<h2 class="nobreak"><SPAN name="ON_THE_GARRET" id="ON_THE_GARRET">ON THE GARRET.</SPAN></h2>
<div class="center">
<div class="poem">
<p><span class="i4">"I scorn your land,</span><br/>
So far it lies below me; here I see<br/>
How all the sacred stars do circle me."<br/>
<span class="i11"><span class="smcap">Henry Vaughan.</span></span></p>
</div>
</div>
<div style="padding-bottom: 5px"><ANTIMG class="decocap" src="images/deco-t.jpg" width-obs="60" height-obs="59" alt="T" title="T" /></div>
<p class="decocap">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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_173" id="Page_173">-173-</SPAN></span> 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.</p>
<p>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
<i><span lang="la">choragium</span></i> of the spheres, and the revelations of the shifting air.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_174" id="Page_174">-174-</SPAN></span></p>
<p>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,—</p>
<p class="center">"Lulled by soft zephyrs thro' the broken pane."</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_175" id="Page_175">-175-</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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:—</p>
<div class="center">
<div class="poem">
<p>"A man must live in a garret aloof ...<br/>
To keep the goddess constant and glad."</p>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_176" id="Page_176">-176-</SPAN></span></p>
<p>Long residence in its precincts, howbeit, may tend to produce a
haughty disregard of the brethren acclimated to lower levels. Your
roof-perching hermit, whose lungs are inflated with rude health,
scoffs at the genteel ailments accruing below from the largesses of
carbonic acid gas. His own dais-like elevation breeds arrogance in
him, and patrician scorn; his descent to the vantage-ground of the
majority is palpable indeed. He cannot, at most, walk their paths,
save, metaphorically, on stilts, like the shepherds of the Landes.
He is accustomed to live cheek-by-jowl with Arcturus. A kite or a
balloon he acknowledges, but no terrene mail-service or horse-car.
Valleys and cellars distress him. He cannot lie on the grass of a
summer's day, to watch a colony of ants. He is of a loftier cast
of mind, and sighs rather for the shining motes of the Milky Way,
"scattered unregarded upon the floor of heaven." We have known him to
refuse a June cherry, plucked only amidmost of the tree. What is such
a bigot to do, but thrust his tall head back, out of alien air, into
his sixth-story<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_177" id="Page_177">-177-</SPAN></span> Arcady where the Muse sits, waiting for him, on a
collapsing chair?</p>
<p class="center"><span lang="fr">"Dans un grenier qu'on est bien à vingt ans!"</span></p>
<p>So have we sought the heights, and clove unto them, in orthodox
privacy, though lacking our just deserts of the aforesaid lady's
favor. Yet do we in nothing reproach thee, eyry of our youth! with
thy beloved townish outlook and undusted shelves, save that the
tutelary pages born of thee are scarce of so Attic a flavor as our
sense of the due sequence of things hath led us to desire.</p>
<p class="illo">
<ANTIMG src="images/footer14.jpg" width-obs="178" height-obs="86" alt="footer" title="footer" /></p>
<hr class="med" />
<p class="center sm">University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />