British Modernism and Chinoiserie 9780748690961

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British Modernism and Chinoiserie

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British Modernism and Chinoiserie Edited by Anne Witchard

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© editorial matter and organisation, Anne Witchard, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund. Typeset in 11/13pt Sabon by Norman Tilley Graphics Ltd, Northampton, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9095 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9096 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9097 8 (epub)

The right of Anne Witchard to be identified as Editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements

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List of Plates

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List of Figures Introduction: ‘the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay’ Anne Witchard 1

2

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China and the Formation of the Modernist Aesthetic Ideal David Porter

18

Shared Affinities: Katherine Mansfield, Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf Patricia Laurence

37

3

Roger Fry, Chinese Art and The Burlington Magazine Ralph Parfect

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Chinese Artistic Influences on the Vorticists in London Michelle Ying-Ling Huang

72

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The Idea of the Chinese Garden and British Aesthetic Modernism Elizabeth Chang

6

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‘Beautiful, baleful absurdity’: Chinoiserie and Modernist Ballet Anne Witchard Fashion, Chinoiserie and Modernism Sarah Cheang

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The Oriental and the Music Hall: Sound and Space in Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Chinatown Paul Kendall

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Staging China, Excising the Chinese: Lady Precious Stream and the Darker Side of Chinoiserie Diana Yeh

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Chinoiserie: An Unrequited Architectural Affair Edward Denison

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press for suggesting the possibility of a collection on British modernism and chinoiserie. The collection as it has evolved owes its existence to the AHRC-funded networking project, China in Britain: Myths and Realities, hosted at the University of Westminster, 2012–13. The contributors to the book were involved in the project, giving papers and attending conferences, and I would like to thank them for their enthusiastic participation. I would also like to thank the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster, especially Martin Willis and Alex Warwick for generous research support as ever, Rebecca Spear for being a thoroughgoing copy editor and Sharon Sinclair whose exceptional organisational skills made the China in Britain events run so smoothly. Thanks also to the two anonymous readers who recommended the collection for publication and for their comments and suggestions, as well as to Rebecca Mackenzie, Kate Robertson and Dhara Patel at Edinburgh University Press.

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List of Plates

Plates to be found between pages 118 and 119. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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New Yorker cover, ‘War Porcelain’, by Charles Addams, 14 November 1942 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Stag, 1913. Pen and ink on paper (buff). 21 ⫻ 33 cm. Image © Kettle’s Yard Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Cock, c. 1912–13. Green wash on paper (buff). 15 ⫻ 20 cm. Image © Kettle’s Yard Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Birds Erect, 1914. Stone cast. 67 ⫻ 30 ⫻ 26 cm. Image © Kettle’s Yard Chung Ling Soo poster Alhambra Russian Ballets poster (author collection) Evening gown by Worth for Gazette du Bon Ton (1923) ‘The Mantle of Wu’ by E. H. Shepard in Punch’s Almanack (1924) Hanging panel of silk satin embroidered with silk and silver threads, China, 1863, loaned by the Lockharts for use in the first London production of Lady Precious Stream. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Edwardian-era ‘Japanese’ fan used to advertise the People National Theatre’s production of Lady Precious Stream

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List of Figures

2.1a and b Illustrations from Ling Shuhua’s Ancient Melodies: Life in Peking as a Child (1953) 43 & 44 2.2 Katherine Mansfield in kimono 50 3.1 Advertisement for East Asian antiques dealer Yamanaka from The Burlington Magazine, March 1913, issue 120, p. 20 57 3.2 Image of St John the Baptist by Titian and a Chinese religious painting, from an article by Sir Arthur Clutton-Brock in The Burlington Magazine, January 1912, issue 106, p. 198 63 3.3 ‘Toad in White Jade’ from The Burlington Magazine, September 1922, issue 232, p. 104 65 6.1 Vera Nemchinova in the role of Chung-Yang in L’Epreuve d’Amour (The Proof of Love) or Chung-Yang and the Mandarin (1936), scenery and costumes by André Derain 127 7.1 Mrs Oliver Locker-Lampson in Vogue (1929) 144 8.1 Out and About (1919) 172 9.1 Roger Livesey as Hsieh Ping-Kuei and Fabia Drake as the Princess of the Western Regions in Lady Precious Stream, produced at the Little Theatre, 8 January 1935, from Play Pictorial, February 1935. Credit: Mander and Mitchenson/University of Bristol/ ArenaPAL 180 9.2 Leon M. Lion as Prime Minister Wang Yun in Lady Precious Stream, 1935. Photograph by John Everard in The Bystander, 2 October 1935, page 23. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans 186

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Louise Hampton as Madam Wang and Maisie Darrell as Lady Precious Stream, Lady Precious Stream, produced at the Little Theatre, 8 January 1935, from Play Pictorial, February 1935. Credit: Mander and Mitchenson/University of Bristol/ArenaPAL 10.1 Sir William Chambers, Great Pagoda, Kew Gardens, London 10.2a and b A Delightful Chinese Effect in Mr and Mrs G. L. Wilson’s home in Shanghai 10.3 Christmas pantomime, Architectural Association, London, 1929. Third Year students performing The Waltzing Mouse featuring the ‘monstrous and luridly oriental’ Mr Cheng 10.4 The Hong Kong Pavilion, British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, London, 1924–5 10.5 Five United Architects: Luke Him Sau (front right), Wang Dahong (front middle), Huang Zuoshen (front left), Chen Zhanxiang (back left) and Zhen Guanxuan (back right). Photographed in Shanghai in the late 1940s

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Introduction: ‘the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay’ Anne Witchard

By the time modernism erupted in the early years of the twentieth century, European artists already owed a profound debt to other civilisations. The Impressionists’ exposure to Japanese woodblock prints, Gaughin’s South Seas primitivism, or Picasso’s early fascination with African sculpture, or example, have been much discussed. However, the continuities between that longstanding interplay involving East and West, chinoiserie, and its role in modernist ways of looking or seeing have been paid far less attention. Why might this be? One reason perhaps is a fear of ‘Saidian orientalism’ which Zhaoming Qian suggests is to blame for a critical avoidance of modernist engagement with the Far East. Trained in the decades after Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), contemporary scholars have been impeded by a concern with what might be just more of the same. If there is no ‘real’ Islamic presence in eighteenth-century orientalist representation, is the finding of the modernist Self in the Chinese Other not similarly suspect? T. S. Eliot’s pronouncement of Pound as ‘the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time’ has been much misread in the light of this wariness as an approbatory expression of orientalist arrogation.1 Put back into context though, Eliot’s statement can be taken as a fair definition of what Pound’s 1915 poetry collection Cathay is because it describes what chinoiserie is: As for Cathay, it must be pointed out that Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time … I predict that in three hundred years Pound’s Cathay will be a ‘Windsor Translation’ as Chapman and North are now ‘Tudor Translations’: it will be called (and justly) a ‘magnificent specimen of XXth Century poetry’ rather than a translation … This is as much as to say that Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound. [emphasis added] 2

‘Chinoiserie’ is a French term, coined to describe an aesthetic mode

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that originates from the seventeenth century, a time when few Europeans had actually visited China but when a profound fascination with every aspect of Chinese culture resulted in a fantastical idealised landscape. The philosophical requirements of utopian alternatives would characterise the decoration of porcelain, silks and wallpapers that depicted an enchanted realm where European values were turned on their heads. Chinoiserie, then, defines an invention of Chineseness and concomitantly the apprehension of that world in the occidental imagination. Chinoiserie, cogently explicated by George Steiner, is a ‘phenomenon of hermeneutic trust’: The China of Pound’s poems … is one we have fully come to expect and believe in. It matches, it confirms powerful pictorial and tonal anticipations. Chinoiserie in European art, furniture and letters, in European philosophicalpolitical allegory from Liebniz to Kafka and Brecht, is a product of cumulative impressions, stylized and selected. Erroneously or not, by virtue of initial chance or method, the Western eye has fixed on certain constants – or what are taken to be constants – of Chinese landscape, attitude and emotional register. Each translation in turn appears to corroborate what is fundamentally a western ‘invention of China’.3

As Eric Hayot observes, by insisting upon the ‘inventiveness’ of Pound’s ‘Chinese’ poetry, Eliot’s statement served to counteract two kinds of reactions to Cathay; those that accepted the translations as a perfect rendering of the nuances of Tang dynasty poetry into English, and those who insisted upon their failure to do so.4 Yet the suggestion that Pound’s seminal collection is best apprehended in terms of a chinoiserie tradition will, in some quarters, be a provocative one. The following account of poetic Imagism is exemplary of the way a gendered modernist critique continues to confine chinoiserie to a decorative irrelevance: There are we should note, two Far Easts in early modernism: the first is the inherited fin-de-siècle bric-à-brac of fans, bowls, petals, the sort of japonisme and chinoiserie we find aplenty in the derivative Imagist poems (Amy Lowell’s for instance); the second, a far more galvanizing force, is the dynamic ‘ideogrammatic’ method that Pound developed from Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character As A Medium for Poetry.5

Leaving aside the misogyny that, until recent feminist reappraisals of her work, has dogged Amy Lowell’s posthumous reputation, one might counteract this partition of ‘two far Easts’ in early modernism, firstly, with the recognition that Pound’s ‘ideogrammatic method’ was initially prompted by his delight in a fin-de-siècle ‘bric-à-brac of fans, bowls, [and] petals’, and secondly that the ‘ideogrammatic

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method’, Pound’s (and Lowell’s for that matter) belief in the pictorial etymology of the Chinese ideograph and its value for poetic expression is no less fanciful than these things are.6 What remains is to rescue chinoiserie as a style that was fundamental to the re-visioning of the modernist eye.

‘For a poet to have even a second-hand contact with China is a great matter.’ Letter from Wallace Stevens to Harriet Monroe (1922) Pound’s determined turn towards China was made when some ‘chinese things’ [sic] arrested his attention in the September 1913 edition of Harriet Monroe’s new Chicago-based Poetry magazine, for which the enterprising London-based poet had recently got himself engaged as ‘Foreign Correspondent’. The ‘chinese things’ were a group of verses by Allen Upward titled ‘Scented Leaves – from a Chinese Jar’. Upward is a largely forgotten figure in early British modernism, an eccentric polymath with a passion for Confucian philosophy. In 1901, with the poet Launcelot A. Cranmer-Byng, he established a small Fleet Street publishing house, the Orient Press, from where they launched a series of translations called ‘The Wisdom of the East’.7 Upward had been discovered for Poetry by Monroe, but he was instantly hijacked by Pound who ‘placed him in the imagist column’.8 As Upward would put it later, Pound ‘rose up and called me an Imagist (I had no idea what he meant)’.9 ‘Scented Leaves – from a Chinese Jar’ is an emblematic work of finde-siècle chinoiserie, a set of aphoristic musings on suggestively exotic images: ‘crimson seaweed’, ‘purple willows’, ‘fragrant heliotropes’ and so on. Pound was so taken by it that he instantly sought out Upward’s acquaintance and discovered from him how the verses had been composed, writing immediately to Monroe to correct Poetry’s annotation that they were ‘not translations but paraphrases’: ‘[Upward] says, by the way, that the Chinese stuff is not a paraphrase, but that he made it up out of his head, using a certain amount of Chinese reminiscence.’10 Yet Upward had never been to China and he spoke no Chinese. His ‘Chinese reminiscence’ was an invention, furnished by his discovery of sinologist, Herbert A. Giles’s translations, Gems of Chinese Literature (1884), the auspiciousness of which occasion Upward would later record in a verse letter to the Egoist (June 1915) written in order to rectify a factional squabble over the origins of Imagism:

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Anne Witchard In the year nineteen hundred a poet named Cranmer Byng brought to my attic in Whitehall Gardens a book of Chinese Gems by Professor Giles, Eastern butterflies coming into my attic there beside the Stygian Thames, And read me one of them – willows, forsaken young wife, spring. Immediately my soul kissed the soul of immemorial China: I perceived that all we in the West were indeed barbarians and foreign devils, And that we knew scarcely anything about poetry. I set to work and wrote little poems … Then I hid them away for ten or twelve years, Scented leaves in a Chinese jar …11

Pound’s introduction to Upward’s ‘Eastern butterflies’ alighting the ‘Stygian Thames’ was to provide him with a validation of the new principles he sought to bring to English poetry: ‘I should like to see China replace Greece as the body of antiquity’ he wrote later to John Quinn, the New York lawyer and patron of modernist art.12 Upward lent Pound other works by Giles whose account of Chinese poetics in A History of Chinese Literature (1901) prompted the excited letter to Dorothy Shakespear, his future wife (and keen sinophile): ‘They hold if a man can’t say what he wants to in 12 lines, he’d better leave it unsaid. THE period was 4th cent. B.C. – Chu Yüan, Imagiste.’13 Shortly after meeting Upward, Pound was introduced to the widow of Ernest Fenollosa, an American scholar who had been professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo.14 When Pound began working from Fenollosa’s notebooks (which included the draft essay ‘The Chinese Written Character As A Medium for Poetry’) he, like Upward, had no knowledge of the Chinese language nor the conventions of Chinese poetry beyond his reading of Giles. What he read in Fenollosa’s notebooks however, tallied uncannily with his own ideas about modern poetry and Imagism. Pound worked up fourteen poems from the 150 or so cribs in the notebooks, mostly from the acclaimed Tang poet Li Po, and published them in April 1915. In a direct acknowledgement of the chinoiserie realm of literary imagination, he titled the work Cathay. In 1915 the pared down, fragmentary poetry of the Imagists was as startlingly strange as the Chinese language.15 Cathay’s popularity derived from a familiar Chineseness – ‘willows, forsaken young wives, spring’ – a cultural shorthand which provided readers with an aesthetic cipher for the challenging poetic form. As literary executor of the eminent American orientalist, Pound had gained considerable credibility. Cathay fashioned a new face for Chinese poetry and at the

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same time gave validation to his modernist poetic of Imagism. That Pound’s ‘clairvoyant absorption of another world’ came via what Hugh Kenner called the ‘cult of the plum-blossoms’ was an achievement that meanwhile went unnoticed.16 Initially this was because of diversionary ‘sniffing and squabbling’ among sinologists about the poetry’s meaning and value in relation to the translations’ validity.17 More recently, Saidian critique in its application to Pound’s modernism has been concerned chiefly with establishing some sort of ‘Chinese’ authenticity, while current work in the field of China and modernism seeks to affirm modernist debt to the formative impact of a genuine Chinese artistic tradition.18 In the process of this though, ‘much of modernism’s China’ as Christopher Bush observes, ‘has been dismissed as offhand, allegorical, ornamental, or merely formal’ and consequently lost from view.19 Even if they are purged of a decadent verbosity, the poems in Cathay are no less chinoiseries than what came before. Pound’s flirtations with Chinese poetry, transposing Giles’s ‘Gems’ into attenuated vers libre, took a serendipitous turn on his acquiring Fenollosa’s notebooks but it was one that would prove significant in masking his place in this tradition. Cathay is at once the best known – and the least recognised as such – of the myriad ways chinoiserie was implicated in cultural modernity and formations of modernism.

That World Before Perspective – A China Tea-cup I had no repugnance then – why should I now have? – to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspective – a china tea-cup. […] Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver – two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! And here the same lady, or another – for likeness is identity on tea-cups – is stepping into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead – a furlong off on the other side of the same strange stream! Farther on – if far or near can be predicated of their world – see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays. Here – a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive – so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay. Charles Lamb ‘Old China’ (1823)

Charles Lamb reflecting on his lifelong passion for chinoiserie teacups was defensive of his ‘almost feminine partiality’ for old china. In its

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feminine appeal, the consumption of an ornamental orientalism had existed in tension with conservative forces since the eighteenthcentury heyday of chinoiserie when it was condemned as the taste of nouveaux riches and of women, neither capable of proper aesthetic judgement. In its challenge to Enlightenment aesthetics, chinoiserie provoked heated critical debate about its cultural effects, attracting condemnation for its sensual indulgence and lack of moral purpose. But the abrupt disfavour expressed by the literati of Georgian England following the vogue for rococo chinoiserie can be ascribed to something more sinister than the inevitable vagaries of fashion. In his analysis of the functions of representations of China in British discourse, James Hevia describes how ‘the negation of Chinese style, morals and manners’ produced bourgeois taste by providing evaluative criteria.20 A feminised China ‘caught up in appearances, irrational, arbitrary, and whimsical’ functioned now to produce a superior English national identity as masculine, ‘the true, the real, the rational and the upright’.21 From the 1750s, consensual acceptance of the superiority of Chinese government, its art, classics and Confucian virtues, began to give way to derision. Admiration for an imagined China was supplanted by the disdain of a developing imperialist power for an increasingly ‘known’ China that was becoming an object for pressure and ultimately for the coercion of the opium wars. Educated attention was directed to focus on the antiquities of Greece and Rome, and the dilettante collection of deviant rarities which had no foundation in morals or nature was regretted: ‘the barbarous gaudy goût of the Chinese … fat-headed Pagods and shaking Mandarins bear the prize from the greatest works of antiquity; and Apollo and Venus must give way to a fat idol with a sconce on his head’.22 David Porter’s work has been vital in theorising the sociopolitical meanings of chinoiserie. In his books Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe, and The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, he reads chinoiserie itself as a primary component of shifts in attitudes towards China. By aestheticising the idea of Chinese cultural authority, chinoiserie ‘effectively eviscerated it, transforming symbols of awe-inspiring cultural achievement into a motley collection of exotic ornamental motifs’ serving to diminish China’s value in a dramatic reversal of those tropes and assumptions that had defined European ideas of China over the preceding century.23 Despite a waning of the craze among the educated classes, the British love of spectacle and display ensured the continued popularity of chinoiserie in places of public entertainment. A ‘Chinese’ pageant

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with fireworks was put on in London to celebrate the centenary of the Hanoverian succession in 1814. The Mall was lit up with Chinese lanterns and St James’s Park transformed into a willow-pattern wonderland by the Prince Regent’s architect, John Nash. Nash designed a Chinese-style bridge in the centre of which stood a sevenstoried pagoda. Disaster struck when the bridge caught fire during the pyrotechnic display and the pagoda collapsed. Two men were killed and a number injured trying to put out the flames. Fire was a familiar hazard to Georgian Londoners and their fondness for entertainments accompanied by ‘Chinese Fires’ (fireworks displays) continued unabated. At Vauxhall’s Spring Gardens, society ate expensive suppers in the crenellated kiosks of its chinoiserie-Gothic arcade while the crowds strolled in its Grand Cross Walk famously illuminated with more than 15,000 coloured oil lamps and popularly referred to as ‘the Chinese Walk’.24 The Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens on the opposite side of the Thames at Chelsea already boasted a ‘Chinese pavilion’ among its attractions. London’s eighteenth-century pleasure gardens with their serpentine ‘dark walks’ encircled by Chinese-style lattice work fencing were popular places of flirtation and romantic assignation, the informality of which lent them unacceptable notoriety. Joseph Addison’s naïve ‘country gent’, Sir Roger de Coverley, commented that he might be a better customer of the gardens at Vauxhall ‘if there were more Nightingales and fewer Strumpets’.25 By the mid-Victorian period the last of the pleasure gardens to bow out was the Cremorne Gardens at Chelsea. Cremorne boasted a ‘monster pagoda’ with a dancing platform designed to accommodate 4,000 dancers.26 Its upturned eaves were festooned with gas-lit globes that glimmered ruby and emerald through the foliage. Reports of boisterous ‘young persons of doubtful morality collid[ing] in Bacchanalian renderings of the polka’ concerned moralists and local residents who campaigned against Cremorne throughout the 1870s.27 It finally fell victim to newly stringent licensing laws in 1878. A fitting finale to Cremorne’s demise was the exhibition that year of James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1874), one of a series of Cremorne Nocturnes in which the pagoda is suggested by the diaphanous sparks which flash from its ironwork and the whirling dancers reflected by its mirrors and coloured globes. John Ruskin, in a prescient anticipation of the audacity of modernism, famously accused Whistler of flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face. He refused to recognise what Whistler was doing as serious. In 1867 Ruskin deplored an ‘increasing interest in Japanese art’ as

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being ‘very harmful to many of our own painters’.28 After the forcible opening of Yokohoma in 1859, goods from the Far East flooded Europe’s international expositions and world’s fairs and lacquerware, ceramics and other artefacts became widely available to buy. Whistler introduced Japonisme to Pre-Raphaelite circles in London through his friendship with the Rossetti brothers. We need to bear in mind that the terms Japonisme, Japonaiserie, or Japanolatry, were really a misnomer insofar as they appear to distinguish between Japanese and other Far Eastern products. Whistler discovered Chinese porcelain at the same time as Japanese prints and made little aesthetic distinction between Chinese and Japanese influence on his work. He bought up quantities of screens and lacquerware, fans, robes and porcelain from shops like La Porte Chinoise and L’Empire Celeste, opened to supply fashionable Paris with decorative goods from the East. His collection, which he installed in a series of houses in Chelsea and which included ‘a huge Chinese bed’ was rivalled only by that of his neighbour, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who owned a ‘curiously carved’ chair ‘formerly belonging to the Chinese Giant “Chang”’ and one of whose ‘earliest purchases was that of the whole collection of blue chinaware formed by the retiring Italian Ambassador’, which cost him £200 and ‘made his big sunlit drawing-room a sight to see’.29 Rossetti, as Ford Madox Ford recalled, ‘wanted to fill his house with anything odd, Chinese or sparkling’.30 In his essay ‘The House Beautiful’ (1882) Oscar Wilde rhapsodised over Whistler’s ‘charming’ blue and yellow room: ‘a marvel of beauty’ when its breakfast-table was laid with ‘dainty blue and white china’ set off by a ‘cluster of red and yellow chrysanthemums in an old Nankin vase in the centre’.31 The fin-de-siècle partiality for willow-pattern china, the homely equivalent of Rossetti and Whistler’s coveted blue ‘Nankin’, is most frequently attested to by Wilde’s supposed lament: ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’ When considered in the light of his subsequent engagement with the fourth-century Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, this seemingly trivial or flippant remark takes on a thought-provoking significance. In ‘A Chinese Sage’ (1890), his enthusiastic review of Herbert Giles’s Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist and Social Reformer (1889), Wilde warns ‘respectable and industrious’ householders, familiar with depictions of the sagacious Chinese philosopher from their teapots and fire screens, that they ‘would tremble’ if they ‘really knew who he was’. Chuang Tzu, he notes with satisfaction: ‘spent his life in teaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all useful things’. The thoughts of Chuang Tzu, ‘a very dangerous writer … the

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publication of [whose] book in English, two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature’ chimed with Wilde’s own anarchistic critique of Victorian values and political institutions which he would develop in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891).32 The late-Victorian Aestheticists were lampooned and parodied for their taste. Ruskin accused Rossetti of ‘willfully perverting’ his ‘powers of conception with Chinese puzzles and Japanese monsters, until his foliage looked fit for nothing but a firescreen’.33 Ruskin’s disdain is evidenced by his diminishment of Rossetti’s achievement to the domestic and decorative. But he missed the point. One of the most distinctive characteristics of avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century would be their determination not to distinguish between the fine arts and applied or decorative arts such as book design, furniture and interior design or costume and stage design. Correlating with this aesthetic development was the philosophy of Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley’s Yellow Book, Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop, Charles Holme’s magazine, The Studio, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes collective and Wyndham Lewis’s Rebel Arts Centre. The painters and poets of 1890s Aestheticism felt the influence of the East through a parallel exposure both to chinoiserie artefacts and to Chinese art. In much of their work both Rossetti and Whistler might be said to have conformed to prevailing taste in the way they ‘decorated’ their canvases with the chinoiserie pieces that adorned their Chelsea drawing rooms, but Whistler’s La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1864) or Rossetti’s Monna Rosa (1867), for example, were conceptually ambitious in prioritising the vitality of decorative form over conventional representational demands. With the Nocturnes Whistler fully embraced the compositional influence of an Eastern aesthetic. His scenes of the Thames stripped these pictures of narrative, the focus being entirely on their formal and painterly qualities. In highlighting the atmospheric evocation of mood over a Ruskinian devotion to nature, the Nocturnes presented a strikingly new way of seeing. Whistler explained his choice of title in the Whistler versus Ruskin libel trial (1878): By using the word ‘nocturne’ I wished to indicate an artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of any outside anecdotal interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. A nocturne is an arrangement of line, form and colour first. The picture is throughout a problem that I attempted to solve.34

Whistler expounded upon this artistic ideal in his ‘Ten O’Clock

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Lecture’ (1885), a polemical harangue that was to prove a model for the manifestos of modernist intent to come. Because of his ability to synthesise ‘the characteristic beauties of Eastern and Western art’, Fenollosa would claim Whistler not only as a ‘central’ artist but an artist of ‘modern centrality’.35 In the late 1880s, Fenollosa’s consideration of Eastern civilisations as the moral and intellectual equivalent of those in the West was fairly singular. Charles Swinburne castigated Whistler’s ‘Asiatic aestheticism’ as an affectation to which ‘he unhappily’ did ‘depreciate and degrade his genius’ (1888),36 while George Moore, though praising Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander, could not escape conventional racial typing: It was Japan that counselled the strange grace of the silhouette, and it was that country, too, that inspired in a dim, far-off way those subtly sweet and magical passages from grey to green, from green again to changing evanescent grey. But a higher intelligence massed and impelled those chords of green and grey than ever manifested itself in Japanese fan or screen; the means are simpler, the effect is greater, and by the side of this picture the best Japanese work seems only facile superficial improvisation.37

Fenollosa’s assertions about the importance of Whistler were reiterated in his posthumous Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912). After Whistler, the engagement of London’s avant-garde with China’s aesthetic difference would be of crucial importance to their artistic development. One of the very first things Pound would send to Harriet Monroe for Poetry was a review of the 1912 Whistler exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery, accompanied by a letter declaring his intention to carry out in poetry ‘the same sort of life and intensity’ which Whistler ‘infused into modern painting’.38 The ‘Chinese’ lyrics that Pound produced to illustrate the tenets of Imagism, ‘Liu Ch’e’, ‘Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord’ and ‘Ts’ai Chi’h’, represent this endeavour to discover an approach to poetry that would detach all non-essential referents and that did not rest primarily upon the foundation of an individual subject giving voice to personal experience. As realism’s basic tenets became increasingly challenged by modernist questioning, the willow-pattern world wherein Lamb’s ‘little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element’, acquired positive valences in its challenge to the system of individual perception required by academically sanctioned technique. The deformations of the perspectival plane and asymmetric formal arrangements familiarly decried as chinoiserie absurdities would free artists from the constraints of realism’s transcriptively referential

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system.39 As part of modernism’s challenge to the universality of Western aesthetic principles, the turn to Whistler’s enchanted ‘pays de la porcelaine’ would contribute far more than has been acknowledged to modernist thinking.

The Chapters The earlier chapters in the volume, from 1 to 4 (Porter, Laurence, Parfect, Huang), explore the ways in which notions of China as a philosophical and aesthetic utopia appealed to early modernist artists and critics including Pound, Laurence Binyon, Roger Fry, members of the Bloomsbury Group, the Imagists and the Vorticists. David Porter considers the objects and texts of modernism’s China vogue, not just as a transcultural amalgamation of styles, but as a transhistorical pastiche of aesthetic attitudes. He compares chinoiserie’s modernist moment to that of its eighteenth-century heyday in the delight found in stylised evocations of the Far East and an impatience with the dominant artistic conventions of the time. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s Letters from John Chinaman (1901) and Lytton Strachey’s A Son of Heaven (1913) took the destruction of traditional Chinese society as occasion to lament the cultural impoverishment of their own. Male Bloomsbury’s vision of Chinese art was based on a paradigm of essential civilisational divide given poignancy by the historical fact that Manchu dynastic rule and traditional Chinese society was facing existential threat in its confrontation with Japan and the West. While heightened public awareness of China’s presence on the world stage thanks to newspaper reports of the military debacles of the Sino-Japanese War (1895) and the Boxer Uprising (1900) prompted comparative cultural nostalgia among Cambridge intellectuals, Patricia Laurence reads a vibrant cross-cultural ‘conversation’ between three women writers: Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Ling Shuhua (labelled in China ‘the Chinese Katherine Mansfield’) by examining their reciprocal feminist participation in a chinoiserie-inflected domestic aesthetic. Those in Bloomsbury circles looked to the East, as Roger Fry noted, for its historic philosophical and cultural wealth. These perceptions would challenge the ‘universality’ of British or so-called Western values and aesthetics. Ralph Parfect discusses Fry’s role in The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs and how, under his auspices in the 1910s, the magazine’s affinities with modernism would develop

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alongside its responses to ‘Chinese art’, an organising concept only then in the process of being ‘invented’ in Western discourse. While the emergence during this period of a scholarly discourse of Chinese art sits in an ambivalent relationship with chinoiserie, in another instance of reciprocal exchange the language and textual strategies of sinologist contributors to The Burlington would provide Fry and Pound with a language for talking about and validating the principles of artistic modernism. Indeed, Pound got his prescriptive modernist mantra, Make it New, from an inscription on the bathtub of ancient Shang Dynasty Emperor, Ch’eng T’ang. The direct link between their intellectual exposure to the aesthetic formulations of early Chinese art and the artistic tenets of the Vorticists is detailed here by Michelle Ying-Ling Huang. In a discussion of Binyon’s relationship with and influence on Wyndham Lewis, Fry and Pound, Huang argues that Pound’s enthusiasm for Chinese art gave him the conceptual means of appraising the work of Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. A renewed intellectual enthusiasm for a mythic China was a foundational element of British modernism, while at the same time the consumption of a Chinese exoticism was becoming increasingly commercialised. The middle chapters, 5−7 (Chang, Witchard, Cheang), show that from cutting-edge modernist chic to mass culture and consumer products, the vogue for chinoiserie style and motifs permeated art and design in the early twentieth century. This is the first collection to explore chinoiserie in relation to modernist aesthetics in their broadest expression; across theatre, fashion, music and dance, interior decor, garden design, and architecture. Once again, the intimate sphere of the domestic, of home decor and fashion, connected the female consumer to cultural difference, her purchase of red lacquer furniture, bamboo birdcages and silk pyjamas, entailing her own desire for and identification with a cultural alterity that with the new century would come to dramatise female sexual liberation in significant ways. Elizabeth Chang takes that archetypal chinoiserie phenomenon, the Chinese garden, and examines it through the lens of aesthetic interest in Japan in the 1890s. Surveys of the rise of British artistic modernism in the latter years of the nineteenth century tend to privilege Japan and displace China, not just across the various fields of decorative arts but in ornamental gardening and landscape design too. Chang takes the Chinese garden as a site to investigate the relationship between subject and nature that paralleled imperial expansion and technological advancement and also our contemporary understandings of the

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relationship between the global environment and global modernisms. She re-reads aesthetic internationalism both through the cultivated environment itself, and through its appearance in modernist literature, from the depraved setting of Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (1899) to Woolf’s short story, ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919) thus restoring the Chinese garden to a place of modernist aesthetic consequence. For the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, a return to the rococo-chinoiserie style relegated by the Edwardian consumer to the province of the decorative historian, or to the lower realms of the musical-comedy stage, was to make active rejection of prevailing bourgeois taste. My own contribution to the volume tracks chinoiserie continuities between a Whistlerian Aestheticism, English music-hall culture and international futurism that coalesce in the emergence of a modern ballet. The connections between chinoiserie and cosmopolitanism, between decorative hybridity and modernist global engagement, are clearly seen in the Ballet Russes productions of Hans Christian Anderson’s allegorical tale ‘The Nightingale’, its setting in a fantastically appointed Chinese garden affording modernist revisioning of the binaries of nature and artifice. The dynamic impact of the Ballets Russes on its female audience consolidated the renewed passion for chinoiserie. Sarah Cheang discusses the implications of the trend for ‘Chinese’ hairstyles, dresses, dogs and drawing rooms, a culturally significant but as yet undertheorised phenomenon of twentieth-century modernity. Fashion’s strong conceptual associations with the feminine and with irrational desire creates a complex picture for expressions of Chineseness. Cheang considers the ways in which chinoiserie, with its connotations of whimsy and nostalgia, has been seen as antithetical to the progressive stance of interwar modernism. At the same time the fashionable shaping of women’s bodies is recognised as a key signifier of Western modernity. The wearing of mandarin robes as evening coats, the collecting of jades, the lacquering of dressing tables, and the nurturing of Pekingese lapdogs offers new and stimulating ways to reappraise the role of chinoiserie in British modernism. What the chapters all make clear is that critical attention to chinoiserie cannot be confined solely to its eighteenth-century manifestation. The desire for a certain idea of China and Chinese culture did not abate as contact with the country grew, it persisted throughout times of opium trade, war and colonialism. In the final chapters, 8−10 (Kendall, Yeh, Denison), some of the darker legacies as well as the popular qualities of chinoiserie’s routes are tracked across emergent twentieth-century hierarchies of high and low culture and contested

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terrains of authorship and identity politics. A singular manifestation of chinoiserie hybridity can be seen in the Chinatown stories of Thomas Burke (1916). Paul Kendall reads Burke’s subtly subversive representation of London’s Chinatown in his best-selling Limehouse fiction through an examination of its chinoiserie musical tropes. While chinoiserie’s stylistic repertoire in Britain has encompassed a wide range of artistic practice, in one field it has remained conspicuously absent. Since the work of William Chambers, reverence for China in British architecture has been negligible when compared with decorative, visual and literary art forms. Edward Denison’s focus on the student experience of Luke Him Sau in 1920s London allows him to consider why this architectural relationship led to intense exchanges on the Chinese side while remaining unrequited on the other. The experience of Chinese people in Britain during the interwar period was mediated by public expectations of what someone or something ‘Chinese’ ought to be like. Diana Yeh interrogates the parameters of British sinophilia and sheds light on the sociocultural politics of authorship, identity and exclusion that chinoiserie expectations effected on the production and reception of Chinese playwright Shih-I Hsiung’s London sensation, Lady Precious Stream (1934). In exploring artistic interconnections between Britain and China in the early twentieth century, Denison and Yeh contribute to the development of contemporary critical approaches to the idea of ‘multiple modernities’ and the question of modernity outside the West. As David Porter has written, any instance of the exotic engages with a dialectic between authenticity and hybridity. The chapters here begin to map out a terrain of chinoiserie modernism, in each instance delineating the historical locatedness of its particular expression. Modernism’s fabricated translations or hybrid evocations of Chineseness were inauthentic certainly, but they represent imaginative leaps of crucial aesthetic import.

