Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century

by George Paston

'No man should use certain evil for probable good, however great the object,' so they run. 'Evil is the prerogative of the Deity. Wellington never used evil if the good was not certain. Napoleon had no such scruples, and I fear the glitter of his genius rather dazzled me. But had I been encouraged, nothing but good would have come from me, because when encouraged I paid everybody. God forgive me the evil for the sake of the good. Amen.'

This tragic conclusion to a still more tragic career created a profound sensation in society, and immense crowds followed the historical painter to his grave. Among all his friends, perhaps few were more affected by his death than one who had never looked upon his face--his 'dear Æschylus Barrett, 'as he called her. Certain it is that, with the intuition of genius, Elizabeth Barrett understood, appreciated, and made allowances for the unhappy man more completely than was possible to any other of his contemporaries. Clear-sighted to his faults and weaknesses, her chivalrous spirit took up arms in defence of his conduct, even against the strictures of her poet-lover. 'The dreadful death of poor Mr. Haydon the artist,' she wrote to her friend Mrs. Martin, a few days after the event, 'has quite upset me. I thank God that I never saw him--poor gifted Haydon.... No artist is left behind with equal largeness of poetical conception. If the hand had always obeyed the soul, he would have been a genius of the first order. As it is, he lived on the slope of genius, and could not be steadfast and calm. His life was one long agony of self-assertion. Poor, poor Haydon! See how the world treats those who try too openly for its gratitude. "Tom Thumb for ever" over the heads of its giants.'

'Could any one--could my own hand even have averted what has happened?' she wrote to Robert Browning on June 24, 1846. 'My head and heart have ached to-day over the inactive hand. But for the moment it was out of my power, and then I never fancied this case to be more than a piece of a continuous case, of a habit fixed. Two years ago he sent me boxes and pictures precisely so, and took them back again--poor, poor Haydon!--as he will not this time.... Also, I have been told again and again (oh, never by you, my beloved) that to give money there, was to drop it into a hole in the ground. But if to have dropped it so, dust to dust, would have saved a living man--what then?... Some day, when I have the heart to look for it, you shall see his last note. I understand now that there are touches of desperate pathos--but never could he have meditated self-destruction while writing that note. He said he should write six more lectures--six more volumes. He said he was painting a new background to a picture which made him feel as if his soul had wings... and he repeated an old phrase of his, which I had heard from him often before, and which now rings hollowly to the ears of my memory--that he couldn't and wouldn't die. Strange and dreadful!'

Directly after Haydon's death a public meeting of his friends and patrons was held, at which a considerable sum was subscribed for the benefit of his widow and daughter. Sir Robert Peel, besides sending immediate help, recommended the Queen to bestow a small pension on Mrs. Haydon. The dead man's debts amounted to £3000, and his assets consisted chiefly of unsaleable pictures, on most of which his creditors had liens. In his will was a clause to the effect that 'I have manuscripts and memoirs in the possession of Miss Barrett, of 50 Wimpole Street, in a chest, which I wish Longman to be consulted about. My memoirs are to 1820; my journals will supply the rest. The style, the individuality of Richardson, which I wish not curtailed by an editor.' Miss Mitford was asked to edit the Life, but felt herself unequal to the task, which was finally intrusted to Mr. Tom Taylor.

Haydon's Memoirs, compiled from his autobiography, journals, and correspondence, appeared in 1853, the same year that saw the publication of Lord John Russell's Life of Thomas Moore. To the great astonishment of both critics and public, Haydon's story proved the more interesting of the two. 'Haydon's book is the work of the year,' writes Miss Mitford. 'It has entirely stopped the sale of Moore's, which really might have been written by a Court newspaper or a Court milliner.' Again, the Athenæum, a more impartial witness, asks, 'Who would have thought that the Life of Haydon would turn out a more sterling and interesting addition to English biography than the Life of Moore?' But the highest testimony to the merits of the book as a human document comes from Mrs. Browning, who wrote to Miss Mitford on March 19, 1854, 'Oh, I have just been reading poor Haydon's biography. There is tragedy! The pain of it one can hardly shake off. Surely, surely, wrong was done somewhere, when the worst is admitted of Haydon. For himself, looking forward beyond the grave, I seem to understand that all things, when most bitter, worked ultimate good to him, for that sublime arrogance of his would have been fatal perhaps to the moral nature, if further developed by success. But for the nation we had our duties, and we should not suffer our teachers and originators to sink thus. It is a book written in blood of the heart. Poor Haydon!' Mr. Taylor's Life was supplemented in 1874 by Haydon's Correspondence and Table-talk, together with a Memoir written in a tone of querulous complaint, by his second son, Frederick, who, it may be noted, had been dismissed from the public service for publishing a letter to Mr. Gladstone, entitled Our Officials at the Home Office, and who died in the Bethlehem Hospital in 1886. His elder brother, Frank, committed suicide in 1887.

On the subject of Haydon's merits as a painter the opinion of his contemporaries swung from one extreme to another, while that of posterity perhaps has scarcely allowed him such credit as was his due. It is certain that he was considered a youth of extraordinary promise by his colleagues, Wilkie, Jackson, and Sir George Beaumont, yet there were not wanting critics who declared that his early picture, 'Dentatus,' was an absurd mass of vulgarity and distortion. Foreign artists who visited his studio urged him to go to Rome, where he was assured that patrons and pupils would flock round him; while, on the other hand, he was described by a native critic (in the Quarterly Review) as one of the most defective painters of the day, who had received more pecuniary assistance, more indulgence, more liberality, and more charity than any other artist ever heard of. But the best criticism of his powers, though it scarcely takes into account the gift of imagination which received so many tributes from the poets, is that contributed to Mr. Taylor's biography by Mr. Watts, R.A.

