What is this soul, then? Whence
Came it?--It does not seem my own, and I
Have no self-passion or identity!
Some fearful end must be--
......
There never lived a mortal man, who bent
His appetite beyond his natural sphere,
But starved and died.--KEATS: Endymion.
On entering his home, Warner pushed aside, for the first time in his
life with disrespect, his aged and kindly relation, who, as if in
mockery of the unfortunate artist stood prepared to welcome and
congratulate his return. Bearing his picture in his arms, he rushed
upstairs, hurried into his room, and locked the door. Hastily he tore
aside the cloth which had been drawn over the picture; hastily and
tremblingly he placed it upon the frame accustomed to support it, and
then, with a long, long, eager, searching, scrutinizing glance, he
surveyed the once beloved mistress of his worship. Presumption, vanity,
exaggerated self-esteem, are, in their punishment, supposed to excite
ludicrous not sympathetic emotion; but there is an excess of feeling,
produced by whatever cause it may be, into which, in spite of ourselves,
we are forced to enter. Even fear, the most contemptible of the
passions, becomes tragic the moment it becomes an agony.
“Well, well!” said Warner, at last, speaking very slowly, “it is
over,--it was a pleasant dream,--but it is over,--I ought to be thankful
for the lesson.” Then suddenly changing his mood and tone, he repeated,
“Thankful! for what? that I am a wretch,--a wretch more utterly hopeless
and miserable and abandoned than a man who freights with all his wealth,
his children, his wife, the hoarded treasures and blessings of an
existence, one ship, one frail, worthless ship, and, standing himself
on the shore, sees it suddenly go down! Oh, was I not a fool,--a
right noble fool,--a vain fool,--an arrogant fool,--a very essence and
concentration of all things that make a fool, to believe such delicious
marvels of myself! What, man!” (here his eye saw in the opposite
glass his features, livid and haggard with disease, and the exhausting
feelings which preyed within him)--“what, man! would nothing serve
thee but to be a genius,--thee, whom Nature stamped with her curse!
Dwarf-like and distorted, mean in stature and in lineament, thou wert,
indeed, a glorious being to perpetuate grace and beauty, the majesties
and dreams of art! Fame for thee, indeed--ha-ha! Glory--ha-ha! a
place with Titian, Correggio, Raphael--ha--ha--ha! O, thrice modest,
thrice-reasonable fool! But this vile daub; this disfigurement of
canvas; this loathed and wretched monument of disgrace; this notable
candidate for--ha--ha--immortality! this I have, at least, in my power.”
And seizing the picture, he dashed it to the ground, and trampled it
with his feet upon the dusty boards, till the moist colours presented
nothing but one confused and dingy stain.
This sight seemed to recall him for a moment. He paused, lifted up
the picture once more, and placed it on the table. “But,” he
muttered, “might not this critic be envious? am I sure that he judged
rightly--fairly? The greatest masters have looked askant and jealous at
their pupils’ works. And then, how slow, how cold, how damned cold, how
indifferently he spoke; why, the very art should have warmed him more.
Could he have--No, no, no: it was true, it was! I felt the conviction
thrill through me like a searing iron. Burn it--did he say--ay--burn it:
it shall be done this instant.”
And, hastening to the door, he undid the bolt. He staggered back as he
beheld his old and nearest surviving relative, the mother of his father,
seated upon the ground beside the door, terrified by the exclamations
she did not dare to interrupt. She rose slowly, and with difficulty as
she saw him; and, throwing around him the withered arms which had nursed
his infancy, exclaimed, “My child!--my poor--poor child! what has come
to you of late? you, who were so gentle, so mild, so quiet,--you are no
longer the same,--and oh, my son, how ill you look: your father looked
so just before he died!”
“Ill!” said he, with a sort of fearful gayety, “ill--no: I never was so
well; I have been in a dream till now; but I have woke at last. Why,
it is true that I have been silent and shy, but I will be so no more.
I will laugh, and talk, and walk, and make love, and drink wine, and be
all that other men are. Oh, we will be so merry! But stay here, while I
fetch a light.”
“A light, my child, for what?”
“For a funeral!” shouted Warner, and, rushing past her, he descended the
stairs, and returned almost in an instant with a light.
Alarmed and terrified, the poor old woman had remained motionless and
weeping violently. Her tears Warner did not seem to notice; he pushed
her gently into the room, and began deliberately, and without uttering a
syllable, to cut the picture into shreds.
