 | CHAPTER XXXV. Paul Fane, or, Parts of a life else untold |  |
35. CHAPTER XXXV.
The delay of Paul's voyage homeward, in consequence
of Mrs. Cleverly's intention of taking passage with him,
weighed heavily on his already depressed spirits. It would
have been a mere trifle at any other time to be thus
detained; but, with his labors completed, and a couple of
weeks of comparative leisure on his hands, there was awkwardness
in still excusing himself from a flying visit, at
least, to Ashly Hall. He might have run over to Paris, to
accompany his friends to England; but the letter of the
princess (written on the supposition that she was to see
which he felt a delicacy in again making his visible
appearance to her. Overworked with the completion of
his professional commissions, and his pencil, of course, distasteful
as a refuge from depression—London Novemberish,
and his acquaintances and friends out of town—he
was fairly driven to the wall by his melancholy. In this
extremity of mood, one foggy and dull morning, he closed
the shutters upon the imperfect struggles of the sun to
make a day, lighted his candles, and had recourse to his
one habitual comfort when all else failed—the society of
his mother. With the world shut out, he thus opened his
heart to her:
You are thinking of me to-day, I know, as half-way across
the water. I was to have sailed a fortnight ago (as I wrote
you), and should have been happy indeed to do so, but for Mrs.
Cleverly's delays at Paris. She and Mary are to come with me,
and the good lady's milliners and dress-makers, I suppose, have
been less prompt than her kindnesses. Boston is to be kept astonished
for a year or two, of course, with the fashions she brings
home—the tribute to the magnificent great heart that beats under
her “latest fashion,” being as little thought of by herself, as it is
by the goodness-blind world she cares only to dazzle.
I shall be with you soon, however, God willing. And, I am very
certain, it will be to leave you no more! Once at home again,
who has made a chance flight on a balloon—not very impatient
even for the elevation with my own wings as a butterfly. I have
been out of reach of the dew of your tears, and of the soft moss
and violets of your every day's love, dearest mother!
Of course I am not so much of a child as to run prematurely
home, leaving my manhood's errand of ambition unperformed. If
it were better for my development of genius to remain longer in
Europe—one year or twenty—I would choke down the homesickness
now busy in my throat, I am sure you will believe. But, very
deliberately, and looking at it from all points of view, I think my
own country is my mind's native air. After trying its lungs in the
perfumed atmospheres of Europe—(and trying them, I confess, by
arts of inhalation not elsewhere to be learned, and necessary for
their full trial of expansibility)—I find my American soul and
brain, as well as my American heart, taste, and temper, pining for
America to breathe in.
I have had success in Europe—in England more particularly—
to my full deserving, I am very free to own. But, when I think
to what I half or wholly owe it, I would rather bury all but the
lesson! It is not to myself, nor to my pencil, that I owe what I
may call my present prosperous reputation. I owe it mainly to
adventitious causes—causes to whose aid and kindness I am properly
grateful, of course, but to which I would rather not be longer
indebted. I have painted many pictures, and for “noble” sitters.
And to paint on, and for the same class of “patrons,” looks more and
more possible, every day. I have found it easy to continue at the
level upon which I began my English recognition and appreciation.
But I began where I never could have reached by my own merit
only. I came with court introductions which were wholly unprofessional
then patronized as an artist for having been their guest. My
zealous friends were all aristocrats, and they have brought aristocracy
to sit to me.
And what better would I have?—perhaps you ask, dearest
mother! Till you have thought of it—perhaps till you have tried
it—this would seem happiness enough. And I scarce think I shall
be successful in explaining to you, even now, why such “bread
and butter” is to be “quarrelled with.”
To be appreciated below my present level, seems to me the
liberty I want. And this, with the false lustre of my present false
position, I should, at least, never believe myself to be. To pass
up from one stratum of society to another, in this country, is difficult
enough. My republican pride would have fretted at that, if
I had not chanced, as the proverb has it, “to come in at a window.”
But to be ever honestly at home, on the stratum below
where you have once been conspicuous or acknowledged, is quite
as difficult. You are looked at through the eyes of your grand
acquaintances, by all whom those acquaintances look down upon.
Whatever might have been their decision as to your merit, if you
could have appealed to it without influence or favor, it is inseparable
from illusion, as it is. And so naturally does it seem to be a
result of aristocratic institutions—the making each class take its
tastes and estimates of talent from the class above—that there is
almost no such thing as individual and independent opinion. They
think by classes. They believe in you by recommendation of
higher authority than their own judgment.
Perhaps it is the instinct for my natural level, that makes me
yearn for the appreciation of those who are not “grand folks”—
not lordships and ladyships. But while condescension or patronage
more untruthful and unworthy which is paid from servility, and
prompted by obsequious imitation. There are exceptions, no
doubt, to this subserviency to rank, but I have not found them.
Following my longing for holier sympathy, I have again and again
picked out Nature's nobility from the middle class—gifted, refined.
and apparently high-hearted, men and women, such as I wished
for friends—and my disappointment has been thus far invariable.
More than for all else, I found myself valued for my familiar
acquaintance with great people.
But, while this looks as if high life in England were the most
appreciative of Art—as if court air, on the whole, were the most
natural element of genius—there are conditions, even to the
enjoyment of this, which, to republican lungs, make it quite
unbreathable. I have been astonished to know that some of the
most eminent men of genius, here, never think of taking their
wives into the society they frequent. Artists and authors—names
known the world over—go nightly to the parties of the nobility,
and stay at the country-houses of their great acquaintances, leaving
at home wives and daughters who are uninquired after and
unthought of. It is looked upon as a very convenient and proper
economy for the usual poverty of a man of genius; and they
number it among the refinements of good-breeding to practise a
“delicacy on such subjects”—inquiring neither into the extent of
an artist's or author's wardrobe, nor into the family or debts with
which he may chance to be encumbered.
