Who dares
Interpret then my life for me as ‘t were
One of the undistinguishable many?
COLERIDGE: Wallenstein.
The first time Clarence had observed the young artist, he had taken a
deep interest in his appearance. Pale, thin, undersized, and slightly
deformed, the sanctifying mind still shed over the humble frame a spell
more powerful than beauty. Absent in manner, melancholy in air, and
never conversing except upon subjects on which his imagination was
excited, there was yet a gentleness about him which could not fail to
conciliate and prepossess; nor did Clarence omit any opportunity
to soften his reserve, and wind himself into his more intimate
acquaintance. Warner, the only support of an aged and infirm grandmother
(who had survived her immediate children), was distantly related to Mrs.
Copperas; and that lady extended to him, with ostentatious benevolence,
her favour and support. It is true that she did not impoverish the
young Adolphus to enrich her kinsman, but she allowed him a seat at her
hospitable board, whenever it was not otherwise filled; and all that she
demanded in return was a picture of herself, another of Mr. Copperas,
a third of Master Adolphus, a fourth of the black cat, and from time to
time sundry other lesser productions of his genius, of which, through
the agency of Mr. Brown, she secretly disposed at a price that
sufficiently remunerated her for whatever havoc the slender appetite of
the young painter was able to effect.
By this arrangement, Clarence had many opportunities of gaining that
intimacy with Warner which had become to him an object; and though the
painter, constitutionally diffident and shy, was at first averse to, and
even awed by, the ease, boldness, fluent speech, and confident address
of a man much younger than himself, yet at last he could not resist the
being decoyed into familiarity; and the youthful pair gradually advanced
from companionship into friendship. There was a striking contrast
between the two: Clarence was bold and frank, Warner close and timid.
Both had superior abilities; but the abilities of Clarence were for
action, those of Warner for art: both were ambitious; but the ambition
of Clarence was that of circumstances rather than character. Compelled
to carve his own fortunes without sympathy or aid, he braced his mind to
the effort, though naturally too gay for the austerity, and too genial
for the selfishness of ambition. But the very essence of Warner’s nature
was the feverish desire of fame: it poured through his veins like lava;
it preyed as a worm upon his cheek; it corroded his natural sleep;
it blackened the colour of his thoughts; it shut out, as with an
impenetrable wall, the wholesome energies and enjoyments and objects of
living men; and, taking from him all the vividness of the present, all
the tenderness of the past, constrained his heart to dwell forever and
forever amidst the dim and shadowy chimeras of a future he was fated
never to enjoy.
But these differences of character, so far from disturbing, rather
cemented their friendship; and while Warner (notwithstanding his
advantage of age) paid involuntary deference to the stronger character
of Clarence, he, in his turn, derived that species of pleasure by which
he was most gratified, from the affectionate and unenvious interest
Clarence took in his speculations of future distinction, and the
unwearying admiration with which he would sit by his side, and watch the
colours start from the canvas, beneath the real though uncultured genius
of the youthful painter.
Hitherto, Warner had bounded his attempts to some of the lesser efforts
of the art; he had now yielded to the urgent enthusiasm of his nature,
and conceived the plan of an historical picture. Oh! what sleepless
nights, what struggles of the teeming fancy with the dense brain, what
labours of the untiring thought wearing and intense as disease itself,
did it cost the ambitious artist to work out in the stillness of his
soul, and from its confused and conflicting images, the design of this
long meditated and idolized performance! But when it was designed;
when shape upon shape grew and swelled, and glowed from the darkness of
previous thought upon the painter’s mind; when, shutting his eyes in the
very credulity of delight, the whole work arose before him, glossy with
its fresh hues, bright, completed, faultless, arrayed as it were, and
decked out for immortality,--oh! then what a full and gushing moment of
rapture broke like a released stream upon his soul! What a recompense
for wasted years, health, and hope! What a coronal to the visions and
transports of Genius: brief, it is true, but how steeped in the very
halo of a light that might well be deemed the glory of heaven!
But the vision fades, the gorgeous shapes sweep on into darkness, and,
waking from his revery, the artist sees before him only the dull walls
of his narrow chamber; the canvas stretched a blank upon its frame; the
works, maimed, crude, unfinished, of an inexperienced hand, lying idly
around; and feels himself--himself, but one moment before the creator of
a world of wonders, the master spirit of shapes glorious and majestical
beyond the shapes of men--dashed down from his momentary height, and
despoiled both of his sorcery and his throne.
It was just in such a moment that Warner, starting up, saw Linden (who
had silently entered his room) standing motionless before him.
“Oh, Linden!” said the artist, “I have had so superb a dream,--a dream
which, though I have before snatched some such vision by fits and
glimpses, I never beheld so realized, so perfect as now; and--but you
shall see, you shall judge for yourself; I will sketch out the design
for you;” and, with a piece of chalk and a rapid hand, Warner conveyed
to Linden the outline of his conception. His young friend was eager in
his praise and his predictions of renown, and Warner listened to him
with a fondness which spread over his pale cheek a richer flush than
lover ever caught from the whispers of his beloved.
“Yes,” said he, as he rose, and his sunken and small eye flashed out
with a feverish brightness, “yes, if my hand does not fail my thought,
it shall rival even--” Here the young painter stopped short, abashed at
that indiscretion of enthusiasm about to utter to another the hoarded
vanities hitherto locked in his heart of hearts as a sealed secret,
almost from himself.
“But come,” said Clarence, affectionately, “your hand is feverish and
dry, and of late you have seemed more languid than you were wont,--come,
Warner, you want exercise: it is a beautiful evening, and you shall
explain your picture still further to me as we walk.”
Accustomed to yield to Clarence, Warner mechanically and abstractedly
obeyed; they walked out into the open streets.