Notes 1. Eliot, T. S. (1928), Introduction to Ezra Pound: Selected Poems, London: Faber and Faber, p. 14. 2. Ibid. p. 14. 3. Steiner, George (1975), After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 378.

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4. Hayot, Eric (2004), Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 5. 5. McGuinness, Patrick (2008), ‘Imagism’ in David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Detmarr (eds) (2008), A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, London: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 187. 6. On Lowell see Bradshaw, Melissa (2011), Diva Poet, Farnham: Ashgate, Adrienne and Melissa Bradshaw (eds) (2004), Amy Lowell, American Modern, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. On the race to translate between Pound and Lowell see Witchard, Anne, ‘Harriet Monroe, Amy Lowell and Witter Bynner: the scramble for Chinese poetry’ in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China, Vol. 75, No. 1, 2013. 7. Among the titles published by the Orient Press were Lionel Giles, Sayings of Confucius (1907), L. Crammer-Byng, Classics of Confucius: The Book of Odes (1908) and A Lute of Jade (1909), and Laurence Binyon, The Flight of the Dragon (1911). 8. Monroe, Harriet (1926), A Poet’s Life: 70 Years in a Changing World, New York: Macmillan, p. 296. 9. See note 13. 10. Paige, D. D. (ed.) (1971 [1950]), Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–41, New York: New Directions, p. 22. 11. Upward’s verse letter appeared under the heading ‘The Discarded Imagist’, his title prompted by Amy Lowell’s exclusion of him from the second Imagist anthology, Some Imagist Poetry (1915). The letter was in response to the Egoist’s ‘Special Imagist Number’ of May 1915 and F. S. Flint’s account of Imagism which sidelined Ezra Pound’s contribution. 12. Letter, 3 September 1916, cited in Zinnes, Harriet (1980), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, New York: New Directions Publishing, p. 241. 13. Letter, October 1913, in Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz (eds) (1984) Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters, London: Faber and Faber, p. 267. 14. Ernst Fenollosa, fresh out of Harvard, was appointed chair of philosophy at the newly created University of Tokyo in 1877. He developed an interest in Japanese art which the Japanese themselves looked down upon as primitive and inferior, and also in Buddhism, taking his vows in 1885 at the Miidera Monastery (where his ashes would be sent). He was so successful in campaigning to raise Japan’s awareness of its native cultural inheritance that he was appointed Imperial Commissioner of Fine Arts in the Ministry of Culture. In 1890 he returned to the States as Curator of the Japanese Department of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The understanding and appreciation of the fine arts of Asia began with Fenollosa’s organisation of the first comprehensive collection at the museum of the best art of China and Japan. He returned to Japan in 1896 where he turned his attention to Chinese poetry and the Noh Drama. For discussions of Fenollosa’s life and his relations to other intellectuals of his period, see Van Wyck Brooks (1962), Fenollosa and His Circle, New York: Dutton, and Lawrence W. Chisolm (1963), Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 15. Chinese did not enter the curriculum at leading universities in England (Oxford) or the US (Yale) until 1875, see Kern, Robert (1996), Orientalism,

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16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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Anne Witchard Modernism and the American Poem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 73. Dorothy Shakespear had begun to teach herself Chinese in 1901 at the age of fifteen. In 1913 she took up her Chinese studies again using Walter Caine Hillier’s The Chinese Language and How to Learn It. With some money given her as a wedding and birthday present she bought Morrison’s seven-volume Dictionary of the Chinese Language from a second-hand bookshop in London’s Charing Cross Road. See David Moody (2007), Ezra Pound Poet: A Portrait of the Man & His Work, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloom, Harold (1987), Ezra Pound, New York: Chelsea House, p. 79. Kenner, Hugh (1973), The Pound Era, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 199. Work in the field of China and modernism has expanded in the last decade: Shu-Mei Shih (2001), The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China 1917−1937, Berkeley: University of California Press; Yao, Steven G. (2002), Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language, London: Palgrave Macmillan; Yunte Huang (2002), Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature, Los Angeles: University of California Press; Hayot, Eric (2004), Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Bush, Christopher (2009), Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Seshagiri, Urmila (2010), Race and the Modernist Imagination, Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard (2011), Modernism and the Museum, Asia, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant Garde, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Zhaoming Qian (ed.) (2012), Modernism and the Orient, New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press. Bush, Christopher (2010), Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. xv. Hevia, James (1995), Cherishing men From Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 73. Ibid. p. 73. Letter from Mrs Elizabeth Montague 1749, cited in Jacobson, Dawn (1999), Chinoiserie, London: Phaidon Press, p. 123. Yet even Mrs Montagu whose ‘gloomy musings on the passing of Antique taste were widely known, boasted of a “Chinese room” in her house’, p. 134. Porter, David (2001), Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 136. Altick, Richard (1978), The Shows of London, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 320. The Spectator, No. 383, Vol. 5, 20 May 1712, p. 294. Wey, Francis (1936), A Frenchman Among the Victorians, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 173. Ibid. p. 173. Ruskin, John (1871), Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work, London: John Wiley & Sons, p. 30. Cited in Chang, Elizabeth Hope (2010), Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature,

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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Empire and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 107. Ibid. p. 107. Reprinted in Wilde, Oscar (2003), Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Harper Collins, pp. 913−25. Reprinted in Ellman, Richard (1969), The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Works of John Ruskin (1908), London: George Allen, p. 271. Spencer, Robin (2003), James McNeill Whistler, New York: Harry N. Abrams, p. 52. Fenollosa, Ernest F. (1907), ‘The Collections of Mr. Charles L. Freer’, The Pacific Era, 1, No. 2, p. 62. Gosse, Edmund, and Thomas James Wise (eds) (1927), The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, London: Russell & Russell, p. 30. Moore, George (1898), Modern Painting, London: W. Scott, p. 12. Ruthven, K. K. (1969), A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae 1926, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 259. See Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, p. 17.

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Chapter 1

China and the Formation of the Modernist Aesthetic Ideal David Porter

Lytton Strachey, known best as a biographer of English worthies and founding member of the Bloomsbury circle in London, took inspiration for his only performed play from events in Beijing that led to the fall of the Qing dynasty. Written in 1912, at roughly the same time as Eminent Victorians, the tragic melodrama A Son of Heaven was produced several times for the London stage between 1925 and 1949, and then for BBC radio in 1950 and 1951.1 Based loosely on an excoriating and, as it turns out, largely fabricated biography of the empress dowager by J. O. P. Bland and Edmund Backhouse, Strachey’s four-act play recounts a series of conflicts and intrigues at court precipitated by the Boxer Uprising and culminating in the royal family’s flight before advancing foreign troops. Taken as history, let alone ethnography, the play is seriously flawed. As the editor of the modern edition acknowledges, it ultimately tells us more about Bloomsbury than China.2 In particular, it offers a revealing glimpse into how members of an elite literary circle in early twentieth-century Britain viewed ‘traditional’ China, and how received ideas about China might serve as a dramatic exposition of familiar themes of decadence and betrayal. Strachey’s description of the stage set for Act I seems, at first glance, to evoke the splendour of a powerful foreign potentate: The Throne Hall of Heavenly Purity in the Winter Palace, Pekin. The great Dragon Throne, with its elaborate carving, its steps, and its canopy, occupies the back of the stage. Pillars support the roof, on carved beams. On each side of the throne are tables with china bowls containing pyramids of oranges.

The first exchange among the three eunuchs who occupy the stage, however, encourages the viewer to read the setting as evoking not the daunting China of imperial might and majesty but rather the frivolous fantasy space of chinoiserie. ‘Such violence! Such changes!’

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expostulates the second eunuch on hearing nearby artillery fire. ‘Yesterday I was so startled by one of their explosions that I dropped a tea-cup’ (23). The mock-heroic juxtaposition of high drama with triviality, by injecting the scene with comedy, de-couples it from realworld considerations of the power of the Qing Dynasty and places it squarely within a lineage of literary and visual treatments of the ‘Chinese style’ dating back two hundred years.3 The term ‘chinoiserie’ generally refers to imitations and adaptations by European craftsmen of visual motifs taken from imported Chinese objects, including lacquerware, furniture, wall hangings and porcelains. In the eighteenth-century context to which the term is most frequently applied, the resulting hybrid style often conveys a sense of other-worldly charm and playful exoticism, and regularly evokes associations with the feminine, the fanciful and the superficial. Contemporary writers and visual artists frequently satirised women who showed an excessive fondness for Chinese and Chinese-styled objects, and the spectacle of shattered porcelain became a recognisable trope in the mockery of women’s preoccupation with useless foreign goods. At the same time, the fragility and diminutive quality of the most highly prized chinaware may have helped to neutralise any sense of threat or anxiety evoked by the rich and mighty empire from which they originated. When Strachey’s eunuch drops his teacup, then, he reminds the viewer not only of the fatally effeminised decadence of a collapsing empire, but also of a long-standing preoccupation in England with the signifying potential of Chinese material culture.4 After fading from view in England for much of the nineteenth century, the chinoiserie style experienced a resurgence in the first decades of the twentieth. Willow-patterned wallpapers came back into vogue, along with similarly themed clothing, furniture, hair styles and, as chapters in this volume make clear, even ballet, music, poetry and theatre. In many respects, the China vogue of this period resembles and, indeed, might be viewed as a resurrection of eighteenth-century chinoiserie. In both cases, the delight found in stylised evocations of the Far East suggests a fascination with the exotic, an impatience with the dominant stylistic conventions of the time – neoclassicism in the first case, and realism in the second – and, perhaps, a heightened awareness of China’s presence on the world stage, prompted in the early twentieth century by journalistic reports of the military debacles of the Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Uprising as it had been in the early eighteenth by Jesuit missionary reports vaunting the achievements of Chinese civilisation. In both

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cases, likewise, the Chinese taste permeated the English visual imagination and directly or indirectly influenced subsequent developments in the visual, literary and performing arts. In this respect alone, the recurrent historical phenomenon of chinoiserie is a useful reminder of the limitations of the mono-directional models of cultural diffusion we too often rely upon in considering the relationship between Western Europe and its others in the early-modern and modern periods. A teacup, however, is never only a teacup, and trends in the world of fashion are rarely quite as entirely capricious as they might first appear. Exotic fashions, in particular, are always motivated by underlying shifts in the intercultural dynamic that marks them as exotic in the first place. The concept of the exotic tends to mask these dynamics, dependent as it is on the mystery and illegibility evoked by difference. If we look beneath the sheen that gives the exotic its seductive allure, we find a variety of strategies at play in the construction of this difference. These underlying strategies, in turn, condition the social function of exotic objects within a particular context, so that seemingly comparable exoticisms may wind up signifying in distinct registers and being received and processed in incommensurate ways. On close examination, the twin efflorescences of Chinese exoticism that link the early eighteenth and twentieth-century style worlds of England reveal a striking and deeply consequential difference in their constitution of the very idea of difference itself. Modernist chinoiserie, in contrast to its early Hanoverian predecessor, is steeped in a civilisational nostalgia that colours its whimsical flights of fancy with a palpable sense of longing and a pronounced ambivalence towards the triumphs of modernity. Strachey’s eunuchs are not the only characters who lend a self-consciously chinoiserie flavour to his play. The commander-inchief of the Empress’s military forces, Jung Lu, excuses his seemingly treasonous disinterest in firing on invading foreign legations on account of a ‘beautiful dream’ he has been enjoying of a pair of amorous butterflies. His lengthy description of the dream evokes both a famous parable by Huangzi and the legendary Chinese tale of lovers Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, both of which Strachey, and likely much of his audience, had encountered in English translation. Jung Lu’s account of his dream is the dramatic equivalent of the slightly ethereal and pointedly anti-naturalistic scenes of Chinese figures and animals familiar from chinoiserie visual motifs. For all her frustration with him, the besieged empress dowager shares something of her commander’s aestheticised nonchalance: ‘Oh, good heavens, I’d do

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anything to be able to sit in peace under an almond tree, and eat sweets and read poetry and admire the view’ (33). Like the recollection of the shattered teacup that opens the play, both these moments and the many others like them contribute to the unfolding historical drama a tragicomic poignancy that derives from the ready association of Chinese sensualism with escapist fantasy. The play’s attitude towards the disengagement of these characters is overtly satirical. The Empress complains when the noise of the battle raging outside the palace gates disrupts her enjoyment of painting and poetry; Jung Lu, pursuing the inspiration of his butterfly dream, quotes suggestive lines from a book of poetry in his attempts to seduce the Emperor’s lover, the young beauty Ta-he, who promptly dismisses him as ridiculous. Not surprisingly, these scenes of decadent abandon are followed swiftly by intimations of the empire’s impending fall. Jung Lu’s pursuit of the young girl as she escapes his entreaties is interrupted by the appearance in the garden by the reformer Kang, who introduces himself by proclaiming: ‘I come from the West.’ After recounting the recent history of failed reform efforts in the Chinese court, Kang declares: It is the West that speaks through me. For the last five years I have lived in the West; I have come to understand the West as I never understood it before; and now I am here to tell you what it is that the West means.

The meaning of the West, it turns out, is China’s destruction: The West has stretched out its hands over all of us; it has come upon us as an inevitable fate … The knell of China has rung; the doom of the West is upon her. The ancient, the immemorial, the unchangeable Celestial Empire has reached her last day. (50)

While the seeming obliviousness of the empire’s defenders to this menace makes them appear as fools, the drama resists being flattened into a simple morality play. Kang, the ambassador of Western modernity, soon reveals himself to be the heartless and cynical betrayer of the young Emperor’s trust, prompting the Emperor to turn the tables on his civilising mission: And this is your enlightenment, your civilisation, your morality! This is the new life you bring from the West, is it? This is how our old oriental barbarism is to be uplifted and purified! By lies, by treachery, by prostitution! (69)

The tragedy ends in blood and ignominy, with the murder of Jung Lu, the execution of Ta-he, and the flight of the royal family before the invading barbarians. Strachey’s play evokes the familiar spirit of chinoiserie – sensual,

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aestheticised, other-worldly, and slightly absurd – only to deploy it, at the end, in an entirely unfamiliar way. For the eighteenth century, Chinese teacups and butterflies enabled the aesthetic indulgence of an aspirational fantasy. Since the time of Marco Polo, China had been a space of opulence and wonder; more recent Jesuit accounts added to the mix a compelling vision of civility, political sagacity and religious common sense. Chinoiserie evoked the luxurious plenitude of this space and the well-earned leisure of its inhabitants in the service of its viewers’ own delight in novelty and whimsicality. English craftsmen and consumers alike embraced the bounty of the foreign style and incorporated it into their own visual lexicons, resulting in the rampant hybridisation of motifs and traditions that so offended conservative guardians of taste.5 China – the place, the society, the culture – was present in early chinoiserie as a site of inspiration, an inexhaustible source of models to be imitated and thoroughly naturalised within the fabric of English life. When Strachey revisits this imaginative space two hundred years later, he finds the outward trappings of sensual allure, but presents them not as simple markers of exoticism, nor as modular motifs to be repurposed in a hybridised pastiche, but as an index of profound civilisational difference. A Son of Heaven dramatises a clash of civilisations, and deploys conventional tropes of chinoiserie both to foreshadow and to explain its inevitable outcome. The eunuch’s fragile teacup, the Empress’s landscape painting, and the commander’s butterfly dream briefly evoke the eighteenth-century fantasy, but the surrounding scenes dispel the expectation of playful insouciance with an air of resignation and nostalgia. From emblems of the material abundance and imaginative fertility of a prosperous society, Strachey transforms them to harbingers of a fatal civilisational flaw. The Qing Empire was destined to fall not merely because of the decadence of its leaders, but because of the fundamental incompatibility of its aesthetic orientation with the values of an ascendant Euro-American modernity. The Chinese devotion to poetry, in particular, signals their unfitness for the new world order. Both the Empress and her commander are devotees, as we have seen, and their susceptibility to its charms indirectly precipitates their tragic end. Just as a recitation of poetry distracts the Empress from an impending military threat, so a recourse to poetry in an attempt at seduction precipitates Jung Lu’s demise at the hands of his love-object. That the failed seduction immediately precedes Kang’s impetuous speech announcing the coming triumph of the West, calls attention to the resonances between these two seemingly unrelated scenes. Jung

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Lu’s age and cultural conservatism stand in contrast to the youthful vitality and spirited independence of both the beauty Ta-he and the reformer Kang. And the older man’s stubborn insistence on the transcendent value of a musty textual tradition – ‘Now you must admit you’re wrong, because poets are always right’ – paints him into the unenviable roles of the pathetically bookish lecher in the eyes of the one and of a representative of the ‘old, unwieldy, antiquated monster’ that is China in the eyes of the other. His world view, in both instances, appears hopelessly anachronistic and ineffectual. And yet Strachey grants him the eloquence of an aesthete in his defence of the self-justifying value of art: What have the roses been telling you, and the irises, and the peach-blossoms, and all the flowers? What have the birds been singing about, I should like to know? And this air, so cool, so warm, so fresh, so scented, has it wafted no message to you? Does not every breath you draw reveal to you the truth of poetry? (48)

In its poignant defence of the simple and utterly purposeless delights of a Chinese garden, Jung Lu’s speech might be regarded as the parting valediction of a doomed martyr of chinoiserie, but a chinoiserie that has been transformed, over the course of 200 years, from a fanciful imitation of a foreign style to an index of essential civilisational difference. For the sources of this valediction, we need look no further than the earlier writings of Strachey himself. In 1908, four years before beginning work on A Son of Heaven, he penned a review of Herbert Giles’s recent translation of a collection of classical Chinese poetry. His delight in his discovery is palpable and unreserved: The book, if you can get it, is worth reading, not only for its curiosity, but for its beauty and its charm. It was published ten years since, and one would be tempted to say that the poetry in it is the best that this generation has known.6

And the terms in which he describes the poetry are steeped in the sensibility of chinoiserie. The word ‘curious’ and its cognates appear three times in the first two pages, before giving way to the equally predictable adjectives ‘strange’, ‘peculiar’, ‘dreamy’ and ‘ethereal’. Blue and white renditions of a Chinese pastoral are evoked by the summer breezes, bird song, airy dreams and old palace gardens Strachey presents to our view. Once we get beyond the familiar catalogue of affect and imagery, however, Strachey departs from the chinoiserie script to offer an intriguing analysis of the source of these poems’ power. While the works themselves may be ‘strange’ or ‘curious’, the scenes they convey

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are entirely ordinary: a girl gathering flowers, for example, or a nightjar calling out its evening song. The highly condensed language of the poems, however, pre-empts any sense of completion or closure in the contemplation of these scenes, and instead ‘hints at wonders’, the simple facts they offer providing only ‘the prelude to a long series of visions and feelings’. Because the ‘hinting verses’ of the Chinese poets offer only ‘beautiful suggestions’ rather than ‘solid flesh-and-blood things’, they remain dreamy and ethereal, whatever their subject. The strangeness and the beauty of these poems, then, stem from their evocative mystery, their ability to conjure in the imagination of the reader a series of subtle affective responses that spill well beyond the limits of the page (140−1). Whereas the strangeness of eighteenthcentury chinoiserie designs was understood chiefly as a function of their unfamiliarity and blithe disregard for European representational conventions, the strangeness Strachey encounters in Giles’s poetic chinoiserie lies rather in the particular aesthetic disposition that is called for in the response to entirely conventional and familiar scenes. A second departure from the Hanoverian experience of the Chinese taste can be seen in Strachey’s treatment of the intercultural dynamic involved in the English consumption of Chinese-styled artifacts. As suggested above, the eighteenth-century consumer of chinoiserie thought of China as either a site of fantasy or a source of inspiration, or both, a place a long way from England in any event, where things were done and housewares manufactured in a sufficiently unfamiliar and appealing way as to serve as a stimulating model for English practice. For Strachey, in contrast, China is not merely a distant land, but Europe’s civilisational other, an inverse image whose specific qualities, far from redefining Englishness by prompting new variations on familiar themes, served to delineate the essence of Englishness (or Europeanness) through a rigid oppositional binary. The essential unity and uniformity necessary to a civilisational binary is established early on. The lyrics in the collection are so similar in spirit that ‘we can perceive a unity in their enchantment’, and might well guess them to be ‘the work of a single mind’, a conjecture bearing a certain figural, if not literal truth, given the strong hold of tradition on Chinese poetic practice: Through the long centuries of Chinese civilisation, poet after poet has been content to follow closely in the footsteps of his predecessors, to handle the very themes which they had handled, to fit the old music to the old imaginations, to gather none but beloved and familiar flowers. (139)

Chinese civilisation provides not only a capacious historical frame for

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this unchanging poetic legacy, but finds its fullest expression through it, so that poems such as those Strachey has before him can be understood as ‘the voice of a civilisation’ (145). Most critically, the attributes of this civilisation represent an inversion of those that characterise its European counterpart. Where ‘our finest lyrics’ are concerned with passion and desire, the poets of China, ‘in their topsyturvy Oriental fashion’ reveal a greater concern with memories than expectations of love (145). Where European lyrics evoke solid things, Chinese lyrics hint at intangibles. Where the classical Greek lyric, like Greek art generally, is a finished expression of the consummation of beauty, that is ‘forever seeking to express what it has to express completely and finally’, and finds its most fitting form in the pointed concision of an epigram, Chinese lyric ‘is the very converse of the epigram’, in that it endlessly defers the expectation of completion or finality by means of the series of visions and feelings it sets in motion (139−40). While individual Chinese poems resist finality in their interpretation, their authors convey a melancholy sense of worldweary resignation suggestive of a different kind of end. They seem, for Strachey, to have passed long ago through the wonders and the tumults of existence, to have arrived at last in some mysterious haven where they could find repose among memories that were forever living, and among discoveries that were forever old. (145)

As in A Son of Heaven, Strachey renders Chinese poetry into a richly polyvalent symbol of a Chinese civilisation understood in contrast to that of the West. The terms of the contrast recall traditional orientalist stereotypes: China is bogged down by the weight of a vast, unchanging tradition, so consumed with the glories of its past that it is oblivious to the future, and predisposed to melancholic reverie rather than passionate, determined action. Strachey’s invocation of familiar tropes of chinoiserie in both these writings is infused, then, with a decidedly post-eighteenth-century paradigm of civilisational contrast. The result, as we’ve seen, is patronising but not entirely disparaging. Strachey’s delight in Chinese poetry, like his character Jung Lu’s, is genuine, and the complementary characterisations he offers in the two works of its subject matter and rhetorical effects recommend it for the reader’s own enjoyment. At the same time, we sense in both pieces that the possibilities for this enjoyment are sharply constrained. The constraint arises not so much from the radical alterity of Chinese lyric, whose novel pleasures, after all, Strachey shows to be readily available to the sensitive English

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reader through Giles’s deft translations, but rather from the radical incommensurability of the historical subject position it invokes. English consumers in the eighteenth century could incorporate chinoiserie designs into the fabric of their daily lives. They were fresh and vital in their allure, and in their combinatory possibilities could complement and extend, through their systematic assimilation, a shared experience of the English domestic interior. While Chinese poetry, in Strachey’s view, offers charms that can be fleetingly enjoyed, its aesthetic can never be assimilated within the modern West because it represents precisely that outlook through the abnegation of which modernity understands itself. As we’ve seen, commander Jung Lu’s poignant speech affirming the value of poetry’s simple pleasures over rank, power, success, and the ‘empty nonsensical phrases’ of the politicians leads in the following scene to the reformed Kang’s premonitions of the collapse, at the hands of the modern West, of a dynasty sustained by little more than a reverence for old books. And for all the evidence in his review that he shares something of Jung Lu’s sensibility, Strachey ends the piece with the suggestion that this sensibility, if not entirely moribund, is incompatible, in the ‘profound … sense of finality’ to which it responds and in the heaped and dried out rose leaves of poetry that sustain it, with the modern spirit of progress. Whether or not Lytton Strachey found progress, in this sense, to be on balance a good thing is not immediately evident from these two works. They offer us, after all, not polemics on Western modernity, but unexpectedly nuanced reflections on the classical poetry and recent history of China, and thereby provide us with a useful framework for interpreting modernism’s reworkings of the legacy of chinoiserie. To grasp the broader implications of a vision of Chinese art based on a paradigm of civilisational divide, we can turn to another prominent member of the Bloomsbury group whose work likely inspired Strachey’s attempts, in A Son of Heaven, to experiment with the voice of a Chinese mandarin. In 1901, G. Lowes Dickinson, the Cambridge political scientist and philosopher whose horror at the carnage of the First World War led to the first modern proposal for a League of Nations, published his Letters from John Chinaman. Like Strachey, he was drawn to his topic by reports of the Boxer Uprising and the existential threat to Chinese dynastic rule that it seemed to portend. And like Strachey, he alludes to the eighteenth-century vogue for China in crafting his response, in this case by adapting the device of the Chinese observer of English society from Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World. In this work and its anonymously published

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sequel, Letters from a Chinese official being an Eastern view of Western civilisation (1903), he anticipates Strachey by invoking a civilisational model for thinking about cultural difference and by situating poetry, in particular, as the essential marker of an unbridgeable divide. The comparison with Oliver Goldsmith is useful in highlighting the dramatic shift from a commensurative to a contrastive model for thinking about China over the 140 years that separate these two works of epistolary chinoiserie. Goldsmith, a satirist in the Horatian mode, finds light-hearted comedy in those foibles of his countrymen and idiosyncrasies of English custom that are revealed through his foreign philosopher’s comparative vantage point. He pokes gentle fun at the propensity of English writers to indulge their peckish tempers in exchanges of calumny and ridicule, for example, and at the willingness of English readers to grant the name of author to any among them who can write. And he at times heightens the satirical effect by offering an explicit contrast with Chinese practice, which in this instance pre-empts the spectacle of Grub Street mud-slinging by having the emperor himself regulate the profession of authorship.7 The language of comparison is casual and incidental. The English do this, the Chinese do that. In England, matters are handled in one way, in China in another. But these variations are relatively inconsequential, ‘national peculiarities’, as the narrator calls them, that never coalesce into a unified cultural mould, let alone prompt talk of civilisational divides (108). Indeed, as a true disciple of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, Goldsmith’s philosopher is constantly at pains to remind us of the triviality of such distinctions, dwarfed as they are by the shared humanity of all nations. ‘The polite of every country pretty nearly resemble each other’, he observes, with the result that ‘the world [is] but one city to me’ (251, 328). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the sorts of ‘national peculiarities’ that delighted Goldsmith and his readers as so many amusing curiosities coalesced, in the writings of Hegel, Herder and Arthur Smith, among others, into deep-rooted, all-pervasive cultural essences and spirits, leading Dickinson’s John Chinaman to diagnose, in both his first and final letters, a ‘fundamental antagonism’ and ‘profound opposition’ between Eastern and Western civilisations that would have utterly baffled his fictional predecessor.8 Most of the intervening letters are devoted to elaborating the terms of this antagonism with the decidedly anti-orientalist purpose of demonstrating the moral and spiritual impoverishment of the European path. The shift in scale and degree of abstraction from Goldsmith’s

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text is dramatic. Where Goldsmith’s philosopher saw a kaleidoscope of idiosyncratic customs and mores, Dickinson’s Chinaman sees symptomatic expressions of monolithic and diametrically opposed civilisational structures. With respect to morality, ‘your civilisation has never been Christian; whereas ours is Confucian through and through’. In regulating relations between the individual and society, ‘our own procedure is the opposite to yours’. In economics and foreign policy, ‘your principle is the opposite to ours’ (12−15). And where Goldsmith deploys differences for the purpose of light-hearted satire, Dickinson brandishes them as a cudgel, castigating the European world view as corrupt to its core. The tone is Swiftean in its vitriol, but its satirical effect is compromised by the utter absence of irony. So wide and deep is the chasm and so self-evident the moral hierarchy between the two sides, that the work reads like a jeremiad, an attempt at rhetorical compensation, perhaps, in its thundering denunciations, for the brusque violence of China’s ongoing military defeats. What exactly constitutes the ‘Western civilisation’ that draws Dickinson’s ire? The two Strachey pieces considered above, after all, point to a certain degree of slippage in the concept. In the review essay, which builds the argument for a civilisational divide from a comparison between the classical poetic traditions of Greece and China, civilisation appears an ahistorical construct, allowing Strachey, writing in 1912, to read a Chinese poem penned a thousand years earlier as representative of a timeless Chinese sensibility, and a Greek epigram as conveying a comparable essence of its Western counterpart. In A Son of Heaven, the Jung Lu character still embodies this timeless Chinese voice, but the voice of the West, represented by the reformer Kang, is now that of a decidedly modern value system. For Dickinson, too, the civilisational divide seems to shift from a spatial to a temporal axis. China is identified with its antiquity: ‘our civilisation is the oldest in the world’, John Chinaman asserts, and the antiquity of its institutions and their Confucian foundations have provided a degree of stability and moral order ‘for which we search in vain among the nations of Europe’ (12). The ‘economic chaos’ he finds in Europe, in contrast, along with its defining unrest, confusion and lack of morality, would seem to stem less from ancient Greek thought and more from the historical contingencies of the modern condition. Whether the object of Dickinson’s critique is the primacy of economic relations in Europe, the sovereignty and freedom of the individual, the embrace of progress and social mobility, or the institutions of imperialism, it would seem to be historically rooted in

