Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [48]
MORSE
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American free-man is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” address delivered August 31, 1837
The invention all admired, and each, how he
To be the inventor missed; so easy it seemed
Once found, which yet unfound most would have thought Impossible.
—Copied out by Morse in 1839 from Paradise Lost, VI, 498–501
Horatio Greenough, Samuel F. B. Morse (1831) (National Museum of American Art)
FIVE
Il Diavolo
(1830–1832)
AFTER A twenty-six day voyage, Morse reached Liverpool on December 4, in cold that frosted his eyebrows and the fur on his cape. He stopped two weeks in London, then caught the small, dirty cross-Channel steamer to France, arriving in Paris at dawn on New Year’s Day. The icy weather had frozen the Seine. From Paris he headed for Rome by diligence, a clumsier vehicle than American stagecoaches, he thought, the cheap rear seats occupied by “low people.”
Even in his own well-cushioned compartment, Morse found the trip south jangling. Snow clogged the iron wheels of the diligence, forcing it to make sudden stops. No guardrail shielded the carriage from plummeting off the winding precipitous mountain roads, often blocked by rocks washed down from the heights. To cross the swollen streams he sometimes had to step out and be carried over on the shoulders of “brawny watermen.” Irksomely, as the diligence passed through the ten “dominions” of divided Italy he again and again had to present his papers and luggage for inspection. And there was talk of bandits, avalanches.
Journeying through France and Italy, Morse sometimes thought of Napoleon. In reading biblical prophecy while at college, he believed he saw Bonaparte foretold in Daniel and Revelation. He took time when in Paris to see the robes and golden cups used in the Emperor’s coronation. Drawing closer to Rome, he stopped at an inn near Antibes and breakfasted in a room Napoleon had occupied as he withdrew into exile on the island of Elba. Although he had exulted in Bonaparte’s defeat, he knew something himself of frustrated ambition, and felt if not kinship at least sympathy with the banished Emperor. He lay down on the bed and looked out on the room, which had been kept as Napoleon left it: “I … endeavored to conceive for the moment how he, who had in that very situation seen the same objects when he woke, then viewed the reverses of life, to which he had apparently hitherto believed himself superior.”
Then, Rome. Encircled by walls, without modern buildings, the city survived as a mausoleum of the classical world, Middle Ages, and Renaissance—to Morse a promised land, overpowering: “All the classic story of our school boy days, history and fable, truth and fiction … are now reality,” he wrote; “Rome, the very spot, Rome … once the seat of the Arts, the seat of the empire of the world.”
Morse settled into a shuttered four-story house at 17 Via dei Prefetti, a narrow cobblestoned street just off one of Rome’s main thoroughfares, the busy Via del Corso. Shelley had lived nearby in 1819, and a few streets away was the Piazza Colonna with its sculpted Egyptian column, taken as a trophy by Augustus after his victory over Cleopatra.
At first Morse established a daily routine of visiting the Vatican galleries, the Palazzi Borghese, or some other dizzyingly lavish collection. There the poorest Italian could experience aesthetic pleasure more refined than any available to even the wealthiest American. Despite his fifteen years’ experience and study, Morse felt unprepared for the scarcely imaginable magnificence he