Tag Archives: Lucretius

“Heavy Fumes of Charcoal Creep into the Brain”

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Lake Eola (2005) by Steven Willis

In March of 2018 I attended the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Orlando, Florida and delivered a brief paper on John Evelyn’s late-seventeenth-century pamphlet Fumifugium: Or, The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated.  The panel’s topic was “Intimations of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene,” and it was scheduled on the conference’s final day and in its final time band, which seemed fittingly apocalyptic given that we were all talking environmental cataclysm.  What follows is a reconceptualization of that paper based on insights from the other panelists as well as dialogue with the audience:

I am afraid I won’t have much that is meaningful to say about our unspeakably vexed environmental present—our “-cene,” be it “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” or some other—except to stress its continuities to the past.  Obviously, the broiling present of our hotbox planet cannot be ignored, and nor can the climate refugees who are its victims.  But I am not yet convinced that there is anything actionable that eighteenth-century studies can say to those whom environmental degradation immiserates except “a lot of people in a lot of places and times saw this coming.”  Even so, the bottom-out environmental condition of “major system collapse after major system collapse after major system collapse,” as Donna Haraway puts it, must niggle at the consciences of those of us who drove to that conference with our sacred gasoline just as it must have weighed on the minds of those of us who flew there on the strength of aviation turbine fuel—a signal petro-chemical achievement in combustibility [1].  Even the Orlando International Airport, that great gateway to the Disney phantasmagoria, must drag down our ecologically privileged souls:  twenty square miles of concrete poured out over a drained swamp where airport employees likely fire propane cannons to scare birds lest their flights disturb ours.

Fumifugium (1661) by John Evelyn

To come back to Evelyn, his Fumifugium is quite simply an anti-air pollution pamphlet.  It was published in 1661 and then later reproduced several times in the eighteenth century, notably in 1772 by antiquarian Samuel Pegge the elder.  In the document proper, Evelyn outlines and Pegge reiterates a geo-engineering project in two strokes:  first the removal of certain industries from the pleasant—read upper class—urban places they are polluting, followed by the mass planting of fine smelling trees.  “But the Remedy which I would propose,” Evelyn writes, “require[s] only the Removal of such Trades, as are manifest Nuisances to the City, which I would have placed at farther distances [from the city]; especially, such as in their works and Fournaces use great quantities of Sea-Coale, the sole and only cause of those prodigious Clouds of Smoake” [2].  A simple and economically productive way to carve out a refuge:  move all the burning industries six miles south of London, for who knows what rabble lives and can be poisoned there.  The title of this post—“Heavy fumes of charcoal creep into the brain”—is W. H. D. Rouse’s English translation of the Latin epigraph on Fumifugium’s title page [3].  The epigraph itself comes from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, a famed example of the consolation of philosophy.  I won’t gloss De Rerum Natura here, but the intertext is important [4].  In an atomistic universe, one in which the collision of primary particles determines events and happenings, the material residues of fire and smoke are essential.  Smoke’s waftings alter things in the human world—they alter the body and brain as Evelyn points out.  Smoke is the clinamen of atoms in perhaps its most obvious form—a classic example of the “airborne toxic event” that we all face down for the remainder of our days [5].  This is how Evelyn’s tract describes London’s repellent air pollution.  The unavoidable smoke and its “black and smutty Atomes […] insinuate[s] itself into our very secret Cabinets, and most precious Repositories,” both bodily and architectural [6].  “It enters by several branches into the very Parenchyma, and substance of the Lungs […] together with those multiform and curious Muscles, […] which becoming rough and drye, can neither be contracted, or dilated […]” [7].  According to Evelyn, the noxious burning of coal can be laid at the hands of “Brewers, Dyers, Soap-boilers and Lime-burners,” whose pursuits unquestionably endanger all.

