Science has had, and perhaps will ever have, its fancies; and fancy has
often aspired to become science; for between the two--wide apart as they
are said to lie--stretches an uncertain domain, which they seem
alternately to occupy by incursion, and of which, when thus seized upon,
each appears, oddly enough, often to take possession in the rival name
of the other. Thus Astronomy, growing visionary, has pretended to trace
from the aspects of the heavenly bodies, not merely their laws and
motions, but the vicissitudes of human fate; and chemistry has had its
poetic visions of an elixir of life and of the philosopher's stone;
while, on the other hand, mere imagination has quite as often attempted
to erect, out of the airiest things, a philosophic realm of her own, and
to deduce into positive sciences the bumps upon the human skull, the
freaks of Nature in the conformation of the features, and even the
whimsical diversities of people's handwriting. From all these have been
set up grave methods of arriving at a knowledge of men's faculties and
characters.
It is surprising that, among these fantastic systems of physiognomy,
that easy and natural one should never have been set on foot, which
might connect the structural efforts of individuals with the cast of
their minds and feelings. To do this would be especially easy in new
countries, where nearly every one is compelled to build his own abode,
and where, for the most part, there is so little of architectural
solidity that habitations seldom last for above a generation, and even
he who inherits a house inherits but a ruin. Thus the simplicity of
Patrick Henry's habits and tastes might be inferred from the
primitiveness of his dwelling. You might have guessed his
unambitiousness from the absence about his home of any thing that
betrayed a longing for grandeur. All was plain, substantial, good;
nothing ostentatious or effeminate. The master's personal desires
coveted nothing beyond rural abundance and comforts--such blessings as
are quite enough to make private life happy and preserve it uncorrupt.
In all this you might discern the public man who cherished, as a
politician, no visions, no novelties; sought, of course, to build up for
his fellow-citizens no other nor better happiness than such as crowned
all his own wishes; believed little in pomp and greatness; loved our old
hereditary laws, manners, liberties, victuals; and dreaded French
principles and dishes as alike contaminating and destructive.
Man, as we have already intimated, is a constructive animal. He alone is
properly such. For the inferior creatures that build do so upon a
single, instinctive, invariable method, always using the same material;
he, rationally and inventively, as outward circumstances may require, or
as, when these constrain him little, his individual fancy, desires, or
judgment may prompt. In the nomadic state a tent of skins, a lodge of
bark, are the sole structures for shelter that fit his wandering life;
and the rudeness of these invites to no decoration, while convenience
itself forbids all diversity of contrivance for him, who, paying no
ground-rent, may decamp to-morrow; and, bound by no leasehold, may carry
his tenement with him, like that travelling landlord, Master Snail, or
abandon it like that lodger by the season, Dame Bird. In short, he comes
not under the terms of zoological or botanical description, as having a
_habitat_; under the line he lives, as did father Adam and mother Eve
(whose housekeeping in Eden, Milton so well relates), in a bower of rose
and myrtle; at the pole, he burrows beneath the snow or makes his
masonry of ice; in Idumea, he dwells, like its lions, in a cavern; on
the Maranon, he perches his house in a tree-top, and his young
ones--plumeless bipeds though they be--nestle among the feathered
denizens of the mid-air; in certain mining regions, he is born and dies
hundreds of fathoms under ground, and perhaps never sees the light of
day; in Naples, he lives, as do the dogs and cats of Constantinople, in
the streets. Thus, whatever idea, whatever purpose, whatever need,
whatever fancy, predominates in him when he builds, it takes shape, it
finds expression, it embodies itself, forthwith, in fitting material,
fittingly contrived, and is, according to his habitative wish, his taste
in a tabernacle, possibly a pig-sty, possibly a palace; for his range of
invention stretches over every thing that lies between the two.
The founders of the great commonwealths of antiquity--the Grecian
statesmen and warriors, the Roman consuls--lived at home, during the
most glorious period of their several states, in an extreme simplicity;
content with a truly noble penury, while they built up the grandeur of
their country. The constructive propensity of the Athenian instead of a
private direction towards his personal gratification, took the generous
form of a passion for public monuments; that of the Roman turned itself,
until the decline of the Republic began, upon the rearing of trophies
and triumphal arches, rather than of lordly mansions; and dictators
sometimes, consuls often, were called from the cot and the plough to the
supreme trusts of war and peace. But this was all in the spirit of ages
and institutions, when the citizen lived in the state and sought his
private, in the public greatness and happiness. Modern times present few
individual instances of the like. In those ancient politics, the state
leaned on the citizen; in our modern, the citizen leans on the state.
