SOURCE: Porter, Roger J. “‘In me the solitary sublimity’: Posturing and the Collapse of Romantic Will in Benjamin Robert Haydon.” In The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflik, pp. 168-87. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Porter attempts to pinpoint the reason why Haydon felt the intense need to chronicle his life in his autobiography and in his journals.]

On June 22, 1846, moments before he committed a kind of double suicide by shooting himself and slashing his throat, Benjamin Robert Haydon, historical painter, would-be savior of British art, and friend to both generations of romantic writers, wrote the final words in the diary he had kept for 38 of his 60 years: “‘Stretch me no longer on this tough World’—Lear.”¹ With a symmetrical gesture he could hardly have been conscious of making, Haydon was closing a parenthesis of allusion around his life. In 1808, at the beginning of what he envisioned—no less than did his companion Keats—as a grand and illustrious calling, Haydon noted in the first entry of his journal that he stood upon the cliffs of Dover where “Lear defied the storm” (1:3) and when a storm actually broke over the coast Haydon fancied himself as the great white-haired king blasted by nature and fiendish daughters; he was moved to reread the play, and thus began a series of identifications with Lear that were to linger through thousands of pages of journal and hundreds of autobiography. At Dover Haydon envisioned a colossal statue of Britannia looming over the sea and facing France, as if in challenge to that country's art. We can take that defiance and heroic posturing at the start of his career, and its self-dramatizing end, as coordinates in his life and the signs and motives for his writing, which in both its magnitude and its obsessive self-aggrandizements became the rival of, if not the substitute for, his painting. With the exception of Van Gogh, there may be no other visual artist whose need to write—out of self-justification and compensation—was as great as Haydon's, and who created as extended a literary self-portrait as an alternate life to the one that brought him such grief.²

Virginia Woolf said of Haydon, “we catch ourselves thinking, as some felicity of phrase flashes out or some pose or arrangement makes its effect, that his genius is a writer's. He should have held a pen.”³ There is an amplitude to his journals that corresponds to the grandiose scale of his historical paintings, their sheer size and the heroism of their subjects, those he actually painted and those he only desired to paint: Achilles, Christ, Samson, Adam, Solomon, Antigone, Orpheus, Lear, Andromache, Macbeth, Caesar, Hercules. His writing similarly refuses to be narrowly focused; a partial list of topics might include meditations on the Bible; literary criticism of Homer, Dante, and Milton; discussions of human and animal anatomy; treatises on the Elgin marbles; character analyses of Wordsworth, Keats, and Napoleon; technical discussions of oil painting; attacks on debtors' laws (Haydon was imprisoned three times for debt); stories of betrayal by those whose patronage he had expected; gossip about other artists, M.P.'s, and critics; detailed descriptions of his progress on a given painting; critiques of English and continental politics; meditations on fleeting fame; endless self-analysis; attacks on the art establishment and its institutions; and long prayers to carry a painting to completion. But Haydon's Diary and his Autobiography, despite their sprawl and catch-all nature, have what we might call an autobiographical plot; I mean this not merely in the sense of a theme or cluster of related themes that we can trace through the life, whether they were composed with hindsight by the autobiographer or with relative spontaneity in the dailiness of the diary. I mean rather “plot” in the sense of its author's motive for writing, as De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater urges us to understand a motif as a motive “in the sense attached by artists and connoisseurs to the technical word motivo, applied to pictures.”⁴ The themes reveal Haydon's motive for writing, and indeed he makes the impelling need to write the dominant theme of autobiography. Writing stands beside painting, if it does not virtually displace it, in Haydon's own order of importance.

Haydon was born at Plymouth on January 26, 1786. He began serious sketching at 6, and although an inflammation of his eyes permanently and early dimmed his sight he pursued his profession as if possessed. From an early age he assiduously read biographies of ambitious men and prophesied his own fame, drawing up a list of painterly subjects that would bring about this result. He was the first English artist to see the importance of the Elgin Marbles, and they greatly influenced him all his life. He soon entered into embattled relations with the Royal Academy, which he had attended as a boy, especially chagrined at not being elected to membership. His continuously disputatious life led to numerous fights with patrons over financial matters, alienated friendships, and a belief that the entire art establishment was bent in opposition to him. His life was a constant oscillation between an obsessive devotion to the cause of British historical painting and a history of debt. In between his stays in debtors' prison, he set up a school to rival the Academy, fought rancorous battles with everyone, and continued to rail against portrait painting as insufficiently heroic. He finally received substantial requests for work, but five of his children died, and the loss of commissions to decorate the Houses of Parliament rendered him particularly bitter. When he committed suicide, the coroner's report included a verdict of insanity.

At 22 Haydon started the journal that was to last throughout his life, and he made almost daily entries in 24 volumes. When he was 53 he began writing his Autobiography, and labored several years on the work, carrying his life only to 1820, 26 years before his death at 60. It is likely that writing about the succeeding years would have caused too much pain; to describe and analyze the difference between his early glory and the later neglect, or at least what he had come to perceive as a lifetime of failed promise and constant oppression from an unappreciative public and a system of reluctant patronage, would doubtless have frayed an already delicate psyche. It was difficult enough for Haydon to record on a daily basis his defeats and embattled status; to place the events in a structure of impending disaster would have been too anguishing. But the large questions remain: why did he write at all, and why was he so committed to some form of autobiography? What function did it serve, and what is its relation to his art?

