Juliana Horatia Ewing

“ A south-west wind is blowing over the plains. It drives the “messengers” over the sky, and the sails of the windmill, and makes the dead leaves dance upon the graves. It does much to dispel the evil effects of the foul smells and noxious gases, which are commoner yet in the little village than one might suppose. (But it is a long time, you see, since the fever was here.) It shows the silver lining of the willow leaves by the little river, and bends the flowers which grow in one glowing mass—like some gorgeous Eastern carpet—on Master Swift’s grave. ”

“ My good friend, I at least am the better judge of what makes a painter’s education. Is the man who shows a Giotto how to use this brush, or mix that paint, to be called his teacher? No, not for teaching him, forsooth, what he would have learned of anybody, everybody, nobody, somehow, anyhow, or done just as well without. But the man who taught him to work as a matter of principle, and apart from inclination (a lesson which not all geniuses learn) ; the man who fostered the love of Nature in him, and the spirit of poetry,—qualities without which draughtsmanship and painting had better not be ”

“ Jan felt that he expected him to go home. Perhaps at this moment the baker had gone, with the best intentions, to fetch the Cheap Jack, and bring about a family reunion. Terror had become an abiding state of Jan’s mind, and it seized him afresh, like a palsy. He left the penny on the counter, and shook the flour-dust from his fingers, and, stealing with side glances of dread into the street, he sped away once more.
He had no knowledge of localities. He ran “on and on,” as people do in fairy tales. ”

“ If the schoolmaster had had any twinges of regret as he bought these things, in defiance of his principles for Jan’s education, they melted utterly away in view of his delight, and the glow that pleasure brought into his pale cheeks. Master Swift was regarded, too, by a colored sketch of Rufus sitting at table in his arm-chair, with his more mongrel friend on the floor beside him. It was the best sketch that Jan had yet accomplished. But most people are familiar with the curious fact that one often makes an unaccountable stride in an art after it has been laid aside for a time. ”

“ Can one picture the generous glow with which the mature and courtly artist recognized unconscious genius struggling under the form of a shepherd lad,—yearning out of his great Italian eyes over that glowing landscape whose beauties could not be written in the sand? Will the golden age of the arts ever return? We are hardly moving towards it, I fear. For I have found a model for my Cimabue,—an artist too, and a true one; but no boy Giotto! ”

“ Not the cold pavement chilling him through his ragged clothes, not the strange staring and jesting of the rough crowds, not even the hideous sense of the hunchback’s vigilant oversight of him, could destroy his pleasure in the sense of the daily increasing powers of his fingers, in which genius seemed to tremble to create. In the few weeks of his apprenticeship to screeving, Jan had improved more quickly than he might have done under such teaching as the Squire had been willing to procure for the village genius. ”

“ Jan slunk out, and when Master Swift turned homewards Jan followed silently in his footsteps through the snow. At the door of the cottage, the old man looked round with a relenting face.
“I suppose Rufus’ll insist on your coming in,” said he; and Jan rushing in hid his face in Rufus’s curls, and sobbed heavily.
“Tut, tut!” said the schoolmaster. “No more of that, child. There’s bitters enough in life, without being so prodigal of your tears.”
“Come and sit down with ye,” he went on. “You’re very young, lad, and maybe I’m foolish to be angry with ye that you’re not wise. ”

“ Lake carrying Jan, they all climbed up the narrow ladder to the next floor.
Heavily ground the huge stones with a hundred and twenty revolutions a minute, making the chamber shake as they went round.
They made the nurse giddy. The simplest machinery has a bewildering effect upon an unaccustomed person. So has going up a ladder; which makes you feel much less safe in the place to which it leads you than if you had got there by a proper flight of stairs. So—very often—has finding yourself face to face with the accomplishment of what you have been striving for, if you happen to be weak-minded. ”

“ But time is not money to the merchant just now, and he watches the western sky patiently, and is made sleepy by the breeze. When at last they saunter under the shadow of the gray church tower, his eye is caught by the mass of color, out of which springs a high cross of white marble, whose top is just flushed by the setting sun. It is of fine design and workmanship, and marks the grave where the great man’s schoolmaster sleeps near his wife and child. ”

“ At the peril of floggings from the Cheap Jack, too many of which had already scarred his thin shoulders, he ransacked his brains for telling subjects, and forced from his memory the lines which told most, and told most quickly, of the pathetic look on Rufus’s face, the anger, pleasure, or playfulness of the mill cats. Perhaps none of us know what might be forced, against our natural indolence, from the fallow ground of our capabilities in many lines. ”

“ It was the painter’s picture. As the other spectators passed, they spoke of the coloring and the draughtsmanship; of the mellow glow of sunshine, which, faithful to the richness of southern summers, carried also a poetical hint of the air of glory in which genius lives alone. To some the graceful figure of Cimabue was familiar, but the new group round the picture saw only the shepherd lad. And if, as the spectators said, his eyes haunted them about the room, what ghosts must they not have summoned to haunt Mr. Ford’s client as he gazed? ”

