All manners take a tincture from our own,
Or come discoloured through our passions shown.--POPE.
What! give up liberty, property, and, as the Gazeteer says, lie down to
be saddled with wooden shoes?--Vicar of Wakefield.
There was something in the melancholy and reflective character of Warner
resembling that of Mordaunt; had they lived in these days perhaps both
the artist and the philosopher had been poets. But (with regard to the
latter) at that time poetry was not the customary vent for deep thought
or passionate feeling. Gray, it is true, though unjustly condemned as
artificial and meretricious in his style, had infused into the scanty
works which he has bequeathed to immortality a pathos and a richness
foreign to the literature of the age; and, subsequently, Goldsmith,
in the affecting yet somewhat enervate simplicity of his verse, had
obtained for Poetry a brief respite from a school at once declamatory
and powerless, and led her forth for a “Sunshine Holiday” into the
village green and under the hawthorn shade. But, though the softer and
meeker feelings had struggled into a partial and occasional vent, those
which partook more of passion and of thought, the deep, the wild, the
fervid, were still without “the music of a voice.” For the after century
it was reserved to restore what we may be permitted to call the spirit
of our national literature; to forsake the clinquant of the French
mimickers of classic gold; to exchange a thrice-adulterated Hippocrene
for the pure well of Shakspeare and of Nature; to clothe philosophy
in the gorgeous and solemn majesty of appropriate music; and to invest
passion with a language as burning as its thought and rapid as
its impulse. At that time reflection found its natural channel in
metaphysical inquiry or political speculation; both valuable, perhaps,
but neither profound. It was a bold, and a free, and an inquisitive age,
but not one in which thought ran over its set and stationary banks, and
watered even the common flowers of verse: not one in which Lucretius
could have embodied the dreams of Epicurus; Shakspeare lavished the
mines of a superhuman wisdom upon his fairy palaces and enchanted isles;
or the Beautifier [Wordsworth] of this common earth have called forth
“The motion of the spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought;”
or Disappointment and Satiety have hallowed their human griefs by a
pathos wrought from whatever is magnificent and grand and lovely in
the unknown universe; or the speculations of a great but visionary mind
[Shelley] have raised, upon subtlety and doubt, a vast and irregular
pile of verse, full of dim-lighted cells, and winding galleries, in
which what treasures lie concealed! That was an age in which poetry
took one path and contemplation another; those who were addicted to the
latter pursued it in its orthodox roads; and many, whom Nature, perhaps
intended for poets, the wizard Custom converted into speculators or
critics.
It was this which gave to Algernon’s studies their peculiar hue; while,
on the other hand, the taste for the fine arts which then universally
prevailed, directed to the creations of painting, rather than those of
poetry, more really congenial to his powers, the intense imagination and
passion for glory which marked and pervaded the character of the artist.
But as we have seen that that passion for glory made the great
characteristic difference between Clarence and Warner, so also did
that passion terminate any resemblance which Warner bore to Algernon
Mordaunt. With the former a rank and unwholesome plant, it grew up to
the exclusion of all else; with the latter, subdued and regulated, it
sheltered, not withered, the virtues by which it was surrounded. With
Warner, ambition was a passionate desire to separate himself by fame
from the herd of other men; with Mordaunt, to bind himself by charity
yet closer to his kind: with the one, it produced a disgust to his
species; with the other, a pity and a love: with the one, power was the
badge of distinction; with the other, the means to bless! But our story
lingers.
It was now the custom of Warner to spend the whole day at his work, and
wander out with Clarence, when the evening darkened, to snatch a brief
respite of exercise and air. Often, along the lighted and populous
streets, would the two young and unfriended competitors for this world’s
high places roam with the various crowd, moralizing as they went or
holding dim conjecture upon their destinies to be. And often would they
linger beneath the portico of some house where, “haunted with great
resort,” Pleasure and Pomp held their nightly revels, to listen to the
music that, through the open windows, stole over the rare exotics with
which wealth mimics the southern scents, and floated, mellowing by
distance, along the unworthy streets; and while they stood together,
silent and each feeding upon separate thoughts, the artist’s pale
lip would curl with scorn, as he heard the laugh and the sounds of a
frivolous and hollow mirth ring from the crowd within, and startle the
air from the silver spell which music had laid upon it. “These,” would
he say to Clarence, “these are the dupes of the same fever as ourselves:
like us, they strive and toil and vex their little lives for a
distinction from their race. Ambition comes to them, as to all: but they
throw for a different prize than we do; theirs is the honour of a day,
ours is immortality; yet they take the same labour and are consumed by
the same care. And, fools that they are, with their gilded names and
their gaudy trappings, they would shrink in disdain from that comparison
with us which we, with a juster fastidiousness, blush at this moment to
acknowledge.”