A View from the East-End of the Brewery Chiswell Street (1792) by George Garrard

“[I]t is manifest,” Evelyn writes, “those who repair to London, no sooner enter into it, but they find a universal alteration in their Bodies, which are either dryed up or enflamed, the humours being exasperated and made apt to putrifie, their sensories and perspiration so exceedingly stopped, with the losse of Appetite, and a kind of general stupefaction, succeeded with such Catharrs and Distillations, as do never, or very rarely quit them, without some further Symptoms of dangerous Inconveniency so long as they abide in the place […]” [8].  Moreover, and because of the use of coal, the trees can no longer bear fruit, flowers no longer flower.  People are condemned to the “strange stupidity” of being “fumo praefocari,” that is, “suffocated by smoke.”  It is stunning that Evelyn’s understanding of the bodily effects of anthropogenic air pollution anticipates our own so neatly.  And so what is to be done to remediate these dangers?  On the one hand, “fumifugium” can mean “removal of smoke.”  According to this translation, the “constant and unremitting poison” of “smoake” can actively be eliminated, or “dissipated,” by human ingenuity and labor, both of which create value.  I’d like to gesture to an alternate construal of “fumifugium” as “flight from smoke.”  For me, this slant translation both anticipates the dire predicament of our own moment’s evaporating refugia and, conversely, gets to the heart of the inhuman dream of imperial capitalism from the seventeenth century to today:  whether by flights of industrious fancy or fleets of frigates, the Earth always offers a new territory lucratively to destroy [9].  At least, that is, until it doesn’t.  Evelyn is an environmentalist type who is legible in our own ruined moment.  Even as he condemns the “sordid and accursed Avarice of some few particular persons” whose means of being produce the inescapable London smoke that Evelyn finds so “impure” and “uliginous”—a word that I learned means “slimy” and “miasmic”—Evelyn’s condemnation is also actually a statement of his own worth as projector.  When Evelyn describes what others have done to make London the “Court of Vulcan” and—one of my favorite of his metaphors—the “Suburbs of Hell,” he does so in order to announce his own value as improvement thinker, one who will lead the king and (some of) his people toward a more wholesome future by way of industrial displacement and tree planting.  These are labor-producing endeavors, the green jobs of long ago.

John Evelyn (1689) by Godfrey Kneller

Fumifugium is an originary biopolitical text.  Its arguments are grounded in the fact, attested by eighteenth-century Bills of Mortality, that air pollution was a public health disaster even as it was caused by economic activities meant to keep the population alive and growing.  Evelyn writes:  “The Consequences then of all this is, that (as was said) almost one half of them who perish in London, dye of Phthisical and Pulmonic distempers.”  Smoke is killing children, which in any economy qualifies as biopolitical quandary.  Secondly, the Fumifugium is a prophetic text in its way.  Evelyn’s distaste for fire—that originary human experience of capitalism, log after log, coal after coal, without end—derives in part because fire threatens to ignite the city, as it would five years later in the Great Fire of London.  Perhaps most interesting for readers of The 18th-Century Common is the Fumifugium’s afterlife.  Samuel Pegge’s 1772 edition all at once dissociates the text from its Restoration context and repurposes it for the new polluting industries of the Georgian era.  One hundred years after the 1661 publication, nothing and everything was different.  “We may observe how much the evil is increased since the time this Treatise was written,” Pegge writes in the preface to the 1772 edition.  Industrial pollution has not abated but increased, a queer thought to think from 2018 looking at 1772 looking at 1661.  Regarding the term “Anthropocene,” the Invisible Committee writes, “At the apex of his insanity, Man has even proclaimed himself a ‘geological force,’ going so far as to give the name of his species to a phase of the life of the planet:  he’s taken to speaking of an ‘anthropocene.’  For the last time, he assigns himself the main role, even if it’s to accuse himself of having trashed everything—the seas, and the skies, the ground and what’s underground—even if it’s to confess his guilt for the unprecedented extinction of plant and animal species” [10].  For these authors, our hubristic term “Anthropocene” is more of the same:  it’s Evelyn in 1661, in 1772, in 2018.  “But what’s remarkable,” the committee writes, “is that we continue relating in the same disastrous manner to the disaster produced by our own disastrous relationship with the world” [11].  So how do we rethink this “disastrous relationship,” and, actually, can we?

Notes

[1] Haraway, Donna.  “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene:  Making Kin.”  Environmental Humanities.  Vol. 6 (2015).  1.

[2] Evelyn, John.  Fumifugium:  Or, The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated.  London:  B. White, 1772.  34.

[3] Lucretius.  “Carbonumque gravis vis, atque odor insinuator / Quam facile in cerebrum?”  De Rerum Natura.  Trans. W. H. D. Rouse.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard UP, 1924.  5.803-4.

[4] By “intertext,” I refer to a general connection between two different pieces of writing.  In this case, Lucretius’s work clearly influences and animates Evelyn’s project.

