A POETS' PAINTER
By ERIC GEORGE
ON the 22nd of June one hundred years ago this country was shocked to learn of the suicide of Benjamin Robert Haydon. He was then sixty ; and for over thirty years, by means of attacks on the Royal Academt posing as a martyr in the cause of art, airing his quarrels in public, claiming to be the sole exponent of grand art in England, exhibiting his enormous and sensational can- vases, and lecturing to packed audiences all over the country, he had imposed himself on public attention and almost created a legend of persecuted genius. The son of a Plymouth bookseller, in his boyhood he contracted the disease of ambition. With a rich endow- ment of gifts that might have won him success in half-a-dozen ways, he made a choice of profession that proved disastrous ; and, letting his fancy run riot in dreams of glory, he indulged his malady till, growing out of proportion to the talents upon which it rested, it finally broke his heart. One cannot discuss a painter without talking about his pictures ; for Haydon they were the key-note of his existence. Round their lurid exaggerations revolves the restless spirit of the man who made them, hullaballooing for attention ; now rising on the crest of the wave in exultant self-glory, now submerged in seas of debt and failure, yet struggling to the end with a courage so indomitable that few could read of it and withhold their admiration.
As an artist he is now generally despised. How far is this justi- fiable? In his Raising of Lazarus, apart from the impressive figure of Lazarus himself, there are some remarkable heads, and the beauti- ful silvery background of Punch shows delicate perception and masterly handling. His most admired picture, The judgement of Solomon, is lost, but it caused a stir at the time. There is David Wilkie's opinion of many years later, " That is truly a great work ... Ah, it is grand! . . . and would have done honour to Rome and Venice." Leigh Hunt in The Examiner devoted a long article to it, saying, " This painter is justly classed with the great masters of Art." The Spectator said, "About Haydon's capacity for achieving greatness there is no question " ; Hazlitt, "He strides his art like a colossus " ; and Fuseli, " By Gode it is the finest ting dat eaver any Englishman painted! " " Tell Haydon I am astonished," said Turner to a friend, and Miss Mitford, thirty years later, wrote that after the exhibition of Solomon" he was considered the most promis- ing artist in England." He received admiring tributes in verse from many poets ; among them three sonnets a-piece from Wordsworth and Keats, and one each from Elizabeth Barrett and Leigh Hunt. So does taste vary, and so do reputations rise and fall.
The effect of such encouragement on a man of his vanity was inevitable ; he wished to create the broad style of imitating nature he saw in the great masters—in Titian, Correggio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt. " Founded as I am," he remarks, " I know I could improve upon it." " I advanced and fell back," he says at another time, " and advanced again . . . and it was at this period I confirmed by perpetual deductions the principles of a standard figure. . . . Principles on which," he adds later, " I reared the figure of Macbeth." This was fatal. He believed so great an asset to his country deserved State support, and that in the meantime he was justified in living on the bounty of his friends. He was imprisoned four times for debt, the first when he was thirty-seven, and he came out a changed man, reduced to what was, for him, the last humiliation of working on a small scale. A small canvas meant to Haydon what deflation means to a balloon ; size and grandeur were inseparable in his eyes. Gone were the ecstatic days when with nothing in his pocket, but with unlimited hope in his heart, he snatched from his duns a few hours of liberty to attack a twenty-foot canvas, while he dreamt of his " day of glory," forever hovering just beyond the horizon. " I am sorry to say," he writes, " my ambition ever dwindles unless kept alive by risk of ruin." If he failed in one gigantic effort, then, " At it again! " was always his motto ; a huger picture still would be begun, with less money. Such a plan could not succeed, and the enthusiastic schoolboy, brought up against the hardness of facts, perforce took on some of the attributes of a grown-up person. In his own eyes he was a man of the highest and most disinterested ideals, sacrificing everything for the eocd of others; but cruelly ill-used. The work of real value he left behind was, of course, the Auto- biography and journals, edited by Tom Taylor from twenty-six volumes of MSS. He began it at the age of fifty-five. Like many ambitious but unsuccessful men he counted much on posterity I it was for this reason chiefly that he wrote. It will be interesting to see what fresh light the prospective new edition from the lost volumes, now happily recovered, will throw. " It is," wrote Elizabeth Barrett, to whom Haydon showed part of the MS., " as unfit as possible for the general reader—fervid and coarse at once, with personal references blood-dyed at every page. I only know that without great modification the Memoirs should not appear at all." But the times are less squeamish and those traduced long dead. The parts already published have the quality, rare in autobiographies, of combining a graphic picture of the period with great psychological interest. To some the last may well be its chief attraction ; never has there been recounted with comparable vividness the history of the birth, progress and extinction of an over-mastering ambition. There have been Lives in plenty of successful men, but the world knows little about the agonies of those who have failed. Whether his readers like Haydon or not, they can hardly travel with him unmoved through his hopes and despairs. The book contains un- forgettable descriptions, such as that of Paris in 1814, and the coronation of George IV, when, on the King's entrance, " the room rose with a sort of feathered, silken thunder."
But, in spite of their unattractiveness, it is the pictures themselves that are the life-blood of the book. It is doubtful if Haydon could have written well on any other subject ; the theme must always have been himself, and his art was his absorbing passion. It is his underlying certainty of greatness that gives the zest to what he relates, while it is the horror of his awakening that casts such air of tragedy over the later pages. Even when writing about himself he could be dull enough ; the Dreams of Somniator, which appeared in the Annals of the Fine Arts, and on which he so prided himself, are sorry stuff. These dreams are a glorification of " Somniator," " H-yd-n," at the expense of the Academicians. " But," he cries indignantly, " such was the animosity generated by my terrific truths about the Academy that the good which was really in the work was rendered nugatory by the violence and injustice of those it skinned." His claim that the Dreams are the best things in the paper sets the reader turning the pages without much enthusiasm ; so it is with a thrill that he suddenly comes upon the immortal words, " My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense." The Ode to a Nightingale and the Ode on a Grecian Urn first appeared in the Annals, without, it would seem, arousing any par- ticular attention ; though they are cheek by jowl with poems of " an almost indescribable insignificance."
And Somniator? He was to go hat in hand to the Academicians begging forgiveness for his folly ; he was to see the grand scheme he had advocated through half a lifetime, that decoration of the Houses of Parliament with wall-paintings on which he had set his heart, take shape without his assistance, and to watch his last despairing efforts at grand art going down before the rivalry of General Tom Thumb. " Poor Haydon! " wrote Elizabeth Barrett. " Think what an agony life was to him, so constituted !—his own genius a clinging curse! . . . the man seeing maniacally in all men the assassins of his fame! "
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