h ite c ts ,r whose work and sig n ifica n ce have

had no real acknowledgment or accommodation in the structure of this

study: Robert Hooke, Roger North, and Christopher Wren. Wren, however,

has been briefly noted as something of an "architectural empiricist"

in the course of my argument. Hawksmaor's, too, would have been another

obvious name and achievement to contend with — collectively, an i l ­

luminating set of contrasts, no doubt, to the Burlingtonians — had

space and time allow ed.

If Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio, and Serlio were Italian sources

of sufficient appeal to have affected English architectural thought

and building had Shaftesbury never written a line (as they undoubtedly

were), there was yet another artist-theorist whose example had a vigour

and efficacy a ll its own: Inigo Jones, the English genius to whom

Burlington and his followers naturally turned for native inspiration.

Bruce Allsopp has written that "there can be no doubt that the seeds of

Palladianism in England were sown by Inigo Jones . 11 ^ It was Jones's

theoretical proclivities that balanced his mannerist and neo-classical

formal tendencies and set a precedent of enduring importance for sub- Q sequent Enghlish thinking about architecture.

Apart from these major sources of influence (to which should

be added Vignola, Labacco, Scamozzi, Zanini, de l'Orme, and several

others), but reflecting them in varying degrees, there stretched a long

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 7 1 -

tradition of English writing and publication that had building as its

subject. John Shute's First and Chief Grounds of Architecture ( 1563 )*

Sir Francis Bacon's essay Of Building ( 162 5) , and S ir Henry Wotton's

The Elements of .Architecture (162*0 are three of the best known early

title s, but there was also Andrew Boorde's The boke for to lerne a man

to be wyse in buyldyng of his house (15*^?).^ I have, on a few occasions,

referred to John Evelyn's translation of Roland Freart's Parallel of the

Ancient Architecture with the Modern (l66*0, and Godfrey Richards i s

believed to have been the first to put Palladio in English in The First

Book of Architecture (1 6 6 3 ). Joseph Moxon translated Vignola's Regola

del Cinque Ordinl in 165 5, and Sir Balthazar Gerbier wrote several

original books, purportedly dedicated to the study of architecture,

in the early l66o's.^° B. Sprague Allen points out that Milton included

architecture in his "ideal curriculum," advice that was echoed in such

guides as Gailhard1s Treatise Concerning Education of Youth (1 678) .^'

From these few examples and the lists of other titles cited as noteworthy

in studies of English art and architecture before 1715* it must be clear

that Campbell and Leoni did not create, but only helped to accelerate,

the publishing phenomenon w ith which th e ir names and the 3urlingtonian 12 sty le have since become synonymous.

It should also be remembered that, in addition to titles which

explored the relatively esoteric features of Renaissance art theory —

some, like Richardson's Theory of Painting (1715)* bearing a close

resemblance to Shaftesbury's publications on aesthetics ~ there was

a large and growing collection of pragmatic building guides that had

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -172-

little or nothing to do with theory or philosophy, per se.^3 Leona

Rostenberg has studied the beginnings of this semi-independent tra­

dition, particularly in the publications of Robert Pricke after 1 6 6 6 ,

and I have, on.occasion, made comparative references to the Builders

Dictionary (173*0 as one of the most interesting eighteenth-century

representatives of the type.^ The importance of such books, especially

in colonial America, cannot be denied or questioned.

This is merely to indicate that the point of this thesis does

not depend on any mistaken or exaggerated idea of the isolated signi­

ficance or wrongly-assumed originality of Shaftesbury, Morris, Ware,

or Gwynn. It is apparent from even the most cursory readings of the

latter three that their status, as intellectuals, is not impressive;

their written works are not of high quality and their influence, in

terms of theory and criticism , cannot easily be proved. There is much

in their books that is contradictory, much that is ill-expressed, much

that is derivative and uninspired. 3ut their collected works are the

only statements available to us of a legion of ideas — some half­

formed, and a few pushed to extremes — that made Burlingtonian

Palladianism something more than a vogue or fad of a particular decora­

tiv e manner or a rch itectu ra l s t y le . Their id e a ls and p rin cip les make

it possible for us to understand the buildings and designs they have

left us as original, self-conscious, and enduring expressions of a

particular intellect and culture. For that reason, and because their

actual achievements have proved to be potent models for imitation and

extension under widely differing circumstances for more than two. hundred

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 173-

years, I have been concerned to suggest, through Shaftesbury, one of

the viable relationships their literature bore to other, better known

and better understood, aspects of that culture. Shaftesbury can be

used to explain their critical appeals to theory and the reinvigorated

force of ancient authority as they discovered, or imagined, it, as well

as a tendency to emotionalism. His popular philosophy could only have

assisted in the revival and heightened appreciation of Inigo Jones, with

a ll the attendant consequences of that artistic restoration. It is

clear, I think, that I do not mean to say Shaftesuury was the only

source of important influence on the Burlingtonians, nor do I mean

to imply that his influence was always direct or critical. Rather,

I suggest that, as outlined in the preceding analyses, the works of

Shaftesbury, Morris, Gwynn and Ware are among the individual but related

tones of a rich "cultural resonance 11 that may be discerned and studied

in depth among the forms of much English architecture of the first

half of the eighteenth century. As to the echoes of that resonance

in Anglo-American architecture and then in American architecture of

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I may only propose the dis­

cussions and hypotheses to be cited in the following, and final,

chapter.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 7 4 -

NOTES

iFor the closeness of Palladio to Alberti, see Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, p. 21.

2Ibid. . p. 64: . . and, more than this, that in conformity with the doctrine of Trissino's Academy, he regarded architecture as an important discipline of the arts and sciences the union of which em­ bodied the ideal of virtus . 11

3lbid., p. 117.

^Ackerman, P a lla d io . p. 22. Of the I Quattro L ib ri. Ackerman says: "Though its author had a Humanist education of a kind, and shared the ideals of his teachers and patrons, it is not a Humanist book. Scholarship and ancient tradition are outweighed by practical know-how expressed in economical and forceful language." Ibid.,- p. 29.

-’Ackerman, Palladio. p. 24; A.E. Santaniello, "Sebastianc Serlio and the Book of Architecture," The 3ook of Architecture (New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1970), pp. 13 and 15.

^The term "scientist-architects" is Frank Jenkins'; see Architect and Patron, pp. 60 - 1 ,

?Bruce Allsopp, "Inigo Jones and Palladianism," Inigo Jones on Palladio . . . (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Oriel Press, 1970), p. x i i .

^Although the theoretical evidence remained unpublished until modem times, the exemplary quality and impact of his buildings as executed are unquestionably at the root of the Burlingtonian problem. For t h is and Jones's own non-Palladian sources, see John Summerson, Inigo Jones (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 19^6), pp. 365 71 and 139.

^The 3oorde title is cited in Frederick Hard's extremely valu­ able intooduction to Wotton's The Elements of Architecture. p. lv ii,

i aCbid.. p. lx x iv .

^ Tides in English Taste, p. 55.

■^ 2See Blomfield, A History of Renaissance Architecture in England. Chapter XIII: "Architectural Literature- in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"; also Saxl and Wittkower, British Art and the Mediterranean. Chapters 41 and 4 3 .

