Men of genius have usually been condemned to compose their finest works,
which are usually their earliest ones, under the roof of a garret; and
few literary characters have lived, like Pliny and Voltaire, in a villa
or _chateau_ of their own. It has not therefore often happened that a
man of genius could raise local emotions by his own intellectual
suggestions. Ariosto, who built a palace in his verse, lodged himself in
a small house, and found that stanzas and stones were not put together
at the same rate: old Montaigne has left a description of his library;
"over the entrance of my house, where I view my court-yards, and garden,
and at once survey all the operations of my family!"
There is, however, a feeling among literary men of building up their own
elegant fancies, and giving a permanency to their own tastes; we dwell
on their favourite scenes as a sort of portraits, and we eagerly collect
those few prints, which are their only vestiges. A collection might be
formed of such literary residences chosen for their amenity and their
retirement, and adorned by the objects of their studies; from that of
the younger Pliny, who called his villa of literary leisure by the
endearing term of _villula_, to that of Cassiodorus, the prime minister
of Theodoric, who has left so magnificent a description of his literary
retreat, where all the elegancies of life were at hand; where the
gardeners and the agriculturists laboured on scientific principles; and
where, amidst gardens and parks, stood his extensive library, with
scribes to multiply his manuscripts:--from Tycho Brahe's, who built a
magnificent astronomical house on an island, which he named after the
sole objects of his musings Uranienburgh, or the Castle of the
Heavens;--to that of Evelyn, who first began to adorn Wotton, by
building "a little study," till many years after he dedicated the
ancient house to contemplation, among the "delicious streams and
venerable woods, the gardens, the fountains, and the groves, most
tempting for a great person and a wanton purse; and indeed gave one of
the first examples to that elegancy since so much in vogue."--From Pope,
whose little garden seemed to multiply its scenes by a glorious union of
nobility and literary men conversing in groups;--down to lonely
Shenstone, whose "rural elegance," as he entitles one of his odes,
compelled him to mourn over his hard fate, when
----EXPENSE
Had lavish'd thousand ornaments, and taught
CONVENIENCE to perplex him, ART to pall,
POMP to deject, and BEAUTY to displease.
We have all by heart the true and delightful reflection of Johnson on
local associations, when the scene we tread suggests to us the men or
the deeds, which have left their celebrity to the spot. We are in the
presence of their fame, and feel its influence!
A literary friend, whom a hint of mine had induced to visit the old
tower in the garden of Buffon, where the sage retired every morning to
compose, passed so long a time in that lonely apartment as to have
raised some solicitude among the honest folks of Montbard, who having
seen the "Englishman" enter, but not return, during a heavy
thunder-storm which had occurred in the interval, informed the good
mayor, who came in due form, to notify the ambiguous state of the
stranger. My friend is, as is well known, a genius of that cast who
could pass two hours in the _Tower of Buffon_, without being aware that
he had been all that time occupied by suggestions of ideas and reveries,
which in some minds such a locality may excite. He was also busied with
his pencil; for he has favoured me with two drawings of the interior and
the exterior of this _old tower in the garden_: the nakedness within can
only be compared to the solitude without. Such was the studying-room of
Buffon, where his eye, resting on no object, never interrupted the unity
of his meditations on nature.
In return for my friend's kindness, it has cost me, I think, two hours
in attempting to translate the beautiful picture of this literary
retreat, which Vicq d'Azyr has finished with all the warmth of a votary.
"At Montbard, in the midst of an ornamented garden, is seen an antique
tower; it was there that Buffon wrote the History of Nature, and from
that spot his fame spread through the universe. There he came at
sunrise, and no one, however importunate, was suffered to trouble him.
The calm of the morning hour, the first warbling of the birds, the
varied aspect of the country, all at that moment which touched the
senses, recalled him to his model. Free, independent, he wandered in his
walks; there was he seen with quickened or with slow steps, or standing
wrapped in thought, sometimes with his eyes fixed on the heavens in the
moment of inspiration, as if satisfied with the thought that so
profoundly occupied his soul; sometimes, collected within himself, he
sought what would not always be found; or at the moments of producing,
he wrote, he effaced, and rewrote, to efface once more; thus he
harmonised, in silence, all the parts of his composition, which he
frequently repeated to himself, till, satisfied with his corrections, he
seemed to repay himself for the pains of his beautiful prose, by the
pleasure he found in declaiming it aloud. Thus he engraved it in his
memory, and would recite it to his friends, or induce some to read it to
him. At those moments he was himself a severe judge, and would again
re-compose it, desirous of attaining to that perfection which is denied
to the impatient writer."
A curious circumstance, connected with local associations, occurred to
that extraordinary oriental student, Fourmont. Originally he belonged to
a religious community, and never failed in performing his offices: but
he was expelled by the superior for an irregularity of conduct not
likely to have become contagious through the brotherhood--he frequently
prolonged his studies far into the night, and it was possible that the
house might be burnt by such superfluity of learning. Fourmont retreated
to the college of Montaign, where he occupied the very chambers which
had formerly been those of Erasmus; a circumstance which contributed to
excite his emulation, and to hasten his studies. He who smiles at the
force of such emotions, only proves that he has not experienced what are
real and substantial as the scene itself--for those who are concerned in
them. Pope, who had far more enthusiasm in his poetical disposition than
is generally understood, was extremely susceptible of the literary
associations with localities: one of the volumes of his Homer was begun
and finished in an old tower over the chapel of Stanton Harcourt;[256]
and he has perpetuated the event, if not consecrated the place, by
scratching with a diamond on a pane of stained glass this inscription:--
In the year 1718,
ALEXANDER POPE
Finished here the f....
fifth volume of HOMER.[257]
It was the same feeling which induced him one day, when taking his
usual walk with Harte in the Haymarket, to desire Harte to enter a
little shop, where going up three pair of stairs into a small room, Pope
said, "In this garret Addison wrote his _Campaign_!" Nothing less than a
strong feeling impelled the poet to ascend this garret--it was a
consecrated spot to his eye; and certainly a curious instance of the
power of genius contrasted with its miserable locality! Addison, whose
mind had fought through "a campaign!" in a garret, could he have called
about him "the pleasures of imagination," had probably planned a house
of literary repose, where all parts would have been in harmony with his
mind.
