Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the
disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they can not
comprehend. All industry must be excited by hope; and as the student
often proposes no other reward to himself than praise, he is easily
discouraged by contempt and insult. He who brings with him into a
clamorous multitude the timidity of recluse speculation, and has never
hardened his front in public life, or accustomed his passions to the
vicissitudes and accidents, the triumphs and defeats of mixt
conversation, will blush at the stare of petulant incredulity, and
suffer himself to be driven, by a burst of laughter, from the
fortresses of demonstration. The mechanist will be afraid to assert
before hardy contradictions the possibility of tearing down bulwarks
with a silkworm's thread; and the astronomer of relating the rapidity
of light, the distance of the fixt stars, and the height of the lunar
mountains.
If I could by any efforts have shaken off this cowardice, I had not
sheltered myself under a borrowed name, nor applied to you for the
means of communicating to the public the theory of a garret; a subject
which, except some slight and transient strictures, has been hitherto
neglected by those who were best qualified to adorn it, either for
want of leisure to prosecute the various researches in which a nice
discussion must engage them, or because it requires such diversity of
knowledge, and such extent of curiosity, as is scarcely to be found in
any single intellect; or perhaps others foresaw the tumults which
would be raised against them, and confined their knowledge to their
own breasts, and abandoned prejudice and folly to the direction of
chance.
That the professors of literature generally reside in the highest
stories has been immemorially observed. The wisdom of the ancients was
well acquainted with the intellectual advantages of an elevated
situation; why else were the Muses stationed on Olympus, or Parnassus,
by those who could with equal right have raised them bowers in the
vale of Tempe, or erected their altars among the flexures of Meander?
Why was Jove himself nursed upon a mountain? or why did the goddesses,
when the prize of beauty was contested, try the cause upon the top of
Ida? Such were the fictions by which the great masters of the earlier
ages endeavored to inculcate to posterity the importance of a garret,
which, tho they had been long obscured by the negligence and ignorance
of succeeding times, were well enforced by the celebrated symbol of
Pythagoras, "when the wind blows, worship its echo." This could not
but be understood by his disciples as an inviolable injunction to live
in a garret, which I have found frequently visited by the echo and the
wind. Nor was the tradition wholly obliterated in the age of Augustus,
for Tibullus evidently congratulates himself upon his garret, not
without some allusion to the Pythagorean precept:
How sweet in sleep to pass the careless hours,
Lull'd by the beating winds and dashing showers!
And it is impossible not to discover the fondness of Lucretius, an
early writer, for a garret, in his description of the lofty towers of
serene learning, and of the pleasure with which a wise man looks down
upon the confused and erratic state of the world moving below him:
... 'Tis sweet thy laboring steps to guide
To virtue's heights, with wisdom well supplied,
And all the magazines of learning fortified:
From thence to look below on human kind,
Bewilder'd in the maze of life, and blind.[28]
The institution has, indeed, continued to our own time; the garret is
still the usual receptacle of the philosopher and poet; but this, like
many ancient customs, is perpetuated only by an accidental imitation,
without knowledge of the original reason for which it was established:
The cause is secret, but th' effect is known.
Conjectures have, indeed, been advanced concerning these habitations
of literature, but without much satisfaction to the judicious
inquirer. Some have imagined that the garret is generally chosen by
the wits as most easily rented; and concluded that no man rejoices in
his aerial abode, but on the days of payment. Others suspect that a
garret is chiefly convenient, as it is remoter than any other part of
the house from the outer door, which is often observed to be infested
by visitants, who talk incessantly of beer, or linen, or a coat, and
repeat the same sounds every morning, and sometimes again in the
afternoon, without any variation, except that they grow daily more
importunate and clamorous, and raise their voices in time from
mournful murmurs to raging vociferations. This eternal monotony is
always detestable to a man whose chief pleasure is to enlarge his
knowledge, and vary his ideas. Others talk of freedom from noise, and
abstraction from common business or amusements; and some, yet more
visionary, tell us that the faculties are enlarged by open prospects,
and that the fancy is more at liberty when the eye ranges without
confinement.
These conveniences may perhaps all be found in a well-chosen garret;
but surely they can not be supposed sufficiently important to have
operated invariably upon different climates, distant ages, and
separate nations. Of a universal practise, there must still be
presumed a universal cause, which, however recondite and abstruse, may
be perhaps reserved to make me illustrious by its discovery, and you
by its promulgation.
It is universally known that the faculties of the mind are invigorated
or weakened by the state of the body, and that the body is in a great
measure regulated by the various compressions of the ambient element.
The effects of the air in the production or cure of corporeal
maladies have been acknowledged from the time of Hippocrates; but no
man has yet sufficiently considered how far it may influence the
operations of the genius, tho every day affords instances of local
understanding, of wits and reasoners, whose faculties are adapted to
some single spot, and who, when they are removed to any other place,
sink at once into silence and stupidity. I have discovered by a long
series of observations that invention and elocution suffer great
impediments from dense and impure vapors, and that the tenuity of a
defecated air at a proper distance from the surface of the earth
accelerates the fancy and sets at liberty those intellectual powers
which were before shackled by too strong attraction, and unable to
expand themselves under the pressure of a gross atmosphere. I have
found dulness to quicken into sentiment in a thin ether, as water, tho
not very hot, boils in a receiver partly exhausted; and heads, in
appearance empty, have teemed with notions upon rising ground, as the
flaccid sides of a football would have swelled out into stiffness and
extension.
For this reason I never think myself qualified to judge decisively of
any man's faculties, whom I have only known in one degree of
elevation; but take some opportunity of attending him from the cellar
to the garret, and try upon him all the various degrees of rarefaction
and condensation, tension and laxity. If he is neither vivacious
aloft, nor serious below, I then consider him as hopeless; but as it
seldom happens that I do not find the temper to which the texture of
his brain is fitted, I accommodate him in time with a tube of mercury,
first marking the point most favorable to his intellects, according
to rules which I have long studied, and which I may perhaps reveal to
mankind in a complete treatise of barometrical pneumatology.
Another cause of the gaiety and sprightliness of the dwellers in
garrets is probably the increase of that vertiginous motion, with
which we are carried round by the diurnal revolution of the earth. The
power of agitation upon the spirits is well known; every man has felt
his heart lightened in a rapid vehicle, or on a galloping horse; and
nothing is plainer than that he who towers to the fifth story is
whirled through more space by every circumrotation, than another that
grovels upon the ground floor. The nations between the tropics are
known to be fiery, inconstant, inventive, and fanciful, because,
living at the utmost length of the earth's diameter, they are carried
about with more swiftness than those whom nature has placed nearer to
the poles; and, therefore, as it becomes a wise man to struggle with
the inconveniences of his country, whenever celerity and acuteness are
requisite, we must actuate our languor by taking a few turns round the
center in a garret.