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specific developments of early modernity or the Enlightenment. While such an elision of several hundred years of European history with ‘Western civilisation’ as a whole is by no means uncommon, it has a significant impact on the tenor of the intercultural dramas these Bloomsbury writers stage for us here. For in a tale of two civilisations where one is effectively identified with the present and the other with the distant past, a subplot of temporal succession is inescapable, and when modernity is the loser in the comparison, this subplot must bear a valence of nostalgia. And indeed we hear echoes in Dickinson’s civilisational critique of the primitivist aetiology of modern social pathology Rousseau offers in his Essay on Inequality. What distinguishes the workings of the implicit post-lapsarian elegy in these two cases is, of course, that John Chinaman is no noble savage. Rousseau subverts the developmental paradigm of Enlightenment proto-ethnography to demonstrate that from an ethical standpoint, ‘advanced civilisation’ is a contradiction in terms, and that hunter-gatherer societies represented the most harmonious and unexploitative form of human community to be found in human history. Dickinson’s lament at the fallen state of modern Western civilisation reveals a considerable debt to Rousseau: everywhere John Chinaman looks he sees violence, depredation, hypocrisy, selfishness and greed, and he sees them as symptoms not of man’s fallen nature but of a distinctively civilisational malaise. From what presumptive state of grace, then, if not the primitive or pastoral, has European society fallen? Pursuing the question through John Chinaman’s letters reveals an endlessly receding horizon. In strictly temporal terms, the most recent Golden Age would appear at some moments to be roughly coincident with the eighteenth century. ‘During the past hundred years,’ he writes, ‘you have dismantled your whole society … All that is most important and most profound in human relationships, has been torn from the roots and floats like wreckage down the stream of time’ (30). Yet at other moments, it becomes clear that the sickness preceded the Industrial Revolution. The dawn of secular humanism in the Renaissance represented the decisive victory of a worldly, materialist outlook over the ‘grandiose ideal’ of Christianity, and ‘from that time on … it has been your object to sweep away every remnant of the old order, to dissociate Church from State, ritual and belief from action’, with the result that ‘you have abandoned your society frankly to economic and political forces’ (36). But the Ages of Faith that preceded this modern disenchantment would seem hardly to have been any more appealing, with their sanctification of beggary,

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stunting of reason, hypertrophy of the imagination, and ubiquitous ‘division, conflict, confusion, intellectual and moral insanity’ (35). The Chinaman’s lamentations, then, pose something of an historical puzzle. Much of what ails the West is clearly the product of modern history. The depredations of the human spirit brought about by urbanisation, rampant materialism and unchecked individualism he recognises as of relatively recent origin, and the idyllic description of a pastoral Chinese village that he offers by way of contrast presents an idealised vision of an agricultural society grounded in deep ties to family and land would be a largely familiar one to readers of English poets from Gray and Goldsmith to Wordsworth. And yet he identifies no moment in English or European history that was free of what comes to seem a deep civilisational malaise of a structural rather than historical origin. Europe, it would seem, has never known a village like that of his own youth, a ‘lovely valley’ suffused with virtues familiar in Europe only through the utopian visions of Thomas More and Shakespeare’s Gonzalo: ‘equality … healthy toil, sufficient leisure, frank hospitality, [and] a sense of beauty fostered by the loveliest nature in the world’ (21). China, in short, stands in for Europe’s civilisational other both as a site of nostalgia, representing what Europe has lost, and as a site of idealism, representing that which Europe never had. To grasp the real significance of Dickinson’s use of China and its implications for the modernist vision of chinoiserie, we need to separate these two components of his vision. Once we factor out those characteristics of ‘Chinese civilisation’ that are the products of his historical nostalgia and critique of modernity, what remains, paradoxically, is a distinctively post-Romantic variation on a Rousseauian theme. The single, most critical factor that distinguishes the Chinese mentality from the European and that distils the essential difference between the two civilisations is an aesthetic sensibility that finds its purest expression in poetry. The Chinaman’s articulation of his aesthetic credo owes certain debts to Wordsworth. Nature is his teacher, and he recalls how he has often sat for long hours on a hilltop in silent contemplation, interrupted only by the voices of labourers from the pastoral scene below. The training of the poet consists in the cultivation of an exquisite appreciation of the most simple and universal relations of life. To feel, and in order to feel to express, or at least to understand the expression of all that is lovely in Nature, of all that is poignant and sensitive in man, is to us in itself a sufficient end. (27)

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Anticipating Strachey’s review essay, John Chinaman identifies simple, evocative scenes as the catalyst of this appreciation: ‘A rose in a moonlit garden, the shadow of trees on the turf, almond bloom, scent of pine, the wine-cup and the guitar’ (27). And yet he departs from the Romantic credo in that his affinity for nature seems to generate an appreciation, rather than disavowal of high cultural refinement, so that his sense of beauty finds expression ‘in gracious and dignified manners where it is not embodied in exquisite works of art’ (21). The most vaunted achievements of Chinese civilisation, in fact, stem from this sensibility: If in China we have manners, if we have art, if we have morals, the reason, to those who can see, is not far to seek. Nature has taught us; and … we have had the grace to learn her lesson. (20)

The purpose of these attainments is neither prestige nor refinement for its own sake, but rather the simple enjoyment of life. To give pre-eminence to mere wealth, as in the West, is a sign of barbarity, for the Chinese ‘measure the degree of civilisation not by accumulation of the means of living, but by the character and value of the life lived’ (13). Such an argument for the redemptive value of art is, of course, not a new one. According to Raymond Williams, the concepts of ‘art’ and ‘culture’ emerged in the nineteenth century precisely as new sources of spiritual salvation in answer to bureaucratisation, mechanisation and competition.9 Literature, in particular, was prescribed for its humanising effects. As Matthew Arnold famously suggested: ‘More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us’ on the grounds that the substance of great poetry is that which ‘gives to our spirits what they can rest upon; and with the increasing demands of our modern ages upon poetry, this virtue will be more and more highly esteemed’. Great poetry will be preserved, Arnold concludes, even in an industrial age, by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.10 Dickinson’s distinctive contribution, then, is to locate these poetic virtues in China, and so to claim for China the role of preserving great poetry from the depredations of modernity: Rose, pine, bird, perfume – to all these things we [Chinese] are trained to respond, and the response is what we call literature. This we have; this you cannot give us, but this you may so easily take away. Amid the roar of looms it cannot be heard; it cannot be seen in the smoke of factories; it is killed by the wear and the whirl of Western life. (28)

But why China? Surely the English Romantic poets demonstrated

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an equal sensitivity to rose, pine and bird, and an equal awareness of the dangers of allowing these pleasures to be overshadowed by the whirl of a modern society? Wordsworth, as much as any Chinaman, could respond to the soft inland murmur of mountain springs, while recognising that our absorption in the pursuits of getting and spending tend to lay waste our power to see ourselves in nature. If such values and insights were already available within the English context, why attribute them to China to the exclusion of England, or indeed bring China into the picture at all? Our writers’ awareness of current world events is clearly critical here. The historical fact that the Chinese state and traditional society were facing what seemed to be an existential threat in their confrontation with Japan and the West was well known and much discussed among both contemporary Chinese and European intellectuals. That A Son of Heaven and Letters from John Chinaman both take this apparent clash of civilisations as the occasion for their intercultural reflections suggests that their authors may have quite deliberately employed the eminent demise of an ancient dynastic system as a means of positioning their thoughts on the role of poetry and art within a framework of mourning and loss. China’s recent history, in this respect, proved useful as a vivid and condensed occasion for the invocation of aesthetic nostalgia: it was surely easier to contemplate the spectre of a culture’s loss of poetic sensibility concentrated over the course of a few years of political turmoil than spread over a century of industrialisation. Just as significant, however, was the usefulness of China in imagining the fusion of a pantheistic aesthetic sensibility with the height of cultural refinement. Chinese versifiers, after all, were no rustic bards or poets of the people, but rather, in Dickinson’s view, devotees of ‘gracious and dignified manners’ and connoisseurs of ‘exquisite works of art’. They demonstrated the coherence of a position, in other words, that embraced the Rousseauian critique of the inequities of advanced civilisation while rejecting Rousseau’s denunciation of its concomitant aesthetic pleasures. In this respect, both Dickinson and Strachey gesture towards a new ideal of aesthetic sensibility, one that combines the most appealing features of the romantic and the aesthete and that signals its very freshness as an alternative and independence from the legacies of both Wordsworth and Wilde by its putative Chineseness. Such a reading would suggest that among the manylayered connotations of the term ‘modernist chinoiserie’ is a hybrid product not only of a transcultural amalgamation of styles but also of a transhistorical pastiche of aesthetic attitudes. The Boxer Uprising, as we have seen, and the spectre of calamitous

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social upheaval that it presented to English intellectuals suffused these earliest twentieth-century expressions of literary chinoiserie with a sense of mournful nostalgia. The civilisational divide on which they are premised is mapped directly onto the contemporary geopolitical scene, so that the poetic values and world view espoused by Jung Lu and John Chinaman appear to be on the verge of being overwhelmed by a Western military-industrial juggernaut. By the time Strachey’s play was produced for the final time on the London stage in 1949, the Qing Dynasty had collapsed, the court literati had fallen from power, and colonial powers and regional warlords had moved in to claim the spoils over four decades of devastating strife. The political chaos was brought to an end only by the Communist defeat of Japanese invaders and the Nationalist regime and the founding, in that same year, of the People’s Republic. With Mao’s triumph, the melancholy undertones of A Son of Heaven would no longer have rung true. While the civilisational chasm between East and West heralded by the play remained a viable paradigm, the terms of the relationship between the two sides had clearly changed. How was the early twentieth-century conception of this divide reconfigured in response to this new world order? In 1946, F. S. C. Northrop, a Yale professor of philosophy and law, published The Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding. As his title suggests, Northrop reconceives as a constructive engagement between two sides the antagonistic conflict that had been imagined by Dickinson and Strachey as heralding the imminent desecration of one side at the hands of the other. Given that he was writing in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the founding of the United Nations in 1945, there is nothing particularly remarkable in Northrop’s gesture of rethinking an old opposition in terms of possible rapprochement.11 The relevance of Northrop’s book to our consideration here of a particular strand of modernist chinoiserie lies in his distinctive and exhaustively elaborated characterisation of the divide itself. Oliver Goldsmith’s worldly philosopher, it will be recalled, perceived no civilisational divide between China and England or Europe at all, but only rich tapestries of national peculiarities. Dickinson and Strachey responded to the reality of military hostilities by taking the destruction of traditional Chinese society as the occasion to lament the spiritual impoverishment of their own. Putting aside the satirical and sentimental approaches of these predecessors, Northrop adopts instead a rhetorical framework of a highly abstracted comparative analysis to demonstrate not simply that the inhabitants of Europe and China function within different value systems and institutions, but that their respec-

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tive civilisations constitute closed and internally coherent structures that have diametrically opposed meanings. Gone is the value hierarchy between the two cultures; gone too is the intimation we saw in Dickinson’s work that the modern state of Western civilisation is to some degree the lamentable result of historical changes over the past 500 years. Northrop studiously refrains from both value judgment and historicisation: the differences he perceives are essential, allpervasive, and ultimately complementary. The entire intellectual and cultural output of each of these two great civilisations is cut from its own respective piece of fabric, and reveals the same fundamental disposition. The eighth and ninth chapters of the book are devoted to expounding the ‘meaning’ of Western and Eastern civilisations, respectively. Putting aside, for a moment, whatever reservations we might have about the implications and even viability of such an undertaking, what is most fascinating here to the student of chinoiserie is the degree to which the essence of Chinese civilisation turns out to derive from that distinctive aesthetic sensibility that Chinese and Chinese-styled art first made available to European consumers in the eighteenth century, and that English translations of Chinese poetry made available in the twentieth. Northrop extrapolates from the heightened responsiveness to nature, art and poetry that Dickinson and Strachey attributed to Chinese intellectuals to posit a distinctive aesthetic orientation as the essential defining feature of Chinese civilisation as a whole. The ‘root and basic unique meaning of Western civilisation’, first expressed in Plato and preserving its basic form ever since, is the spirit of rational scientific thought and its endless quest for abstract first principles. ‘Confronted with himself and nature’, Northrop observes, ‘Western man arrives by observation and scientific hypothesis at a theoretical conception of the character of these two factors’, with the result that ‘Western scientific, philosophical, and religious knowledge always asserts more than immediate apprehension conveys’, and that even the production and appreciation of works of art tends to privilege their capacity to enhance an abstracted or theoretical understanding of their subjects.12 The essential meaning of Eastern civilisation, in contrast, derives from its focus upon ‘the nature of all things in their emotional and aesthetic, purely empirical and positivistic immediacy’. Immediate aesthetic experience is valued for its own sake, leading to distinctively ‘Oriental’ forms of knowledge, art and spiritual insight grounded in the direct apprehension of nature as an end in itself. The ethical pragmatism of Confucius, the centrality of real suffering to the ideal of

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Buddhist compassion, and the Daoists’ radical embrace of a natural spontaneity all stem, for Northrop, from this fundamentally aesthetic or realist disposition. The types of experiences to which this disposition responds are of an immediately sensory kind: ‘[colours], sounds, fragrances, and [flavours]’ (377). This catalogue of basic ‘aesthetic materials’, characterised, for Northrop, by their vividness and emotional evocativeness, recalls the lists of stimuli Dickinson and Strachey both offered as typical of Chinese poetic responsiveness. Paradoxically, it recalls as well an essential component of the European response to chinoiserie or, perhaps, any manifestation of visual exoticism: a delight in the purely sensory apprehension of unassimilable, unintelligible difference. For Northrop, however, this form of aesthetic experience has been elevated from the status of a superficial response prompted by a superficial ornament to the essential defining feature of an entire civilisation. Current orthodoxy in intercultural studies, with its emphasis on mobility, flow, dynamism and diversity, tends to be deeply sceptical of the notion of static, coherent cultural formations, let alone civilisations, and to respond to claims of essence or authenticity with variations on the observation that everything is always already hybrid. Reading forward from Northrop, however, we find ample evidence that his paradigm of diametrically opposed civilisational dispositions and his conception of the fundamentally ‘aesthetic’ orientation of Chinese culture, as problematic as they may seem, are alive and well in influential recent works of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and even literary memoir, suggesting that certain lineaments of Bloomsbury chinoiserie have had a longer afterlife than the transience of more visible manifestations of the Chinese style might suggest.13 Reading backward from Northrop onto the thoroughly hybrid objects and texts that constituted modernism’s China vogue, we are reminded of the inescapable dialectic between authenticity and hybrid that constitutes any instance of the exotic, as well as of the historically located instrumentality of its pleasures.

Notes 1. Strachey, Lytton (2005), A Son of Heaven: A Tragic Melodrama, ed. George Simson, London: Cecil Woolf, p. 7. 2. Ibid. p. 16. 3. For a detailed discussion of the role of eighteenth-century chinoiserie in managing the perceived threat of Chinese power, see Porter, David (2001), Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001, pp. 143−69.

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4. Standard sources on eighteenth-century chinoiserie include Honour, Hugh (1962), Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay, New York: Dutton; Impey, Oliver (1977), Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration, London: Oxford University Press; Jacobson, Dawn (1993), Chinoiserie, London: Phaidon Press; and Porter, David (2010), The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 5. On the reception of the ‘Chinese taste’ in eighteenth-century England, see especially Allen, Beverly (1937), Tides in English Taste: 1619–1800, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; ‘Chapter 3’ of Porter, Ideographia; and ‘Chapter 1’ of Porter, The Chinese Taste. 6. Strachey, Lytton (1933), ‘An Anthology’ in Characters and Commentaries, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., p. 138. 7. Goldsmith, Oliver (1970), The Citizen of the World; The Bee, London: Everyman’s Library, p. 79. 8. Dickinson, G. Lowes (1946), Letters from John Chinaman and Other Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 11, 44. 9. Williams, Raymond (1960), Culture and Society, Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, pp. xiii−xviii. 10. Arnold, Matthew (1880), ‘General Introduction’ [‘The Study of Poetry’], T. H. Ward, The English Poets, Vol. 1, London: Macmillan, pp. xviii, xxxv, xlvii. 11. Haun Saussy (2001) helpfully situates Northrop’s book in the context of other large-scale comparative projects in a relative vein in Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 104−8. 12. Northrop, F. S. C. (1946), The Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding, London: Collier-Macmillan, pp. 294−5, 306. 13. See, for example, Hall, David and Roger Ames (1995), Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture, Albany, NY: SUNY Press; Nisbett, Richard (2003), The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why, New York: Simon & Schuster; and Jen, Gish (2013), Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Chapter 2

Shared Affinities: Katherine Mansfield, Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf Patricia Laurence ‘It’s like walking over the bridge on a willow pattern plate’ remarked Virginia Woolf when reviewing the stories of the seventeenth-century Chinese writer, Pu Song-Ling.1 Using the narrow bridge on the popular willow plate as a metaphor for her attempt to understand the strange stories − boys who climb ropes to find peaches in heaven or men who fall to the ground and dissolve into tigers − Woolf relates her feeling of estrangement in walking over this cultural bridge. Her reference to the willow-pattern plate − one of England’s bestknown projections of a fanciful China − is an expression of British chinoiserie, an often devalued decorative motif and style in ceramics, fashion, architecture and gardens. Yet chinoiserie, like Woolf’s reading venture, is an expression of England’s fascination with the Chinese aesthetic, an aesthetic that would serve as valuable training for the British visual and reading eye in the early twentieth century. In a 1942 New Yorker cover, the cartoonist Charles Addams would shatter this idealised notion of a timeless China on the blue willow plate. Inserting wartime images from the brutal Sino-Japanese War fought on Chinese soil, 1937−45, Addams replaces doves with Japanese planes. Cannons are lined up among the willow trees, Japanese soldiers rush across a footbridge carrying national flags, and warships replace junks on the river. This image conjures a geo-political China, a historical dimension ignored in the hyperreality of chinoiserie.2 Looking at a blue willow plate, or any aspect of chinoiserie, presents us then with a double challenge: to understand the way the aesthetic and culture of China is filtered through British and European tastes in the decorative arts, and also to see through the fictions and hyper-reality of these arts to the history behind the decorative style and objects (Plate 1). We begin then with multiple Chinas, a China without origins, time or place as represented on the willow plate; the historical China with

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its political and cultural upheavals during the Republican era, the civil war and the Sino-Japanese War; and the magnetism of the Chinese aesthetic that would enrich British visual and literary arts in the century to come. By extension, the literary chinoiserie of authors like Katherine Mansfield, and the occidentalism of her counterpart in China, Ling Shuhua, prepared both the British and Chinese eye and literary imagination for later aesthetic encounters between China and England. David Porter convincingly argues for the association of chinoiserie objects in the eighteenth century with a female literary space, supporting a reading of visual and literary texts working together in a similar way in the twentieth century.3 Katherine Mansfield’s exotic taste for kimono fashions and fanciful tropes of China in her short stories reveals the allure of the aesthetic that piqued curiosity about the culture. Mansfield, often seized by a scene, offers sharp observations of a group of ‘evening Chinamen’ in ‘Ole Underwood’ (1913) as she traces the steps of a criminal who escapes prison: He walked past the Chinamen’s shops. The fruit and vegetables were all piled up against the windows. Bits of wooden cases, straw, and old newspapers were strewn over the pavement. A woman flounced out of a shop and slushed a pile of slops over his feet. He peered in at the windows, at the Chinamen sitting in little groups on old barrels playing cards. They made him smile … They sat still with their long pigtails bound round their heads and their faces yellow as lemons.4

This story presents a vivid description of people as they go about their work, and street scenes like this − as well as intimate rooms, shops, cafes and tea terraces − illustrate the lives of the Chinese. Mansfield’s melancholy themes of injustice, often about women and children, and the wrecking of romantic illusion, as well as her poetic and filigree style of writing led to the translation of her stories into Chinese, beginning in 1927.

Art Happens: Theory James McNeill Whistler in his ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture announces: ‘Art happens.’ Art, he writes: is a cruel jade, that feeds upon materials from anywhere in the world. Art hies her off to the East to find among the opium eaters of Nankin, a [favourite] with whom she lingers fondly – caressing his blue porcelain and painting his coy maidens.5

At the same time that chinoiserie was feeding upon materials in

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China for the decorative arts, Katherine Mansfield, Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf were unwittingly involved in a similar kind of aesthetic exchange. Engaged in their own writing and experiments as women writers about the same time in different parts of the globe, they were initially ignorant of each other, and, in time, informed of each other’s work and aesthetic through translations or personal contacts. Placing them side by side in this chapter, and taking a larger anthropological view as David Porter advocates in his writings, will illuminate cultural and aesthetic refractions between China and England in the 1920s and 1930s. Abandoning the overworked literary category of ‘influence’ and adopting this comparative methodology of shared affinities, relieves these authors of their overworked cultural and critical positions. This essay re-positions them on a broader global canvas. It removes Mansfield from her relationship with John Middleton Murray and as a competitor of Woolf. It removes Ling Shuhua from the leftist critique of her ‘decadent’ and ‘bourgeois’ short stories and association with the Western-identified Crescent Moon Society. It releases Woolf from postcolonial charges of xenophobia, snobbism, imperialism and collusion with Empire. It admits a pre-existing need in Chinese literary circles during the republican era (1912−49) for experiment with the workings of the imagination, romanticism and fantasy, literary directions that were later discouraged in China; it admits a need in British art and literature for new aesthetic patterns and shapes to be found in other cultures. Each author is then viewed in the broader global context of women writers and their concerns. We turn towards the mutual appeal to Chinese readers of Mansfield and Woolf. Unwitting ‘contrapuntal perspectives’ emerge in these comparisons: parallel or discrepant, sympathetic or oppositional, as described by Edward Said.6 But the importance, methodologically, is that they play off each other in literary and cultural relief, dramatising perspectives that would otherwise remain hidden if not viewed from a transnational perspective. The influence of this upon that − a methodology that has long dominated literary studies of England and China − is abandoned. Recent articles on the ‘one way’ model of historical or literary interaction are based on a faulty or politicised notion of how art happens and how ideas spread. For example, that the two-way model (equality of exchange) was superseded by a one-way model (the influence of the West upon China) that preoccupied some of the participants in the ‘Cambridge English and China: Colloquium’ held at Cambridge, July 2011, is encapsulated in an essay by Li Zhimin. Advancing a post-

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May Fourth ‘one-way model’ of cultural exchange, he asserts with little evidence that Xu’s ‘admiration of the West came not from a good understanding of Western culture or friendship with Western individuals, but rather from the Chinese nation having been defeated, and often humiliated’.7 Xu Zhimo’s aesthetic engagements and friendships are diminished under the sweep of ‘the weak man of China’ political rhetoric. The variety and uses of Western literature in twentieth-century China, as Perry Link asserts, is much greater than has been recognised or studied. We are only beginning to allow and explore the literary and aesthetic exchanges and affinities between individuals, institutions and literary groups in Britain and China in less politicised contexts. In the new model of shared affinities in the realm of aesthetics, European, British or other values and literary sensibilities do not ‘replace’ Chinese qualities or values; rather, authors interpret − sometimes misinterpret − and selectively adapt and use what they personally and culturally need for the development of their art. This happened in the development of chinoiserie; authors in China and England continue to do the same. It is important to distinguish that models of interaction or exchange in the realm of art occur in spite of political and historical events. Art is viewed here as an assemblage of cultural and aesthetic fragments − an adaptation of Levi-Strauss’s notion of ‘bricolage’ gathered on the Silk Road of cultural contact.8 Art, ‘the cruel jade,’ as Whistler noted, takes off to the East or the West, and takes what she needs.

Literary Chinoiserie: Katherine Mansfield, Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf In China, Ling Shuhua, the painter, short story writer and memoirist, would develop English eyes. She was exposed to English culture and writing, early discovering Katherine Mansfield through the recommendation and translations of her friend, Xu Zhimo, the flamboyant poet, in 1927, as well as Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf’s nephew, in 1935 when he was teaching at Wuhan University. Ling was living in Wuhan because her husband, Chen Yuan (1896−1970), a historian and critic who had attended the London School of Economics, had become Dean of the School of Arts and Letters at Wuhan. She was an educated woman who had spoken up in the May Fourth Movement for the emancipation of women from restrictive cultural traditions in China. Xu Zhimo is the crucial link between Katherine Mansfield, Ling

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Shuhua and Virginia Woolf. It was he, full of life and personality, and member of the Anglophile Crescent Moon literary group in Beijing, who first read and met Mansfield in London, and returned to China to translate her stories. Xu Zhimo described Ling as ‘the Chinese Katherine Mansfield’ at the same time as Katherine Mansfield, then known as an English (not New Zealand) writer, was being translated into Chinese. Ling Shuhua admired Mansfield’s stories and even translated one of them, ‘The Doll’s House’ (1922). Further literary connections between Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf developed because of Ling’s affair with Julian Bell. Ling later looked to Virginia Woolf as a mentor sending her chapters of her memoir, Ancient Melodies in the 1930s. Woolf praised ‘the charm in the very unlikeness’ of Ling’s writing; Chinese critics and readers admired the melancholy and delicacy of Mansfield’s sensibility and insights, and ferreted out the ‘sentimental’ in her writing.9 Women writers in China, often confined to writing in the domain of children’s literature, appreciated Mansfield’s focus on children and sympathised with her ways of feeling, her sense of injustice and her satire. Each culture was attracted to and found what it needed in the other’s literature. Xu Zhimo, Ling Shuhua, and her husband, Chen Yuan, put Mansfield on the literary map of China. She was part of Xu’s call for revolution in art in China and the appreciation of European writers, advocated in his essay, ‘Art and Life’ (1922). Xu called for China to awaken from its cultural torpor, the trammelling of convention, ‘Bolshevists, worshiping their infallible God Karl Marx’, to a new idealism embracing humanity in other parts of the world as its creed, and art as its religion. Calling for ‘consciously cultivating self consciousness’, ‘the recognition of the individual’s right to complete self-expression’ and the vivid experience of the body, he urged, ‘mind your life and art will take care of itself’.10 He was drawn to the writings of Ling in China, and Mansfield in England as well as the British Romantics, particularly Shelley, Thomas Hardy and, eventually, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. At home in China, he was criticised for his tastes. Qu Qiubai, a leading critic, who had formed the League of Left-Wing writers with Lu Xun (in 1930) accused Xu of being ‘sentimental’ in his tastes − a romantic, a fantasist − given his affinity with individual expression in writing, as well as with Western literature at a historical moment when the Marxists were announcing a ‘realist’ platform that Mao would exhort in his later Talks at Yan’an.11 In these talks, words like ‘feeling’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘subjectivity’ that had preoccupied Mansfield, Ling and Woolf would be omitted. Released from the pressures of 1920s China in his travel

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to Cambridge, and having the luxury of time, Xu developed friendships and explored East-West aesthetics. He spent time studying with Dadie Rylands and G. L. Dickinson, dons at Cambridge, met Woolf and Mansfield, and copied out Joyce’s Ulysses in the British Museum library. Xu was receptive to British modernism and prescient about the aesthetic value of modernism that would inform China’s literature. He sought to meet Mansfield and talked with her in July 1922. She, dying of tuberculosis, evoked his sympathy because of her illness, her beauty, her style, as well as the miniaturist quality of her short stories capturing small scenes and the inner life of thought and feeling. She might have emerged from a scene from Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias, the first European novel to gain a mass audience in China, in which a handsome, rich bourgeois falls in love with a beautiful courtesan dying of tuberculosis and tries to save her from her way of life. When Mansfield died in January 1923, Xu wrote an article in memoriam, and romantically recalled her as ‘a wonder of nature – she is like the renewed mountains and lake after the autumn rain … a pure and clear Indian jade − a transparent object’.12

Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf Ling Shuhua read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) upon Julian Bell’s urging when he was teaching English literature at Wuhan University (1935−7). They were engaged in a risky love affair – Ling was the wife of the Dean who hired him – and this brought Ling into the Bloomsbury circle. Ling’s correspondence with Woolf, however, did not begin until after Bell left China, and went off to the Spanish Civil War as an ambulance driver in 1937. He was killed in a blast the same year. After he left, Ling was in a personally and nationally beleaguered position. Caught in the turmoil of the SinoJapanese War as well as the civil war in China, she was in flight from her home in Wuhan to Sichuan with her daughter to escape the encroaching Japanese. She was in a desperate state but sought to preserve her writing self. ‘One day’, she wrote in her journal: I happened to come across and read again Virginia Woolf’s book, A Room of One’s Own and I was quite carried away by her writing, so suddenly I decided to write and see if she were in my situation what she would do.13

A year and a half’s correspondence ensued (3 March 1938 to 16 July 1939). Woolf sympathised with Ling’s personal plight, and wrote:

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think how you could fix your mind upon something worth doing in itself. I have not read any of your writing, but Julian often wrote to me about it. He said too that you have lived a most interesting life.14

Ling sent Woolf chapters of her autobiography which eventually became Ancient Melodies, an interesting cross-cultural production published by Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1957, after Ling had emigrated to England with her husband and daughter in the late 1940s before Mao came to power. Though the narrative voice is somewhat stilted in this memoir, that of a child narrator, and is silent about Ling Shuhua’s more turbulent adult life, it is, nevertheless written simply with the searching eye of an artist and poet. She sketches in writing and drawing (the two arts always more intimately connected than in the West) the intimate scenes of her traditional life as the daughter of the fourth concubine of the Mayor of Peking (Figs 2.1a and 2.1b).

Figures 2.1a (above) and 2.1b (next page) Illustrations from Ling Shuhua’s Ancient Melodies: Life in Peking as a Child (1953).

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As part of the Crescent Moon group, Ling had heard stories about London and British literature from Xu Zhimo, as well as her husband, Chen Yuan who had assisted H. G. Wells in his work on History of the World. The travel and conversation of her husband and others in her circle, and her ability to read Mansfield’s stories in English enabled her receptivity to Mansfield. Ling’s epistolary relationship with Virginia Woolf is described more fully elsewhere,15 but England became for her an ‘imagined community’ in Benedict Anderson’s sense.16 And art continues to ‘happen’ in the circularity and free flow of ideas and literary stories as the contemporary Chinese author, Hong Ying, fictionalises and sensationalises the story of Ling Shuhua and Julian Bell’s relationship in her novel, ‘K’: The Art of Love, published in 2004.

Shared Affinities At the same time that their stories were being published and translated, Chinese writers were finding commonalities between the themes and styles of Ling, Mansfield and Woolf. The eminent short story

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writers, Shen Congwen and Su Xuelin, agreed with Xu Zhimo’s assessment of Mansfield arguing that she and Ling shared a sensibility, a delicacy and psychological insight. Departing from the themes of the ‘Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly’ literature that popularised stories of women’s romance in 1910−20s China, usually the troubled romance of a poor scholar and a beauty for example, Ling and Mansfield dwelled not only on romantic love but its disillusionments. They were known for their sharp observations of women’s lives, and incorporated a women’s point of view through new narrative methods. They discovered the interest of psychology where ‘the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary’, as Woolf announces in her essay on ‘Modern Fiction’ (1921).17 Ling and Mansfield not only share a subjective approach in describing the moods and the interior life of women and children, but an interest in representing what remains unsaid by women and children through developing a quality of mood, atmosphere or nature. In addition, they did not take it for granted, as Woolf said of ‘the Edwardians’ that ‘Life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.’18 Chinese readers and critics were also, importantly, drawn to her sensibility and spare style, and quick sketches of intimate scenes. The writer, Xiao Qian, saw Mansfield’s style as the literary correlative to southern Song Dynasty paintings, from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, that focused on small scenes from nature and life, visually close and intimate scenes that were gentle in feeling, and that were composed to express love or grief or the mood and tone of quiet meditation. The early translations of Mansfield stories in the late 1920s−30s were of such intimate, domestic and sometimes sad expression of states of mind captured in nuances of tone and mood. We can hear in Mansfield’s stories the sadness beneath her lyric style. Like the bird in ‘The Canary’ (1923), a story popular in China because of the affection for and keeping of birds in cages, there was ‘under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this – sadness? – Ah, what is it? – that I heard’.19 The story about domesticity and flight suggesting Mansfield’s confinement and convalescence struck a cultural chord. In addition, writers like Ling and Xu Zhimo were drawn to Mansfield’s style, as Ling would later be to Virginia Woolf’s, because of the lyricism and expression of the inner feelings of women and children. They noted their use of indirect discourse or ‘stream of consciousness’ (what has been translated by some as ‘mud rock flow’

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in Chinese, taken from the bottom of consciousness) that appealed to a modernist sensibility, apparent in China for many centuries from Tang poetry on.

