Hayward

Hayward is the cultured friend whose early authority over Philip Carey rests on his knowledge of art and literature. He first helps Philip find a room and an introduction to an art school in Paris; later, the two men’s changing tastes expose the distance between the young Philip who once looked up to him and the more skeptical man who ultimately learns of his death. Their friendship does not end in a dramatic quarrel: admiration fades into disillusion, then indifference and habit, until news of Hayward’s death makes old conversations and the years in Heidelberg newly painful.

Identity and Early Influence

Hayward’s influence on Philip begins with the authority of culture. Philip had admired him as someone able to speak with assurance about art and literature, and the friendship formed in Heidelberg became associated with an ardent expectation that Hayward himself would achieve great things. After Philip decides to study art in Paris, Hayward sends him the name of a hotel where he can rent a room for thirty francs a month and a note of introduction to the school’s massiere. This practical assistance helps connect Philip’s ambition to an actual place to live and a route into art training.

Hayward also belongs to a social world in which education and cultural fluency carry status. Philip remembers his uncle’s saying that it takes three generations to make a gentleman, and the saying is linked to a familiar formula of gentlemanly credentials: family background, public school, and Oxford or Cambridge. At Blackstable, brewing had been treated with civil contempt, but Philip is surprised to discover the importance attached to Watson, who had been to Winchester and Oxford. The contrast makes visible the social authority of elite schooling and the cultural polish Hayward represents to Philip in their early friendship.

Friendship and Changing Taste

In Paris, Hayward’s artistic vocabulary is part of the debate that surrounds Philip. The young artists argue over the older schools and the newer painters, with the standing of Raphael challenged in favor of artists such as Velasquez and the impressionists. In a conversation about the Mona Lisa, Hayward invokes Walter Pater and says that Pater is its only justification; he also mentions that Cronshaw had known Pater. His remark places him within a literary culture that interprets painting through aesthetic criticism, rather than treating artistic value as self-evident.

Philip’s own taste changes quickly under the pressure of this environment. He turns from the old authorities and comes to admire Manet, Monet, and Degas, while photographs of Ingres’s Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia hang side by side above his washing-stand. The images become objects of daily contemplation, and his response to the old masters is recast through newer standards. Hayward is not presented as the sole cause of that transformation, but he belongs to the intellectual and artistic circle against which Philip defines his developing judgments.

When Hayward returns to Paris after an interval, Philip is eager to see him, but their reunion brings disappointment. Hayward’s appearance has altered: his hair is thinner, his blue eyes paler, and his features have become wizened and colorless. More important to the relationship, Philip finds that Hayward’s mind seems unchanged while his own has moved on. At twenty-one, Philip looks back with scorn on opinions he had held only recently and has little patience with those who continue to hold them. He takes Hayward through the galleries and delivers the revolutionary views he has newly adopted, scarcely recognizing how much he wants to show off before his former mentor.

Artistic Judgment and Disillusionment

Hayward’s literary and aesthetic sensibility also shapes the language in which other characters discuss art. When Philip is shown the beauty of a painting, the response is framed as something that must be felt before it can be understood. This emphasis on cultivated perception contrasts with the severe practical judgment Philip later receives from Foinet. Foinet tells Philip that he has manual dexterity and could, through work and perseverance, become a careful but mediocre painter; he sees industry and intelligence, but no talent. The verdict is not Hayward’s, but its bluntness throws into relief the earlier world in which cultural knowledge and artistic enthusiasm had helped sustain Philip’s hopes.

By the time the friends meet regularly in London, their youthful intimacy has largely disappeared. They continue to see each other once or twice a week when Hayward is in town, and books remain one of their subjects, but Philip no longer believes that nothing matters except art. He resents Hayward’s contempt for action and success and recognizes that his former friend talks of literary achievement without bringing it about. The three hundred pounds a year on which Hayward lives is increasingly difficult for Philip to regard as proof of a meaningful artistic life. What had once seemed promise now looks like talk and resignation.

Hayward nonetheless remains part of a recurring social circle. At the tavern in Beak Street, he meets Macalister, the philosophic stockbroker, and their arguments can become heated. Macalister mocks Hayward’s delicate sentiments and vague suggestions of future masterpieces; despite their antagonism, the men are drawn back together by habit, and by the end of the evening they generally make peace. Philip also encounters Lawson there. The tavern’s repeated meetings give the friendship a durable setting even after intellectual respect has weakened: shared custom persists where shared conviction no longer does.

Final Separation and Death

In the spring, Philip goes to the Beak Street tavern hoping to see Macalister and discuss his own financial troubles, but finds Hayward there instead. Hayward tells him that he is joining the Dorset Yeomanry as a trooper. Philip has known him for eight years. Their youthful intimacy, founded on Philip’s enthusiastic admiration for a man who could instruct him in art and literature, has long since vanished; habit has taken its place. Philip now objects to Hayward’s disdain for action and success and thinks that, despite his hopes for him, Hayward will never do anything but talk.

The tavern group later breaks apart. Macalister no longer goes there, and Hayward leaves for the Cape; Philip avoids Lawson, feeling that the two painters no longer have anything in common. When Philip unexpectedly meets Lawson on Regent Street, he learns that Hayward died soon after landing. The news shocks him even though he no longer feels the warmth of their earlier friendship. Until then, he had never lost a friend his own age; Cronshaw’s death had seemed ordinary because Cronshaw was so much older. Hayward’s death makes Philip feel, rather than merely know, that death applies to him too.

The news turns Philip back toward the friendship’s beginning: their first meeting, their pleasant months in Heidelberg, and the good conversations that cannot be resumed. He thinks of the strange way a companion can once seem essential, then become unnecessary after separation, while life goes on without him. Hayward’s death is described as futile, like the life Philip believes he has led without achieving anything: he dies of a disease soon after arriving, having failed, in Philip’s retrospective judgment, to accomplish what his youthful promise seemed to foretell. The final separation gives the old friendship a last, painful significance—not by restoring Philip’s former admiration, but by making its lost years and remembered conversations impossible to dismiss.