Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [14]
Jedediah and Elizabeth did not join in their son’s cheers. Solid Congregationalist-Federalists, they viewed England as the defender of the Christian civilization of the West against atheistic France. America’s “mad rulers,” Elizabeth wrote to Finley, had plunged the nation into chaos, “into an unnecessary War with a country that I shall always revere as doing more to spread the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ … than any other nation on the globe.” Finley’s parents not only disliked his politics. They also worried that it might be dangerous for him to discuss his beliefs with others in England. “Be the artist wholly,” his father cautioned, “… let politics alone.”
But for Finley there was no separating art and politics. What mattered was that America be respected abroad. This meant that while achieving its own artistic culture, the country must also show that it could not be intimidated. “The only way to please John Bull is to give him a good beating,” he told his parents, “and such is the singularity of his character, that the more you beat him the greater is his respect for you and the more he will esteem you.” Thus beaten by American frigates, the British were already changing their tune. “What!”—he now heard it said—“is this the cowardly, weak, inefficient race of men, we have so often sneered at.” And not only the British. Italian, Dutch, and Swedish newspapers, he added, also reported the country’s naval victories, and “speak in raptures of the rising greatness of America.”
Finley dismissed as fantasy the Federalist charge that in waging war against England, the American government was aiding Napoleon. In fact, by convincing Americans that they needed a strong navy, the war would equip the country to also chastise France, for its insolence. He told his parents that, in his view, many New Englanders who decried the war did so not from political or religious principle but to prevent any interruption of their business affairs: “Is this the spirit of ’76? the spirit of ’76 was sacrifice of individual interest for the good of the public; their spirit seems to be, the sacrifice of the public interest for that of the individual.”
Finley’s parents did not enjoy his lectures. Jedediah stiffened: “It is with great difficulty & self denial that we maintain you abroad. We cannot do it, for the purpose of making you a politician.” But two years of independence in England had made Finley more restive than ever under his parents’ control. When Jedediah sent one of his recent sermons, attacking American policy for undermining “the only Christian nation beside ourselves,” Finley returned an anti-Federalist tirade, nineteen closely written pages long. It came laced with hints of old resentment over inadequate financial support, attempts to maneuver him into the book business.
Now a student at the Royal Academy, a protégé of Washington Allston, Finley made it clear to his parents that he and his ideas deserved to be taken seriously. “I find I am three and twenty years old, that I am neither blind nor deaf, can hear, and I hope understand, that I have some judgment in many things, that I can trace the causes of that judgment to their sources … that I am in England, wide awake & that it is no dream; now having found all this I begin to exercise my judgment.”
Finley worked on through the wartime tension. He decided to submit a painting for the 1813 exhibition of the Royal Academy. He began by making a two-foot-long clay model of the famous Farnese Hercules, his first attempt at sculpture. It pleased Allston, who did much modeling in clay and recommended the practice to young painters for gaining accurate knowledge of the joints. West praised it as no mere academic exercise, saying that it “displayed thought.” Finley glowed: “He could not have paid me a higher compliment.”
Finley used his sculpture of Hercules as a model for a painting of the same subject. Following West’s advice to “paint