The Autobiography of Leslie seems to us in some sort the complement
of Haydon's, and throws the defiant struggle of that remarkable
self-portraiture into stronger relief by the contrast of its equable
good-fortune and fireside tranquillity. The causes of the wide
difference in the course and the result of these two lives are on the
surface and are instructive. Comparing the two men at the outset, we
should have said that all the chances were on Haydon's side. If he had
not genius, he had at least the temperament and external characteristics
that go along with it. He had what is sometimes wanting to it in its
more purely aesthetic manifestation, the ambition that spurs and the
unflagging energy that seemed a guerdon of unlimited achievement.
Yet the ambition fermented into love of notoriety and soured into a
fraudulent self-assertion, that grew boastful as it grew distrustful of
its claims and could bring less proof in support of them; the energy
degenerated into impudence, evading the shame of spendthrift bankruptcy
to-day by shifts that were sure to bring a more degrading exposure
tomorrow; and the whole ended at last in a suicide whose tragic pang
is deadened to us by the feeling that so much of the mixed motive that
drove him to it as was not cowardice was a hankering after melodramatic
effect, the last throb of a passion for making his name the theme of
public talk, and his fate the centre of a London day's sensation.
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