Then, public life was much, private life was little; now, it is
reversed, the citizen wants not to help the state, but wants the state
to help him. Now, over-civilization has so multiplied the conveniences
of life, and habit has rendered its indulgences so necessary, that he
who, being great, can live without and above them, has need to be of a
rare elevation, an inherent grandeur of soul.
The statesman whose mansion and whose habits in retreat we are about to
describe, without being altogether of that heroical cast of mind which
graced the character of a Washington, a Henry, or a Clay, had yet much
of that elevated simplicity which marks the highest strain of greatness.
Mr. Madison, when he laid down what he had so worthily and wisely worn
as to have disarmed all previous reproach and hostility--the supreme
dignity of the Union--returned quietly to his hereditary abode, resumed
the unaffected citizen, and seemed to be as glad to forget his past
greatness as to escape from the anxieties and envy that attend power as
shadows do the sun. He went back, after his stormy but successful
presidency of eight years, to his father's seat, Montpelier, where, but
for the accident--the same which befell a hero of Irish song, Denis
Brulgruddery--of his mother's being on a visit to her mamma at the time,
he would certainly have been born. There, like a sensible man, and a
good fellow to boot (as he was), he sat down on a fine plantation, in a
good old-fashioned house, with a fine old cellar of old-fashioned wines
under it, and the best old Virginian servants in it, to spend the rest
of his days upon that wise plan which King Pyrrhus proposed to himself,
but, postponing too long, did not live to execute. He (that is, Mr.
Madison, not Pyrrhus) sat down like an actor who has played out his part
with applause, calmly to look at the rest of the piece, no further
concerned in its business, but not affecting (as others have done) the
uninterested spectator of the performance. He did not assume the
philosophic sage; he did not bury himself in a monastic gloom like
Charles V.; nor, like the same discrowned prince and Mr. Jefferson,
betake himself to mending watches; nor, like Dioclesian, to cultivating
cabbages; but in the bosom of that pleasant retreat, which had witnessed
his youthful preparation for public toils, sought the repose from them
which he had fairly earned; and sweetening it with all that could give
it zest, in the companionship of the amiable wife who had shared with
him and adorned public honors, and in the society of the many personal
friends that his virtues and talents drew about him, passed the evening
of his days in gentlemanly and genial ease and hospitality.
Montpelier, the residence to which, as an only child, he had succeeded
at his father's death, is a plain but ample, and rather handsome
habitation of brick, around which spreads out, in such undulations of
gently-waving swells and irregular plains as pleasantly diversify the
view, a fertile domain of some two thousand six hundred acres; a part of
it well cultivated, but a still larger part yet in all the wildness of
nature. The region is one where she has shed, in great beauty, the
softest picturesque of hill and dale, forest and glade. At hand, in the
rear, rises, as if to adorn the prospect with bolder contrasts, the
gracefully wavering chain of the southwest mountain, to fence on one
side the vale of Orange and Albemarle, on whose southeastern edge of
nodding woods and green fields Montpelier lies embosomed and embowered;
while on the other side, in the airy distance beyond that vale, tower in
fantastic line the blue peaks of the long Appalachian ridge, breaking the
horizon, as if to form another and a more fanciful one. The wide scene,
caught in glimpses through the mantling trees, or opening out in the
larger vista of farm beyond farm, or shining in loftier prospect above
the tree-tops and the low hills, offers to the ranging eye, many a
charming view,--sweet spots of pastoral beauty; jutting capes and
copses, or nodding old groves of woodlands; the rich and regular
cultivation of spreading plantations, amidst which glisten now a stately
mansion, and now a snug farm-house, each decorated with its peculiar
growth of trees for shade or fruit; and far away, mountain regions,
whose heights, and whose rude and massy but undefined forms, suggest to
the fancy the savage grandeur of that remoter landscape which the eye
knows to be there, though it mocks the sight with what is so different.
All these are, at frequent points, the aspects of that fine country from
Orange court-house up to Charlottesville; they are nowhere seen in
greater perfection or abundance than just around Montpelier. At almost
every turn, one discovers a new pleasure of the landscape; at nearly
every step, there is a surprise. It looks like a realm of pictures; you
would almost think that not nature had placed it there, but that the
happiest skill of the painter had collected and disposed the scenes.