“Look around us,” said Warner, pausing, “look among this toiling and
busy and sordid mass of beings who claim with us the fellowship of clay.
The poor labour; the rich feast: the only distinction between them is
that of the insect and the brute; like them they fulfil the same end and
share the same oblivion; they die, a new race springs up, and the very
grass upon their graves fades not so soon as their memory. Who that is
conscious of a higher nature would not pine and fret himself away to be
confounded with these? Who would not burn and sicken and parch with
a delirious longing to divorce himself from so vile a herd? What have
their petty pleasures and their mean aims to atone for the abasement of
grinding down our spirits to their level? Is not the distinction from
their blended and common name a sufficient recompense for all that
ambition suffers or foregoes? Oh, for one brief hour (I ask no more) of
living honour, one feeling of conscious, unfearing certainty that Fame
has conquered Death! and then for this humble and impotent clay, this
drag on the spirit which it does not assist but fetter, this wretched
machine of pains and aches, and feverish throbbings, and vexed
inquietudes, why, let the worms consume it, and the grave hide--for Fame
there is no grave.”
At that moment one of those unfortunate women who earn their polluted
sustenance by becoming the hypocrites of passions abruptly accosted
them.
“Miserable wretch!” said Warner, loathingly, as he pushed her aside; but
Clarence, with a kindlier feeling, noticed that her haggard cheek was
wet with tears, and that her frame, weak and trembling, could scarcely
support itself; he, therefore, with that promptitude of charity which
gives ere it discriminates put some pecuniary assistance in her hand and
joined his comrade.
“You would not have spoken so tauntingly to the poor girl had you
remarked her distress,” said Clarence.
“And why,” said Warner, mournfully, “why be so cruel as to prolong,
even for a few hours, an existence which mercy would only seek to bring
nearer to the tomb? That unfortunate is but one of the herd, one of the
victims to pleasures which debase by their progress and ruin by their
end. Yet perhaps she is not worse than the usual followers of love,--of
love, that passion the most worshipped, yet the least divine,--selfish
and exacting,--drawing its aliment from destruction, and its very nature
from tears.”
“Nay,” said Clarence, “you confound the two loves, the Eros and the
Anteros; gods whom my good tutor was wont so sedulously to distinguish:
you surely do not inveigh thus against all love?”
“I cry you mercy,” said Warner, with something of sarcasm in his
pensiveness of tone. “We must not dispute; so I will hold my peace: but
make love all you will; what are the false smiles of a lip which a few
years can blight as an autumn leaf? what the homage of a heart as feeble
and mortal as your own? Why, I, with a few strokes of a little hair
and an idle mixture of worthless colours, will create a beauty in whose
mouth there shall be no hollowness, in whose lip there shall be no
fading; there, in your admiration, you shall have no need of flattery
and no fear of falsehood; you shall not be stung with jealousy nor
maddened with treachery; nor watch with a breaking heart over the waning
bloom, and departing health, till the grave open, and your perishable
paradise is not. No: the mimic work is mightier than the original, for
it outlasts it; your love cannot wither it, or your desertion destroy;
your very death, as the being who called it into life, only stamps it
with a holier value.”
“And so then,” said Clarence, “you would seriously relinquish, for the
mute copy of the mere features, those affections which no painting can
express?”
“Ay,” said the painter, with an energy unusual to his quiet manner, and
slightly wandering in his answer from Clarence’s remark, “ay, one serves
not two mistresses: mine is the glory of my art. Oh! what are the
cold shapes of this tame earth, where the footsteps of the gods have
vanished, and left no trace, the blemished forms, the debased brows, and
the jarring features, to the glorious and gorgeous images which I can
conjure up at my will? Away with human beauties, to him whose nights
are haunted with the forms of angels and wanderers from the stars, the
spirits of all things lovely and exalted in the universe: the universe
as it was; when to fountain, and stream, and hill, and to every tree
which the summer clothed, was allotted the vigil of a Nymph! when
through glade, and by waterfall, at glossy noontide, or under the silver
stars, the forms of Godhead and Spirit were seen to walk; when the
sculptor modelled his mighty work from the beauty and strength of
Heaven, and the poet lay in the shade to dream of the Naiad and the
Faun, and the Olympian dwellers whom he walked in rapture to behold;
and the painter, not as now, shaping from shadow and in solitude the dim
glories of his heart, caught at once his inspiration from the glow of
earth and its living wanderers, and, lo, the canvas breathed! Oh! what
are the dull realities and the abortive offspring of this altered and
humbled world--the world of meaner and dwarfish men--to him whose realms
are peopled with visions like these?”
And the artist, whose ardour, long excited and pent within, had at last
thus audibly, and to Clarence’s astonishment, burst forth, paused, as
if to recall himself from his wandering enthusiasm. Such moments of
excitement were indeed rare with him, except when utterly alone, and
even then, were almost invariably followed by that depression of spirit
by which all over-wrought susceptibility is succeeded. A change came
over his face, like that of a cloud when the sunbeam which gilded leaves
it; and, with a slight sigh and a subdued tone, he resumed,--
“So, my friend, you see what our art can do even for the humblest
professor, when I, a poor, friendless, patronless artist, can thus
indulge myself by forgetting the present. But I have not yet explained
to you the attitude of my principal figure;” and Warner proceeded once
more to detail the particulars of his intended picture. It must be
confessed that he had chosen a fine though an arduous subject: it was
the Trial of Charles the First; and as the painter, with the enthusiasm
of his profession and the eloquence peculiar to himself, dwelt upon
the various expressions of the various forms which that extraordinary
judgment-court afforded, no wonder that Clarence forgot, with the artist
himself, the disadvantages Warner had to encounter in the inexperience
of an unregulated taste and an imperfect professional education.