No need now to sit solitary in the cramped little shop behind the counter, dreaming lonely day-dreams and fashioning his models all by himself. With new strength a new life was opening up to him—or rather the old life grew day by day transformed and beautified.
It was Mrs. Matthew, the wife of his friend the clergyman, who first drew the boy from his life of loneliness. She was touched and interested in him, and she asked him to her house. He went and he went again. He met there men who fired his smouldering longing one day to be a sculptor—to do some great thing in the world of art. Mrs. Matthew had many friends among such. At other times he spent evenings not less delightful when she herself read aloud from Virgil and Homer soul-stirring tales of ancient heroes—and the boy sat by drinking in the poetry while he tried with eager, untaught fingers to draw some of the passages that took his fancy. Again she would lay aside her book and talk to him of the wonders of sculpture, while there sprang up in his heart a great longing amounting almost to a passion.
No wonder these were golden hours, full of pleasure to young John, and looked back upon many a time in after years as among the happiest times of his life.
A gentleman, seeing some of these boyish attempts, gave the boy an order for a set of drawings, and by and by more orders followed.
When he was eleven years old he left the privacy and quiet of the little side eddy of the stream of life in which he had been living and struck out, as it were, into the mid-stream. That year he won a prize from the Society of Arts for models of figures in clay. Two years later he was again successful. What we know as the Royal Academy then first came into being, and when it was in its second year, and when Flaxman was only fifteen years old, he exhibited models there. Step by step, small steps at first, he was entering on the beginning of that which for long had been the desire of his heart. In the same year he entered as an Academy student, and won the silver medal. People already were beginning to acknowledge his outstanding ability. Rewards, prizes came upon him one by one. The boy’s outlook was beginning to be very bright, and his heart was beginning to beat high with hope, when just as he had reached the age of sixteen he got an unexpected check.
He made up his mind to try for the gold medal—the highest reward of merit—and among all the students he was generally allowed to have the best chance. Hardly a fellow-student but felt sure that he would get it. “Flaxman! Flaxman!” they cried almost unanimously, for they were strongly impressed with the skill and ability of the grave, reserved boy. Speaking of this time in later years Flaxman said—
“I had made up my mind that I was to win.... It was given by Reynolds to Engleheart. I burst into tears. This sharp lesson humbled my conceit, and I determined to redouble my exertions....”
May he perhaps have over-estimated his own skill? Years after he said of himself—
“I was the most conceited artist of the day.” And yet where another might have been downcast he refused to be discouraged. He was upheld by a strong and silent sense of power within him. He went home to his father, and he said, “Give me time, and I will yet produce works which the Academy will be proud to acknowledge.”
Engleheart, the winner of the medal, was never heard of in later life, while the loser made for himself a name that afterwards “waxed wide.”