The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1853-10-04 00:00:00

REVIEWS OF BOOKS.

ne Dublin University Magazine for October.

Dublin : JalUes VGlashan,

This, the two hundred and fiftieth number,
like most of its predecessors, is spirited and
lively. It commences with one of those delight-
ful poetical wreaths which of late have formed
an interesting feature of its contents. The pre-
sent, under the name of " Leaves of October,"
contains a melange of charming poetry from the
pens of many poets, some new to fame, some only
soaring into its enchanted realms. This chaplet
from -the bowers of song is strung upon a thread
e golden tissue, spun by no less cunning a hand
than that of our ancient friend Anthony Poplar,
lea:Lose fine taste and delicate sensibility have fre-
quently lent lustre to the adornment of this ma-
gazine. This melange is followed by one of the
racy and dashing series, " Irish Rivers," in which
topography, statistics, and glowing descriptive
imagery are blended with a skill and gusto at once
overleaping the pales of dry propriety, and, like the
graceful gambols of a startled fawn, bounding in
wild freedom over meadow and upland, through
thicket and copse, and away far up among heath-
bells and mountains ; a varied and devious flight,
yet nimbly and joyously pursued. To this suc-
ceeds a sombre, indeed melancholy paper, illus-
trative of the unhappiness and ultimate misery of
ever-sensitive genius in its unequal struggles with
the every-day world. The paper is founded on the
auto-biography of Benjamin R. Haydon, the cele-
brated historical painter, whose life, like that of
Barry, and other kindred sons of the muses, whose
Eves have been embittered, and many of their best
days wasted, in fruitless efforts to make men wiser
and more refined than the circumstances of the age
in which they lived would permit. The paper,
though of great social importance, is tragic in its
lines ; and in tracing the greatness of Hay don's
achievements, and their melancholy results, the
opportunity is not lost of inculcating the whole-
some lesson—that even the brightest genius can-
sot drive society, although, judiciously employed,
it may greatly accelerate the
.speed of social im-
provement, while directing it into a safe and
profitable channel. At his opening, the author of
this article says truly that mere repetition of effort
is not enough to ensure success, but that these
repetitions must be directed in the course by which
they can best reach and penetrate the public mind.
He thus particularises

THI3 DPLIISIOSS OP HAYDON,

The aspirant who struggles with fortune for fame ought
to be prepared for reverses, and know how to meet them.
His duty is to bend before them, but rise up after they
are past, and pursue his course. A long-continued effort
of this kind, when it becomes conspicuous, is called
heroism ; it often results in success. But there is some-
thing more wanted than mere obstinacy of intention in
the face of obstacles, to justify the epithet and realize that
lofty character. An insane shaking of the bars of his
dungeon by a madman, though it were continued ever so
long, would never command our admiration. And, on the
other hand, petulance, ill-humour, vindictiveness, animo-
sity, and despair, exhibited by the struggler, deprive us of
the power of appropriately designating his struggles as
heroic. That disappointment should be nobly borne is
essentially necessary to the sympathy of the world for it.
And no man can expect to be canonized in its affections
who proves himself undeserving of its respect. Although,
therefore, there are distinct reasons for our directing the
reader's attention for a few moments towards the memoirs
of a very remarkable individual, we must not be under-
stood as by any means adopting the unhappy artist's
creed, as regarded either himself or his treatment by others.
His whole career was a mistake—a mistake which ended
fatally for himself. He believed he was born to be a great
historical painter, and never could be brought to suspect
that the cause of his failure might possibly lie in his own
incapacity as well as in the stolidity of the public, the,
corruption of the Academy, and the culpable apathy of
Government. He wrote a partial autobiography, and a
journal almost as comprehensive as an autobiography, as a
warning to students of art—for so he expressly says ;—but
only meant to be so as far as regarded the vexations and
repulses that would beset them throughout their career,
no matter what their talents and deserts might be ;—not
by any means intending that his own reverses should put
them upon a rigid self-scrutiny, with a view to prevent
that collision between them and the world, in which the
odds are so fearfully against the individual. In short, we
must read the book before us from the beginning in the
light of its close, and accept the revelation as another leaf
in that mysterious record, the human heart, held up to us
to humble our pride, and to reconcile us to our lot, by
showing us what too fierce a resistance to it comes to at last.

The summing up of the account between the,
gifted, though erratic, artist and the public, as
given in the conclusion of the paper, is a truthful
and pregnant corollary from its opening strictures,
and may be entitled

THE MISDIRECTION OF RANDON'S EFFORTS.

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 magni-
ficent compartments of those halls in which the councils
of the Empire were thenceforward to be held, were not to
be enriched by the creations of his fervid imagination.
This, which would have been a bearable disappointment to
artistic patriotism, was a death-stab—a 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
true merit, to his position, to his success, to his real
; allowing himself only to see what he boasted of
being blind to—namely, petty and paltry vexations. There
emu moral •
m
ch all this. It is a dangerous thing to write so
world, and so well, about one's self, as Haydon did. The
thus enlightened, will probe the autobiographer's
heart better than he thought. He will be seen through
where he had flattered himself he had interposed the
Opacity of la
His words :virilualfeec as a screen between himself and us.
which lies dee
per
thaonme conductors, and radiate a truth
themselves. Out, of this truth we
draw our lesson. Never let us assume the office of apostle,
priest, or martyr, without first merging aedf once Aud far