SOURCE: Huxley, Aldous. Introduction to The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), by Benjamin Robert Haydon, edited by Tom Taylor. Vol. 1, pp. v-xix. London: Peter Davies, 1926.

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...