I am coming home, dearest mother, to be happy in American
liberty—the liberty not only of sinking to where, by the laws of
specific gravity, I belong, but of being looked at, after I get to
or the liberty to fall, and, at any level, to be judged of by the
simple individual opinion, without class condescension, class servility,
or class prejudice, seems to me to be American only. The
hell of social life, and of all life, is false position—I am fully persuaded—and,
in England, an artist, at least, can have nothing else.
But I have said enough of this. You will think the London fog,
from which I fled to pen and ink, has overtaken me!
And now, with my head upon your lap, what else shall I confess
to you, dear mother?
My heart, as well as my pride and my pencil, has had its lessons
since I left you. It has been instructive to all three “to see the
world.” I have been beloved, and I have loved; and I come
home, not only without a wife, but, for preference, very much
where I started. I despair of ever being loved by one woman for
all that I should wish to be loved for. Only a corner seems to be
wanted in the house of which we offer the whole. Those who
have shown partiality for me, hitherto, have done so for such different
reasons! One loved me for my appreciative discrimination
and flattery of portrayal, and, her I changed into a friend; one,
for the proof I had chanced to give of qualities of character she
thought rare (and, by her final preference, I was repaid for a long
remembered scorn); one for my personal magnetism, felt only
when near, and her (loving her most of all, and wildly and passionately
I shame to say!) I helped give to the bridegroom now
happy with her; and there was a fourth who has confessed to
a sacred friendship for me that might have been love, and this
last precious tribute was to you—for what I had learned of you—
for my honor of woman and my never-wavering deference of belief
this triple pilgrimage (of heart, pride, and pencil), loved me for
my genius only—and who loves it still, or more (and that only),
now that we return together—and for her I felt no passion at
home, and I feel none now. Yet with my sad knowledge of the
incompleteness of all love, I should be happiest, perhaps, with
what she would not fail me in. I have a presentiment sometimes
—reasoning upon it only, and with the pulse of my heart shut
down—that the mind's love (if there must be one quality among
many to be alone valued and appreciated), is the best worth securing
and living for. She would begin with it, at least—our pure,
sweet Mary!
So much for the heart and pride I bring home to you. My
pencil, I think, will return also, to breathe in its native air more
freely. The architecture of the great temple of Art is undoubtedly
more complete on this side the water. But, while, in it, one artist
is but a brick—bricks sustaining him below, but immovable bricks
pressing on him from above—in America he is the tent pitched in
the desert, with the sunshine and air all around him. I feel the
want of this singleness and free fame. Genius develops here, and
is rewarded, by schools—a gregariousness of effort and dependence
which (for me, certainly) smothers all hope of individuality and fire.
Though I know I have improved in the knowledge and dexterities
of Art, while abroad, I wait till I get home for the inspiration to
conceive what shall be only my own, and achieve in it a triumph.
Republican air must loose the blood in my now fettered wrist and
brain.
I will keep my letter open, to add to it any news I may get to-morrow,
as to our voyage and movements. Perhaps I may have
if kept longer in suspense. For to-day, however, farewell, and, that
God may preserve you to bless once more these weary eyes, prays
fervently, dearest mother, your affectionate
arrival in London of Mrs. Cleverly and Mary, and the
date of their proposed embarkation for the voyage.
Contrary to Paul's wishes, his friends the Tetherlys
became aware of his intention to steal off thus quietly,
and, by Mrs. Cleverly's delays, they were enabled to
hear of him as still in London, after his written farewell.
They came down to Liverpool from Ashly Hall,
to bring him the kind adieux of Miss Mildred and Mr.
and Mrs. Arthur Ashly, and to see the last of him on
the English shore. But, by both of them, it was a
farewell hard to utter. By him it was still harder to
receive and respond to. The leaning of the ship to
the pressure of the fair wind, and the last waving of
the hands, as the returning pilot-boat took those two
dear friends from his sight, was a relief to a heart
overburdened.
With the close of that voyage, and the return of
the American artist, Mr. Paul Fane, from Europe, we
come upon that part of his history that is already
known. The entrance upon his profession, after his
few years of foreign study and travel, was naturally
the earliest point at which Fame, in his own country,
would recognise his career, and, with that, commences
commonly what knowledge of him is now upon men's
lips. His adoption of a style of Art peculiarly his
own, his doubtful success for a while, his marriage
to Miss Mary Evenden, and his struggles with poverty
and misappreciation (her love and completeness of
sympathy forming the whole sunshine of his life, to
himself, as it did its most visible beauty and poetry
to the eyes of others)—all this is in hearsay while
he is living, and (should his pictures live after him)
likely to be written of, by-and-by. There were apprenticeships
little understood, however—trainings of his
heart and pride, as well as of his pencil—which, the
author has thought it might be curious to tell. This
book has accordingly confined itself to those secret
mouldings of his genius and character “which were
else untold;” but, by the reader's acquaintance with
which, he will be enabled to comprehend the impulses
to Fane's artistic career and style, as well as the
If it has not turned out to be as much of a “romance”
as was expected, it is because the real life, of this our day,
faithfully pictured, seldom is.
| CHAPTER XXXV. Paul Fane, or, Parts of a life else untold | |