The Intellectual Life

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

TO A FRIEND WHO OFTEN CHANGED HIS PLACE OF RESIDENCE.

An unsettled class of English people—Effect of localities on the mind—Reaction against surroundings—Landscape-painting a consequence of it—Crushing effect of too much natural magnificence—The mind takes color from its surroundings—Selection of a place of residence—Charles Dickens—Heinrich Heine—Dr. Arnold at Rugby—His house in the lake district—Tycho Brahe—His establishment on the island of Hween—The young Humboldts in the Castle of Tegel—Alexander Humboldt’s appreciation of Paris—Dr. Johnson—Mr. Buckle—Cowper—Galileo.

I find that there is a whole class of English subjects (you belong to that class) of whom it is utterly impossible to predict where they will be living in five years. Indeed, as you are the worst of correspondents, I only learned your present address, by sheer accident, from a perfect stranger, and he told me, of course, that you had plans for going somewhere else, but where that might be he knew not. The civilized English nomad is usually, like yourself, a person of independent means, rich enough to bear the expenses of frequent removals, but without the cares of property. His money is safely invested in the funds, or in railways; and so, wherever the postman can bring his dividends, he can live in freedom from material cares. When his wife is as unsettled as himself, the pair seem to live in a balloon, or in a sort of Noah’s ark, which goes whither the wind lists, and takes ground in the most unexpected places.

Have you ever studied the effect of localities on the mind—on your own mind? That which we are is due in great part to the accident of our surroundings, which act upon us in one or two quite opposite ways. Either we feel in harmony with them, in which case they produce a positive effect upon us, or else we are out of harmony, and then they drive us into the strangest reactions. A great ugly English town, like Manchester, for instance, makes some men such thorough townsmen that they cannot live without smoky chimneys; or it fills the souls of others with such a passionate longing for beautiful scenery and rustic retirement, that they find it absolutely necessary to bury themselves from time to time in the recesses of picturesque mountains. The development of modern landscape-painting has not been due to habits of rural existence, but to the growth of very big and hideous modern cities, which made men long for shady forests, and pure streams, and magnificent spectacles of sunset, and dawn, and moonlight. It is by this time a trite observation that people who have always lived in beautiful scenery do not, and cannot, appreciate it; that too much natural magnificence positively crushes the activity of the intellect and that its best effect is simply that of refreshment for people who have not access to it every day. It happens too, in a converse way, that rustics and mountaineers have the strongest appreciation of the advantages of great cities, and thrive in them often more happily than citizens who are born in the brick streets. Those who have great facilities for changing their place of residence ought always to bear in mind that every locality is like a dyer’s vat, and that the residents take its color, or some other color, from it just as the clothes do that the dyer steeps in stain. If you look back upon your past life, you will assuredly admit that every place has colored your mental habits; and that although other tints from other places have supervened, so that it may be difficult to say precisely what remains of the place you lived in many years ago, still something does remain, like the effect of the first painting on a picture, which tells on the whole work permanently, though it may have been covered over and over again by what painters call scumblings and glazings.

The selection of a place of residence, even though we only intend to pass a few short years in it, is from the intellectual point of view a matter so important that one can hardly exaggerate its consequences. We see this quite plainly in the case of authors, whose minds are more visible to us than the minds of other men, and therefore more easily and conveniently studied. We need no biographer to inform us that Dickens was a Londoner, that Browning had lived in Italy, that Ruskin had passed many seasons in Switzerland and Venice. Suppose for one moment that these three authors had been born in Ireland, and had never quitted it, is it not certain that their production would have been different? Let us carry our supposition farther still, and conceive, if we can, the difference to their literary performance if they had been born, not in Ireland, but in Iceland, and lived there all their lives! Is it not highly probable that in this case their production would have been so starved and impoverished from insufficiency of material and of suggestion, that they would have uttered nothing but some simple expression of sentiment and imagination, some homely song or tale? All sights and sounds have their influence on our temper and on our thoughts, and our inmost being is not the same in one place as in another. We are like blank paper that takes a tint by reflection from what is nearest, and changes it as its surroundings change. In a dull gray room, how gray and dull it looks! but it will be bathed in rose or amber if the hangings are crimson or yellow. There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the heart goes to the water-brooks; there are other natures that need the solitude of primæval forests and the silence of the Alps. The most popular of English novelists sometimes went to write in the tranquillity of beautiful scenery, taking his manuscript to the shore of some azure lake in Switzerland, in sight of the eternal snow; but all that beauty and peace, all that sweetness of pure air and color, were not seductive enough to overcome for many days the deep longing for the London streets. His genius needed the streets, as a bee needs the summer flowers, and languished when long separated from them. Others have needed the wild heather, or the murmur of the ocean, or the sound of autumn winds that strip great forest-trees. Who does not deeply pity poor Heine in his last sad years, when he lay fixed on his couch of pain in that narrow Parisian lodging, and compared it to the sounding grave of Merlin the enchanter, “which is situated in the wood of Brozeliande, in Brittany, under lofty oaks whose tops taper, like emerald flames, towards heaven. O brother Merlin,” he exclaims, and with what touching pathos! “O brother Merlin, I envy thee those trees, with their fresh breezes, for never a green leaf rustles about this mattress-grave of mine in Paris, where from morning till night I hear nothing but the rattle of wheels, the clatter of hammers, street-brawls, and the jingling of pianofortes!”