The house, we have said, is plain and large. Its size and finish bespeak
gentlemanly but unpretending ease and fortune. It has no air of assumed
lordliness or upstart pretension. No foreign models seem to have been
consulted in its design, no proportions of art studied; yet it wants not
symmetry as well-planned convenience, comfort, and fitness lend, as if
without intention. A tall, and rather handsome columned portico, in
front, is the only thing decorative about it; but is not enough so to be
at all out of keeping. It is of the whole height of the central
building, of two stories, and covers about half its length of some
forty-five feet. Broad steps, five in number, support and give access
along its entire front. Its depth is about one-third its width. The main
building itself is a parallelogram, near half as deep as it is long. At
each flank, a little receding, is a single-storied wing of about twenty
feet, its flat roof surmounted by a balustrade. The house stands on a
gently-rising eminence. A wide lawn, broken only here and there by
clumps of trees, stretches before it. On either side are irregular
masses of these, of different shapes and foliage, evergreen and
deciduous, which thicken at places into a grove, and half screen those
dependencies of a handsome establishment--stables, dairies and the
like--which, left openly in sight, look very ill, and can be made to
look no otherwise, even by the trying to make them look genteel: for
they are disagreeable objects, that call up (attire them as you will)
ideas not dainty. As, therefore, the eye should not miss them
altogether--for their absence would imply great discomfort and
inconvenience--the best way is to half-veil them, as is done at
Montpelier.
In the rear of the house lies a large and well-tended garden. This was,
of course, mainly the mistress's care; while the master's was, as far as
his bodily feebleness permitted, directed towards his agricultural
operations. In the Virginia economy of the household, where so much must
be ordered with a view to entertaining guests all the while, the garden
plays an important part. Without ample supplies from it, there would be
no possibility of maintaining that exuberant good cheer with which the
tables continually groan, in all those wealthier habitations where the
old custom of a boundless hospitality is still reverently observed. In
such--and there are yet many, although the Jeffersonian "Law of
Descents," and the diffusion of the trading spirit are thinning them out
every day, as rum and smallpox are dispeopling our Indian tribes--there
is little pause of repletion. Every guest must be feasted: if a
stranger, because strangers ought to be made to pass their time as
agreeably as possible; if a friend, because nothing can be too good for
one's friends. Where such social maxims and such a domestic policy
prevail, there will seldom, according to Adam Smith's principle of
"Demand and Supply," be any very serious lack of guests. Indeed, the
condition is one hard to avoid, and so pleasant, withal, that we have
known persons of wit and breeding to adopt it as their sole profession,
and benevolently pass their lives in guarding their friends, one after
another, from the distresses of a guestless mansion. But, to return to
the garden of Montpelier; there were few houses in Virginia that gave a
larger welcome, or made it more agreeable, than that over which Queen
Dolly--the most gracious and beloved of all our female
sovereigns--reigned; and, wielding as skilfully the domestic, as she had
done worthily and popularly the public, sceptre, every thing that came
beneath her immediate personal sway--the care and the entertainment of
visitors, the government of the menials, the whole policy of the
interior--was admirably managed, with an equal grace and efficiency.
Wherefore, as we have said, the important department of the garden was
excellently well administered, both for profit and pleasure, and made to
pour forth in profusion, from its wide and variously-tended extent, the
esculents and the blooms, herb, fruit, flower, or root, of every season.
Nor was the merely beautiful neglected for the useful only; her truly
feminine tastes delighted in all the many tinted children of the
parterre, native and exotic; and flowers sprang up beneath her hand, as
well as their more substantial sisters, the vegetables. In a word, her
garden was rich in all that makes one delightful; and so of all the
other less sightly but needful departments of her large and well-ordered
establishment.
