Theory of Garden Art by C. C. L. Hirschfeld (review)

79 varied’’ lives of businessmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘‘The patriarchal family and kinship networks coexisted with possessive individualism. Thecapitalistethossurfacedintraditional families alongside conventional social ambitions.’’ Mr. Grassby’s iconoclasm pursues the ‘‘facts’’ so intently that, with the refreshing candor of an ‘‘independent scholar,’’ he sometimes vindicates the work of his targets. As part of his argument that, ‘‘Marriage in thebusinesscommunitydid not just transfer power over women from father to husband,’’he asserts that ‘‘Companionate marriage’’ flourished during his period of study, a position that vindicates Stone’s Family, Sex and Marriage . His work in ‘‘apprenticeship registers ’’ finds women joining ‘‘the cutlers, pewterers, drapers, glasssellers, girdlers, basketmakers, scriveners, gunmakers, weavers, clockmakers, goldsmiths, carpentersand stationers.’’However,thepercentage of women apprentices was so ‘‘tiny,’’ and the ‘‘disadvantage’’they suffered from ‘‘lack of capital’’so great, that he, like any good gender theorist, concludes , ‘‘Apprenticeship brought women into the economy without changing the patriarchal character of society.’’ Perhaps most revealing, as Mr. Grassby moves through the topics of marriage, family, men in business, and women in business, he repeatedly corroborates the demographic analysis that underlies much of Stone’s recent work. Although a period of scientific advancement and increasing material wealth, 1580–1740 also wasatimeofdemographiccrisis.‘‘In the early eighteenth century 45 percent of . . . [London] aldermen had no male issue .’’ ‘‘Of the 1,226 baronetcies created (1611–1800), 55 percent were extinct by 1800, and only 295 existed by 1928; only fourteen of ninety-three families achieved succession in single direct male line, often through grandsons.’’ Whether we find it in Nancy Armstrong’s comments upon the ‘‘dismantling’’of the ‘‘aristocratic body’’or in Michael McKeon’s upon ‘‘categorial instability,’’ the claim that patrilineal succession failed in early modern England underlies many of the cultural, gender, and literary studies of which Mr. Grassby is so suspicious. That he unwittingly spreads the ‘‘virus’’ of which he is so contemptuous hardly diminishes his achievement. Rather, it betokens the purity of his method. This book is a ‘‘must-read’’foranyhistorian or literary critic who wishes to attempt (or rely upon) generalizations about marriage, family, and property in eighteenth-century England. Its great lesson is that such generalizations always risk being ‘‘anachronistic’’ and must be offered cautiously, charily—even by Mr. Grassby himself. Brian McCrea University of Florida C. C. L. HIRSCHFELD. Theory of Garden Art, ed. and trans. Linda B. Parshall.Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture. Philadelphia : Pennsylvania, 2001. Pp. ix ⫹ 496. $59.95; £42. C. C. L. Hirschfeld’s five-volume Theorie der Gartenkunst (1779–1785), one of the most influential and popular books on landscape design published in the later eighteenth century, has never been available in English. (This may be because it appeared simultaneously in French; because large swatches of the book are lifted from British and French treatises and guidebooks; or because others later plundered his work, making it seem less original that it actually is.) Hirschfeld’s Theory is both a hymn of praise to the new, ‘‘natural’’ English gar- 80 den and a critique, not only of ‘‘artificial’’ French gardens but of many contemporary garden practices: mixing Chinese, Moorish, and Gothic styles; ignoring the contours and character of the landscape; building ostentatious structures too big for their context and function. Throughout he advocates simple, expressive gardens , ‘‘free of empty ornamentations and trivial affectations,’’ and ‘‘naturalness improved by a restrained art.’’ While he acknowledges that ‘‘princes’’ are necessary to build the more elaborate gardens, he often sounds as if he and his readers would be happy with a carefullydesigned and tended quarter acre. Unlike many other eighteenth-century garden theorists, Hirschfeld is remarkably eclectic and non-dogmatic: ‘‘In matters that theory has not yet exactly determined , perhaps cannot determine, people follow established linguistic practice ; and we understand and are understood , without tying ourselves to the precision of logic and the stubbornness of an arbitrary terminology.’’ He was a professor of philosophy and aesthetics at the University at Kiel, but also the director of a fruit tree nursery. His publishedwork reflects this unusual marriage of the theoretical and the pragmatic. He criticizes landscape theorists like Whately for elevating ‘‘pure metaphysics’’ over ‘‘feeling ,’’ as well as for giving very little ‘‘practical guidance.’’ He...