Walter Jackson Bate, in his biography of Keats, has described Haydon's “vivid, simple-hearted energy” and his “endless, booming confidence.”⁵ These traits do emerge from Haydon's writing, especially in his heroic claims to outdo the greats of the past. One of the dominant voices is that of the young man staking his place in history:

People say to me: “You can't be expected in your second picture to paint like Titian and draw like Michel Angelo”; but I will try; and if I take liberties with nature and make her bend to my purposes, what then? “Oh yes, but you ought not to do what Michel Angelo alone might try.” Yes, but I will venture—I will dare anything to accomplish my purpose. If it is only impudent presumption without ability I shall find my level in the opinion of the world; but if it be the just confidence of genius I shall soon find my reward.⁶

Even his endless prayers to God for blessings have the self-assured tone of a man who, if he cannot cajole the deity to shower talent upon him, at least is on intimate and easy terms with that authority. Much of the autobiographical writing is a trying out of such attitudes, and even towards the end Haydon persists in his confident address to the world: “My position still is solitary and glorious. In me the solitary sublimity of High Art is not gone” (5:407).

The Autobiography and the Diary are filled with assertions of his own greatness and immortality, the devotion to a high calling almost as if it were a divine mission. When the serious eye disease he suffered as an adolescent left him temporarily blind, Haydon defiantly proclaimed he would be the first great sightless painter. Later he described the cure as if it were the work of destiny, and his own spirit as if it were sanctified: “It would have been quite natural for an ordinary mind to think blindness a sufficient obstacle to the practice of an art, the essence of which seems to consist in perfect sight, but ‘when the divinity doth stir within us,’ the most ordinary mind is ordinary no longer” (Autobiography, p. 15). Much of the Autobiography takes the form of a Bildungsroman, with Haydon the hero who overcomes the obstacles of disease, official resistance to his youthful bravado, the Academy's timidity toward historical painting, and its insistence that artists conform to the vogue of portraiture that Haydon detests. There is a description of a ritual moment of stocktaking as he begins his first painting, an allusion to the close of Paradise Lost as the world of promise opens before him, a prophecy that he will bring honor to England with his art, and a characteristic belief that difficulties are stimulants that discourage only the indolent. Again and again we hear of his monumental labors, the anticipation of glory, greatness and fame, and his posturing in the style of Julien Sorel.

I was so elevated at … the visit of crowds of beauties putting up their pretty glasses and lisping admiration of my efforts, that I rose into the heaven of heavens, and believed my fortune made. I walked about my room, looked into the glass, anticipated what the foreign ambassadors would say, studied my French for a good accent, believed that all the sovereigns of Europe would hail an English youth with delight who could paint a heroic picture.

(Autobiography, p. 104)

Every encounter is a test, every creative act a competition with past greatness, and Haydon uses the Autobiography to convince himself that he is correct in his defiance, or if he misjudges things, that he is nonetheless heroic in his convictions. There is an ebullience and daring in his self-congratulation: “I had proved the power of inherent talent, and I … had shown one characteristic of my dear country—bottom. I had been tried and not found wanting. I held out when feeble, and faint, and blind, and now I reaped the reward” (Autobiography, p. 199).

When Haydon wrote this passage, describing the reception of his work “The Judgement of Solomon,” it was 1844 and the painting was gathering dust in a warehouse. Haydon sees its ignominy as a metaphor for his own decline in popular and official esteem, but prophesies “shame on those who have the power without the taste to avert such a fall; who let a work which was hailed as a national victory rot into decay and dirt and oblivion! But it will rise again; it will shine forth hereafter, and reanimate the energy of a new generation” (Autobiography, p. 236). This challenge corresponds to Haydon's motives for autobiography: vindication in the Rousseauean mode; and a nostalgic reliving of past greatness from a perspective in which, as he moves towards the close of the autobiography, his powers and fame are waning. Autobiography sanctions Haydon's struggles not by merely recording them but by elevating them to a heroic status in spite of, or rather because of, the difficulties they brought upon himself. Haydon deeply overestimated the greatness and originality of his own work, and this misjudgment makes his condemnation of his critics suspect, unlike the way Van Gogh's self-justification gains our credence. Nevertheless, despite the fact that, as Haydon's biographer has argued, the “myth of ill-usage was one he cultivated assiduously throughout his life,”⁷ the autobiography reveals how Haydon refused to “bear affliction and disappointment” and often acted in a self-destructive way against all his better judgment. He claims his work can serve as a guide to the young, who will exercise more caution and avoid the fatal consequences arising from reckless behavior, but Haydon's tone suggests he also relishes those actions, and relived them as much for his own morbid pleasure as to convince the world of his integrity.

