Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850

by Various

“My father,” said Andrew, and a feeling of interest overspread his bloodless face. “You have told me little of him. Why do you speak of him so harshly?”

“Go and work, and make money, I say. I tell you I must get money; right or wrong, I must get it; there’s no living longer, and enduring what I’ve endured. I dream of being rich; I waken every morning from visions where my hands are filled with money; that wakening turns my head, when I know and see there is not a halfpenny in the house, and when I see you, my son, sitting there, working like a fool with pen and brain, but without the power to earn a penny for me. Go out and work with your hands, I say again, and let me get money—do any thing, if it brings money. There is the old woman over the way, who has a working son; his mother may bless God that he is a shoemaker and not a poet; she is the happy woman, so cozily covered with warm flannel and stuff this weary weather, and her mutton, and her tea, and her money jingling in her pocket forever; that’s what a working son can do—a shoemaker can do that.”

At this some noise in the kitchen called Mrs. Carson away, to the great relief of Andrew. He rose, and closed the door gently after her. He seated himself again, and took up his pen, but his head fell listlessly on his hand; he felt as if his mother’s words were yet echoing in his ears. From his earliest infancy he had regarded her with fear and wonder, more than love.

Mrs. Carson was the daughter of a Scotch Presbyterian clergyman, who was suspected by his brethren in the ministry of entertaining peculiar views of religion on some points, and also of being at intervals rather unsound in his mind. He bestowed, however, a superior education on his only daughter, and instructed her carefully himself until his death, which occurred when she was not more than fourteen. As her father left her little if any support, she was under the necessity of going to reside with relations in Ireland, who moved in a rather humble rank. Of her subsequent history little was known to Andrew; she always maintained silence regarding his father, and seemed angry when he ventured to question her. Andrew was born in Ireland, and resided there until about his eighth year, when his mother returned to Scotland.

It was from his mother Andrew had gained all the little education that had been bestowed on him. That education was most capriciously imparted, and in its extent only went the length of teaching him to read partially; for whatever further advances he had made he was indebted to his own self-culture. At times his mother would make some efforts to impress on him the advantages of education: she would talk of poetry, and repeat specimens of the poets which her memory had retained from the period of her girlhood in her father’s house; but oftenest the language of bitterness, violence, and execration was on her lips. With the never-ceasing complaints of want—want of position, want of friends, but, most of all, want of money—sounding in his ears, Andrew grew up a poet. The unsettled and aimless mind of his mother, shadowed as it was with perpetual blackness, prevented her from calmly and wisely striving to place her son in some position by which he could have aided in supporting himself and her. As a child, Andrew was shy and solitary, caring little for the society of children of his own years, and taking refuge from the never-ceasing violence of his mother’s temper in the privacy of his own poor bedroom, with some old book which he had contrived to borrow, or with his pen, for he was a writer of verses from an early age.

Andrew was small-sized, sickly, emaciated, and feeble in frame; his mind had much of the hereditary weakness visible in his mother; his imagination and his passions were strong, and easily excited to such a pitch as to overwhelm for the moment his reason. With a little-exercised and somewhat defective judgment; with no knowledge of the world; with few books; with a want of that tact possessed by some intellects, of knowing and turning to account the tendencies of the age in literature, it was hardly to be expected that Andrew would soon succeed as a poet, though his imagination was powerful, and there was pathos and even occasional sublimity in his poetry. For five long years he had been toiling and striving without any success whatever in his vocation, in the way of realizing either fame or emolument.

Now, as he sat with his eyes fixed on the two returned manuscripts on his table, his torturing memory passed in review before him the many times his hopes had been equally lost. He was only twenty years of age, yet he had endured so many disappointments! He shook and trembled with a convulsive agony as he recalled poem after poem, odes, sonnets, epics, dramas—he had tried every thing; he had built so many glorious expectations on each as, night after night, shivering with cold and faint with sickness, he had persisted in gathering from his mind, and arranging laboriously, the brightest and most powerful of his poetical fancies, and hoped, and was often almost sure, they would spread broadly, and be felt deeply in the world. But there they had all returned to him—there they lay, unknown, unheard of—they were only so much waste paper.

As each manuscript had found its way back to him, he had received every one with an increasing bitterness and despair, which gradually wrought his brain almost to a state of mental malady. By constitution he was nervous and melancholy: the utmost of the world’s success would hardly have made him happy; he had no internal strength to cope with disappointment—no sanguine hopes pointing to a brighter future: he was overwhelmed with present failures. One moment he doubted sorely the power of his own genius: and the thought was like death to him, for without fame—without raising himself a name and a position above the common masses—he felt he could not live. Again, he would lay the whole blame on the undiscerning publishers to whom his poetry had been sent; he would anathematize them all with the fierce bitterness of a soul which was, alas! unsubdued in many respects by the softening and humbling influences of the religion of Christ. He had not the calm reflection which might have told him that, young, uneducated, utterly unlearned in the world and in books as he was, his writings must of necessity have a kind of inferiority to the works of those possessed of more advantages. He had no deep, sober principles or thoughts; his thoughts were feelings which bore him on their whirlwind course to the depths of agony, and to the brink of the grave, for his health was evidently seriously impaired by the indulgence of long-continued emotions of misery.

He took up one of the rejected manuscripts in his hand: it was a legendary poem, modeled something after the style of Byron, though the young author would have violently denied the resemblance. He thought of the pains he had bestowed on it—of the amount of thought and dreams—the sick, languid headaches, the pained breast, the weary mind it had so often occasioned him; then he saw the marks of tears on it—the gush of tears which had come as if to extinguish the fire of madness which had kindled in his brain. When he saw that manuscript returned to him, the marks of the tears were there staining the outside page. He looked fixedly on that manuscript, and his thin face became darker, and more expressive of all that is hopeless in human sorrow; the bright light of success shone as if so far away from him now—away at an endless distance, which neither his strength of body or mind could ever carry him over.

At that moment the sharp, rapid knock of the postman sounded in his ears. His heart leaped up, and then suddenly sank with suffocating fear, for the dark mood of despair was on him—could it be another returned manuscript? He had only one now in the hands of a publisher; the one on which he had expended all his powers—the one to which he had trusted most: it was a tragedy. He had dreamed the preceding night that it had been accepted; he had dreamed it had brought him showers of gold; he had been for a moment happy beyond the bounds of human happiness, though he had awoke with a sense of horror on his mind, he knew not why. The publisher to whom he had sent his tragedy was to present it to the manager of one of the London theatres. Had it been taken, performed, successful?—a dream of glory, as if heaven had opened on him, bewildered his senses.