A Reader on Reading

At about the same time and in other places, gardeners were discovering that same notion. Horace Walpole, writing about the landscape artist William Kent, noted that “he leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.” Kent did what in another context Marcel Duchamp was to do centuries later: he put a frame around the readymades of nature. He called the wilderness a garden simply because he was there to look upon it, and merely redistributed what he found for better effect in a procedure Alexander Pope was to call “landscape painting.” A rock was moved, a watercourse diverted, but the general aspect of the garden remained decidedly “wild.” Kent’s masterstroke took place in 1735, when, under the patronage of Queen Caroline, he planted a dead tree in Richmond Gardens. The gesture was directly equivalent to the use of unattributed quotations in so much eighteenth-century writing, for instance in the work of Laurence Sterne.

In contrast with Kent’s “recuperation” of the wilderness in England, Friedrich’s Sanssouci was a model of French artifice, a product of human reason. Kent’s wilderness was, in some sense, a response to the English Puritans’ abhorrence of the geometrical forms in gardens, to the logical constructions that, according to them, prevented the soul from finding its narrow path. Sanssouci, on the other hand, obeyed the baroque impulse born with the Counter-Reformation, the intuition that truth can best be revealed in hiding, in the elaborate volutes and spirals that lend presence to a concept by enclosing it. Looking towards the palace, a visitor would have been able to follow the careful lines of terraced gardens which look, especially in winter when the trellises are visible, like rising rows of bookshelves in a dream library; the viewer would probably reflect for a moment on the circumscribed passages of laid-out parterres, enjoy the convoluted swirls that surrounded the central fountain, remember the stories of the ancient gods illustrated by the sculptures. In his Essai sur les moeurs, written at Sanssouci, Voltaire had noted that “it is not in the nature of man to desire that which he does not know” and that therefore he required “not only a prodigious length of time but also felicitous circumstances to rise above his animal state.” Sanssouci allowed the visitor to understand how nature could be reasoned, could be read through its unfurled texts revealed in apparently coded flowerbeds and deliberately arranged views, could be reflected in poetical compositions and musical scores, could be understood through baroque emblems and artifices, thereby encouraging an ardent desire for natural knowledge. At least, that was the intention.

But Friedrich became disillusioned with Voltaire’s teachings, or with Voltaire the man, or with that part of himself that as a youngster had believed that there was wisdom in art beyond the scope of power and accomplishments in the spirit that no imperial armies could conquer. He had opposed his personal vanity to that of his father, the sophisticated, cultured identity of the heir apparent to the brutish, ambitious identity of Friedrich I. Like Prince Hal, Prince Friedrich suddenly realized that “The tide of blood in me / Hath proudly flow’d in vanity till now: / Now doth it turn and ebb back to the sea, / Where it shall mingle with the state of floods / And flow henceforth in formal majesty.” Of such majesty Voltaire wanted no part even though in his Memoirs he was to confess: “I could not but be attracted to him, because he was witty, graceful, and also because he was a king, which always proves very seductive, given our human weakness.”