Geography, including books of travel, contained many new works and one old favorite, Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy. Though Jefferson had recommended Addison’s work as a guidebook for those traveling to Italy, the copy of Addison in his retirement library shows that it still made good pleasure reading for someone who had no intention of ever traveling to Italy again. Not content solely with this longtime favorite, Jefferson also acquired one of the latest volumes of Italian travel, James Sloan’s, Rambles in Italy, in the Years 1816–17. Furthermore, Jefferson owned American works of exploration and travel that he had been instrumental in bringing to fruition, including Zebulon Pike’s Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi and Through the Western Parts of Louisiana to the Sources of the Arkansaw, Kansas, La Platte, and Pierre Jaun Rivers.
“Philosophy”—what would now be termed “Science”—corresponds to reason in Bacon’s tripartite division of knowledge. Jefferson split “Philosophy” into two categories, mathematics and ethics, each of which is further subdivided. He divided his mathematical books into “The Science of Quantity,” or mathematics proper, and “The Science of Space,” or geometry. He divided ethics into three categories: “Morality,” both ancient and modern; “Moral Supplements”; and “Social Organization,” which roughly corresponds to politics but encompasses a wide variety of works. What Jefferson meant by “Moral Supplements” is obvious from its subdivisions: religion and law. His unusual category title suggests that he saw man as naturally a moral creature but also perceived the need to bolster man’s inherent morality by external means.
Fine arts, Jefferson’s third major division, corresponds to the imagination in Bacon’s categories of knowledge. Within fine arts, Jefferson made two categories: “Beaux Arts,” which included books on architecture, gardening, music, painting, and sculpture, and “Belles Lettres.” Two of the most important new works reflecting Jefferson’s interests in the latest developments in both art and literature were Stendhal’s twovolume Histoire de la Peinture en Italie and Moritz Retzsch’s illustrated edition of Goethe’s Faust.
Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, Stendhal’s first important book, anticipated the Romantic rediscovery of Michelangelo. While assuming the role of art historian, Stendhal also treated contemporary attitudes toward art. To him, aesthetic appreciation was more a matter of feeling than intellect. The work of Correggio, his favorite artist, Stendhal approached almost as a lover. In short, Stendhal’s Histoire could be called the bible of the Romantic artist.23 Jefferson shared Stendhal’s attitude toward art. Both saw aesthetics as the province of the heart, not the head.
The presence of Retzsch’s Faust in Jefferson’s retirement library further reinforces his affinity with the Romantics.24 As an illustrator, Retzsch drew his figures in outline form. Deceptively simple, Retzsch’s outlines provoked the imagination of his readers. Shelley, to cite one of his most prominent admirers, found poetic inspiration in his etchings. He admitted that Retzsch’s illustrations to Faust made his head pulse in much the same way that others’ hearts pulsed. He explained, “What etchings those are! I am never satiated with looking at them, and I fear it is the only sort of translation of which Faust is susceptible—I never perfectly understood the Hartz Mountain scene, until I saw the etching.—And then, Margaret in the summer house with Faust!—The artist makes one envy his happiness that he can sketch such things with calmness, which I dared only to look upon once, and which made my brain swim round only to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which I knew that it was figured.”25 Jefferson left no such emotional reaction, but the presence of Retzsch’s Goethe in his library shows how open-minded he was to new forms of art and literature.
An 1822 letter to Nicholas Trist, who had temporarily returned to New Orleans, provides a further indication of what the Jeffersons were reading at Monticello. Trist was known in the family as a great Byron enthusiast. His affinity to Byron may partly explain Trist’s restlessness. Jefferson knew he would be happy to learn that “the tragedy of Lord Byron was immediately put into the hands of the family and was I believe read by every member of it.”26 The letter does not say which of Byron’s poetic tragedies they were reading. The historical drama Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice is the likeliest possibility. Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey had just issued the first American edition of Marino Faliero the year before. Lately, Jefferson had been ordering numerous books from Carey.
Jefferson left no reaction to Marino Faliero himself, but Byron’s tragedy contained much both to delight and dismay him. Rebelling against the aristocratic oligarchy that controls Venice, Faliero voices some stirring words in favor of rebellion:
We will renew the times of truth and justice,
Condensing in a fair free commonwealth
Not rash equality but equal rights,
Proportion’d like the columns to the temple,
Giving and taking strength reciprocal,
And making firm the whole with grace and beauty,
So that no part could be removed without
Infringement of the general symmetry.
Faliero’s words are stirring, but he makes an unlikely figure to voice the rhetoric of rebellion. While rebelling against his fellow aristocrats, he nonetheless feels antipathy toward his low-born soldier-conspirators. The personal conflict Faliero experiences creates much of the drama’s tension.27
Another letter to Trist, this one by Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen, also suggests that Byron’s poetry was well known at Monticello. Playfully upbraiding Trist for a comment he had made in a letter to her, Ellen quoted Byron’s The Island, a humorous poem retelling the story of the mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty that appeared in 1823, the year before her letter to Trist. She wrote:
I must say with old Laddy Grippy “weel! this beats print,” though to say the truth I am more tempted to quote from Sir Anthony Absolute “Why Jack, you d—-d impudent dog!” only I am afraid you might be shocked at so flagrant an usurpation of the rights of your sex, which reserves as a peculiar privilege, the use of such energetic expressions, and although the words G-d d—m, or as the French write it, godam or godem, are considered by this ingenious people in common with other foreigners, as the very basis and root of the English tongue, or as Lord Byron expresses it
———those syllables intense.
