painted that picture should ever be under the turf. O'Connell was amazingly pleased. He told me some capital stories. Some great big Irish counsellor said to Curran, 'If you go on so I'll put you in my pocket.' By God, if you do,' said Curran, 'you'll have more law in your pocket than ever you had in your head.'"-Vol. ii. pp. 351–353.

Here is a curious piece of light and shade:

"13th [Jan. 1836].-I was obliged to take my black coat out of pawn to lecture in; and this morning, when all my friends are congratulating me, in walks an execution for £30. I wrote to Lord Melbourne, Peel, and Duke of Bedford. Lord Melbourne sent me directly a cheque for £70. This was kind-hearted. He told me I must not think him hard, but decidedly he could not repeat it. I concluded my grateful reply by telling him that I should think nothing hard but his building the House of Lords without pictures at which he laughed heartily I will be bound."-Vol. iii. p. 27.

An excellent picture of the Lake poet deserves framing :

"Wordsworth called to-day, and we went to church together. There was no seat to be got at the chapel near us, belonging to the rectory of Paddington, and we sat among publicans and sinners. I determined to try him, so advised our staying, as we could hear more easily. He agreed like a Christian; and I was much interested in seeing his venerable white head close to a servant in livery, and on the same level. The servant in livery fell asleep, and so did Wordsworth. I jogged him at the Gospel, and he opened his eyes and read well A preacher preached when we expected another, so it was a disappointment. We afterwards walked to Rogers's, across the park. He had a party to lunch, so I went in to the pictures, and sucked Rembrandt, Reynolds, Veronce, Raffaele, Bassan, and Tintoretto. Wordsworth said, 'Haydon is down stairs.' said Rogers, he is better employed than chattering nonsense up stairs.' As Wordsworth and I crossed the park, we said, 'Scott, Wilkie, Keats, Hazlitt, Beaumont, Jackson, Charles Lamb, are all gone -we only are left.' He said, 'How old are you?' 'Fiftysix,' I replied. How old are you?' 'Seventy-three,' he said; 'in my seventy-third year. I was born in 1770.' 'And I in 1786.' 'You have many years before you.' 'I trust I have; and you, too, I hope. Let us cut out Titian, who was ninety-nine.' Was he ninety-nine ?' said Wordsworth. 'Yes,' said I, and his death was a moral; for as he lay dying of the plague, he was plundered, and could not help himself.' We got on Wakley's abuse. We laughed at him.

'Ah,'

I quoted his own beautiful address to the stock dove. He said, once in a wood, Mrs. Wordsworth and a lady were walking, when the stock dove was cooing. A farmer's wife coming by, said to herself, 'Oh, I do like stock doves.' Mrs. Wordsworth, in all her enthusiasm for Wordsworth's poetry, took the old woman to her heart; 'but,' continued the old woman, some like them in a pie; for my part there's nothing like 'em stewed in onions.'"-Vol. iii. pp. 199, 200.

We have no room for Haydon's visit to Walmer. The following entry exhibits the "Great Duke" church:

at

"A few moments after the service had begun, the Duke and Mr. Arbuthnot came up-no pomp, no servants in livery with a pile of books. The Duke came into the presence of his Maker without cant, without affectation, a simple human being.

"From the bare wainscot, the absence of curtains, the dirty green footstools, and common chairs, I feared I was in the wrong pew, and very quietly sat myself down in the Duke's place. Mr. Arbuthnot squeezed my arm before it was too late, and I crossed in an instant. The Duke pulled out his prayerbook, and followed the clergyman in the simplest way. I got deeply affected. Here was the greatest hero in the world, who had conquered the greatest genius, prostrating his heart and being before his God in his venerable age, and praying for his mercy. However high his destiny above my own, here we were at least equal before our Creator. Here we were stripped of extrinsic distinctions; and I looked at this wonderful man with an interest and feeling that touched my imagination beyond belief. The silence and embosomed solitude of the village church, the simplicity of its architecture, rather deepened than decreased the depth of my sensibilities. At the name of Jesus Christ the Duke bowed his silvery hairs like the humblest labourer, and yet not more than others, but to the same degree. He seemed to wish for no distinction. At the epistle he stood upright, like a soldier, and when the blessing was pronounced, he buried his head in one hand, and uttered his prayer as if it came from his heart in humbleness."-Vol. iii. pp. 114, 115.

It is difficult for us to pass over the abundant stores of what is simply amusing in these volumes. Enough to fill a dozen articles might be selected; and we can well believe the editor, that as much remains unpublished in the amplitude of the twenty-six folios which the painter left behind him. But one object we think it so necessary to recur to, that we restrain ourselves within its scope, though at a considerable effort, in

order to illustrate what we commenced by asserting. Of Haydon, as we have said, the one capital error was his not seeing his own position. He had constituted himself from the first the great witness, or martyr of high art in England. This was a self-assumed office-nay, acknowledged to be such thirty years before his death. In 1812 he decided, calmly and deliberately, upon attacking the Royal Academy. This first attack he inserted in the Examiner. He says:

"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."-Vol. i. p. 164.