As he writes the Autobiography his own life is gradually crumbling about him—several children have died, he has spent months in debtors' prison, he fears his creative juices may be drying up, his work has been attacked in the press, and even former supporters have deserted him. To compose autobiography is to risk further pain, perhaps even to cultivate this pain as a sign of stoical resignation and ultimately of heroic courage. The most common psychological move that Haydon makes throughout both the Autobiography and the Diary is to embrace struggle and difficulty as a sign of superiority. He encounters “ceaseless opposition” from the first, and there is a kind of energizing joy in confrontation with his enemies, a power that only contentiousness confers. Indeed controversy and conflict are the very animators of his writing. In an argument with Leigh Hunt, Haydon determines to get the better in print; Hunt is a dangerous opponent because he is editor of the Examiner, in whose pages they will do battle. In the Autobiography Haydon's punning metaphor draws the fight with Hunt into Haydon's own domain: “Though this is not the first time Leigh Hunt is mentioned it is the first opportunity I have had of bringing him fairly on the canvas. … This controversy consolidated my power of verbal expression and did me great good. … I resolved to show I could use the pen against the very man who might be supposed to be my literary instructor” (Autobiography, pp. 142, 144). Failure is a great stimulus for Haydon, a kind of tempering mechanism to test his invincibility. There is a determination not to be defeated in any competition. To complete a painting under trying circumstances is analogous to composing autobiography itself: ruthless honesty through the analysis of emotional complexity or foolish action testifies to a willingness to face difficult home truths and to avoid easy evasions. Too luxurious a climate would encourage indolence; too uncomplicated a romance would undermine the value of the love; too charmed a life would dull its vigor. “Some faculties only act in situations which appall and deaden others. Mine get clearer in proportion to the danger that stimulates them. I get vigour from despair, clearness of perception from confusion, and elasticity of spirit from despotic usage … want and necessity, which destroy others, have been perhaps the secret inspirer of my exertions” (2: 397-98).

How does conflict produce this feeling of well-being? In Haydon's case it creates the illusion that he has, in the very act of facing difficulty, justified his life and reached down into deeper resources of being. It is true that Haydon avoids excessive difficulty, arguing, for example, that his painting keeps him from madness and pain, and dulls his sensitivity to really disastrous experience; he even inserts into his journal a bit of doggerel claiming a purgative function for painting, writing, and love. The last line anticipates inadvertently the twin weapons of his suicide, as if he were invoking them as a talisman to ward off what later happens.

Oh hail, my three blessings of Life,
My pencil, my Book, and my Wife,
Never mind the alloy,
While these I enjoy,
I defy both the bullet & knife.

(4: 321)

Yet he constantly writes about difficulty as a catalyst for creativity, and links this strategy with the trope of heroic identification. Napoleon and Nelson are only two of many figures Haydon views as different from the run of ordinary men (as presumably Haydon himself is) exactly because to men of genius insurmountable difficulties are stimulants to action.

Nelson is an illustrious example of what persevering, undivided attention to one Art will do; of how far a restless habit of enterprise will carry a man; to what a length never resting in indolent enjoyment after exertion will go. He began the war unknown … and concluded it famous throughout the World. … The same eagerness, the same enthusiasm, the same powers, the same restlessness, the same determination to go on while in existence, in any art, will carry a man the same length, because such conduct begets a confidence in others, as well as yourself.

(1: 284)

Throughout his work Haydon wavers between the egotistical sublime of heroic self-assertion and the negative capability of self-effacement or identification with other men, primarily Napoleon, Wellington, and Michelangelo. It would seem that the latter impulse is no less self-projecting, since Haydon takes on the identities of triumphant figures. Nevertheless, I would suggest this strategy is an ironic form of self-denigration, in that the identification implicitly asserts the failure of originality and the need to subsume other selves. Unlike such autobiographical writers as the Keats of the Letters, writers who playfully try out a series of roles, inventing spiderlike from within themselves, Haydon often defines himself by taking on the personae of historical or artistic figures. Haydon's autobiographical writing meets the problem of unavailable originality by allowing him to assert a range of identifications, as though mimicry could substitute for genius, if not validate it.

Bate has elsewhere described the burden such demands for originality placed on writers and painters by the end of the eighteenth century:

The eighteenth-century “Enlightenment” had created, and had foisted upon itself and its immediate child … an ideal of “originality”: sanctioned both officially (theoretically, intellectually) and, in potentia, popularly. As a result the vulnerability of the [artist], already great enough, was accentuated by having his uneasiness now given a “local habitation and a name.” For the first time in history, the ideal of “originality”—aside from the personal pressures the artist might feel to achieve it anyway—was now becoming defined as necessary, indeed taken for granted.⁸

That pressure on Haydon comes not from external sources but from within himself. Again and again he declares he will be the salvation of British art by raising it to a level formerly attained only in ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy. He aspires to the achievements of Raphael and Michelangelo (Haydon literally dreams that the latter comes to him; in a Wordsworthian echo he muses: “I certainly think something grand in my destiny is coming on, for all the spirits of the illustrious dead are hovering about me,” 3: 510), and he will not bow to any contemporary or obey any obsolete rule if it will inhibit the value of his work. “Genius is sent into the world not to obey laws but to give them” (Autobiography, p. 95). A decade later, in 1815, he expresses the feeling of power and buoyant self-assertion in an entry suggesting not merely confidence but something like a self-apotheosis:

Never have I had such irresistible, perpetual and continued urgings of future greatness. I have been like a man with air balloons under his arm pits and ether in his soul. While I was painting, or walking, or thinking, these beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me! … Grant that they may be the fiery anticipations of a great Soul born to realize them. They came over me, & shot across me and shook me.

