The Intellectual Life Part 21

It was one of the many fortunate circ.u.mstances in the position of the two Humboldts that they pa.s.sed their youth in the quiet old castle of Tegel, separated from Berlin by a pine-wood, and surrounded by walks and gardens. They too, like Tycho Brahe, enjoyed that happy combination of tranquillity with the neighborhood of a capital city which is so peculiarly favorable to culture. In later life, when Alexander Humboldt had collected those immense ma.s.ses of material which were the result of his travels in South America, he warmly appreciated the unequalled advantages of Paris. He knew how to extract from the solitudes of primaeval nature what he wanted for the enrichment of his mind; but he knew also how to avail himself of all the a.s.sistance and opportunities which are only to be had in great capitals. He was not attracted to town-life, like Dr. Johnson and Mr. Buckle, to the exclusion of wild nature; but neither, on the other hand, had he that horror of towns which was a morbid defect in Cowper, and which condemns those who suffer from it to rusticity. Even Galileo, who thought the country especially favorable to speculative intellects, and the walls of cities an imprisonment for them, declared that the best years of his life were those he had spent in Padua.

LETTER II.

TO A FRIEND WHO MAINTAINED THAT SURROUNDINGS WERE A MATTER OF INDIFFERENCE TO A THOROUGHLY OCCUPIED MIND.

Archimedes at the siege of Syracuse--Geoffroy St. Hilaire in the besieged city of Alexandria--Goethe at the bombardment of Verdun--Lullo, the Oriental missionary--Giordano Bruno--Unacknowledged effect of surroundings--Effect of Frankfort on Goethe--Great capitals--Goethe--His garden-house--What he said about Beranger and Paris--Fortunate surroundings of t.i.tian.

There are so many well-known instances of men who have been able to continue their intellectual labors under the most unfavorable conditions, that your argument might be powerfully supported by an appeal to actual experience. There is Archimedes, of course, to begin with, who certainly seems to have abstracted himself sufficiently from the tumult of a great siege to forget it altogether when occupied with his mathematical problems. The prevalent stories of his death, though not identical, point evidently to a habit of abstraction which had been remarked as a peculiarity by those about him, and it is probable enough that a great inventor in engineering would follow his usual speculations under circ.u.mstances which, though dangerous, had lasted long enough to become habitual. Even modern warfare, which from the use of gunpowder is so much noisier than that which raged at Syracuse, does not hinder men from thinking and writing when they are used to it. Geoffrey St. Hilaire never worked more steadily and regularly in his whole life than he did in the midst of the besieged city of Alexandria. "Knowledge is so sweet," he said long afterwards, in speaking of this experience, "that it never entered my thoughts how a bombsh.e.l.l might in an instant have cast into the abyss both me and my doc.u.ments." By good luck two electric fish had been caught and given to him just then, so he immediately began to make experiments, as if he had been in his own cabinet in Paris, and for three weeks he thought of nothing else, utterly forgetting the fierce warfare that filled the air with thunder and flame, and the streets with victims. He had sixty-four hypotheses to amuse him, and it was necessary to review his whole scientific acquirement with reference to each of these as he considered them one by one. It may be doubted, however, whether he was more in danger from the bombardment or from the intensity of his own mental concentration. He grew thin and haggard, slept one hour in the twenty-four, and lived in a perilous condition of nervous strain and excitement. Goethe at the bombardment of Verdun, letting his mind take its own course, found that it did not occupy itself with tragedies, or with anything suggested by what was pa.s.sing in the conflict around him, but by scientific considerations about the phenomena of colors. He noticed, in a pa.s.sing observation, the bad effect of war upon the mind, how it makes people destructive one day and creative the next, how it accustoms them to phases intended to excite hope in desperate circ.u.mstances, thus producing a peculiar sort of hypocrisy different from the priestly and courtly kind. This is the extent of his interest in the war; but when he finds some soldiers fishing he is attracted to the spot and profoundly occupied--not with the soldiers, but with the optical phenomena on the water. He was never very much moved by external events, nor did he take that intense interest in the politics of the day which we often find in people less studious of literature and science. Raimond Lullo, the Oriental missionary, continued to write many volumes in the midst of the most continual difficulties and dangers, preserving as much mental energy and clearness as if he had been safe and tranquil in a library. Giordano Bruno worked constantly also in the midst of political troubles and religious persecutions, and his biographer tells us that "il desiderio vivissimo della scienza aveva ben piu efficacia sull' animo del Bruno, che non gli avvenimenti esterni."