^ ^Compare the following extract from The Theory of Painting. for example, with Shaftesbury: "... his (£he artist1 business is to ex­ press great, and noble sentiments: let him make them familiar to him,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 7 5 -

and his own, and form himself into as bright a character as any he can draw. . , . The way to be an excellent painter is to be an excellent man." The Works of Mr. Jonathan Richardson (London. 1773)* P«

^%ee Leona Rostenberg, Bnlish Publishers in the Graphic Arts 1599-1700 (New York: Burt Franklin, 19637]!

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. REMARKS ON THEORY IN AMERICA.

Having suggested the affinities between Shaftesbury, Ware,

Morris and Gwynn in a comparative analysis of theory and philosophical

orientation, it remains to indicate the relevance of the total topic

to American architectural and cultural history. At this stage, of

course, the picture must be sketched in a preliminary state rather than

permanently fixed on documentary grounds beneath layers of protective

critical varnish.

Daniel Boorstin, author of a prestigious and influential history

of the American experience, emphatically suggests that a study such as

this is of limited value to those seeking to understand the reality of

the colonial American character and achievement. With specific reference

to political history, he writes:

How irrelevant to look to the bookish prospectuses of English or French political theorists — of Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau — to explain Virginia's political enthusiasms! Americans who knew the reality did not need the dream. . . . The great Virginians were in the closest touch with the world of conflicting interests. They possessed a sense of full-bodied economic and political reality, but no particular genius for the abstractions of closet-philosopby. This was to prove one of their greatest strengths,^

While Boorstin is by no means alone in recognizing the importance of a

fundamental and characteristic American pragmatism (in politics, the

-176-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 7 7 -

sciences or the arts), he seems to go further than most historians in

branding theory irrelevant. But in a field where, overwhelmingly, the

concentration of scholars has been fixed upon the pragmatic and immed­

iately material aspects of cultural achievement (as in colonial American

architectural studies) it may be that historical understanding w ill re­

main incomplete until a context of theoretical tradition, of conscious

intention and intellectual consensus, is formulated to provide a comple­

mentary dimension of the otherwise already documented phenomena. Given

the breadth and orthodoxy of American history as written to date, Boor- .

stin‘s emphasis is not misplaced, but it should not be allowed to in­

hibit the suggestive investigation of tentative, theoretical relation­

ships whose relevance, not immediately apparent from his particular

perspective, may nevertheless prove profound to disciplines suffering

under traditions and orthodoxies of their own.

I t i s a commonplace o f American h isto ry th at learn ing and know­

ledge were pursued more as means than ends in themselves; an idea that

was of use could take root and survive in colonial environs while pre­

sumptions and pretensions to systematic or comprehensive philosophical

wisdom soon fe ll of their own dead weight. Boorstin defines the demo­

cratic implications of this fact as follows:

But the new kind of knowledge which life in America made possible, precisely because it was factual and miscel­ laneous, required no preliminary training. One could plunge in anywhere. . . . The American did not need to begin with explicit premises or with precise definitions and propositions; he began with the first novelty that came to his attention. If "knowledge" was miscellaneous, men could educate themselves with the random materials of experience. . . . The ideal of knowledge which came

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -178-

from natural history was admirably suited to a mobile society. Its paths did not only ran through the academy, the monastery, or the university; they opened everywhere and to every man . 2

If this was true, it was as true of colonial architecture as it was of

colonial political or educational thinking — and the point is made in

the pages of architectural histories as frequently as in other, more

general histories. Indeed, the architectural books which bear the .most

obvious relation to colonial building practices are precisely the pic­

torial miscellanies of motives and practical data, the text-books of

eclectic self-instruction.^ Other than the house-wrights and carpenters,

who had an occupational interest in the subject, men whose private

libraries included architectural titles (with a few rare exceptions)

almost certainly enjoyed an avocational or amateur*s fam iliarity with

their contents, and did not trouble themselves with anything more than

that.**’

But this is not to say that the classical tradition which in­

vigorated Shaftesbury and would support the influence of theoretical or

philosophical works such as his had no currency in colonial America. To

the contrary, a long succession of scholars have defined the classical

heritage and gauged its vitality in various phases of pre-Revolutionary

American culture. In New England, Samuel Eliot Morison defends the

seventeenth-century clergy as

leaders in liberalism and Enlightenment, purveyors of new learning to the people. . . . They neither made, nor intended to make a breach with English and classical culture. The best of the ancient classics were included in the school and college curricula; contemporary English lite r a tu r e was imported and read. 5

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 7 9 -

Louis Wright points to Robert "King" Carter of Virginia as "interested

in classical learning,"^ and his grandson, Robert, as "especially de­

lighted in history, philosophy, law, religion, science, and the theory

o f music.In addition to the colonial tendencies toward amateurism

and self-improvement, which were materially aided by the imported book,

Wright points out that

the humanist tradition of the Renaissance, with its in- sistance upon the cultural discipline of Greek and Latin writers, exerted a strong influence upon the choice of books for American libraries throughout the seventeenth century.®

Both Morison and Wright agree that literature was a crucial weapon in

the conscious struggle to perpetuate the established civilization that

had been purposefully transmitted to unprecedented and largely unknown

settings.^ More recently, Richard Gumnere concludes that "it is clear

that an increasing interest in matter Greek and Latin gathered force and

spirit between the years 1607 and 1789,"^° and Bernard Bailyn reminds us

th a t th is c la s s ic a l in stru ctio n was no mere "cultural ornament" but

rather a matter of continuing concern, a tradition of real force because

of its apparent "moral and social utility."^

In Seedtime of the Republic. The Origin of the American Tradition

of Political Liberty. Clinton Rossiter unhesitatingly deals with ex­

pressions of philosophy or the traditions of instruction and formalized

learning. Like Bailyn, he cites the colonial faith in the power of ed­

u cation and a b e lie f in man‘s ed u cab ility:

Man was something more than a fortuitous complex of virtues and vices. He was educable — he could learn and be taught. More to the point, he could

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 So­

le am why to cherish virtue and shun vice, how to serve the community and defend lib e r ty . Free government rested on virtue, virtue on knowledge, knowledge on regular techniques of education.^

There is some justification, therefore, for the point of view that

architectural literature, as a whole, relates to the broad pattern of

educational development in America and that those titles in which theory

predominates, rather than being irrelevant flukes of individual col­

lecting habits, may bear a significant relationship to other recognised

aspects of the colonial Anglo-American culture*

To instance only a handful of potential examples, one might

begin with Rossiter's discussion of John Wise, whose The Churches Quarrel

Espoused (1715) he quotes on the subject of order;

Order is both the beauty and safety of the universe; take away the decorum whereby the whole hangs together, the great frame of nature is unpinned and drops piece from piece; and out of a beautiful structure we have a ch a o s. 13

Surely Wise's audiences would not have been disinterested in Shaftesbury's

similar views. And on the topic of man's basic nature, as discussed in

colonial documents, the Earl's work must make a worthwhile comparison

when R ossiter w rites th a t

perhaps the most politically significant of a ll these qualities was sociability, the urge man feels to associate with other men, even if this means surrendering a substantial part of his original freedom. So pointed was the emphasis placed upon “the social principle in man" that many thinkers excluded the pre-social state o f nature, and therefore natural man, from serious consideration. Man was clearly a social animal.^

More specifically, we may look for Shaftesbury's influence in the dia­

logues between Philocles and Horatio in the Pennsylvania Gazette of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 181-

1730.1^ Thomas Jefferson's commonplace book contains passages which prove he had read and approved the Characteristics. and Robert Feke, the painter, is known to have read both the Characteristics and the Hercules

essay. ^ Later in the century, Ezra Stiles referred to the Earl as “the amiable Confucius o f deism" and ranked him before Hume and Voltaire

in taste and judgment, while Timothy Dwight's 1797 lectures at Yale

included a study of the inconsistencies in Shaftesbury*s philosophy.