The casus belli was, his picture of Macbeth not being hung in a good place at the Academy exhibition.

"I was twenty-six years of age when I attacked the Academy. I exposed their petty intrigues; I laid open their ungrateful, cruel, and heartless treatment of Wilkie. I annihilated Payne Knight's absurd theories against great works. I proved his ignorance of Pliny; and, having thus swept the path, I laid down rules to guide the student which time must confirm-rules, the result of my own failures, collected and digested within six years rules which posterity will refer to, and confirm, early acquired without a master or instructor, settled in spite of folly, and put forth in spite of ignorance or rank." -Vol. i. pp. 165, 166.

Observe how clearly he saw the position he had placed himself in:

"The thing was done, and there was an end. I did not anticipate the consequences, but I defied them now they were come."Vol. i. p. 166.

He had thus deliberately, and with his eyes open, set himself at strife with the only associated body representing art in the country. Although he did not foresee the consequences, he bound himself solemnly to abide by them. But further, he had likewise early avowed his intention of fighting the battle of high art against its degradation, as practised in his day. Here are some of his observations on the subject, penned in this year (1812):

"Do you really expect to raise art by encouraging pictures two feet long and three feet wide? Do you also agree with the

Edinburgh reviewers, that Raphaele would have deserved more praise had he painted pictures of more moderate dimensions? He has done so, and what are they? Fat, oily, and leaden. He has painted easel pictures of a moderate size: let us cut off his great works-how high would he rank?

"But people can't afford-people have not room-I know it-we do not want private people to afford such assistance-we want and expect you, who are assembled as representatives of the people of England, you who are peers of taste, we want you who stand high in station to act as becomes your station. One of your own class has asserted, that an historical picture of acknowledged merit, with a price proportioned to its skill, would be the longest unsold on the walls of the British Gallery; and would not he, as one of the patrons, be to blame? Certainly. He forgets he implicates himself. If the churches are not to be open (and why St. Paul's should not be open as well as St. Peter'swhy pictures should not be admitted as well as statues, no reason on earth can be given), let the public halls be adorned with subjects characteristic of their relations-let the artists be desired to send sketches, and let the best be chosen. At the same time, for the support and encouragement of the rising students, let premiums still be given of one hundred guineas and fifty guineas, which will enable the best to advance on sure ground-open a prospect to students in the first instance, and enable them, after being thus lifted, to look forward to steady assistance if they display equal improvement and equal industry in the second stage. Without such regular and systematic encouragement nothing will, nothing can be done in England. Men of ardour and enthusiasm may risk their lives and ruin their health by privations, and may produce excellence; but, if they are suffered to pass unheeded and neglected, what must be the end?

"Individual effort, without support, can go to a certain extent, and its efforts may be great when enmity and prejudice have ceased. But the artist must be sacrificed before the effect can be produced. No man of genius would refuse such a fate if necessary. He has not the proper fire if he shrink from becoming the Decius of art; but surely he would prefer succeeding whilst alive, and confirming his early successes by subsequent exertions."-Vol. i. pp. 192, 193.

Nothing can be clearer than the artist's recognition, in this passage, of the alternative he had voluntarily accepted. But it is equally clear from it, that by sacrifice he never meant to imply suicide. The expression is evidently metaphorical; and we may gather from it that in the writer's estimation, the pilgrim of the sublimer walks of art ought to feel happy in

foregoing all worldly, or rather temporary and social advantages for the sake of the propagation of his principles throughout the world.

In order, therefore, to act in conformity with this character, he should have accepted the terms of the contest cheerfully in all its consequences; and, still more, he ought to have been able to see how he was really acting it out successfully through life. This it is which, as we conceive, was the capital mistake of Haydon - that is, assuming that he was sincere in those early expressions of his. According to his own rule, he had actually achieved, before the termination of his life, the very objects he had set before him at its commencement. Those objects were, first, to raise the public standard of taste; and secondly, to obtain public or state patronage for high art. As to the former, we have his own judg ment deliberately pronounced several years before his death. It is thus he writes in January, 1837 :

"I find after thirty-three years' struggle, the state of art certainly with a better prospect the Academy completely exposed, the people getting more enlightened, a School of Design begun; and I more than hope the House of Lords will be adorned with pictures.

"O God! spare my intellect-my eyesmy health-my life, to see that accomplished.--Vol. iii. p. 62.

He adds, indeed :

"To see my devotion-my sincerity-my perseverance rewarded and acknowledged; to see my honour proved by the payment of my debts, and my dear family established in virtue and credit, and I will yield my breath with cheering. Amen, with all my soul."Vol. iii. p. 62.

