Little Kingdoms (24 page)

The title of the painting may seem to derive from Schumann’s
Nachtstücke
, op. 23, but Schumann’s “night pieces,” or nocturnes, were not published until 1840 and are never mentioned in Elizabeth’s Journal. It is more likely that the choice of title was influenced by Schumann’s
Fantasiestücke
, op. 12, the collection of
eight piano pieces (including the stormy
In der Nacht)
that Elizabeth liked to have Sophia play for her when the four friends were gathered late at night in the music room of the cottage on the far shore of Black Lake. It nevertheless remains possible that the painting does not derive its title from Schumann at all, but rather from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s collection of stories
Nachtstücke
(1816–17). The effect of the title, whatever its origin, is to darken the painting with Germanic consonant clusters and so to oppose it in yet another way to
Clair de lune.

It is not clear when Moorash began the
Nachtstück
, which appears to have been preceded by two or possibly three paintings that remained unfinished and presumably were destroyed. The first mention of a
Nachtstück
occurs in Elizabeth’s Journal on 30 March 1840, but on 18 June she records that “Edmund has begun his Night Piece again,” which opens the possibility that the
Nachtstück
of 30 March was one of the destroyed paintings, about which nothing whatever is known. What is certain is that Moorash took unusual pains with this canvas, which was not completed until the end of September.

It was during the long composition of this painting that an event occurred which must take its place among the more bizarre episodes in the annals of American romanticism. In late June, at Strawson, Edward Vail’s beloved wife, Charlotte, fell ill with a mysterious wasting disease. She could not rise from her bed; she ran a continual low temperature; she could scarcely eat. A local doctor diagnosed pleurisy and recommended mountain air, but a specialist in respiratory diseases summoned from Philadelphia declared her lungs to be sound and urged that the patient be moved to a warm, dry climate. A third physician, from Boston, noted for his work in nervous diseases, prescribed bed rest and absolute quiet and warned that under no circumstances should the patient be moved. In despair, Vail sat by the bedside of his bride from dawn to midnight, holding her limp hand and gazing at her with tender, moist eyes. As the days passed he
watched her cheeks grow hollow, her dark eyes grow large, her face fill with weariness and suffering. One night when the end seemed near, Charlotte was seized with a sudden, desperate animation, and struggling up in bed she confessed in a torrent of tears that she had fallen in love with Edmund Moorash. Edward Vail was a mediocre artist, but he prided himself on being a good-hearted man, and he was capable of imagining a noble, perhaps too noble, gesture. Shattered by the news, he at once sat down and wrote a remarkable letter, which has not survived but is summarized in the diary of Elizabeth Moorash’s friend Ann Hudley. In it Vail revealed his wife’s terrible secret and earnestly entreated Moorash to come to Strawson and save her by any means in his power. Did he understand that he was asking Moorash to become his wife’s lover? After reading the letter Moorash stayed shut up in his studio for two days; on the night of the second day he walked the six and a half miles to Rose Cottage and did not return until morning. Precisely what happened during that visit will never be known, but Moorash began visiting Strawson three times a week, and Charlotte’s health swiftly improved. All of Charlotte’s letters to Moorash were later destroyed, but a fragment was discovered in a trunk in Boston in 1957. It reads as follows:

