THE DEATH-PAINTER;
OR,
THE SKELETON'S BRIDE.
"This will hardly keep body and soul together," said Conrad Bergmann, as he eyed with a dissatisfied countenance some score of dingy kreutzers thrust into his palm by a "patron of early genius,"—one of those individuals who take great merit to themselves by just keeping their victims in that enviable position between life and death;—between absolute starvation and hopeless, abject poverty, which effectually represses all efforts to excel, controls and quenches all, but longings after immortality,—who just fan the flame, to let it smoke and quiver in the socket, but sedulously prevent it rising to any degree of steadiness and brilliance.
Conrad that morning had taken home a picture, his sole occupation for two months, and this patron, a dealer in the "fine arts," dwelling in the good, quiet city of Mannheim, had given him a sum equivalent to thirty-six shillings sterling for his labour. Peradventure, it was not in the highest style of art; but what Schwartzen Bären or Weisse Rösse—Black Bears, White Horses, Spread Eagles, and the like, the meanest, worst painted signs in the city, would not have commanded a higher price?
In fact, Conrad had just genius enough to make himself miserable; to wit, by aspiring after those honours it was impossible to attain, keeping him thereby in a constant fret and disappointment, instead of being content with his station, or striving for objects within his reach. Could he have drudged on as some dauber of sign-posts, or taken to useful employment, he might, doubtless, have earned a comfortable sustenance. He had, however, like many another child of genius, a soul above such vulgarities; yearning after the ideal and the vain; having too much genius for himself and too little for the world: suspended in a sort of Mahomet's coffin, between earth and heaven, contemned, rejected, by "gods, men, and columns."
Conrad Bergmann was about two and twenty, of good figure and well-proportioned features. Complexion fair, bright bluish-grey eyes, whiskers well matched with a pale, poetical, it might be sickly, hue of countenance, and an expression more inclining to melancholy than persons of such mean condition have a right to assume. His father had brought him up to a trade, an honest, thriving business, to wit, that of Knopfmacher (button-maker). But Conrad, the youngest, and his mother's favourite, happened to be indulged with more idle time than the rest, which, for the most part, was laudably expended in scrawling sundry hideous representations—all manner of things, on walls and wainscoats. Persevering in this occupation, he was forthwith pronounced a genius. About the age of fifteen, Conrad saw a huge "St. Christopher," by a native artist, and straightway his destiny was fixed. He struggled on for some years with little success, save being pronounced by the gossips "marvellously clever." His performances wanted that careful and elaborate course of study indispensable even to the most exalted genius. They were not only glaring, tawdry, and ill-drawn, but worse conceived; flashy, crude accumulations of colour, only rendering their defects more apparent. He was, in a great measure, self-taught. His impetuous, ardent imagination could not endure the labour requisite to form an artist. He would fain have read ere he had learned to spell; and the result might easily have been foretold.
His father died; and the family were but scantily provided for. Conrad was now forced to make out a livelihood by what was previously an amusement, not having "a trade in his fingers;" and he toiled on, selling his productions for the veriest trifle. He had now no leisure for improvement in the first elements of his art.
"Better starve or beg, better be errand-boy or lackey, than waste my talents on such an ungrateful world. I'll turn conjurer—fire-eater—mountebank;—set the fools agape at fairs and pastimes. Anything rather than killing—starving by inches. Why, the criminals at hard labour in the fortress have less work and better fare. I wish!—I wish——"