Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays — Themes and Context

There was no fault of the intellect in his apprehension of the thing he thought to stand possessed of. He conceived it aright, and he was just in his rebuke of a world so dull and trivial before the art for which he died. He esteemed it aright, except when he deemed it his.

His editor, thinking himself to be summoned to justify the chastisement, the destruction, the whole retribution of such a career, looks here and there for the sins of Haydon; the search is rewarded with the discovery of faults such as every man and woman entrusts to the common generosity, the general consciousness. It is a pity to see any man conning such offences by heart, and setting them clear in an editorial judgement because he thinks himself to hold a trust, by virtue of his biographical office, to explain the sufferings and the failure of a conquered man.

What, in the end, are the sins which are to lead the reader, sad but satisfied, to conclude with "See the result of--", or "So it ever must be with him who yields to--," or whatever else may be the manner of ratifying the sentence on the condemned and dead? Haydon, we hear, omitted to ask advice, or, if he asked it, did not shape his course thereby unless it pleased him. Haydon was self-willed; he had a wild vanity, and he hoped he could persuade all the powers that include the powers of man to prosper the work of which he himself was sure. He did not wait upon the judgement of the world, but thought to compel it.

Should he, then, have waited upon the judgement of such a world? He was foremost in the task of instructing, nay, of compelling it when there was a question of the value of the Elgin Marbles, and when the possession--which was the preservation--of these was at stake. There he was not wrong; his judgement, that dealt him, in his own cause, the first, the fatal, the final injury--the initial subtle blow that sent him on his career so wronged, so cleft through and through, that the mere course and action of life must ruin him--this judgement, in art, directed him in the decision of the most momentous of all public questions. Haydon admired, wrote, protested, declaimed, and fought; and in great part, it seems, we owe our perpetual instruction by those judges of the Arts which are the fragments of the Elgin sculptures, to the fact that Haydon trusted himself with the trust that worked his own destruction. Into the presence especially of those seated figures, commonly called the Fates, we habitually bring our arts for sentence. He lent an effectual hand to the setting-up of that Tribunal of headless stones.

The thing we should lament is rather that the world which refused, neglected, forgot him--and by chance-medley was right, was right!--had no possible authority for anything that it did against him, and that he might have sent it to school, for all his defect of genius; moreover, that he was mortally wounded in the last of his forty years of battle by this ironic wound: among the bad painters chosen to adorn the Houses of Parliament with fresco, he was not one. This affront he took at the hands of men who had no real distinctions in their gift. He might well have had, by mere chance, some great companion with whom to share that rejection. The unfortunate man had no such fortuitous fellowship at hand. How strange, the solitude of the bad painter outcast by the worst, and capable of making common cause indomitably with the good, had there been any such to take heart from his high courage!

There was none. There were ranged the unjust judges with their blunders all in good order, and their ignorance new dressed, and there was no artist to destroy except only this one, somewhat better than their favoured, their appointed painters in fresco; one uncompanioned, and a man besides through whose heart the public reproach was able to cut keenly.