Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [12]
Finley’s new way of life, with its farces, cheroots, and addicted poets, took some explaining to his pious parents. He wrote home often, assuring them of his efforts to be what his mother called a “good child.” His roommate, Leslie, was exemplary, he promised, “very agreeable, industrious, steady.” He himself had become a steady person, having chosen art for his life’s work. He thanked his parents for having tolerated his earlier fidgeting: “They have watched every change of my capricious inclinations,” he wrote home; “I hope that one day my success in my profession will reward you in some measure for the trouble and inconvenience I have so long put you to.” As if to mark his new identity, he stamped the seal of at least one letter with an antique gem—a replica of the original, which had sat in the seal ring of Michelangelo.
But to Elizabeth and Jedediah, Finley’s devotion to painting was itself worrisome. “He is so absorb’d in his art that every thing else is considered unimportant,” she complained to Finley; “I hope he will not think so much of that or any thing else in this Vain World as to neglect his precious soul.” His spiritual nature, in fact, remained undeveloped. He attended a Congregational church near his lodgings, but had yet to experience conversion—the quasi-mystical assurance that he truly loved God, entitling him to full church membership. “The acquisition of a new heart,” his father wrote to him, “would give us more pleasure than any other you could name. Fail not to be emulous of this honor & happiness in preference to every other.” Their son did not seem headed in the right direction, however. Elizabeth frowned on his evenings at Drury Lane—“a most bewitching amusement,” she warned, “ruinous both to soul and body.” Nor did she applaud his keeping company with young Payne, American Hamlet though he was: “however pure you may believe his morals to be…. he is in a situation to ruin the best morals.”
Parents and child scrapped about money as well. Jedediah had agreed to provide Finley an annual allowance of about $800. But Finley protested that to get by on that amount he had to deny himself necessary art supplies, and ordinary needs and pleasures: “I am treated with no dainties, no fruit, no nice dinners,” he wrote home, sounding like the Yale undergraduate rather than the scion of Michelangelo; “I have had no new clothes for nearly a year; my best are threadbare, and my shoes out at the toes.” His wheedling stirred compassion (guilt?) in Jedediah, who praised his thrift but urged him not to risk his health or reputation by it. “Let your appearance be suited to the respectable company you keep, and your living such as will conduce most effectually to preserve health of body and vigor of mind. We shall all be willing to make sacrifices at home so far as may be necessary to the above purposes.” He raised Finley’s allowance to $1000.
Finley stayed in touch with his brothers, Sidney and Richard. Both were completing their studies at Yale and helping Jedediah to ready new geographies for the press. Jedediah tried to enlist Finley as well, offering to send him a volume on American geography that he might try to get reprinted in England, retaining the copyright and the profit. But Finley resisted being drawn into the business world: “my mind has been so habitually employed in works of fancy and imagination, that I found myself perfectly stupid, the moment I thought of the plain, dry, matter of fact, book accounts.”
Jennette Hart, the young woman he had courted in New Haven, stayed