John Jasper's Secret by Henry Morford (Illustrated) (eBook)

Henry Morford (Autor)

Henry Morford (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
249 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-1-78656-703-1 (ISBN)

Infos

This eBook features the unabridged text of 'John Jasper's Secret by Henry Morford' from the bestselling edition of 'The Complete Works of Charles Dickens'.

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Textauszug

CHAPTER II.

DURDLES, SCULPTOR; AND HONEYTHUNDER, AVENGER.

DURDLES at work. Impossibilities become possibilities, and falsehoods absolute facts — just as while all the Old philosophers were demonstrating, with a laborious persistency and an equally laborious folly, that no vessel propelled by the steam of a kettle could ever cross the great ocean, and that no needle could ever be induced to carry a thread regularly through any fabric, by blind mechanical power — the New philosophers were quietly perfecting the ocean-steamer and inventing the sewing-machine.

An anomaly, certainly, and yet no less a truth. Durdles, known never to be at work, actually at work — and at work with a will, whatever there might have been, or failed to be, of that judgment which should control the will, and without which it is somewhat more dangerous than indecision.

And Durdles sober. At least so nearly freed from the habitual sottishness of his ordinary life, that if it hung around him like a murky atmosphere it did not envelop him in its close embrace like an impenetrable fog. Grim, stolid, heavy-looking and stone-dusty as ever, there was yet something about the man, just then, elevating him above the wholly-debased and sordid, if it could not lift him into the realm where dwells romantic interest. Perhaps it lifted him even there, in spite of dirt, squalor, ignorance, ill-temper, drunkenness. We are not very expert at measuring personal positions or calculating moral distances — most of us; and Stony Durdles may at some moment be found quite as severe a strain upon the mathematical faculties, as the new planet discovered last month, or the comet that is to flaunt its luminous tail in our view next year.

It has already been said of the Stony One, that fame called him a wonderful workman, while actual observation only saw him doing nothing, with much accompaniment of two-foot rule, dinner-bundle, accepted outlawry, and self - satisfied comments upon himself in the third person. Who knows, meanwhile, but Fame — who must possess wonderful (if never mentioned) ears, to gather up all the intelligence spread abroad in the world through the medium of her trumpeting mouth — may have been wiser than the speakers who saw and heard at a lower level, may even have caught the occasional clink of a hammer and chisel the use of which brought the dusty old stone-mason within the scope of her duties?

Then, too, Fame may have had an assistant or two, the post of observation being the ordinary level. Who knows but Mr. Tope, the verger, so likely to be acquainted with all the minor details of the lives of those with whom he was much thrown in contact — and Mr. Crisparkle, so careful of the grammatical accuracy of Durdles’ language when addressing his Reverence the Dean — may have been the means through whom there crept to the outer world of Cloisterham certain indefinite rumors of an ability belied by every appearance and surrounding?

Durdles’ den or cave in the city wall was deeper than most people knew — even as possibly so was the solitary tenant, if a modern and not-too-classical secondary use of the word may be permitted. Few persons stumbled over the broken stone and chips of the yard, to enter the precincts at all; still fewer knew that the miserable apartment, which only they saw, had any other outlet than the broken door; and yet fewer dreamed that within that inner apartment was carefully hidden one of the most notable oddities of the century — the “studio” of Durdles the Sculptor!

“Stony Durdles,” indeed, and in how different a sense from that in which the ordinary little world of Cloisterham understood it! Durdles the Sculptor. If laboring for immortality, doing so with scarcely more than a clientele of two or three; if for some other end, it may not be easy to number the invisible beings coming into the calculation.

That Mr. Tope knew of the “studio,” and yet carefully concealed its existence, who could better tell than himself, remembering the thousand gruff importunities first and last addressed him by the odd human compound, to assist in procuring privately some bit of stone that promised to serve the one great purpose? And that Mr. Crisparkle, the bright, fresh, clear-headed but excessively-human Minor Canon, possessed equal intelligence — what better proof was necessary than his presence at the very moment when the clink of mallet and chisel was being heard in the unsuspected recess?

