On May 24th Pallant House, Chichester won the 2007 Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries. A current exhibition, entitled ‘Poets in the Landscape’, begins with William Hayley. Born on the site of Pallant House’s new wing (the architect, Colin St. John Wilson died on May 14th), Hayley was sufficiently well regarded to be offered the Poet Laureateship in 1790. He is now best remembered as the patron of, among others, George Romney and William Blake.
It was whilst enjoying Hayley’s extended hospitality that Blake was acquitted at Chichester Guildhall on charges arising from his ejection of a drunken soldier from the garden of Hayley’s villa at Felpham.
There is a Romney portrait of John Flaxman modelling the bust of William Hayley in the exhibition, and it was to Flaxman that Hayley’s son was apprenticed. Hayley also commissioned Flaxman’s monument to another Chichester poet, William Collins, that is in the Cathedral not far from the recumbent figures that inspired Philip Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’.
The sad story of William Collins is one of indigence occasioned by lack of preferment, exacerbated by chronic irresolution. Dr Johnson defended him stoutly,
“A man doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditations or remote enquiries”.
Perhaps it was Johnson’s active sympathy for those unable to “pass unentangled through the snares of life” that appealed to Samuel Beckett. ‘Human Wishes’, a play he began in 1938, depicts the ill-assorted unfortunates charitably accommodated under Dr Johnson’s roof in Bolt Court, engaged in irritable conversation as they await the arrival of their benefactor. Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that their wait for Dr Johnson is in vain.