Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/568

476 says: "The characteristics of Haydon's art appear to me to be great determination and power, knowledge and effrontery. His pictures are himself, and fail as he failed. In Haydon's work there is not sufficient forgetfulness of self to disarm criticism of personality. His pictures are themselves autobiographical notes of the most interesting kind; but their want of beauty repels, and their want of modesty exasperates. Perhaps their principal characteristic is want of delicacy of perception and refinement of execution. His touch is generally woolly, and his surface disagreeable."

He was determined to force his idea of the Heroic in Art on a public that had got beyond gods and goddesses and the heroes of the Greeks and Romans. He would have done well at the Court of Louis XIV, but he was out of date at the dawn of the naturalism of the nineteenth century.

The public, thought Haydon, were sick, and knew not what Art was. They must be forced, scolded, lectured, rated to admire it. The last thing that would occur to him would be to study the trend of public taste and to adapt himself to it.

When drawing his cartoons for the Houses of Parliament, he would not even consider what was fitting. Had he sent in his "Alfred and Trial by Jury," it might and probably would have been approved; but instead he sent pictures from the Reign of Terror in France to represent Anarchy, which was of all things unsuited for the new palace, that did not desire scenes from French history, and those recent ones.

And his huge cartoons were a mistake. Epics are not for the masses, and only great public buildings could contain these canvases. Public bodies did not care to spend large sums upon pictures for town halls and exchanges.