(1: 430)

And in a letter to Keats, Haydon sounds like both Prospero and a Hotspur of the creative spirit, the elements of water and earth substituting for the fire and air of the previous passage: “I have no doubt you will be remunerated by my ultimate triumph. … By Heaven I'll plunge into the bottom of the sea, where plummets have now never sounded, & never will be able to sound, with such impetus that the antipodes shall see my head drive through on their side of the Earth to their dismay and terror.”⁹ What disturbs about the autobiographical writing, however, is Haydon's continual need to identify himself with other beings or with forces of nature. To be sure, it is hard not to admire the Tamburlaine-like desire to seize upon elements outside the self and to absorb and incorporate them as a way of vitalizing his longed-for power. And yet, on another view of the case, each identification undermines the very claims Haydon makes for originality and implies the need to compensate for disappointment or uncertainty with an endless series of self-dramatizations. As part of the autobiographical motive this process answers the twin needs to be original and to be like others, especially like persecuted men. The irony is that while Haydon desired to join himself to greatness, whether in the role of Wellington, Michelangelo, Achilles, or Christ, he never could make his influence felt. When the news of Haydon's death reached Hunt he remarked, “I looked upon [Haydon] as one who turned disappointment itself into a kind of self-glory,—but see how we may be mistaken” (5: 561).

Throughout the Diary and the Autobiography Haydon's view of himself veers between those of a misunderstood, martyred man (the oppressors include patrons, critics, rival painters, the general public, and the Royal Academy), and of a successful, dominating will. Haydon's identification with satanic energy (“Give me the sublimity of chaos, give me the terror of Hell, give ‘Hail, horrors, hail … and thou profoundest hell receive thy new possessor,’” 1: 309) appears as a Romantic strategy to achieve power while it recoils against orthodox Christian beliefs. The impulse here is to equate greatness with suffering wherever it can be found, but the seminal figure behind both the Autobiography and the Diary is not Satan but Rousseau.

Often Haydon asserts the absolute sincerity of his efforts as autobiographer; he will not be outranked on this score: “There I will defy any man, let him be Raffaele himself, to beat me” (Autobiography, p. 90). He is talking not about painting but about honesty and confessional integrity. The “Author's Introduction” to the Autobiography bears a striking resemblance to the famous opening paragraphs of Rousseau's Confessions; Haydon claims that his writing originates from a sense of unjust persecution, and that although he has made occasional mistakes, and has even been sinful, his sincerity, decent intentions, and perseverance will serve to exonerate him in the eyes of his readers. But sincerity is not the real issue. Haydon's deeper instinct is for a Rousseau-like cultivation of suffering, which he hopes will testify to a misunderstood genius; indeed he is self-congratulatory about his willingness to acknowledge anguish: “I am one of those beings born to bring about a great object through the medium of suffering. … Adversity to me, individually, is nothing” (3: 334). Haydon's aspiration to be raised above the world gradually gives way to an awareness of futility and a corresponding nurturing of defeat, almost as if it were an alternate proof of greatness.

In a crucial diary entry Haydon distinguishes between sublimity and the pathetic. Sublimity is unconnected with the earth, freed from mundane emotions; it speaks to the imagination and genius, unavailable to the mass of mankind; pathos speaks to the heart and is common. The sublime corresponds to what he calls “the grand conception,” ambition and glory. Pathos contains the realization of heart-aching failure, the impossibility of achievement, and the recognition that he might be “born the sport and amusement of Fortune” (2: 362).

Both aspects of personality—heroic genius and ill-usage—receive their due in the writing; it is difficult to say which myth gives Haydon more pleasure in the recording. There is a curious luxuriating in the numerous long passages documenting and expanding upon the instances of persecution and official neglect, almost as if oppression itself were a valid sign of genius. Each mode produces its characteristic rhetoric of hyperbole, whether in the high Romantic sublime or in the Rousseauean complaint.

In 1824, after losing commissions, being rejected for membership in the Academy, getting arrested for debt with no help from patrons, and failing to persuade influential M.P.'s to appropriate government funds for the support of painting, Haydon laments: “Of what use is my Genius—to myself or to others? … All this was bearable when I was unknown because the hope of fame animated me to exertions in order to dissipate my wants; but now, what have I to hope? My youth is gone! every day and year will render me more incapable of bearing trouble; at an age when I ought to have been in ease, I am ruined!” (2: 474). It would be absurd to claim that Haydon simply takes pleasure in his losses or enjoys the sensation of defeat; nevertheless the self-dramatizing easily adheres to whatever the situation, and “the glories of a great scheme” are no more ecstatically described than “the troubles, the pangs, the broken afflictions, the oppressions, the wants, the diseases of life” (Autobiography, p. 165). Haydon stands simultaneously inside and outside his life, not only a public man concerned with the impact of art on the social body, or a private man tracing each particular nervous agitation in the self, but one who dramatizes a self for the public even as he speaks to himself within the privacy of his journals.

