Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [16]
Finley appealed to his parents for another year’s support, beyond the three they had granted. He said that he needed the extra time in order to become a history painter: “I cannot be happy unless I am pursuing the intellectual branch of the art. Portraits have none of it.” Allston backed him up. He wrote to Jedediah that Finley’s progress had been “unusually great.” But should the young man be obliged to return to America, his progress might be squandered in work unworthy of his potential: “It is true he could there paint very good portraits, but I should grieve to hear at any future period that on the foundation now laid, he shall have been able to raise no higher superstructure than the fame of a portrait painter.”
Jedediah’s reply is not known, but Elizabeth was unconvinced. She was certain that Finley could not survive as an artist in America by offering the public wall-size spectacles of Marius before Carthage. “You must not expect to paint anything in this country, for which you will receive any money to support you, but portraits,” she warned; “That is all your hope here, and to be very obliging and condescending to those who are disposed to employ you.” However unkindly expressed, the warning was not groundless. Few artists even in England managed to support themselves as history painters, the notable exception, Benjamin West, having had the patronage of the King. And forward-looking America had no kings and paid not much homage to history. Anyway, Finley’s request for new funds was badly timed. Already in debt and forced to borrow, Jedediah had accumulated new debts of $4000 and feared bankruptcy—“in consequence,” Elizabeth let her son know, “of his endeavors to establish you in the Book Store of Farrand & Mallory … which failed.”
Finley did not help his case by telling his Federalist parents that he wished to spend the extra year in France. He had rejoiced in the Russian-Austrian-Prussian attack on Paris during the spring of 1814 that forced Bonaparte into exile and raised Louis XVIII to the throne of France. When Louis visited London, Finley stood for five hours in Piccadilly to see the new French king, craning his neck for a look and joining the crowd’s cries of “Vive le roi! Vive Louis!” A month later, as other European potentates arrived in London preliminary to the Vienna peace congress, he strained to get close to Czar Alexander, who recently had led a review of mounted Cossacks down the Champs-Elysée—“truly a great man,” he thought, vanquisher of “the most alarming despotism that ever threatened mankind.” He got hold of a ring on the door of Alexander’s coach, and kept pace for a quarter mile as the Czar rolled along.
Finley explained to his parents that the crushing of Napoleon augured a new Renaissance. With Europe once again open to study, art seemed destined to revive as it had in the fifteenth century. “I long to bury myself in the Louvre,” he said. There he would no longer have to bear daily insult to his feelings as an American. He could improve in drawing, where he was still deficient, and undertake a serious historical work. Scarcely any of his fellow art students remained in England; all had gone to liberated Paris. And the thought of them reveling in opportunities to view the Old Masters, while he might be forced to return to Charlestown, brought back his adolescent spells of gloom: “for the first time since I left home,” he told his parents, “have I had one of my desponding fits.”
But to Elizabeth, Paris was no place for a Congregationalist son—“the seat of dissipation,” she called it. Finley had mentioned the possibility of visiting Russia, too, a harebrained notion demonstrating that he had yet to conquer his restlessness: “You must not be a schemer,