[5] In Lucretius, “clinamen,” or swerve, refers to the spontaneous and unpredictable movement of particles that lead to different potentialities.  “Airborne toxic event” is a reference to the second part of Don Delillo’s White Noise (1985).

[6] Evelyn, Fumifugium, 20.

[7] Evelyn, Fumifugium, 26.

[8] Evelyn, Fumifugium, 24.

[9] See other articles in this series, including Cynthia Williams’s “Napoleon, an English Poet, and the Gas Lighting of London” and Nick Allred’s “Locke’s American Wasteland.”

[10] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends.  Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e) (2014).  32.

[11] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 32.

350 Years of Dangerous Women

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Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth. By Paul van Somer, ca. 1576-1621, Flemish, active in Britain (from 1616); After: Peter Lely, 1618-1680, Dutch, active in Britain (from 1643). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth. By Paul van Somer, ca. 1576-1621, Flemish, active in Britain (from 1616); After: Peter Lely, 1618-1680, Dutch, active in Britain (from 1643). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

By the end of the first decade of Charles II‘s reign, the King had acquired a reputation for his many mistresses; his patronage of the theater; and his interest in natural philosophy and the new sciences [1]. These pursuits and those of his most prominent court mistresses, Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland; Nell Gwyn; Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth; and Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin shaped two movements in England, libertinism and sensibility. Writers’ frequent depictions of these women gave new prominence to a remarkable figure in literature, the female libertine, that remains with us.

Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730 (Ashgate 2011) rewrites the history of libertinism and sensibility and considers the female libertine in relation to cultural, philosophical, and literary contexts that contributed to her transformations from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries in England.  I argue that there are five representative types across a diverse group of texts, including “Lady Lucretius” in John Dryden’s Marriage A-la-Mode (1671); “Lady Sensibility” in Aphra Behn’s The Luckey Chance, or an Alderman’s Bargain (1686) and novella, The History of the Nun (1689); “The Humane Libertine” in Catharine Trotter’s epistolary narrative, Olinda’s Adventures (1693), and only comedy, Love at a Loss, or the Most Votes Carries It (1700); “The Natural Libertine” in Delariviere Manley’s The History of Rivella (1714); and “The Amazonian Libertine” in Daniel Defoe’s novel, Roxana (1724) [2]. These authors created female libertines that made lasting contributions to later depictions of the figure, partially inspired by Epicurean ideas found in Lucretius‘s On the Nature of the Universe, which experienced a revival in late Stuart England. Behn and other libertine writers found its destabilizing proposal that all matter, including humans, is composed of free-floating, constantly moving atoms attractive. Thomas Creech’s multiple English translations of Lucretius’s text created a relationship between atomism and the emotions that reflected seventeenth-century natural philosophers’ interest in the connections between the soul and body. Early writers of sensibility were likewise concerned with the physiological effects of heartache made evident through their characters’ weeping, fainting, illness, or even death. Sensibility converged with libertinism in its attention to the senses in the late seventeenth century.

LinkerCharles II’s French mistresses, Portsmouth and Mazarin, who held salons in London during the 1670s, helped to transmit French ideas and culture to England, including characteristics of sensibilité that influenced Behn’s creation of “Lady Sensibility.” The court mistresses became the most influential women in England during the 1660s, 70s, and early 80s. Literary figures modeled after them persisted long after their “reigns” at court were over.

There is a current spate of historical biographies and romances about Charles II’s mistresses in the literary marketplace [3]. Next year will mark seventy years since the publication of the first bestselling modern historical romance set during the first decade of the Restoration, Kathleen Winsor‘s Forever Amber (1944). Published during the Second World War, the novel was banned in Boston and several other cities when it first appeared, mainly for its questionable morality and highly suggestive scenes involving the heroine, Amber St. Clare, a female libertine modeled after several of the real-life and fictional women I examine in Dangerous Women. Current books about female libertines owe a debt to Forever Amber, as bestselling novelists Philippa Gregory and Barbara Taylor Bradford, among others, have admitted. Readers still consistently place Forever Amber at the top of their “Historical Romance” lists, and the novel was re-released in 2000.