From these scenes they would rove on, and, both delighting in contrast,
enter some squalid and obscure quarter of the city. There, one night,
quiet observers of their kind, they paused beside a group congregated
together by some common cause of obscene merriment or unholy
fellowship--a group on which low vice had set her sordid and hideous
stamp--to gaze and draw strange humours or a motley moral from that
depth and ferment of human nature into whose sink the thousand streams
of civilization had poured their dregs and offal.
“You survey these,” said the painter, marking each with the curious eye
of his profession: “they are a base horde, it is true; but they have
their thirst of fame, their aspirations even in the abyss of crime or
the loathsomeness of famished want. Down in yon cellar, where a farthing
rushlight glimmers upon haggard cheeks, distorted with the idiotcy
of drink; there, in that foul attic, from whose casement you see the
beggar’s rags hang to dry, or rather to crumble in the reeking and
filthy air; farther on, within those walls which, black and heavy as the
hearts they hide, close our miserable prospect,--there, even there, in
the mildewed dungeon, in the felon’s cell, on the very scaffold’s self,
Ambition hugs her own hope or scowls upon her own despair. Yes! the
inmates of those walls had their perilous game of honour, their ‘hazard
of the die,’ in which vice was triumph and infamy success. We do but
share their passion, though we direct it to a better object.”
Pausing for a moment, as his thoughts flowed into a somewhat different
channel of his character, Warner continued, “We have now caught a
glimpse of the two great divisions of mankind; they who riot in palaces,
and they who make mirth hideous in rags and hovels: own that it is but
a poor survey in either. Can we be contemptible with these or loathsome
with those? Or rather have we not a nobler spark within us, which
we have but to fan into a flame that shall burn forever, when these
miserable meteors sink into the corruption from which they rise?”
“But,” observed Clarence, “these are the two extremes; the pinnacle of
civilization, too worn and bare for any more noble and vigorous fruit,
and the base upon which the cloud descends in rain and storm. Look to
the central portion of society; there the soil is more genial, and its
produce more rich.”
“Is it so, in truth?” answered Warner; “pardon me, I believe not: the
middling classes are as human as the rest. There is the region, the
heart, of Avarice,--systematized, spreading, rotting, the very fungus
and leprosy of social states; suspicion, craft, hypocrisy, servility to
the great, oppression to the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly vices,
the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the faculties
and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker, Gain,--these
make the general character of the middling class, the unleavened mass of
that mediocrity which it has been the wisdom of the shallow to applaud.
Pah! we too are of this class, this potter’s earth, this paltry mixture
of mud and stone; but we, my friend, we will knead gold into our clay.”
“But look,” said Clarence, pointing to the group before them, “look, yon
wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest accents
of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her infant,
with a fondness stamped upon her worn cheek and hollow eye, which might
shame the nice maternity of nobles; and there, too, yon wretch whom, in
the reckless effrontery of hardened abandonment, we ourselves heard a
few minutes since boast of his dexterity in theft, and openly exhibit
its token,--look, he is now, with a Samaritan’s own charity, giving the
very goods for which his miserable life was risked to that attenuated
and starving stripling! No, Warner, no! even this mass is not
unleavened. The vilest infamy is not too deep for the Seraph Virtue to
descend and illumine its abyss!”
“Out on the weak fools!” said the artist, bitterly: “it would be
something, if they could be consistent even in crime!” and, placing his
arm in Linden’s, he drew him away.
As the picture grew beneath the painter’s hand, Clarence was much struck
with the outline and expression of countenance given to the regicide
Bradshaw.
“They are but an imperfect copy of the living original from whom I have
borrowed them,” said Warner, in answer to Clarence’s remark upon the
sternness of the features. “But that original--a relation of mine, is
coming here to-day: you shall see him.”
While Warner was yet speaking, the person in question entered. His
were, indeed, the form and face worthy to be seized by the painter.
