John Keats - The Complete Poems of John Keats

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WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST FOR POETRY

So much for the relations of Keats with Hunt himself in these first six months of their intimacy. Next of the other intimacies which he formed with friends to whom Hunt introduced him. One of the first of these, and for a while the most stimulating and engrossing, was with the painter Haydon. This remarkable man, now just thirty, had lately been victorious in one of the two great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory in the other. For the last eight years he had fought and laboured to win national recognition for the deserts of Lord Elgin in his great work of salvage — for such under the conditions of the time it was — in bringing away the remains of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens. By dint of sheer justice of conviction and power of fight, and then only when he had been reinforced in the campaign by foreigners of indisputable authority like the archaeologist Visconti and the sculptor Canova, he had succeeded in getting the pre-eminence of these marbles among all works of the sculptor’s art acknowledged, and their acquisition for the nation secured, in the teeth of powerful and bitterly hostile cliques. His opponents included both the sentimentalists who took their cue from Byron’s Curse of Minerva in shrieking at Elgin as a vandal, and the dilettanti who, blinded to the true Greek touch by familiarity with smoothed and pumiced Roman copies, had declared the Parthenon sculptures to be works of the age of Hadrian.

Haydon’s victory over these antagonists is his chief title, and a title both sound and strong, to the regard of posterity. His other and lifelong, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His high-flaming energy and industry, his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his indomitable self-assertion and of his ceaseless conflict with the academic powers, even his unabashed claims for pecuniary support on friends, patrons, and society at large, had won for him much convinced or half convinced attention and encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of dilettantism and fashion. His first and second great pictures, ‘Dentatus’ and ‘Macbeth,’ had been dubiously received; his third, the ‘Judgment of Solomon,’ with acclamation. This had been finished after his victory in the matter of the Elgin marbles. He was now busy on one larger and more ambitious than all, ‘Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,’ in which it was his purpose to include among the crowd of lookers-on portraits of many famous men both historical and contemporary. While as usual sunk deep in debt, he was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence — for he was in truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. ‘Never,’ wrote he about this time, ‘have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me…. They came over me, and shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God.’ But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to Haydon. Its vision and originality, its gift of ‘heavenly alchemy’ for transmuting and new-creating the materials offered it by experience, its sovereign inability to see with any eyes or create to any pattern but its own, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an occasional bold conception, a trick of colour or craftsmanship not too obviously caught from greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of true great art but of imitative pictorial posturing and empty pictorial bombast.

As a draughtsman especially, Haydon’s touch is surprisingly loose, empty, and inexpressive. Even in drawing from the Elgin marbles, as he did with passionate industry, covering reams, he fails almost wholly to render the qualities which he so ardently perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety of the original. Infinitely better is his account of them in words: for in truth Haydon’s chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best instrument the pen. Readers of his journals and correspondence know how vividly and tellingly he can relate an experience or touch off a character. In this gift of striking out a human portrait in words he stood second in his age, if second, to Hazlitt alone, and in our later literature there has been no one to beat him except Carlyle. But passion and pugnacity, vanity and the spirit of self-exaltation, at the same time as they intensify vision, are bound to discolour and distort it; and the reader must always bear in mind that Haydon’s pen portraits of his contemporaries are apt to be not less untrustworthy than they are unforgettable. Moreover in this, the literary, form of expression also, where he aims higher, leaving description and trying to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied void turgidity, and proof of spiritual hollowness disguised by temperamental fervour, as in his paintings.

But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his character, and not his essential commonness of gift and faculty, that impressed his associates as they impressed himself. Sturdy, loud-voiced, eloquent, high of colour, with a bald perpendicular forehead surmounting a set of squarely compressed, pugnacious features, — eyes, lips and jaw all prominent and aggressive together, — he was a dominating, and yet a welcome, presence in some of the choicest circles of his day. Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s firm ally, the painter-baronet Sir George Beaumont, Hazlitt, Horace Smith, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Mary Mitford, were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit of thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for deliverance from ‘pecuniary emergencies,’ and the like. ‘I always rose up from my knees,’ he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, ‘with a refreshed fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life.’ And he was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both particulars, lecturing them loftily on faith and conduct while he was living without scruple on their bounty.

In October 1816, the first month of Keats’ intimacy with Hunt, Haydon also made a short stay at Hampstead. He and Hunt were already acquainted, and Hunt had published in the Examiner the very able, cogent and pungent letter with which Haydon a few months before had clenched the Elgin marble controversy and practically brought it to an end. Hunt had congratulated Haydon in a sonnet on the occasion, closing with a gentle hint that, fine as such a victory was, he was himself devoted to a mission finer still, as

One of the spirits chosen by heaven to turn

The sunny side of things to human eyes.