“Upon my word, Harrington,” said Wentworth, “I shouldn’t be much astonished if you were to assert that the author of Shakspeare’s plays, as you call him, would be, if he was alive, a Garrisonian Abolitionist.”
“Well,” replied Harrington, laughing in his beard, “you know Montaigne says a man’s books are his children, and I’m sure this author’s children don’t vote with the Webster Whigs or go union-saving or kidnapping with either Whigs or Democrats. And as for Shakspeare being a Garrisonian, it’s quite clear to my perverted sense, that the man who makes his patriot, Brutus, cry aloud, as the first demand of political justice, ‘Liberty, Freedom, and Enfranchisement,’ would not, at any rate, if he were with us, be found in Mr. Ben Hallett’s party.”
Wentworth, touched at the idea of Shakspeare and Ben Hallett being by any chance thrown together, laughed immoderately, while Harrington, highly amused at his mirth, sat and smiled at him.
“Harrington,” said Wentworth, recovering from his merriment, “you almost tempt me to extend my studio among the sons of men.”
“That’s where the great artists extended theirs,” replied Harrington. “Raphael, Giotto, Cellini, Angelo, all those superb artists, were politicians, country-lovers, friends and comrades of their kind. Their human sympathies gave their genius its pulse of life. You young artists ought to blush when you think of Michael Angelo.”
“Well, Michael was a trump,” returned Wentworth, gaily.
“A trump?” repeated Harrington. “I wish he was a trump that could sound some of you fellows into life. Yes, there was a man behind the artist in Michael, and his works are cryptic with his humanity. By the way, Richard, how comes on the ‘Death of Attucks?’”
The “Death of Attucks” was a picture which Wentworth, instigated by Harrington, had begun to paint in illustration of the picturesque scene on that wild March night of the early Revolution, when a black man flung himself on the bayonets for a country which enslaves his race, and has scribes to defile his memory.
“Well,” replied Wentworth, with a look of momentary sadness, “I haven’t painted much lately—so the picture stands. O me,” he sighed, “I see intellectually the truth of all you say about the relation of liberty to art, but somehow I don’t get kindled.”