The Press. — London, England, 1853-07-23 00:00:00

auLY 23, 1853. blandly-termed mistakes, be it said, were the fruits of a headstrong, ill-disciplined character, which, sowing in the storms naturally reaped in the whirlwind. The narrative in some sort re sembles a Greek play, in which the coming catas trophe casts a shadow throughout, without fore stalling the interest, which is sustained by the step-by-step progress, and by the moral and m elancholy which, like a low note, runs throughout the tragedy. Mr. Haydon was - born iu 1788, at Plymouth, where his father was a bookseller. The organs of the athlete and artist were early developed, by the boy's delight in drawing guillotines and caricaturing his schoolfellows. Placed behind the counter, he insulted the customers. and in 1804 started for London, reckless of his father's advice and his mother's tears. The wild lad opened his schemes, on his arrival, to his townsman, old Northeote Heestori caul peinter 1" replied the world-wise miser, " ye'el starve—anatomy's no use—Sir 'Joshua didn't know it," " But Michael Angelo did, sir." " Michael Angelo ! what's he to du here? You must paint portraits here, or ye'ell die with a bundle of straw under ye'er head." Haydon turned a deaf ear to this true prophet —clung to the fantastic Fuseli—aud was cheered and misled by that congenial hater of portraits. Mr. Haydon's daguerreotype of his strange Mentor evinces his Hogarthean powers of portrait bordering on caricature. Arrived at the terrible threshold, galvanised devils met him in anticipation. " I heard the foot " steps of Fuseli (whom he fancied a giant), and " then saw a little bony hand slide round the " edge of the door, followed by a little white " headed, lion-faced man, in an old flannel " dressing-gown, tied round his waist with a " piece of rove, and upon his head the bottom "of Mrs. } usell'a work-basket." The stu dent proceeded to sit down doggedly to draw the figure at the Academy, and formed a friend ship with Wilkie—" a raw, pale, queer Scotch " man"—which continued all their lives, widely as they diverged and differed in character and art. The anecdotes and inklings of Wilkie scattered through these pages form some of the interesting portions, for Haydon had a graphic power of describing incidents and per sons. The canny Scot, who bowed to every storm and to every great man, achieved fame and fortune by painting what his patrons do sired to have, while the wrong-headed, sturdy Saxon, who fought against the pricks, by trying to force down what no one wished for, lived and flied in disgrace and distress. The road to fortune was soon opened to both by Lord Mulgrave and Sir George Beaumont, whose hobbies were politics and pictures. Wilkie took the tide at the ebb, but Haydon neglected the sound advice of his patrons to paint smaller subjects and portraits, as a relief to mind and purse—nay, was proud of quar relling with at man of rank. When too late he found out his many errors, and turned (to keep the wolf from the door) to subjects and sizes which if, as he maintained, inde pendent of high art, at least made artists in dependent, by tilling their sacks, which never, when empty, can stand upright : in the end this martyr to principle, this champion of high art in theory, descended to an habitual practice of moral and artificial lowness almost without example ; and yet for every tergiversation and dereliction his self-love found a ready excuse. He began with a false start, and, ascribing to the jealousy of the Royal Academy the un favourable position in which his first picture was hung, forthwith threw away the scabbard, and commenced an internecine war with that corporation, embittering it with personalities which recoiled on their author. He flew at Martin Shee with that bull-dog spirit by which we have seen his pupil, Eastlake, recently as sailed by an opponent into whom—if there be truth in metempsychosis—his fiery and furious spirit has transmimstted. Endued with the " pluck" and" bottom" of a bntiser, RS he boasted, he waxed fiercer from opposition; and while his friend Keats—slain by a paper pellet—allowed himself to be snuffed out by an " article," and while Wilkie, when president West pitted the poor Bird against him, nearly gave up the ghost, Haydon " determined to fight it out," and returned blow for blow with all his might, and, standing like a stag at bay, gored without mercy, reckless if his hood wero singed, THE PRESS. so as the furnace heated for his foe was hot. In an evil hour his associate Leigh Hunt opened to him the pages of the Examiner, and he suc cumbed to the temptation of wielding the pen — a power most perilous to artists. Subsequently he corresponded with the Times, and attributed to "three letters" all of the success of the Reform Bill, as the fly on &sop's axle placed the dust to his credit. His ardent tempera ment threw him early into the company of patriots, spouters, and boon companions. Hints occur early of an " infernal woman," a siren, by whom his road to ruin was accele rated; yet, in the lucid intervals of his spas modic career, he worked hard, and had a sincere appreciation of Nature, in all her in exhaustible varieties, and worshipped her as the true mistress of the beautiful. His pre dilections for the grand anti heroic led him also to be among the first to recognise the value of the Elgin marbles, which, sneered at by the Academicians and the Payne Knights of the day, were stowed away in " a back pent house in Park-lane " until his judgment was ratified by Canova. Those he had studied, when wet, cold, and starving on a crust, for from ten to fifteen hours at a stretch. In lt4lo the pecuniary support from his father ceased, and then began a system of borrowing and makeshifts, from which he never got extricated. This portion of the auto biography is no less prominent than painful : pages and pages occur filled with mean devices for raising the wind, and with new schemes for paying old debts. Once caught in the meshes of money-lenders and attorneys, he was worn and wasted—marrowbone and all. He was so often taken in execution and impri soned in the King's Bench, that it became a " blessed house of refuge." He never, in spite of all his fine professions, made any real, high-minded effort to cut down his expenses to his means, and endeavour to be prudent anti just before he was generous and indulgent ; may, this creature of passions and impulses, when over head anti ears in debt, fell deeper in love, anti married, with out a shilling in his pocket, a widow with a ready-made family, and marvellous sub sequent fecundity. The honeymoon scarcely waned ere the prison was his home, and the Court