It has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature.As a rule this must necessarily be so.
That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation.To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance.Yet there are many exceptions to this rule.Rubens served as ambassador,and Goethe as state councillor,and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell.
Sophocles held civic office in his own city;the humourists,essayists,and novelists of modern America seem to desire nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their country;and Charles Lamb's friend,Thomas Griffiths Wainewright,the subject of this brief memoir,though of an extremely artistic temperament,followed many masters other than art,being not merely a poet and a painter,an art-critic,an antiquarian,and a writer of prose,an amateur of beautiful things,and a dilettante of things delightful,but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities,and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.
This remarkable man,so powerful with 'pen,pencil and poison,'as a great poet of our own day has finely said of him,was born at Chiswick,in 1794.His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of Gray's Inn and Hatton Garden.His mother was the daughter of the celebrated Dr.Griffiths,the editor and founder of the MONTHLY REVIEW,the partner in another literary speculation of Thomas Davis,that famous bookseller of whom Johnson said that he was not a bookseller,but 'a gentleman who dealt in books,'the friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood,and one of the most well-known men of his day.Mrs.Wainewright died,in giving him birth,at the early age of twenty-one,and an obituary notice in the GENTLEMAN'SMAGAZINE tells us of her 'amiable disposition and numerous accomplishments,'and adds somewhat quaintly that 'she is supposed to have understood the writings of Mr.Locke as well as perhaps any person of either sex now living.'His father did not long survive his young wife,and the little child seems to have been brought up by his grandfather,and,on the death of the latter in 1803,by his uncle George Edward Griffiths,whom he subsequently poisoned.His boyhood was passed at Linden House,Turnham Green,one of those many fine Georgian mansions that have unfortunately disappeared before the inroads of the suburban builder,and to its lovely gardens and well-timbered park he owed that simple and impassioned love of nature which never left him all through his life,and which made him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual influences of Wordsworth's poetry.He went to school at Charles Burney's academy at Hammersmith.Mr.Burney was the son of the historian of music,and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to turn out his most remarkable pupil.He seems to have been a man of a good deal of culture,and in after years Mr.Wainewright often spoke of him with much affection as a philosopher,an archaeologist,and an admirable teacher who,while he valued the intellectual side of education,did not forget the importance of early moral training.It was under Mr.Burney that he first developed his talent as an artist,and Mr.Hazlitt tells us that a drawing-book which he used at school is still extant,and displays great talent and natural feeling.Indeed,painting was the first art that fascinated him.It was not till much later that he sought to find expression by pen or poison.
Before this,however,he seems to have been carried away by boyish dreams of the romance and chivalry of a soldier's life,and to have become a young guardsman.But the reckless dissipated life of his companions failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made for other things.In a short time he wearied of the service.'Art,'he tells us,in words that still move many by their ardent sincerity and strange fervour,'Art touched her renegade;by her pure and high influence the noisome mists were purged;my feelings,parched,hot,and tarnished,were renovated with cool,fresh bloom,simple,beautiful to the simple-hearted.'
But Art was not the only cause of the change.'The writings of Wordsworth,'he goes on to say,'did much towards calming the confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations.I wept over them tears of happiness and gratitude.'He accordingly left the army,with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-tattle,and returned to Linden House,full of this new-born enthusiasm for culture.A severe illness,in which,to use his own words,he was 'broken like a vessel of clay,'prostrated him for a time.His delicately strung organisation,however indifferent it might have been to inflicting pain on others,was itself most keenly sensitive to pain.He shrank from suffering as a thing that mars and maims human life,and seems to have wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from which so many great,perhaps greater,spirits have never emerged.But he was young -only twenty-five years of age -and he soon passed out of the 'dead black waters,'as he called them,into the larger air of humanistic culture.As he was recovering from the illness that had led him almost to the gates of death,he conceived the idea of taking up literature as an art.'I said with John Woodvil,'he cries,'it were a life of gods to dwell in such an element,'to see and hear and write brave things:-'These high and gusty relishes of life Have no allayings of mortality.'
It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance of a man who had a true passion for letters.'To see and hear and write brave things,'this was his aim.