In 2002, Elaine Showalter reviewed the 2000 edition of Forever Amber for The Guardian, confessing to having been, as a young girl, “awed by Amber’s courage, daring and strength. Rereading the novel now is no disappointment, and I am also impressed by Winsor’s subversive feminism and the scope and ambition of her historical imagination.” Most of the characters in the novel, including Amber, reflect Hobbesian tendencies, vying with each other to achieve precedence at Charles II’s court in the 1660s. The novel demonstrates Winsor’s command of the historical and literary figures she re-imagines from the Restoration. Her characters’ vanity, plotting, and cruelty resonate with historical records of figures Amber encounters at the Carolean court, Newgate prison, and Alsatia in Whitefriars, the London “sanctuary” for criminals. Winsor drew the characters from the hundreds of accounts, poems, plots, and textbooks she claimed to have read before writing the novel.

Amber’s many marriages and romantic relationships certainly read like an early amatory plot. Born on a dark and stormy night, Amber is the long-lost child of two ill-fated aristocrats separated by the English Civil Wars. Her parents die, and she is raised by villagers of Marygreen, where she is a misfit. Like French seventeenth-century romances by Madame de Scudéry, who influenced Behn and other early English novelists, the story relies on remarkable coincidences. The novel signals that Amber is of noble, not peasant, stock, evident also in her captivating looks, a quality she shares with early romance heroines. One of Amber’s most generous lovers, Captain Rex Morgan, describes her in language we find in Restoration comedy about heroines: “I see you have wit as well as beauty, madame. That makes you perfect” (181). Winsor blends qualities of female libertines in her depiction of Amber, who rises through every class position in the novel to achieve greater autonomy and power through varied performances.

A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). © The British Library Board.

A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). © The British Library Board.

Part of Forever Amber‘s continuing appeal remains in its sweeping survey of 1660s London and the meticulous attention to historical detail. Winsor used Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) as a source for Amber’s experience of plague in London in 1665, and her novel blends elements of other plots by Restoration and early eighteenth-century writers. Like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Amber makes an early career out of trickster-ism and thievery, landing in Newgate prison after her trial. As an actress in the Restoration theater and then a court mistress of Charles II, Amber resembles Nell Gwyn. Defoe’s Roxana, also modeled on Gwyn and Mazarin, is perhaps Amber’s closest literary antecedent. As Amber rises higher in her liaisons with powerful aristocrats, her one consistent relationship is with her maid, Nan, who gives her advice and rises with her, much as Amy counsels Roxana through relationships and crises about the discovery of her “real” identity. Both Roxana and Amber have husbands who desert them early in the narratives, leaving them penniless. Disgraced when she dances for the court in a sheer costume, Amber becomes the “Amazonian Libertine” at court, and the scene parallels Roxana’s dance in her exotic costume. Both women experience a vague punishment at the end, and there is no narrative closure in either text.

Amber experiences disillusionment from her lover, Lord Bruce Carlton. Their relationship echoes plots by Manley, Behn, and Trotter, whose heroines are mistreated or left by cruel and faithless lovers. Carlton sees Amber as a lower-class village girl, even when she becomes a wealthy Duchess. Midway through Winsor’s novel, Amber, now the mother of Carlton’s son, tearfully pleads with him to marry her, but he refuses, arguing that “love has nothing to do with it” (426), a concise description of upper class marital relations frequently examined in Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy and fiction.

Amber’s downfall results partly because of her class aspirations, mirrored by Winsor’s depiction of the Duchess of Cleveland, still Barbara Palmer when she first arrived to Charles II’s court as his mistress. On June 24 1667, Samuel Pepys complained of Cleveland’s influence (she was then called Lady Castlemaine) in his Diary because it produced “the horrid effeminacy of the King,” who “hath taken ten times more care and pains in making friends between my Lady Castlemayne and Mrs. Stewart, when they have fallen out, than ever he did to save his kingdom.”  Though powerful, Cleveland never received a true marriage proposal from the King. She fell from power after he lost patience with her tantrums and ambition. So too with Amber and Carlton.

Single-minded in her social-climbing, Amber seems unaware that she lives in an exciting decade of scientific discovery. She never engages philosophical debates about atomism or Descartes’s mechanical theories of the body, ongoing discussions that we find the most interesting female libertine figures examining in literature. Despite a brief liaison with a student early in the novel, Amber does not question him about his studies or read his books. She lacks associations with any leading thinkers at the Carolean court and does not debate the merits of Epicurean pleasure, the existence of animal spirits, or the theological assertions of “right reason” with theologians or members of the Royal Society she would certainly have met at Whitehall. Perhaps, had Winsor continued writing the sequel she originally planned, she would have featured a more complex female libertine and a more mature Amber, a figure styled after the Duchess of Mazarin, who developed  an intellectual life as interesting as her adventures [4].  But that is another story for another time.