Haydon seems drawn to the most dramatic gyrations of fortune, the sinusoidal curve of his life providing evidence of both sensitivity and recovery. Even here the exemplary figure is Napoleon, advancing on Moscow, retreating, escaping from Elba, defeated once again. The pleasure of triumph, says Haydon, is that we no longer look up (we are there) but down (Haydon longs to excite envy); and yet looking down already anticipates an inevitable decline to the grave. Haydon was of two minds regarding Napoleon: he revered his titanic power and aloofness from ordinary men, yet was comforted by Napoleon's ordinariness and vulnerability. This fascination with the swings of fortune appears throughout Haydon's writings: he receives a commendatory sonnet from Wordsworth that cheers him; immediately after he relapses into melancholy. He walks the streets in grief, and within moments enters a drawing room “like a comic hero in a farce.” Following an arrest for debt he goes from the bailiff's house into a room full of beautiful women and elegant pictures. “What a destiny is mine! One year in the Bench, the companion of Demireps & Debtors—sleeping in wretchedness & dirt, on a flock bed, low and filthy, with black worms crawling over my hands, another, reposing on down & velvet, in a splendid apartment, in a splendid House, the guest of Rank & fashion & beauty!” (3: 167).

The inconsistencies of his own personality intrigue “that mysterious, incomprehensible, singular bit of blood, bottom, bone, & genius, B. R. Haydon” (2: 273). The same perplexity of human character not surprisingly attracts him to Shakespeare's mixed style and juxtaposition of character types (this of course is a common Romantic attitude). The Diary is filled with instances of incongruity, such as the laughter in his infant son's sleep at the moment Haydon's wife is lying in agony in the next room. Haydon appears drawn to rather than dismayed by these turns and violent contrasts; his autobiographical writing stands in opposition to the classical certitude and careful planning of a life such as Gibbon's, who perceives his existence as a work of art given compositional grace and symmetrical order corresponding to schemata ordained by prudence. For Haydon there are no models to follow with confidence, for even the ostensible exemplars are patterns of inconsistency.

Haydon holds a mirror to himself, but each event witnessed, every book read, seems to reflect a different self. In 1844 he had painted some 25 portraits of Napoleon, and while there was an economic motive for this obsession, it also reflects his penchant for finding infinite variations in an emulated figure, and thus a desire to be many different persons—an indirect version of Rembrandt's life-long series of self-portraits. Haydon's journals fight against the tendency of autobiography to freeze the self into a fixed image; they express not merely the implicit fragmentation we expect from journal writing, but a subtle pleasure in the act of creating multiple perspectives.

This book is a picture of human life, now full of arguments for religion, now advocating virtue, then drawn from chaste piety, & then melting from a bed of pleasure, idle & active, dissipated & temperate, voluptuous & holy! burning to be a martyr when I read the Gospel! ready to blaze in a battalion when I read Homer! weeping at Rimini and at Othello. Laughing & without sixpence, in boisterous spirits when I ought to be sad & melancholy when I have every reason to be happy!

(2: 273)

The irony of this dissipation of self is that once again the powerful impulse toward ego does not hold. Whether we call him a manic-depressive or a doubt-ridden genius, there is continual self-qualification that undermines the foundations of his own confidence and makes the autobiographical writing less Cellini-like than might otherwise be the case.

Perhaps the roots of this fragmentation are to be found in Haydon's dwelling on fleeting fame, passing time and loss. In a world that presents to him so many images of frustrated ambition, unexpected suffering and diminished power, it is not surprising that the self appears unstable. Frequently at the end of a calendar year Haydon identifies the year's passing with death in terms imaged as either an eternal waterfall churning into a gulf below or an irresistible tide sweeping everything away in its wake. We are vulnerable children, and neither our hopes, raptures, calculations nor our art can prevent us from sinking into sorrow. In other passages time is a reptile devouring men, who are born to putrefaction, or a Conqueror who exceeds Napoleon for power. At such moments Haydon's voice is that of an evangelical preacher, or of Leonardo da Vinci in the Notebooks, foreseeing universal ruin in the deluge, the swirling and anarchic water of our helpless condition. This is a sublime, visionary moment: “The sun shines, winds blow, ships are wrecked, men are drowned, children are born, women are in labour, youths in love, in one ceaseless round! … Matter & events seem to be in one eternal reaction & destruction” (2: 347). Haydon struggles to affirm existence, for he cannot bear this ceaseless round: despondency takes over, and he sees himself as a desperate chaser of an unattainable happiness that diminishes as he approaches it, and an overrater of joy that lies just ahead but is darkened by folly and wickedness. What appears sweet and beautiful on the outside is revealed as “bitter & corky & putrid & full of ashes.”

Like an Old Testament prophet, Haydon dramatizes his vulnerability and isolation, and then turns and acts out an imaginary retribution, as if retaliating against all the authorities who have humiliated him. His fragile sense of self, controlled by a susceptibility to natural process and social attack, finds a reprieve in fantasy. In one of the most melodramatic passages, he imagines himself a self-exiled Romantic wanderer.

