DREAM OF GLORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 508, 18 March 1949, Page 12

DREAM OF GLORY

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON. By Eric George. Oxford University Press, London. English price, 21/-. AYDON believed himself to be a genius, and he was ready to sacrifice everything and everyone, including himself, to. the demands of art. Throughout his life he lived largely on faith and borrowed money; but the faith was in himself, or in a deity which could be seen as a monstrous enlargement of his own ego, so that a time came when it could no longer save him; and the people to whom he looked for help when he was in danger of being taken off to prison grew weary of lending. His life could have been different and brighter if he had been less in love with fame. In the years of promise, when influential people shared the belief in his greatness as a historical painter, he wanted everything or nothing. A dream of glory drew him into extravagant follies. He offended his patrons, insulted his benefactors, and went out of his way to discover enemies in the Royal Academy. His enormous vanity made him sacrifice friendships and opportunities; and at the end, when his work was cruelly rejected, he was left with no way, out except through Suicide. It is probable that even then, in the darkness and misery of the final scene in his painting room, he died with the conviction that posterity would give him full agd favourable recognition. Posterity has taken notice of Haydon, but not as the great painter he believed himself to be. Eric George, who has used his’ material with excellent judgment, sees in Haydon’s life the elements of Greek tragedy. Here was a man who prayed for fame, and who won enough of it to make him persevere with huge canvases and historical subjects when public taste was changing. He did not understand the satisfaction of work that is done for its own sake; and although he could work as hard as the most selfless artist, he worked too often for the wrong reasons-his thoughts: on "beauty, rank and fashion’-and so was drawn by his fatal ambition into paths that led to the abyss. The real tragedy of Haydon’s life might have been ‘his failure to discover his vocation. Everyone who has read his description of the "immortal dinner" at which Keats wag introduced as Wordsworth must have suspected that England lost a great writer when Hay-. don turned to painting. There are other passages of comparable value in the Autobiography and the Journals. They may keep Haydon alive, in strong and vivid writing, long after the pictures have disappeared. Yet it is painful to read of him, for he suffered much; and at the end of his life there is only one | thing to be said-‘"poor Haydon!"

M.H.

H.