History and Translation The history of the period is important in understanding the impetus to the translation of Mansfield. The 1920s was a comparatively open period for Chinese writers and artists. Although the country was torn by factions and warlords, writers and intellectuals were permitted to travel to study in America, particularly at Columbia, Cornell and Clarke Universities, and in England at the London School of Economics, London University, Cambridge and Oxford. At Cambridge University, King’s College, students and writers were welcomed by dons and writers, G. L. Dickinson, E. M. Forster, and Dadie Rylands among others. Both Chen Yuan, and Xu Zhimo had travelled to England. In 1927, Xu Zhimo, after a visit to China, returned home and published the translation Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, a year before her death at the age of thirty-four. This was the first phase of Mansfield translations in the 1920s−30s by freelance writers, many connected with the Crescent Moon group: Xu Zhimo, Chen Yuan, Ling Shuhua, and later, Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo. One notes at a quick glance the Mansfield stories that were translated and refracted through Chinese culture at the time. The choices reveal an interest in themes of sentimentalism, poverty, the abuse of children, injustice and the heartlessness of the wealthy. The stories introduced in Xu Zhimo’s collection, included, ‘An Ideal Family’, ‘The Wind Blows’, ‘Life of Ma Parker’, ‘A Cup of Tea’, ‘Late at Night’, ‘Poison’, ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘Bliss’. These choices reveal not only the early interest in children, injustice, the effects of wealth and poverty on families, and wrecked romance, but also the interest in the most sentimental of Mansfield’s stories. The first story Xu Zhimo chose to translate was ‘An Ideal Family’ (1921), an odd choice as it was not one of Mansfield’s well-known or well-liked stories in Britain and America. Circulating around the problems of a man cut off from his family, the story may have appealed to Xu because of his own alienation within an arranged marriage and his romantic entanglements in England at the time. Chen Yuan translated what would become one of Mansfield’s most translated stories, ‘The Doll’s House’ (1922). Drawn by the

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psychological insight into the world of little girls, Yuan chose a sentimental story about rich and poor children, exposing the ‘hidden injuries of class’ that would fit with the Chinese perspective on capitalism.20 Ling Shuhua would also translate this story later, reflecting the same cultural interest in family, particularly the heartlessness of a wealthy family. In ‘The Doll’s House’ two desperate sisters, Lil and Else, are deprived of viewing a special doll house that the rich Burnell children have been given as a gift, and shared with all the children in the town, except them. One Burnell child name Kezia, who Chen Yuan felt was ‘the most lively and lovable’, allows the poor Kelvey sisters to see the doll’s house for a few minutes before they are harshly chased away by the vicious Aunt Beryl.21 The story ends with the two sisters silently appreciative of what little they have seen: ‘I seen the lamp’, said Else softly as she nudged up to her sister with a ‘rare smile’.22 The insensitivity of the middle-class and the poverty of the Kelvey children in this story struck a cultural chord in China, as the 1920s was a wretched time of famine and poverty. Praising the psychological insight into moods and feelings, Chen concludes: ‘Who is prepared to say that children are the happiest of beings, that children are never unhappy.’23 Later Chinese critics were also attracted to the story and Bin Zhang wrote an article comparing the children in Katherine Mansfield and Ling Shuhua’s stories in 2010.24 Since one third of Ling’s own stories were about children and her autobiography, Ancient Melodies, is narrated through the eyes of a child, ‘The Doll’s House’ was a natural choice for her to translate with its ‘poor little rich girl’ plot in which a successful and preoccupied father has no time for showing affection or interest in his daughter. There is poignancy in the young girl’s observation of the happiness in a poor family living next door. Later Xiao Qian, the eminent journalist and writer who visited Cambridge in the 1940s, mentioned in a 1995 interview that Katherine Mansfield was the first foreign author that he read. Working at the age of sixteen in 1926 as an apprentice in a publishing house, he was asked to go to Beijing University Library to copy a translation of Mansfield’s story, ‘The Young Girl’, by Xu Zhimo. The story, said Xiao, brought memories of ‘my own lonely and painful childhood. So as I copied I ran tears.’25 When Kezia, the daughter in the story, laboriously makes a beautiful yellow silk pincushion with double cotton as a present for her father’s birthday, and accidentally stuffs it with strips of an important speech he was to give, her father beat her hands with a ruler. Kezia wondered who made such fathers.

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The emptiness that the young girl feels echoes in a story by Ling Shuhua, ‘Embroidered Pillows’, where she similarly relates the futility of a young woman’s project to embroider cushions with beautifully coloured threads that are only to be trampled upon by drunken and careless guests. Both young girls dutifully create a beautiful present − they are virtuous − yet their gifts are trashed in a patriarchal culture. Similarly, the story ‘A Cup of Tea’ was translated early in China, again revealing unattractive qualities in the wealthy class. Rosemary Fell, ‘not exactly beautiful’ but very rich, lived an extremely luxurious life. Married two years with a young boy and adoring husband, her life was complete. One day on a stray charitable impulse she brings home an impoverished, raggedy girl to offer her a cup of tea and a warm place. Being more fortunate, she led the dazed ‘captive’ home, feeling pity as the girl relates that she can go on no longer, ‘I shall do away with myself.’ When her husband comes home and observes that the visitor is ‘astonishingly beautiful’, the wife packs her off with some five pound notes and flirts with her husband, ‘am I pretty?’ The self-absorbed selfishness of the wife is revealed beneath a show of charity. Again, the vices of the rich and disillusionment in marriage are revealed; a story attractive to Chinese readers critical of the bourgeoisie. It was not until the 1930s, with formation of The League of Left Wing Writers, that political ideas as the basis for literary works hardened into adversarial relations between writers and the Party. Following these translations was a critical silence. Wen Jieruo, the wife of Xiao Qian, recently wrote that she and her husband had translated Mansfield early because her stories were ‘delicate marvels created out of tightly ordered spheres of small scenes and experiences’.26 The freelance writers of this first phase, 1920s−30s, identified with Mansfield’s sensibility and aesthetic and chose stories to translate according to personal taste. After this, translations of Mansfield and most Western writers, with the exception of ‘leftist’ writers like Jack London, John Steinbeck and Russian writers, were suspended (1949−76). This was a period when Mao called upon Chinese writers to view literary works not as art but social directives. The second phase of translation of Mansfield, beginning around 1979 after the demise of Mao and his anti-Western campaign, brought translations by established scholars in universities and institutions. The politics toward literature and art changed and houses like Renmin Literature Publishing House, Shanghai Literature Translation Publishing House and Foreign Literature Translation Publishing House translated and advanced her work. More of Mansfield’s major

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stories were published and the choices were less personal and idiosyncratic than the earlier freelance writers of 1920−30s, but also more closely overseen by the government. In the 1990s, with the revival of popular fiction in China, the admission of so-called Western works, the rise of film and more experimental writing, political controls yielded to marketisation. Yiming Ren, a contemporary Chinese literary critic, has noted that Mansfield is now more widely translated but still kept on the margins of the study of modern English literature in China, Virginia Woolf assuming a more central place along with James Joyce. Consequently, as Shifen Gong, the excellent critic who writes of Mansfield from the Chinese point of view in A Fine Pen reports, all of her major and better-known stories like ‘The Prelude’, ‘The Garden Party’, ‘Bliss’, and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ are now translated.27 Since the 1980s, new collections of Mansfield have emerged in China: The Collected Short Stories, translated by Chen Liangting (1981); Honeymoon and The Garden Party, both translated by Wen Jieruo (1987 and 2006); The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield, translated by Yang Xianrong (2001); The Canary: The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield, translated by Chan Liangting, Zhen Qiyin, et al (2006); A Married Man’s Story translated and edited by Xiao Qian, Wen Jieruo and Chen Jianing (1988, 2010). These collections, plus the translation of The Selected Letters and Diary of Katherine Mansfield (1993), has created a new Mansfield, different from the 1920−30s image of the frail beauty and writer of sentimental and poignant stories advanced by the freelance translators. In the past twenty years there appears to be more critical importance attached to Mansfield’s sturdiness as she battled against her tuberculosis; as a modernist writer; as a major force in the development of the short story; as well as more interest in comparisons with other women writers like Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf, as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. Referred to sometimes as ‘the English Chekov’ some critics now present her as Virginia Woolf’s competitor.28 There is also more interest in her origins as a New Zealand writer, earlier, an ignored aspect.29

Self-fashioning Another aspect of Mansfield’s chinoiserie was the allure of her selffashioning. She had the look, Virginia Woolf said, ‘of a Japanese doll’. Claire Tomalin reports in her biography that after visiting a Japanese

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Figure 2.2

Katherine Mansfield in kimono.

exhibition, Mansfield ‘began to receive guests in a kimono with a bowl of chrysanthemums beside her’. And though she had worn her hair long, she had it cut into a sleek short style with a fringe. She took on, said Tomalin, a Japanese air and spoke of visiting the country. And she discovered a dressmaker who would make her shawls and ‘small coats of lovely colours and soft velvet materials and dresses with long fitted bodices and pleated skirts’.30 Described by friend Frieda Lawrence as ‘exquisite’ and ‘pretty as a statuette’ she cultivated an aesthetic – that included chinoiserie in her decor – to enhance her literary image.31 Contemporary publishers of her collections of stories have capitalised on her performance and decked the covers of her books with chinoiserie (Fig. 2.2). As this chapter suggests, the lyricism, stylistic restraint, melancholy tone and moods and stories of children, women and the elderly in beleaguered cultural positions, illustrate the shared affinities in women writers who never met. Ling Shuhua, in reading the stories of Katherine Mansfield, may have become more open about expressing her ideas about romantic love and its disillusionment as the public

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expression of love and sex diminished in the 1950s under Mao’s influence, and both Ling Shuhua and Mansfield were encouraged to join Woolf in writing about the dark places in the psychology of women. Mansfield in her self-fashioning and exploration of ideas and aesthetics of Japan and China incorporated other cultural and narrative values into some of her stories and adapted another image of femininity that fitted her declining health and sensibilities. Sharp observations of the lives of women and children advanced in England and China at the same time. And though emerging from very different cultural, political and economic systems, the authors, Katherine Mansfield, Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf, were drawn to similar themes and new styles that articulated the vulnerabilities, injustices, sympathies, moods and ‘silences’ in children and women’s lives. Shared affinities emerge in their writing as they present ruptures in domestic and romantic values and the need for new kinds of relations between men, women and children.

Notes 1. McNeille, Andrew (ed.) ([1967] 1986), The Essays of Virginia Woolf 1912−1918, New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, p. 8. 2. See Hayot, Eric (2011), Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht and Tel Quel, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 3. Porter, David (2011), Gendered Utopia in Transcultural Context: Chinese Porcelains and English Women’s Writings, 1650−1750, Coventry: University of Warwick. 4. Online story: www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/assets/KM-Stories/OLEUNDERWOOD1913.pdf (accessed 19 August 2014). 5. Whistler, James McNeill Whistler (1907), Mr. Whistler’s ‘Ten O’Clock,’ as Delivered in London, at Cambridge and at Oxford, Chicago: Alderbrink Press, p. 27. 6. Said, Edward (1993), Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf, p. 32. 7. Zhimen, Li (2012), ‘The One-Way Model of Cultural Interaction: Literary Interactions between China and Cambridge’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 41:1, p. 117. 8. Levi-Strauss (1966), The Savage Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago, p. 12. 9. See Welland, Sasha Su-Ling (2006), A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, p. 283. 10. Xu Zhimo (1983), ‘Art and Life’, trans. Ming Ho, The Complete Works of Xu Zhimo, Xianquang: Shang wu yin shu quan. 11. Mao Zedong (1967), ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, 1942’, in Mao Tse Tung on Literature and Art, Beijing: Foreign Language Press.

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12. Leung, Gaylord (1994), ‘English Friends’, in A New Biography of Xu Zhimo, Tapei: Lien Qing, p. 24. 13. Ling Shuhua, Memoir, Berg Collection, New York Public Library (5 pp.). 14. Woolf, Virgina, Letters, Monk’s House Papers, Sussex University, Brighton, England, 5 April 1938. 15. Laurence, Patricia (2003), Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, pp. 246−93. 16. Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. 17. Woolf, Virginia (1953), ‘Modern Fiction’ in The Common Reader, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, p. 156. 18. Ibid. p. 155. 19. Mansfield, Katherine (2010), The Montana Stories, London: Persephone Books, p. 297. 20. Chen Yuan in Gong, Shifen (2001), A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand: Otago University Press. This excellent study describes the historical reception and translation of Mansfield in China in detail. 21. Ibid. p. 120. 22. The Montana Stories, p. 185. 23. A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield, p. 120. 24. ‘A Comparison of Children’s Writing between Ling Shuhua and Katherine Mansfield’, Journal of Radio and TV University, No. 2, 2010. 25. http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/assets/Uploads/Mansfield.pdf (accessed 19 August 2014). 26. Email communication, Patricia Laurence, October 2013. 27. A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield, preface. 28. Mansfield greatly admired Chekov and other Russian writers, and tried her own hand at translation with S. K. Koteliansky. See Gorky, Maxim (1948), Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekov and Andreev, London: Hogarth Press. 29. Recent studies include: Zhu Naichang (1987), Commentary on Three Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield, Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House; Han Xu (2007), The Characteristics of Modernism in The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield, Yunnan: Yunnan University Press; Jian Hong, Jian (2004), Contradictory Identity in Katherine Mansfield’s Works, Beijing: China Social Science Press; Guo Haixia (2011), The Prose Poems in the Spirit World of Dissimilar People: An Interpretation of Mansfield and Joyce’s Short Stories, Shanghai: Joint Publishing. 30. Tomalin, Claire (1988), Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, New York: Knopf, p. 87. 31. Ibid. p. 88. Note: Special appreciation to Ms Ruoyun Xiong, a graduate student in Chinese Literature and Languages, Fudan University, China, for helpful research on recent translations of Katherine Mansfield in China.

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Chapter 3

Roger Fry, Chinese Art and The Burlington Magazine Ralph Parfect

In 1903, Roger Fry became instrumental in launching and sustaining a venture that would occupy him for the next thirty years, namely the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs (hereafter the Burlington). Intended in part to remedy the lack in Britain of a high-quality journal for art scholarship comparable to existing continental publications such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (founded in 1859) and the Reportorium für Kunstwissenschaft (founded in 1876), the Burlington quickly established itself as an authoritative and critical voice, with contributors including many of the leading art historians and connoisseurs of the day and with regular editorials campaigning on issues of national importance such as the loss of artworks from British private collections to overseas buyers.1 The Burlington became a new source of artistic legitimacy, an alternative to entrenched institutions such as the Royal Academy, with its espousal of highVictorian pictorial realism, to which the magazine set itself in opposition.2 At first Fry’s nominal role in the magazine was as a member of the consultative committee, a forty-strong body of art world luminaries that included thirteen Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries. On a practical level Fry’s efforts would be crucial in saving the expensively produced Burlington from financial ruin in its early years through his money-raising from wealthy donors such as American financier, John Pierpoint Morgan.3 Soon Fry, who had already been art critic of the Athenaeum, was also writing for the Burlington and moreover strongly influencing its editorial policy. In 1909 he became co-editor, a position he held for ten years, firstly up to December 1913 with art historian, Lionel Cust, and thereafter with both Cust and the critic and aesthete, More Adey. Under Fry’s influence, the Burlington expanded its range to cover modernist French painting, a greater number of theoretical essays, nontraditional subjects such as children’s art, and a much wider coverage of non-European art, including Chinese art.

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In 1903 the Burlington did not have an explicitly modernist agenda, as might have been suggested by the fact that the magazine’s visual design, which owed much to the Arts and Crafts aesthetic of the previous century, was distinctly unlike that of a modernist ‘little magazine’.4 Much of what appeared in the Burlington was distinct from the characteristic concerns of modernism in involving empirical matters of art connoisseurship such as the subject matter, dating, attribution and provenance of individual art works, and the origins and evolution of forms and styles through art history. Such matters were certainly of great interest to Fry who had made his reputation as an expert on early Renaissance art; he was the author of a published monograph on Bellini (1901), and was influenced to a significant extent by the ‘scientific connoisseurship’ of the Italian medical doctor Giovanni Morelli (1816−91).5 Nevertheless, both the Burlington and Fry himself were also deeply concerned with aesthetic as opposed to purely scholarly approaches to art, and it is in this area that the magazine’s affinity with modernism would develop. The manifesto-like editorial in the March 1903 launch issue stated that the Burlington’s ultimate aim was to facilitate the ‘aesthetic satisfaction’ of the ‘sincere amateur, a true lover of the arts’ and thereby foster ‘a future in which the real importance of beauty for life will be understood’, even if a due measure of ‘scientific study’ must provide a necessary foundation of knowledge on which to build aesthetic judgements.6 Furthermore, the Burlington positioned itself from the first as concerned with addressing problematic aspects of modernity. ‘The modern malady is sameness’ ran the first line of the editorial which then lamented the incapacity of mainstream realist art, permeated as it was with ‘false sentiment and fatuous cheerfulness’, to ‘act on the feelings and the imagination by reflecting with an ordered and purposeful distortion our actual life’.7 The Burlington’s proposed remedy was twofold: a reappraisal of the art of the past and a critical attention to contemporary art, in both cases through an ‘austere Epicureanism, an attentive and rigorous weighing of values’.8 In the magazine’s first few years contemporary art in fact made relatively few appearances. However, by 1910, the year of Roger Fry’s pivotal Post-Impressionists exhibition, the Burlington had become associated with modernist painting, publishing in 1910 for example, Maurice Denis’s essay on Cézanne, translated with an introduction by Fry himself, asserting the value of formalism and abstraction, praising ‘this new conception of art, in which the decorative elements preponderate at the expense of the representative’.9 Alongside modernism, art from China was another incipient

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presence in the early decades of the Burlington, and in many ways one with more solid foundations. Although at this time ‘Chinese art’ was, as Craig Clunas, Judith Green and others have argued, still relatively new as an organising concept in the process of being ‘invented’ in Western discourse, nevertheless ceramics and other objects from China had had a presence of several centuries in Europe, albeit often being treated as mere ‘curiosities’, or as part of the chinoiserie fashion of the long eighteenth century.10 The relationship between chinoiserie and modernist interest in Chinese art is an ambivalent one. A key difference, I shall argue in this chapter, was the presence during the modernist period of a more substantial scientific and scholarly discourse of Chinese art. Chinoiserie took its most visible form in the appropriation of Chinese decorative motifs and styles. While in England and other countries it co-existed with extensive and growing knowledge of Chinese culture, history and thought, deriving from among other places the widely circulated writings of Jesuit missionaries, nevertheless, as David Porter has argued, chinoiserie flourished partly as a site of stylistic resistance to dominant eighteenth-century discourses of classical order and decorum.11 By contrast, modernist sinophilia was connected, in places such as the Burlington, with an increasingly professionalised scholarly and scientific discourse of archaeology and ethnography. By the time that Roger Fry turned his attention to Chinese art in the early twentieth century, it was as the focus of a significant and growing body of scholarship on the material culture of China. However, it was also the focus of a more self-reflexive aesthetic discourse than had been true for his sinophile predecessors. Somewhat paradoxically, while a focus of scientific attention, Chinese art was also seen as having the potential to liberate Western art from overly ‘scientific’ concerns, such as those with anatomy and perspective, that characterised classical European realism. In this respect, and as we shall see, modernism can be seen as retaining something of the spirit of resistance to European classical models that can be found in the earlier chinoiserie fashion. From its first issue, the Burlington’s coverage of Chinese art demonstrated a significant combination of scholarly and aesthetic priorities. In the first of a series of articles ‘On Oriental Carpets’ (‘from Morocco to China’) direct references to China are concerned purely with the historical matters of two-way stylistic influences with Persia.12 Yet the tone of the article and some of its judgements are enthusiastically aesthetic. Promoting a notion of the ‘true lover of carpets’ in keeping with the editorial’s idea of the ‘true amateur’, it sets a firm precedent

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for the magazine’s subsequent positive appraisals of Asian art above Western. Whereas modern Western carpets are criticised for the ‘rigid conformity to pattern’ of ‘machine-woven designs’, ‘Oriental’ carpets rejoice in an ‘irregularity of pattern […] brought about by the fact of the work being hand-woven’, allowing ‘the impress of the individuality of the village-artist who produces it’. They also enjoy ‘the richer and more luminous colouring of the East’, ‘the substitution of the angular line in the drawing for the flowing “Classical line of Beauty”’, and the fascination of ‘a deep and complicated symbolism’. This aesthetic discourse subsequently merged with modernist concerns, as seen in 1913, ten years after their debut, when Chinese carpets again appeared in the pages of the Burlington, but in the very different context of being cited by modernist proselytiser Clive Bell as embodying his key formalist concept, ‘significant form’: What quality is common to S. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, the masterpieces of Poussin, of Cézanne, and of Henri Matisse? Only one answer seems possible − significant form.13

Yet alongside the absorption or appropriation of Chinese art into the modernist discourse embraced by the Burlington, a very different way of writing about Chinese art had operated and continued to operate within the magazine, namely a scholarly discourse of ‘scientific study’ which at times openly distanced itself from aesthetic concerns. For example, in a series of short essays on ‘The Chinese Philosophy of Art’ in 1920−1, Arthur Waley seemed to pour cold water on aesthetics in general, including both Bell’s ‘significant form’ and Xie He’s (fifth-century) principle of qi yun shun dong (‘rhythmic vitality’) which had been much cited in modernist sinophile discourse. Waley wrote: Each eye and clime has made its attempt to define asthetic [sic] beauty, has produced its convenient phrase (Disegno, Grand Gust, Significant Form, etc.), and grown tired of it. Who shall say that Hsieh’s formula is any more nebulous than the rest?14

In their articles for the Burlington, the focus of Waley and many other Chinese art experts was overwhelmingly with sources, classifications, attributions, ethnographic content and historical context. In embodying such marked contrasts, the Burlington thus provides us with an opportunity to examine the position of the enthusiastic modernist advocacy of Chinese art in a broad context, and to explore how scholarly and aesthetic discourses operated and intersected in the magazine. I treat these ‘two discourses’ as distinct while acknowledg-

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Figure 3.1 Advertisement for East Asian antiques dealer Yamanaka from The Burlington Magazine, March 1913, issue 120, p. 20.

ing that it is often a convenient over-simplification to separate the ‘aesthetic’ from the ‘scientific’ or ‘empirical’. Roger Fry would certainly have questioned such an approach, having read Natural Science at Cambridge, and being at times eager to investigate artistic questions ‘from a scientific standpoint’.15 But in spite of the unstable boundary between these categories, a distinction between scholarly and aesthetic discourses is a productive one for gaining a sense of how the modernist practice of advocating Chinese art had to do so in competition as well as cooperation with other practices. In addition to being an object of both scholarly and aesthetic attention, Chinese art was also of course inextricably caught up in political and commercial forces. The presence of Chinese art in Britain, as again Craig Clunas, Judith Green and others have shown, was a direct consequence of a British imperialism that ‘collected’ territory in China as its subjects collected art objects, and which, as influentially theorised by Edward Said, produced knowledge as a form of power.16 Meanwhile, Chinese art was also a commodity, and the Burlington, as a magazine intended for connoisseurs and collectors, was inextricably involved in the marketplace for artworks, while at the same time eager to assert a certain distance from purely commercial considerations. Each issue contained numerous pages of

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advertisements for art dealers and publishers; one advertisement of 1913 for artworks from China placed by the prominent international dealer, Yamanaka, rather crassly boasts of: ‘Constant arrivals of fresh shipments from the Far East’ (Fig. 3.1).17 At times the magazine reflected with some defensiveness on this matter. In a special Burlington monograph on Chinese art of 1925, a Preface explains: We believe the inclusion of [advertisements] to be justified because of the interesting character of many of the pieces described and illustrated, because they constitute a useful and almost complete directory of firms dealing in Chinese works of art in London, Paris, and elsewhere; and because the revenue from these advertisements has been instrumental in enabling us to publish the book at the lowest possible price.18

Chinese Art Scholarship in the Burlington Around 1900, a professionalisation of scholarship and an accompanying scholarly literature were increasingly arising out of the activities of collectors both within China and beyond.19 In the later nineteenth century, Britain saw an increased influx of objects from China, particularly following the looting of the Summer Palace at the end of the Second Opium War in 1860, which opened up Imperial collections to bring ‘Chinese taste’ artifacts onto the market, as opposed to the more familiar ‘export ware’ produced specially for European consumption. By the turn of the century, the number of Chinese artworks appearing in London was becoming still greater, not least after a further wave of looting following the suppression of the Boxer Uprising in 1900, but also due to the unearthing of ‘tomb wares’ through such excavations as those relating to railway construction. The new objects included ceramics from earlier in Chinese history than hitherto had been the case, as well as an increasing variety of other objects such as bronzes, jades, silver items and paintings. A pivotal figure of the time in the scholarship of Chinese ceramics was Stephen Wootton Bushell, Physician to the British Legation in Beijing from 1868 to 1900.20 Bushell provided a number of early articles on Chinese art for the Burlington before his death in 1908. As Judith Green has noted, Bushell valued Chinese objects not for their aesthetic qualities but for their antiquarian interest, as historical documents, and drew on Chinese sources to produce histories of the objects, their provenance, and the meanings of the inscriptions on many of them.21 As perhaps befits Bushell’s profession as a medical

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doctor, this reflected a broader nineteenth-century discourse of scientism and evolutionism. Bushell’s approach exemplified the decisive move of Chinese art out of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ of earlier collectors to its being regarded as both archaeological and ethnographic ‘specimen’. His few essays for the Burlington are entirely concerned with antiquarian aspects of Chinese art. While the magazine valued his contributions to scholarship, it nevertheless criticised the limitations of his approach. In 1905, it reviewed Bushell’s book, Chinese Art: In his singularly modest preface he explains that his position is merely that of an inquirer, and an inquirer every sinologist must be for years to come […] The author has done all that archaeological and linguistic science can do in the matter of historical and palaeographic research, and has a manysided knowledge of Chinese history, religion, language, and manufactures. Nevertheless he is not an art critic, and though the day may be far distant when another author will arrive who combines equal learning with sound taste and insight into works of art, such an author must arrive before we can have a standard book on the subject.22

In spite of such aestheticist objections to scholarly narrowness, the Burlington subsequently devoted considerable attention to the ‘scientific study’ of Chinese art. This was consolidated particularly by the advent of R. L. Hobson as the magazine’s leading writer on Chinese ceramics in 1909, from which time he produced sixty articles up until 1933. Hobson was a key figure in early twentieth-century Chinese art scholarship. He was in charge of oriental antiquities at the British Museum for twenty-seven years and was instrumental in the China Exhibition at Burlington House in 1935. The Times praised his ‘hawk-like eye to observe and the unswerving directness of judgement which enabled him to master the material whether in clay or in print, and to build up a structure of reliable fact where all had been surmise and unproved tradition’.23 Hobson’s position as a Burlington contributor on Chinese ceramics was established with a series of six articles on ‘Wares of the Sung and Yuan Dynasties’ in 1909–10, contemporaneous with the ground-breaking exhibition in 1910, Early Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, at which newly unearthed ‘tomb wares’ were displayed to a wider public than hitherto. In these articles, while he acknowledges changing taste from Qing to earlier ceramic ware, his prime concern is with classification, periodisation, places of manufacture, and the veracity of documentary sources such as ‘Hsiang’s album’, discussion of which is the main topic of the first article in the series.24 Further series of articles subsequently appeared in the Burlington, demonstrating

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Hobson’s patient work of cataloguing: ‘Chinese Cloisonné Enamels’ (1912), ‘The Eumorfopoulos Collection’ (1919), ‘The Gow Collection’ (1919−21), and the ‘Pottery of the Six Dynasties’ (1928). Hobson’s aesthetic judgements and ventures into critical evaluation are often terse, and eschew key modernist terms such as ‘vitality’. In ‘A Silver Cup of the Yuan Dynasty’ (1912), the object described is simply judged ‘more quaint than beautiful to the Western eye’.25 Discussing a recently acquired Chinese sculpture in the British Museum in 1917, Hobson shows his aesthetic appreciation when he writes that: ‘The well-balanced proportions, the dignified natural pose, the simple drapery with its supple, flowing lines and the expressive features are full of character and strength.’ Yet he seems more comfortable attending to more practical considerations of scale and skill, continuing: It is built, moreover, on an imposing scale, especially for ceramic sculpture in which large figures present special difficulties in modelling and firing and are liable to many mishaps. But it has come through the ordeal of the kiln without distortion or blemish.26

A rare reference in another article by Hobson to Xie He’s aesthetic principle, here translated as ‘life-movement’, tellingly puts the term in inverted commas: ‘The three grooms […] are delightfully real persons. Their attitude as holding imaginary leading reins is full of “lifemovement”; and one feels that one is here in the presence of a genuine T’ang citizen, henchman though he be.’27 Hobson then characteristically moves quickly on from referring to the ‘power’ of the sculptures to their importance ‘for purposes of study’. Writing about another figure, a Lohan, Hobson tellingly comments that the sculpture exerts ‘an almost uncanny fascination […] even […] in the unemotional Western’.28 By contrast ‘emotion’ was a favoured term of both Fry and Bell, another of whose key concepts alongside ‘significant form’ was ‘aesthetic emotion’. A central idea of Fry’s, expressed in his 1920 ‘Retrospect’, was that art served to communicate the emotion of the artist to the spectator.29 The most prolific scholarly contributor on Chinese art to the Burlington during Roger Fry’s lifetime was Walter Perceval Yetts, authoring over seventy articles up to 1934. Like Bushell, a medical doctor, Yetts had also served as physician to the British Legation in Beijing. Having turned to Chinese art scholarship, he later wrote three volumes of the catalogue of the prominent collector George Eumorfopoulos and became Professor of Chinese Art at the Courtauld Institute in 1933.30 The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

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described him as a ‘perfectionist’ with a ‘sense of responsibility […] for accurate information and balanced judgement’.31 Yetts’s first article for the Burlington, ‘Pictures of a Chinese Immortal’ (1921), is indicative of his primarily scholarly interest in historical and ethnographic aspects of Chinese art. The article is concerned almost entirely with the historical context and the transmission through ten centuries of images of a particular Chinese xian or immortal, Lu Dongpin. Yetts’s expressed aim is to demonstrate that a millennium of varying yet still traditionally determined images of Lu Dongpin exemplify ‘that peculiar conservatism and love of strict adherence to ancient type’ in Chinese art. Like Hobson, Yetts was not entirely averse to aesthetic evaluation. He comments on one Lu Dongpin portrait: ‘Regarded as a work of art it is open to criticism. For instance, the spontaneity and significance of the original brushwork have assuredly suffered at the hands of the copyist and stone mason […].’ However, Yetts quickly adds that ‘such considerations are beside the present argument and quite subsidiary to the main fact’.32 Other significant scholarly contributors on Chinese art to the Burlington included Arthur Waley, Bernard Rackham (1876−1964), Osvald Sirén (1879−1966) and H. F. E. Visser (1890−1965). While all of these would at times venture into aesthetic criticism, they would focus in their work largely on more empirical considerations. With its important position in the commercial and scholarly world of collecting and connoisseurship, it was natural that the Burlington would wish to employ such expertise in this way. This focus, however, at times sat awkwardly with the prominent role that the Burlington allowed to a modernist discourse of aesthetic criticism, to which I shall now turn.

