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Page 3
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 lifted the low voice to that high
note, so delicately untuned? She who would not be prodigal of words
might yet, indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales, and laughed
at gilded butterflies of the court of crimes, and lived so long in the
strange health of an emancipated brain as to wear out
Packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.
She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry and
strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid called
Barbara.
It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona
remembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth. Of all the songs of
the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there is
nothing more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some have
died for love." To one who has always recognized the greatness of this
poem and who possibly had known and forgotten how much Ruskin prized it,
it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in _Modern Painters_,
where this grave lyric is cited for an example of great imagination. It
is the mourning and restless song of the lover ("the pretty Barbara
died") who has not yet broken free from memory into the alien world of
the insane.
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