by heart, and setting them clear in an editorial judgement because he thinks himself to hold a trust, by virtue of his biographical office, to explain the sufferings and the failure of a conquered man.

What, in the end, are the sins which are to lead the reader, sad but satisfied, to conclude with “See the result of—”, or “So it ever must be with him who yields to—,” or whatever else may be the manner of ratifying the sentence on the condemned and dead?  Haydon, we hear, omitted to ask advice, or, if he asked it, did not shape his course thereby unless it pleased him.  Haydon was self-willed; he had a wild vanity, and he hoped he could persuade all the powers that include the powers of man to prosper the work of which he himself was sure.  He did not wait upon the judgement of the world, but thought to compel it.

Should he, then, have waited upon the judgement of such a world?  He was foremost in the task of instructing, nay, of compelling it when there was a question of the value of the Elgin Marbles, and when the possession—which was the preservation—of these was at stake.  There he was not wrong; his judgement, that dealt him, in his own cause, the first, the fatal, the final injury—the initial subtle blow that sent him on his career so wronged, so cleft through and through, that the mere course and action of life must ruin him—this judgement, in art, directed him in the decision of the most momentous of all public questions.  Haydon admired, wrote, protested, declaimed, and fought; and in great part, it seems, we owe our perpetual instruction by those judges of the Arts which are the fragments of the Elgin sculptures, to the fact that Haydon trusted himself with the trust that worked his own destruction.  Into the presence especially of those seated figures, commonly called the Fates, we habitually bring our arts for sentence.  He lent an effectual hand to the setting-up of that Tribunal of headless stones.

The thing we should lament is rather that the world which refused, neglected, forgot him—and by chance-medley was right, was right!—had no possible authority for anything that it did against him, and that he might have sent it to school, for all his defect of genius; moreover, that he was mortally wounded in the last of his forty years of battle by this ironic wound: among the bad painters chosen to adorn the Houses of Parliament with fresco, he was not one.  This affront he took at the hands of men who had no real distinctions in their gift.  He might well have had, by mere chance, some great companion with whom to share that rejection.  The unfortunate man had no such fortuitous fellowship at hand.  How strange, the solitude of the bad painter outcast by the worst, and capable of making common cause indomitably with the good, had there been any such to take heart from his high courage!

There was none.  There were ranged the unjust judges with their blunders all in good order, and their ignorance new dressed, and there was no artist to destroy except only this one, somewhat better than their favoured, their appointed painters in fresco; one uncompanioned, and a man besides through whose heart the public reproach was able to cut keenly.

Is this sensibility to be made a reproach to Haydon?  It has always seemed to me that he was not without greatness—yet he was always without dignity—in those most cruel passages of his life, such as that of his defeat, towards the close of his war, by the show of a dwarf, to which all London thronged, led by Royal example, while the exhibition of his picture was deserted.  He was not betrayed by anger at this end of hopes and labours in which all that a man lives for had been pledged.  Nay, he succeeded in bearing what a more inward man would have taken more hardly.  He was able to say in his loud voice, in reproach to the world, what another would have barred within: one of his great pictures was in a cellar, another in an attic, another at the pawnbroker’s, another in a grocer’s shop, another unfinished in his studio; the bills for frames and colours and the rent were unpaid.  Some solace he even found in stating a few of these facts, in French, to a French official or diplomatic visitor to London, interested in the condition of the arts.  Well, who shall live without support?  A man finds it where he can.

After these offences of self-will and vanity Tom Taylor finds us some other little thing—I think it is inaccuracy.  Poor Haydon says in one phrase that he paid all his friends on such a day, and in another soon following that the money given or lent to him had been insufficient to pay them completely; and assuredly there are many revisions, after-thoughts, or other accidents to account for such a slip.  His editor says the discrepancy is “characteristic,” but I protest I cannot find another like it among those melancholy pages.  If something graver could but be sifted out from all these journals and letters of frank confession, by the explainer!  Here, then, is the last and least: Haydon was servile in his address to “men of rank.”  But his servility seems to be very much in the fashion of his day—nothing grosser; and the men who set the fashion had not to shape their style to Haydon’s perpetual purpose, which was to ask for commissions or for money.

Not the forsaken man only but also the fallen city evokes this exercise of historical morality, until a man in flourishing London is not afraid to assign the causes of the decay of Venice; and there is not a watering place upon our coasts but is securely aware of merited misfortune on the Adriatic.

Haydon was grateful, and he helped men in trouble; he had pupils, and never a shilling in pay for teaching them.  He painted a good thing—the head of his Lazarus.  He had no fault of theory: what fault of theory can a man commit who stands, as he did, by “Nature and the Greeks”?  In theory he soon outgrew the Italians then most admired; he had an honest mind.

But nothing was able to gain for him the pardon that is never to be gained, the impossible pardon—pardon for that first and last mistake—the mistake as to his own powers.  If to pardon means to dispense from consequence, how should this be pardoned?  Art would cease to be itself, by such an amnesty.

A NORTHERN FANCY

“I remember,” said Dryden, writing to Dennis, “I remember poor Nat Lee, who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and witty answer to a bad poet who told him, ‘It was an easy thing to write like a madman.’  ‘No,’ said he, ‘’tis a very difficult thing to write like a madman, but ’tis a very easy thing to write like a fool.’”  Nevertheless, the difficult song of distraction is to be heard, a light high note, in English poetry throughout two centuries at least, and one English poet lately set that untethered lyric, the mad maid’s song, flying again.

A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—the age of the re-discovery of death; against the crime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that had made the poets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy, inconstancy—may have caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this tune of innocence, and this carol of liberty, to be held so dear.  “I heard a maid in Bedlam,” runs the old song.  High and low the poets tried for that note, and the singer was nearly always to be a maid and crazed for love.  Except for the temporary insanity so indifferently worn by the soprano of the now deceased kind of Italian opera, and except that a recent French story plays with the flitting figure of a village girl robbed of her wits by woe (and this, too, is a Russian villager, and the Southern author may have found his story on the spot, as he seems to aver) I have not met elsewhere than in England this solitary and detached poetry of the treble note astray.

At least, it is principally a northern fancy.  Would the steadfast Cordelia, if she had not died, have