THE PARISH CHURCH.—REMBRANDT.—THE SNOW SCENE.—MASTER SWIFT’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
In most respects, Jan’s conduct and progress were very satisfactory. He quickly learned to read, and his copy-books were models.
The good clerk developed another talent in him. Jan learned to sing, and to sing very well; and he was put into the choir-seats in the old church, where he sang with enthusiasm hymns which he had learned by heart from the schoolmaster.
No wild weather that ever blustered over the downs could keep Jan now from the services. The old church came to have a fascination for him, from the low, square tower without, round which the rooks wheeled, to the springing pillars, the solemn gray tints of the stone, and the round arches that so gratified the eye within. And did he not sit opposite to the one stained window the soldiers of the Commonwealth had spared to the parish! It was the only colored picture Jan knew, and he knew every line, every tint of it, and the separate expression on each of the wan, quaint faces of the figures. When the sun shone, they seemed to smile at him, and their ruby dresses glowed like garments dyed in blood. When the colors fell upon Abel’s white head, Jan wished with all his heart that he could have gathered them as he gathered leaves, to make pictures with. Sometimes he day-dreamed that one of the figures came down out of the window, and brought the colors with him, and that he and Jan painted pictures in the other windows, filling them with gorgeous hues, and pale, devout faces. The fancy, empty as it was, pleased him, and he planned how every window should be done, and told Abel, to whom the ingenious fancy seemed as marvellous as if the work had been accomplished.
Abel was in the choir too, not so much because of his voice as of his great wish for it, and of the example of his good behavior. It was he who persuaded Mrs. Lake to come to church, and having once begun she came often. She tried to persuade her husband to go, and told him how sweetly the boys’ voices sounded, led by Master Swift’s fine bass, which he pitched from a key which he knocked upon his desk. But Master Lake had a proverb to excuse him. “The nearer the church, the further from God.” Not that he pretended to maintain the converse of the proposition.
Jan learned plenty of poetry; hymns, which Abel learned again from him, some of Herbert’s poems, and bits of Keats. But his favorites were martial poems by Mrs. Hemans, which he found in an old volume of collected verses, till the day he came upon “Marmion,” and gave himself up to Sir Walter Scott. He spouted poetry to Abel in imitation of Master Swift, and they enjoyed all, and understood about half.
And yet Jan’s progress was not altogether satisfactory to his teacher.
To learn long pieces of poetry was easy pastime to him, but he was dull or inattentive when the schoolmaster gave him some elementary lessons in mechanics. He wrote beautifully, but was no prodigy in arithmetic. He drew trees, windmills, and pigs on the desks, and admirable portraits of the schoolmaster, Rufus, and other local worthies, on the margins of the tables of weights and measures.
Much of his leisure was spent at Master Swift’s cottage, and in reading his books. The schoolmaster had marked an old biographical dictionary at pages containing lives of “self-made” men, who had risen as inventors or improvers in mechanics or as discoverers of important facts of natural science. Jan had not hitherto studied their careers with the avidity Master Swift would have liked to see, but one day he found him reading the fat volume with deep interest.
“And whose life are ye at now, laddie?” he asked, with a smile.
Jan lifted his face, which was glowing. “’Tis Rembrandt the painter I be reading about. Eh, Master Swift, he lived in a windmill, and he was a miller’s son!”
“Maybe he’d a miller’s thumb,” Jan added, stretching out his own, and smiling at the droll idea. “Do ’ee know what etchings be, then, Master Swift?”
“A kind of picture that’s scratched on a piece of copper with needles, and costs a lot of money to print,” said Master Swift, dryly; and he turned his broad back and went out.
It was one day in the second winter of Jan’s learning under Master Swift that matters came to a climax. The schoolmaster loved punctuality, but Jan was not always punctual. He was generally better in this respect in winter than in summer, as there was less to distract his attention on the road to school. But one winter’s day he loitered to make a sketch on his slate, and made matters worse by putting finishing touches to it after he was seated at the desk.
It was not a day to suggest sketching, but, turning round when he was about half way to the village, the view seemed to Jan to be exactly suitable for a slate sketch. The long slopes of the downs were white with snow; but it was a dull grayish white, for there was no sunshine, and the gray-white of the slate-pencil did it justice enough. In the middle distance rose the windmill, and a thatched cattle shed and some palings made an admirable foreground. On the top and edges of these lay the snow, outlining them in white, which again the slate-pencil could imitate effectively. There only wanted something darker than the slate itself to do those parts of the foreground and the mill which looked darker than the sky, and for this Jan trusted to pen and ink when he reached his desk. The drawing was very successful, and Jan was so absorbed in admiring it that he did not notice the schoolmaster’s approach, but feeling some one behind him, he fancied it was one of the boys, and held up the slate triumphantly, whispering, “Look ’ee here!”
It was Master Swift who looked, and snatching the slate he brought it down on the sharp corner of the desk, and broke it to pieces. Then he went back to his place, and spoke neither bad nor good to Jan for the rest of the school-time. Jan would much rather have been beaten. Once or twice he made essay to go up to Master Swift’s desk, but the old man’s stern countenance discouraged him, and he finally shrank into a corner and sat weeping bitterly. He sat there till every scholar but himself had gone, and still the schoolmaster did not speak. 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. But yet ye’ve more sense than your years in some respects, and I’m thinking I’ll try and make ye see things as I see ’em. I’m going to tell ye something about myself, if ye’d care to hear it.”
“I’d be main pleased, Master Swift,” said Jan, earnestly.
“I’d none of your advantages, lad,” said the old man. “When I was your age, I knew more mischief than you need ever know, and uncommon little else. I’m a self-educated man,—I used to hope I should live to hear folk say a self-made Great Man. 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. I’m not a native of these parts, ye must know. I come from the north, and in those mining and manufacturing districts I’ve seen many a man that’s got an education, and could keep himself sober, rise to own his house and his works, and have men under him, and bring up his children like the gentry. For mark ye, my lad. In such matters the experiences of the early part of an artisan’s life are all so much to the good for him, for they’re in the working of the trade, and the finest young gentleman has got it all to learn, if he wants to make money in that line. I got my education, and I was sober enough, but—Heaven help me—I must be a poet, and in that line a gentleman’s son knows almost from the nursery many a thing that I had to teach myself with hard labor as a man. It was just a madness. But I read all the poetry I could lay my hands on, and I wrote as well.”
“Did you write poetry, Master Swift?” said Jan.
“Ay, Jan, of a sort. At one time I worshipped Burns. And then I wrote verses in the dialect of my native place, which, ye must know, I can speak with any man when I’ve a mind,” said Master Swift, unconscious that he spoke it always. “And then it was Wordsworth, for the love of nature is just a passion with me, and it’s that t............