If I were alone again I would leave my Country for ever—buried in Italy or Greece, I would pass my days in the lowest avocations, could I get by it peace! ay, peace! I would lie out in the Acropolis and hail the ruins about me, as congenial to my own destroyed hopes. I would wander in the Alps, sleep in ravines, and be lulled by the invisible roar of foaming floods, and be waked by echoing screech of soaring eagles! I would willingly have footed, scrambled over rugged barks, fallen pines, and climb sharp cutting flinty rocks, & plunge with the flood, & rise from its depths, & lie panting & breathless on its banks, till Nature recovered sensation, & my desolation returned to me! Or I would … vent my rage on the trees, the stones, the birds, the animals, & glory with ecstatic rapture, to meet a solitary human being without defence on whom I might vent my hatred of human nature! and gratify my tiger feelings by tearing out his heart & drinking his blood! and then strip my body, my half clothed & ragged body, & paint it with grinning faces in the blood yet warm and unclotted by the air! Ah, ah, Revenge, thou dear, dear, dear passion!

(2: 475)

This passage, with its powerfully suggestive echo of Milton's Satan, implies that within the confines and shelter of the Diary he can enact his fantasies of retribution without having to confront his adversaries. He can play out with impunity a range of roles, allowing him to justify himself and to appear as oppressed scapegoat. These strategies find a place in the privacy of the book, but even as we witness the Romantic will sublimely asserting itself against all opposition, we also see the luxury of self-effacement. For Haydon, autobiography simultaneously permits a therapeutic assertion and an unembarrassed diminution of self.

In designating the Diary and Autobiography as shelters I am claiming that his writing (especially in the Autobiography, where the events have occurred at least two decades earlier) is part of an elaborate process of image formation. He is pleased to be thought a fighter, and the autobiographical writings are filled with verbatim letters and essays in which his career and public self is launched against others. Haydon revels in his status as pariah because within the writing he is free to vindicate his actions without public consequence. Haydon may relive his experiences but he need not account to others for his actions. There is no evidence that he intended publication of either the journals or the autobiography during his lifetime. He took great pleasure in the force of his attacks upon painters, critics, and patrons, the very strength of the offended opposition confirming him to himself as a man of convictions.

But if aggrieved outrage regarding a painting hung in a dimly lit exhibition space, or a patron who reneged on a commission, marks one pole of Haydon's sensibility, reckless self-destruction marks another. There are numerous litanies of self-accusation:

I had always a tendency to fight it out, a tendency most prejudicial to artists, because it calls off his mind from the main point of his being—perfection in his art. … My will had not been curbed, or my will was too stubborn to submit to curbing; Heaven knows. Perhaps mine is a character in which all parts would have harmonised if my will had been broken early. The same power might have been put forth with more discretion, and I should have been less harassed by the world

(Autobiography, p. 116)

These sentiments contrast with the more vituperative ones directed outward against the world. Harold Bloom has remarked how, according to Freud, part of the ego's own self-hatred is projected onto an outward object but part remains in the ego. Such a description precisely fits Haydon's situation.¹⁰ “The heart … sinks inwardly in itself & longs for a pleasure calm & eternal, majestic, unchangeable. I am not yet 40 and can tell of a Destiny melancholy and rapturous, severe, trying, & afflicting, bitter beyond all bitterness, afflicting beyond all affliction, cursed, heart burning! heart breaking! maddening, not to be dwelt on lest its thought scathe my blasted heart and blighted brain.” (2: 499). There is as much self-hatred as loathing of the world in this entry. Puritanical disgust and guilt for not working harder or achieving greater stature dominate his writing in the middle years. But Haydon's fundamental strategy is to escape the implications of his particular, idiosyncratic behavior by lamenting both a crippled self and the disappointments of living. Chastened by his growing awareness that he is simply not as great a painter as he had thought, he cannot bear to acknowledge that truth, even to himself within the confines of writing. Instead, he turns on the world and on the general state of human misery without facing the possibility of self-delusion regarding his own skill. Autobiographical writing defers the problem by allowing endless options for the perpetuation of ambivalence towards himself. All Haydon could hope for was that his sufferings alone would vindicate him, but the more he stresses them the more it appears he has brought them on himself.

Haydon's biographer Eric George claims that Haydon's ultimate tragedy would have been not to be noticed, and that all his efforts were bent on avoiding that final humiliation. But one can also argue that Haydon knew, as all the Romantics did, the impossibility of fulfillment, and that the autobiographical writing testified to what could not be avoided. This awareness seems to have come early to Haydon, whose endless prayers for the energy to conquer obstacles soon turned into prayers to bear up under stress and defeat. Loss of power and the crises brought by its realization were Haydon's subject from the start, as if in his desperate need to find models in history for his desire, he envisioned a radical emptiness even as he projected a powerful libido.

When he is most critical of a life without design, when most ashamed of his drift, the prose becomes fragmented, as Haydon dramatizes the disconnected moments in the life.

My mind fatuous, impotent—drewling over Petrarch—dawdling over Pausanias—dipping into Plutarch. Voyages and Travels no longer exciting—all dull, dreary, flat, weary, & disgusting. I seem as if I should never paint again. I look at my own Xenophon, & wonder how I did it—read the Bible—gloat over Job—doubt Religion to rouse my faculties, and wonder if the wind be East or S. S. West—look out of the window and gape at the streets—shut up the shutters, & lean my hand on my cheek—get irritable for dinner, two hours before it can be ready—eat too much, drink too much—and go to bed at nine to forget existence! I dream horrors, start up, & lie down, & toss & tumble, listen to caterwauling of cats, & just doze away as light is dawning. Delightful life!—fit attendents on Idleness. With my Ambition! my talents! my energy! Shameful.

