Reviews of the Week
Bad PoO : Good Friend
Blake's Hayley. By Morchard Bishop. (Collancz. :Ss.)
WILLIAM HAYLEY has long been regarded as a figure of fun, a poetaster, a dilettante, a busybody, and a very tedious person, not worth a second thought—except in so far as he impinged on the lives of certain other significant people. It is, therefore, at first sight a matter of astonishment that anyone should have thought it worth while to write a biography of this nonentity extending to 356 pages with fairly full documentation and attractively illustrated. In fact, however, this has now been done by Morchard Bishop. and surprisingly it turns out to have been well worth while. The book is called Blake's Hayley, though it might equally well have been called Cowper's Hayley, or even Romney's Hayley, since this singular man played an important part in a number of lives, though it is perhaps in relation to Blake that he is best known owing to the savage epigrams that Blake wrote about him in his private notebook, exasperated by his lack of understanding of True Art. Hayley was soft, sentimental, arch, sportive, sprightly and some- ' times idiotic, and his life was in most respects a failure. His output of bad poetry was prodigious, but scarcely a line of it is remembered today—not even one from his Triumphs of Temper, written to Induce sensibility and good humour in young females and successful by ordinary standards, since it went into fourteen editions.
His domestic life was unhappy, Mrs. Hayley proving to be so silly as to be quite unbearable (Hayley generously chose to suppose that she was slightly mad) and barren into the .:,argain, though she obligingly connived at her husband's having an affair with a maid- servant. The son, Thomas Alphonso, whose arrival blessed this illicit union, was the object of doting affection from both of them, and, even after Hayley had succeeded in inducing his " pitiable Eliza" to live away from him, visited both as if he were their lawful offspring. He turned out, indeed, to be an attractive, sensible and .talented boy, though, as part of Hayley's usual bad luck, he died of spinal tuberculosis before he was twenty.
Hayley's life was spent in Sussex where he had a large house and estate at Eartham, near Bognor. Both he and his wife—though particularly his wife—were extravagant, so that ultimately he built a smaller, though expensive house, The Turret, in the neighbouring village of Felpham, and tried to sell Eartham. It was at Felpham that Blake was to sojourn for three years " on the banks of ocean " until Hayley's kindness drove him back to London in 1803. Hayley lived for seventeen years after this, °dying in 1820 at The age of seventy-five. In 1808 Byron had characterised Hayley's work in the cruel lines: " His style in youth or age is still the same,
For ever feeble and for ever tame."
Byron, moreover, was right, so it may be wondered what claim Hayley can have on our attention at the present time. The answer lies in Hayley's remarkable faculty for projecting himself into the lives of other people, and in these relationships, though the first advances had usually' come from him, he was capable of such affection, loyalty and disinterested kindness, often in the face of every discouragement, that in the end he wins his way to our hearts too. The publisher's blurb calls this "a positive genius 'for friendship," and the clich6 is admittedly difficult to avoid. Hayley's circle of friends centred from 1792 round Cowper, and so naturally included Mrs. Unwin, Lady Hesketh, John Johnson and Samuel Rose. Other important figures in his life were Gibbon, Anna Seward, Romney, Flaxman, Cary, Lord Egremont, William. Huskisson, William Mason, Amelia Opie and Wright of Derby, and innumerable other names of some interest come into the story. Hayley had started his acquaintance with „Cowper by writing a letter, accompanied by an inevitable sonnet." Cowper responded, and very soon the two Williams were an important part of each other's lives. Hayley's efforts to counter his friend's attacks of depression and insanity and the generosity of his affection for " the stricken deer " atone for a multitude of sonnets, ballads, epitaphs, dramas and poetical epistles. When Cowper died in 1800 Hayley immediately undertook to write the Life, and it is this book that is by far the most important that came from his busy pen. Indirectly it led to the association with Blake, who was to be at Hayley's right hand while making the engravings to illustrate it.
The whole tangled episode of Blake's relations with Hayley is unravelled more completely and satisfactorily than ever before in the book under review. The author has drawn on Hayley's correspondence with Lady Hesketh which has lain more or less unknown in the British Museum, and his defence-of Blake against her strictures is a contribution of the first importance to our knowledge of the situation. Incidentally, Hayley says of Catherine Blake that
" the good woman not only does all the work of the. House, but she even makes the greater part of her Husband's dress, and assists him in his Art—she draws, she engraves and sings delightfully, and is so truly the Half of her good man that they seem animated by one soul, and that a soul of indefatigable Industry and Benevolence."
This new and understanding life of Hayley should indeed do much to rehabilitate him in the eyes of the world. He could be sentimental and silly, but his energy and eagerness in doing good, his drive, his invincible optimism clearly made him an incomparable friend. Gibbon liked him. Cowper loved him. Southey wrote of him, " Everything about that man is good, except his poetry." The author is to be congratulated op having painted a large canvas with a light touch and excellent judgement. The book is not only an account of an extraordinary man, but is also a picture of a period, and can be read with fascinated interest from cover to cover.
GEOFFREY KEYNES.
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