'The characteristics of Haydon's art,' he writes, 'appear to me to be great determination and power, knowledge, and effrontery... Haydon appears to have succeeded as often as he displays any real anxiety to do so; but one is struck with the extraordinary discrepancy of different parts of the work, as though, bored by a fixed attention that had taken him out of himself, yet highly applauding the result, he had scrawled and daubed his brush about in a sort of intoxication of self-glory... In Haydon's work there is not sufficient forgetfulness of self to disarm criticism of personality. His pictures are themselves autobiographical notes of the most interesting kind; but their want of beauty repels, and their want of modesty exasperates. Perhaps their principal characteristic is lack of delicacy and refinement of execution.' While describing Haydon's touch as woolly, his surfaces as disagreeable, and his draperies as deficient in dignity, Mr. Watts admits that his expression of anatomy and general perception of form are the best by far that can be found in the English school. Haydon had looked forward in full confidence to the favourable verdict of posterity, and to an honourable position in the National Gallery for the big canvases that had been neglected by his contemporaries. It is not the least of life's little ironies that while not a single work of his now hangs in the National Gallery, his large picture of Curtius leaping into the Gulf occupies a prominent position in one of Gatti's restaurants. [Footnote: Three of Haydon's pictures, however, are the property of the nation. Two, the 'Lazarus' and 'May-day,' belong to the National Gallery, but have been lent to provincial galleries. One, the 'Christ in the Garden,' belongs to the South Kensington Museum, but has been stored away.]

As a lecturer, a theoriser, and a populariser of his art, Haydon has just claims to grateful remembrance. Though driven to paint pot-boilers for the support of his family, he never ceased to preach the gospel of high art; he was among the first to recognise and acclaim the transcendent merits of the Elgin Marbles; he rejoiced with a personal joy in the purchase of the Angerstein collection as the nucleus of a National Gallery; he scorned the ignoble fears of some of his colleagues lest the newly-started winter exhibitions of old masters should injure their professional prospects; he used his interest at Court to have Raphael's cartoons brought up to London for the benefit of students and public; he advocated the establishment of local schools of design, and, through his lectures and writings, helped to raise and educate the taste of his country.

Haydon has painted his own character and temperament in such vivid colours, that scarcely a touch need be added to the portrait. He was an original thinker, a vigorous writer, a keen observer, but from his youth up a disproportion was evident in the structure of his mind, that pointed only too clearly to insanity. His judgment, as Mr. Taylor observes, was essentially unsound in all matters where he himself was personally interested. His vanity blinded him throughout to the quality of his own work, the amount of influence he could wield, and the extent of the public sympathy that he excited. He was essentially religious in temperament, though his religion was so assertive and egotistical in type that those who hold with Rosalba that where there is no modesty there can be no religion, [Footnote: Rosalba said of Sir Godfrey Kneller, 'This man can have no religion, for he has no modesty.'] might be inclined to deny its existence. From the very outset of his career Haydon took up the attitude of a missionary of high art in England--and therewith the expectation of being crowned and enriched as its Priest and King. He clung to the belief that a man who devoted himself to the practice of a high and ennobling art ought to be supported by a grateful country, or at least by generous patrons, and he could never be made to realise that Art is a stern and jealous mistress, who demands material sacrifices from her votaries in exchange for spiritual compensations. If a man desires to create a new era in the art of his country, he must be prepared to lead a monastic life in a garret; but if, like Haydon, he allows himself a wife and eight children, and professes to be unable to live on five hundred a year, he must condescend to the painting of portraits and pot-boilers. The public cannot be forced to support what it neither understands nor admires, and, in a democratic state, the Government is bound to consult the taste of its masters.

Haydon's financial embarrassments were perhaps the least of his trials. As has been seen, he had fallen into the hands of the money-lenders in early youth, and he had never been able to extricate himself from their clutches. But so many of his friends and colleagues--Godwin, Leigh Hunt, and Sir Thomas Lawrence among others--were in the same position, that Haydon must have felt he was insolvent in excellent company. As long as he was able to keep himself out of prison and the bailiffs out of his house, he seems to have considered that his affairs were positively nourishing, and at their worst his financial difficulties alone would never have driven him to self-destruction. Mrs. Browning was surely right when she wrote:--'The more I think the more I am inclined to conclude that the money irritation was merely an additional irritation, and that the despair, leading to revolt against life, had its root in disappointed ambition. The world did not recognise his genius, and he punished the world by withdrawing the light... All the audacity and bravery and self-calculation, which drew on him so much ridicule, were an agony in disguise--he could not live without reputation, and he wrestled for it, struggled for it, kicked for it, forgetting grace of attitude in the pang. When all was vain he went mad and died... Poor Haydon! Think what an agony life was to him, so constituted!--his own genius a clinging curse! the fire and the clay in him seething and quenching one another!--the man seeing maniacally in all men the assassins of his fame! and with the whole world against him, struggling for the thing that was his life, through day and night, in thoughts and in dreams ... struggling, stifling, breaking the hearts of the creatures dearest to him, in the conflict for which there was no victory, though he could not choose but fight it. Tell me if Laocoön's anguish was not as an infant's sleep compared to this.'