(3: 549)

The Diary can be read as the gradual recognition that hope is less salvation than nemesis, in the sense that it not only holds out impossible illusions but, if miraculously gratified, is followed by inevitable disappointment. For Haydon all dreams are enchantments; the nearer we get to their fulfillment the less desirable they become. We live in a world of time and imperfection, but deceive ourselves that we can remedy our plight. There are moments of relief, when Haydon endows his Muse-like precursor painters, his friends, a beloved, and of course his creative work with the potential to redeem his despair. He even declares that similarly wretched men “shoot themselves—but not me” (5: 412). Nevertheless he seems to know that nothing will come of his hopes, that all “grand conceptions” and “elevated sensations of an ambitious and glorious soul” (Autobiography, p. 165) are flimsy constructions, much like love objects who can never make good the expectations with which we have freighted them.

Haydon's reluctance to submit to the reality of events and to the diminution of his life in its contingencies has its analogy in his attack on realism and portrait painting, and on the need for a heroic scale. There is something almost visceral in his passionate commitment to painting that is heroic in both size and subject matter, as if his very being could not tolerate limitation. He constantly seeks a form of transcendence, and the sheer scale of his work becomes the measure of escape from the trivial and mundane aspects of existence. In his public life Haydon craved largeness of scale as if to proclaim his greatness; smallness (or portrait painting) was equated in his mind with obscurity. When he painted large canvases he felt important and significantly controversial. His Autobiography in fact concludes with a description of his beginning to work on a painting of Lazarus, “determined to make it my grandest and largest work” (Autobiography, p. 345), and the Autobiography breaks off not after a description of the work or its execution, but after a meditation on size per se: “I always filled my painting-room to its full extent; and had I possessed a room 400 feet long, and 200 feet high, and 400 feet wide, I would have ordered a canvas 399-6 long by 199-6 high, and so have been encumbered for want of room, as if it had been my pleasure to be so” (Autobiography, p. 346). The painter, hemmed in and striving to create a gigantic world, is a Titanic figure wrestling with resistant material. The desire to transcend limits is a projection of heroic striving into both the principal figures of the painting: the Christ who performs a miracle, and the Lazarus who achieves his rebirth. (From the vantage point of the composition of the Autobiography, two decades after this scene from 1820, Haydon no doubt saw Lazarus as a symbol of his own hoped-for rebirth after twenty years of public defeats and private unhappiness.) Painting is a form of combat “because [in the eyes of a misguided public] Reynolds beat West in force, depth & color, Portrait Painters beat Historical Painters” (3: 118). Losing the game is inevitable, because “the Historical Painter, whatever be his talent … is considered half cracked or completely mad” (3: 311). In the face of public disdain, Haydon turns to the autobiographical writings, where the intensification of these struggles magnifies his sense of being both victim and scourge.

Paul de Man's acute observation about autobiography applies to Haydon's need to live within the writing: “We assume the life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined in all its aspects, by the resources of its medium?”¹¹ Haydon's life was partly shaped by the achievement of the writing, in that autobiography granted him a certain freedom to experiment in his life by trying out and anticipating within the security of the writing all possible consequences of his action. Then, as he confronted lost commissions and official neglect, he turned to the autobiographical project for solace, the very privacy of the writing compensating for and justifying his unacknowledged work. A myth of self-defeat emerges as the dominating one, as in a remark appended to an earlier entry where an inner voice urges him not to miss out in proposing designs for the Nelson Monument: “And yet it ended in nothing, & here my old voice deceived me” (4: 525). Triumph or even desire inevitably turns to loss, and the writing unfolds this design as if Haydon—against his will—were both compelled actor and composing author of his tragedy.

Haydon, both sinned against and sinning, finds the causes for disappointment wherever he can—in the public world, in his own misapprehensions, in the way life is. He bows to a course of ineluctability, even as he asserts that he will not submit to suicide; time is inexorable and surrender is half-sweet in the contemplation. He alleges he would plunge over the falls of Niagara if he could, those sublime torrents that always stand for the deadly rush of time. Reading through great stretches of the Diary, we see that passages of calm and ordinary experience inevitably give way to passages of hysteria and nightmare: whether Haydon meditates on his own self-destructive impulses, his dreams of revenge, his marriage as the ruination of his art and of those whom he drags down with him, or the overestimation of his chances for greatness, he is aware of a tragic arc to his life, yet unable to accept it. The autobiographical writing, veering as it does between hope and despair, expresses the instability of its author as he attempts both to write himself into tranquility and to lash out against the failures he can no longer deny.