The buildings of William Buckland and Peter Harrison have re­

peatedly been used by Kimball, Pierson, Morrison and others as the rich­

est sources of exemplary pattern-book influence in the colonies, but

the careers of each can be profitably studied in the unexplored dimen­

sion of philosophy, as well. Buckland's Annapolis, for instance, saw

Charles Wallace honored for his building activities with a poem that

must be read in the light of Shaftesbury and the 3urlingtonian tradition:

By different methods, different men excell If Paea speaks, yet Wallace acts as well. Intent this Town and Country to befriend, and fond to useful works his hand to lend. He rears the Column and projects the Dome and makes our streets like those of ancient Rome. A grateful People shall preserve thy Fame; and rank w ith Jones and Wren thy honored name. But tho the Trav'ler views with pleased Surprise Stupendous Fabricks reaching to the Skies, Admires the Structures and Applauds thy Art, 'Tis mine to praise the Goodness of the Heart. Thy many s o c ia l V irtues to Commend, The u se fu l C itizen and Public Friend.

Harrison's biographer, Carl Bridenbaugh, speculates on the possibility

of influential or real contacts between that architect and Lord Burling­

ton or Kent in Y o r k . Among those who would turn to Harrison for arch­

itectural assistance, the Reverend Henry Caner, who wrote in 17^9 to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -182-

request designs for King's Chapel in Boston, showed that he had at least

a passing acquaintance with the language of theory;

As the chief beauty and strength of building depends upon a due proportion of the several members to each other . . . we do not require any great expense of ornament, but c h ie fly aim a t symmetry and proportion, which we entirely submit to your judgment. 2°

If Harrison introduced the Palladian style to America, Caner's letter is

evidence that, at some levels, a Burlingtonian quality of educated

patronage, a necessary prerequisite for the success of the style, al­

ready existed. Harrison's sense of duty and his virtuoso-like archi­

tectural activity could additionally be investigated as a possible

manifestation of Shaftesbury's influence. Bridenbaugh says:

A ll Newport considered the Harrison family as definitely of "the better sort"; its master a "Man of Taste." Con­ servative in politics as well as in temperament, an admirer of a ll things British, he mightily respected property with a ll its appurtenances, its duties and its rights, including the right divine of gentlemen to do as they thought best. As a leading representative of the gentry he always willingly laid aside his dearest projects when church or colony called. This was his duty. His belief in the responsibility of his class for the public weal was as highly developed as was his judgment in architecture . 21

Bridenbaugh describes Harrison as a link between the "Palladianisra" of

Inigo Jones and the "purer Roman" forms favored by Thomas Jefferson;

he also suggests a "significant parallel" between Harrison's "retro­

spective quality in design" and "current American thinking" about

government and law (which turned to the "republicanism of Harrington,

Sidney and Locke") on the grounds that "republicanism in political

theory together with classicism in architecture eventually became the

mode of a new nation," but this provocative point is severely weakened

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 183 -

for art historians by Bridenbaugh*s confused and indiscriminate use

of stylistic terms whose sociological connotations are poorly defined

but highly volatile.

At least ono architectural scholar has announced that "Ware's

exposition of the urban and rural common house types is basic for a

study of city and country domestic [architecture} in the colonies.

And Robert Morris lias been thought of as a direct and major influence

upon Thomas Jefferson, who traced in pencil some of the plates in his

personal copy of Select Architecture (1755).^ With Jefferson, of

course, the discussion becomes more wide-ranging and fascinating. The

architect-President was devoted to ancient authorities and is on record

as having despised the average level of English architectural achieve­

ment, but Morris* impact on his work is now accepted, and in addition

to Alberti and Vitruvius, Jefferson recommended that Castell's Villas

o f the Ancients and Ware’s Complete Body o f A rchitecture (both o f which

he p erson ally owned), monuments o f the Burlingtonian movement, be pur­

chased for the University of Virginia's fine arts library.

Behind Jefferson's obvious architectural sources, Shaftesbury

again returns to the picture. In reference to doctrines of social in­

stinct and a universal moral sense, the eminent historian Merrill

Peterson has written that

Jefferson was familiar with . . . (Hobbes^ teachings ~ several of Mandeville's books were in his library — and was repelJLed by them. The idea th at se lfish n e ss led to virtue, that private vices produced public benefits — M andeville's famous axiom — seemed to him a cy n ica l assault on morality, . . . He found his solution in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the "moral sense" school of Lord Shaftesbury.2^ Peterson's assessment refines and amplifies the echo of Jefferson's

words to Madison, written in 1785 and quoted by Kimball in a discussion of the President's attitude toward art and civic virtue: - I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste o f my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world, and to procure them its praise.2' Kimball adds: "With Jefferson, as he developed, a ll art became civic

art."2^ Like Shaftesbury, Jefferson studied the classics directly; their sources were the same, in many instances,2^ Quite naturally,

their positions were frequently similar. Jefferson was no' less a propagandist for the arts than Shaftesbury and the Burlingtonians had

come to be: . . . he dreamed of setting up a standard of esthetic judgment based on c la ssica l examples. "How," he asked Madison, "is a taste in th is beautiful art to be formed in our countrymen unless we avail ourselves of every occasion when public buildings are to be erected, of presenting to them models for their study and imitation? In addition to his well-known interest in public building projects, Jefferson sought to establish both an architectural profession and a

course of formalized architectural instruction at every opportunity.^

Of course, Jefferson's genius was highly individual, and there are important characteristics that set off his work from any English precedent. Kimball speaks of a sc ie n tific impulse, a "relish for pre­ cision" which was half of the peculiar hybrid (the other being "histor­ ical passion") that was his design sen se.Jefferson 's methods were

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 8 5 -

definitely bookish and profoundly iiiitative, perhaps revealing a coloni­

al sense of cultural inferiority as much as a modem devotion to histor­ ical accuracy in their careful pedantry. For all their character, his finished designs have none of the creative expansiveness that-Shaftes­

bury and the Burlingtonians would have recognized as the essence of the greatest art; but they were serious and sober attempts at effective and moral civic art. If the United States had no ancient or long-standing national manner of pernicious decorative excess to stimulate a reformer's

enthusiasm, Jefferson's work proves that at least some Americans were

determined that their architectural art should rest, from its national beginnings, upon the sound foundations of valid principles.

To a great degree, this thesis has taken for granted the assump­

tion that it is feasible to discuss a phenomenon, of purposefully vague character and definition, which may be called, with reasonable accuracy, Anglo-American architecture. That assumption is obviously a crucial one

in the discussion of philosophical and literary themes distinctly English in origin which are asserted to have been a force in American

building. The assumption can be supported, to a degree, by references to Kimball and Bridenbaugh on the documented importance of architectural

art in American life and the rough equivalence between provincial English and colonial American conditions and achievements. 33 Any attempt to pin­

point the means or time of emergence of an independent American archi­ tecture from the Anglo-American tradition i s probably f u t ile , but certain­

ly impossible without an awareness of their shared characteristics. While Kimball postulated that post-Revolutionary Jeffersonian

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -186-

neo-classicism was a unique and truly national sty le , th is th esis has indicated that the literary component of Anglo-American architecture can be interpreted to contain from its earliest manifestations certain principles that were sufficiently broad and deeply enough rooted in a common cultural core of literature and philosophy to have shaped archi­ tectural form as importantly in Harrison's, Ware's or Burlington's work as Jefferson's. A theoretical coherence is evident beneath the vicis­

situdes of form and shadings of personal style.

