A VANQUISHED MAN


Haydon died by his own act in 1846, and it was not, in the event, until
1853 that his journal was edited, not by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as
he wished, but by Tom Taylor. Turning over these familiar and famous
volumes, often read, I wonder once more how any editor was bold to "take
upon himself the mystery of things" in the case of Haydon, and to assign
to that venial moral fault or this the ill-fortune and defeat that beset
him, with hardly a pause for the renewal of the resistance of his
admirable courage.

That he made a mere intellectual mistake, gave thanks with a lowly and
lofty heart for a genius denied him, that he prepared himself to answer
to Heaven and earth for the gift he had not, to suffer its reproach, to
bear its burden, and that he looked for its reward, is all his history.
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