for a power.  A fine critic, a vivid sketcher of character, and a writer of singular clearness, point, and eloquence was spoiled to make an artist, sometimes noble in conception, but without sense of color, and utterly inadequate to any but the most confused expression of himself by the pencil.  His very sense of the power which he was conscious of somewhere in himself harassed and hampered him, as time after time he refused to see that his failure was due, not to injustice or insensibility on the part of the world, but to his having chosen the wrong means of making his ability felt and acknowledged.  His true place would have been that of Professor and Lecturer in the Royal Academy.  The world is not insensible or unjust, but it knows what it wants, and will not long be put off with less.  There is always a public for success; there never is, and never ought to be, for inadequacy.  Haydon was in some respects a first-rate man, but the result of his anxious, restless, and laborious life was almost zero, as far as concerned its definite aims.  It does not convey the moral of neglected genius, or of loose notions of money-obligations, ending in suicide, but simply of a mischosen vocation, leading sooner or later to utter and undeniable failure. Pas meme academicien!  Plenty of neglected geniuses have found it good to be neglected, plenty of Jeremy Diddlers (in letters and statesmanship as often as in money-matters) have lived to a serene old age, but the man who in any of the unuseful arts insists on doing what Nature never asked him to do has no place in the world.  Leslie, a second-rate man in all respects, but with a genuine talent rightly directed, an obscure American, with few friends, no influential patrons, and a modesty that would never let him obtrude his claims, worked steadily forward to competence, to reputation, and the Council of the Academy.  The only blunder of his life was his accepting the Professorship of Drawing at West Point, a place for which he was unsuited.  But this blunder he had the good sense and courage to correct by the frank acknowledgment of resignation.  Altogether his is a career as pleasant as Haydon’s is painful to contemplate, the more so as we feel that his success was fairly won by honest effort directed by a contented consciousness of the conditions and limitations of his faculty.

Nothing can be more agreeable than the career of a successful artist.  His employment does not force upon him the solitude of an author; it is eminently companionable; from its first design, through all the processes that bring his work to perfection, he is not shut out from the encouragement of sympathy; his success is definite and immediate; he can see it in the crowd around his work at the exhibition; and his very calling brings him into pleasant contact with beauty, taste, and (if a portrait-painter) with eminence in every department of human activity.