[In the following excerpt from his introduction to the 1926 edition of Haydon's Autobiography, Huxley insists that Haydon wasted his creative energy on painting when it was as a writer—in particular as a romantic novelist—that Haydon's true talent lay.]

Haydon was something more than a bad and deservedly unsuccessful painter. He was a great personality to begin with. And in the second place he was, as I like to think, a born writer who wasted his life making absurd pictures when he might have been making excellent books. One book, however, he did contrive to make. The Autobiography reveals his powers. Reading it, one realises the enormity of that initial mistake which sent him from his father's bookshop to the Academy schools. As a romantic novelist what might he not have achieved? Sadly one speculates.

There were times when Haydon himself seems to have speculated even as we do. “The truth is,” he remarks near the end of his life, “I am fonder of books than of anything else on earth. I consider myself, and ever shall, a man of great powers, excited to an art which limits their exercise. In politics, law, or literature they would have had a full and glorious swing. … It is a curious proof of this that I have pawned my studies, my prints, my lay-figures, but have kept my darling authors.” The avowal is complete. What genuine, born painter would call painting an art which limits the exercise of great powers? Such a criticism could only come from a man to whom painting was but another and less effectual way of writing dramas, novels, or history.

It is, I repeat, as a novelist that Haydon would best have exhibited his powers. I can imagine great rambling books in which absurd sublimities (“a Sphinx or two, a pyramid or so”) and much rhapsodical philosophising would have alternated in the approved Shakespearean or Faustian style with admirable passages of well-observed, naturalistic comic relief. We should yawn over the philosophy and perhaps smile at the sublimities (as we smile and yawn even at Byron's; who can now read Manfred, or Cain?); but we should eagerly devour the comic chapters. The Autobiography permits us to imagine how good these chapters might have been.

Haydon was an acute observer, and he knew how to tell a story. How vividly, for example, he has seen this tea-party at Mrs Siddons's, how well he has described it!

After her first reading (from Shakespeare) the men retired to tea. While we were all eating toast and tingling cups and saucers, she began again. It was like the effect of a Mass bell at Madrid. All noise ceased, we slunk to our seats like boors, two or three of the most distinguished men of the day with the very toast in their mouths, afraid to bite. It was curious to see Lawrence in this predicament, to hear him bite by degrees and then stop, for fear of making too much crackle, his eyes full of water from the constraint; and at the same time to hear Mrs Siddons's “eye of newt and toe of frog,” and then to see Lawrence give a sly bite and then look awed and pretend to be listening. I went away highly gratified, and as I stood on the landing-place to get cool, I overheard my own servant in the hall say, “What! is that the old lady making such a noise?” “Yes.” “Why, she makes as much noise as ever.” “Yes,” was the answer, “she tunes her pipes as well as ever she did.”

There are, in The Autobiography, scores of such admirable little narratives and descriptions.

Haydon's anecdotes about the celebrated men with whom he came in contact are revealing as well as entertaining. They prove that he had more than a memory, a sense of character, an instinctive feeling for the significant detail. Most of the anecdotes are well known and have often been reprinted. But I cannot resist quoting two little stories about Wordsworth, which are less celebrated than they deserve to be. One day Haydon and Wordsworth went together to an art gallery. “In the corner stood the group of Cupid and Psyche kissing. After looking some time, he turned round to me with an expression I shall never forget, and said, ‘The Dev-ils!’” From this one anecdote a subtle psychologist might almost have divined the youthful escapade in France, the illegitimate daughter, the subsequent remorse and respectability. The other story is hardly less illuminating. “One day Wordsworth at a large party leaned forward in a moment of silence and said: ‘Davy, do you know the reason I published my “White Doe” in quarto?’ ‘No,’ said Davy, slightly blushing at the attention this awakened. ‘To express my own opinion of it,’ replied Wordsworth.”

Merely as a verbal technician Haydon was singularly gifted. When he is writing about something which deeply interests and excites him, his style takes on a florid and violent brilliance all its own. For example, this is how, at the coronation of George IV, he describes the royal entrance. “Three or four of high rank appear from behind the throne; an interval is left; the crowd scarce breathe. Something rustles; and a being buried in satin, feathers and diamonds rolls gracefully into his seat. The room rises with a sort of feathered, silken thunder.” He knows how to use his adjectives with admirable effect. The most accomplished writer might envy his description of the Duke of Sussex's voice as “loud, royal and asthmatic.” And how one shudders at the glance of a “tremendous, globular and demoniacal eye!” How one loves the waitresses at the eating-house where the young and always susceptible Haydon used to dine! When they heard that he was bankrupt, these “pretty girls eyed me with a lustrous regret.”

Haydon could argue with force and clarity. He could be witty as well as floridly brilliant. The man who could talk of Charles Lamb “stuttering his quaintness in snatches, like the Fool in Lear, and with as much beauty,” certainly knew how to turn a phrase. He could imply a complete criticism in a dozen words; when he has said of West's classical pictures that “the Venuses looked as though they had never been naked before,” there is nothing more to add; the last word on neo-classicism has been uttered. And what a sound, what a neatly pointed comment on English portrait-painting is contained in the following brief sentences! “Portraiture is always independent of art and has little or nothing to do with it. It is one of the staple manufactures of the Empire. Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonise, they carry, and will every carry, trial by jury, horse-racing and portrait-painting.” And let us hope they will every carry a good supply of those indomitable madmen who have made the British Empire and English literature, English politics and English science the extraordinary things they are. Haydon was one of these glorious lunatics. An ironic fate decreed that he should waste his madness in the practice of an art for which he was not gifted. But though wasted, the insanity was genuine and of good quality. The Autobiography makes us wish that it might have been better directed.