“To expose the ignorance of a powerful patron (thus offending the patrons) and to attack the Academy (thus insuring an alliance of the academicians with the patrons) would have been at any time the worst and most impolitic thing on earth. I should have worked away and been quiet. My picture rose very high, and was praised. The conduct of Sir George was severely handled. People of fashion were beginning to feel sympathy. In fact, had I been quiet, my picture would have sold, the prize of three hundred guineas would have been won, and, in a short time, I might, in some degree, have recovered the shock his caprice had inflicted.

“But no. I was unmanageable. The idea of being a Luther or John Knox in art got the better of my reason. Leigh Hunt encouraged my feelings, and without reflection, and in spite of Wilkie’s entreaties, I resolved to assault. ‘Hunt,’ said Wilkie, ‘gets his living by such things; you will lose all chance of it. It is all very fine to be a reformer; but be one with your pencil and not with your pen!’”

Sounder advice could not have been given; but the rabies was upon Haydon, and he would not listen. First appeared the attack upon Payne Knight—next that on the Academy. Very improperly, as it appears to us, John Hunt, the brother of Leigh, on being questioned, divulged the name of the writer. Haydon tells the consequences.

“From this moment the destiny of my life may be said to have changed. My picture was caricatured, my name detested, my peace harassed; so great was the indignation at my impertinence that all merit was denied to ‘Macbeth.’

“West went down and did his best as president to damn the picture before a crowded room. Sir George was at once praised for his resistance to my insolent attempt to force on him a picture he, in fact, never ordered (it was said); and no excuse or palliation for me, either in the case of Sir George or the Academy, was listened to for a moment. I was looked at like a monster, abused like a plague, and avoided like a maniac.”

There is, of course, an immense deal of exaggeration in this. Haydon was not quite so formidable as he evidently wishes us to believe; neither were shafts from such a quiver armed with so formidable a barb. But he certainly did enough to make himself unpopular with the Academy, and to alienate those who, up to that time, had shown the warmest disposition to befriend him. Wilkie, whose name he had very improperly introduced in his diatribes, as one equally injured with himself, wrote him a most sensible, kind, and affectionate letter, which terminated thus:—

“You have certainly got plenty of work on your shoulders, and I should advise you to get out of it in the best way you can. But is this the way an artist should be engaged? Why not follow up the reputation your painting might gain you, and let that carry you through? It will lessen the respect people would have for your talents as a painter, when they find them employed disputing in a newspaper.

“I shall be miserable till I hear that you are going on with your picture—I shall then be assured that you have regained your peace of mind.”

Wilkie might have spared himself the trouble. Haydon had now convinced himself that he was a deeply injured man, had thrown down the gauntlet of defiance, and begun to write. His notion evidently was that he had made the whole of the Academicians his enemies for life.

How stood the fact? This escapade of his occurred in 1812, and immediately afterwards he began to paint the “Judgment of Solomon.” He was awfully in debt, which was constantly increasing, and at last we find him in perfect despair for a dinner. The kind-hearted owner of an eating-house, where he had dined for years, allowed him to run a score; and his landlord consented to wait for better times. It is a curious feature in human life that indulgences, so given, rarely stimulate to exertion. Haydon seems to have considered them as the proper acknowledgments of his genius, and to have idled more than he ever formerly had done. He got, too, into some sort of entanglement with “an infernal woman,” which seems to have caused him needless remorse, since he says, he “came off, thank God, without actual falling;” but possibly he may have committed himself unwarily, through the new habit, unfortunately acquired, of writing letters for the Examiner. He was then in the country; but, returning to London, he appears to have worked lazily, and for many months to have been in great distress, without credit anywhere, except for food and lodging. His new friends, Leigh and John Hunt, were then imprisoned for their libel on the Prince of Wales, and he had no one to apply to. He was very indolent, studying Italian when he should have been painting, and then chronicling his defalcations in his journal, without any visible effort at amendment. At last, in 1814, his position became desperate. From Hilton, an old fellow-student of his, he borrowed a considerable sum; but this would not suffice, and, just as his eyesight was failing, from inanition as he says, West, the President of the Academy, whom he had attacked, came in to his assistance. Although straightened in his own means, West sent him £15, an act of kindness which Haydon, indeed, acknowledges to have been “noble,” but which does not seem in the least degree to have modified his belief in the unrelenting persecution of the Academy. Men of letters and artists are strangely liable to this sort of delusion. Starting with an exaggerated view of their own importance, they regard criticism as the result of a deliberate conspiracy to put them down. They are such consummate gluttons of praise that they construe everything like censure into the outpouring of diabolical malignity. Certainly up to this time it does not appear that Haydon had suffered anything at the hands of the Academicians. If jealousy in any quarter prevailed, he had himself to blame as the aggressor; but there is not, in these journals, a scrap of evidence that the leading artists regarded him otherwise than with forbearance and compassion.