Works Cited

Churchill, Winston. Marlborough, His Life and Times. 4 vols. London: George G. Harrop & Company, 1949. Print.

Winsor, Kathleen. Forever Amber. New York: Macmillan, 1944. Print.

Notes

[1] Charles II cultivated this image. Tim Harris’s excellent article, “Charles II: The Reality Behind the Merry Monarchy,” concisely summarizes historical scholarship on Charles’s reign and the man behind the throne.

[2] Manley was considered a “dangerous woman,” even in the twentieth century. Winston Churchill, descendent of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, describes Manley, who satirized his ancestors, as “a woman of disreputable character paid by the Tories to take part in a detraction which in the intense political passion of the time, was organized against Marlborough” (2: 53-4).

[3] The list of popular novels or biographies continues to grow. Among others, they include Elizabeth C. Goldsmith’s The Kings’ Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (2012); Penelope Sullivan’s Rose Scarlet (2011); and Susan Holloway Scott‘s Royal Harlot: A Novel of the Countess Castlemaine and King Charles II (2007),  The King’s Favorite: A Novel of Nell Gwyn and King Charles II (2008), and The French Mistress: A Novel of the Duchess of Portsmouth and King Charles II (2009).

Cultivating Philosophy in the Epicurean Garden

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Denham Place, Buckinghamshire. Unknown artist, 17th century, British. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Denham Place, Buckinghamshire. Unknown artist, 17th century, British. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

In the late seventeenth century, the philosopher Epicurus and his garden made a comeback in England. Natural philosophers looked to his arguments about atomic swerve to understand the cosmos, and translations of Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe, the primary classical source for dissemination of Epicurus’s ideas, went through multiple English translations by a diverse group of enthusiasts, including, among others, the Puritan, Lucy Hutchinson; the Restoration court writer and poet laureate, John Dryden; the diarist, John Evelyn; and the most prolific of the translators, Thomas Creech, praised by Aphra Behn for making Lucretius available to English readers.

At the center of Epicurean philosophy lies the garden, a symbol for Epicurus’s philosophical ideal of ataraxia, or tranquil pleasure. It is perhaps not surprising that the tumultuous years of civil war and regicide (1640s); the Restoration (1660); plague (1665); fire (1666); and several wars with the Dutch (1650s-70s) would have produced renewed interest among the English in Epicurean philosophy, which argued for retreat from chaos and politics, always unstable, whether in ancient Rome or late Stuart London. The seventeenth century was perhaps a good time to stay in one’s English countryside garden and tend the roses.

Sir William Temple’s essay, “Upon the gardens of Epicurus, or, of gardening in the year 1685,” offers practical advice and best practices for growing plants in England and describes other gardens around the world. In Temple’s world, virtuous philosophy cultivates virtuous vegetation, and Temple is most interested in the nutritious and sweetest fruits with the greatest health benefit. He takes particular interest in the natural plants that counter poisons. The perfect garden provides the simplest nourishment, which Temple advises is the best diet, cautioning the reader against too much meat and wine. We might do well to follow some of his advice today.

The physical garden was to Temple and other Epicureans a reflection of  one’s mental landscape, and in the best of all possible worlds, one would stay in the garden–a position that Voltaire would later and more famously endorse in Candide. That is, if duty–a Stoic ideal of virtue–didn’t intervene. An important statesman, Temple negotiated the Triple Alliance, taking an active role in Charles II’s government until he followed Epicurus’s advice and retired to his own garden. He praises retirement as a philosophical mode in his “Upon the gardens,” and he defends Lucretius from detractors who attacked him for atheism. One of the ancients, Lucretius rightfully belongs among the ranks of Homer, Virgil, and Horace, classical writers revered in the period. Lucretius, Temple argues, was no more or less pagan than they were and deserves equal admiration.