I do not mean to say that the pilasters on the front, of the Vassal house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance, are to be taken solely as straight-forward English academicisms, nor even that they are

a feature of "academic style" which slowly filtered from court and country-house to provincial middle-class employments. Rather, I suggest that English minds were formulating and publishing, proposing and dis­ cussing, individual architectural precepts and entire systems from which such forms derive significant degrees of whatever meaning they possess in Anglo-American culture. These are ideas which modern stu­

dents must survey with respect if they hope to understand and interpret

their particularized formal manifestations whether in Whitehall, Dublin,

Boston or Washington, D,C, As an example, I believe that Kimball's discussion of applications of the academic style in "ordinary cottages" both English and American should, be revised to acknowledge that "acade® mic" theorists had faced the problem o f building modest structures in accord with the same principles employed in their most imposing edifices,

and that their solutions, easily available to American designers.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -187-

sp ecifica lly excluded the fragmented usage of unrelated ornamental de­ vices which mark many of the most ambitious and sophisticated colonial buildings.-^* I t may w ell be that where an academic style seems to have been most obviously employed by colonial or provincial craftsmen i t was,

in truth, most completely mis-understocd. In any event, the character

of the actual and specific monument cannot be defined apart from the ideals of the general system i t represents. Until an academic or theo­ retical principle, such as decorum, is articulated, we cannot hope to

discover its existence or absence as a factor in colonial building. Style is simply too superficial a concept, too vulnerable a system of categorization, around which to write a history of eighteenth-century Aagla-Axorican architecture; the scholar must search for the intellec­

tual relationship which gives meaning to the isolated facts of forzc.-^ ts

Finally, the relevance of this study to American culture need

not be limited to the colonial and early national periods. The colonial revival and academic neo-classicism of the late nineteenth eentury in­

cluded conscious reference, in many instances, to the character and

values of earlier American architecture. As Kimball puts it: The influence o f the Chicago Exposition, to which the revival is usually ascribed, is not enough to account for its native vitality, or for the distinguishing austerity of its work. These are due to familiarity with, and to the special character of, the early buildings of the republic — factors which have given the classical revival a nationalistic s a n c t i o n . 3°

Apart from the curious and indirect relation to the revival mentality, the principles discussed in this thesis have been independently for­

mulated and re-stated in the apologia of modern architecture. One such.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 188-

by Eldon Modisette, includes an interpretation of functionalism that

does not seem radically removed from the central propositions of Shaftes­

bury and th e B urlingtonians.

In our time functional analyses of society are common. In this view society and culture are seen as systems composed of inter-dependent subsystems. The keynote here is the view of the whole, as an integrated entity — analogous to a living body, each part being vitally related to the other parts and incapable of a separate existence. When applied to architecture, this doctrine yields the proposition that building is vitally related to the rest of the culture. Religion, the econoiny, and political ideals, for example, are related to and vitally affect architecture.

If great architecture is to flourish, then social harmony must be restored.

Art not only reflects life, it can shape life.

"integration" of man and community provided a key ideal in th is proposed reformation. I t i s to be seen at every stage of the work of the modern architect. . . . In addition, the theme of co-operation is central to the American radical and reform movements of the past several decades. It is, therefore, in no way surprising that the social therapy of the architects should stress integration, harmony, unity and repose. In their writings we find an extraordinarily strong emphasis on fellowship, on _ groups, and on creating a genuine sense of community.'5' In 1952# Lewis Mumford edited a series o f original documents and wrote

the introductory essay for a book that he called Roots of Contemporary American Architecture; what he said there, among other things, was that

long before the 'eighties(of the nineteenth centurjj, a new approach to both architecture and lif e began to take form in the American mind. It is important to grasp this sequence; for a fear of ideas is one of the marks of our present cultural self-stultification; and nothing could be more misleading than a histoiy of American architecture concerned solely with technical processes and building forms, without any reference to the ideal framework in which a ll these changes took p l a c e . 38

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In Mumford's selected time-frame the first liint of the new approach is

found in essays by Thoreau, Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux, and one o f i t s most important aspects is a social conception of archi­ tecture that was helped along, he says, by Ruskin, William Morris, and others. But to anyone who has read Shaftesbury, Morris, ware and Gwynn,

Mumford's tone is completely familiar, and the "discoveries" of the nineteenth century modernists assume an exciting relationship to the “dogma" of the eighteenth-century classicists, Mumford says what Morris, or Gwynn, or Shaftesbury might have said two hundred years earlier: . . . the community as a whole, not the individual building, becomes the center of our concern. The architect must visualize wholes and design wholes for a simple reason: we live in wholes, not as individual atoms moving at random, but as purposive beings, creating orderly patterns of related activities, made coherent by an orderly en­ vironment. Viewed in this fashion, the beauty of the individual building cannot be self-contained: the hand­ somest building may be defaced by it s surroundings, while the simplest of vernacular structures, if properly grouped and gardened, may have a charm, . . . So i t follows that streets, courts, gardens, arcades of trees, parks, parkways, must be treated as an integral part of the building, not introduced as a belated afterthought, to be fitted into an irrelevant plan. . , . Even when buildings are created for private owners, the architect must become a representative and a spokesman for the whole community.39

Further proof of the topic's relevance, if needed, is found in the. modem American descendant of the eighteenth-century architectural books, House and Garden Building Guide (Fall-Winter, 1973) which includes this remark by the eminent and highly successful architect Louis I. Kahn:

"l say today you can s t i l l use the Colonial house. I f you blend spaces in the Colonial way, you have a society of rooms. F inally, i f . Summerson's conclusions are controversial, and I do not deny that they

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. are, they provide a provocative and helpful punctuation to any dis­

cussion of eighteenth-century architectural history, and an especially fitting termination to this one: The roots of modern architecture are in the thought and performance of these[modern-day]leaders and the thought and performance of these leaders i s inextricably in­ volved with their reactions to, their alliance with and departures from the classical traditions of their own and earlier centuries. Not only that, but within these consecutive traditions there are persistent fore­ shadowings of the modern, from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. In short, an exact understanding of what we so vaguely and airily call modern can only come through an understanding of its classical parentage,^

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -191-

NOTES

^Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans. The Colonial Experience (New York: Random House, 1958), p. 122.