of Insolvency his sheet-anchor ; and, if the cell and the court recurred constantly, at least his love for his amiable and long-suffer ing wife continued to the end—gladdening, as a ray of sunshine, the ruined fabric of his worldly hopes and ambitions. This tender sentiment, which, like a rich lode, ran through his corsair granite nature, was coupled with a deep but wayward religiousness—tbr the term religion would be misapplied in reference to his mode of conducting relations with the Deity ; —this arrogant self-assertive creature held "constant converse" with his Creator in prayer, and by double entry in his journal ledgers, in which he kept a running debtor and creditor account of favours asked for and received. This despiser of human authorities was neither orthodox or a churchman, or ever failed to miss church whenever it suited him, feeling that he derived greater benefit in his studio than dozing at a dull sermon in a pew. When shut up in his closet, his particular petitions, no less frequent than familiar, referred more to his personal physical necessities, art triumphs, anti mundane vanities of vanity, than to future aunt spiritual blessings. He treated the Deity as his tutelar and special guardian, and trusted in some interruptive action by which the great scheme of Providence was to be disturbed to meet his petty emer gencies. The Deity was summoned at all hours and occasions, ex issachind, just as an able bodied mendicant applies for daily bread to a relieving officer. Thus he closes his medita tions of 15:1.1 with thanks for " subsistence truly miraculous." fed as it were with quails anti manna, a diet he expected to find con tinued if needful. So when the kind but eccentric Lord Egremont came, with am brosial cash, in the very nick of ruin, he prays God "to make so generous a nobleman his lasting friend." Numerous are his thanks givings for " rapid extrication from prison," ' and hearty are those when "he reflects that, " without a farthing in his pocket, he has a " good house, food, a dear wife, a sweet family, " and good orsdir His gratitude savoured 281 somewhat of a lively anticipation of the future. To advance high art in England was a main item in his supplications; and, conse quently, those " merciful assistanees in pecu niary exigencies during my last picture" were most acceptable. Anon he prays that" his Laza rus' may reach the National Gallery, to be placed in competition with the Sebastian del Piombo," and that his " first fresco painting may be blessed" as the locomotives are in France by the priests when a new line of rail is opened. But when ho begins a Calvary, and " prays God that it may be the grandest Crucifixion over painted," we close the book with the conviction, how closely irreverence and blasphemy tread on the heels of natural and artificial superstition. Limited space compels us to suspend for the pre ' sent these notices on this singular man of prayer and his supplications, part of which the gods granted, and part dispersed in thin air. It would have been better, perhaps, if all had been rejected, for in the end he wearied out the heavens, as he had tired the three united king doms, anti his first fondest and most fervent petition was vouchsafed, the furtherance of the art decoration of public buildings at the public cost. When the destruction of the Houses of Parliament by fire led to the open competition of cartoons of historical subjects on a grand scale, Haydun, older even then in years, ha rassed and broken in mind and body, de scended into the arena to wrestle with younger opponents, and failed. His wounded vanity mortified under the blow, and from that mo ment he drooped, and, unable longer to buffet with diminishing powers against increasing difficulties, which came now like fl ights of ill ()likened birds,until his house roof was blackened, ho sought refuge in suicide Thus, to use the simile of Byron, the shaft that pierced the eagle wits winged by a leather plucked from his own breast, and the realisation of the prayers of his life caused his death by self-slaughter, against which the Everlasting had fixed his canon. The Story of Corfe Coale. By the Bight Honourable George Blinked, M.P. London : Murray. IT is curious how in childhood the relation of striking incidents seizes the youthful mind. All our readers, probably, will recollect how Elfrida and Corfe Castle are associated with their earliest recollections of English history. In the sound of their very names there is a cadence that arrests the ear; and in aftertimes, when we read in Clarendon of the gallant defence of Corfu Castle by the heroine Lady Bankes, the old name marked by us in youth gives pleasure to the grown mind. We have read the volume before us with great interest; and the fact that it exhibits none of the hackneyed craft of authorship im parts to the style a freshness that is one of the highest merits in the eyes of a critic. Mr. Banker writes with the refined homeli• ness of an English gentleman, avoiding claptrap. and preWrring the sensible to the sentimental. Amid the flashy publications of the day, his plain, manly style comes on us with the pleas ing effect of wholesome English fare after a months diet on foreign kiekshaws. It is only right to give our readers a specimen of the calui vigour of the narrative power of Mr. Bankes. In alluding to the attainder of Strafford he says : The question being then put fur passing the bill against the earl, it was carried in the affirmative-2M against Mi. The majority was large, but little more than one half of thu members of the house were present, and it way be Ke nneled that nearly the whole of the members who did not ap pear were.unfavounible to the measure—for this unrighteous vote received at the time the vehement applause of the people. This is a period which may bear comparison with that of the reign of terror in the French revolution, when the cry for blood influenced the votes of a humbling Par liament, and brought a man nnetinvicted by say law to the • . From the time when the bill attain INIIIIOI4 Wei peo. posed, serious dissensions appeared in she ploy wideis bat hitherto cordially , acted together in the Cosiness: a melt number only had the courage to vote aCt *. A. for the fury of the people had now stirred up by preachers in the pulpits throughout the aseesepolia. The fiftpnirw who gave this vote beams, irrefure par scribed men, their lives thremeased, std sink pumas eat , d a : they dared to appear Is pubis. /Na pden did not approve of fhb node el s = Denzil Holies would take as dim is it. protas against id, mad so did wary lawyer of say raw WIA WII IA tie; hoot s osceptiag St. Jo* who tbsow hes II I I I