To be in the halting state of Mr Henry Gowan; to have left one of two
powers in disgust; to want the necessary qualifications for finding
promotion with another, and to be loitering moodily about on neutral
ground, cursing both; is to be in a situation unwholesome for the mind,
which time is not likely to improve.
The worst class of sum worked in
the every-day world is cyphered by the diseased arithmeticians who are
always in the rule of Subtraction as to the merits and successes of
others, and never in Addition as to their own.
The habit, too, of seeking some sort of recompense in the discontented
boast of being disappointed, is a habit fraught with degeneracy. A
certain idle carelessness and recklessness of consistency soon comes of
it.
To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is
one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose
with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.
In his expressed opinions of all performances in the Art of painting
that were completely destitute of merit, Gowan was the most liberal
fellow on earth. He would declare such a man to have more power in his
little finger (provided he had none), than such another had (provided he
had much) in his whole mind and body. If the objection were taken that
the thing commended was trash, he would reply, on behalf of his art, 'My
good fellow, what do we all turn out but trash? I turn out nothing else,
and I make you a present of the confession.'
To make a vaunt of being poor was another of the incidents of his
splenetic state, though this may have had the design in it of showing
that he ought to be rich; just as he would publicly laud and decry the
Barnacles, lest it should be forgotten that he belonged to the family.
Howbeit, these two subjects were very often on his lips; and he managed
them so well that he might have praised himself by the month together,
and not have made himself out half so important a man as he did by his
light disparagement of his claims on anybody's consideration.
Out of this same airy talk of his, it always soon came to be understood,
wherever he and his wife went, that he had married against the wishes
of his exalted relations, and had had much ado to prevail on them to
countenance her. He never made the representation, on the contrary
seemed to laugh the idea to scorn; but it did happen that, with all his
pains to depreciate himself, he was always in the superior position.
From the days of their honeymoon, Minnie Gowan felt sensible of being
usually regarded as the wife of a man who had made a descent in marrying
her, but whose chivalrous love for her had cancelled that inequality.
To Venice they had been accompanied by Monsieur Blandois of Paris, and
at Venice Monsieur Blandois of Paris was very much in the society of
Gowan.