Coffee is widely drunk in Paris: there are a great many public establishments where it is served. In some of these establishments news is disseminated; in others, people play chess: there is one place where coffee is prepared in such a manner as to sharpen the wits of those who drink it; at any rate, of those who emerge from there, not a single one fails to be convinced that he is four times cleverer than he was upon entering.
But what shocks me about these wits is that they give no service to their country, but fritter away their talents on childish things; for instance, when I arrived in Paris I found them all worked up over the most trivial dispute one could imagine: it concerned the reputation of an ancient Greek poet, whose land of birth and year of death have remained a matter of conjecture for two thousand years. Both sides admitted that he was an excellent poet: it was simply a question of the degree of excellence to be attributed to him. Everyone believed his own estimate the best, but among these bestowers of reputation, some thought the poet better than did others; that was the quarrel. It was very heated, for the two parties exchanged, with great cordiality, such crude insults and acidulous witticisms that I found the style of the dispute no less amazing than its subject. If anyone, I thought to myself, were foolish enough to appear before one of these defenders of the Greek poet and attack the reputation of some worthy citizen, he would undoubtedly be challenged; and I believe that this touchy fervour over the reputation of the dead would be kindled into a real conflagration in defence of the living; be that as it may, I added, may God protect me from ever drawing upon myself the enmity of these critics of a poet whom two thousand years in the tomb have been unable to defend against such implacable hatred: at the moment they beat the air, but what would happen if their fury were fuelled by the presence of an enemy?
Those whom I have just described to you argue in the vernacular, and one should not confuse them with certain other disputants, who employ a barbaric tongue which seems somehow to add to the fury and obstinacy of the combatants; there are places where one finds a kind of dense, black confusion of such people; they feed on fine distinctions; they live on obscure reasoning and false inferences; that occupation, whose devotees ought to be starving, does nevertheless yield a livelihood.
IIA5 Joseph Addison (1672–1719) from ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’
Joseph Addison was a prominent literary figure in early eighteenth‐century England. His poetry and drama have now faded from view, but his most lasting contribution was as an essayist in pioneering publications such as the Tatler and The Spectator. Read and discussed by a wide metropolitan audience in the new coffee houses, such publications played a key role in the establishment of the ‘public sphere’, that hallmark of civil society in emerging modernity. Addison’s long essay on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ was published in 11 daily parts between Saturday 21 June and Thursday 3 July 1712. For Addison, as he wrote a few days earlier in an essay on ‘Taste’, the imagination occupies an interim position between the comparatively ‘gross’ pleasures of the senses and the more ‘refined’ pleasures of understanding; but because it develops from the stimulus of the senses, it can be more influential on human conduct than purely rational intellection. In Addison’s view, Nature is a more powerful stimulus to the imagination than Art, and the commingling of the two, stronger still. Gardens, that is to say, can play an important role in the work of the imagination. Although a supporter of the classical tradition, and a critic of the Gothic, it is interesting from the point of view of the present anthology that Addison recommends Chinese gardens over European ones – and especially over the then‐predominant fashion in England for geometric garden design. The present short extracts are taken from the fourth part of the essay, published on Wednesday 25 June 1712, reprinted in The Spectator, Volume the Sixth, London 1757 pp. 99 and 101–4.
If we consider the works of Nature and Art, as they are qualified to entertain the Imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in comparison of the former; for though they may sometimes appear as Beautiful or Strange, they can have nothing in them of that Vastness and immensity, which afford so great an entertainment to the mind of the beholder. The one may be as polite and delicate as the other, but can never shew herself so august and magnificent in the design. There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of Nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of Art. […]
But though there are several of these wild scenes, that are more delightful than any artificial shows; yet we find the works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art: For in this case our Pleasure rises from a double principle; from the agreeableness of the objects to the eye, and from their similitude to other objects. […]
[T]here is generally in Nature something more grand and august, than what we meet with in the curiosities of Art. When, therefore, we see this imitated in any measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted kind of pleasure, than what we receive from the nicer and more accurate productions of Art. On this account our English gardens are not so entertaining to the Fancy as those of France and Italy, where we see a large extent of ground covered over with an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent every where an artificial rudeness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country. […]
Writers, who have given us an account of China, tell us the inhabitants of that country laugh at the plantations of our Europeans, which are laid out by the rule and line; because, they say, any one may place trees in equal rows and uniform figures. They choose rather to shew a genius in works of this nature, and therefore always conceal the Art by which they direct themselves. They have a word, it seems, in their language, by which they express the particular beauty of a plantation that thus strikes the Imagination at first sight, without discovering what it is that has so agreeable an effect.1 Our British gardeners, on the contrary, instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissars upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure; and cannot but fancy that an orchard in flower looks infinitely more delightful, than all the little labyrinths of the most finished parterre.
IIA6 John Shebbeare (1709–88) ‘The taste of England at present …’
John Shebbeare was an eighteenth‐century political writer. His Tory sympathies led him to publish a series of satires against the Whigs and the Hanoverian dynasty with whom they were associated. His Letters on the English Nation used the device of a series of letters by a fictional author to criticize contemporary social mores, much as Montesquieu had done in the Persian Letters. Shebbeare’s fictional author was ‘Batista Angeloni’, a Jesuit with long experience of English life. The fifty‐sixth of his 59 ‘Letters’ concerned ‘The taste of England at present in architecture’. It is in essence a critique of the all‐pervading fashion for things Chinese. Chinoiserie was often identified with ‘effeminacy’ in taste, and something of this leaks through into Shebbeare’s defence of the ‘simple and sublime’, that is to say, the classical achievements of the seventeenth century. Paradoxically, for him the affectations of the ‘Grand Tour’ seem to have weakened a true appreciation of the classical, and opened the door to the caprice of Chinoiserie and the Gothic. The extracts are from Letters on the English Nation, vol. 2, London, 1756, ‘Letter LVI’, pp. 259–64.
How few of those men of taste who have travelled Italy, have ever studied the human body; it is cloathed and concealed, and almost impossible in the common ways of life to be seen frequently and with attention; notwithstanding this, in every painting and piece of sculpture, they set themselves forth as just judges of every human figure, which can never be obtained but from the thorough consideration of many