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notion of being a genius, a hero, a martyr, an apostle of art, came strong upon him; and besides all this, he must prove that he is better read, a keener critic, and altogether a more marked and distinguished character than the distinguished character before whom all these pretensions are so sedulously paraded.

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Opportunities for such self-assertion were frequent with him. In early life, we have witnessed his introduction to high society, and later, when he ceased to be the fashion, and his great friends dropped off, circumstances brought him in the way of such intercourse again. Having rather capriciously taken up liberal politics (for he would have advocated any despotism which appointed him painter of its tyrannies,) he was chosen to paint the picture of the Reform Banquet, a choice most unfortunate for those who hoped to be perpetuated to an admiring posterity, but a real relief to the readers of Haydon's life, who for several pages are amused by graphic descriptions of men of note, instead of wearied by his pecuniary distresses, and the reiteration of his national appeals for patronage. Grey, Althorpe, Nugent, Lansdowne, and many others, successively sat to him. Lord Melbourne pleased him most, probably because he was most diverted by the painter. His easy, careless good nature relished his good stories, I am always brilliant, Haydon says, with Lord Melbourne,'-he was amused by his enthusiasm, tolerated his presumption, and found some pleasure even in parrying his questions on public matters, and turning off his attacks and appeals for national assistance, illustrating in this instance the truth of a saying of his friends, that 'everything amused Lord Melbourne.' One snatch of dialogue will illustrate the style in which the artist obtruded his views and opinions on the statesman, and the cool style in which the other treated him:-

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'9th.-Sent down in the morning to know if Lord Melbourne could see me. He sent me back word he would receive me at one. At one I called, and saw him. The following dialogue ensued, "Well, my Lord, have you seen my petition to you?" "I have." "Have you read it?" "Yes." Well, what do you say to it?" He affected to be occupied, and to read a letter. I said, "What answer does your Lordship give? What argument or refutation have you?" "Why, we do not mean to have pictures. We mean to have a building with all the simplicity of the ancients." "Well, my Lord, what public building of the ancients will you point out without pictures? I fear, Lord Melbourne, since I first saw you, you are corrupted. You meet Academicians at Holland House. I am sure you do." He looked archly at me, and rubbed his hands. "I do. I meet Calcott. He is a good fellow." "Good enough: but an Academician." "Ha, ha," said Lord Melbourne. "Now, my Lord, do be serious." Well, I am: Calcott says he disapproves of the system of patrons taking up young men to the injury of the old ones; giving them two or three commissions, and letting them die in a workbouse." 66 But if young men are never to be taken up, how

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are they to become known? But to return. Look at Guizot. He ordered four great pictures to commemorate the barricades for the government. Why will not the Government do that here? What is the reason, Lord Melbourne, that no English minister is aware of the importance of art to the manufactures and wealth of the country? I will tell you, my Lord, you want tutors at the Universities "-I was going on talking eagerly with my hand up. At that moment the door opened, and in stalked Lord Brougham. He held out his two fingers and said, "How dy'e do, Mr. Haydon?" While I stood looking staggered, Lord Melbourne glanced at me and said, "I wish you good morning." I bowed to both and took my leave.'-Vol. ii. pp. 365, 366.

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The picture was a failure, a mere crowd of heads without grouping and arrangement, and in one place he naïvely betrays that the likenesses were but indifferent, where he pronounces Jeffrey to have no observation, and to possess a mind merely critical, because he could not recognise a single portrait. Soon after, he painted a similar picture for the Anti-Slavery Convention, with as little success.

He never felt at home in portraits; indeed he turned with loathing from them, and it was only the excitement of the occasion, and the number of heads, which gave him an interest in these pictures; but on a congenial subject he frequently describes with such gusto the process of painting, that it is hard to understand how he should fail at last,-for we must call his shortlived success and his present neglect an utter failure, compared with his own anticipations. Listen to his description of the brilliancy of his conceptions, and the flow of his hand:

'What an extraordinary, invisible sort of stirring is the impulse of genius. You first feel uneasy, you cannot tell why. You look at your picture, and think it will not do. You walk for air-your picture haunts you. You cannot sleep; up you get in a fever, when all of a sudden a great flash comes inside your head, as if a powder-magazine had exploded without any noise. Then come ideas by millions-the difficulty is to choose. Xenophon cheering on the point of a rock came flashing into my head. It is a hit. Everybody says it will do. I am sure of it. The world will echo it. It is the finest conception I ever saw. I speak as my own critic. I know it is wrong to say so. I care not. O God! grant me life and health to complete this grand work!