We should, however, slight one of its most pleasing features, were we to
omit mentioning the peculiar purpose to which was consecrated one of
those low wings of the building which we have briefly described. There
dwelt, under the most sacred guard of filial affection, yet served in
her own little separate household by servants set apart to her use, the
very aged and infirm mother of Mr. Madison; a most venerable lady, who,
after the death of her husband, thus lived under the tender guardianship
of her son and of her daughter-in-law, down to near her hundredth year,
enjoying whatever of the sweets of life the most affectionate and
ingenious solicitude can bestow upon extreme decrepitude. Here she
possessed without the trouble of providing them, all the comforts and
freedom of an independent establishment; and tended by her own
gray-haired domestics, and surrounded at her will by such younger
relatives as it gratified her to have about her, she passed her quiet
but never lonely days, a reverent and a gentle image of the good and
indeed elevated simplicity of elder times, manners, and tastes. All the
appointments of her dwelling bespoke the olden day; dark and cumbrous
old carved furniture, carpets of which the modern loom has forgotten the
patterns; implements that looked as if Tubal Cain had designed them;
upholstery quaintly, if not queerly venerable. In short, all the objects
about her were in keeping with her person and attire. You would have
said that they and she had sat to Sir Godfrey Kneller for a family
picture; or that you yourself had been suddenly transported back to
Addison's time, and were peeping by privilege into the most secluded
part of Sir Roger de Coverley's mansion. Indeed, to confirm the
illusion, you would probably find her reading the Spectator in the large
imprint and rich binding of its own period, or thumbing--as our
degenerate misses do a novel of the Dickens or Sue school--the leaves of
Pope, Swift, Steele, or some other of those whom criticism alone (for
the common people and the crowd, of what is now styled literature, know
them not) still recalls as "the wits of Queen Anne's day." These were
the learning of our great-grandmothers; need we wonder if they were
nobler dames than the frivolous things of the fancy boarding-school,
half-taught in every thing they should not study, made at much pains and
expense to know really nothing, and just proficient enough of foreign
tongues to be ignorant of their own? The authors we have mentioned,
their good contemporaries, and their yet greater predecessors, who gave
to our language a literature, and are still all that holds it from
sinking into fustian and slipslop, a tag-rag learning and a
tatterdemalion English, were those that lay around this ancient lady,
and beguiled her old age as they had formed and delighted the youth of
her mind and heart. If you made her refer to them, as the favourite
employment of her infirmity-compelled leisure, it was pleasant to hear
her (as in that other instance which we have given of Patrick Henry's
sisters) talk of them as if they had been dear and familiar personal
friends. Perhaps, however, authors were then better loved and more
respected by their readers than they are nowadays; and possibly this was
because they deserved to be so; or indeed there may be a double decline,
and readers as much worse than the writers. Not that either of these is
the fact, or even a conjecture which we ourselves entertain. We merely
mention it _en passant_, as a bare possibility. The opinion would be
unpopular, and should not be admitted in a democracy; of which it is the
very genius to have no opinions but such as are popular; and therefore
to think no thoughts that might betray one into an opinion not that of
the majority.
Such books then, and, when her old eyes grew weary, the almost equally
antiquated occupation of knitting, habitually filled up the hours of
this old-time lady; the hours, we mean, which pain or feebleness
remitted her for occupation. As to those sadder moments of suffering, or
of that sinking of the bodily powers which presses at times upon
far-advanced age, she bore them with the cheerfullest patience, and even
treated them as almost compensated by the constant delight of the
affections which the pious care of her children gave her all the while.
Nothing could exceed their watchfulness to serve her, soothe her,
minister to her such enjoyments as may be made by lovingness to linger
around even the last decline of a kindly and well-spent life. In all
such offices, her son bore as much part as his own frail health and the
lesser aptitude of men for tending the sick permitted; but no daughter
ever exceeded in the tender and assiduous arts of alleviation, the
attentions which Mrs. Madison gave to her husband's infirm parent.
Reversing the order of nature, she became to her (as the venerable
sufferer herself was accustomed fondly to say) the mother of her second
childhood. Mistress as she was of all that makes greatness pleasing and
sheds a shining grace upon power, Mrs. Madison never appeared in any
light so worthy or so winning, as in this secret one of filial affection
towards her adopted mother.
It was a part, however, of her system of happiness for the ancient lady,
at once to shut out from her (what she could ill sustain) the bustle of
that large establishment, and the gayeties of the more miscellaneous
guests that often thronged it, and yet to bring to her, in special favor
towards them, such visitors as could give her pleasure and break the
monotony of her general seclusion. These were sometimes old and valued
friends; sometimes their hopeful offspring; and occasionally personages
of such note as made her curious to see them. All such she received,
according to what they were, with that antique cordiality or amenity
which belonged to the fine old days of good-breeding, of which she was a
genuine specimen. To the old, her person, dress, manners, conversation,
recalled, in their most pleasing forms, the usages, the spirit, the
social tone of an order of things that had vanished; an elevated
simplicity that had now given way to more affected courtesies, more
artificial elegancies. To the young, she and her miniature household
were a still more singular spectacle. They had looked upon their host
and hostess as fine old samples of the past, and the outer, the exoteric
Montpelier, with its cumbrous furniture and rich but little modish
appointments, as a sort of museum of domestic antiquities; but here,
hidden within its secret recesses, were a personage, ways, objects,
fashions, that carried them back to the yet more superannuated elegance
of days when what now struck them as obsolete must have been regarded as
the frivolous innovations of an impertinent young generation.