“ Of such trades as were open to him in the Home Jan inclined to cabinet-making. It must be amusing to dab little bunches of bristles so deftly into little holes with hot pitch as to produce a hearth-brush, but as a life-work it does not satisfy ambition. For boot-making he felt no fancy, and the tailor’s shop had a dash of corduroy and closeness in the atmosphere not grateful to nostrils so long refreshed by the breezes of the plains. But, when an elder boy led him into the airy room of the cabinet-maker, Jan found a subject of interest. ”

“ The shepherd boy’s eyes were as dark as his own; but that look in their upward gaze, which stirred every heart, pierced his as it had moved it years ago from eyes the color of a summer sky. To others their pathos spoke of yearning genius at war with fortune; but for Mr. Ford’s client they brought back, out of the past, words which rang more clearly in his ears than the condolences of the crowd,—
“You’ll remember your promise, D’Arcy? You will be quite sure to take me home to bury me? And you will call my child after my father,—JAN?” ”

“ To gratify that old whim of his about the red shawl, his doting foster-mother made him little crimson frocks; and as he wandered over the downs in his red dress and a white pinafore, his yellow hair flying in the breeze, his chin up, his black eyes wide open, with slate in one hand, his pencil in the other, and the sandy kitten clinging to his shoulder (for Jan never lowered his chin to help her to balance herself) , he looked more like some elf than a child of man. ”

“ I’m reminding you of what ye’ll know better than me (though not by yourself, for Jan tells me you’re a grand artist) , that a man may have the ambition and the love, and some talent for an art, and yet be just without that divine spark which the gods withhold. Sir, God forbid that I should undervalue the pure pleasure of even that little gift; but it’s ill for a lad when he has just that much of an art to keep him from a thrifty trade—and no more.”
The painter replied as earnestly as Master Swift had spoken,—
“Jan’s estimate of me is weaker than his judgment in art is wont to be. ”

“ It’s a bitter thing to have the ambition without the genius, to smoulder in the fire that great men shine by! However, it’s something to have just the saving sense to know that ye’ve not got it, though it’s taken a wasted lifetime to convince me, and I sometimes think the deceiving serpent is more scotched than killed yet. However, ye seem to me to be likelier to lack the ambition than the genius, so we may let that bide. But there’s a snare of mine, Jan, that I mean your feet to be free of, and that’s a mischosen vocation. ”

“ So I come because Abel axed me. For I be main fond of Abel.”
“Abel was right,” said the old man. “Take to learning, my lad. Love your books,—friends that nobody can kill, or part ye from.”
“I’d like to learn pieces like them you say,” said Jan.
“So ye shall, so ye shall!” cried Master Swift. “It’s a fine thing, is learning poetry. It strengthens the memory, and cultivates the higher faculties. Take some more bacon, my lad.” ”

“ The Fine Arts are not the road to fame for working-men. Jan, Jan, be guided by me. Learn what I bid ye. And when ye’ve made name and fortune the way I show ye, ye can buy paints and paintings at your will, and paint away to please your leisure hours.”
It did not need the gentle Abel’s after-counsel to persuade Jan to submit himself to the schoolmaster’s direction. ”

“ Ay, ay, a Great Man, please the Lord; and, when I’m laid by in the churchyard yonder, folks’ll come to see the grave of old Swift, the great man’s schoolmaster. Ye’ll be an inventor yet, lad, a benefactor to your kind, and an honor to your country. I’m not raising false hopes in ye, without observing your qualities. You’ve the quick eye, the slow patience, and the inventive spark. You can find your own tools and all, and don’t stop where other folk leaves off: witness yon bluebells ye took to make skies with! But, bless the lad, he’s not heeding me! ”

“ The pertness, the liveliness, the humor, the love of mischief, the fiendish ingenuity and perversity of which pigs are capable, can be fully known to the careworn pig-minder alone. When they are running away,—and when are they not running away?—they have an action with the hind legs very like a donkey in a state of revolt. But they have none of the donkey’s too numerous grievances. And if donkeys squealed at every switch, as pigs do, their undeserved sufferings would have cried loud enough for vengeance before this.
Jan’s opportunities for studying pigs were good. ”

“ I thought, ‘If there’s a genius in obscurity here, I’ll come across the boy, being schoolmaster, and I’ll do for him as I’d have done for my own.’ Jan, I’ve seen nigh on seven generations of lads pass through this school, but he’s never come! Society’s quit of that blame. There’s been no ’mute, inglorious Miltons’ here since I come to this place. There’s been many a nice-tempered lad I’ve loved, for I’m fond of children, but never one that yearned to see places he’d never seen, or to know things he’d never heard of. ”

“ It was not in moments of tender feeling, or at his prayers, or by Abel’s grave, that Jan recalled his foster-brother’s dying charge; but as he emptied slops, cleaned grates, or fastened Mrs. Lake’s black dress behind. Nor did gratitude flatter his zeal. “Boys do be so ackered with hooks and eyes,” the poor woman grumbled in her fretfulness, and then she sat down to bemoan herself that she had not a daughter left. She had got a trick of stopping short half way through her dressing, and giving herself up to tears, which led to Jan’s assisting at her toilette. ”