John Evelyn by John Dixon Hunt

Author:John Dixon Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

NINE

Ancient and Modern in Architecture and Gardening

ONE DOES NOT GO FAR IN READING Evelyn’s writings without realizing how much he was concerned with exchanges between modern ideas and ancient wisdom on a variety of matters. His long, deliberate and pedagogical letter of 1656 to Edward Thurland (LB, I.190–93) is a virtual essay on the subject of prayer, a barrage of citations for and against its topic, from the classics (Silius Italicus, Democritus, Pythagoras, Plato, the Stoics, Cicero), to St Paul and St Augustine, and thence to moderns like Lancelot Andrewes, Henry Hammond and Henry More. While others letters are less instructional, his public writings still dilate upon a similar and pertinent repertory of influences; indeed, he seems unable to write without weighing in with references to relevant authorities. In this seventeenth-century ‘battle of ancients and moderns’ Evelyn occupies a considerable and visible place as both a careful, yet sometimes awkward, adjudicator of those rivalries.1

A crucial and related aspect of the ‘battle between ancients and moderns’, especially for those committed to the modern, was the appeal to a progress of the arts, that is to say a transference, and so an improvement, of ancient ideas now brought into England. But what if the ancients were after all better than the moderns? Nobody who was both a Baconian and a member of the Royal Society is likely to have believed that the ancients were better, but Evelyn was not inclined to dismiss ancient wisdom in matters that concerned him. Charles Perrault’s Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (1688–97) maps the progress of the arts with a metaphor that would have appealed to Evelyn’s domesticity: ‘should not our forefathers not be regarded as the children’, writes Perrault, ‘& we as the Elders and true Ancients of the world?’ Such an argument turns the tables on those who wished unreservedly for a new modernity – like Charles’s brother, Claude Perrault2 – by seeing a family relationship, maybe even a physical resemblance, between ancient and modern writers. A similar argument on the progression of the arts is made by the French gardener Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, translated by Evelyn in the 1690s: the French text praises the art of pruning as an ancient practice that ‘begun not in our days, for it was held [‘among the curious’] as a maxim many ages since, as appears by the testimony of the ancients [the margin names Theophrastus, Columella, Xenophon]; so that, to speak the truth, we only follow now, or perhaps improve what was practiced by our forefathers’. After all, the ‘Georgical’ Committee saw Virgil as both an ancient and yet as a ‘child’ who needed to be raised to be a ‘truer ancient’, re-educated in a modern family and culture: Dryden would do it with his translations, as did Pope in his imitations of Horace’s epistles and satires. Evelyn was performing the same in his reinvention of Albury’s garden terraces. For Evelyn, all wisdom, knowledge and arts

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.