We have already described the house, and glanced at its appointments,
but may add that the former seemed designed for an opulent and an easy
hospitality, and that the latter, while rich, was plainly and solidly
so. No expedients, no tricks of show met the eye; but all was well set
forth with a sort of nobleness, yet nothing of pomp. The apartments were
of ample size; the furniture neither scanty nor (as now seems the mode)
huddled together, as if the master were a salesman. Nothing seemed
wanting, nothing too much. A finished urbanity and yet a thorough
cordiality reigned in every thing: all the ways, all the persons, all
the objects of the place were agreeable and even interesting. You soon
grew at your ease, if at arriving you had been otherwise: for here was,
in its perfection, that happiest part and surest test of
good-breeding--the power of at once putting every one at ease. The
attentions were not over-assiduous, not slack; but kept, to great
degree, out of sight, by making a body of thoroughly-trained and most
mannerly servants their ministrants, so that the hosts performed in
person little but the higher rites of hospitality, and thus seemed to
have no trouble and much pleasure in entertaining you. Accordingly,
there has seldom, even in the hilarious land of old Virginia, been a
house kept--especially by elderly people--at which it was pleasanter to
be a sojourner. They always made you glad to have come, and sorry that
you must go.
Such was the main interior life of Montpelier. Its business seemed but
the giving pleasure to its guests, of whom a perpetual succession came
and went. Little was seen of the working machinery of the fine, and on
the whole, well-managed estate, that poured forth its copious supplies
to render possible all this lavish entertainment, this perennial flow of
feasting. For here, be it observed, as elsewhere in the rural
hospitalities of Virginia, it was not single visitors that were to be
accommodated, but families and parties. Nor did these arrive unattended,
for each brought with it a retinue of servants, a stud of horses, and
all were to be provided for. Meantime, the master was seen little to
direct in person the husbandry of his domain; and indeed, he was known
to be too feeble to do so. Nevertheless, the tillage of Montpelier was
productive and its soil held in a state of progressive improvement.
Indeed, capable of every thing he had engaged in, except arms (in which
the Jeffersonian dynasty, except Monroe, must be confessed not to have
excelled)--wise, attentive, and systematic, he had established his
farming operations upon a method so good and regular, that they went on
well, with only his occasional inspection, and the nightly reports of
his head men of the blacks. The mildest and humanest of masters, he had
brought about among his slaves, by a gentle exactness, and the care to
keep them happy while well-governed, great devotion to him and their
duties, and a far more than usual intelligence. Every night he received
an account of the day's results, and consulted freely with his managers,
on the morrow's business. All was examined and discussed as with persons
who had and who deserved his confidence. Thus encouraged to think, the
inert and unreflecting African learnt forecast, skill, self-respect, and
zeal to do his duty towards the master and mistress who were so good to
him. We do not say that the like could be done to the same extent every
where. Montpelier was cultivated merely to support itself, and not for
profit; which is necessarily the ruling end on the plantations
generally, and perhaps compels more enforced methods; which, indeed, can
scarcely be expected to cease, as long as fanatical interference from
without, between the master and the slave, shall only serve to breed
discontent on the one part and distrust on the other, and driving the
threatened master to attend to the present security of his property,
instead of occupying himself with its future amelioration. Men of any
sense abroad should surely have perceived, by this time, that the method
of driving the Southern States into Emancipation does not answer; but,
on the contrary, is, so far as the temper of that region is concerned,
only postponing it, and meanwhile aggravating the condition of both
classes.
Thus gentle, genial, kindly, liberal, good and happy, passed the life of
Montpelier. Public veneration shed all its honors; private friendship
and communion all their delights upon it. Even those dignities which, in
this country of party spirit, beget for the successful more of reproach
than fame, had left the name of Madison without a serious stain. His
Presidency past, the wise and blameless spirit of his official
administration came speedily to be acknowledged on all sides, and envy
and detraction, left without an aim, turned to eulogy. An ample fortune,
the greatest domestic happiness, and a life prolonged, in spite of the
original feebleness of his body, to the unusual age of eighty-five, gave
him in their full measure, those singular blessings which the goodness
of God deservedly dealt to him and the admirable partner of his
existence. A philosophic, and yet not a visionary ruler, he should stand
among ours as next to Washington, though separated from him by a great
interval. The Jeffersons and the Jacksons come far after him, for
"He was more
Than a mere Alexander; and, unstained
With household blood and wine, serenely wore
His sovereign virtues: still we Trajan's name adore."
=Jay.=
[Illustration: Jay fac-simile of letter]
[Illustration: Jay's Residence, Bedford, N.Y.]