These examples which have just occurred to me, and many others that it would be easy to collect, may be taken to prove at least so much as this, that it is possible to be absorbed in private studies when surrounded by the most disturbing influences; but even in these cases it would be a mistake to conclude that the surroundings had no effect whatever. There can be no doubt that Geoffroy St. Hilaire was intensely excited by the siege of Alexandria, though he may not have attributed his excitement to that cause. His mind was occupied with the electrical fishes, but his nervous system was wrought upon by the siege, and kept in that state of tension which at the same time enabled him to get through a gigantic piece of intellectual labor and made him incapable of rest. Had this condition been prolonged it must have terminated either in exhaustion or in madness. Men have often engaged in literature or science to escape the pressure of anxiety, which strenuous mental labor permits us, at least temporarily, to forget; but the circ.u.mstances which surround us have invariably an influence of some kind upon our thinking, though the connection may not be obvious. Even in the case of Goethe, who could study optics on a battle-field, his English biographer recognizes the effect of the Frankfort life which surrounded the great author in his childhood. "The old Frankfort city, with its busy crowds, its fairs, its mixed population, and its many sources of excitement, offered great temptations and great pasture to so desultory a genius.

This is perhaps a case wherein circ.u.mstances may be seen influencing the direction of character.... A large continuity of thought and effort was perhaps radically uncongenial to such a temperament; yet one cannot help speculating whether under other circ.u.mstances he might not have achieved it. Had he been reared in a quiet little old German town, where he would have daily seen the same faces in the silent streets, and come in contact with the same characters, his culture might have been less various, but it might perhaps have been deeper. Had he been reared in the country, with only the changing seasons and the sweet serenities of nature to occupy his attention when released from study, he would certainly have been a different poet. The long summer afternoons spent in lonely rambles, the deepening twilights filled with shadowy visions, the slow uniformity of his external life necessarily throwing him more and more upon the subtler diversities of inward experience, would inevitably have influenced his genius in quite different directions, would have animated his works with a very different spirit."

We are sometimes told that life in a great capital is essential to the development of genius, but Frankfort was the largest town Goethe ever lived in, and he never visited either Paris or London. Much of the sanity of his genius may have been due to his residence in so tranquil a place as Weimar, where he could shut himself up in his "garden-house"

and lock all the gates of the bridge over the Ilm. "The solitude," says Mr. Lewes, "is absolute, broken only by the occasional sound of the church clock, the music from the barracks, and the screaming of the peac.o.c.ks spreading their superb beauty in the park." Few men of genius have been happier in their surroundings than Goethe. He had tranquillity, and yet was not deprived of intellectual intercourse; the scenery within excursion-distance from his home was interesting and even inspiring, yet not so splendid as to be overwhelming. We know from his conversations that he was quite aware of the value of those little centres of culture to Germany, and yet in one place he speaks of Beranger in the tone which seems to imply an appreciation of the larger life of Paris. "Fancy," he says, "this same Beranger away from Paris, and the influence and opportunities of a world-city, born as the son of a poor tailor, at Jena or Weimar; let him run his wretched career in either of the two small cities, and see what fruit would have grown on such a soil and in such an atmosphere."

We cannot too frequently be reminded that we are nothing of ourselves, and by ourselves, and are only something by the place we hold in the intellectual chain of humanity by which electricity is conveyed to us and through us--to be increased in the transmission if we have great natural power and are favorably situated, but not otherwise. A child is born to the Vecelli family at Cadore, and when it is nine years old is taken to Venice and placed under the tuition of Sebastian Zuccato.

Afterwards he goes to Bellini's school, and there gets acquainted with another student, one year his junior, whose name is Barbarelli. They live together and work together in Venice; then young Barbarelli (known to posterity as Giorgione), after putting on certain s.p.a.ces of wall and squares of canvas such color as the world had never before seen, dies in his early manhood and leaves Vecellio, whom we call t.i.tian, to work on there in Venice till the plague stays his hand in his hundredth year.