Aesthetic and Modernist Advocacy of Chinese Art in the Burlington By the time of the Burlington’s launch, the practice of admiring Chinese art on aesthetic grounds was already well established, but the material and the context for such appreciation was changing as new kinds of Chinese objects increasingly entered Britain and as modernist aesthetics developed. In the 1860s, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James Whistler had both been credited with instigating an aesthetic fashion for Chinese blue underglaze porcelain. The ensuing ‘Chinamania’ built on the chinoiserie tastes of the previous century, and as such, contrasted increasingly in the early twentieth century with the new

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influx of objects from China. These were often less decorated than Ming and Qing ceramics, and therefore better matched to modernist interest in ‘pure form’. An increasing number of Chinese paintings also began to enter British collections, both through such previously mentioned dubious routes as looting, and later through the activities of explorers such as Sir Aurel Stein (1862−1943). These paintings inspired the enthusiastic appreciation (as well as critical scholarship) of people such as Laurence Binyon, curator at the British Museum and a key figure in the influence of Chinese art on British modernism. Both Binyon and Fry, as we shall see, would write much about the ‘linear rhythm’ and the ‘calligraphic line’ of Chinese painting. Before discussing the contributions of Binyon and Fry to the Burlington’s modernist appreciation of Chinese art, however, I wish to note an underlying concern in the magazine, not only with the aesthetic, but with the spiritual example set by Chinese art, and to suggest that this may be linked to the magazine’s critique of modernity and promotion of modern art. In 1903 the American art historian Bernhard Berenson, a key mentor of Roger Fry’s in the connoisseurship of early Renaissance art, wrote a rare article for the Burlington. (He and Fry fell out following a rivalrous argument over attributions.)33 While Berenson’s main topic relates to various Renaissance painters’ representations of the story of St Francis, he includes, as a means of criticising the overly realist nature of much of the Western tradition, an effusion on a Chinese picture of Buddhist monks. Concluding a detailed critical appreciation of this picture, Berenson writes: Why is Christian art so unreligious, so unspiritual, as compared with the art of Buddhism? Is it because we Europeans as individuals are much less spiritual, much less mystical, than orientals [sic]? … Our art has a fatal tendency to become science, and we scarcely possess a masterpiece which does not bear the marks of having been a battlefield for divided interests.34

While not explicitly modernist, I would argue that Berenson’s thinking here provides a crucial subtext to modernist aesthetics, for the lack of ‘spirit’ in an overly mechanistic modernity is a key motive for modernism’s search for new forms of practice. Berenson’s strategy of critiquing Western ‘scientific’ realism through the more spiritual freedom from representational accuracy of Chinese art was replicated in the Burlington nine years later, when critic Sir Arthur Clutton-Brock similarly compared a Titian portrait of John the Baptist with a Chinese portrait of a hermit, writing that, with the latter, here was a ‘civilised’ artist painting a ‘modern’ man and allowing for both a

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Figure 3.2 Image of St John the Baptist by Titian and a Chinese religious painting, from an article by Sir Arthur Clutton-Brock in The Burlington Magazine, January 1912, issue 106, p. 198.

‘holiness’ and an ‘emotional significance’ that were conspicuously absent in the overly sophisticated rendering of the Titian (Fig. 3.2).35 Laurence Binyon, whose importance in mediating Chinese culture and aesthetics for British modernism is discussed in Chapter 4 of this volume, wrote on Chinese painting for the Burlington throughout his career, and in his earliest full article in January 1904, ‘A Chinese Painting of the Fourth Century’, he similarly asserts the spiritual importance of the example of Chinese art.36 Writing of the British Museum’s newly acquired early painting ‘Admonitions of the Court Instructress’, attributed to Gu Kaizhi (c. 344−406 ad), Binyon praises Chinese art’s ‘spirituality and expressiveness’, recommending Okakura’s Ideals of the East (1903) as a guide. Binyon’s main focus, however, is on the aesthetic, and it is he who introduces to the Burlington Xie He’s notion of ‘rhythmic vitality’. (It is worth noting here the complementarity of this idea of ‘vitality’ with that found in the thought of Henri Bergson, in terms of their simultaneous influence on artistic modernism.) Gu Kaizhi is argued by Binyon to display just such ‘vitality’ in his painting, and is thoroughly acclaimed as a

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‘modern’ artist; he ‘would have enchanted Aubrey Beardsley’. Politically, Binyon voices a similarly anti-imperialist position to that of Fry, noting wryly that Chinese art needs to be protected from ‘armies of western civilisation’ and looking forward to when ‘we have learned to look at Chinese masterpieces without wanting to burn them first’; however, he also displays the characteristic national focus of the Burlington, in stating the importance of the Gu Kaizhi acquisition for ‘our national collection’. Most of Binyon’s subsequent writing for the Burlington focuses on empirical matters; his ideas about the ‘modernness’ of Chinese art were more fully elaborated elsewhere, particularly in the two books Painting in the Far East (1908) (praised by Arthur Morrison in the Burlington for advocating a ‘pure sense of art’ and ‘a less gross and material view of art than that which is in the European habit’) and Flight of the Dragon (1911) praised in BLAST (1915) by Ezra Pound.37 Such enthusiasm as Berenson’s and Binyon’s for the spiritual and aesthetic aspects of Chinese art were not merely individual views, but had consistent editorial backing in the Burlington. All three of the longest-serving editors in the magazine’s first three decades, Charles Holmes (1904−9), Roger Fry and Robert Tatlock (1921−33), would voice pro-modernist views of Chinese art. ‘Archaic Chinese Bronzes’ (1905), for example, while largely an empirical account of bronze vessels and their classification and periodisation, sees Holmes opine that ‘the next movement of European art (which for the moment seems to have exhausted the possibilities of realism) may take the form of a return to the principles enunciated by the Chinese more than a thousand years ago’.38 In the same year, Holmes also contributed ‘The Use of Japanese Art to Europe’, which aims ‘to separate the essential points in which Oriental art differs from our own and see what lessons our artists may draw from it’; the article again criticises scientifically based European realism, as against the calligraphic line of Chinese and Japanese art, for lacking the latter’s ‘power of suggesting swift motion, and therewith of vitality’.39 For his own part, Robert Tatlock penned two appreciative articles on individual Chinese art objects, in ‘An Unidentified Chinese Mask’ (1925), and ‘A T’ang Figure’ (1928).40 Roger Fry himself wrote on numerous occasions on Chinese art for the Burlington, especially exhibitions and book reviews, but also through references to Chinese art and aesthetics in articles on other subjects and in theoretical essays. Three review articles of Fry’s for the Burlington demonstrate his characteristic concerns and approach. In the first of these, a 1911 review of a private collection of Chinese

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Figure 3.3 ‘Toad in White Jade’ from The Burlington Magazine, September 1922, issue 232, p. 104.

porcelain, his aesthetic enthusiasm is conspicuous. He uses the words ‘beauty’ or ‘beautiful’ ten times in two and a half pages, praises the ‘masterly feeling for spatial arrangement and rhythm’ of one vase, and wonders at the ‘heroic self-effacement’ of the authorial anonymity in such ceramic art.41 Eleven years later, Fry contributed ‘A Toad in White Jade’, a brief formalist appreciation of a small jade animal sculpture (Fig. 3.3). Consistent with his broader practice of focusing on individual works yet at the same time theorising freely, Fry writes: The problem of the artist is almost always the same, namely, that of discovering a possible synthesis for life and form. […] The vivid impression of the inner life of the animal is the most striking effect of this work. […] It is a masterpiece of plastic design as logical and as sure in its rhythm as the most conventional art, but for all that with a freedom and subtlety that can embrace life.42

In a third piece of Fry’s dedicated to Chinese art, a 1923 review of a collection at Yamanaka’s London dealership, Fry takes a contrastive approach, characteristically condemning the ‘mechanical’ patterning in a certain bronze mirror (which he sardonically imagines could be ‘a modern sham, machine-made in Birmingham for exportation to the East’) with another mirror, ostensibly of the same period, that is

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‘vitally rhythmical’ in design. Fry explicitly links the need for discernment among Chinese artworks to the need to weigh value in modern art: ‘there are nearly as great differences between the aesthetic achievement of different artists [in China] as we note among our contemporaries’.43 Fry’s citations of Chinese art in the Burlington in support of his formalist appreciation of modern art spanned a variety of artistic forms. He praises the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska for using ‘his various materials […] always with an instinctive sense of their material life […] comparable to those early Chinese sculptors whose work he so enthusiastically admired’.44 In an essay, ‘Line as a Means of Expression in Modern Art’ in 1918−19, Fry regrets that: ‘We have never held calligraphy in the esteem that the Chinese and Persians did’, advocating ‘a possibility of expression in pure line’, whose ‘rhythm may be of infinite different kinds’ as seen in ‘the quality of Matisse’s line’.45 Fry also cited Chinese art in praise of the jewellery designs of Florence Koehler, not only to belie the ‘vague feeling that the utility of the work of the applied arts brings into play a lower kind of faculty’, but also to embody an exemplary ‘reconciliation […] between barbaric vitality and preciosity [that] has always marked the best products of Chinese art’.46 Little wonder that shortly after Fry became co-editor of the Burlington in 1909, an article simply entitled ‘Oriental Art’ had advocated the study of art from China as conducive to ‘a more spiritual, a more expressive idea of design’ for the West.47 Perhaps the most significant meeting point in the Burlington of the advocacy of modernism and of Chinese art, in retrospect, appears when the latter is cited in support of Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910. In Arthur Clutton-Brock’s review of the exhibition for the Burlington, he writes, again invoking the importance of emotion, that: the aim of the Post-Impressionists is to substitute the deeper and more lasting emotional interest for the interest of curiosity. Like the great Chinese artists, they have tried to know thoroughly what they paint before they begin to paint it, and out of the fullness of their knowledge to choose only what has an emotional interest for them.48

We thus see modernist aesthetics intertwining extensively with ideas of Chinese art in the Burlington. Western modernist aesthetics, in particular a formalism that made claims to universal applicability, were in fact responding to increasing Western encounters with other forms of art, not just Chinese. As the Burlington itself noted in 1911: By devoting much of its space to the criticism of early Chinese pottery and

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painting, to the origins of Mohammedan art, and even to the art of quite primitive civilisations, the Magazine has, we think, helped to enlarge our idea of what qualities are essential to great works of art.49

Moreover, particularly with the questioning of traditional religion, modernism coincided with a crisis of confidence in Western civilisation, into which modernist aesthetics could be inserted as a new article of faith, the more universalist the better, especially when seemingly allied with such a ‘spiritual’ tradition as the Chinese. Within this dynamic, as Colin Rhodes has noted of tribal art in the Burlington, Chinese art could authenticate modern European art, which could then in turn re-authenticate Chinese art.50 Virginia Woolf understood this well when she remembered in her biography of Roger Fry: Then there was the great lady, the patroness of art, who, confronted with a blue Picasso, emitted ‘one of those great sayings of the century – “Well, if you call them Chinese, I think they’re beautiful, but if you call them French, I think they’re quite stupid”’.51

Chinese art moreover played a mediating role between ideas of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘primitive’, as again Colin Rhodes has argued. In the Burlington the consistent aesthetic appreciation of Chinese art heralded perhaps more challenging endorsements that the magazine would soon make, under Fry’s auspices, of such ‘primitive’ forms as ‘Negro Art’ and ‘Children’s Drawings’.52

The Relationship between Scholarship and Modernist Advocacy ‘Scientific’ scholars and aesthetic critics would often display accommodation and deference to one another in the Burlington. Fry himself was notable in deferring to expertise, while practising aesthetic criticism himself. On the Toad in White Jade previously mentioned, he courteously wrote: ‘I can fortunately leave it to more competent hands to discuss its provenance and date.’53 Conversely, praising Fry’s formalist introduction to a book on Animals in Chinese Art in 1923, the more empiricist Arthur Waley writes: ‘It is always easier to talk of archaeology than of art. In his preface Mr. Fry has chosen the more difficult course.’ The accommodation between the two approaches is also well illustrated by the chapter order in the Burlington monograph on Chinese Art of 1925, in which Roger Fry provides an opening chapter which recapitulates many of his aesthetic and modernist views on Chinese art, and is then followed by a series of

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articles by Binyon, Rackham, Sirén and others that are overwhelmingly scholarly and empirical. At times, however, a tension would emerge between the two discourses. On the one hand, as we have already seen in early criticism of Bushell, narrowly empirical approaches could meet with resistance from Burlington contributors. Lewis Einstein, writing in 1912, commented: In an art which has so important a literary and calligraphic side, it is unfortunate that those few Westerns [sic] who have the necessary Chinese scholarship should have apparently so little comprehension of our own standards of art criticism as to restrict their utility to the translators’ task.54

In 1924, critically reviewing Waley’s own Introduction to the Study of Chinese Art, Roger Fry laments the ‘flatness of effect’ brought about by Waley’s not sharing ‘with the reader any of his own esthetic [sic] experiences’.55 On the other hand, criticism of aesthetic discourse also emerges in the Burlington; for example, a 1912 article complained about ‘aesthetic vapouring in the hackneyed jargon’ in writing about Chinese art;56 one of 1925 criticised the ‘lyricism divorced from discrimination’ of a book on Chinese art under review;57 and again in 1925 Leigh Ashton, later Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, berated Osvald Sirén for a ‘paralysing’ attempt at aesthetic criticism: Few can tread this thorny field as firmly, yet as delicately, as Mr. Roger Fry, but much can be forgiven an author’s bad expression of theory, if the practical application of it is successful. But here Dr. Siren seems to fail in both respects. The central pillar of his aesthetic structure is what he calls ‘rhythm,’ […] This means very little […].58

Conclusion Colin Rhodes has noted that ‘even before Fry’s death in 1934, the magazine [under Read’s editorship] seems to have pulled back from its modernist position’.59 The same is true of the advocacy of Chinese art as ‘modern’, and its use as a means of legitimating modernist art. Modernist aesthetic approaches to Chinese art preponderate in the 1910s, and thereafter decline. The main reasons for this, I would argue, were the continually increasing demands for scholarly work on the ongoing accumulation of Chinese art in private and public collections in Britain, as against the increasing public acceptance of modernism itself, making it less necessary to provide aesthetic legitimation through Chinese art; the National Gallery purchased a

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Cézanne in 1926, much to Roger Fry’s satisfaction.60 Collectors such as George Eumorfopoulos enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with scholars such as Yetts, Hobson and Binyon, who catalogued his work. Once the affinities of European modernist art with certain aspects of Chinese aesthetics had been well established, along with the aesthetic paradigms of modernism itself, there was simply less perceived need to continue repeating them than to get on with the business of classification, dating, attribution and historical and ethnographic contextualisation. While it had successfully and significantly ridden the wave of early British modernism, and had done much to connect this with Chinese art, the Burlington was primarily, as its title indicated, a publication ‘for connoisseurs’, and what connoisseurs and collectors overwhelmingly demanded was empirical research. Roger Fry himself continued to wed modernist aesthetics to Chinese art up until his Last Lectures, but then, as Leigh Ashton put it, ‘Few can tread this thorny field as firmly, yet as delicately, as Mr. Roger Fry.’

Notes 1. Elam, Caroline (2003), ‘“A More and More Important Work”: Roger Fry and the Burlington Magazine’, The Burlington Magazine, March 2003, pp. 143−4. 2. See Rees Leahy, Helen (2002), ‘“For Connoisseurs’: The Burlington Magazine 1903−11’, in Mansfield, Elizabeth (ed.), Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, London: Routledge, pp. 231−45. 3. Elam, ‘A More and More Important Work’, p. 142. 4. Ibid. pp. 147−8. 5. Reed, Christopher (1996), A Roger Fry Reader, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 7. 6. Anon., ‘[Editorial]’ (1903), The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, March 1903, p. 4. 7. Ibid. p. 3. 8. Ibid. p. 4. 9. Denis, Maurice, and Roger Fry (1910), ‘Cézanne-I’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, January 1910, p. 207. 10. See Green, Judith Tybil (2002), ‘Britain’s Chinese Collections, 1842−1943: Private Collecting and the Invention of Chinese Art’, PhD thesis, University of Sussex. 11. See Porter, David (2010), The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17−36. 12. ‘On Oriental Carpets. Article I: Introduction’ The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, March 1903, pp. 75−83. 13. Bell, Clive (1913), ‘Post-Impressionism and Aesthetics’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 1913, p. 227. 14. Waley, Arthur (1920), ‘Chinese Philosophy of Art−I. Note on the Six

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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Ralph Parfect “Methods”’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, December 1920, p. 310. Reed, A Roger Fry Reader, p. 12. Clunas, Craig (1994), ‘Oriental Antiquities/Far Eastern Art’, positions, east asia cultures critique 2:2, Fall 1994, pp. 318−57; Green, ‘Britain’s Chinese Collections’, pp. 39−40. ‘Front Matter’ (1913), The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, March 1913, p. 20. Fry, Roger et al. (1925), Chinese Art: An Introductory Review of Painting, Ceramics, Textiles, Bronzes, Sculpture, Jade, Etc, London: Batsford, p. v. See Clunas, ‘Oriental Antiquities/Far Eastern Art’, p. 321. Green, ‘Britain’s Chinese Collections’, p. 97. Ibid. p. 103. ‘Chinese Art. Vol. I by S. W. Bushell − Book Review’ (1905), The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, February 1905, p. 417. ‘R. L. Hobson’ (1941), The Times, Saturday, 7 June 1941, p. 6. Hobson, R. L. (1909), ‘Wares of the Sung and Yuan Dynasties−I’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, April 1909, pp. 18−25. ‘A Silver Cup of the Yuan Dynasty’ (1912), The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, December 1912, p. 158. ‘A New Chinese Figure in the British Museum’ (1917), The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, December 1917, p. 243. ‘The Eumorfopoulos Collection−Xi. T’ang Pottery Figures in the Victoria and Albert Museum’ (1921), The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, January 1921, p. 25. ‘A New Chinese Masterpiece in the British Museum’ (1914), The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, May 1914, p. 69. Fry, Roger (1920), Vision and Design, London: Chatto & Windus, p. 194. ‘London University and Chinese Art’ (1933), The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, April 1933, p. 196. Hansford, S. Howard (1958), ‘Walter Perceval Yetts’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, April 1958, p. 111. Yetts, W. Perceval (1921), ‘Pictures of a Chinese Immortal’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, September 1921, pp. 113−21. Spalding, Frances (1980), Roger Fry: Art and Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 69. Berenson, Bernhard (1903), ‘A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend. Part I’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, September−October 1903, p. 7. Clutton-Brock, Arthur (1912), ‘Chinese and European Religious Art’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, January 1912, pp. 197−200. See Hatcher, John (1995), Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Morrison, Arthur (1908), ‘Chinese and Japanese Painting’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, December 1908, p. 159. Holmes, C. J. (1905), ‘Archaic Chinese Bronzes’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, April 1905, p. 19. ‘The Use of Japanese Art to Europe’ (1905), The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, October 1905, p. 10.

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40. Tatlock, R. R. (1925), ‘An Unidentified Chinese Mask’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, October 1925; ‘A T’ang Figure’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, November 1928. 41. Fry, Roger (1911), ‘Richard Bennett Collection of Chinese Porcelain’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, June 1911, pp. 133−9. 42. Fry, Roger, and Una Pope-Hennessy (1922), ‘A Toad in White Jade’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, September 1922, p. 103. 43. Fry, Roger (1923), ‘Some Chinese Antiquities’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, December 1923, pp. 276−83. 44. Fry, Roger (1916), ‘Gaudier-Brzeska’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, August 1916, p. 210. 45. Fry, Roger (1918), ‘Line as a Means of Expression in Modern Art’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, December 1918, p. 202. 46. Fry, Roger (1910), ‘A Modern Jeweller’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, June 1910, pp. 169−74. 47. Anon., ‘Oriental Art’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, April 1910, pp. 3−4. 48. Clutton-Brock, Arthur (1911), ‘The Post-Impressionists’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, January 1911, pp. 216−17. 49. Anon. (1911), ‘Number One Hundred’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, July 1911, pp. 185−6. 50. Rhodes, Colin (2004), ‘Burlington Primitive: Non-European Art in the Burlington Magazine before 1930’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, February 2004, p. 102. 51. Woolf, Virginia ([1940] 2003), Roger Fry: A Biography, London: Vintage, p. 256. 52. Salmon, André (1920), ‘Negro Art’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, April 1920, pp. 164−6; Fry, Roger (1917), ‘Children’s Drawings’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, June 1917, pp. 225−31. 53. Fry, Roger, and Una Pope-Hennessy, ‘A Toad in White Jade’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, September 1922, p. 103. 54. Einstein, Lewis (1912), ‘Some Notes on Chinese Painting’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, July 1912, p. 185. 55. Fry, Roger (1924), ‘An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting by Arthur Waley’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, January 1924, pp. 47−8. 56. Einstein, Lewis (1912), ‘Some Notes on Chinese Painting’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, July 1912, p. 185. 57. Visser, H. F. E. (1925), ‘Bildwerke Ost. Und Südasiens Aus Der Sammlung Yi Yuan by Karl With. Review by: H. F. E. Visser’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, May 1925, pp. 251−2. 58. Ashton, Leigh (1925), ‘Chinese Sculpture’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, August 1925, pp. 104−5. 59. Rhodes, ‘Burlington Primitive’, p. 104. 60. Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography, p. 286.

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Chapter 4

Chinese Artistic Influences on the Vorticists in London Michelle Ying-Ling Huang

Asian export commodities traded by the East India Company were the catalyst for the manifestation of chinoiserie, which reached its peak in mid eighteenth-century Britain. From the seventeenth century, cabinets of curiosity across Europe were filled with numerous exotic objects and artifacts from China, Japan, India and other sources, while Asian export art which was made to European taste provided an inspiring prototype for chinoiserie objects. A European image of the people, landscape, culture and art of China was visualised in a wide range of artistic and architectural productions, notably wallpapers, porcelains, lacquer wares, furniture, and interior design in the ‘Chinese’, rococo and Gothic tastes. Although the vogue for Chinese styles was somewhat eclipsed when japonisme prevailed in the West during the fin-de-siècle period, Europeans and Americans renewed their interests in chinoiserie fashion in the early twentieth century. Their search for fantastical decorations was extended to an intellectual inquiry into the aesthetic ideas of early Chinese art. By 1910, Chinese and Japanese artworks had become widely available in museums and on art markets in the West. Coinciding with a dynamic change in modern European art and the chinoiserie revival, oriental ideas were becoming an alternative source of inspiration for the West, and were discussed and applied in the work of modern poets and artists in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Laurence Binyon, English poet and pioneering curator of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, was influential in disseminating ideas about Asian painting to collectors, scholars and artists in both Europe and America. In the Bloomsbury circle, Binyon was renowned for his generosity in helping young artists and writers, including Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, who later collaborated with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to promote a new form of art for which Pound coined the name ‘Vorticism’. Being inspired by Binyon’s

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literary work and his scholarship in East Asian painting, the Vorticists shared a common interest in early Chinese art: Pound found Chinese painting and written characters fascinating, Gaudier-Brzeska was interested in Chinese animal bronzes of the Zhou dynasty (1100− 256 bc) and Lewis in the landscape art of the Song dynasty (ad 960−1276). Through a discussion of Binyon’s relationships with Lewis and Pound, this chapter examines how the Vorticists became interested in Chinese art in the 1910s. With early Chinese art as an exotic stimulus differentiating from other European art movements, it is important to study how Lewis, Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska expressed in their Vorticist tenets their curiosities about Chinese art and culture, and how Chinese aesthetics and the British Museum’s collections of Asian art influenced the literary and artistic ideas of English modernism as well as the creative practice of avant-garde artists working in London.

Pound’s Writings on the Vortex The relationship between Binyon and Pound has been expounded by contemporary scholars, such as James Wilhelm, Qian Zhaoming and Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, whose books on modernism reveal the cross-cultural and intellectual interactions among poets, artists, curators and scholars in early twentieth-century London.1 Ezra Pound, who came to London in September 1908, was among the key figures involved in the social network of British avant-garde artists and writers and worked regularly in the Reading Room of the British Museum.2 It was perhaps on 31 January 1909, that Pound was first introduced to Binyon by the Australian poet Frederic Manning, but on 6 February, the London publisher Elkin Mathews gathered Binyon, Pound and poet Selwyn Image, for lunch at a small restaurant near the British Museum; the Vienna Café.3 Pound was invited to the Museum’s Print Room on 9 February 1909, and made subsequent visits on 1 March and 16 June.4 Binyon became Pound’s mentor for his study of early Chinese art in Britain, and at subsequent lunches at the Vienna Café introduced him to Lewis and the poets, Thomas Sturge Moore and Robert Bridges.5 Binyon played a significant role in deepening Pound’s interest in Chinese art and culture when the latter was formulating new ideas of form and design in poetry. In early March 1909, Pound attended Binyon’s lecture series on ‘Art and Thought in East and West: Parallels and Contrasts’ at the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington.6 Pound admired

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Binyon’s pioneering knowledge of Chinese and Japanese art, and found his lecture ‘intensely interesting’.7 Pound’s interest in Asian art coincided with the rise of the modernist movement in poetry in the West. The experience of the First World War challenged religious beliefs in America and Europe. The superiority of Western culture became suspect and aroused an interest in Eastern cultures.8 Pound saw oriental art as a much-needed model for the West, while Chinese philosophies inspired his Imagist theory and conception of Vorticism. In 1912 Pound was configuring an entirely new poetics in which, in his first manifesto for Imagism in Poetry March 1913, the idea of ‘rhythm’ was foregrounded.9 Pound’s Imagist theory envisaged poetry infused with dynamic expression to drive its rhythmic movement to create a harmony.10 For him, poetry was the most powerful means of artistic expression. Wyndham Lewis found Pound’s idea of ‘rhythm’ reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler’s (1834–1903) theories.11 Pound appreciated Whistler’s aesthetics in the ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture (1885)12 and admired his music-poetry-painting correspondences.13 He concurred with Whistler’s idea that a painter should treat a flower ‘as his key, not as his model’.14 That is to say, the arrangement of form was far more important than the representation of objects. Like Whistler, Pound derived the ‘common ground of the arts’ from the concept of ‘harmony’ in musical keys, as well as their form, arrangement and organisation.15 It is also not difficult to detect the influence of Walter Pater’s aesthetics – ‘all arts approach the conditions of music’ – which Pound cited in his Vorticist manifesto of 1914.16 Pound’s concern for ‘arrangement’ and ‘expression’ also appeared in his writings on visual arts. In March 1914, he collaborated with Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska and other artists to establish the Rebel Art Centre, a rival to Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop, and prepared the first issue of the magazine BLAST which attacked decaying aesthetics inherited from the Victorian age. Pound conceived of the ‘Vortex’ as the innate power of man and his momentum, pushing the artist to present his vivid consciousness and emotion in ‘an intensive art’, similar to a machine working to the point of greatest efficiency and maximum energy.17 The Vorticists were dynamic artists and desired intensity of expression, ‘for certain forms of expression are “more intense” than others’.18 This fluid force or vortex pushed the artist to the most intense and expressive state. The essence of ‘an intensive art’, for Pound, was the ‘arrangement’ – just as poets arranged words and images, painters arranged forms and colours, sculptors arranged ‘planes in relations’.19 Different from simple imitation, the ‘arrange-

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ment’, or the organisation of forms, was a much more energetic and creative action. Pound perceived that: From Whistler and the Japanese, or Chinese … the fragment of the Englishspeaking world that spreads itself into print, learned to enjoy ‘arrangements’ of colours and masses.20 When a man begins to be more interested in the ‘arrangement’ than in the dead matter arranged, then he begins ‘to have an eye for’ the difference between the good, the bad and the mediocre in Chinese painting. His remarks on Byzantine, and Japanese, and on ultra-modern painting begin to be interesting and intelligible.21

Chinese painting became a touchstone for validating the principles of Vorticism. The anti-mimetic nature of Chinese painting was a model for ‘intensive art’.22 The relationship Pound made between Chinese art and Vorticism is also manifested in his ‘Chronicles’ of 1915.23 The approving quotes from The Flight of the Dragon (1911) show that Pound appreciated Binyon’s phrasing of ‘ordered relations’, or ‘organic relation’.24 In particular, he was much enchanted by the Chinese painting aesthetics of qiyun shengdong (in Herbert Giles’s translation ‘rhythmic vitality’) which was the first law of Lufa (The Six Principles) set out in Xie He’s (fl. fifth century) Guhua pinlu (The Record of the Classification of Old Painters) of the Southern Qi dynasty (ad 479−502).25 Binyon’s writings inspired Pound to correlate the ‘arrangement’ and ‘rhythm’ in Chinese painting with the ‘movement’ and ‘energy’ of Vorticism. John Hatcher points out that Binyon’s emphasis on art as being spiritual and non-naturalistic, his attacks on Western art’s commitment to mimesis since the Renaissance, and his investigations of ‘rhythm’ – the artist’s use of mass, rhythm and design to incarnate the underlying ‘energies’ and ‘essence’ of reality – found their way into Pound’s developing ideas of ‘absolute rhythm’ and organic form. Binyon’s books and his personal introduction to Pound of the riches of Asian art and thought exerted a lifelong influence, extending through Pound’s Imagist, Cathay, and Vorticist periods and into his decades of work on the Cantos. Binyon helped the young Pound move beyond his cosmopolitan but still Eurocentric vision, and thus helped bring a more genuinely multicultural dimension to nascent modernism.26 Woon-Ping Chin Holaday also suggests that in Painting in the Far East (1908), ‘Binyon’s analysis of the artist’s relationship to his tradition in the Orient may have adumbrated Pound’s own theories.’ 27 The practice of imitating tradition and surpassing the work of the past not only tested Chinese artists’ originality, but also liberated their creative mind to renew tradition. This principle of continuity seems to

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be a solution which Pound found inspiring and useful for Vorticist artists. The growing availability of oriental objects in art markets and galleries in London, especially the three exhibitions of Chinese and Japanese paintings held at the British Museum between 1910 and 1914, provided Pound with several opportunities to see tangible pictures of landscapes, flowers and birds, animals and still-life, as well as works expressive of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. Qian and Arrowsmith identify how the 1910−12 Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings at the British Museum which Binyon organised, inspired Pound’s literary work. In particular, The Admonitions of the Court Instructress, an early Chinese painting formerly attributed to Gu Kaizhi (c. 334−406 ad) of the Eastern Jin dynasty (ad 317–420), which was acquired by the British Museum in 1903, and first displayed in the exhibition, enhanced Pound’s interest in Chinese art, aesthetics and philosophy.28 The Aurel Stein collection of Buddhist paintings recovered from Dunhuang also provided genuine works for Pound to meditate, particularly the stillness of Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy and Loving-kindness. The Buddhist motif of Guanyin which appeared in The Pisan Cantos demonstrates the influence of Zen Buddhism on Pound’s writing.29 The distinctive aesthetic ideas behind Chinese paintings, including space, suggestion and tonality, also fascinated Pound. Pound’s poems reflected his appreciation of Chinese painters’ unique sense of colour and vision, as well as new concepts of form and compositional design. For instance, the ‘blue-and-green style’ of Chinese landscapes and the depiction of Dragon and Guanyin appear in Pound’s ‘A Song of the Degrees’ and ‘Further Instructions’ of 1913, as well as in ‘Three Cantos’ of 1917, respectively.30 Pound’s preference for oriental culture and Whistlerian aesthetics, together with his personal contact with Binyon at the British Museum, all contributed to his development of Imagism and Vorticism. Pound’s method of correlating different cultures allowed him to shuttle between the past, present and future, in poetry, painting and music, thus fusing the arts of the East and West.

