Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [65]
Morse’s son Charles was about thirteen, two years older than his youngest child, Finley—as James Edward Finley had become known. The boys stayed for a while with their grandmother’s family, the Breeses, in upstate New York. Mostly they seem to have been at school in New Haven, Morse paying off part of their school bills in copies of self-portraits by Rubens and Titian. Charles took Latin and French, achieving many grades of Excellent. Finley did less well, his mind and senses dulled. At some time in his early years he had contracted measles and scarlet fever. The diseases reportedly produced convulsions that damaged his brain and, among other impairments, left him partly deaf. The boy’s schoolmaster told Morse that with a little more strength Finley probably would make “respectable improvement” in his studies.
Samuel F. B. Morse, The Muse—Susan Walker Morse (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Morse still felt the shock of Lucrece’s death ten years earlier, and still spoke of “the wounds which one such blow sends through all the affections of the heart.” But he wanted to remarry, and courted several women, without success. He still loved young Catherine Pattison—only as a daughter, he told himself, “not with that kind of love which were we nearer in age I could not help indulging. Such a love is now forbidden by every consideration.” Just the same he kept writing to her. And his avuncular warnings about the traps of this world came scented with gallantry:
I have seen but few such as you, except in the ideal creations of Romance, and I can only liken the concern with which you have inspired me when I see you entering into Society to that which one feels on seeing a beautiful young fawn fearlessly gambolling on the borders of a forest where its natural enemies of every kind lurk.
Catherine too knew how to play yes-and-no: “whatever you may say,” she replied, “will be looked upon as destiny.”
Morse found a more suitable prospect in New York City, but became put off by her character. He found another in Boston, whose “inexorable friends,” as James Fenimore Cooper described them, forbade her to marry him. Cooper and his family, returned from Europe with four Swiss servants, had rented a splendid town house on St. Mark’s Place, a half-dozen streets from Morse’s tower at New York University. A rumor went around that Morse had become engaged to Cooper’s daughter Sue—“which he laughed at, of course,” Cooper said.
Morse’s experience of Europe had intensified his already fierce nationalism. With his artistic career stalled, he gave much of his time to writing about the threat to America of foreign despotisms. While abroad he had kept extensive journals, full of political observation and commentary. He revised them for publication in the Observer, where they appeared as a series of “Sketches of France, Italy and Switzerland.” He also honored a request from Lafayette to publicize the reactionary nature of Louis-Philippe’s government. In an article for the New York Commercial Advertiser, he described how gendarmes “invaded” Lafayette’s country estate, seized a leading Polish exile Lafayette had been housing there, and drove him off as a prisoner to Tours. “Thus you will see what kind of liberty is enjoyed [in France],” he told American readers, “and you may well ask, whether the cause of freedom has gained any thing by the three days’ revolution.”
Morse tried to show that Louis-Philippe menaced freedom in the United States as well. Writing for the Journal of Commerce, he addressed the long-simmering issue of the payment by France