The genius came into the world, but all the possibilities of his development depended upon the place and the time. He came exactly in the right place and precisely at the right time. To be born not far from Venice in the days of Bellini, to be taken there at nine years old, to have Giorgione for one's comrade, all this was as fortunate for an artistic career as the circ.u.mstances of Alexander of Macedon were for a career of conquest.

LETTER III.

TO AN ARTIST WHO WAS FITTING UP A MAGNIFICENT NEW STUDIO.

Pleasure of planning a studio--Opinions of an outsider--Saint Bernard--Father Ravignan--Goethe's study and bed-room--Gustave Dore's studio--Leslie's painting-room--Turner's opinion--Habits of Scott and d.i.c.kens--Extremes good--Vulgar mediocrity not so good--Value of beautiful views to literary men--Montaigne--Views from the author's windows.

Nothing in the life of an artist is more agreeable than the building and furnishing of the studio in which he hopes to produce his most mature and perfect work. It is so pleasant to labor when we are surrounded by beauty and convenience, that painters find a large and handsome studio to be an addition to the happiness of their lives, and they usually dream of it, and plan it, several years before the dream is realized.

Only a few days ago I was talking on this very subject with an intellectual friend who is not an artist, and who maintained that the love of fine studios is in great part a mere illusion. He admitted the necessity for size, and for a proper kind of light, but laughed at carved oak, and tapestry, and armor, and the knicknacks that artists enc.u.mber themselves with. He would have it that a mind thoroughly occupied with its own business knew nothing whatever of the objects that surrounded it, and he cited two examples--Saint Bernard, who travelled all day by the sh.o.r.e of Lake Leman without seeing it, and the _pere_ Ravignan, who worked in a bare little room with a common table of blackened pine and a cheap rush-bottomed chair. On this I translated to him, from Goethe's life by Lewes, a pa.s.sage which was new to him and delighted him as a confirmation of his theory. The biographer describes the poet's study as "a low-roofed narrow room, somewhat dark, for it is lighted only through two tiny windows, and furnished with a simplicity quite touching to behold. In the centre stands a plain oval table of unpolished oak. No arm-chair is to be seen, no sofa, nothing which speaks of ease. A plain hard chair has beside it the basket in which he used to place his handkerchief. Against the wall, on the right, is a long pear-tree table, with bookshelves, on which stand lexicons and manuals.... On the side-wall again, a bookcase with some works of poets.

On the wall to the left is a long desk of soft wood, at which he was wont to write. A sheet of paper with notes of contemporary history is fastened near the door. The same door leads into a bed-room, if bed-room it can be called, which no maid-of-all-work in England would accept without a murmur: it is a closet with a window. A simple bed, an armchair by its side, and a tiny washing-table with a small white basin on it, and a sponge, is all the furniture. To enter this room with any feeling for the greatness and goodness of him who slept here, and who here slept his last sleep, brings tears into our eyes, and makes the breathing deep."

When I had finished reading this pa.s.sage, my friend exclaimed triumphantly, "There! don't you see that it was just because Goethe had imaginative power of a strong and active kind that he cared nothing about what surrounded him when he worked? He had statues and pictures to occupy his mind when it was disengaged, but when he wrote he preferred that bare little cell where nothing was to be seen that could distract his attention for an instant. Depend upon it, Goethe acted in this matter either from a deliberate and most wise calculation, or else from the sure instinct of genius."

Whilst we were on this subject I thought over other instances, and remembered my surprise on visiting Gustave Dore in his painting-room in Paris. Dore has a Gothic exuberance of imagination, so I expected a painting-room something like Victor Hugo's house, rather barbarous, but very rich and interesting, with plenty of carved cabinets, and tapestry, and _biblos_, as they call picturesque curiosities in Paris. To my surprise, there was nothing (except canvases and easels) but a small deal table, on which tubes of oil-color were thrown in disorder, and two cheap chairs. Here, evidently, the pleasure of painting was sufficient to occupy the artist; and in the room where he made his ill.u.s.trations the characteristics were simplicity and good practical arrangements for order, but there was nothing to amuse the imagination. Mr. Leslie used to paint in a room which was just like any other in the house, and had none of the peculiarities of a studio. Turner did not care in the least what sort of a room he painted in, provided it had a door, and a bolt on the inside. Scott could write anywhere, even in the family sitting-room, with talk going forward as usual; and after he had finished Abbotsford, he did not write in any of its rich and n.o.ble rooms, but in a simple closet with book-shelves round it. d.i.c.kens wrote in a comfortable room, well lighted and cheerful, and he liked to have funny little bronzes on his writing-table.

