“Went to Spring Gardens,” says Collins, “to see Haydon’s picture of ‘The Judgment of Solomon.’ In this most extraordinary production there is everything for which the Venetian school is so justly celebrated; with this difference only, that Haydon has considered other qualities equally necessary. Most men who have arrived at such excellence in colour, have seemed to think they have done enough; but with Haydon it was evidently the signal of his desire to have every greatness of every other school. Hence, he lays siege to the drawing and expression of Nature, which, in this picture, he has certainly carried from, and in the very face of, all his competitors. Of the higher qualities of Art are certainly the tone of the whole picture; the delicate variety of colour; the exquisite sentiment in the mother bearing off her children; and the consciousness of Solomon in the efficacy of his demonstration of the real mother. In short, Haydon deserves the praise of every real artist for having proved that it is possible (which, by the way, I never doubted) to add all the beauties of colour and tone to the grandeur of the most sublime subject, without diminishing the effect upon the heart. Haydon has done all this; and produced, upon the whole, the most perfect modern picture I ever saw; and that at the age of seven-and-twenty!”
SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE.
Among the correspondence of Collins occurs the following characteristic letter to him from this celebrated writer.
“To W. Collins, Esq., A.R.A.
Highgate, December, 1818.
“My dear Sir,—I at once comply with, and thank you for, your request to have some prospectuses. God knows I have so few friends, that it would be unpardonable in me not to feel proportionably grateful towards those few who think the time not wasted in which they interest themselves in my behalf. There is an old Latin adage: ‘Vis videri pauper, et pauper es.’ Poor you profess yourself to be, and poor therefore you are, and will remain. The prosperous feel only with the prosperous; and if you subtract from the whole sum of their feeling for all the gratifications of vanity and all their calculations of lending to the Lord, both of which are best answered by conferring the superfluity of their superfluities on advertised and advertisable distress—or on such as are known to be in all respects their inferiors—you will have, I fear, but a scanty remainder. All this is too true; but then, what is that man to do whom no distress can bribe to swindle or deceive? who cannot reply as Theophilus Cibber did to his father, Colley Cibber, who, seeing him in a rich suit of clothes, whispered to him as he passed, ‘The.! The.! I pity thee!’ ‘Pity me! pity my tailor!’ Spite of the decided approbation which my plan of delivering lectures has received from several judicious and highly respectable individuals, it is too histrionic, too much like a retail dealer in instruction and pastime, not to be depressing. If the duty of living were not far more awful to my conscience than life itself is agreeable to my feelings, I should sink under it. But, getting nothing by my publications, which I have not the power of making estimable by the public without loss of self-estimation, what can I do? The few who have won the present age, while they have secured the praise of posterity, as Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Southey, Lord Byron, etc., have been in happier circumstances. And lecturing is the only means by which I can enable myself to go on at all with the great philosophical work to which the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years of my life have been devoted. Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum. Yet sometimes, spite of myself, I cannot help bursting out into the affecting exclamation of our Spenser (his ‘wine’ and ‘ivy garland’ interpreted as competence and joyous circumstances),—
“Thou kenn’st not, Percy, how the rhyme should rage!
Oh if my temples were bedewed with wine,
And girt with garlands of wild ivy-twine,
How I could rear the Muse on stately stage!
And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine,