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.
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