Ne

Thus, he leads us to suspect that, after all, his zeal for art might not have been so entirely disinterested as he would have had us believe at the outset. vertheless, we have a right to take his case as he himself originally stated it; and thus to expect that he would hail the accomplishment of this object, achieved, as he no doubt felt it was, in no inconsiderable degree through his personal instrumentality, as a triumph grandly conspicuous, and brilliant enough to prevent mere private and personal embarrassments from casting any appreciable shadow over it.

The second of the terminal points

year;

he had set before him, as it was of more difficult attainment, so when attained the glory would be only the greater. State encouragement to high art-this was the burden of his song, year after a song as monotonous, and apparently as ineffectual, as a dirge over a dead body. Ineffectual for years; but at length, to this aspiration also fate seemed reluctantly favourable; softening, stimulating, urging statesmen's minds, bringin ground circumstances, and finally, by an inconceivably-unexpected catastrophe, opening wide the door of opportunity, by which all these influences could rush in together, and bear the life long preacher forward and upward upon the tide of his own success.

Towards the close of 1832, Haydon was called upon to paint a picture of a banquet, into which were to be introduced portraits of most of the leading men of liberal politics in England. This gave him access to men in power; and he made use of the opportunity with characteristic perseverance, never omitting to take advantage of the slightest real or imaginary opening to urge the claims of art to state patronage upon his (often reluctant) sitter. There can be little doubt that these efforts had their weight. But it might have been long before any practical good would have come of them, had not the month of October, 1834, been made memorable by a tremendous conflagration

"16th.-Good God! I am just returned from the terrific burning of the Houses of Parliament. Mary and I went in a cab, and drove over the bridge. From the bridge it was sublime. We alighted, and went into a room of a public-house, which was full. The feeling among the people was extraordinary; jokes and radicalism universal. If ministers had heard the shrewd sense and intelligence of these drunken remarks! I hurried Mary away. Good God, and are that throne and tapestry gone with all their associations!"Vol. ii. pp. 362, 363.

Here, then, was the way made plain. A few years later, the Fine Arts Commission gave notice of the conditions for the cartoon competition, intended to test the capacity of English artists for the style of art suited to the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament, by that time in a state of forwardness. This again ought, according to the theory, to have been matter of unalloyed satisfaction to

Haydon. But no; bitterness was his portion to drink, because he was himself unsuccessful in the competition. He laboured at the study of fresco with the desperate hope that he might be one of those chosen to adorn the walls. Here is a letter written to his own pupil, showing the personal light in which he viewed the matter:

"MY DEAR EASTLAKE, - I am delighted, because being a permanent plan it has broken the ice, and will ultimately end in decoration. I depend on yours and the commissioners' judgments; it was doing the thing rightly and with energy; no mincing the matter. Go on, and God prosper us all.

"I appeal to the Royal Commission, to the First Lord, to you the secretary, to Barry the architect, if I ought not to be indulged in my hereditary right to do this, viz., that when the houses are ready, cartoons done, colours mixed, and all at their posts, I shall be allowed, employed or not employed, to take the first brush and dip into the first colour, and put the first touch on the first intonaco. If that is not granted, I'll haunt every noble lord and you, till you join my disturbed spirit on the banks of the Styx. Keep that in view if you regard my peace of mind, my ambition, my pride, and my glory. "Ever yours,

"B. R. HAYDON."

-Vol. iii. pp. 223, 224.

But through this, as through volumes of the diary, runs the same grand inconsistency. Ambition took the guise of disinterested enthusiasm ; and that success which he achieved for his country, and ought to have gloried in, proved fatal to him, because he was not destined to be the immediate instrument as well as the remote means of its accomplishment. The magnificent compartments of those halls in which the councils of the Empire were thenceforward to be held, were not to be enriched by the crea tions of his fervid imagination. This, which would have been a bearable disappointment to artistic patriotism, was a death-staba lethalis arundo - to vanity. And the "white hairs dabbled in blood" spoke, in the affecting language which is the last solution of the life-riddle, that Haydon was blind to the last-blind to his own true merit, to his position, to his success, to his real fame; allowing himself only to see what he boasted of being blind to-namely, petty and paltry vexations.

It is a

There is a moral in all this. dangerous thing to write so much, and

VOL. XLII. NO. CCL.

so well, about one's self, as Haydon did. The world, thus enlightened, will probe the autobiographer's heart better than he thought. He will be seen through where he flattered himself he had interposed the opacity of language as a screen between himself and us. His words will become conductors, and radiate a truth which lies deeper than themselves. Out of this truth we draw our lesson. Never let us assume the office of apostle, priest, or martyr, without first merging self once and for ever in the cause to which we have devoted ourselves. The triumph of the cause will then be our own; and for us ruin can never arrive, as long as the cause is triumphant.