The peculiarity of his character made him affect a plainness of dress
unusual to the day, and approaching to the simplicity, but not the
neatness, of Quakerism. His hair--then, with all the better ranks, a
principal object of cultivation--was wild, dishevelled, and, in wiry
flakes of the sablest hue, rose abruptly from a forehead on which either
thought or passion had written its annals with an iron pen; the lower
part of the brow, which overhung the eye, was singularly sharp and
prominent; while the lines, or rather furrows, traced under the eyes and
nostrils, spoke somewhat of exhaustion and internal fatigue. But this
expression was contrasted and contradicted by the firmly compressed lip;
the lighted, steady, stern eye; the resolute and even stubborn front,
joined to proportions strikingly athletic and a stature of uncommon
height.
“Well, Wolfe,” said the young painter to the person we have described,
“it is indeed a kindness to give me a second sitting.”
“Tusk, boy!” answered Wolfe, “all men have their vain points, and I own
that I am not ill pleased that these rugged features should be assigned,
even in fancy, to one of the noblest of those men who judged the
mightiest cause in which a country was ever plaintiff, a tyrant
criminal, and a world witness!” While Wolfe was yet speaking his
countenance, so naturally harsh, took a yet sterner aspect, and the
artist, by a happy touch, succeeded in transferring it to the canvas.
“But, after all,” continued Wolfe, “it shames me to lend aid to an art
frivolous in itself, and almost culpable in times when Freedom wants the
head to design, and perhaps the hand to execute, far other and nobler
works than the blazoning of her past deeds upon perishable canvas.”
A momentary anger at the slight put upon his art crossed the pale brow
of the artist; but he remembered the character of the man and continued
his work in silence. “You consider then, sir, that these are times in
which liberty is attacked?” said Clarence.
“Attacked!” repeated Wolfe,--“attacked!” and then suddenly sinking his
voice into a sort of sneer, “why, since the event which this painting
is designed to commemorate, I know not if we have ever had one solitary
gleam of liberty break along the great chaos of jarring prejudice and
barbarous law which we term forsooth a glorious constitution. Liberty
attacked! no, boy; but it is a time when liberty may be gained.”
Perfectly unacquainted with the excited politics of the day, or the
growing and mighty spirit which then stirred through the minds of men,
Clarence remained silent; but his evident attention flattered the fierce
republican, and he proceeded.
“Ay,” he said slowly, and as if drinking in a deep and stern joy from
his conviction in the truth of the words he uttered,--“ay, I have
wandered over the face of the earth, and I have warmed my soul at the
fires which lay hidden under its quiet surface; I have been in the city
and the desert,--the herded and banded crimes of the Old World, and the
scattered but bold hearts which are found among the savannahs of the
New; and in either I have beheld that seed sown which, from a mustard
grain, too scanty for a bird’s beak, shall grow up to be a shelter and
a home for the whole family of man. I have looked upon the thrones of
kings, and lo, the anointed ones were in purple and festive pomp; and
I looked beneath the thrones, and I saw Want and Hunger, and despairing
Wrath gnawing the foundations away. I have stood in the streets of that
great city where Mirth seems to hold an eternal jubilee, and beheld the
noble riot while the peasant starved; and the priest built altars to
Mammon, piled from the earnings of groaning Labour and cemented with
blood and tears. But I looked farther, and saw, in the rear, chains
sharpened into swords, misery ripening into justice, and famine
darkening into revenge; and I laughed as I beheld, for I knew that the
day of the oppressed was at hand.”
Somewhat awed by the prophetic tone, though revolted by what seemed to
him the novelty and the fierceness of the sentiments of the republican,
Clarence, after a brief pause, said,--
“And what of our own country?”
Wolfe’s brow darkened. “The oppression here,” said he, “has not been
so weighty, therefore the reaction will be less strong; the parties
are more blended, therefore their separation will be more arduous; the
extortion is less strained, therefore the endurance will be more meek;
but, soon or late, the struggle must come: bloody will it be, if the
strife be even; gentle and lasting, if the people predominate.”
“And if the rulers be the strongest?” said Clarence.
“The struggle will be renewed,” replied Wolfe, doggedly.
“You still attend those oratorical meetings, cousin, I think?” said
Warner.
“I do,” said Wolfe; “and if you are not so utterly absorbed in your vain
and idle art as to be indifferent to all things nobler, you will learn
yourself to take interest in what concerns--I will not say your
country, but mankind. For you, young man” (and the republican turned to
Clarence), “I would fain hope that life has not already been diverted
from the greatest of human objects; if so, come to-morrow night to our
assembly, and learn from worthier lips than mine the precepts and the
hopes for which good men live or die.”
“I will come at all events to listen, if not to learn,” said Clarence,
eagerly, for his curiosity was excited. And the republican, having now
fulfilled the end of his visit, rose and departed.