^Ibid. , p. 168. A very similar conclusion is reached by Richard M. Gummere, The American C olonial Mind & the Classical Tradition: Essays in Comparative Culture (Cambridge: Harvard U n iversity P ress, 19^-3), p. viii: ‘Our colonial predecessors did not force their study of the ancient sources into group patterns. Instead of theorising, or seek­ ing a strict and logical arrangement of ideas, they took from the past whatever was relevant to their own concerns and transmuted the material into their own language. . . . They cut the Gordian knot of complicated theoretical or political arguments and restated cases to suit their own views. At least until the Revolution they were extremely local. At all times they were pragmatic rather than philosophical. 3Connally, Printed Books on Architecture. p. 2*f,

^One does not question, for instance, the applicability of the following passage, although architecture is not specified. The refer­ ence is to Hugh -Jones1 The Present State of Virginia (172^): "A shrewd observation upon the amateur rather than professional interest in learn­ ing shown by the gentlemen of the plantations' is made by Jones in a description of the habits and customs of the Virginians. Planters, he points out, are 'generally diverted by business or inclination from profound study, and prying into the depths of things, being ripe for the management o f th e ir a ffa ir s before they have la id so good a founda­ tio n o f le a r n in g .' Though they are n atu rally quick and c le v e r , w ith a 'sufficiency of. knowledge and a fluency of tongue.' their learning is 'but superficial,' and they are more inclined to read men by business and conversation than to dive into books.' Hence they are 'desirous of learning what is absolutely necessary in the shortest and best method.' To provide short cuts to learning, Jones himself prepared for Virginia students certain handbooks in English grammar, theology, mathematics, surveying and navigation. A little farther on, describing in more detail the education of the planter's sons, Jones remarks that 'several are sent to England for it, though the Virginians, being naturally of good parts . . . neither require nor admire as much learning as we do in Britain." Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class (San Marino: The Huntington Press, 1940), p. 111.

^Samuel Eliot Morison, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England. (New York: New York University Press, 1956), p. 272.

^Louis B. Wright, The Cultural Life of the American Colonies 1607-1 763 (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1957), p. 11.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -1 9 2 -

?Ebid. . p. 13 .

8Ib ld ., p . 1 3 0 .

?Morison, The In tellectu a l Life of Colonial New England, p. 272, and Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia, p. 153. 1 ^Gummere, The American Colonial Mind, p. 18. Guramere goes on to point out that radically different uses of the tradition were made in support of opposing points of view among the highly educated, and that it constituted a basic level of general education for the larger public: "These Greco-Roman sources were so deeply imbedded in the common fund of knowledge that i t i s often hard to trace their origin. For example, does Franklin's Socratic Dialogue between Philocles and Horatio (1730) derive directly from Xenophon s Memorabilia, which Franklin studied and imitated, or from The Moralists in Shaftesbury's Characteristics?" Ibid. . p. 1 6 . See note 15* below. Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society, p. 19. Bailyn, like Boorstin, is aware of an important string of con­ sequences emanating from the seriousness and pragmatic nature of coloni­ al American educational developments. On p. j S , he writes: "W hat lay behind the interest in mutual instruction, in informal education of all sorts, and in extemporized institutions like evening schools was the recognition that one's role in life had not been fully cast, that the immediate inheritance did not set the fin al lim its, that opportunities beyond the expectation of birth lay a ll about and could be reached by effort." On p. 48, he continues: 'On almost every major point the original inheritance had been called into question, challenged by cir­ cumstance, altered or discarded. A process whose origins lay in the half-instinctive workings of a homogeneous, integrated society was trans­ formed in the jarring multiplicity, the raw economy, and the barren environment of America. No longer in stin ctiv e, no longer safe and re­ liable, the transfer of culture, the whole enterprise of education, had become controversial, conscious, constructed: a matter of decision, w ill and effort."

^^Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of P o litic a l Liberty (New York: Karcourt Brace and Company, 1953), P." 373. 13lbid. . pp. 213-14-. 1^Ibid.. p. 371. 15See note 10 for a reference by Gummere. Aldridge, in "Shaftes­ bury and the Deist Manifesto," p. 374-, asserts that Franklin's editions on June 23 and July 9 were reprints from the London Journal of 1729 and not his own work. Regardless of their origin, their similarity to Shaftesbury's thought i s accepted, and their appearance in America is

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 193-

the point of significance to my argument.

l% illic e n t E. Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, D.C.: The Library of Congress, 19537, p. 13 (#1258), and Aldridge, "Shaftesbuiy and the Deist Manifesto, !l p. 331 • and Henry Wilder Foote, Robert Feke. Colonial Portrait Painter (Cam­ bridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), pp.59-°3l

^Aldridge, "Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto," pp. 381 and 382 .

iSRosamund R. Beirne and John H. Scarff, William Buckland. 1734-177*4-: Architect of Virginia and Maryland (Baltimore: The Maryland Historical Society, 1958), p. &9. 19carl Bridenbaugh, Peter Harrison: First American Architect (Chapel H ill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1949), p. 41.

20I8id.. p. 55. 21Ibid., p. 74. It should be noted that Harrison's class was the one to which he had risen by virtue of the fluidity of American society rather than a status and responsibility to which he had been born and bred. 22ibld.. p. 48. Bridenbaugh's estimation of Jefferson's archi­ tectural literacy and propensities is also more provocative than defini­ tive, but perhaps more because of his unfortunate choice of words than any more serious reasons.

^3John Fabian K ienitz, "Basic Phases of Eighteenth Century Architectural Form: Part One," Art in America. 35, No. 1 (January, 194?), 51. ^See Clay Lancaster, "Jefferson's Architectural Indebtedness to Robert Morris," The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. X, No. 1 (March, 1951)» 3-1°. Lancaster s article is modelled after Kimball's precedent of comparative formal analysis and is therefore full of methodological problems. Evidence of tracing is, of course, impressive; but Lancaster b lith ely assumes that 1) Jefferson can only have reacted to Morris on a le v e l of visual taste "independent of prin­ cip les and arguments," and 2) that Morris i s a typical B ritish archi­ tect (and therefore an ironic source for the pro-French Jefferson). In fa c t, Kaufmann has pointed out that Morris may be more fu lly under­ stood as Burlingtonian in theory but advanced or atypical in English architecture of hi3 age, and importantly related to subsequent revolu­ tionary French designs in the original quality of his p lates. While Jefferson can hardly be classified as under the influence of a consis­ tent English conservatism in practice, he did know Shaftesbury and might well have understood and appreciated many individual points of English theory, perhaps even as formulated by Morris, (whose play,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 9 4 -

Fatal Necessity: or. Liberty Regain'd. was also in his library, Sowerby, # 4550) or Ware.

25tfiHiam B. O'Neal, Jefferson's Fine Arts Library for the University of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 195°), p. 2?. He also recommended. The Builder's Dictionary (1734), and owned a copy, himself.

2% errill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson & the New Nation (Mew York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 55. 2?Fiske Kimball, "Thomas Jefferson and Civic Art," City Planning at Yale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 25. 28Ibid.

29See Louis 3„ Wright, "Thomas Jefferson and the Classics," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 87, No. 3 (July 14, 1943) , 227.

30lbid. . p. 232. 31Fiske Kimball, Thomas Jefferson. Architect (New York: DaCapo Press, 1968), P. 85.

3^1 bid. , p. 8 3 . Kimball adds: "in his studies we see lit t l e of that free plasticity which marks the sketches of self-confident masters of technique. Instead we find a determined effort at formu­ lation, a logical following through of consequences, and above all a critical historical spirit." 33"Already it is becoming evident . . . that, down at least to I83 O, the arts, especially architecture, occupied a place of muoh im­ portance in American life .11 "There was little on this side of the Atlantic which did not find its origin or its counterpart in provincial England or other parts of Europe of the same day. A truly American movement in architectural style appeared only after the Revolution." Fiske Kimball, "Architecture in the History of the Colonies and of the Republic,1 The American H istorical Review. XXVII (October, 1921, to July, 1922) 47 and48. Bridenbaugh agrees: "indeed, cultural pro­ gress in colonial America compares favorably with developments in pro­ vincial cities of any European country in these years." Cities in the Wilderness: The F irst Century of Urban Life in America 1625-1742 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 19^0), P. 297. 3^"The infiltration of the academic forms in the architecture of the provincial towns and small mancr-houses, to say nothing of or­ dinary cottages, was slow. . . . Thus the earlier houses of the colonies represent quite an equal stage of development in style with those of the same class in provincial England." Kimball, "Architecture in the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 9 5 -

History of the Colonies . . ."p. 53.

