Chatterton makes us lenient to a life of fraud by the dogged and cynical
uncomplainingness of the despair that drove him to cut it short; but
Haydon continues his self-autopsy to the last moment, and in pulling the
trigger seems to be only firing the train for an explosion that shall
give him a week longer of posthumous notoriety. The egotism of Pepys was
but a suppressed garrulity, which habitual caution, fostered by a period
of political confusion and the mystery of office, drove inward to a kind
of soliloquy in cipher; that of Montaigne was metaphysical,--in studying
his own nature and noting his observations he was studying man, and that
with a singular insouciance of public opinion; but Haydon appears to
have written his journals with a deliberate intention of their some day
advertising himself, and his most private aspirations are uttered with
an eye to the world. Yet it was a genuine instinct that led him to the
pen, and his lifelong succession of half-successes that are worse than
defeats was due to the initial error of mistaking a passion for a power.
A fine critic, a vivid sketcher of character, and a writer of singular
clearness, point, and eloquence was spoiled to make an artist, sometimes
noble in conception, but without sense of color, and utterly inadequate
to any but the most confused expression of himself by the pencil. His
very sense of the power which he was conscious of somewhere in himself
harassed and hampered him, as time after time he refused to see that his
failure was due, not to injustice or insensibility on the part of the
world, but to his having chosen the wrong means of making his ability
felt and acknowledged.
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