Gaudier-Brzeska’s Interest in Ancient Chinese Art Among the Vorticists, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, whom Pound met at the Allied Artists exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall in July 1913, was closest in sharing his aesthetic ideas and enthusiasm for Chinese art.31

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In response to modern art movements, the two men sought inspiration from China’s ancient past. Although they advocated the maximum energy of Vorticism, their aesthetics also inclined towards the harmony of nature. Pound appreciated Gaudier-Brzeska’s unique sensitivity to animal life, which resulted in his vivid and harmonious animal drawings with free brushstrokes, such as Horse (1912), Antelope (1912−13) and Stag (1913) (Plate 2). Gaudier-Brzeska’s love of animals, birds and plants became a part of his artistic expression. The animal drawings were Gaudier-Brzeska’s direct response to nature and the expression of his own ego,32 that is the presentation of his ‘intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, in Pound’s words.33 What Pound saw as the absolute subjugation of details of a given work to the ‘dominant will’ he discussed in relation to Gaudier-Brzeska’s stag drawings and animal carvings: [H]e was so accustomed to observe the dominant line in objects that after he had spent, what could not have been more than a few days studying the subject at the museum, he could understand the primitive Chinese ideographs (not the later more sophisticated forms), and he was very much disgusted with the lexicographers who ‘hadn’t sense enough to see that that was a horse’, or a cow or a tree or whatever it might be […]34

Pound had become infatuated with Chinese characters after reading Fenollosa’s ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’ in October 1913.35 He venerated and used Chinese characters extensively as illustrations in The Cantos.36 However, contemporary scholars have questioned the accuracy of Pound’s and Fenollosa’s Chinese translations. Pound’s concept of the Chinese ideogram in fact reveals his occidental way of seeing.37 He summarised his thoughts in his ABC of Reading of 1934: [T]he Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures. That is to say, Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound […] it is still the picture of a thing; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things it pictures.38

Pound agreed with Fenollosa’s observation, or speculation to be exact, that Chinese characters are ‘images’, and that ‘a language written in this way simply HAD TO STAY POETIC’.39 Pound’s interpretation of the formulating principles of Chinese characters was too reductive to be correct. He left out, or was ignorant of, more complicated questions.40 Therefore, his association of ‘observing the dominant line in objects’ and ‘understanding Chinese ideographs’ becomes implausible. Pound’s misinterpretation and distortion of the

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principles of Chinese characters show that he overestimated GaudierBrzeska’s ability to read ‘a certain amount of Chinese writing without ANY STUDY’.41 However, most primitive ideographs, which were commonly shown on ancient Chinese bronzes as inscriptions, are representations of natural or animal images in lines. Some ideographs, such as ‘Horse’ (㤿) and ‘Stag’ (㮵 ), are not particularly difficult to comprehend. Whether or not Gaudier-Brzeska consciously used Chinese ideographs in his animal drawings, he was sensitive enough to capture the forms, the arrangement of lines, and the expression of emotions in animals. He insisted: ‘The great thing is: That sculpture consists in placing planes according to rhythm.’ 42 He created geometric yet cartoon-like images of animals in various positions, like the Cock (1912–13) in a Vorticist style (Plate 3). Using forceful brushstrokes, Gaudier-Brzeska brought both energy and emotions to create ‘rhythm’ in his dynamic drawings. It was this energy and rhythm in the highly stylised pen and ink strokes that led Pound to associate his work with Chinese ‘calligraphic drawings’. Gaudier-Brzeska’s friend Horace Brodzky remarked that the artist had worked after hours studying ‘everything’, including Egyptology and China, during the years 1912−13.43 When Gaudier-Brzeska first developed a strong interest in China and became influenced by other oriental enthusiasts such as Pound and Brodzky, he made some drawings, painted in Chinese ink with a flat pliable stick in a calligraphic mode.44 In his drawing of Brodzky’s head, Pound saw a ‘calligraphic drawing’ theory: ‘painting and drawing are first of all calligraphy. It is a belief Chinese in origin, or else deduced from Chinese work by some occidental theorist.’45 He remembered that Gaudier-Brzeska had been studying recondite early woodcuts and Chinese painting.46 Contours which are commonly found in Chinese painting and calligraphy were stimuli for Gaudier-Brzeska’s early drawings.47 Pound also believed that the animal bronzes of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046−256 bc) were an important source for Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture.48 In the Zhou dynasty, most vessels, braziers and mirrors of bronze were decorated with carvings in the shape of birds, snakes, dragons and tigers.49 These carvings influenced Gaudier-Brzeska’s investigation of abstracted animal forms in planes and lines, as well as his way of depicting animals in a geometrical manner. Pound suggested that Gaudier-Brzeska had a talent for synthesising the intimate feeling of animals in nature with the form of Chinese bronzes. In March 1914, he wrote in the Egoist:

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It is no use saying that [Jacob] Epstein is Egyptian and that [Gaudier-] Brzeska is Chinese [...] Brzeska is in a formative stage, he is abundant and pleasing. His animals have what one can only call a ‘snuggly’, comfortable feeling, that might appeal to a child […] Of the two animal groups, his stags are the more interesting if considered as a composition of forms. ‘A Boy with a Coney’ is ‘Chou’, or suggests slightly the bronze animals of that period. Brzeska is as much concerned with representing certain phases of animal life.50

Ironically, Pound’s judgment was challenged by his friend. GaudierBrzeska denied the Chinese influence and argued that his work was ‘better’ than the bronze animals of the Zhou dynasty: They had, it is true, a maturity brought by continuous rotundities – my statuette has more monumental concentration – a result of the use of flat and round surfaces. To be appreciated is the relation between the mass of the rabbit and the right arm with that of the rest. The next is a bird.51

Gaudier-Brzeska had studied Chinese bronzes and calligraphy on his visits to museums and art galleries in London around 1912.52 He took particular notice of primitive statues by the black, yellow, red and white races which he believed had a feeling of individuality: Egyptian, Assyrian, African, Chinese, Gothic and Greek.53 Arrowsmith argues that Gaudier-Brzeska looked mainly towards Assyian work and small carved objects from the Far East in the British Museum where he had also studied Chinese and Japanese calligraphy with Pound.54 The primitive sculptures and East Asian bronzes displayed in the British Museum were valuable resources for his investigation into form and movement which is ‘the translation of life’ and ‘should come into art’.55 Gaudier-Brzeska found that the forms of primitive sculpture could communicate both serene happiness and excessive sorrow, and were more emotive than the work of modern European sculptors.56 The ornamental style and geometrical elements of Chinese bronze animals of the Zhou dynasty also had a sense of individuality for him. Roger Fry too noticed that Gaudier-Brzeska’s early sculptures closely resembled early Chinese sculptures of which he also was an enthusiastic admirer.57 Gaudier-Brzeska’s vision of primitive and non-Western cultures was similar to Pound’s belief that the past is vital and capable of living in the future. In BLAST, Gaudier-Brzeska contrasted ‘the vortex’ of Indians with that of the Chinese. The former inclined towards the repetitive asceticism of Greek influence, whereas the latter was invested with intense paleolithic feeling from human ancestors, the spirits of the horse, the land and grain. He also appreciated this notion of the vortex in the Shang (c. 1600−1100 bc) and Zhou dynasties. According to his ‘Vortex’ of 1914, it appears that Gaudier-Brzeska

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acquired his knowledge of Chinese history and art through the Han (206 bc−ad 220) and Tang (618−907 ad) dynasties.58 In addition, he linked the ‘vortex’ to pre-Christian history from the barbaric world to the end of Impressionism by observing the history of ‘form’ in both the East and West. He admired the art of the East and Egypt at the expense of Greek sculpture which ‘WAS DERIVATIVE [its] feeling for form secondary. The absence of direct energy lasted for a thousand years.’59 This echoed Pound’s idea: ‘We have other standards, we have gone on with the intentions of Pico, to China and Egypt.’ 60 The non-European cultures, Pound recognised, had broadened GaudierBrzeska’s vision, ‘[i]n like manner he analyses the Chinese and Mexican and Oceanic forms. The sphere, the vertical, the horizontal, the cylinder and the pointed cone; and then the modern movement.’61 Through his cross-cultural study of primitive sculpture, GaudierBrzeska began a gradual process of formal geometric reductions, focusing on ‘the arrangement of his surfaces, lines and planes’ in his sculpture. He explored the notion of ‘rhythm’ in Dancer (1913) and Birds Erect (1914), especially the latter which was concerned with closely related and rounded geometric forms in a rhythmic arrangement of planes (Plate 4).62 While Pound found the ‘primary’ characteristic of sculpture as ‘FORM OR DESIGN IN THREE PLANES’, Gaudier-Brzeska emphasised the power of artists to control elements and create new forms in order to express their intellectual and conscious ideas. To express his own ‘vortex’, that is will and consciousness,63 Gaudier-Brzeska further claimed that: ‘I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES, I shall present my emotions by the ARRANGEMENT OF MY SURFACES, THE PLANES AND LINES BY WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED.’ 64 In this way, Gaudier called on the vortex in the modern world to create ‘the DESIGN of the future’.65 While Pound projected his oriental fantasy in literary works, Gaudier-Brzeska experimented with the style of ancient Chinese art in his animal drawings and early sculptures. Even when fighting in the trenches in 1915, Gaudier-Brzeska continued his study of Chinese art, expecting that after his return, he would ‘develop a style of [his] own which, like the Chinese, will embody both a grotesque and a nongrotesque side’.66 Unfortunately, Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in battle and therefore unable to apply his ideas of Chinese aesthetics to his vision of a new form of art.

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Lewis’s Search for Rhythm Wyndham Lewis first met Binyon sometime between 1898 and 1901, when he was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Timothy Materer remarks that by 1909 Lewis had become a protegé of Thomas Sturge Moore who introduced him to the British Museum circle meeting at the Vienna Café in New Oxford Street. Lewis received advice and encouragement from the mature poets and artists, and appreciated the literary works of the intellectual habitués, such as Binyon’s Porphyrion and Other Poems (1898) and Odes (1901).67 At the same time, these middle-aged scholars were impressed by Lewis’s literary talent and encouraged his interest in poetry.68 According to Victor Cassidy, in subsequent years Lewis showed ‘an unusual knowledge of oriental art in his theoretical and critical writings. Lewis’s paintings and drawings at various times showed distinct Eastern influences’.69 Lewis would have learnt about oriental painting from Binyon. He visited the Prints and Drawings Students’ Room (commonly known as the Print Room) of the British Museum quite regularly between October 1899 and December 1901.70 Even though Lewis might have looked at both European and oriental paintings and drawings during his visits to the Print Room, he would only have glimpsed selected Japanese and Chinese paintings such as those in the William Anderson and the Augustus Wollaston Franks collections. Lewis furthered a knowledge of Chinese art and culture after 1903 when Binyon and other sinologists, like Herbert Giles, began to publish their writings on Chinese pictorial arts. While Chinese ideas of ‘arrangement’ and ‘rhythm’ were exemplified in Pound’s poetry and Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture, Wyndham Lewis also engaged with these notions when he formulated his conception of Vorticist painting. Pound asserted: ‘if any man is to bring into Western art the power of Chinese painting it will be Lewis’.71 In the early 1910s, a forceful rhythm was expressed in Lewis’s drawings of dynamic figures and abstract background such as The Dancers (1912), Timon of Athens portfolio (1912) and Red Duet (1914). However, the ‘rhythm’ shown in Lewis’s drawings manifested a sense of anger and hostility that was different from the gentle, poetic and romantic ‘rhythm’ which Binyon found in the Admonitions scroll.72 As with Pound, Lewis was fascinated by Binyon’s writings on Chinese aesthetics, especially qiyun shengdong. According to David Peters Corbett, Binyon’s ideas in The Flight of the Dragon had been picked up by Wyndham Lewis, who was also concerned with ‘rhythm’ and ‘the transformation of the physical world of nature in

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the imagin-ative order of art’.73 It would seem that Lewis’s vision of Chinese painting was more clearly reflected in his writings than his paintings. In the manifesto of BLAST 1 (1914), Lewis declared the Vorticist’s hope of making in England ‘an art of Individuals’.74 He later expressed his regret in ‘Towards an Art-less Society’ that world politics had led to the outbreak of the war and the end of art, thus altering the face of European civilisation. ‘It left the European nations impoverished, shell-shocked, discouraged and unsettled.’75 In this tragic atmosphere, emergent new art movements were ‘the heralds’ of great social change: ‘In every case the structural and philosophic rudiments of life were sought out.’76 However, Lewis regretted that the artist was now of little general importance and regarded as ‘least valuable citizen’ in any society.77 Deprived of art, the healthy intellectual discipline of well-being is lost. Life instantly becomes so brutalized as to be mechanical and devoid of interest […] But without art – then life is utterly impossible. And there is unquestionably less and less art in life at the present time – and less and less in what passes as art, too.78

Lewis found ‘Life’, rather than ‘Nature’ to be an important concern for revitalising the cultural spirit of modern European art. He conceived that ‘Nature is a blessed retreat, in art, for those artists whose imagination is mean and feeble, whose vocation and instinct are unrobust’, ‘Infinite Nature […] does their thinking and seeing for them.’ 79 For Lewis, ‘imagination’ was an aspect of activity, reflecting man’s involvement in the material world and in the circumstances of his life.80 The artist must force his life into comprehensible forms, with no impulse to imitation, and ‘lets Life know its place in a Vorticist Universe!’81 Lewis’s emphases on ‘Life’, ‘Nature’ and the ‘Universe’ corresponded with the mentality of Chinese landscape painters, especially those of the Song dynasty (ad 960–1279). As Binyon wrote in Ma Yüan’s Landscape Roll (1916): [F]or the Chinese mind from very early times the universe was conceived as a stupendous unity, through which the eternal energy of life streamed under innumerable and ever-changing forms […] Hence in art, landscape seemed the greatest and worthiest subject of the brush because it included most of the elements of life.82

Inspired by Daoism and Zen Buddhism, Song painters demonstrated a way of freeing their imagination, individuality and spirit in landscape art. Binyon recognised them as great masters who transformed ‘Life’, ‘Nature’ and the ‘Universe’ into rhythmical forms of art.

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In his post-First World War manifesto, The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is your Vortex? (1919), Lewis admired the intimacy of man and nature in the Song landscape art: The best artists of the Sung period lived a secluded life, very luckily for them. It was considered incumbent upon them, in accordance with contemporary feeling, to inhabit the fairly distant country and live in intercourse with the objects of Nature. When this fashion passed, and a painter had to live within hailing distance of the court, the pictures produced showed an immediate decline in quality. That is one lesson.83

Lewis was not only attracted to the secluded life of Song artists, but also the creative capability and feat of Southern Song painters. He praised: ‘Ma Yuan [(active c. 1190−1225)] [who] we can consider, roughly speaking, as the creator of the first tree; or substitute for him the best artist, who has painted the best tree, that you can call to mind.’ 84 By 1920, Lewis’s knowledge of Ma Yuan was possibly acquired from Binyon’s writings on the so-called ‘Ma Yuan Landscape Roll’ in the Charles Lang Freer collection now in Washington DC. In a monograph on the artist, Binyon wrote that Ma Yuan’s name ‘brings with it associations of great pines and mountain solitudes and contemplative sages, portrayed with grand character and profound feeling’.85 Ma Yuan’s landscape was ‘a mirror of the mind of man’; its intellectual pleasure was derived from an emotion which belongs to the sense of life itself.86 Viewers would feel themselves embraced or melted according to the mood evoked. Thus, what Lewis appreciated in Ma Yuan were perhaps his skills in portraying the tree which embodied the forms of life, subtle affinities with its own nature, as well as the expression of the artist’s thought and emotion. According to Paul Edwards, Lewis admired the non-human principle in the art of Asia, in contrast to that of Europe, which proposes a finer standard of art upon purely human grounds. Through a spiritual engagement with Nature, the artist could reveal a fuller sense of mankind. This aspect of art is what Lewis found missing from the modernism of ‘purity’.87 In a situation where all styles were ideological, Lewis was compelled to construct a mythology of societies more or less outside the history that answer[s] to his ideal of the highest type of civilisation. These are earlier civilisations that are more in touch with nature, and through that, more in touch with non-human, metaphysical values.88

Hence, Edwards discerns that the Song art is ‘always Lewis’s touchstone for the greatest art’.89 Interestingly, Lewis extended his interest from Song landscape art

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to Chinese fengshui (the Wind-and-Water system of geomancy) which he consulted from Herbert Giles’s The Civilisation of China (1911). In 1914, Lewis had been struck in exploring the relationship between ‘Feng Shui and Contemporary Form’: Geomancy is the art by which the favourable influence of the shape of trees, weight of neighbouring water and its colour, height of surrounding houses, is determined. ‘No Chinese street is built to form a line of uniform height’ (H. A. Giles), the houses are of unequal heights to fit the destinies of the inhabitants. I do not suppose that good Geomancers are more frequent than good artists. But their functions and intellectual equipment should be very alike.90

Lewis’s analogy of Geomancers with artists related to their common sensitiveness to plastic forms and life, as well as their conceptual arrangement of natural objects and materials in a spatial setting. Richard Humphreys states that Lewis ‘saw the artist’s close engagement with the material world as a complex relationship with psychic and metaphysical realities’.91 Chinese artists’ and Geomancers’ mental outlook on ‘Life’, ‘Nature’ and the ‘Universe’ not only sustained Lewis’s mental-emotive impulse, but also inspired him to draw on Chinese aesthetics and thought in imbuing British avant-garde art with a deeper metaphysical meaning.

Conclusion These cultural interactions among curators, poets, artists and art critics in 1910s London demonstrate the ways in which British modernists expanded their boundaries of art appreciation and renewed their creative practices, broadening our conceptions of chinoiserie for the twentieth century. Rather than imitating idealised motifs of Chinese mandarins, fantastical landscapes and the exotic decorative schemes prevailing in eighteenth and nineteenth-century chinoiserie objects and design, Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska and Lewis demonstrated a new attitude and approach to the reception of Chinese art in their literary and artistic works. The British Museum’s collections of Asian art and relevant publications by authoritative sinologists contributed to shape British modernists’ knowledge of Chinese art and culture. The three Vorticists were particularly inspired by the aesthetic and metaphysical values of early Chinese art as expressed in the ideas of rhythmical relationships and intimate feeling between man, animal and nature. Their experience of viewing tangible artifacts and artworks in museums and their study of

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Binyon’s writings on East Asian painting helped enhance their visual and intellectual abilities in evaluating Chinese painting, calligraphy, bronzes and other kinds of art, the result of which was that their understanding of Chinese aesthetics became a touchstone for validating the principles of Vorticism.

Notes 1. See, for example, Wilhelm, James (1990), Ezra Pound in London and Paris 1908−1925, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press; Qian, Zhaoming (2003), The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens, Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press; Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard (2011), Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2. Rhys, Ernest (1940), Wales England Wed: An Autobiography, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, p. 196. 3. With reference to Pound’s letters to his parents, Wilhelm lists Pound’s scheduled meetings with friends in London, including two meetings with Binyon on 31 January and 6 February 1909, see Ezra Pound in London and Paris 1908−1925, pp. 6−8, p. 19. However, Zhaoming Qian who also consulted Pound’s manuscripts has claimed that, through Elkin Mathews, Pound and Binyon first met in a restaurant near the British Museum on Friday, 5 February 1909, see Qian, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art, p. 10, and Qian (2000), ‘Pound and Chinese Art in the “British Museum Era”’, in H. M. Dennis (ed.), Ezra Pound and Poetic Influence, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, pp. 100−12, p. 105. 4. Qian mentions that Pound first entered his name and address into the Visitors Book on 27 September 1912, see ‘Pound and Chinese Art in the “British Museum Era”’, p. 111. However, Pound did visit the Print Room as early as 9 February 1909. Between September 1912 and March 1913, Pound made additional visits with his future wife Dorothy Shakespear (1886−1973) who studied materials of Chinese and Japanese art in the Print Room. See Visitors Book of the Print Room, the British Museum, Volume 20; Hatcher 1995, pp. 157−63. 5. See Stock, Noel (1970), The Life of Ezra Pound, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 60−1; Pound, Ezra ([1964] 1975), The Cantos of Ezra Pound, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 506−7. 6. Binyon gave four lectures, with lantern slides, on Wednesday afternoons, at 5.30 pm at the small theatre of the Royal Albert Hall. On 10 March 1909, he gave the first lecture on ‘Sculpture and Religious Art’, followed by ‘The Renaissance in Europe and in Japan’, ‘Landscape and the Feeling for Nature’ and ‘Popular Art and Realism’ on 17, 24 and 31 March, respectively. A syllabus of the lecture series can be found in the Papers of Sir William Rothenstein, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Eng 1148 (p. 126). Pound scholars generally accept that Pound attended the second lecture ‘The Renaissance in Europe and in Japan’, while Zhaoming Qian and

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7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

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Michelle Ying-Ling Huang Rebecca Beasley think that Pound attended at least two of the lectures. See ‘Pound and Chinese Art in the “British Museum Era”’, pp. 105−6, and Beasley, Rebecca (2007), Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 60. Also, Ewick, David (2003), ‘BC Laurence Binyon’, Japonisme, Orientalism, Modernism: A Bibliography of Japan in English-Language Verse of the Early 20th Century. http:// themargins.net/bib/B/BC/bc34.html (accessed 20 November 2009). The Life of Ezra Pound, p. 61. See Chung, Ling (2003), Meiguo shi yu Zhongguo meng: Meiguo xiandai shi li de Zhongguo wenhua moshi (American Poetry and Chinese Dream: Chinese Cultural Modes in Modern American Verse), Guangxi: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, p. 8; Venne, Peter (1979), ‘Western Opinions and Attitudes: Concerning China: A Historical Survey’, Tamkang Review 10: 2, 157−65. Zinnes notes that Pound saw a memorial exhibition of Paul Cézanne during the early Cubist period, see Zinnes, Harriet (ed.) (1980), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, New York: New Directions, p. xii. This initially influenced Pound’s development of first Imagism and later Vorticism, see Humphreys, Richard (1985), Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy, London: Tate Gallery, p. 39. The manifesto was presented in the form of an interview with Pound by Frank Stuart Flint (1885−1960), entitled ‘Imagisme’. Pound republished the three doctrines under ‘Vorticism’ in the Fortnightly Review (1914), 96, p. 573, 1 September 1914, pp. 461−71. Lewis, Wyndham (1967), Blasting and Bombardiering, London: Calder, p. 278. See Pound, Ezra (1960), Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, Hessle: Marvell Press, p. 125. Whistler, in ‘The Red Rag’, said that his paintings could be called ‘symphonies’, ‘arrangements’, ‘harmonies’ and ‘nocturnes’; he also said, ‘[a]s music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour’. Whistler, James McNeill ([1890] 1967), The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, New York and London: Dover, pp. 126−7. Ibid. p. 128. Pound quoted Whistler’s words in his Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 84, p. 120. In his famous ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture, Whistler reasserted that ‘the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group […], as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring[s] forth from chaos glorious harmony’, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, p. 143. Pound, Ezra (1914), ‘Vortex’, Blast 1, 20 June, p. 154. Ibid. p. 153. Ibid. See ‘Vorticism’, pp. 468−71. See Pound, Ezra (1914), ‘Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist’, Egoist 1, 15 August, pp. 306−7; ‘Vorticism’, p. 470; Pound to Harriet Monroe, 1914, in Zinnes, Harriet (ed.) (1980), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, New York: New Directions, pp. 288−9. Pound believed that Vorticist artists had given him a new sense of form. He

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25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

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also proudly said that he was now ‘ten times as quick to discriminate between fine and mediocre Chinese or Japanese prints or paintings’. See Pound, Ezra (1915), ‘Affirmations-II’, New Age 16: 11, 14 January, p. 277, and Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 126. ‘Vortex’, BLAST 1, p. 153. Pound, Ezra (1915), ‘Chronicles’, Blast 2, July 1915, p. 6. The passage was later reprinted in Pound, Ezra (1958), Pavannes & Divagations, New York: New Directions, pp. 148−50. Lewis thought that Pound’s ‘Chronicles’ essay was excellent. See a letter from Lewis to Pound, January 1915, in Materer, Timothy (ed.) (1985), Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, New York: New Directions, pp. 7−8. Pound (in Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 122, pp. 134−5) reiterated that he had intended to quote further from Whistler’s ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture and from Binyon’s The Flight of the Dragon, ‘but it is perhaps enough to remind the reader that these essays exist, and one may by thinking them over, arrive at some degree of enlightenment’. Giles’s translation of Chinese terminologies in his An Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Arts ([1905] rev. edn 1918) was commonly adopted by Binyon and his contemporaries. Hatcher, John (2005), ‘Binyon, Stevens, Pound, Eliot’, Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies 64, p. 12. Holaday, Woon-Ping Chin (1977), ‘Pound and Binyon: China via the British Museum’, Paideuma 6, pp. 27−36, p. 29. See Modernism and the Museum, pp. 105−6; The Modernist Response to Chinese Art, pp. 3−13. For the Chinese display in the 1910−12 exhibition, see Huang, Ying-Ling Michelle (2010), ‘British Interest in Chinese Painting, 1881−1910: The Anderson and Wegener Collections of Chinese Painting in the British Museum’, Journal of the History of Collections 22: 2, November 2010, 279−87, pp. 283−4. See Pound, Ezra ([1964] 1975), The Cantos of Ezra Pound, London: Faber and Faber: 74/455, 462, 471. See ‘Pound and Chinese Art in the “British Museum Era”’, pp. 107−8; The Modernist Response to Chinese Art, pp. 12−15. The two men’s friendship is vividly presented in Cork, Richard (1982), Henri Gaudier & Ezra Pound: A Friendship, London: Anthony d’Offay. Also see Pound, ‘Letter to William Carlos Williams’, 19 December 1913, in Paige, D. D. (ed.) (1951), The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907−41, London: Faber and Faber, p. 65. See Gaudier-Brzeska to Sophie, 19 May 1911, in Lewison, Jeremy (1983), Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Sculptor, 1891−1915, Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard Gallery, p. 8. ‘Vortex’, BLAST 1, p. 154. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, p. 46. Pound began to read Confucius, probably the French translation of The Unwobbling Pivot in early 1915, and started his own translation of the Confucian Classics in 1928. Cai Zong-Qi (1993) argues that the dynamic force in Chinese characters which Pound saw as an essential deficiency in Western pictorialism led him to depart from his early Imagist tenets to develop a theory of kinetic Image in the light of Vorticist aesthetics. See The

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Life of Ezra Pound, p. 176, pp. 269−70. 36. See Meiguo shi yu Zhongguo meng, pp. 174−81. 37. See Ezra Pound in London and Paris 1908−1925, pp. 129−35; The Modernist Response to Chinese Art, p. 105, p. 112. For recent criticisms on Pound’s and Fenollosa’s command of Chinese, see Bush, Christopher (2003−4), ‘Review Essays’, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 51, p. 179; Meiguo shi yu Zhongguo meng, p. 8. 38. Pound, Ezra (1961), ABC of Reading, London: Faber and Faber, p. 21. 39. Ibid. p. 22. 40. See Meiguo shi yu Zhongguo meng, pp. 174−81. 41. Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 21. 42. Ede, Harold (1931), Savage Messiah, New York: The Literary Guild, p. 83. 43. Ibid. pp. 40−1, p. 52, pp. 232−5; Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, p. 85. 44. Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy, p. 51. 45. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, p. 75. 46. Ibid. pp. 105−7. 47. However, Pound noted that there was not any trace of calligraphic drawing in Gaudier-Brzeska’s later drawings which were almost always done with a stylographic pen, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, pp. 75−6. 48. Ibid. pp. 78−9. 49. Watson, William (1963), Handbook to The Collections of Early Chinese Antiquities, London: Trustees of the British Museum, pp. 47−67. 50. Pound, Ezra (1914), ‘Exhibition at the Goupil Gallery’, Egoist 1, 6, 16 March, p. 109. 51. Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri (1914), ‘Allied Artists’ Association Ltd., Holland Park Hall’, Egoist 1, 15 June, p. 227. 52. Around 1910−11, Gaudier-Brzeska visited several exhibitions of Japanese prints, Goya drawings, French paintings and German engravings. Gaudier also found that German culture helped him understand the art of the East. See Savage Messiah, p. 19, p. 40, pp. 50−2; Silber, Evelyn (1996), Gaudier-Brzeska: Life and Art, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, p. 106, p. 129. 53. See Savage Messiah, pp. 212−3; Gaudier-Brzseska: A Memoir, p. 138. 54. Arrowsmith also notes that Japanese netsukes, which were on display at the eastern end of the Asiatic Saloon of the British Museum by 1913, inspired Gaudier-Brzeska’s animal sculptures with their geometrical shape and pleasing composition; see Modernism and the Museum, pp. 99−102. 55. Several Chinese works of art in the Shang, Zhou and Han dynasties were exhibited in the collections of early Chinese antiquities at the British Museum. For details, see Watson, William (1963), Handbook to The Collections of Early Chinese Antiquities, London: Trustees of the British Museum; The Modernist Response to Chinese Art, pp. 19−21. Also see Gaudier-Brzeska to Sophie Suzanne Brzeska, end of November 1912, in Savage Messiah, p. 214. 56. Gaudier-Brzeska found Greek sculptures were right in balancing masses, in studying planes and rhythm and right for form in general. Gaudier-Brzeska, ‘Letter to Haldane Macfall’, 27 January 1912, in Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Sculptor, 1891−1915, pp. 6−7.

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57. Gaudier-Brzeska’s interest in Chinese art was mainly reflected in his small animal sculptures. See Fry, Roger (1916), ‘Gaudier-Brzeska’, The Burlington Magazine 29, August 1916, pp. 208−11, p. 210; Green, Judith Tybil (2002), ‘Britain’s Chinese Collections, 1842−1943: Private Collecting and the Invention of Chinese Art’, PhD thesis: University of Sussex, pp. 168−9. 58. ‘Vortex’, BLAST 1, p. 157. See also Gaudier-Brzeska: Life and Art, pp. 133−4. 59. ‘Vortex’, BLAST 1, p. 156. 60. See Pound, Ezra (1915), ‘Affirmations-V’, New Age 16, No. 14, 4 February 1915, p. 380. Pound found this global vision a challenge: ‘we have more aliment, we have not one classic tradition to revivify, we have China and Egypt, and the unknown lands lying upon the roof of the world – Khotan, Kara-star and Kan-su.’ Pound, ‘The Renaissance’, Poetry, March and May 1915, in Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, p. 269. 61. Pound, ‘Affirmations-V’, p. 381. 62. As Pound described, ‘Bird Erect’ in the ‘squarish and bluntish’ style was ‘most alive to the significance of Gaudier’s work’, see Henri Gaudier & Ezra Pound: A Friendship, p. 5; Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, pp. 78−9. 63. ‘Vortex’, Blast 1, p. 158. 64. Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri (1915), ‘Vortex (Written from the Trenches)’, Blast 2, July 1915, pp. 33−4. 65. Ibid. 66. Gaudier-Brzeska to Pound, 27 January 1915, in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, p. 60. 67. See Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, pp. 47−63; Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 273; Letters from Lewis to his mother, c. 1904 and c. 1907, in Rose, W. K. (ed.) (1963), The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, London: Methuen, pp. 16−17, p. 35. 68. See Cork, Richard (1976), Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, Vol. 1, Origins and Development, London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, p. 2, p. 22. 69. See Reginald Williams to Basil Gray, 23 March 1973, Archive of Laurence Binyon, British Library, London (hereafter ALB-BL), Vol. 37; Victor Cassidy to Basil Gray, 3 March 1973, and Cassidy to the Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings, the British Museum, 18 November 1972, ALB-BL, Vol. 56. 70. See Basil Gray to Victor Cassidy, 27 March 1973, ALB-BL, Vol. 56. For the location and access to the Print Room of the British Museum in the old days, see Modernism and the Museum, pp. 106−9, Plan 2. 71. Pound’s assertion was probably inspired by Lewis’s Timon of Athens which he sent to Quinn. Pound to John Quinn, 18 April 1915, in Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, p. 230. 72. For details see Huang, Ying-Ling, Michelle (2004), ‘Laurence Binyon’s Conception of Chinese Painting’, MLitt dissertation: University of St Andrews, pp. 228−9. 73. Corbett, David Peters (1997), ‘“Make It New”: Laurence Binyon, Pound and Vorticism’, Paideuma 26, pp. 189−90. 74. Lewis, Wyndham (1914), ‘Great Preliminary Vortex – Manifesto I’, Blast 1, 20 June, pp. 11−29. 75. Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 258.