35william H. Pierson's American Buildings and their Architects. The C olonial and N eo-C lassical S tyle (Garden C ity, New York: Doubleday & Company, I n c ., 1970), seems to me to suffer from precisely this weakness. Instead of synthesizing the general impetus and character of colonial building, Pierson is concerned with the identification of formal mannerisms of Wren or Gibbs, twice or thrice diluted by deri­ vations and imitations. His analyses are largely formal and the quality o f the materials to which he addresses himself necessarily determines the interest (or lack of it) and worth of his results. Predictably, his treatments of Jefferson and Bulfinch are among the best sections of the entire book,

3^Cimball, "Architecture in the History of the Colonies ..." P. 57. 37Eldon L. Moaisette, "The Legitimation of Modern Architecture," The Journal o f A esth etics and Art C riticism (Spring, 19^2), pp. 253-^*

38]Lewis Mumford, Ed., Roots of Contemporary American Architec­ ture (New York.* Dover Publications, Inc*., 1972), pp. 7-S.

39 ib id .. pp. 25- 6.

^louis I. Kahn, quoted by Beverly Russell, "Louis Kahn Talks About the House," House and Garden Building Guide (Fall-Winter, 1973). P. 165. ^1John Summerson, The C lassical Language o f Architecture (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1963), p. *H.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED

PRIMARY SOURCES

Addison, Joseph. The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison. Vol. I I . London: Henry G. Bohn, 1354. Alberti, Leon 3attista. The Architecture of L.3. Alberti in Ten Books. Of Painting in Three 3ooks and of Statuary in One 3ook. Trans- lated into Italian by Cosimo Bartoll. And now first into English . . . by James Leoni. 3 "vols. London, 1?2S. Anon. Review o f A Complete Body of Architecture. by Isaac Ware, The C ritical Review. October, 1757» PP. 239-302, and November, 1757, PP. 426-31. . Anon. Review of An Essay on Design, by John Gwynn. The Monthly Review. June, 1749, pp. 81-92, and July, 1749, pp. 161-71. Bacon, Francis. The Essays of Francis Bacon. Ed. Mary Augusta Scott. New York: Charles Scribner1s Sons, 1908. Boyle, Richard, Third Earl o f Burlington and Fourth Earl of Cork. Fabbrlche1 antiche1 Disegnate da Andrea Palladio Vicentino e 1 Date Tn Luce1 da Riccardo Conti di Burlington. London, 173°>. Brettingham, Matthew, The Plans. Elevations and Sections of Holkham in Norfolk, the Seat of the late Earl of Leicester. London, 17&1. The Builc r. ;• s Dictionary; or. Gentleman and Architect* s Companion. 2 vols. London, 1734. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry in to the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. J.T, Boulton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. Campbell, Colen, Vitruvius Britannicus. or the B ritish Architect. 3 vols. London, 1715-25. Castell, Robert. The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated. London, 1728,

Chambers, Ephraim. Cyclopedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. 2 vols. London, 1728.

- 196-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -197-

Chambers, William. A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. London, 1772, ' A Treatise on Civil Architecture. London, 1759* Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Characteristics of Men. Manners. Opinions. Times. 2 vols. in one. Indianapolis: The Bobbs M errill Company, In c., 19&*. . Characteristicks of Men. Manners. Opinions. Times. 3 vols. 5th ed, Birmingham: John Baskerville, 1773. . Second Characters. or the Language of Forms. Ed. Benjamin Rand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914. Frlart, Roland, Sieur de Chambray. A Parallel of the Antient Archi­ tecture with the Modern . . . To which is added an Account of Architects and Architecture . . . b^r John Evelyn. 3rd ed., London, 1723. Garrett, Daniel. Designs and Estimates fox* Farm Houses in the Counties of Yorkshire. Cumberland. Westmoreland and the Bishopric of Durham. 3rd ed ., London, 17^7. Gwynn, John. The Art of Architecture. London, 17^2. . An Essay on Design, including Proposals for erecting a Public Academy. London, 17^-9. :______. (?) An Essay Upon Harmony. As It Relates Chiefly to Situation and Buildings. 2nd ed. ^T)» London, 1739. . London and Westminster Improved to which is prefixed §i discourse on public magnificence. 1st ed., 17% 6; rpt, Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 19&9. Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty. Ed. Joseph Burke. 1st e d ., 1753; rpt. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1955. Jones, Inigo. Inigo Jones on Palladio: being the notes by Inigo Jones in the copy of I_ Quattro libri dell architettura di Andrea Palladio. 1601. in the Library of Worcester College, Oxford. 2 vols. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Oriel Press, 1970. Kate, Lambert Hermanson Ten. Ideal Beauty in Painting and Sculpture. 3rd e d ., London, 17&9. Kent, William. The Designs of Inigo Jones. 2 vols. 1st ed., 1727; rpt. Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 19&7.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -198-

Knyff, Leonard, and Jan Kip. Britannia Illu stra ta . London, 1730. Morris, Robert. The Architectural Remembrancer: being a collection of designs of ornamental buildings. London, 1751.

• Architecture Improved. London, 1755. . An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture; or. a. parallel of the ancient buildings with the modem. London, 1728.

. Lectures on Architecture. consisting of Rules founded upon Harmonick and Arithmetical Proportions in Building. London, 173^-36. . et al. The Modem Builder's Assistant. London, 174?. . Rural Architecture: consisting of regular, designs of plans and elevations for buildings in the country. 1 st- ed., 1750? rpt. Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1971. . Select Architecture. London, 1755.

Palladio, Andrea. The Architecture of A. Palladio; In Four Books . . . To which are added several Notes and Observations made by Inigo Jones, never printed before. Revis'd. Design'd."and Publish d by Giacomo Lsoni. a Venetian. Trans. Nicholas Dubois. London, 1715. ' The First Book of Architecture, by Andrea Palladio. translated out of Italian with diverse other designes necessary to the art of well building by Godfrey Richards. London, 1&c>3. . The Four Books of Architecture by Andrea Palladio. London: Isaac Ware, 1738. Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations. Ed. John Butt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 19°3. Ralph, James. (?) A New Critical Review of the Publick Buildings. Statues, and. Ornaments in and about London and Westminster. 2nd e d ., London, 1736. Richardson, Jonathan. The Works of Hr. Jonathan Richardson. London, 1773.

Serlio, Sebastiano. The Book of Architecture. 1611 ed.j rpt. New York: B. Blom, 1970. Shute, John. The F irst and Chiefe Groundes of Architecture. London, 15^3.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 1 9 9 -

Vardy, John. Some Designs o f Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent. London, 17^ . Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus. The Architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio in Ten Books. Trans. Joseph Gwilt. London: Priestley A Weale, 18237” . I_ Djeci Libri Dell1 Architettura di M. Vitruvio. Tradotti et Commentati da Konsig. Daniel Barbaro. Venetia, 1584. Ware, Isaac. A Complete Body of Architecture. 1st ed ., c. 1735 ( T)5 1768; rpt. Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1971. . The Plans, elevations, and sections, chimneypieees. and ceilin gs o f Houghton. London, 1735. . Designs of Inigo Jones and Others. London, n.d. (1735?) Wotton, Henry. The Elements of Architecture. Facsimile Reprint of the First Edition (London. 1624) with Introduction and Motes by Frederick Hard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 19*381

SECONDARY SOURCES

Ackerman, James S. Palladio. Baltimore: Penguin Books, In c., 19^6.

