The story of Haydon is indeed a sad one, though by no means without its parallels. Nature designed him to be a painter, and, as is customary in such cases, he overcame at an early age the parental opposition, and enlisted himself as a child of art. In this commercial and money-seeking country of ours, parents very often take upon themselves to decide the future destiny of their children without any regard to the peculiar direction of their talents or bent of their inclination. Nothing is more common than to hear elderly men, connected with trade or manufactures, complain that gross injustice was practised towards them in their boyhood, and that, if they had been allowed to take their own way, they would, to a certainty, have become shining lights of art, literature, or science, instead of having simply made their fortunes by attending to foreign exportation. We confess that we always listen to such murmurs without an atom of sympathy. We don’t believe that the gentleman who has just cleared ten thousand pounds by a lucky consignment to Australia, could ever have written a stanza worthy of a reviewer’s scalpel, or that the wholesale fabricator of calico could by any effort have painted a picture which the easiest Boniface would have hoisted as a signboard attractive to his hostelry. We are inclined to hold that, in the great majority of cases, the parental judgment is correct, and the influence legitimately exercised. Were it not so, the stage would be inundated with recruits; and the attainment of the part of Romeo (whenever there was a good-looking Juliet) be an object of ambition, perhaps at the risk of bloodshed. Even among the Anglo-Saxons, practical as they may call themselves, there is, in early youth, a considerable feeling of romance; and no boy would willingly devote himself to a perch on a three-legged stool if he saw a reasonable prospect of achieving fame or independence otherwise. For our own part, we believe that the annual sacrifice of talent is very small, and that, of genius infinitesimally less. For, where true genius exists, it is irrepressible. Let parents strive as they may, they cannot extinguish the flame in one who is a poet born. No adverse circumstances, no accumulation of distasteful labour will put it out—it is like the fire which the Ghebirs adore—stop it up at one place, and it is sure to break forth at another. So with the genuine painter. Bind him apprentice to an attorney, and his art breaks out on the blotting-sheet—try to make a mechanic of him, and the walls are defiled with charcoal. Mere talent may succumb: genius never does. And very often men of genius have, through being thwarted in the earlier part of their career, and through subjection to a training altogether alien from their fancy, received most wholesome lessons and impressions which afterwards have been of signal benefit. Haydon, we suspect, obtained his liberty too early. A few years of servitude might have been of great use in the way of teaching him prudence, and as a corrective against rashness, impetuosity, and defiance. They might, at any rate, have tended to lessen his overweening confidence in his own ability, and have sent him better prepared to woo fortune in that particular walk for which he certainly was designed. But, from the very first, he was opinionative, self-willed, and impatient of restraint. An accidental perusal of Reynolds’s Discourses seems to have strengthened his hankering after art into an inflexible resolution to pursue it. He says—“I read one. It placed so much reliance on honest industry; it expressed so strong a conviction that all men were equal, and that application made the difference, that I fired up at once. I took them all home, and read them through before breakfast the next morning. The thing was done. I felt my destiny fixed. The spark which had for years lain struggling to blaze, now burst out for ever.” At this time Haydon could not have been much above eighteen. His father, a respectable tradesman in Plymouth, but by no means opulent in his circumstances, made the usual remonstrances, and he was further assailed by his mother with every argument which love and anxiety could suggest. Nothing, however, would serve young Benjamin but an immediate removal to London, where, uncontrolled, he might work out the plans which he had conceived for the future, and devote himself thoroughly and entirely to the study of art, in what he conceived to be the highest walk. Haydon had no notion whatever of intellectual progression, and therefore fell into the error committed by many artists and writers, who, not content with gradual advancement, strive to anticipate their time. For portrait-painting—undoubtedly the most lucrative department of his profession, and a very high one, as is testified by the masterpieces of Vandyke, Velasquez, Titian, and Rembrandt, besides a host of later distinguished painters—he entertained an intense contempt. Utterly destitute of worldly prudence, and reckless to a culpable degree in pecuniary matters, he could not be brought to understand that the first duty of every man, whether gifted with genius or not, is to labour for his livelihood, and to avail himself, for that purpose, of all the means within his power. To the end of his days Haydon never understood this. He seemed to think that the possession of genius gave him an absolute claim upon the purses of the opulent; and that they were, if not legally, at all events morally bound to come forward and buy his pictures whether they wanted them or not. Be it remembered that a picture by Haydon was no trifle, nor adapted for the capacity of every drawing-room. Here is his own account of his system and method, in connection with his picture of the “Raising of Lazarus.”