At length his picture was finished, but he would not exhibit it at the Academy. He sent it to the Water-Colour Society, which then admitted pictures, and it proved entirely successful. The “Judgment of Solomon” is generally considered as the best of Haydon’s paintings; it was again exhibited this season at the British Institution, and stood its ground well among some of the masterpieces of antiquity. It was purchased on the third day by the partners of a Devonshire banking-house, for the sum of six hundred guineas, the receipt of which enabled Haydon to discharge his most pressing claims, but it did not extricate him from his difficulties. On a review of his liabilities, just before sending the picture for exhibition, it appeared that he owed upwards of £1100.

Haydon’s exultation was naturally very great. He had indeed achieved a triumph, but, with his usual pugnacity, he could not entertain the idea of a triumph disconnected with the humiliation of an enemy. He estimated the value of success by the amount of opposition encountered, and, as usual, magnified the latter. That he was sincere, however, in his delusion, no one, we think, can doubt. The following is his pæan:—

“The success of Solomon was so great, and my triumph so complete, that had I died then my name must have stood on record as a youth who had made a stand against the prejudices of a country, the oppressions of rank, and the cruelty and injustice of two public bodies.

“It was a victory in every sense of the word. In my pursuit, I had proved the power of inherent talent, and I had done good to this great cause as far as I could do it. I did not command bayonets and cannons; would to God I had! But what I did command, I wielded with firmness and constancy. I had shown one characteristic of my dear country—bottom. I had been tried and not found wanting. I held out when feeble, and faint, and blind, and now I reaped the reward.”

So that, in the opinion of Haydon, he had not only to contend against the opposition of the Academy, but against the prejudices of the country, and the ill-will of the aristocracy! The last charge, in particular, is most ungracious. No one can peruse these volumes attentively without feeling amazed at the extent of the private liberality shown in his instance. The perverseness of the man in supposing himself to be the victim of a conspiracy, is the more unaccountable because he actually was receiving substantial acknowledgment of his talents. A few pages later, we find this entry: “The British Institution, on the proposition of Sir George Beaumont, seconded by Lord Mulgrave, voted me one hundred guineas, as a mark of admiration for the ‘Judgment of Solomon.’”

Some recreation was doubtless necessary for the re-establishment of his health, but hardly to the extent he allowed himself. More than six months elapsed before he commenced seriously to work at his next picture. His difficulties were again increasing.

“February 25th (1815).—The more I reflect on my nature, the more I am convinced of my adaptation to great difficulties. I am once again without a farthing. I have paid off the greatest part of my debts. The price of ‘Solomon’ was so inadequate, that my models and journey have swept off most of the rest. So far from being depressed, my breast broadens at the contemplation of conquering. I look upon all difficulties as stimulants to action. I have £200 to pay the twenty-first of next month. As yet I have not a sixpence towards it; but in God I trust who has always relieved me. Let me but be successful in realising my conceptions in my day’s labour, and what shall subdue me but extinction?”