______. "Palladio & 1* Archittetura del *700 Negli Stati Uniti. Bollettino del Centro Intemazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio. VI, Parte II (19^4), 29-38.

. "il Presidente Jefferson & il Palladianesimo Americano." . Bollettino del Centro I ntemazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio. VI, Parte II (19657, 39-48. Albee, Ernest. Review of Second Characters, ed„ Benjamin Rand. Philosophical Review. XXV (1916/, 182-7. Alderson, William E. "The Significance of Shaftesbury in English Speculation." Publications of the Modem Language Association of America. XXXVIII (1923), 175-95. Aldridge, Alfred Owen. “Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto." Trans­ actions of the American Philosophical Society. N.S. 41, Part 2, (1951).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -200-

A llen, B. Sprague. Tides in English Taste ( 1619-1800). 2 vols. New York: Rowman and L ittle fie ld , In c ., 1 969. Allsopp, Bruce. "Inigo Jones and Palladianism.11 Ini go Jones on Palladio. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Oriel Press, 1970. Bailyn, Bernard. Education in the Forming of American Society. Chapel H ill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, i 960. Bate, Walter Jackson. From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth Century England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19^6. Becker, Carl L. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932. Beim e, Rosamond Randall and John Henry Scarff. William Buckland. 173^-1774-: Architect of Virginia and Maryland. Baltimore: The Maryland H istorical Society, 1958. Blomfield, Reginald. A History of Renaissance Architecture in England. 1500-1800. London: George B ell and Sons, 1897. Bono, Gabriel. "La Culture et la Civilisation Britanniques devant l!opinion Francaise de la Paix d1Utrecht aux Lettres Philoso- phiques. " Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. N.S. 38 , Part I (1948)7 Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The Colonial Experience. New York: Random House, 1958. . B rett, R.L. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth Century Literary Theory. London: Hutchinson House, 1951. Bridenbaugh, Carl. C ities in the Wilderness. The F irst Century of Urban Life in America. 1625-1742. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, . T9So7 . The Colonial Craftsman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1950. . Peter Harrison: First American Architect. Chapel H ill: The University of North Carolina Press, 19^9. Briggs, Martin S, The Architect in History. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1927. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Trans. Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cassirer, Ernst. The Platonic Renaissance in England. Trans. James P. Pettegrove. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1953. Chancellor, E. Beresford. "Pioneers of London Development. I . John Gwynn." The Architectural Review. 49 (1921), 22-3. Clark, Kenneth. "Thomas Jefferson and the Italian Renaissance." Virginia Quarterly Review. 48 (Autumn, 1972), 519-31.

Colvin, H.M. A 3iographical Dictionary of English Architects. 1660- 1840. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954.

Connally, Ernest Allen. Printed Books on Architecture. 1485-1805. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1960. Crompton, W.E. Vernon. "The Renaissance as an A ristocratic Expression The Journal of the Roval Institute of 3ritish Architects. XXXII (December, 1924),""631^ Dictionary of National Biography. Eds. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee. London: Oxford University Press, 1885-1901.

Downes, Kerry. Hawksmoor. London: A. Zwemmer Ltd., 1969. Draper, John W. "Eighteenth Century English Aesthetics: A Bibliography Anglistische Forschungen. 71 (Heidelberg, 1931). Foote, Henry Wilder. Robert Feke. Colonial Portrait Painter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 193°. Gilbert, Katherine and Helmut Kuhn. A History of Aesthetics. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1954-. Gloag, John. The English Tradition in Architecture. New York: Barnes & Noble, In c ., 1963. Gombrich, E.H. In Search of Cultural History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19^9. . Review of The Social History of Art, by Arnold Hauser. The Art Bulletin. XXXV, No. 171953), 79-84. Grean, Stanley. "Self-Interest and Public Interest in Shaftesbury's Philosophy." Journal of the History of Philosophy. II (April, 1964), 37-45.

. Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics. Athens, Ohio: Ohio U niversity P ress, 19 67. Gummere, Richard M. The American Colonial Mind & the C lassical

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -202-

Tradition: Sssavs in Comparative Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19&3. Hamlin, Talbot. Review of Mr. Samuel Mclntire. Carver, the Architect of Salem, by Fiske Kimball. The Art B ulletin. XX3XI, No. 1 ([March, 1941), 88-90. Harris, Eileen. "The Treatise on Civil Architecture." Sir William Chambers. Knight of the Polar Star, by John Harris. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970.

Harris, John. "Clues to the *Frenchness' of Woodccte Fark . 11 Connoisseur. 14? (June, 1961), 241-50. . Sir William Chambers. Knight of the Polar Star. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University press, 1970. Herrmann, Wolfgang. Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory. London: A. Zwemmer Ltd., 19^2. Hippie, Walter John, Jr. The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth Century British Aesthetic Theory. Carbondale: The Southern Illinois University Press, 1957. Hummel, Charles F. "The Influence of English design books upon the Philadelphia Cabinetmaker, 17 60-1780 . 11 Unpublished M.A. Thesis,University of Delaware, 1955. Irwin, David. English Neoclassical Art: Studies in Inspiration and Taste. London: Faber & Faber, 1 9 ^ 1 Jenkins, Frank L. Architect and Patron. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. Jourdain, Margaret. The Work of William Kent. London: Country Life Limited, 19^. Kaufmann, Emil. Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post- Baroque in England. I ta ly , and France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955. Keith, William Grant. "Inigo Jones as a Collector." The Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. XXXIII, No. 4 (December, 1925), 95-108. K ienitz, John Fabian. "Basic Phases of Eighteenth Century Architectural Form, P a r ti." Art in America. 35» No. 1 (January, 1947)* 34-52. Kimball, Fiske. "Burlington Architectus." The Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. XXXIV, No. 20 (October, 1927)»

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -203-

675—93; XXXV, No. 1 (November, 1927), 14-16.

Kimball, Fiske. "Colonial Amateurs and Their Models: Peter Harrison." Architecture. LEU (June, 1926), 155-60; LEV (July, 1926), 185-90.

. "Jefferson and the Arts." American Philosophical Society Proceedings. 87 (July, 1943), 238-45. . "Les Influences Anglaises dans la Formation du Style Louis XIV." Gazette des Beaux A rts. 6e periode Tome V (1931* 1er semestre), 29-44 and 231-55. . Review of Kistoire de 1*architecture classioue en France. Vol. IV. by Louis Hautecoeur. The Art B ulletin. XXXV, No. 1 (1953), 74-9. . "Romantic Classicism in Architecture." Gazette des Beaux Arts. s 6 , 25 (February, 1944), 95-112.

. "Thomas Jefferson and Civic Art." City Planning at Yale. Eds. Christopher Tunnard and John N. Fearce. New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 1954.

. "Thomas Jefferson and the Origin of the Classical Revival in America." Art and Archeology. I (May, 1915), 218-27. . Thomas Jefferson. Architect. New York: DaCapo Press, 1968 .