'How mysteriously I was impelled to begin it-by an urging when on the brink of ruin. Am I then reserved for something? I know it-I feel it. O God, my Creator, Thou knowest it. Thou knowest I shall not die till I have accomplished that for which I was born.'-Vol. ii. p. 262.

'Invention presses on a man like a nightmare. I composed the Crucifixion in part, while going in a hackney coach to sign a warrant of attorney. I began Solomon without a candle for the evening. I finished it without food, at least meat for the last fortnight.'-Vol. ii. p. 145.

4th. Another day of work: God be thanked! Put in the sea-a delicious tint. How exquisite is a bare canvas, sized alone, to paint on; how the colour drags over; how the slightest colour, thin as water, tells; how it glitters in body; how the brush flies-now here-now there; it seems as if face, hands, sky, thought, poetry, and expression were hid in the handle, and streamed out as it touched the canvas. What magic! what fire! what

unerring hand and eye! what fancy! what power! what a gift of God! I bow and am grateful.

10th.-It is extraordinary what a guard I am obliged to keep on myself. The moment the excitement of a great work is over, if I do not go at another, I am sure to burst out-in writing. My brain seems to require constant pressure to be easy, and my body incessant activity. In a great public work alone, I shall ever find rest, which will never be afforded me.'-Vol. iii. p. 245.

We call this melancholy, because we know the result; but the style would have had its admirers, had the performance corresponded to the artist's description of the power and genius that had executed them.

With such an apprehension of his merits we can scarcely wonder that the contrast between these brilliant gifts and their appreciation by mankind, when once forced upon him, should be poignant enough to upset a mind so dependent on the world's opinion, and which could not for a moment be insensible to neglect. In an interview with a brother artist he sums up the heavy amount of this neglect:

'Reinagle said he thought me infamously used, and wondered I had not gone mad or died. "Where is your Solomon, Mr. Haydon?" "Hung up in a grocer's shop." "Where your Jerusalem?" In a ware-room in Holborn." "Where your Lazarus?” “In an upholsterer's shop in Mount Street." "And your Macbeth?" "In Chancery." "Your Pharaoh?" "In an attic, pledged." "My God! And your Crucifixion?" "In a hayloft." "And Silenus?" "Sold for half price." Such was the conversa

tion.'-Vol. ii. p. 137.

But, as has been already said, this ready fluent tongue and pen proved fatal to his art, diverting all thought into another channel, if indeed he was not wholly mistaken in himself.

One mode of engaging the interest of others in the cause he most cared for, he entered upon only late in life, and yet it was what he was best fitted for-that of giving public lectures. In these he was eminently successful; his manner, his enthusiasm, his ready eloquence, his really extensive knowledge, roused the attention and sustained the interest of his numerous audiences. It was a means of spreading the principles his life was devoted to into other circles, and giving high art a wider and less aristocratic set of patrons, while, at the same time, it secured for himself the publicity he loved. But lecturing cannot be a lasting occupation, nor could he ever have consented to abandon his chosen profession, or ceased to crave for larger fields of canvas on which to execute his teeming conceptions.

But a blow was preparing for him which neither himself nor those who had thought the visions of his life eutopian (and they were the greater part of his hearers), could at one time have believed within the range of possibility. What he had all along

been demanding of the nation, and of every man in power, had been some great national assistance to art, especially the adorning of our public buildings by historical pictures. Years before he had actually proposed removing the old tapestry in the House of Lords and applying those walls to the purpose. No one would then listen to the proposal; but now that the Houses of Parliament were burnt down, and new ones must be built, his endless tirades and exhortations seemed to have effect at last. Pictures were to be. All went as he would have had it; a Fine Arts' Commission sat, a notice was issued of the conditions for the cartoon competition, to test the capacity of English artists for the style of art suited to the decoration of the new houses of Parliament. He set to work upon fresco in a strange mixture of triumph and misgivings; misgivings inevitable to a man who has been boasting all his life, and is now to be tested against others, many amongst the most distinguished being his own pupils. He sent his cartoons to Westminster Hall. Here he says:

'I found Eastlake, my pupil, walking about. He was most happy to see me. I said, "Do you recollect drinking tea with me in 1808, and telling me my conversation had made you a painter?" "I do," said he, "and there is no doubt of it." And "Do you remember," said he, "coming with me into Westminster Hall, and drawing a gigantic limb on the wall with the end of the umbrella, saying, 'This is the place for art.' I did not. He said I actually did so, thirty years ago; and he remembered my jumping up to reach high. Now here we were, master and pupil, marching about, and the first act of this great drama of art just beginning. O God! when I reflect on thy leading me on so many years from the beginning, I must believe I ever have been, and ever shall be, protected by Thee.'-Vol. iii. p. 229.

When the time of decision came, his cartoons were not successful, and were passed over in silence by the Commission. It is the firm opinion of the Editor that this fatal exclusion from the first great national work of art broke his heart; that every subsequent effort to assert his claims in the remaining three years of his life were void of true hope, a frantic lashing the sides of his intent,' to approve himself a great artist, when he had begun to doubt it. The mortification to a well-regulated mind would have been intense; to him who had no resignation, and who said of philosophy, I have no philosophy-I hate it; I am very wretched and I will complain;' whose only mode of meeting disappointment was by conjuring up a larger vision of hope to shut out the sight or thought of it, and who now in declining years found hope itself fail him as any substantial support the effect was overwhelming. Certainly, from this time we may observe a greater extravagance of thought, a more reckless self-assertion, a wilder superstition gaining ground upon him. He goes on painting, still resolving to appeal against the Commission to the public, but he gets irrationally excited

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by his subjects, and his journal has scattered flighty designs for a figure of Satan, which was to form the chief object of a grand Miltonic picture, and whose countenance was to be a gathering place for the separate features of himself and various other distinguished men. The alternations from prostration and dejection to extravagant hope, are almost too painful to dwell upon, and his difficulties' still dog him with their ceaseless worry, though the kindness of friends, the indulgence of his landlord (the same he had insulted), and the compassion of great men, among whom Sir Robert Peel stands conspicuous, seem always at hand to help him. Besides which, up to the last he was in the receipt of considerable sums. But he had lived upon a delusion through his whole life, and the apprehension coming at last in his sixtieth year, that it was a delusion, was too much for a reason which it had been the deliberate work of his existence to subvert. It makes the heart bleed to find this rash and buoyant spirit noting down such entries as these: :

Omens of failure in this exhibition.

1st. The cab-horse slipped on the wood, and tumbled.

2d. I let all the letters tumble for the private day, and to-day, in trying to put up Wordsworth, he tumbled, knocked down Lord Althorp, broke the frame, and played the devil.

After this what success can come? 'Do I believe this, or don't I?

Half inclined. . . .

13th-Easter Monday. O God, bless my receipts this day, for the sake of my creditors, my family, and my art. Amen.

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'An advertisement, of a finer description to catch the profanum vulgus, could not be written, yet not a shilling more was added to the receipts. They rush by thousands to see Tom Thumb. They push, they fight, they scream, they faint, they cry help and murder! and oh! and ah! They see my bills, my boards, my caravans, and don't read them. Their eyes are open, but their sense is shut. It is an insanity, a rabies, a madness, a furor, a dream.

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I would not have believed it of the English people. . . . .

My dangers are great.

May 1st.-Every spring time presses; money flies; the butcher, the baker, the tax-collector, the landlord, give louder knocks than before; away goes the only hope to the exhibition; for artists, like the evil spirits of hell, doubt and tremble, and yet abhor and do.

3d.-I put down in my Journal everything which passes through a human mind, that its weaknesses, its follies, its superstitions, may be balanced against its vigour, propriety, and sound convictions.

5th.-Came home in excruciating anxiety.'-Vol. iii. pp. 307, 308, 310.

He often speaks of confusion of head :

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