The Mind Is a Collection. Sean Silver

      8. A fragment of marble, now in Twickenham, fastened in a grotto with “invisible clamps.” Image used with kind permission of Radnor House School.

      But this does not go far enough. Pope was a collector, of many of the same sorts of things as Woodward. He was, for instance, interested in old coins, a habit he picked up when he inherited a small collection of miniatures and ancient medals from his maternal aunt.¹²⁸ And Pope, like Woodward, collected geological specimens; his collection, considered in sheer numbers of stones and weight of rock, outweighs even Woodward’s at the Sedgwick Museum. Likewise, Pope crafted for himself a cabinet—which, again like Woodward’s, survives mostly as Pope designed it. Pope’s five acres of Twickenham land, leased in 1719 with profits from his wildly successful translation of the Iliad, were marred by a curious circumstance; they were bisected by the London highway, which separated his neo-Palladian villa from his small plot of plantable ground. A tunnel solved this problem. At one end of the tunnel, which runs completely under highway and house alike, is Pope’s garden; at the other, fronting the house, is a short lawn sloping down toward a bend in the Thames. This tunnel was destined to become a site of use.¹²⁹ Contemporary sketches, including a rough sketch by William Kent, the architect responsible for at least some of the house and grounds, suggest that the tunnel was fitted with a desk and enough furniture that it could function as a place of retreat and poetic composition. Built over the last twenty years of his life, Pope’s tunnel realized (in Samuel Johnson’s words) “ornament from inconvenience,” offering a retreat from civilization, a site of intellectual labor, and a meeting place for Pope and his friends in the Tory opposition.¹³⁰ Finally, it came to house Pope’s mineralogical collection, which remains today where it was originally placed.

      Pope named this tunnel his “grotto,” and its design multiply registers Pope’s understanding of the relationship between ideas and the senses—enough so that it makes sense to trace out its genesis in some detail. To begin with, Pope’s grotto represents a paradigmatic example of what Diana Balmori calls an “intermediate structure.” These structures historically included things like grottoes, hermitages, artificial ruins; they stand halfway between “architecture and landscape,” thereby “articulat[ing] the relationship between art and nature.”¹³¹ The grotto after all links neo-Palladian house to semi-informal garden, art put manifestly on display alongside a delicately sculpted natural scene. These are the sort of tensions with which Pope was at home; passing from a pastoral landscape to the house’s formal symmetry, Pope’s grotto displays manifold resemblances with his poetic craft, which delights in staging nature in the rigorous symmetry of the heroic couplet. He was a figure of paradox, who waded into public life by retreating from public centers. Set free from the demands of the marketplace, Pope, like the Roman poet Horace, took up a site outside the immediate orbit of City politics—a place from which he could launch his satires, free of the demands of piece-work production.¹³² But if the grotto has helped us develop a general understanding of the public figure he established for himself, this is in part because Pope built it as a site of work for his particularly poetic intellect. Indeed, he designed it to stage and to mirror the intellect at work there. The grotto was, as Frederick Bracher put it in 1949, a “Maze of Fancy.”¹³³ During the winter months, Pope composed from the warmest rooms in the house—indeed, like Milton, composing at times from bed. But during the warmer seasons, he composed in the grotto, which was, among other things, the house’s coolest space. And as he became used to composing there, he turned the space itself into a reflection of the poetic process as he understood it. In time, this mental cabinet and space of labor was destined to become, in Helen Deutsch’s memorable phrase, “Pope’s most representative and elusive self-portrait.”¹³⁴

      The grotto has, in other words, all the signs of an active cognitive ecology, a space of thinking that captured something about how Pope saw his place in the world. This was true right from the beginning, in the grotto’s first state. The best-known description of the grotto appears in a 1725 letter penned to Edward Blount; Pope invites us to stand at the back of the grotto, looking down its long tunnel toward the Thames. Pausing at its back entrance, and looking along its length, Pope insists, “you [will] see the Sails on the River passing suddenly and vanishing, as thro’ a Perspective Glass.” Indeed, Pope’s gardener, in a pamphlet written upon Pope’s death, invites us to witness precisely this view. What he calls a “Perspective View of the Grotto”¹³⁵ ends up offering a tantalizing view through the grotto, “as thro’ a Perspective Glass,” with a small sail just passing silently by. Even here, the language is language that would not have been out of place in a description of a camera obscura; Joseph Addison and Samuel von Hoogstraten developed strikingly similar descriptions of camera obscuras they separately saw in Greenwich and London.¹³⁶ But this similarity is perhaps because Pope was himself thinking of the grotto’s other trick. “When you shut the Doors of the Grotto,” Pope continues, “it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera obscura; on the Walls of which the Objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture in their visible Radiations.”¹³⁷ Deutsch calls the grotto, described in this way, Pope’s “personal embodiment of the human mind,” for it stages a streamlined account of intellection for the reflexive consumption of the eye.¹³⁸ It was not enough simply to throw the doors of the grotto open to the scene they frame; this would simply be to take advantage of the view Pope’s villa commanded. The grotto is also made to internalize an epitome of the same scene when the doors are closed, putting the process on review. This is the basic work of the camera obscura.