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Michelle Ying-Ling Huang Ibid. p. 257. Ibid. p. 259. Ibid. Lewis, Wyndham (1914), ‘“Life is the Important Thing!”’, Blast 1, 20 June, pp. 129−31. Lewis, Wyndham (1914), ‘Relativism and Picasso’s Latest Work’, Blast 1, 20 June, pp. 139−40. Lewis, Wyndham (1914), ‘Our Vortex’, Blast 1, 20 June, pp. 147−9. Binyon, Laurence (1916), Ma Yüan’s Landscape Roll, New York: De Vinne Press, p. 15. Lewis, ‘The Caliph’s Design’, in Michel, W. and C. J. Fox (eds) (1969), Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913−1956, London: Thames & Hudson, p. 151. Lewis was aware of the techniques of both Chinese and Japanese art, although he referred to China more than Japan in his writings on art. See Lewis, ‘The Credentials of the Painter − Part II (from English Review, April 1922)’, in Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913−1956, p. 153, p. 251; Humphreys, Richard (2004), Wyndham Lewis, London: Tate Publishing, pp. 37−8. Ma Yüan’s Landscape Roll, pp. 1−2. Ibid. p. 20. See Edwards, ‘“It’s Time for Another War”: The Historical Unconscious and the Failure of Modernism’, in “‘Make It New”: Laurence Binyon, Pound and Vorticism’, p. 138. Ibid. Ibid. Lewis quoted from ‘Religion and Superstition’, the second chapter of Herbert Giles’s The Civilisation of China (1911). In his lecture to the occultist Quest Society of 1914, Lewis also mentioned reading lately of Chinese Geomancers. See Lewis, Wyndham (1914), ‘Feng Shui and Contemporary Form’, Blast 1, 20 June, p. 138; Giles, Herbert ([1911] 1919), The Civilisation of China, London: Butterworth, pp. 64−5. Also see Wyndham Lewis, p. 26. Ibid. p. 27.

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Chapter 5

The Idea of the Chinese Garden and British Aesthetic Modernism Elizabeth Chang

My subject is something that did not actually exist. Or at least it is the consensus of aesthetic historians past and present that a ‘Chinese garden’, designed and grown in Britain in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, could be found nowhere in practice, though everywhere in reference and history. The reasons given for this are various: for one, writers have argued, a landscape garden that represents and distils its larger national context could never be properly manifested extra-nationally, but needed to remain secondary, as an influence or allusion. For another, the Chinese nation at the turn of the century was held to be crippled by internal conflict and ill-equipped, culturally and politically, to affect styles of garden designs in European nations busy reconfiguring international law to claim Chinese territories for their own purposes. And most of all, Japan, an aesthetic influence both relatively new and exceptionally widespread at the end of the century, was understood to supersede China in all matters horticultural and architectural, exercising superior taste in both the design and planting of gardens at home and abroad. Chinese gardens were framed as historical phenomena, something to be consulted in the archives or in fantastical volumes like Sir William Chambers’ A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, but nothing to be a part of the gardener’s direct experience.1 On the other hand, my subject is something that existed everywhere. With improvements in technologies of global plant exchange, the opening of territories of Western China similar in climate to England by armed conflict or unequal treaty, and the willingness of plant collectors to travel the breadth of the globe to find new and beautiful flowering plants, the nineteenth century had produced an unprecedented increase in the number of so-called ‘hardy exotics’, plants sourced abroad but naturalised to grow easily on British soil.

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By this token, most of the gardens of Britain in the early twentieth century were Chinese gardens, because the plants that grew in them had largely come, recently or in the distant past, from China. Influential garden historian Alicia Amherst, in her A History of Gardening of England (1895), notes that ‘[t]he varieties of hardy Rhododendrons and Azaleas, collected from East and West, now form so striking a picture in nearly every garden and public park, it is scarcely possible to imagine a time when England was not possessed of these treasures’.2 That many readers would be familiar with my first proposition, and few with my second, is a condition of the ways that surveys of the rise of British aesthetic modernism have been composed.3 These surveys, whose first appearances nearly coincide with the earliest moments of the aesthetic movement itself, privilege Japan and displace China in the latter years of the century across the various fields of decorative arts as well as in ornamental gardening and landscape design, and, equally, prioritise aesthetic theory over material elements in identifying the garden’s value. What’s more, by resorting to the narrower categories of japonisme and chinoiserie as aesthetic paradigms irrespective of botanical provenance, writers employed the metonymic displacement and deflation of those decorative categories to divide and rank non-European contributions to a globalising modern aesthetic. Japonisme, as Petra Chu has critically summarised the prevailing historical argument, was held to be a ‘thoughtful adoption of new formal characteristics’ while chinoiserie meant only a ‘superficial borrowing of exotic subject matter’.4 This presents at least two interpretive sticking points: first, the reductive proposition that only one Asian decorative influence can be active in Europe at any time, a proposal already subject to broad critique across the disciplines. The second point of contention, and the one this essay will more specifically address, is the narrowing tendency to displace or dismiss the influence of plants both as components of aesthetic modernism and as elements of national or international distinction at the turn of the twentieth century. While the rise of ‘second nature’, the expansion of managed landscape that ‘makes most of the everyday world people see as natural’ has long been noted as a crucial feature of the nineteenth century, the reckoning for global modernism has been relatively constrained.5 This limitation reveals a conceptual vagueness concerning the international territory where horticulture, environmentalism and aesthetics overlap. While aesthetic modernism has been exhaustively routed along European and colonial routes of trade commodities, not to mention thoroughly

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charted across expanding colonial metropoles, it also can be traced in the reorientation of relationship between subject and nature that paralleled imperial expansion and scientific advancements. Built landscapes and manufactured objects shaped new currents in visual aesthetics, but equally so did new varieties and combinations of plant life and new ideas of possibilities for relations between plants and humans – particularly in the garden. As Craig Clunas has argued, European and American pronouncements on Chinese gardens are themselves statements on Chinese ‘nature’, not only in its environmental but in its cultural and essentialist sense; thus, to discuss the Chinese garden is also to map ‘the larger set of practices of European and American ideological engagement with the Chinese polity in the high age of imperialism and beyond’.6 This is a more specific version of the general idea that gardens of every era, as John Dixon Hunt and others have shown, both represent and relay nature to viewers while also insisting on the garden’s distinction and difference from common and ordinary natural surroundings.7 As Karl Kullmann puts it, ‘the idea of the garden depends on the frame to separate out a representation brought forth from the background of the continuity of the world’.8 Of particular interest to this time period, one that has historically been assigned a key purpose in articulating conventions of international relations, is the idea that gardens are in many ways open to the same avenues of analysis as the commodity routes or colonial metropoles that have been employed to describe the scope and scale of cosmopolitan thinking in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To call a garden grown in Britain in the first decades of the twentieth century a Chinese garden, then, or even to note that such a garden has chinoiserie elements, is to make a particular claim about national distinctions in landscape aesthetics that requires both explanation and context. My subject, then, is both the way that Chinese or chinoiserie gardens are described and dismissed by British writers, and the result of what happens when that discourse meets an organic object. As much as the garden, and the state of nature it stood in for, operated as ideological constructs for Europeans, the plant life of the garden also must equally be understood as both material and real, possessed of active and immediate existence. As I have argued elsewhere, British apprehension of Chinese aesthetics articulated an alternate way of seeing both limiting and radically re-situating of the possibility of visual meaning, often shorthanded through reference to the chinoiserie style.9 To produce this way of seeing in the garden in particular is

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to carry over these aesthetic concerns and to connect them to another range of organic and environmental questions.10 The ‘modern Chinese garden’, three words freighted with the burdens of their own indeterminate definitions, makes a particularly challenging and particularly interesting site to ask questions about transnational aesthetics and about the relationship between developing ideas of global environment and global modernisms.11 It is also a particularly open site to ask about the connections between chinoiserie and cosmopolitanism, between decorative hybridity and exchange and more general theories of global engagement. In particular, an idea of ‘organic cosmopolitanism’ can help us understand what happens when elements of Chinese style, usually associated with chinoiserie and material culture, are embedded within the foundations of the British landscape. While cosmopolitanism has become a constitutive mode of explicating a nineteenth-century globalism beyond the British Empire, less attention has been paid as of yet to the contours of an organic cosmopolitanism; likewise, an understanding of the nature of organic cosmopolitanism as a transnational phenomenon connecting natural environments outside of networks of ‘native soil’ is not yet a part of more longstanding histories of modernist aesthetic practices.12 As Tanya Agathocleus has recently summarised, cosmopolitanism ‘differs from words like internationalism and globalization in its connotations of an individual ethos and an intellectual enterprise: a stance adopted by those who seek to be “citizens of the world”’.13 (That her reference suggests Oliver Goldsmith’s eighteenth-century series of letters published purportedly ‘from a Chinese Gentleman’ shows, perhaps, how central China and the Chinese must be to European articulations of cosmopolitan ideals.)14 If the limitations of cosmopolitanism concerns the term’s inevitable inadequacy in attaining the ideals to which it aspires, a solution can be found in a turn to literary form over content, as others including Agathocleus have suggested, but a solution can also be found in resituating the content that describes and makes material its global ideals.15 While the deployment of a qualifying adjective has frequently served to guard against unwanted implications of the broad and general term ‘cosmopolitanism’, my choice of the particular adjective ‘organic’ does more than limit cosmopolitanism to one frame of analysis – it also makes available a different order of concerns drawn from environmental history and studies. Environmental historians of the turn of the twentieth century have sometimes been stymied by that era’s distinction between botany and horticulture; that is, by the

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division between nature as it is, and nature as human hands would have it be. Add to that the complications of national origin introduced both through the plantings of the gardens themselves and through the rhetoric of landscape theorists and garden designers authoring treatises on the global and local scales of the British garden, and the cultural operations of the idea of nature become even more daunting. The supposedly straightforward matter of naming an aesthetic garden ‘Chinese’ or ‘Japanese’ bears the heavy weight of all of these complications. Thus, the division of the Chinese garden into constitutive elements of plants on the one hand, and an abstracted exotic difference on the other, can and should be seen to both counterpoint and complement the presence of the Japanese garden as a mode of participation in cosmopolitan discourse. This is not simply through the presence of foreign plants in the landscape, nor through the incorporation of rockeries or pagodas in the garden architecture. Rather it is the combination of the multiple forms of the Eastern garden, both the deconstructed Chinese and the constructed Japanese, which provides a new way of understanding aesthetic internationalism through the cultivated environment. Design, as both a practice and an imperative, was made manifest in the garden but also made open to physical alteration.

Gardens Past and Present That Britons could grow gardens filled with plants imported from China, while denying the possibility that they cultivated Chinese gardens, rests on a general tendency to suppose that gardens are not dependent, as cultural objects, exclusively upon the plants that grow within them. The cultural work of the garden in European society has been, of course, the subject of several centuries of writing, with a high point achieved in England around the eighteenth century. Yet even further into the century, as painting replaced landscape gardening as the cultural achievement of note, the ever-increasing corpus of writing about gardens continued to classify, organise and describe gardens both in terms of contributions to evolutions in the decorative arts as well as to cultural sophistication more generally. That garden history served as de facto index of degree of civilisation is evident from the opening lines of Alicia Amherst’s A History of Gardening in England: The history of the Gardens of England follows step by step the history of the people. In times of peace and plenty they increased and flourished, and during

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years of war and disturbance they suffered. The various races that have predominated, and rulers that have governed this country influenced the gardens in a marked degree. Therefore, as we trace their history, we must not lose sight of the people whose national characteristics or whose foreign alliances left a stamp upon the gardens they made.16

And, just as frequently, China’s gardens were held to signify both China’s early advance and prolonged stasis in its degree of civilisation: Horticultural authorities, attribute the creation or invention – which shall we call it? – of Parks, or Irregular Gardens to the Chinese … we may reasonably infer that, at an epoch when Hellas was still content with her simple vineyard, the Middle Empire, had invented the Ornamental Garden.17

Such historical narrative in comparative landscape studies established past precedent for a modern cosmopolitanism that enfolded and integrated garden ideas and elements from a range of nations. Unwilling to cede prolonged influence to these early ornamental gardens, however, writers emphasised that the techniques of the ‘Oriental Garden’ were an unwieldy fashion requiring the firm hand of European designers like William Chambers for successful execution. The noted garden designer and architect Inigo Triggs, in his Garden Craft of Europe (1913) suggests: Chambers brought to bear a highly cultivated mind upon the subject of garden design and did what he could to check the absurdities that were being perpetrated everywhere. In this, however he was not altogether successful; and the Chinese style, in the hand of less skillful designers, led to the erection of the most amazing of garden freaks.18

Others more bluntly suggested that ‘[t]he plan for a garden in the Anglo-Chinese style … show to what atrocities bad taste had come’ in the eighteenth century.19 By the 1860s and 70s, as William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of which he was an early member, and the writings of John Ruskin all worked in various ways to advance a renewed attention to naturalism in art and design, China’s gardens and gardens in general increasingly shared the stage with design commodities more portable and exchangeable. The practice of gardening, explicated for the masses by a new raft of gardening periodicals and handbooks authored by horticultural experts like John Loudon, John Lindley, and later in the century Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, emphasised practical advice for urban or small-scale gardening over admiration of the major landscape gardens once held to instantiate British claims to land, views and national territory. Throughout this period, contemporary

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attention to either Chinese gardens in China or Chinese-style gardens elsewhere in the world made a relatively minimal part of theoretical writing about gardens. It was not until the publication in 1949 of Osvald Sirén’s The Gardens of China that attention to China as a geographic influence on garden design and a legitimate locale in an internationalist theory of landscape design could be revived.20 So even as influential gardeners of the late nineteenth century like William Robinson championed ‘wild gardening’ and asserted a fierce devotion to hardy plants arranged in natural environments in keeping with ‘Nature’s laws’, many critics were agreeing with Reginald Blomfield’s claim in The Formal Garden in England (1892) that: ‘Horticulture stands to garden design much as building does to architecture; the two are connected, but very far from being identical.’21 The close of the Victorian era and the dawn of the twentieth century saw the publication of a range of new kinds of writing about the English garden, writings that sought to combine national history and proscriptive advice, both long-standing features of the genre, with a new and exceptionalist narrative of the late nineteenth-century’s global revision of native origins.

Gardens East and West Beyond the space of the garden, the relationship between Britain and China had of course been long since shaped by the trade in botanical commodities.22 Even setting aside the most pernicious and notorious of these, the post-Opium War landscapes of the two countries were inextricably shaped by each other’s horticultural productions in ways that were everywhere apparent to, if rarely acknowledged by, British writers.23 Though the garden, long understood as a figurative theory expressed in spatial form, has always depended on textual annotation and explanation to make plain its consequences, the eighteenthcentury tradition of landscape appreciation as a privileged form of aesthetic critique was largely abandoned during the Victorian era, as I have suggested in the previous section. Its inadequate supplement, the proliferation of gardening advice manuals, gave proscriptive response to China’s horticultural intrusions while implicitly or explicitly dismissing Chinese capacity to make and maintain gardens within a Chinese landscape. As Fa-ti Fan and Erik Mueggler have shown, British horticulturalists and ‘plant hunters’ like Reginald Farrer and Francis Kingdon-Ward, travelling through Western China at the start of the twentieth century, relied heavily on local knowledge

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provided through networks of Chinese botanists later passed over in the narratives and records produced by these British travellers.24 But despite the advice doled out to British gardeners in these narratives on topics such as the construction of rock-gardens, the selection of ‘hardy exotics’, and other practical and aesthetic concerns, little linkage was made between these Chinese plant importations – rhododendrons, azaleas and so on – and the elements of chinoiserie decor that retained a lingering presence in British domestic spaces. This meant that the material culture category of chinoiserie stood in for a far broader range of ‘Chinese’ influences inside and outside the home, a metonymical position for which the narrow and particular decorative tradition was quite ill-suited. Variously termed a style, a phenomenon, a craze, or a passion, chinoiserie had depended for its definition on a cumulative history of association that, in the later nineteenth century, took a significant stumble.25 No longer did chinoiserie remain an actively generative category for the Victorian and Edwardian consumer – rather, it was the province of the past, to be surveyed and controlled by the connoisseur, the collector, the decorative historian, and others of a new class of professional regulating relationships between readers and things. Though chinoiserie cannot exist without Chinese nature, as many of its most recognisable decorative elements depend on organic forms derived from Chinese flowers, by convention the style is considered one of the most artificial and inconsequential to lived experience of any in modern European history. For designers and decorators of the early twentieth century, then, to draw upon the Chinese style was to make active rejection of both present fashions and ‘natural’ landscapes – all the more so because chinoiserie in the landscape was traditionally betokened by built elements like bridges, pagodas and lanterns even more than the cultivation of its plants or the layout of its beds and walkways. On the other hand, the Japanese garden, as theory and as inspiration, appeared everywhere at the turn of the twentieth century as a current influence of the highest order.26 Reginald Farrer, the plant hunter in China, declares in My Rock-Garden (1907) that: Of course the absolute masters of rock-garden, before whose names one must go helpless to one’s knees in adoration, are the Japanese. Not to plunge into the bottomless sea of their mysticism and symbolism in design, the sight of a Japanese garden is enough to bring tears of ecstasy to the eyes of any gardenlover.27

Even as Japanese styles were praised for their singular capacity, however, the Chinese prehistory of the Japanese garden continued to

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be acknowledged, albeit it oddly; as travel writer Douglas Sladen notes: ‘Give a Japanese a backyard ten feet square, and he will have a Chinese garden … But give a prosperous Japanese a few acres … and he will make a landscape garden worthy of Kubla Khan.’28 This tension between past and present coexisted uneasily with an even stronger distinction of space, place and visual perception held to divide East from West in style, art and ontology. Florence Du Cane’s Flowers and Gardens of Japan (1908) instructs readers: The gardens of China and Japan have remained unique; the Eastern style of gardening has never spread to any other country, nor is it ever likely to; for, just as no Western artist will ever paint in the same manner as an Oriental artist because his whole artistic sense is different, so no Western gardener could ever hope to construct a garden representing a portion of the natural scenery of Japan – which is the aim and object of every good Japanese landscape garden, however small – because, however long he might study the original scene, he would never arrive at the Japanese conception of it, or realise what it conveyed to the mind of a Japanese. Their art of gardening was originally borrowed from the Chinese … but to the Japanese belongs the honour of having perfected the art of landscape gardening.29

This sense of the perpetually denied synecdoche conceptually central to the art of the Asian garden, despite its multiple logical paradoxes, nevertheless functioned as established consensus for authors and designers of the opening years of the twentieth century. Even if the effective emotional response – Farrer’s dropping to his knees with tears of ecstasy – was both strong and meaningful, the dissimilar source material and understanding of or affinity for the chosen gardening methods rendered ‘Western’ perception of the ‘Japanese’ garden forever inadequate and supplemental. Given the perpetual difficulties and efforts put into distinguishing between ‘Chinese’ and ‘Japanese’ gardens in this time period, and the inevitable lack of success in making such distinction, we can conclude that what these gardeners, designers and authors were really talking about was not a matter of national standards of garden design at all. They were wrestling with the possibilities of delineating a cosmopolitanism cultivated through plant and landscape which both acknowledged national contributions while also integrating conditions resistant to national boundaries. Chinoiserie, whether explicitly or implicitly named, is by definition a cosmopolitan practice; chinoiserie in the garden, where specific design principles are even more elusive and a general perception of ‘Chinese-ness’ alone can be allowed to designate the garden as ‘exotic’, is thus even more clearly an example of organic cosmopolitanism where natural land-

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scape unites disparate territories. To trace out the way that the Chinese or chinoiserie garden has appeared in modernist literature, then, is also to examine the ways that such literature reads differently when we allow that its cosmopolitanism takes both human and horticultural forms.

Gardens in Literature With the publication of the English translation of Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden in 1903 (first published in French as Le Jardin des Supplices in 1899), the early twentieth-century decadent literary world gained a particularly compelling allegory of the Chinese garden as a site of repression, sexual transgression and general exoticism. Mirbeau’s narrator praises the capacities of the Chinese as cultivators and as designers, claiming: The Chinese are right to be proud of their Torture Garden, perhaps the most absolutely beautiful in all China where there are many marvelous gardens. The rarest and the most delicate and robust species of flora are collected … each species represented by numerous specimens which, gorged upon organic food treated according to the rituals of gardening experts, assume abnormal forms and colourings, the wonderful intensity of which, with our sullen climates and insipid gardens, we are unable to imagine.30

The surrounding narrative works to flesh out both the painful implications of such abnormalities of interest for human inhabitants of the gardens and also to bridge the unimaginable distance from Europe to China by means of both organic metaphor and shocking depiction. Not surprisingly, it was a book widely condemned for its content by British critics: ‘full of sheer loathsomeness of detail’ according to the Nineteenth Century, and the English Illustrated Magazine characterised it as ‘not ad usum virginibus puerisque’, while at the same time noting that Mirbeau’s ‘vigorous, not to say virulent style’ differs only in degree from more palatable members of the ‘Young France’ group of authors such as Anatole France.31 As an explicit, shockingly violent and sadistic work of fiction The Torture Garden is of its era; but as a satiric excursion drawing upon Chinese gardens as a displaced location for internal critique, it is of a piece with a preexisting tradition of European writing. Since Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World, and Sir William Chambers’ Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, writers had long found China’s landscape an accommodating and exotic refuge for ideas too critical, challenging or scandalous to be located domestically. Most certainly Baudelaire’s

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heavily annotated translation of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) into Les Paradis Artificiels (1860) helped Mirbeau and other French decadents gain a notable literary precedent for the Chinese landscape as a setting for depraved fantasy.32 When Mirbeau’s work was itself translated into English and circulated among members of the decadent movement in Britain, its horticultural setting, references and structure were already implicitly understood as part of a long-standing literary tradition linking China to the gardens of Europe. Yet if China’s organic exoticism, as an abstract condition, retained unproblematic purchase throughout the shifts of fin-de-siècle aestheticism and decadence, the material and organic conditions of the Chinese garden as an actual location proved more difficult to keep stable. The Torture Garden, despite its explicitly Chinese geographical location, has frequently been taken up by critics past and present in a Japanese context. Claire O’Mahony, in her survey of aesthetic gardens, has suggested that Mirbeau’s ‘freakish hothouse’ of a fictional Chinese garden should be taken in contrast with Claude Monet’s ‘redemptive, Japonist idyll’ at Giverny, as possible evidence of the contradiction within the aesthetic movement between a perverse fin-de-siècle interiority (implicitly Chinese) and its pensive, redemptive external expression (implicitly Japanese).33 As Emily Apter has pointed out, the design of Giverny, with its symmetrical sections, climbing plants and large central pond crossed by a bridge is exactly doubled in Mirbeau’s description of the setting for his torture garden. Even contemporary visitors like the novelist Edmond de Goncourt (with his brother, a crucial earlier champion of Japanese aesthetics for European artists and writers) sense the ‘unnatural parentage’ between Mirbeau’s and Monet’s spaces.34 (Certainly the fact that the two men shared a gardener helped matters as well.) Most especially, though, to read from garden plot to text in either the past or present requires the addendum of a national origin that verbal description demands but that visual perception may allow to lie silent, and so a falsely reductive singularity of national influence must be assigned in print that a planted garden, or even a painting of that garden, could continue to resist. This is in keeping with other ways that written versions of gardens, presented as fully fledged settings or merely allusive moments, force articulation of particular ways of seeing and specific relationships with the natural world not possible in the visual, decorative and landscape arts themselves. Writings about gardens, and particularly modernist writings about impossible gardens, bring the reader into a hybrid intertextual space

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where the awareness of a natural world not unlike their own persists without ever coming quite fully into form. Mirbeau’s torture garden pulls together the literary history of Chinese gardens with the recognition of a terrain that undergoes material (if unnatural) cultivation; in so doing, it proposes that the Chinese garden is especially effective as a place to imagine connections between the organic and the rhetorical, and between literary gardens of the past and cultivated plant specimens of the present. But Mirbeau’s fever dream of a landscape is not the only possible avenue by which modernists understood Chinese gardens to be theoretically and horticulturally present in their thinking. Take, for example, Virginia Woolf’s early short story ‘Kew Gardens’ (published, among other locations, in the 1921 collection Monday or Tuesday) − a story which, as critics have noted, foreshadows many of the formal preoccupations of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Patricia Laurence has taken up Woolf’s formulation of Lily Briscoe’s Chinese eyes in the latter novel and written comprehensively of the connections between the Bloomsbury Group and a nascent Chinese modernism, explicating in the process a variety of British engagements with a range of ideas of Chinese landscapes beyond the scope of this essay. My purpose here is to complement Laurence’s broader survey to show the ways that Kew Gardens, itself a ‘Chinese garden’ of a kind, draws the reader into a similarly interstitial position from which to contemplate the possible epistemological vigour of the garden within a literary text. Woolf’s text is like Mirbeau’s because it presses explicitly on the distinctions between real and imagined gardens, and between gardens as they are perceived, partially and subjectively, and gardens as they are conceived, with strong figurative and ideological unity. Woolf’s text is also like Mirbeau’s, however, in using a Chinese garden to investigate these concerns of aesthetic modernism in a framework drawing heavily on the history of aesthetics. To call Kew a Chinese garden is, of course, to provoke a little at the scene of Britain’s premier national museum of plants. And yet such provocation is not entirely unwarranted: William Chambers’ Chinese pagoda has remained a key landmark at the botanical garden from the time of its construction in 1762 through to the present. The plants on display at Kew, sourced by collectors under the direction of Joseph Banks and others, came from around the globe but notably from China, where the vast geography and variations of terrain provided scientific interest, the crops of tea and of opium supported investigations of economic botany, and the elaborate domestic traditions of

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gardening supported horticultural practices. Woolf’s use of Kew is more complicated than any single national assignation; yet her refusal to disallow the possibility of its Chineseness connects her story to these horticultural traditions. Both public and private gardens are essential spaces for Woolf, fusing as they do human activity, interaction and designs with organic and cultivated specimens and landscapes. In ‘Kew Gardens’ the overlap between plants and people devolves into a study of colour and light, with only a few architectural elements retaining their whole form and even fewer flowers gaining specific identification. Bonnie Scott has argued that the garden represents ‘ambivalent territory’ for Woolf as its enclosed space provides ‘imperfect freedom’; of the many gardens cultivated by relatives and Woolf’s husband Leonard, few reappeared in her writing without a pointed assessment of their physical and mental constraints as well as their botanical global inclusiveness.35 The narrative movement in ‘Kew Gardens’, between past and present, person, animal, plant and decorative object allows an associative linking of shoe buckles, red flowers, snails and strolling couples that defies realist progression. Visual ephemera – the coloured ‘stain’ made by sunlight on a snail’s shell – reinforce equally fleeting conditions of an imagined past or future; one member of the couple, Trissie, finds her path to the tea house is cluttered with alternate routes through the garden that pass by ‘orchids and cranes among wild flowers, a Chinese pagoda and a crimson crested bird’.36 Woolf’s refusal of the definite article to describe Chambers’ pagoda suggests a delicate expansion of possible hybridity within the garden – it is perhaps only one of many pagodas possible in this visually complex and particulated natural scene. Such disjunction is familiar to readers of Woolf, who will find much resonance in the couple’s awkward embraces ‘on the edge of the flower bed’ as they ‘expressed their feelings in a strange way, as these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far and thus alighting awkwardly upon the very common objects that surrounded them …’.37 The closing moments of Woolf’s story, however, suggest something even more interesting about the ways that figurative language, visual knowledge and lived urban experience combine to produce a garden space that is both of the world and impossible to represent in the world. In the final lines of the piece, Trissie senses the complete dissolution of visual information into motionless colour fields, with only their voices continuing onwards:

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Voices. Yes, voices. Wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth of contentment, such passion of desire, or, in the voices of children, such freshness of surprise; breaking the silence? But there was no silence; all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air.38

With that ending, collapsing sound into colour into mechanical transport, Woolf suggests the expansive possibilities of the organic cosmopolitanism only occasioned in the site of the non-native natural landscape garden – a site very often correspondent with the idea of the modern Chinese garden. As I have suggested, few contemporary authors or gardeners would agree that such a site had material existence in the early years of twentieth-century Britain in its strongest form. But what Woolf’s expanding figurative use of the idea of China – from the pagoda within the garden walls to the ‘nest of Chinese boxes’ describing the omnibuses outside the walls in the imperial metropole – shows us is that the partially expressed and imperfectly realised plantings of many kinds of British gardens in the early twentieth century are forms of Chinese gardens themselves. Like no other landscape – with the complicated caveat of Japan – China could as a nation be metonymically represented as a garden, but could also direct the representational work and challenge of a garden abroad. To call a garden ‘Chinese’ was to say something about the influences and history of landscape design, of course, but it was also to acknowledge the garden’s representational power as a site where the idea of nature could be filtered through a powerful cultural lens. That many aesthetic modernists wished to mute that filter’s profound intervention in their work did not lessen the intervening ideological effects.

Notes 1. Gregory Missingham has investigated this question both more practically and more bluntly. He wonders: ‘[W]hy, since the 1860s, have approximately 10 times as many Japanese-style gardens been constructed outside Japan as there have been Chinese-style gardens constructed outside China?’ Missingham, Gregory Kenneth (2007), ‘Japan 10±, China 1: A First Attempt at Explaining the Numerical Discrepancy Between Japanese-style Gardens Outside Japan and Chinese-style Gardens Outside China’, Landscape Research 32:2, 118. 2. Amherst, Alicia (1896), History of Gardening in England, London: Bernard Quaritch, p. 313. 3. Maggie Keswick does propose in her influential survey Gardens of China

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5. 6.

7.

8.