In a moment that looks like melodrama but really suggests a fascination with the course of his own psyche, we see why Haydon could never let any emotional problem rest without examination: “I do not think any man on Earth ever suffered more agony of mind than I have done, & so would the World think if it knew why, and yet I always had an abstracting power, & that saved my mind and made me look down & meditate, as it were, on my own sufferings. They became a curious speculation” (3: 38). Haydon reveals both a therapeutic benefit from self-exploration and also a morbid excitement from his own pain. Writing brings peace—it helps dispel the uncertainty of things—but it also intensifies the anguish as he relives it and explores every detail. He is unable to escape from the circle of curiosity he has drawn.

Haydon claims he writes to show the reader how to “bear affliction and disappointment” (Autobiography, p. 164); it is an autobiographical commonplace for a writer ostensibly to address his work to an audience who will benefit from his wisdom, but Haydon, like so many autobiographers, writes largely to console himself and to assert an irrepressible claim for his own genius. We have noted that early in the Diary he imagines himself as a figure of fiery greatness: “I have been like a man with air balloons under his arm pits and ether in his soul. While I was painting, or walking, or thinking, these beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me! … Grant that they may be the fiery anticipations of a great Soul born to realize them” (1: 430). Twenty-six years later he is still unquenchable, his imagery equally Promethean. “Had a most glorious idea of Genius at 4 this morning. I awoke saying what is Genius? It is a spark from the Deity's Essence which shoots up into the Heavens fiery & blazing over an astonished World, & when it has reached its elevation, drops back into his Being like lava from a Volcanic Mountain” (5: 82). The Romantic ego expressed here is in the high mode of natural supernaturalism and self-renovation. But the defeated dross of nature, unresponsive society, and an unwilling self combine to check those enthusiasms. Nevertheless, Haydon celebrates the self even in and through its defeats; autobiography replaces the painted self-portrait (he did only one), and expresses a belief that in his solipsism he can gather strength against his detractors and assert a radical “I am” even as he slowly kills himself with recrimination.

But, ironically, Haydon's problem is that he can never fully turn inward, at least without extreme self-consciousness; too often he has his eyes on others, on their judgments and their determination of his fortune. Haydon enacts what Bloom calls the first stage or Promethean mode of the “internalized quest-romance,” defined as an “involvement in political [and] social … revolution, and a direct, even satirical attack on the institutional orthodoxies of … English society.”¹² Haydon's condemnation of the Royal Academy and of misplaced patronage figures here. But he is ultimately fixated on these issues—he can never shake free of a preoccupation with the accusing voices, even when he internalizes them. He needs others' condemnation in order to assert himself; trapped in the process, he becomes fully absorbed with defense of his worth. His obsession with avatars suggests that he cannot separate himself from the past and from judgment. (Does Michelangelo in the dream come to inspire or to judge?) It is not surprising that he was unable to paint in an original style.

Just as he can never turn from his elders, so he exhibits an adolescent petulance in his life-long insistence that he is better than anyone else. The Diary and the Autobiography express his attempt to re-beget himself and to assert an identity without the defining imperatives of others, but Haydon cannot sustain this posture. Defiance is as crucial as achievement; indeed one is impossible without the other. Frustrated or defeated creativity is mandatory for self-assertion. “In reading over my journals of 1818, I gloried to see how I suffered … how I vanquished,” and “It is my destiny to perform great things, not in consequence of encouragement, but in spite of opposition, & so let it be. … ‘Impossibility is the Element in which he glories.’—Hazlitt” (5: 447, 430).

He is plagued not only by the expectations of others, but also by his own heroic demands, the images he must live up to. Here is Haydon's essentially oxymoronic position: it is in a purgatorial mode, expressing hopeful labor and fear of entrapment. Autobiographical writing is both an escape from sorrow and the net that enmeshes him more tightly in his grief; that writing is not merely reflective, composed at the end of a long life, but an almost daily tracing of the torment of his failure to meet his own expectations. Self-absorption becomes a tragic game in Haydon's hands, his writing both the vantage point from which to perceive his life's slow dying, and the virtual instrument of that death.

Notes

1. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 5: 553. Further references to this edition by volume and page number will be in parentheses following the passage.

2. Midway between these entries Haydon described the birth of his first son like Lear pronouncing on the inevitable doom in store for the child: “I had been sitting on the stairs, listening to the moaning of my love, when, all of a sudden, a dreadful, dreary outcry, a tortured, passionate, dull, & throttled agony, gasping, breathless, & outrageous, announced intense suffering, and then there was a dead silence, as if from exhaustion, and then a puling, peaked cry, as of a little helpless living being, who felt the air, & anticipated the anxieties, & bewailed the destiny of his irrevocable humanity” (2: 392). Heroic defiance, prophetic doom, and exhaustion are all characteristics Haydon assigned to his own Lear-like being.

3. Virginia Woolf, “Genius,” in The Moment and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), p. 191.

4. The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols. (London: A. and C. Black, 1897), 3: 233.

5. W. Jackson Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 98, 101.

6. The Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Malcolm Elwin (London: Macdonald, 1950), p. 94. Further references to the Autobiography will be in parentheses following the passage.

7. Eric George, The Life and Death of Benjamin Robert Haydon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 92.

8. W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 106-7.

9. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 278, letter from Haydon to Keats, Jan. 23, 1819.

10. Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 12.

11. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” Modern Language Notes, 94 (1979): 920.

12. Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,” p. 11.