Members of the Royal Society took Epicureanism seriously in their investigations of the body and soul. Temple, however, disliked natural philosophy. In “Upon the gardens,” he does not endorse Lucretian atomism to understand the body or the soul. The era saw tremendous advances in medicine, including Thomas Willis’s discovery of the cranial nerves, still called the “Circle of Willis,” and debates about the operation of the ‘animal spirits,’ those invisible forces thought to flow through the nerve pathways and link a higher with a lower soul. The eclectic physician and natural philosopher Walter Charleton, among others, connected the animal spirits to Lucretian atomism. Temple thought this was not the business of mankind. We might hear Alexander Pope’s Great Chain of Being swinging off in the distance.

Temple most admired Lucretius’s arguments for retreat into a natural space where even the poorest of humans might experience the noblest of tranquil virtues, thereby rivaling or surpassing kings in the simple acts of growing, weeding, planting, and reaping. Though a Royalist, Temple makes a subtle argument in his “Upon the gardens” for the equality of mankind. In other essays, he advocates for peace over conflict, lauding the virtues of a well-functioning government over the glory of war. This in a period that saw England’s greatest imperialistic expansion and many English translations of epics. Temple suggests the inferiority of Homer and Virgil, who depict epic deities with the worst human qualities enacting the basest schemes against mortals, to Lucretius, who argues against their existence. Though at other times sounding strongly Christian, Temple here seems to endorse Lucretius’s ideas, which led some critics to accuse him of atheism.

The idea of Epicureanism as a state of virtuous tranquility or simple living has not survived in popular understandings of the word “Epicurean.” It became associated with a pleasure ideal followed by Charles II’s court libertines, who misused the term in writing about their sensory pleasures. It was precisely these sorts of pleasures that Epicurus and Lucretius discouraged their followers from pursuing. They argued that it disrupted the mind and caused unhappiness, frustration, and depression. Lucretius spends an entire book (Book 4)–which Dryden translates in Sylvae–in On the Nature of the Universe in dissuading humans from sexual promiscuity along with other excesses, including gluttony. Ironically, a Google search of the term “Epicurean” will yield more results for food, wine, and kitchen products than it will for anything Epicurus or Lucretius valued–friendship, moderation, and gardening–all pursuits cultivating virtue and the life of the active body and mind.

That is not to say that Epicurus or Lucretius disavow all sensory pleasures, and the garden Temple describes is abundant with procreative purpose. He genders certain plants as strong and masculine and describes the eroticism of the plants, redefining the idea of sensuous experience in an age when debauchery still ruled the court. In Temple’s garden, all sorts of pleasures await the senses. Birdsong ravishes the ears; fruits tantalize the eyes and noses; the texture of plants and fruits roughen, nuzzle, or prick the skin; and exotic oranges, ripe cherries, and perfect apples sweeten the tongue. Temple’s Eden is an erotic space where Adam and Eve once played and “worked” happily together. These organic pleasures are subtle and require finely tuned senses rather than the baser ones the notorious rake, John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, refines in his poetry.

The film The Serpent’s Kiss (1997, directed by Philippe Rousselot), is set during the reign of William III in 1699 and dramatizes some of Temple’s ideas. A Dutch landscape gardener, Meneer Chrome (actor Ewan MacGregor) arrives to the English countryside to design a garden for a pretentious would-be gentleman, Thomas Smithers (actor Pete Postelthwaite), who desires a garden for his vain and adulterous wife, Juliana (actress Greta Scacchi). The daughter of the house, Anna, who renames herself Thea (actress Carmen Chaplin), opposes the planned garden and seems to command the wind to destroy it. She filters her world through the lens of Andrew Marvell’s poetry, wanting only the wild natural world to fill her senses. Her parents’ lifestyle seems to drive her mad, and her father nearly has her committed, treating her “unnatural” obsession for the outdoors as a form of madness requiring several tortuous treatments. She eventually elopes with the gardener, literally throwing out her poetry book. Both Meneer and Thea/Anna embrace the idea of a natural Edenic world and an uncontrived life.

Though Temple rejects the vanity that Smithers and Juliana represent, he saw the patterned garden as an expression of reason, anticipating the magnificently complex gardens of the eighteenth century. Like seventeenth-century definitions of wit, Temple’s philosophy of the garden expresses a balance of judgment and fancy, those gendered faculties of the mind, and an appropriate blend of reason and passion. The act of gardening for Temple was the practice of freeing the self from the disordered passions, unavoidable but capable of being subdued like wild weeds. One needs only a patch of earth, a shovel, and a life of the mind.