Durdles the Sculptor — once more. Think twice, careful student of the calculus of probabilities, before adding to the mistakes of human arrogance by declaring such a thing impossible, except in some sense involving the broadly ridiculous. For if we live a dual life in sleeping and in waking hours, so different each from each that scarcely one can recognize the other of those twin components when meeting on the border of the shadow-land — so surely, too, our powers and our capacities are dual, making the rule of life more strong by forming the exception, and balancing the blemish showing to the eye upon a surface otherwise so brilliant, by some small spark at least to light what otherwise would seem too base and common for the Forming Hand.

There is an old German story, having to do with the life of Albert Dürer, which has been told once and again by those who love the great art of which he was declared the “evangelist,” but which may be briefly told once more, with the title indicated, if not expressed— “The Unexpected.”

Samuel Duhobert was color-grinder to the great painter — a poor little humpbacked fellow, who seemed especially made for the drudgery of the studio, and for the Xantippe words, and often blows of Madame Durer. To escape the last, he built him a little hovel of retreat under the bank of the Pegnitz; and there he ground the colors which, under the master’s hand, were to form hues of immortality. But the poor fellow was not without leisure, and not beneath ennui. In a mere spirit of imitation of what he saw every day, he used a few scraps of the colors, and daubed. Pictures he had none to copy, even had he possessed the capacity; so he did the only thing possible — he tried in his own feeble way to reproduce the scene spread before him at the door of his hovel — a reach of the silver-winding river, a few trees, an old castle crowning a distant height, and the blue Franconian mountains bounding the prospect. This was what he — daubed; what else than daubing could be the work of the poor color-grinder?

But there came a day when he was expelled from his master’s service, during that master’s absence, by his proud and violent mistress. He was penniless and without resources.

Stay — there was his picture; that might buy him enough of bread for at least a day or two, if he could but sell it. As fortune ordered, there was to be a sale of pictures the very next day, at a seat about to be dismantled in the neighborhood. The auctioneer knew him, and might favor him, in his distress, by offering the picture as the humblest portion of the refuse of the collection. The auctioneer took pity on him, as he had hoped, after a certain amount of objection. The unpretending effort was brought to view, fortunately before the representatives of rank and wealth, as well as cultivated tastes; and the poor hunchback, shivering in his corner, saw it sold — admittedly the equal of the best effort of Claude Lorraine — to an agent of the Emperor, at the price of the original for the picture; eventually to confer on the color-grinder the Barony of Duhobart, and to become one of the leading attractions of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna.

But what of this? Was it not simply an instance of the bringing to light of genius before unknown? Not so, the bow was never drawn again; there were no more arrows in the quiver. If Duhobart ever painted again, to meet the demands of his own awakened self-love, and the expectations of the world of art, he only daubed. He had done his life-work at a single stroke. His story has place here, because there was a similar life-work flashing out a single spark from amid the dust, squalor and stupidity of Durdles.

“How are you getting on, Durdles? The morning was so bright and cheery, that I said to myself, Durdles will be at work, to take advantage of the excellent light; and I will drop around and flog my own indolence and self-indulgence by observing his industry.”

It was the voice of Mr. Crisparkle, cheery as he had described the morning; and the whole man indefinably informed and irradiated by the atmosphere of sunrise, bird-songs, and the flash of falling water.

He stood just within the low inner door, to pass under the stony lintel of which he had been obliged to bend himself at least two feet from the perpendicular, without reckoning the height of his hat: and he saw the miserable walls of broken stones, rather thrown together than built, with a bed of little else than rags in one corner; and in the other — beneath a broad ray of morning light, which came in from what would have been called a loophole in the days of mediaeval attack and defence, a short bench of heavy wooden planks, bearing a block of stone, drab-colored and slightly friable, like that of Caen, with which the French have managed so to brighten up the architectural tone of their cities.

This block, some three feet in height, and a foot square, stood on end, the bottom portion as yet all unworked, but the upper beginning to assume some rough resemblance to the head and face of a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 17.7.2017
• Reihe/Serie: Delphi Parts Edition (Charles Dickens)
• Reihe/Serie: Delphi Parts Edition (Charles Dickens)
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Anthologien
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: bleak • Copperfield • Expectations • Nickleby • Novels • pickwick • Twist
• ISBN-10: 1-78656-703-2 / 1786567032
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78656-703-1 / 9781786567031