That Haydon was practically deficient in taste, perhaps nobody will be found to deny. The reader of these volumes must certainly admit it. Those who have seen his works, as we have done, have had glaring proof of it. But at the same time it must also be allowed, that seldom has criticism on art been so eloquently and copiously poured forth as through the numerous channels by which Haydon loved to communicate with the world. His letters, these journals, his petitions to Parliament, his memorials to public men, as well as his published lectures, are manuals of artinstruction. Even Sir Joshua, if more elegant, was less vigorous. The elevated, the poetical, the imaginative, towards such he ever strove to lift public and private interest; and, as the means to this end, constantly urged the study of the antique, which at the opening of his life was very generally neglected. He it was who first set himself to a critical examination and a faithful anatomising of the Elgin marbles, about which public taste was for a time divided. He discouraged-he scouted-portrait painting. He hurled contempt upon cabinet and familiar subjects, though he was forced during his life to try all of these in turn. In combating prevailing errors, indeed, he attacked those who had adopted them; and, spurning the excellent advice given him by some one, to "paint down his enemies," he brandished his cuchillo, the pen, and dipped it in poison before he thrust with it. But, although the venom was his own, the dart went home to prevalent abuses; and even the Academy-the life-long incubus of his existence was sensibly affected in 2 F

the long run by the powers of the truth he plied it with.

These achievements of his will survive his name and his painted works. He will be best known by the reflection of his mind in the performances of others; and thus will he prove virtually, after Barry, the regenerator, if not the originator, of high art in England.

This cursory notice of Haydon's essays in criticism induces us to glance for a moment, before we conclude, at another work dealing with the same subject, as different in its form, substance, and spirit as the authors of the two are from each other in every conceivable particular. M. Guizot's

Treatise on the Fine Arts is impressed with the character of that writer's mind. Refined, instructed, chaste, and elegant, it forms an admirable corrective to the extravagancies of the English enthusiast; while it must be allowed to want the soul-informing energy, the bright and bold originality of concep tion which it may serve to temper, but cannot pretend to rival. Guizot devotes a preliminary essay to comparing and contrasting painting, sculpture, and engraving; executing his task, as he always does, with tact and ability. But in doing so, as it appears to us, he falls into mistakes here and there, which we were scarcely prepared to meet with in so accomplished a writer. In his definition, for instance, of the distinctive aims of the sculptor and painter, he adopts an erroneous standard, which Haydon, with all his zeal for antique correctness of details, would never have admitted. The sculptor's manner of proceeding he states to be this:

"He takes a mass of clay; his model is present to his eyes as, according to Plato, that of the archetypal man was in the creative mind of God: he walks in spirit round it, examines it on all sides, and takes its dimensions thoroughly. He is acquainted too with its frame-work, with the form, the length, and the thickness of the bones; he knows how they are connected, and what the muscles are which clothe and move them. His first act is to set up in imagination this scaffolding of bones; he then covers it with muscles, to which he gives the attitude and degree of motion necessary for his statue,

and finally envelops all with the flesh which is to give the proportions and the living form of man. It is thus that the gems of antiquity show us Prometheus over his awful work. When marble has been substituted for clay, and has been impressed by the hand of the master with the delicate form of the human features; when its surface has assumed the gentle undulations of flesh, and those forms which conceal, while they allow us to conjecture, the shape of what is below; when this is done, the man of stone will be found to differ from his living prototype only in substance, colour, and weight, and, in fact, to possess even in detail, all the outward characteristics of the human body."pp. 10, 11.

As far as the latter part, or result, of the process is concerned, the critie is quite right; but we believe and feel that the steps by which the sculptor arrives at that result are misstated, or at least not stated in their proper order. When Guizot says, that "his first act is to set up a scaffolding of bones," we can believe Haydon, with all his idolatry of the antique and of anatomical skill, to be the first to exclaim, No! the first act is to represent, upon the surface of the clay the surface of the thought. If he do not realise this to a certain extent in the first instance, he will have accomplished nothing. The poetic conception, utterly irrespective of either detail or structure, flies to embody itself as it can. It models it

self into a rude outline, keeps the original idea prominently forward, preserving every line of grace or vigour, but passing for the moment over structural niceties, which would at this stage only tend to obscure and ideal, around which crystalises the obliterate the one bright and glowing substantial creation of art. It is only when all this is worked out to the uttermost that the sculptor begins to exercise his corrective skill, or judgment, as distinguished from the imagi native or poetic faculty, and to chasten and examine his work by the rules of his art, enriched, as they ought to be, from the amplest and most varied stores of knowledge. Here the Greek precision will come appropriately into play. Anatomy and every structural nicety should be brought to bear upon the model-every limb, every muscle should be subjected to the most rigid

Scharf, jun. London: 1853.

With Illustrations drawn on wood, by George