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that ‘… obscure hills and valleys in Yunnan and Sichuan did more to transform the horticultural traditions of the West than the designs of all the great pleasure gardens of China − and their underlying philosophy − put together’ − but the fact that she frames this proposal as a provocation reinforces my point. Keswick, Maggie (2003), The Chinese Garden: History, Art, and Architecture, rev. edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 37. Chu, Petra (2011), ‘Chinoiserie and Japonisme’, The Orient Expressed: Japan’s Influence on Western Art, 1854−1918, Gabriel P. Weisberg (ed.), Seattle: Mississippi Museum of Art; in association with University of Washington Press, p. 99. In the most emblematic example of this line of reasoning, Klaus Berger observes: ‘[T]he Chinoiserie of the Rococo, … or the ‘Orientalism’ of the Romantics went no further, on the whole, than a superficial imitation of costume, settings, or poorly understood detail; they had at least as much to do with fashion as with art. The arrival of Japanese woodcuts in the West … was a very different matter’, one that Berger characterises as ‘a decided shift in taste’ that would ‘[open] up unimagined possibilities of new form that would influence the whole Western world’. Berger, Klaus (1992), Japonisme in Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 1. Lustig, A. J. (2000), ‘Cultivating Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century English Gardens’, Science in Context, 13:02, 155–81, p. 156. Clunas, Craig (1997), ‘Nature and Ideology in Western Descriptions of the Chinese Garden’, Joachim Wolschke (ed.), Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, pp. 21–34, p. 22. Clunas asserts that ‘statements about Chinese gardens made by Europeans and Americans are themselves part of the great archive of orientalism, in which the term nature is deployed in an essentialising way with regard to an undifferentiated Chinese garden … Discussions of “the Chinese garden” are, therefore, I will argue, of some importance in mapping the larger set of practices of European and American ideological engagement with the Chinese polity in the high age of imperialism and beyond’, Clunas, pp. 21–2. Kullmann, Karl (2012), ‘De/framed Visions: Reading Two Collections of Gardens at the Xi’an International Horticultural Exposition’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 32:3, 182–200, p. 195. Works investigating the meaning-making at work in the garden enclosure most notably include the works of John Dixon Hunt (2004), The Afterlife of Gardens, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press and Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (2000), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Stephanie Ross’s (1998), What Gardens Mean, University of Chicago Press, Bernard St-Denis’s (2007), ‘Just What Is a Garden?’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 27:1, 61–76, David E. Cooper’s A Philosophy of Gardens (2006), Oxford: Oxford University Press and Robert Pogue Harrison’s (2008), Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. On this rhetoric of enclosure see especially John Dixon Hunt’s Greater Perfections.

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9. See Chang, Elizabeth (2010), Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 10. Philip J. Pauly has asked with deliberate provocation: ‘Is Environmental History a Subfield of Garden History?’ in an article of the same name; see Pauly, Philip J. (2005), ‘Is Environmental History a Subfield of Garden History?’, Environmental History 10:1, 70–1. 11. On this, see Gagnier, Regenia (2010), Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859−1920, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, and the work of her Global Modernisms Project more generally. 12. On cosmopolitanism more generally, see: Breckenridge, Carol Appadurai (ed.) (2002), Cosmopolitanism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Cheah, Pheng and Bruce Robbins (eds) (1998), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Vertovec, Steven and Robin Cohen (eds) (2002), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press and Anderson, Amanda (2001), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment, Princeton: Princeton University Press. On modernism and cosmopolitanism, see Berman, Jessica Schiff (2011), Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism, New York: Columbia University Press and Walkowitz, Rebecca L. (2006), Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation, New York: Columbia University Press. 13. Agathocleous, Tanya (2010), ‘Cosmopolitanism and Literary Form: Cosmopolitanism and Literary Form’, Literature Compass 7:6, 452–66, p. 452. 14. On Goldsmith and cosmopolitanism, see Watt, James (2006), ‘Goldsmith’s Cosmopolitanism’, Eighteenth-Century Life 30:1, 56–75. 15. For an influential critique of cosmopolitanism, see Brennan, Timothy (1997), At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. For a critique of cosmopolitanism grounded on China and on Goldsmith’s letters, see Parker, David (2003), ‘Diaspora, Dissidence And The Dangers Of Cosmopolitanism’, Asian Studies Review 27:2, 155–79. 16. Amherst (1896), p. 1. 17. Anonymous (1880), The Famous Parks and Gardens of the World Described and Illustrated … London: T. Nelson, p. 20. 18. Triggs, H. Inigo (1913), Garden Craft in Europe, London: B. T. Batsford, p. 295. 19. Agar, Madeline (1911), Garden Design in Theory and Practice, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, p. 10. 20. As Sirén explains in his preface, his titular subject ‘belongs to the borderland between the respective histories of art and of civilisation in the Far East, and is a field of research that has been allowed to lie relatively fallow, so that the original plantations have been overgrown by weeds and thickets, or have dried up and been effaced by the more utilitarian crops of a later time’, Sirén, Osvald (1949), Gardens of China, New York: Ronald Press Co., p. iii. 21. Blomfield, Reginald Theodore (1892), The Formal Garden in England, London: Macmillian, p. vi.

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22. See, among other sources, Rangan, Haripriya, Rangan, Judith Carney and Tim Denham (2012), ‘Environmental History of Botanical Exchanges in the Indian Ocean World’, Environment and History 18:3 (2012): 311–342.2. 23. Excellent recent studies of British botany and the imperial project include Richard Grove (1995), Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600−1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Drayton, Richard Harry (2000), Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World, New Haven: Yale University Press. 24. See Fan, Fa-ti (2004), British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Mueggler, Erik (2011), The Paper Road Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet, Berkeley: University of California Press. 25. On chinoiserie, see the following influential histories: Honour, Hugh (1973), Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay, New York: Harper & Row; Impey, O. R. (1977), Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration, New York: Scribner’s; and Jacobson, Dawn (1993), Chinoiserie, London: Phaidon Press. See also recent critical re-situations including Porter, David (2010), The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-century England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Jenkins, Eugenia Zuroski (2013), A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism, New York: Oxford University Press. 26. See Lambourne, Lionel (2005), Japonisme: Cultural Crossings Between Japan and the West, London: Phaidon, p. 194. 27. Farrer, Reginald (1907), My Rock-Garden, London: E. Arnold, p. 9. 28. Sladen, Douglas (1912), Queer Things About Japan, London: A. Treherne, p. 12. 29. Du Cane, Florence (1908), The Flowers and Gardens of Japan, London: A. & C. Black, pp. 1–2. 30. Mirbeau, Octave (2007), The Torture Garden, London: Bookkake, p. 136. 31. Frewen, Lord Walter (1905), ‘Last Month’ The Nineteenth century and After, 57:335, 175–80, p. 178. Beaugeard, Tiburce (1904), ‘Young France’, The English Illustrated Magazine 15, 252–9, p. 259. 32. On this see especially Chabrier, Christina Ferree (2006), ‘Aesthetic Perversion: Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin Des Supplices’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 34:3, 355–70. 33. O’Mahony, Claire I. R. (2008), ‘Fin-de-siècle Fantasy to the Western Front: The Aesthetic Gardens of Nancy’, Garden History, 36:2, 253–72, p. 263. 34. Quoted in Apter, Emily (1988), ‘The Garden of Scopic Perversion from Monet to Mirbeau’, October, 47, 91–115, p. 106. 35. Scott, Bonnie Kime (2012), In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, p. 11. 36. Woolf, Virginia (1921), ‘Kew Gardens’, Monday or Tuesday, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 83–98, p. 96. 37. Ibid. p. 94. 38. Ibid. p. 98.

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Chapter 6

‘Beautiful, baleful absurdity’: Chinoiserie and Modernist Ballet Anne Witchard

For its devoted adherent Osbert Sitwell the return of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to London in September 1918 was a delightfully unexpected portent of peace. It was thanks to memories of the ‘beautiful, baleful, absurdity’ of productions he had witnessed during the company’s London seasons between 1912 and the summer of 1914, that Sitwell’s spirit had managed to withstand the ‘bleak, intolerable burden’ of trench warfare.1 Despite some misgivings about the venue, Diaghilev had decided to accept Sir Oswald Stoll’s offer of a special ‘Russian Ballets’ season at the London Coliseum, his great ‘People’s Palace of Entertainment’ in the West End. One ballet was to be included in each of two daily performances, matinee and evening, of assorted music-hall acts.2 The engagement ended in March 1919, but so enthusiastic had been the reception that the company reopened almost immediately at Stoll’s Alhambra with a nightly programme devoted entirely to ballet. Enormous colour posters advertised the Russian Ballets across the West End and throughout the Underground. They featured a larger than life-size ‘Chinaman’ complete with waist-length pigtail which, to the gratified amusement of Pablo Picasso, promptly attracted the addition of scribbled-on moustaches, umbrellas and other waggish graffiti (Plate 6).3 Picasso’s costume design for the Chinese conjurer in Jean Cocteau’s futurist ballet, Parade (1914) had been chosen to herald the new London season in bold style − even though Parade was not actually on the Alhambra bill. The ballet would not receive its London premiere until later in the year. While the fiercely avant-garde Parade had a distinctly minority appeal, Picasso’s ‘Chinese conjurer’ was a shrewdly commercial choice in announcing the company’s return to London. Lavishly decorative posters of the marvellous ‘Chinese’ conjurer, Chung Ling Soo, Picasso’s inspiration for the design, had been attracting sell-out audiences for over ten years until his

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accidental death on the stage of the Wood Green Empire some months previously. And despite its being a lowbrow musical comedy, Diaghilev wished his ballets to emulate the enormous and ongoing success of the spectacular Chu Chin Chow, testament to the British public’s enduring love affair with chinoiserie spectacle and mystical mandarin allure (Plate 5). Russia had shared the European aristocratic passion for chinoiserie, a legacy that underwent a revival in the interval between Russia’s fin-de-siècle and avant-garde periods, during which outmoded aspects of the eighteenth-century style were reinvigorated. Examples include Petr Konchalovsky’s painting Family Portrait with Chinese Print (1911) or Natalia Goncharova’s Chinoiserie (1912). This chapter will consider Diaghilev’s initial engagement with theatrical chinoiserie in the light of this moment. His company’s pre-war opera-ballet Le Rossignol (1914) (from now referred to as The Nightingale) was to remain a vehicle for modernist developments in scenography, choreography, and musical composition throughout the 1920s yet despite this, The Nightingale has been overlooked as an unfashionable fin-de-siècle remnant, a ‘monstrous Beardsleyesque after-birth’ as one mid-twentieth-century critic would describe it.4 While a full performance history of the multiple Ballets Russes versions of The Nightingale is beyond the limits of this chapter, its earliest production provides an exemplary account of the genesis of this modernist chinoiserie ballet while it serves also to illuminate the central role that chinoiserie spectacle played in the development of the art of ballet from its very inception at the Versailles court of Louis XIV.

‘Rather music-hall, I’m afraid!’ The Russian Ballets’ post-Armistice audience was comprised largely of the clerks and suburbanites who eagerly filled the cheaper seats of London’s big music halls, although Diaghilev’s success in pre-war London had been determined by his refusal to countenance anything less than the elite audiences his company attracted on the Continent.5 The first Ballets Russes appearances in the capital had been for the Coronation Gala of George V in June 1911 at the Royal Opera House (and for the following seasons, until 1914, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane) where the sumptuous orientalisms of productions like Scheherazade, Prince Igor, and The Nightingale, had been mirrored by the ‘Oriental Splendour’ of audiences made up of ‘ambassadors and ministers, African kings, Indian chiefs, maharajahs

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and mandarins’ and of course ‘the cream of British society’.6 Since then, war across Europe and Bolshevik upheaval at home had left the Ballets Russes not only in financial crisis but also stateless exiles. No longer could Diaghilev insist that his company would perform only on London’s grandest stages. In 1911 this had been something of a coup. Until that point, the principal locations for staging the ballet in London were the two great music halls in Leicester Square; the Alhambra Palace Music Hall and the Empire Theatre of Varieties. In Britain, ballet was a decidedly devalued art. This was largely to do with Victorian sensibilities that saw the relationship between the female body and public display as connoting rather more than artistry.7 At the Empire the ‘want of clothing’ in the corps de ballet, famously denounced in 1895 by social purity campaigner Laura Ormiston Chant, continued to be mirrored by the ‘abbreviated costumes’ of the women who purposively strolled the theatre’s promenade bar.8 When Mariinsky favourite Lydia Kyasht took up an appointment as principal ballerina at the Empire in 1908, her patron Tsar Alexander II was appalled. But the twentieth-century forerunners of Diaghilev’s cultural offensive had no choice but to perform ‘on the halls’. Russia’s imperial court ballerinas found themselves billed alongside plate spinners, Bioscope picture reels and clog dancers. Tamara Karsavina and Olga Preobrazhenska appeared at the Coliseum and the Hippodrome, while ‘all during Coronation Month’ the ‘incomparable Anna Pavlova’ herself was dancing at the Palace Theatre of Varieties following ‘magicians, acrobats, ventriloquists, clowns, jugglers, and even animal acts’.9 These Russian dancers made compromises because they were phenomenally well paid.10 Thanks to the Edwardian gentrification of the music hall undertaken first by Stoll and swiftly emulated by his competitors, vast profits were being made from Empires, Coliseums, and Hippodromes across the land. Stoll insisted the ribald and the racy be toned down and judiciously combined regular music-hall fare with more elevated material so that one-act plays by the likes of George Bernard Shaw or Arthur Pinero, or indeed ‘turns’ by Russian ballerinas, might be sandwiched between a boxing kangaroo and a knife-thrower. Stoll had transformed the unedifying entertainment of English working-class tradition into something inoffensive to standards of genteel propriety. Diaghilev’s post-war acceptance of Stoll’s proposal was largely consequent on promises of box-office draw, but there were other than purely commercial factors at play. By 1918, for an art cognoscenti, music hall had acquired a new set of meanings. In the years since the

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fledgling Ballets Russes had raised the status of ballet in London from a ‘silly after-dinner entertainment for vulgar men’ to a ‘passionate, poignant spectacle … conceived at a high pitch of emotional intelligence’, the company had continued to absorb and collaboratively evolve the newest developments in art.11 The most significant of these was Italian futurism. While Stoll was engaged in hijacking English music hall from its traditional working-class audience, F. T. Marinetti had commandeered the music-hall mode of speedily spliced topicalities for his futurist agenda. Marinetti’s paean to Variety Theatre published in the Daily Mail (1913) and subtitled with typical panache as ‘The Meaning of the Music Hall by the Only Intelligible Futurist’ indicates the vital role of music hall in the forming of avant-garde sensibilities.12 With its reckless pace and hyperactive disregard of narrative coherence, music hall provided for Marinetti an urban vernacular as responsive to the electricity of the moment as it was distanced from the misty aestheticisms of fin-de-siècle bourgeois culture. Curiously enough, Diaghilev’s earliest encounter with the notorious Italian movement was thanks to one of Stoll’s rather less successful attempts at an ‘elevating’ programme. On 15 June 1914, the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky arrived in London for rehearsals of his opera-ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s chinoiserie fairy tale, ‘The Nightingale’. That evening, he and Diaghilev attended a ‘Grand Futurist Concert of Noises’ at the Coliseum, where they were confronted with the ‘Buzzers, Whistlers, Rattlers, Exploders, Murmurers, Cracklers, Thunderers, Gurglers and Roarers’ of Luigi Russolo’s electric intonarumori and heard Marinetti holding forth on ‘The Art of Noises’.13 Marinetti’s declamatory exposition of futurist principles was greeted by a derisive reception from the gallery, reputed to have lasted a full twenty minutes and thoroughly ‘qualified to give him a lesson in his own Art of Noises’ according to The Times.14 Nevertheless Diaghilev and Stravinsky were intrigued.15 Stravinsky’s attention to the futurists would be maintained because of their enthusiastic admiration for his own compositions; meanwhile Diaghilev envisaged collaborative possibilities with the maverick Italians which he would follow up during the peripatetic war years to come. Three nights later, The Nightingale had its London premiere at Drury Lane. It was here that an excited Osbert Sitwell saw the celebrated composer on stage for the first time. Sitwell noted the ‘pure, flat, two-dimensional beauty’ of Stravinsky’s composition, ‘very rare and full of delicacy’. However, looking back from 1948, he recalled that while The Nightingale was received politely by the

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‘clustered, nodding tiaras and the white kid gloves’ it was thereafter ‘rather seldom mentioned, and perhaps in its first version not altogether successful’.16 Sitwell’s retrospective inference is that this ‘first version’ of The Nightingale paled in comparison with the dramatics of Stravinsky’s earlier Petroushka (1911) or the innovations of his infamous The Rite of Spring (1913), ballets which had marked such radical change, not only in music but in the choreographic fusion of music and dance. Yet Austin Harrison, editor of The English Review and generally a Ballets Russes champion, was decidedly disconcerted by the ‘whooping cough syncopation and disharmony’ of The Nightingale.17 Harrison made sense of it for readers in terms of the series of concerts causing such a stir at the Coliseum: ‘The noises are strangely reminiscent of Signor Ruffalo’s [sic] Futurist orchestra of “roarers” and squealers: ugly, odd, insincere, based on no foundations.’18 While Stravinsky’s London encounter with the futurists left him amused by their media antics, his own interest in ‘noise’ had in fact anticipated the experiments of Russolo by some years. The initial impact of The Nightingale’s modernism has been eclipsed by legends of the furore generated by the Rite of Spring and historically it has remained entirely in its shadow. In fact, for discerning reviewers at the time, it was a case of succès d’estime replacing succès de scandale. Composer and critic Émile Vuillermoz saw The Nightingale not only as ‘a miracle of Far Eastern art … in its characteristic sonorities’ but also ‘a progressive step’ from the extraordinary technique Stravinsky had developed in the Rite of Spring.19 Maurice Ravel claimed the score a masterpiece and wrote of the ballet’s visual impact: ‘I believe I have never seen more perfectly harmonious sets and costumes. As a measure perhaps of his French origins, M. Alexandre Benois blends a delicate taste with the Asiatic splendour of his compatriots.’20 Benois himself was delighted with the production, writing in his Reminiscences about this collaborative chinoiserie: The sea and landscape of the first act, the throne-room and the golden bedroom in the Emperor’s palace, gave me an opportunity to express all my infatuation with Chinese art. At first I hoped to keep to the style of the somewhat ridiculous Chinoiseries fashionable in the eighteenth century, but as the work advanced I became irritated by their insipidity. My love for genuine Chinese Art began more and more to permeate my production. My collection of popular Chinese colour-prints, which had been brought for me from Manchuria, served as valuable material for the costumes. The final result was a Chinoiserie de ma façon, far from accurate by pedantic standards and even, in a sense, hybrid, but undoubtedly appropriate to Stravinsky’s music.21

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The story of Stravinsky and Benois’ collaboration on The Nightingale reveals a series of transnational artistic exchange that takes us back to the origins of chinoiserie and reveals its close aesthetic kinship with the art of ballet.

‘It is the Orient of Beardsley’ In the summer of 1909, Sergei Diaghilev wrote to Anatoly Lyadov, composer and music master at the St Petersburg Conservatory, with his usual inimitable conviction: I need a ballet and a Russian one – the first Russian ballet, since there is no such thing – there is Russian opera, Russian symphony, Russian song, Russian dance, Russian rhythm – but no Russian ballet. And that is precisely what I need, to perform in May of the coming year in the Paris Grand Opera and in the huge Royal Drury Lane Theatre in London.22

The insistent tone was to some extent on account of Lyadov’s renowned distractedness. ‘The libretto is ready’, Diaghilev encouraged him, ‘Fokine has it and it was cooked up by us all collectively. It’s The Firebird.’23 Diaghilev was eager to capitalise on the surprise success of his very first season of ballets, the unexpected culmination of a series of cultural exchanges which had confirmed a Parisian passion for Slavic orientalism. Curator, tastemaker and impresario extraordinaire, Diaghilev’s particular genius was for the creative administration of music and art. For six years he was editor-in-chief of Mir iskusstva (World of Art) the magazine he founded in 1899 with the Russian artists Alexandre Benois and Leon Bakst. World of Art served as a beacon of aesthetic taste after the fashion of Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, the Yellow Book and The Studio. The miriskusniki professed their disdain for Russian social realism and a devotion to an international ornamental aesthetic. They revered traditional Russian folk art, Italian commedia dell’arte, and the rococo chinoiserie of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684– 1721) and Francois Boucher (1703–70).24 Their most admired contemporary was the London-based James McNeill Whistler whose paintings served as a critical benchmark for the group. The compositional influence of an oriental aesthetic on Whistler, the asymmetric arrangements, flattened planes and shortened perspectives of Chinese ink-wash painting and Japanese woodblock prints had proved disturbing to conservative critics (most famously John Ruskin) because in foregrounding such formal qualities Whistler’s pictures, notably the Nocturnes (1872−5), a series of vaporous Thameside vistas, were emptied of any narrative or moral comment.

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Diaghilev organised numerous exhibitions in St Petersburg at which Russian viewers were shown works considered important by World of Art. Between 1897 and 1899, Whistler was the highlight of these, together with other British-based followers of his style including the ‘Glasgow Boy’ James Lavery, (who would later paint Pavlova as a fiery, barefoot bacchante), and Yellow Book contributor, Charles Conder, whose exquisite Versailles fantasies painted on silk fans would inspire Benois’ first ballet, Le Pavillon d’Armide (1907). Benois, the balletomane of the group, readily declared himself under ‘the spell of anglomania’.25 Their passion for a Wildean Aestheticism and art-for-art’s-sake Decadence was a distinctive characteristic of the World of Art modernists. In 1906, Diaghilev took his curatory expertise abroad. He staged a major retrospective of Russian painting and ikons at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. The following year he put on a lavish festival of ‘Russian Music Down the Ages’ at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra, and in 1908 a splendidly spectacular production of the opera Boris Godunov at the Palais Garnier. The historical significance of Diaghilev’s ‘foreign export campaign’ as Benois called it, was to be the optical splash of Russian theatrical production, its bombardment of clashing colour and stirring rhythm that would invigorate and expand the parameters of a moribund Western orientalism.26 Diaghilev’s staging of Boris privileged a pictorial over an anecdotal approach, exemplifying his distinctly anti-literary conception of musical theatre: ‘Literary things one reads. It is not necessary to hear them spoken on stage.’ Diaghilev made this provocative statement to the New York Post in 1916, some seven years after his export enterprise had been forced to renounce the verbal pretty much entirely.27 On 9 February 1909, the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, the Tsar’s uncle and Diaghilev’s principal source of funding, dropped dead. The lavishly expensive operas needed shortening or to be cut altogether. A planned single evening of ballet for the forthcoming season was extended to replace them. The ballets proved the surprise hit of the saison russe, amazing the French who considered ballet to be their own national preserve. The Polovtsian Dances from the second act of Prince Igor, choreographed by Mikhail Fokine for a male corps de ballet, brought the air of the Cossack steppes to the Théâtre du Châtelet while his Nuit d’Egypte (later Cleopatra) stunned elite Parisians with the violent eroticism of the harem. Diaghilev had cannily orchestrated his revised programme to continue to appeal to the taste he had cultivated among Parisians for a ‘semi-Asiatic barbarism’.28

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Classical ballet, in Russia an aristocratic diversion preserved in aspic, was on the face of it an unlikely source of artistic renewal. Yet for Benois the realm of ballet, located in the exotic, magical and otherworldly, ‘true to superannuated principles of beauty and stylisation’ and quite uncompromised by sociopolitical Realism, rendered it the ideal expression of World of Art ideology.29 In 1908, Benois published a ‘Colloquy on Ballet’ in which he augured: ‘the history of ballet is far from over; before it lie even greater prospects, perhaps, than lie before opera or drama’.30 The undoing contradiction of opera, as Benois saw it, was to force music into fusion with the ‘utilitarian medium of words’.31 Benois’ paramount recollection of a St Petersburg Shrovetide harlequinade which he was just old enough to have seen, aged four, ‘was the outstanding fact that … nobody spoke … the magic spell was unbroken by any foolish words’.32 In ballet’s theatrical synthesis of aural, kinetic and visual artistry, the sequence of images creates a musico-scenic coherence of its own, superseding narrative logic. Above all, ballet might exemplify the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a collective production in which every constituent artistic element contributes in equal measure to an integrated whole. Diaghilev’s Parisian triumph of 1909, born of pecuniary necessity, was the vindication of Benois’ ballet manifesto. Of equal importance to the dancing talent of Pavlova, Nijinsky and Karsavina were the integrated elements of costume and scenery devised by Benois, Bakst and Nicholas Roerich. French critics raved but were careful to distinguish between their own ‘civilised’ ballet tradition and this Russian ballet, ‘impregnated by centuries of Asiatic tradition’.33 Dances choreographed precisely by Fokine were praised for their improvisational spontaneity and instinctual ‘primordial rhythm’. Bakst’s ‘haphazard’ colour combinations stupefied the senses simply because they were ‘inconceivable for Occidentals’.34 Few critics chose to recognise what was at core a shared balletic tradition of European orientalism, meanwhile Diaghilev realised he had unwittingly devised an unprecedented genre, a ‘Russian’ ballet. Where the project fell short of the startling innovation of its dance and design was musically. Hence Diaghilev’s rather desperate letter to Lyadov. He was aware that what his ballets lacked was music that would prove a worthy counterpart to the decorative and choreographic astonishments of the Polovtsian Dances and Cleopatra. The already clichéd Eastern motifs and barbaric effects of Russia’s ‘Mighty Five’ composers, RimskyKorsakov, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Cui and Balakirev were inevitably likely to pall.

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It was while pursuing Lyadov in St Petersburg, that Diaghilev happened to attend a private concert at the Conservatory where he was struck by the reluctant composer’s erstwhile pupil. The ‘chirrs, whistles, buzzes, jingles, and flutters’ as one bemused critic described the peculiar sonic effects of Igor Stravinsky’s Scherzo Fantastique (1908) and Fireworks (1908), had an originality that so impressed Diaghilev he decided to offer The Firebird project to him.35 Conservative St Petersburg opinion disowned young Stravinsky’s harmonic dissonance and ‘excessive pursuit of sonorities’ comparing him to a ‘man who would drive away a good woman and get involved with God knows who, dyed, and rouged, but heartless, yes and very likely mad too’.36 Yet Stravinsky would go on to fuse the national and the modern in a way that had eluded his contemporaries in their search for artistic rejuvenation in pagan antiquity. His compositions transcended the folkloric sources from which they sprang; their wider source of influence, through Stravinsky’s exposure to European musical chinoiseries, rendering them a force in international modernism. French critics, in their excitement over the ‘barbarians come from the Orient’, on the whole chose to ignore the influences of decadence and aesthetic orientalism on the Russian moderns. Only Henri Ghéon, founder with André Gide of the avant-garde journal, La Nouvelle Revue Française, noted: ‘It is the Orient of Beardsley that Bakst brings back to us … purified by the Slavic Orient that Stravinsky animates with a new energy!!’37 Closer even to the aesthetic vision of Mir iskusstva than Slavonic orientalisms was a Beardsleyesque style rococo. Benois sought to discover the fabled ‘Russian soul’ in the dilapidated artificial landscapes and crumbling chinoiserie follies of his country’s aristocratic estates. Tsarskoye Selo and Oranienbaum outside St Petersburg were the most lavish of these, the latter constructed under the direction of Catherine the Great, who, crazy about Anglo-Chinese rococo, translated William Chambers’ Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757) into Russian.38 The groves, alleys and pavilions of Russia’s bygone jardins anglo-chinois were depicted by the miriskusniki painters, most notably Benois’ childhood friend Konstantin Somov, in the manner of Beardsley’s Watteau-inspired fêtes galantes, peopled by melancholic Pierrots, sinister Harlequins and capricious Columbines. The inclusion of Benois’ one-act ballet Le Pavillon d’Armide in the Saison Russe of 1909 was calculated to balance the anticipated Slavic exotica with this ultra-civilised, raffiné style, while his libretto revisited the origins of ballet at the court of Versailles where once Louis XIV had ruled in

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mandarin absolutism, styling himself after the fantastical despots of Far Cathay.

Les Fêtes chinoises The wordless dance drama we know as ballet evolved out of the court spectacle of Versailles where ideals of aristocratic bearing were refined into aesthetic principle. Louis XIV became known as Le Roi Soleil after his own performance as Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, in the Ballet de la Nuit in 1653. Lavish celebrations such as this were contrived to impress foreign dignitaries and to reinforce pretensions of the House of Bourbon to absolute rule. In 1670, Louis presented his mistress, Madame de Montespan, with a pagoda constructed entirely of blue and white porcelain wherein they might disport themselves à la mode Chinoise in its Chambre des Amours. This Parisian pagoda was a particularly extravagant signifier of the Chinese Orient as realm of sensual indulgence and power. Under the patronage of the Sun King, the passion for imitating such aspects of Chineseness, from latticed pavilions in palace gardens to adaptations of Chinese plays for masques and ballets, spread throughout the grand estates of Europe, eventually to be given the name chinoiseries.39 Few theatrical productions of the time lacked the addition of a ‘Chinese’ ballet which merged elaborate spectacle with perceived Chinese virtues of decorum and grace. In 1751, ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre created Les Fêtes chinoises, a production that elaborated upon the court ballets, its ingenious choreography tracing ‘a prodigious number of new and perfectly designed attitudes’.40 Les Fêtes chinoises had little dramatic action, consisting of a series of danced pictures performed by an impressively sized and carefully schooled corps de ballet. J. des Boulmiers, eyewitness to a performance at the Opéra Comique, in Paris described: a public square decorated for a festival with, in the background, an amphitheater on which are seated sixteen Chinese [and] thirty-two are seen on the gradins (stepped tiers) going through a pantomime. As the first group descends, sixteen further Chinese, both mandarins and slaves, come out of their habitations [...] All the Chinese, having descended, begin a character march. There are a mandarin, borne in a rich palanquin by six white slaves, whilst two negroes draw a chariot on which a young Chinese woman is seated. They are preceded and followed by a host of Chinese playing various musical instruments [...] the Chinese return to their place on the amphitheater, which is transformed into a china cabinet. Thirty-two vases, which rise up, conceal [...] the thirty-two Chinese one saw before.41

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The ballet had been inspired by La Dance chinoise (1743) a tapestry designed by Francois Boucher for Beauvais, one of the manufactories which along with Gobelins and Aubusson, were established by Louis XIV and Louis XV, and where extensive series such as L’Histoire de l’Empereur de la Chine were woven for the French nobility from designs by the masters of rococo chinoiserie, Boucher, Watteau and Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728−1808). Benois went back to this period of ballet’s ‘original enchantment and vitality’ for Le Pavillon d’Armide (1907) telling the story of a Beauvais tapestry come to life.42 The libretto was adapted from ‘Omphale’ (1834), a tale of Gothic erotica by the French decadent, orientalist and balletomane, Théophile Gautier. His ‘conte dans le style rococo’ as ‘Omphale’ is subtitled, darkens the whimsicality and bucolic frivolity of the eighteenth-century fête galante with its depiction of a dilapidated ‘pavilion of delight’ haunted by the transience of fleshly pleasures. When Diaghilev saw the ballet performed at the Mariinsky in 1907 (and incidentally first beheld seventeen-year-old Vaslav Nijinsky who danced Armida’s favourite slave) he resolved ‘this must be shown to Europe’.43 The Parisian premiere of Le Pavillon d’Armide, in May 1909, demonstrated that the Russians could outdo the French on their own ground. Benois accounted for the phenomenon: ‘We had shown Europe something European that had been miraculously preserved in our own country and there transfigured and revived.’44 Fokine’s choreography derived its inspiration directly from Noverre’s Les Fêtes chinoises. A succession of divertissements included a procession of little Ethiopian slave boys, a frantic bacchanale danced by a cohort of maenads led by Bacchus, an entrance of magicians led by King Hydrao which darkened the mood leading to a dance of the shades, dispelled finally by the wave of a magic wand. Benois based his design for the ballet’s garden with topiary obelisks and working fountains on his painstaking researches into the work of Noverre’s scenographer and costumier for Les Fêtes chinoises, Louis-René Boquet (1717− 1814). Jean Cocteau recalled his impressions of seeing Le Pavillon d’Armide in 1909, its effect ‘better than a poem by Heine, than a story of Poe, than any dream, this nostalgia for things partly seen, insubstantial and insistent’.45 Diaghilev’s Russian dancers were leading art into the future via the chinoiserie escapades of the past.

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Plate 1 New Yorker cover, ‘War Porcelain’, by Charles Addams, 14 November 1942.

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Plate 2 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Stag, 1913. Pen and ink on paper (buff). 21 x 33 cm. Image © Kettle’s Yard.

Plate 3 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Cock, c. 1912–13. Green wash on paper (buff). 15 x 20 cm. Image © Kettle’s Yard.

Chung Ling Soo poster.

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Plate 4 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Birds Erect, 1914. Stone cast. 67 x 30 x 26 cm. Image © Kettle’s Yard.

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