"I scorn your land,
So far it lies below me; here I see
How all the sacred stars do circle me."
Henry Vaughan.
THERE survives in certain men a climbing instinct, a persistence, dating from Babel days, which keeps them to the belief that they were meant to be, in Spenser's phrase, "neighbors to the sky." Put them down in a city, and they mount, by choice, as by force of circumstances, oil-like, over the gross mass. These are the garret-dwellers, disburdened, for the most part, of the money-bags of capitalists. Surely, the more a creature is denuded of riches and responsibilities, the lighter his spiritual weight, the fitter he is for nearing the unembarrassed planets. He is no underling. His poverty literally raises him up. He marches, like a conqueror towards some fine, deserted city, into the high places; his castle is over against the morning; and his bare forehead is reared above the hereditary crowns of Europe.
That the rich should be the groundlings, after all, is one of the diverting sarcasms and counter-turns of society. Who would not, rather, stand play-fellow to the sun, and consider the moon's light nothing less familiar than a beneficent household elf, and suffer the companionship of the rainbow and of snows? Distant and faint sounds the thunder of the streets; Teufelsdröckh, and such as he, "sit above it, alone with the stars." Nethermost darkness cannot overtake the denizen of the garret. His matins are over and done while candles still flicker below. The wail of the Banshee reaches not his far-removed ear. No flood in civic highways appalls him; the tramp of armies, likewise, is beneath him, and he overlooks revolutions, undisturbed. For him, perpetually, are ultra-mundane joys, the choragium of the spheres, and the revelations of the shifting air.
The conjurer and the astronomer alike love the "high lonely tower." The painter goes thither for light, the student for contemplation. There, according to international traditions, is the Poor Author perennially to be found,—
"Lulled by soft zephyrs thro' the broken pane."
The Poor Author! The saving leaven of literature! Here is his native heather, and not elsewhere. Here his latitude must be taken. If ghosts revisit their whilom kingdoms, here Otway, Addison, Dryden, Chatterton, Hood, Béranger, flock some time or other. Here you shall brush against the shade of Marvell, who dwelt thus high and thus solitary, when the king's deputies came with unavailing gifts in their hands, to buy his favor; and presently dear Oliver Goldsmith shall turn his homely face upon you, and tell you, in his delightful voice, as he once blurted it out before the elegant circles at Sir Joshua's, how he lived happily among the beggars in Axe Lane! In a garret sat Tasso, whimsically beseeching his cat to lend to his nocturnal labors the guiding radiance of her eyes, having no candle whereby to write his verses. Dickens, who was never a Poor Author, caught, at least, something of his privilege in his "sky-nest," with the clouds and the birds shadowing his study windows in their passage.
As the dwellers in the Happy Valley were daily entertained with tales and songs which treated of their own felicity therein, so we know of nothing more judicious than to sound the praises of the ever-noble garret to the Poor Author, who has an eternal patent on its worth and beauty. The least that can be said of it is that it engenders the philosophy of comment. Its kind soil fosters the spectator and the observer, in default of commoner weed. The Muse, traditionally coy, can be caught there, if anywhere. She has been known to neglect her votaries in proportion to the fattening of their purses and their proximity to the first-floor drawing-room. A poet himself has marked it as a warning:—
"A man must live in a garret aloof ...
To keep the goddess constant and glad."