Nucleus of England’s native eloquence,
yet with the injustice which has uniformly marked your proceedings wherever women were concerned, you forbid us to avail ourselves of what would give so much bone and sinew to our sayings.28
Suddenly, Ellen is all grown up. In addition to The Island, she also alluded to The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy, a satirical novel by John Galt published the same year as The Island, and Richard Brinsely Sheridan’s stage comedy The Rivals, a perennial favorite. Besides giving Ellen the daring to say things that proper young ladies were not supposed to say, these three works, none of which were in Jefferson’s retirement library, show that there was a powerful undercurrent of literary activity flowing through Monticello that is not represented by her grandfather’s library catalogue.
Jefferson’s open-mindedness toward new forms of literary expression did not extend to the novel. While serving as vice president, he received a copy of Wieland, or The Transformation; An American Tale presented by its author, an ambitious young novelist named Charles Brockden Brown. The two men were unacquainted personally. Brown gave the book to Vice President Jefferson in the hopes of securing his patronage. With this presentation copy, Brown included a cover letter that amounted to a spirited defense of fiction. After admitting that he did not know whether Jefferson enjoyed “mere works of imagination and invention,” Brown argued that fiction could combine an “artful display of incidents,” a “powerful delineation of characters,” and a “train of eloquent and judicious reasoning” to create an emotional narrative.29
Thanking Brown for the gift, Jefferson assured him that his defense of fiction was unnecessary. “Som
e of the most agreeable moments of my life,” he explained, “have been spent in reading works of imagination which have this advantage over history that the incidents of the former may be dressed in the most interesting form, while those of the latter must be confined to fact. They cannot therefore present virtue in the best and vice in the worst forms possible, as the former may.”30 What Jefferson told Brown in this letter closely resembles what he had told Robert Skipwith a quarter century earlier when he recommended several novels to him. Jefferson’s theory of fiction had not changed much during the intervening years. He closed his letter of thanks by assuring Brown that he would read the book with great pleasure in the future.
Designed to encourage the young author, Jefferson’s letter to Brown does not really reflect his personal tastes. This presentation copy of Wieland is not among the books Jefferson sold to the Library of Congress, nor is it listed in the catalogue of his retirement library. The mystery of its whereabouts is not hard to fathom: most likely, he gave Wieland to his daughter Martha, who was fond of novels. The Foundling of Belgrade, an anonymous novel Jefferson received as a gift during his presidency, likely went the same way. He did not need to read beyond the cliché-ridden opening paragraph of The Foundling of Belgrade to see that it was not his kind of book: “ ‘Villain!’ exclaimed a voice from behind, while a rapier passed under the arm of Alfonso. Bleak and stormy was the night, and, the alternate brightness, and total absence of the moon, served but to perplex the way-lost traveller on the heath.”31
The catalogue of his retirement library provides a much better indication of his personal attitude toward novels than either his letter to Brown or a list of books Jefferson received as presents. The catalogue lists no modern novels whatsoever. The few works of prose fiction his retirement library contained—Don Quixote, Bocaccio’s Decameron—were shelved with poetry, in a subdivision titled “Prosaic Narrative Poetry.” Gargantua and Pantagruel, the other great narrative of prose fiction he owned, formed part of Rabelais’s Oeuvres, which he shelved in a miscellaneous category titled “Levities, Pastoral, Anatomy, Lyric, etc.”
His daughter and his granddaughters kept trying to interest him in novels. They read passages, sometimes long passages, from Sir Walter Scott’s novels to him, but he was not impressed. He did purchase several works by Sir Walter Scott from Washington bookseller R. C. Weight-man, all poetry: Ballads and Lyrical Pieces, The Lady of the Lake, The Lay of the Last Minstel, Marmion, and The Vision of Don Roderick. Regarding The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Scott puffed the work as follows: “The poem now offered to the public is intended to illustrate the customs and manners which anciently prevailed on the borders of England and Scotland. The inhabitants, living in a state partly pastoral and partly warlike, and combining habits of constant depredation with the influence of a rude spirit of chivalry, were often engaged in scenes highly susceptible of poetical ornament.” Jefferson clipped Scott’s comment about this poem from the newspaper. Furthermore, he clipped additional selections from The Lay of the Last Minstrel.32 Scott’s verse appealed to Jefferson for much the same reasons Ossian appealed to him, yet Scott’s poetry could not sustain his interest the way Ossianic verse could. None of these titles appear in the catalogue of the retirement library. More than likely he presented them to his granddaughters. When Ivanhoe appeared in 1819, Martha persuaded her father to read it. Before getting halfway through Ivanhoe, he pronounced it “the dullest and dryest reading he had ever experienced.”33
He tried to dissuade his grandchildren from novel-reading by ridiculing the conventions of the Gothic novel. He told them that when he was a young man, he had trouble with insomnia until he devised an ideal solution. He would mentally compose a love-and-murder novel. On sleepless nights, he would resume the composition of this novel wherever he left off. Before getting three more pages into it, he would find himself sound asleep.34
Jefferson’s fullest condemnation of the novel occurs in a letter to Nathaniel Burwell:
A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed. When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. Reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so bedecked comes amiss. The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.35
Fictional narratives from other cultures, however, did appeal to Jefferson. When Baron Lescallier sent him a copy of Enchanted Throne: An Indian Story, his translation of the collection of traditional Persian tales known as Vikramacarita, Jefferson enjoyed it very much. Thanking Lescallier for the present, Jefferson told him, “I have read it with satisfaction, and with the more as a piece of natural history, presenting to us, as in a map, the mind of the man of Persia, and the means of measuring it.”36 Fiction from different parts of the world provided important insights into other nations and cultures.
