Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [6]
But at Yale as before at the Academy Finley, found a way to what interested him. He was drawn to science. Scientific training at most American colleges was outdated and meagerly equipped with apparatus. Through President Dwight’s efforts to hire outstanding faculty, however, Yale’s science offering was superior to that of most other schools. Finley attended the chemistry classes of Professor Benjamin Silliman (1779–1864), who later organized the Yale Medical School. Silliman’s lectures included demonstrations of galvanic electricity, in which he explained the construction and operation of such current-producing devices as the Voltaic pile and the Cruikshank battery. Apparently fascinated by the subject, Finley spent one school vacation in the college’s “Philosophical Chamber,” assisting a tutor in electrical experiments. He also attended the demonstrations given by Jeremiah Day, Professor of Natural Philosophy. Day had all of the students hold hands to form a circuit, which he electrified: “it felt as if some person had struck me a slight blow across the arms,” Finley wrote home; “we all received the shock apparently at the same moment.”
Finley developed literary interests as well. He swapped an eight-volume set of Montaigne for a copy of Gil Blas, “not so much for the books contents,” he tried to explain to his parents, “as its acquainting me more thoroughly with the Language.” Jedediah and Elizabeth insisted that he return the book. They were no happier when after selling his gun for $4 he bought a copy of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and an unidentified play “which I consider as trash,” he wrote home, “… only took them that I might sell them again.” He tried writing verse himself, a dramatic dialogue in which an old Revolutionary War veteran prays to the Goddess of Liberty that “I may live forever free.” For one of his college compositions he also wrote an essay on “Beauty.” It treated painting and natural landscapes together, under the same three aesthetic principles of Variety, Proportion, and Uniformity.
Finley continued to paint, too, more seriously than before and now with some profit. His parents would not have approved what he reportedly sketched on the wall of his room—a scene of freshmen scrambling up the Hill of Science on their hands and knees, a burlesque of his father’s admonitions to him about the labor of acquiring knowledge. But he found Yale faculty and other New Havenites willing to pay a dollar for his watercolor profiles of them on paper or $5 for ivory miniatures. He did a miniature of himself as well, a Portrait of the Artist as a genial stylish Young Man. His commissions gave him the means not only to buy his own paint supplies, but also to pay off some of his buttery bills and treat himself to a fashionable double-breasted waistcoat.
Samuel F. B. Morse, Self Portrait (ca. 1809) (National Academy of Design)
Jedediah and Elizabeth badly missed their sons. By her account, they often looked at the picture of the far-off College Finley had painted for them, saying, “Now the boys are going in to prayers & now to recitation & now to commons.” Nor did the couple find comfort in Charlestown. Jedediah’s disgruntled congregation excluded him from a commemoration of the founders of New England, determined, he said, “to mortify and ‘put me down’ as they express it.” And Elizabeth lost two more daughters, one a few days after birth. Eight of her children had died, leaving only Finley, Sidney, and Richard.
The world outside Charlestown offered not much comfort either. Jedediah was alarmed at the growing appeal in New England of liberal Protestant sects. Unitarianism did the most harm—“the democracy of Christianity,” he called it, softheaded optimistic worship with no vision of human degeneracy since The Fall. “It dissolves all the bonds of Christian union, & deprives religion of all