The best way appears to be to surround ourselves, whenever it can be conveniently done, with whatever we know by experience to be favorable to our work. I think the barest cell monk ever prayed in would be a good place for imaginative composition, and so too would be the most magnificent rooms in Chatsworth or Blenheim. A middling sort of place with a Philistine character, vulgar upholstery, and vulgar pictures or engravings, is really dangerous, because these things often attract attention in the intervals of labor and occupy it in a mean way. An artist is always the better for having something that may profitably amuse and occupy his eye when he quits his picture, and I think it is a right instinct which leads artists to surround themselves with many picturesque and beautiful things, not too orderly in their arrangement, so that there may be pleasant surprises for the eye, as there are in nature.

For literary men there is nothing so valuable as a window with a cheerful and beautiful prospect. It is good for us to have this refreshment for the eye when we leave off working, and Montaigne did wisely to have his study up in a tower from which he had extensive views.

There is a well-known objection to extensive views, as wanting in snugness and comfort, but this objection scarcely applies to the especial case of literary men. What we want is not so much snugness as relief, refreshment, suggestion, and we get these, as a general rule, much better from wide prospects than from limited ones. I have just alluded to Montaigne,--will you permit me to imitate that dear old philosopher in his egotism and describe to you the view from the room I write in, which cheers and amuses me continually? But before describing this let me describe another of which the recollection is very dear to me and as vivid as a freshly-painted picture. In years gone by, I had only to look up from my desk and see a n.o.ble loch in its inexhaustible loveliness, and a mountain in its majesty. It was a daily and hourly delight to watch the breezes play about the enchanted isles, on the delicate silvery surface, dimming some clear reflection, or trailing it out in length, or cutting sharply across it with acres of rippling blue.

It was a frequent pleasure to see the clouds play about the crest of Cruachan and Ben Vorich's golden head, gray mists that crept upwards from the valleys till the sunshine suddenly caught them and made them brighter than the snows they shaded. And the leagues and leagues of heather on the lower land to the southward that became like the aniline dyes of deepest purple and blue, when the sky was gray in the evening--all save one orange-streak! Ah, those were spectacles never to be forgotten, splendors of light and glory, and sadness of deepening gloom when the eyes grew moist in the twilight and secretly drank their tears.

And yet, wonderful as it was, that n.o.ble and pa.s.sionately beloved Highland scenery was wanting in one great element that a writer imperatively needs. In all that natural magnificence humanity held no place. Hidden behind a fir-clad promontory to the north, there still remained, it is true, the gray ruin of old Kilchurn, and far to the south-west, in another reach of the lake, the island-fortress of Ardhonnel. But there was not a visible city with spires and towers, there were only the fir-trees on the little islands and a few gravestones on the largest. Beyond, were the depopulated deserts of Breadalbane.

Here, where I write to you now, it seems as if mankind were nearer, and the legends of the ages written out for me on the surface of the world.

Under the shadow of Jove's hill rises before me one of the most ancient of European cities, _soror et aemula Romae_. She bears on her walls and edifices the record of sixty generations. Temple, and arch, and pyramid, all these bear witness still, and so do her ancient bulwarks, and many a stately tower. High above all, the cathedral spire is drawn dark in the morning mist, and often in the clear summer evenings it comes brightly in slanting sunshine against the steep woods behind. Then the old city arrays herself in the warmest and mellowest tones, and glows as the shadows fall. She reigns over the whole width of her valley to the folds of the far blue hills. Even so ought our life to be surrounded by the loveliness of nature--surrounded, but not subdued.

FOOTNOTE:

[14] How purely this is the misery of a man of culture! A peasant would not have gone so far.