“Nature and Imagination: the posterity of Joseph Addison’s ‘Pleasures’ in British Enlightenment culture”

Résumé En

In this paper, I would like to discuss the seminal influence of Joseph Addison’s famous series of Spectator essays entitled ‘the Pleasures of the imagination’ (1712) on the new forms of artistic expression (novel, landscape garden, painting) which emerged in England in the 18th century. At the heart of his aesthetic theory, and in the wake of Locke’s empirical account of the understanding, is the provocative assertion of nature’s superiority over art, the ‘most polite’ creations, henceforth, being those that provide that ‘wanton kind of chace’ towards a better comprehension of God’s ‘Great Book’. Indeed, in the decades immediately following Addison’s Spectator, writers and artists proposed resolutely new ‘experiments’ in literature, garden design or art, which all attempt to explore this ‘modern’ link between nature, imagination, pleasure and knowledge. From Defoe’s Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver to the novels of Richardson and Fielding or Thomson’s Seasons, from the work of Vanbrugh at Blenheim Palace to the ‘natural’ garden designs of Stourhead or Stowe, from Hogarth’s conversation pictures and ‘modern history paintings’ to Gainsborough’s outdoor portraiture, all those new forms of expression can be regarded as so many new optical (spectatorial) instruments, purporting to offer a more direct, ‘modern’ (and English) observation of Nature, that is to say Nature as it appears rather than as it ought to be. In effect we can read them as the conscious performance of Addison’s epistemological conception of aesthetic pleasure, based on a much more active involvement of individual subjectivity in the work of art. As such Addison’ essays and their immediate artistic legacy can be said to have played a crucial part in the rise of Enlightenment culture.