. "William Kent's Designs for the Houses of Parliament, 1730-40." The Journal of the Royal Institute of British Archi- te c ts , 39, No. 18 £August, 1932). 733-55» 39, No.' 19 (September, 19327, 300-07. Kubler, George. The Shane of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven: Yale University Press, 19^2. Lancaster, Clay. "Jefferson's Architectural Indebtedness to Robert Morris." The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. X (March, 1951), 3-10. Lee, Rensselaer W. Ut Pictura P oesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, In c., 1967 .

Lees-Milne, James. Earls of Creation: Five Great Patrons of Eighteenth- Century A rt. New York: London House & Maxwell, 19^3. . "Lord Burlington in Yorkshire." Architectural Review. XCVIII (July, 1945), 11-18.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -20*J-

Lipking, Lawrence. The Ordering o f the Arts in Eighteenth Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. MacColl, D.S. "Richmond H ill and Marble H ill." The Architectural Review. 10 (1901), 23-9.

Malins, Edward. English Landscaping and Literature. 1 660- 1840. London: Oxford University Press, 19^6. Modisette, Eldon L. "The Legitimation of Modem Architecture." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Spring, 19^2 , pp. 251- 61”. Moore, C.A. "Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England, 1700-1760." Publications of the Modem language Association of America. XXXI <191 ^>). 2&+~325. Mori son, Samuel E liot. The In tellectu al Life of Colonial New England. New York: New York University Press, 1956. Mumford, Lewis, ed. Roots o f Contemporary American Architecture. New York: Dover Publications, In c., 1972. Nicholson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the In fin ite . Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1959. Nye, Russell. The Cultural Life of the New Nation. 1776-1830. New York & Evanston: Harper & Row, 1960. O'Neal, William B. Jefferson's Fine Arts Library for the University of Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 195 K Papworth, Wyatt. "John Gwynn, R.A., Architect, A Biographical Sketch." The Builder. 21 (June 27, 1863 ), 45^-7. Park, Helen, A List of Architectural Books Available in America Before the Revolution. Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls Inc., 1973. Parker, James. "'Designed in the Most Elegant Manner, and Wrought in the Best Marbles'; The Caryatid Chimney Piece from Chesterfield House." The Metropolitan Museum of Art B ulletin. February, 1963, PP. 202-13. Peterson, M errill D. Thomas Jefferson & the New Nation: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Pevsner, Nikolaus. The Engllshness of English Art. London: The

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. -205-

Architectural Press, 195&. Pevsner, Nikolaus. "The Genesis of the Picturesque." The Architec­ tural Review. XCVI (November, 1 9 ^ ), 139-46. . An Outline of European Architecture. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 19&3. Pratt, Roger. The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt. Ed. R.T. Gunther. Oxford; University Press, 1923. Rossiter, Clinton. Seedtime of the Republic: The Origins of the American Tradition of P o litica l Liberty. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1953* Rostenberg, Leona. English Publishers in the Graphic Arts, 15Q9-1700. New York: Burt Franklin, 1 963. Rykwert, Joseph. On Adam’s House in Paradise. The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History. New. York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1972. Sambrook, James. "Alexander Pope as Landscape Gardener." The Times Literary Supplement. June 22, 1973* PP. 715-16. Saxl, F. and R. Wittkower. British Art and the Mediterranean. London: Oxford University Press, 19^3.

Sekler, Eduard P. Wren and His Place in European Architecture. New York: The MacMillan Company, 195&. Smith, Joan Sumner. "The Italian Sources of Inigo Jones1 Style." The Burlington Magazine. July, 1952, pp. 200-07.

Sowerby, M illicent. Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson. 5 vols. Washington, D.C.: The Library of Congress, 1955.

Steegman, John. The Rule o f Taste from George I_ to George V. London: MacMillan and Co., Limited. 193&. . "Shaftesbury's Second Characters." The College Art Journal. 9, No. 3 (Spring, 1950)* 260-if. Stolnitz, Jerome. "On the Origins of Aesthetic Disinterestedness." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Winter, 19^1, pp. 131-^3. . "On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory." The Philosophical Quarterly. XI (April, 1961), 97-113.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 206-

Stutchbury, Howard E. The Architecture of Colen Campbell. Cambridge: Harvard U niversity Press, 1967.

Summerson, John. A rchitecture in B rita in . 1530-1810. Baltimore: Penguin Books Ltd., 1958.

. "The Classical Country House in Eighteenth Century England." Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. CVI (July, 1959), 539-587.

. The C la ssica l Language o f A rch itectu re. Cambridge: The M .I.T. P ress, 19&3.

. Georgian London. New York: Praeger Publishers, 19&2.

. Heavenly Mansions and other essays on architecture. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, I n c ., 19&3.

Inigo Jones. Baltimore: Penguin Books, Inc.,1966 .

Tiffany, Esther. "Shaftesbury as Stoic." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. XXXVIII (1923),""^42-Sh.

Uphaus, Robert W. "Shaftesbury on Art: The Rhapsodic A esthetic." The Journal o f A esth etics and Art C riticism . XXVII (Spring, 19S9) , 341-8.

Wall, Alexander J. "Books on Architecture Printed in America, 1775- I 83 O.” Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to W ilberforce Eames. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 192^.

Whinney, Margaret. "Inigo Jones: A Revaluation." The Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. 3^8 series, 59 '(June, 1952),^3^19.

Willey, Basil. The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies in the Idea o f Nature in the Thought o f the Period. London: Chatto and Winders, 1953.

W illiams, Basil. The Whig Supremacy. 171h-1760. 2nd ed. Oxford: The Clarendon P ress, 19^2.

Wind, Edgar, "Shaftesbury as a Patron o f A rt." The Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institute. II (1938-1939"), 185-88.

Wittkower, Rudolf. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. New York: Random House, 19^5.

' "Burlington and His Work in York." Studies in Architectural History. Ed. William A. Singleton. London

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. - 2 0 7 -

.and York: St. Anthony's Press, 195^.

Wittkower, Rudolf. "Inigo Jones, Architect and Man of Letters." Journal of the. Royal Institute of British Architects. 3rd series, £>0 ^January, 1953)9 33-90.

. "Giacomo Leoni’s Edition of Palladio's ’Quattro Libri Dell' Architettura'." Arte Tenets. 195^.

______. "La L etteratura Palladiana in I n g h ilte r r a ." 3oIlettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, VII, Parte II (1 9 6 5) , 128-32.

______. "Lord Burlington aid William Kent." The Archeo­ logical Journal. CII (19^7). 151-6^.

. "il 'Pre-neopalladianesimo5 in Inghilterra"; "I Principe informativi del nuovo movinento1; "L architettura di Lord Burlington (169^-1753) s del suo ambiente." Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio. II (l9d0), 77-37.

- "Pseudo Palladian Elements in English Neo-Classical Architecture." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute. VI (19^3), 15^-&f.

. "Sviluppo stilistico dell1 architettura palladiana"; ‘Diffusions dei nodi palladiani in Inghilterra." Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, l"Tl959), &1-9."

. "Systems of Proportion." The Architects Yearbook. V, pp. 9-18.

Wolff, Erwin. Shaftesbury und seine Bedeutung fur die Snglische Litera- tur des 13 Jhs. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 19°C.

Wood, Charles 3. "A Survey and Bibliography of Writings on English and American A rch itectu ral Books Published before 1895." Winterthur Portfolio. II (19°5)» 127-37.

Wright, Louis 3. The Cultural Life of the American Colonies. 1607-1 763 . New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1957.

. The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class. San Marino: The Huntington Press, 19^0.

. "Thomas Jefferson and the Classics." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 87, No. 3 (July, 19^3). 223-33.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.