In the biography of Dr. Arnold, his longing for natural beauty recurs as one of the peculiarities of his constitution. He did not need very grand scenery, though he enjoyed it deeply, but some wild natural loveliness was such a necessity for him that he pined for it unhappily in its absence. Rugby could offer him scarcely anything of this, “We have no hills,” he lamented, “no plains—not a single wood, and but one single copse; no heath, no down, no rock, no river, no clear stream—scarcely any flowers, for the lias is particularly poor in them—nothing but one endless monotony of enclosed fields and hedgerow trees. This is to me a daily privation; it robs me of what is naturally my anti-attrition; and as I grow older I begin to feel it.... The positive dulness of the country about Rugby makes it to me a mere working-place: I cannot expatiate there even in my walks.”

“The monotonous character of the midland scenery of Warwickshire,” says Dr. Arnold’s biographer, “was to him, with his strong love of natural beauty and variety, absolutely repulsive; there was something almost touching in the eagerness with which, amidst that ‘endless succession of fields and hedgerows,’ he would make the most of any features of a higher order; in the pleasure with which he would cherish the few places where the current of the Avon was perceptible, or where a glimpse of the horizon could be discerned; in the humorous despair with which he would gaze on the dull expanse of fields eastward from Rugby. It is no wonder we do not like looking that way, when one considers that there is nothing fine between us and the Ural mountains. Conceive what you look over; for you just miss Sweden, and look over Holland, the north of Germany, and the centre of Russia.”[14]

This dreadful midland monotony impelled Dr. Arnold to seek refreshment and compensation in a holiday home in the Lake district, and there he found all that his eyes longed for, streams, hills, woods, and wild-flowers. Nor had his belief in the value of these sweet natural surroundings been illusory; such instincts are not given for our betrayal, and the soul of a wise man knows its own needs, both before they are supplied, and after. Westmorland gave him all he had hoped from it, and more. “Body and mind,” he wrote, “alike seem to repose greedily in delicious quiet, without dulness, which we enjoy in Westmorland.” And again: “At Allan Bank, in the summer, I worked on the Roman history, and hope to do so again in the winter. It is very inspiring to write with such a view before one’s eyes as that from our drawing-room at Allan Bank, where the trees of the shrubbery gradually run up into the trees of the cliff, and the mountain-side, with its infinite variety of rocky peaks and points upon which the cattle expatiate, rises over the tops of the trees.”

Of all happily-situated mental laborers who have worked since the days of Horace, surely Tycho Brahe was the happiest and most to be envied. King Frederick of Denmark gave him a delightful island for his habitation, large enough for him not to feel imprisoned (the circumference being about five miles), yet little enough for him to feel as snugly at home there as Mr. Waterton in his high-walled park. The land was fertile and rich in game, so that the scientific Robinson Crusoe lived in material abundance; and as he was only about seven miles from Copenhagen, he could procure everything necessary to his convenience. He built a great house on the elevated land in the midst of the isle, about three-quarters of a mile from the sea, a palace of art and science, with statues and paintings and all the apparatus which the ingenuity of that age could contrive for the advancement of astronomical pursuits. Uniting the case of a rich nobleman’s existence with every aid to science, including special erections for his instruments, and a printing establishment that worked under his own immediate direction, he lived far enough from the capital to enjoy the most perfect tranquillity, yet near enough to escape the consequences of too absolute isolation. Aided in all he undertook by a staff of assistants that he himself had trained, supported in his labor by the encouragement of his sovereign, and especially by his own unflagging interest in scientific investigation, he led in that peaceful island the ideal intellectual life. Of that mansion where he labored, of the observatory where he watched the celestial phenomena, surrounded but not disturbed by the waves of a shallow sea, there remains at this day literally not one stone upon another; but many a less fortunate laborer in the same field, harassed by poverty, distracted by noise and interruption, has remembered with pardonable envy the splendid peace of Uranienborg.

It was one of the many fortunate circumstances in the position of the two Humboldts that they passed 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 masses 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 primæval nature what he wanted for the enrichment of his mind; but he knew also how to avail himself of all the assistance 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.