“What are you about, my child?” cried the old woman “you are mad; it is
your beautiful picture that you are destroying!”
Warner did not reply, but going to the hearth, piled together, with nice
and scrupulous care, several pieces of paper, and stick, and matches,
into a sort of pyre; then, placing the shreds of the picture upon it, he
applied the light, and the whole was instantly in a blaze.
“Look, look!” cried he, in an hysterical tone, “how it burns and
crackles and blazes! What master ever equalled it now?--no fault now
in those colours,--no false tints in that light and shade! See how that
flame darts up and soars!--that flame is my spirit! Look--is it not
restless?--does it not aspire bravely?--why, all its brother flames
are grovellers to it!--and now,--why don’t you look!--it
falters--fades--droops--and--ha--ha--ha! poor idler, the fuel is
consumed--and--it is darkness.”
As Warner uttered these words his eyes reeled; the room swam before him;
the excitement of his feeble frame had reached its highest pitch; the
disease of many weeks had attained its crisis; and, tottering back a
few paces, he fell upon the floor, the victim of a delirious and raging
fever.
But it was not thus that the young artist was to die. He was reserved
for a death that, like his real nature, had in it more of gentleness and
poetry. He recovered by slow degrees, and his mind, almost in spite of
himself, returned to that profession from which it was impossible to
divert the thoughts and musings of many years. Not that he resumed the
pencil and the easel: on the contrary, he could not endure them in his
sight; they appeared, to a mind festered and sore, like a memorial and
monument of shame. But he nursed within him a strong and ardent desire
to become a pilgrim to that beautiful land of which he had so often
dreamed, and which the innocent destroyer of his peace had pointed out
as the theatre of inspiration and the nursery of future fame.
The physicians who, at Talbot’s instigation, attended him, looked at his
hectic cheek and consumptive frame, and readily flattered his desire;
and Talbot, no less interested in Warner’s behalf on his own account
than bound by his promise to Clarence, generously extended to the
artist that bounty which is the most precious prerogative of the rich.
Notwithstanding her extreme age, his grandmother insisted upon attending
him: there is in the heart of woman so deep a well of love that no
age can freeze it. They made the voyage: they reached the shore of the
myrtle and the vine, and entered the Imperial City. The air of Rome
seemed at first to operate favourably upon the health of the English
artist. His strength appeared to increase, his spirit to expand; and
though he had relapsed into more than his original silence and reserve,
he resumed, with apparent energy, the labours of the easel: so that
they who looked no deeper than the surface might have imagined the scar
healed, and the real foundation of future excellence begun.
But while Warner most humbled himself before the gods of the pictured
world; while the true principles of the mighty art opened in their
fullest glory on his soul; precisely at this very moment shame and
despondency were most bitter at his heart: and while the enthusiasm of
the painter kindled, the ambition of the man despaired. But still he
went on, transfusing into his canvas the grandeur and simplicity of the
Italian school; still, though he felt palpably within him the creeping
advance of the deadliest and surest enemy to fame, he pursued, with
an unwearied ardour, the mechanical completion of his task; still, the
morning found him bending before the easel, and the night brought to his
solitary couch meditation rather than sleep. The fire, the irritability
which he had evinced before his illness had vanished, and the original
sweetness of his temper had returned; he uttered no complaint, he dwelt
upon no anticipation of success; hope and regret seemed equally dead
within him; and it was only when he caught the fond, glad eyes of his
aged attendant that his own filled with tears, or that the serenity of
his brow darkened into sadness.
This went on for some months; till one evening they found the painter
by his window, seated opposite to an unfinished picture. The pencil
was still in his hand; the quiet of settled thought was still upon
his countenance; the soft breeze of a southern twilight waved the hair
livingly from his forehead; the earliest star of a southern sky lent
to his cheek something of that subdued lustre which, when touched by
enthusiasm, it had been accustomed to wear; but these were only the
mockeries of life: life itself was no more! He had died, reconciled,
perhaps, to the loss of fame, in discovering that Art is to be loved for
itself, and not for the rewards it may bestow upon the artist.
There are two tombs close to each other in the strangers’ burial-place
at Rome: they cover those for whom life, unequally long, terminated in
the same month. The one is of a woman, bowed with the burden of many
years: the other darkens over the dust of the young artist.