Such residences of men of genius have been enjoyed by some; and the
vivid descriptions which they have left us convey something of the
delightfulness which charmed their studious repose.
The Italian, Paul Jovius, has composed more than three hundred concise
eulogies of statesmen, warriors, and literary men, of the fourteenth,
fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries; but the occasion which induced him
to compose them is perhaps more interesting than the compositions.
Jovius had a villa, situated on a peninsula, bordered by the Lake of
Como. It was built on the ruins of the villa of Pliny, and in his time
the foundations were still visible. When the surrounding lake was calm,
the sculptured marbles, the trunks of columns, and the fragments of
those pyramids which had once adorned the residence of the friend of
Trajan, were still viewed in its lucid bosom. Jovius was the enthusiast
of literature, and the leisure which it loves. He was an historian, with
the imagination of a poet, and though a Christian prelate, almost a
worshipper of the sweet fictions of pagan mythology; and when his pen
was kept pure from satire or adulation, to which it was too much
accustomed, it became a pencil. He paints with rapture his gardens
bathed by the waters of the lake; the shade and freshness of his woods;
his green slopes; his sparkling fountains, the deep silence and calm of
his solitude! A statue was raised in his gardens to Nature! In his hall
stood a fine statue of Apollo, and the Muses around, with their
attributes. His library was guarded by a Mercury, and there was an
apartment adorned with Doric columns, and with pictures of the most
pleasing subjects dedicated to the Graces! Such was the interior!
Without, the transparent lake here spread its broad mirror, and there
was seen luminously winding by banks covered with olives and laurels; in
the distance, towns, promontories, hills rising in an amphitheatre,
blushing with vines, and the first elevation of the Alps, covered with
woods and pasture, and sprinkled with herds and flocks.
It was in a central spot of this enchanting habitation that a cabinet or
gallery was erected, where Jovius had collected with prodigal cost the
portraits of celebrated men; and it was to explain and to describe the
characteristics of these illustrious names that he had composed his
eulogies. This collection became so remarkable, that the great men his
contemporaries presented our literary collector with their own
portraits, among whom the renowned Fernandez Cortes sent Jovius his
before he died, and probably others who were less entitled to enlarge
the collection; but it is equally probable that our caustic Jovius would
throw them aside. Our historian had often to describe men more famous
than virtuous; sovereigns, politicians, poets, and philosophers, men of
all ranks, countries, and ages, formed a crowded scene of men of genius
or of celebrity; sometimes a few lines compress their character, and
sometimes a few pages excite his fondness. If he sometimes adulates the
living, we may pardon the illusions of a contemporary; but he has the
honour of satirising some by the honest freedom of a pen which
occasionally broke out into premature truths.
Such was the inspiration of literature and leisure which had embellished
the abode of Jovius, and had raised in the midst of the Lake of Como a
cabinet of portraits; a noble tribute to those who are "the salt of the
earth."
We possess prints of Rubens's house at Antwerp. That princely artist
perhaps first contrived for his _studio_ the circular apartment with a
dome, like the rotunda of the Pantheon, where the light descending from
an aperture or window at the top, sent down a single equal light,--that
perfection of light which distributes its magical effects on the objects
beneath.[258] Bellori describes it _una stanza rotonda con un solo
occhio in cima_; the _solo occhio_ is what the French term _oeil de
boeuf_; we ourselves want this _single eye_ in our technical language
of art. This was his precious museum, where he had collected a vast
number of books, which were intermixed with his marbles, statues,
cameos, intaglios, and all that variety of the riches of art which he
had drawn from Rome:[259] but the walls did not yield in value; for they
were covered by pictures of his own composition, or copies by his own
hand, made at Venice and Madrid, of Titian and Paul Veronese. No
foreigners, men of letters, or lovers of the arts, or even princes,
would pass through Antwerp without visiting the house of Rubens, to
witness the animated residence of genius, and the great man who had
conceived the idea. Yet, great as was his mind, and splendid as were the
habits of his life, he could not resist the entreaties of the hundred
thousand florins of our Duke of Buckingham, to dispose of this _studio_.
The great artist could not, however, abandon for ever the delightful
contemplations he was depriving himself of; and as substitutes for the
miracles of art he had lost, he solicited and obtained leave to replace
them by casts which were scrupulously deposited in the places where the
originals had stood.
Of this feeling of the local residences of genius, the Italians appear
to have been not perhaps more susceptible than other people, but more
energetic in their enthusiasm. Florence exhibits many monuments of this
sort. In the neighbourhood of _Santa Maria Novella_, Zimmerman has
noticed a house of the celebrated Viviani, which is a singular monument
of gratitude to his illustrious master, Galileo. The front is adorned
with the bust of this father of science, and between the windows are
engraven accounts of the discoveries of Galileo; it is the most
beautiful biography of genius! Yet another still more eloquently excites
our emotions--the house of Michael Angelo: his pupils, in perpetual
testimony of their admiration and gratitude, have ornamented it with all
the leading features of his life; the very soul of this vast genius put
in action: this is more than biography!--it is living as with a
contemporary!