The doctrine held by the ancients that the Goddess of Fortune was stone-blind has much to warrant it. Let us take the case of three contemporary nineteenth-century etchers, all three being men of genius. I mean the two French masters, Charles Meryon and Jean-François Millet, and the Englishman Seymour Haden. The two French etchers lived in dire poverty and often had to go hungry because they had not the means to pay for a meal; while, to their English contemporary, “the lines were fallen in pleasant places” and he never knew the wants that pinch the poor.
Born in 1818, in his father’s fine house in Sloane Street, London West, Francis Seymour Haden had the advantage of coming of a good and well-known family, in easy circumstances, and the further advantage of having received an excellent university education, so that he found himself, from the first, the social equal of many of the best in the land, and he never had to invade and overcome that formidable social barrier which in England so sternly divides the “somebodies” from the “nobodies”; and during his long and active life he certainly did nothing to diminish or discredit the high social standing to which he was born and bred.
This being so, he remained to the end of his life an ideal Tory aristocrat, a condition which might be compared to that of the Bourbon kings, who “never forgot anything and never learned anything.” In maintaining any opinion which he had formed, or inherited, he was as immovable as the rock of Gibraltar, and it made no difference to him if later evidence showed that his earlier opinions were wrong.
Portrait of Seymour Haden at the age of Sixty-Two
From the engraving by C. W. Sherborn
Size of the original engraving, 6 × 3½ inches
Portrait of Seymour Haden at the Age of Forty-four
From his etching from life, done in 1862
Size of the original print, 7¾ × 10⅝ inches
I well remember hearing that man of genius, Henry Ward Beecher, say in a sermon: “Talk of the sin of Pride—we haven’t half enough of it!” Be that as it may, Seymour Haden was always a proud man, and this innate pride sometimes rendered him intolerant of the opinions of other good men whose ideas were also entitled to due respect. Indeed, I have never known a man who set a higher value on himself. Nothing was too good for him—whether it might be his collection of the best prints by older masters, his house and its appointments great and small, or the instruments which he used when he practised surgery,—everything must be of the very best. This determination of his was, within limits, a noble one, although it sometimes made him intolerant of other men who were unable to rise to his high ideals.