Vail’s journal was also destroyed, but the incidents at Strawson did not pass unnoticed and found their way into several diaries, in particular that of Vail’s brother Thatcher, from which we may
reconstruct the apparent course of events. It appears that Vail absented himself every other day from Rose Cottage, leaving before dawn and returning late at night. For at least one month and probably two, until the end of August, Moorash visited Charlotte Vail regularly. They never left the house. Where could they go? Thatcher Vail’s diary speaks of “disgusting licentiousness” and the “shrill laughter of devils behind muslin curtains”; in assessing such statements it must be remembered that he speaks not only as the outraged older brother but also as a man who, two years earlier, unsuccessfully courted the fifteen-year-old Charlotte Singleton and was rejected in favor of his own brother. The love of Moorash and Charlotte Vail was certainly physical, and desperately unhappy. Charlotte, who had always admired and even loved her husband, was anguished by guilt; Moorash, always scrupulous to a fault, was conscious of injuring his friend in the very act of fulfilling his request; and despite his fierce attachment to Charlotte, he kept waiting for her to ask him to go, please go, and was always conscious of holding himself back. Vail himself could no longer bear the sight of his former friend; he was simply waiting for the hellish summer to end. In early September he wrote a second letter to Moorash, in which he offered to release his wife to him, on the condition that he marry her. This letter appears to have brought about a crisis: Charlotte declared hysterically that she could never abandon her husband, and she and Moorash vowed to “die” to each other forever. The vow was broken in a week, when Charlotte in a state bordering on madness arrived unannounced at Stone Hill Cottage shortly before midnight. Moorash would not see her; she spent the night in Elizabeth’s arms, weeping uncontrollably. In the morning Elizabeth returned with her to Rose Cottage, where Vail declared that he was leaving for Boston the next day, and that Charlotte was welcome to accompany him as his lawful wife or to leave him forever. Elizabeth spent the night at Rose Cottage and saw
Charlotte into the coach the next morning. Vail settled in Boston and began his swift rise to fame as a portraitist, noted for the clarity of his flesh tones; he never returned to Strawson. A portrait of him in 1846 by Chester Calcott shows a man with melancholy eyes and a stern mouth. Charlotte remained his devoted wife; only, she was often tired, and liked to keep to herself, out of the social whirl. Moorash shut himself up in his studio and finished the
Nachtstück
before the end of September.

[15]

THE HOUSE OF USHER
1840
Oil on canvas, 39 1/8 × 37 3/8 in.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” was collected in
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(1840). Although Moorash might well have read a copy of the book, there is no reference to it in Elizabeth’s Journal, which does, however, mention “The Fall of the House of Usher” in passing (8 December 1840) and never refers to any other tale by Poe. It is therefore possible that Moorash read the story in
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine
(September 1839), a copy of which might have been brought to him or Elizabeth by William Pinney or any one of several other visitors during 1839 and 1840. The painting was begun some time in October and completed before Christmas.

The picture has been taken to represent the collapse of the House of Usher in the famous last paragraph (see Havemeyer, p. 79), but such a reading presents two difficulties: the word “fall” is conspicuously absent from the title of the painting, and the painting does not actually show the dreamlike house falling into the tarn. The second objection is perhaps the less decisive, for Moorash might well have intended to represent the fall in a
non-literal fashion, but the title cannot so easily be explained away. The striking presence of red tints, like flakes of fire, that flash up among the browns and blacks are supposed by Havemeyer to represent the murky light of the blood-red moon, but the red tints may with equal justice be seen to allude to other reds in the tale, such as the “feeble gleams of encrimsoned light” that make their way through the trellised panes of Usher’s studio, or the drops of blood on Madeline’s white robes. It is more to the point that the dissolving, vanishing, visionary house, painted in nervous small strokes separated by intervals of brown or black, is mirrored in the dark tarn. The whole effect is less that of a fall than of the dissipation of a fever-vision: a dream-house over its dream-reflection vanishing into black depths. It is as if Moorash had imagined the House of Usher to be insubstantial by nature, to be perpetually on the verge of dissolving or disappearing.

The motif of doubling, so reminiscent of
Clair de lune
, and the allusion to a brother and sister, suggest that the painting, and the tale itself, must have had a strong personal meaning for Moorash. If Moorash saw himself as Roderick Usher, and Elizabeth as Usher’s sister, then the painting may express his sense of guilt over burying Elizabeth alive at Stone Hill Cottage, and over their mutual, fatal interdependence; but in the last analysis, the picture remains enigmatic.

[16]

ELIZABETH AND SOPHIA
1841
Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 × 34 5/8 in.

After Pinney’s marriage proposal to Elizabeth on the last day of August 1839 he returned with Sophia to Boston, but we read in
Elizabeth’s Journal of a Thanksgiving visit at Stone Hill Cottage, and during the following spring, when Pinney returned to Black Lake, the four friends were once again often in one another’s company, though not quite as often as during the first summer. Moorash’s summer affair with Charlotte Vail was apparently kept secret from William and Sophia, who nevertheless must have heard rumors and noted his frequent and uncharacteristic absences. The precise state of knowledge among the four remains uncertain, but it appears to have been as follows: Edmund and Elizabeth never spoke of Charlotte Vail to William or Sophia, who half-knew about it and chose not to investigate. William’s relation to Elizabeth had by now taken its new shape: he resigned himself gracefully to the role of rejected suitor and resumed, with a touch of wistfulness, his enjoyment of her company. His friendship for Edmund underwent no discernible change, though there is evidence in Sophia’s letters to her friends Fanny Cornwall and Eunice Hamilton that he must at times have felt he had lost Elizabeth to her own brother. The one striking change was in Sophia: she grew markedly cool to Edmund, criticized him to her brother, and grew still more devoted to Elizabeth.

A preliminary sketch of
Elizabeth and Sophia
was made during a walking tour with the two women on a day in April 1841 when William was unable to be with them, having had to return to Boston on business and having left Sophia with Elizabeth and Edmund at Stone Hill. The freely drawn pencil sketch shows both women distinctly—Sophia is wearing her straw hat, Elizabeth is bareheaded—but the painting shows only their shadows stretching across a field in the too-yellow light of late afternoon. The long shadows have a slightly sinister air as they ripple distortedly across the darkening grass. The heads are bent close, as though sharing a confidence; below the shoulders the two shadows flow into each other.

[17]

SOPHIA DAYDREAMING
1841
Oil on canvas, 27 1/2 × 34 in.

We know from Elizabeth’s Journal that Sophia disliked being painted and agreed to pose for this picture only at Elizabeth’s “urgent entreaty” (3 July 1841). It is not clear whether she disliked posing in general, or posing for Moorash in particular; she appears to have felt uneasy at being stared at and “studied to death” (Journal, 6 July). It is difficult to avoid the inference that she was disturbed by the intimacy of a prolonged sitting, in which she had to endure passively Moorash’s sustained gaze. Sophia had always had to fight a secret disapproval of her brother’s eccentric friend; after the failed marriage proposal she held Moorash responsible for Elizabeth’s refusal. Nor did she share her brother’s enthusiasm for Moorash’s painting: Sophia viewed the pictures with bewilderment and growing distaste, always preferring the meticulously detailed and elegantly precise portraits of Chester Calcott and Edward Ingham Vail.

The sittings began on 3 July and continued for more than a week before they were terminated by Sophia. She appears to have relented, for on 23 July Elizabeth notes another sitting; the last recorded session took place on 8 August. Moorash worked on the painting all summer but did not complete it until October, long after Sophia and William had returned to Boston. Sophia’s opinion of the painting is not known, but from what we know of her taste she cannot have cared for it. The painting is reminiscent of Moorash’s earlier masterpiece,
Elizabeth in Dream
, although here he makes use of the device of the landscape seen from a window. Part of a window frame divides the painting into two realms, an inner realm indicated by a portion of wall on which part of a picture (unidentified) is visible, and an outer realm of darkening garden and dusky sky. But the contrasts are
deliberately undermined and thrown into question, for it is impossible to make a neat distinction between the world of art and the world of nature, or the world of imagination and the world of experience: the room flows into landscape, which in turn echoes the room, and Sophia herself flows wraithlike through the window into the garden, thereby binding the inner and outer worlds. Both worlds of the painting appear to be Sophia’s daydream, but she herself is no less dreamlike. It is as if Moorash had attempted to paint the experience of daydream itself, in which the boundaries between inner and outer grow uncertain. Elizabeth was “deeply affected” by the painting, which she considered “masterful” (16 October). Moorash promptly gave it to her, and she hung it in her bedroom between two windows looking out over the garden.

[18]

PHAEDRIA’S ISLE
1842
Oil on canvas, 32 1/16 × 42 in.

In the long winter evenings of 1841–42 Elizabeth read aloud to Edmund, night after night, Sir Walter Scott’s
Guy Mannering, Quentin Durward
, and
The Black Dwarf
, Hawthorne’s
Twice-Told Tales
(the edition of 1837), Byron’s
Manfred
, and Spenser’s
Faerie Queene.
She appears to have read the latter at the rate of one canto a night, over a period of seventy-four consecutive nights (six complete Books of twelve cantos each, and the two Mutabilitie cantos). During the readings Edmund liked to lie on the sofa in the kitchen with his ankles crossed and his head on a pillow, warming his hands on the bowl of his pipe and staring off into bluish smoke-clouds.