The catalogue of Jefferson’s retirement library shows that he also subscribed to many of the day’s learned journals. As catalogued, his library is weighted toward American magazines, but he also enjoyed British journals. His favorite was the Edinburgh Review. Ellen recalled that he “read new publications as they came out, never missed the new number of a review, especially of the Edinburgh, and kept himself acquainted with what was being done, said, or thought in the world from which he had retired.”37
Jefferson called the Edinburgh Review “unrivalled in merit” and predicted that if it were “continued by the same talents, information, and principles,” it “would become a real Encyclopedia, justly taking its station in our libraries with the most valuable depositories of human knowledge.”38 His idea that a set of magazines could evolve into an encyclopedia helps explain why he grouped both together in his library under a category titled “Polygraphical,” which basically meant collections of various writings. A periodical that lasts long enough and explores a wide variety of topics could, indeed, became encyclopedic.
The section of the retirement library devoted to philology was impressive. Jefferson’s sizable collection of Anglo-Saxon books included nearly all of the important studies of the language. But the collection was weak in Anglo-Saxon poetry: the only major Anglo-Saxon poem Jefferson owned was Judith, which forms part of Edward Thwaites’s Heptateuchus. One of the scholarly works he owned, Joseph Bosworth’s Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar, Jefferson called “a treasure of Anglo-Saxon learning.”39 His copy of Bosworth, which survives at the American Philosophical Society, shows how closely he was studying Anglo-Saxon. Tipped into the volume is a closely written page of notes he took while reading the work. Jefferson’s study of Anglo-Saxon would culminate in his Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language, the fullest literary essay he had written since “Thoughts on English Prosody.”40
Jefferson was also interested in Chinese. During his presidency, he had clipped from the newspaper a Confucian poem titled “A Very Ancient Chinese Ode,” which had been translated from the Chinese by Sir William Jones.41 Keen to learn more, Jefferson added two books treating the Chinese language to his retirement library: Robert Morison’s Dialogues and Detached Sentences in the Chinese Language, with a Free and Verbal Translation in English and Morison’s View of China for Philological Purposes. The first Protestant missionary to China, Morison encountered much hostility from the Chinese government. The only way he could hope to accomplish his mission was to lie low and bide his time. He obtained a position as translator of the East India Company in China and studied the language.42 He designed Dialogues as an introductory Chinese textbook. The more advanced View of China taught the language by offering an overview of Chinese culture.
Though Jefferson told Adams that his new collection of books would be for amusement, the library catalogue suggests that Jefferson’s idea of amusement differed greatly from the average reader’s. In the early nineteenth century, novels were offerin
g hordes of readers the opportunity for light-hearted reading that provided much pleasure but required little concentration. Jefferson had no thoughts of whiling away his remaining years reading novels. In his retirement, he found amusement by teaching himself to read Chinese!
CHAPTER 39
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth
Few authors in Jefferson’s retirement library were better represented than Baron d’Holbach, the renowned freethinker who had dared to question the basic tenets of Christianity. Holbach had established his reputation with Christianisme Dévoilé, a scathing attack tracing human evil back to religion in general and Christianity in particular. He developed his ideas along these same lines in subsequent treatises. Système de la Nature, his most famous work, denied the existence of a deity. Long, ponderous, and often confusing, Système de la Nature nonetheless provoked contemporary readers to rethink their understanding of Christianity. To give his ideas greater currency, Holbach digested the work as Bon Sens. These two works were part of the great library Jefferson sold to Congress, and he bought replacement copies of both for his retirement library. Neither of these anonymously published works verifies Jefferson’s interest in Holbach, however: he attributed both to Diderot. The catalogue of his retirement library shows that Jefferson really became interested in Holbach during the last ten years of his life. Altogether, he had nine works by Holbach in his retirement library.
A brief comment Jefferson made shortly before he sold his great library explains his interest in Holbach. Thanking Thomas Law for a copy of his latest work, Second Thoughts on Instinctive Impulses, Jefferson agreed with him that morality was an innate human quality. Refuting those who argued that morality stemmed from the love of God, Jefferson chose several renowned atheists to make his point: “Diderot, Dalembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue then must have had some other foundation than the love of god.”1
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