One has only to glance at one of Haydon’s drawings to perceive that the man had absolutely no artistic talent. The lines are hard, heavy, uncertain and utterly insensitive. He fumbles painfully and blunderingly after likeness to nature, and when he cannot achieve realism falls back on the cheapest art-student tricks. The paintings—such of them, at any rate, as I have seen in the original or in reproductions—are entirely without composition. They abound in bad drawing and disproportions. The colour is crude and inharmonious. In his enormous Agony in the Garden, which now reposes in the cellars of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a shapeless Saviour (straight from the studio and illumined by a strong North light) kneels in the right foreground. Behind Him lies a Rembrandtesque night, full of torch flames, of ruddily illuminated faces and portentous chiaroscuro. The ground is apparently meant to slope up from the place where the Saviour is kneeling. But it slopes in such a curious way that the background seems to be on a level with, if not actually in front of, the figure in the foreground. One is forced to imagine a Mount of Olives constructed like those Tudor houses, in which each storey projects a little farther forward than the one below.
The painting is broad, dashing, and amateurishly uncertain. In the draperies, and in what is visible of the landscape, one notices great swishing brush strokes entirely devoid of meaning, whole passages daubed in for the sole reason that every inch of the canvas has got to be covered with paint. The thing is ludicrous. The Agony in the Garden is admittedly one of the least successful of Haydon’s pictures. I regret that I have never seen his best—Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, and The Raising of Lazarus. The former is at Cincinnati; to judge by the photographs it bears a certain very distant resemblance to a picture. Where the latter is, I do not know; nor have I ever seen it reproduced. But after having looked at the Agony in the Garden, the portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, and the various reproductions in Sir Robert Witt’s library, I feel quite justified in saying that it must be entirely worthless.
Most children are geniuses, and perhaps there may have been some excuse for admiring the scribblings of the infant Haydon. Half the five-year-olds in any country are Raphaels; one in a hundred retains his genius at the age of ten. One in a million of these childish talents survives puberty. Some Imp of the Perverse must have suggested to young Haydon that he was destined to preserve his baby gift and become a painter. Outraged nature protested. The boy was afflicted with a disease of the eyes that permanently weakened his sight. To a natural incapacity to draw or paint was now added an inability to see. It was a broad hint. But the Imp of the Perverse and Haydon’s will were very strong. Illness only reinforced the boy’s decision to become a painter. All his exuberant energy, which a piece of judicious advice or a happy accident might have harnessed to some congenial labour, was now directed to painting. His self-confidence became a confidence in his powers as an artist.
His heavenly muse breathed artistic inspirations. He had, as he tells us, ‘perpetual and irresistible urgings of future greatness.’ And again, ‘I have been like a man with air balloons under his armpits and ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me.’ To have refused, in such circumstances, to devote oneself body and soul to painting would have been the sin against the Holy Ghost. On another occasion, after having conceived my background stronger than ever, I strode about the room imitating the blast of a trumpet—my cheeks full of blood, my heart beating with a glorious heat. Oh, who would exchange these moments for a throne?’ These ecstatic moments came to him whenever his mind was occupied with something that specially interested it. He would spend a whole evening ‘in a torrent of feeling about Homer.’ On the day after the news of Waterloo had come through to London, he ‘got up in a steam of feeling and read all the papers till he was faint.’ Since he had elected painting as the chief concern of his life, it was natural that these delicious and inspiring moments came oftenest while he was at work on a picture.
They justified his belief in his own powers, in the same way as the raptures of the mystic justify his belief in a personal God. An emotion so intense must, it is felt, have some adequate external cause. Similarly, the sentiments of a lover are so enormous that it seems impossible that they should have been aroused by plain Miss Jones or plainer Mr. Brown. Something cosmic, something divine must have crept in somewhere. Nothing short of the Absolute could account for such ecstasies. A whole literature of platonizing love-poems has arisen, in order that Mr. Robinson’s feelings for Miss Smith might be satisfactorily accounted for. Something analogous took place in Haydon’s case.
Full-blooded, emotional, a sort of Gargantua turned idealistic and romantic, he was easily excited and, when excited, felt profoundly. He could not believe that such prodigious emotions as his were not due to some proportionate cause. If he felt grandly about his painting, that was because his painting was grand, and because to paint was his mission in life, his divinely ordained duty.
Of the divine approbation he was, indeed, directly convinced. We find references in the Autobiography and Journals to voices which commanded him to embark, even in the midst of financial ruin, on vast and unsaleable works. To his prayers for guidance (and Haydon was always praying) were vouchsafed, so he believed, encouraging replies. And every small success, every happy coincidence—the opportune arrival, for example, of a cheque or a commission—was interpreted by him as a friendly message from the Almighty. It is not to be wondered at if, in the teeth of failure and of hostile criticism, he should have gone on believing in himself. What matter the sneers of human connoisseurs when one knows, one is certain that the Heavenly Critic approves?
And then there was Haydon’s pride, there was Haydon’s ambition. Right or wrong, he had embarked on a painter’s career. He was too proud to admit failure and withdraw. And his ambition to excel was inordinate, his vanity was without bounds. He admits (and his frankness is engaging, his perspicacity even in the midst of so much self-deception is remarkable) that he was ‘always panting for distinction, even at a funeral (for I felt angry at Opie’s that I wasn’t in the first coach).’ He wanted to be in the first coach at the christening of a new school of English painting. Portrait making, the sham beau idéal, petty genre painting were to be ousted from their pre-eminence and historical painting on a colossal scale was to take their place. Haydon was to be the father of the new school. ‘The production of this picture (Dentatus) must and will be considered an epoch in British Art.’ And towards the end of his life he records: ‘I thought once of putting up a brass plate (on his old house in Lisson Grove), Here Haydon Painted His Solomon, 1813.’
Sanguine and very susceptible to flattery, Haydon was always ready to believe that the smallest stroke of good fortune must be the herald of complete success, that a word of praise was the first note in that chorus of universal commendation for which he was always anxiously listening. When a ‘lady of the highest rank’ remarked (with that charming and entirely meaningless politeness of which only ladies of the highest rank know the secret): ‘We look to you, Mr. Haydon, to revive the Art,’ poor Haydon ‘anticipated all sorts of glory, greatness and fame.’ He was a man who dramatized his own life, who saw himself acting his own part, not merely as he was playing it at the moment, but in the future too. ‘I walked about the room, looked into the glass, anticipated what the foreign ambassadors would say, studied my French for a good accent, believed that all the Sovereigns of Europe would hail an English youth who could paint a heroic picture.’
The ‘Sovereigns of Europe,’ it may be remarked parenthetically, played a great part in Haydon’s imaginative life. Of burgess origin, and endowed with a romantic temperament, Haydon was—fatally and inevitably—a snob. The prestige of great names and titles impressed him profoundly. The picturesqueness of traditional aristocracy and the splendours of wealth went violently to his romantic head, just as they went to Balzac’s. We have seen how absurdly elated he felt when the ‘lady of the highest rank’ looked to him to ‘revive the Art.’ He was as much delighted when Sir George Beaumont and his family ‘allowed that nothing could exceed the eye of my horse.’
Even the approbation of a noble savage (if only sufficiently noble) was intoxicating to Haydon, who records complacently that the Persian Ambassador remarked of his Jerusalem ‘in good English and in a loud voice, “I like the elbow of soldier.” ’ But bitter experience soon taught him that lordly patrons are fickle and their favour not to be relied on. He realized that he