“I always filled my painting-room to its full extent; and had I possessed a room 400 feet long, 200 feet high, and 400 feet wide, I would have ordered a canvass 199–6 long by 199–6 high, and so have been encumbered for want of room, as if it had been my pleasure to be so. My room was 30 feet long, 20 wide, 15 high. So I ordered a canvass 19 long by 15 high, and dashed in my conception, the Christ being 9 feet high. This was a size and a subject which I loved to my very marrow.”

No wonder that with these views he was doomed to repeated disappointment—that Lady Beaumont objected to the purchase of his “Macbeth” because “we have no room”—and that, on another occasion, when a gentleman had offered six hundred guineas for the “Judgment of Solomon,” (12 feet 10 inches by 10 feet 10 inches) his lady said, “But, my dear, where am I to put my piano?” And that bargain was at an end. By making his pictures utterly disproportionate to the size of ordinary dwelling-houses, Haydon, as a matter of course, deprived himself of the chance of disposing of his pictures to that very numerous and opulent class of persons who are sincerely attached to art, and willing to buy its choicest productions on a moderate scale. People will not build houses for pictures. They want pictures that will suit their rooms, and, if artists will be foolish enough to expand their ideas over whole acres, they must necessarily pay the penalty of their folly. Large art is not high art, nor is it necessary for sublimity to expand the human figure into the colossal dimensions of a giant. But more of this hereafter. On his arrival in London, Haydon waited upon Northcote, likewise a Plymouth man, with a letter of introduction.

“I went. He lived at 39 Argyle Street. I was shown first into a dirty gallery, then up-stairs into a dirtier painting-room, and there, under a high window with the light shining full on his bald grey head, stood a diminutive wizened figure in an old blue striped dressing-gown, his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. Looking keenly at me with his little shining eyes, he opened the letter, read it, and, with the broadest Devon dialect, said, ‘Zo, you mayne tu bee a peinter doo-ee?—what zort of peinter?’ ‘Historical painter, sir.’ ‘Heestoricaul peinter! why, yee’ll starve with a bundle of straw under yeer head!’

“‘I zee,’ he added, ‘Mr Hoare zays you’re studying anatomy; that’s no use. Sir Joshua didn’t know it; why should you want to know what he didn’t?’ ‘But Michael Angelo did, sir.’ ‘Michael Angelo! What’s he tu du here? you must peint portraits here!’ This roused me, and I said, clinching my mouth, ‘But I won’t.’ ‘Won’t?’ screamed the little man, ‘but you must! your vather isn’t a monied man, is he?’ ‘No, sir; but he has a good income, and will maintain me for three years.’ ‘Will he? hee’d better make ’ee mainteen yeezelf!’ A beautiful specimen of a brother artist, thought I. ‘Shall I bring you my drawings, sir?’ ‘Ees, you may,’ said he, and I took my leave.”

Ten thousand pities for Haydon that he did not take Northcote’s words to heart. By laying himself out for portrait painting, at least for a time, and studying the essentials, Haydon would have acquired more rapidly than in any other manner the mechanical portion of his art, and probably would have been gradually weaned from that extravagance of manner which disfigured many of his most ambitious works. He might also have learned independence, which, under his circumstances, was a duty, and so have early avoided the fatal habit of looking to others for support. Fuseli gave him worse counsel, and confirmed him in his resolution to adhere to what is, absurdly enough, denominated the “Grand Style.”