Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [61]
Morse had also come to understand why European governments so often criticized the United States. They dreaded change. They feared that America’s example of people ruling themselves would threaten class privilege and possibly foment revolution. “Our simple existence keeps hope alive in the breasts of patriots.” He had often heard Europeans speculate that in fifty or a hundred years the United States would split into several different domains, some returning to monarchy. But Americans universally preferred republicanism, and sought political relief by changing administrations, not forms of government. The opposite was more likely to happen: over the next century all Europe would be revolutionized into constitutional governments, then republicanized, adopting “the principles of liberty promulged 60 years ago in America, and proved sound by 60 years experience.”
But three months before Morse’s departure, news from America tested his confidence in the country’s future. South Carolina cotton producers had blamed a serious decline in cotton prices on the high protective tariffs levied by the federal government. A South Carolina convention had declared the tariffs null, and warned that if President Jackson tried to enforce them, the state would secede from the Union. Morse deplored this “blindness and madness.” It encouraged European enemies of civil liberty, who claimed that republics were inherently unstable. He remained convinced that Americans were committed to enduring as a single people, the United States: “As to the Union,” he told Lafayette, “let the simple question ‘Shall this Union be dissolved?’ be so put that the nation must decide it, and but one voice will be heard from Maine to Mississippi, Never!”
Samuel F. B. Morse, Grand Gallery of the Louvre (Terra Museum of American Art)
About his own future, Morse was less optimistic. He had learned much about brushwork and color harmony from Europe’s canvases aglow with centuries of ambition, skill, and genius. But what he had seen only recalled to him his still-frustrated longing for distinction as a history painter. Where was his School of Athens?
When he left America, Morse had been depressed, his career faltering. The thought that he was not improving as an artist but going backward, he said, “unremittingly tormented me.” He had hoped while abroad to rekindle his ardor and regain his proficiency, so that he might at last “execute some great subject.” He now felt better than ever prepared to do so, conscious “of the power to do more than I have ever been able to do.” But all told he had not accomplished much in Europe. Lack of money had forced him to spend his time copying. Not even The Grand Gallery of the Louvre had demanded the full range of his talents. As Greenough said, his gifts and most of his time had been wasted, “dribbled away in little things.”
Where was his School of Athens? The answer left Morse feeling no less futile than when he left America. His only hope lay in obtaining from Congress one of the still-uncommissioned history paintings to be hung under the dome of the Capitol. He had decided that the perfect subjects for him would be the departure and return of Columbus—“on these two I will stake my reputation as an artist.” Greenough implored him not to give up: “Hang on like Columbus himself…. These subjects are yours, you are theirs.”
But hanging on was not so easy. At times Morse felt that for too long he had spent too much energy dreaming