in love; and so she was able to get the better of her cousin, Mary
Queen of Scots, who, poor soul! allowed herself to be ensnared by
the tender passion. Queen Elizabeth, on the historic page, is a
monster. Yet what was singular in her is now quite general.
It has been America which has given the world, this strange type;
like everything else that happens in this country, she has sprung
suddenly upon us, as if she had neither father nor mother nor any
visible ancestry.
She may be in a minority, yet she is not difficult to discover, for
she is most active, showing herself everywhere. Nor is it difficult
to describe her, since she spends much of her time in describing
herself. In the first place, like the orator, she is made rather
than born; indeed, she is herself a good deal of an orator, always
being ready to harangue her friends, explaining and enforcing
her ideas. Self-improvement is her passion; improvement in what
direction? you will ask. She herself does not know. Meantime she
insists on absolute personal liberty--moral, physical, mental, and
also political. That she may be free she places a ban on the senses
and upon sex; either of these would put her back under subjugation.
She announces herself to be eager for affection, but its object
must be some person who is supernaturally perfect and complete;
anything else would be illogical and unworthy and enslaving. And
while her mother dreamed of a life of love and duty in a world
where both are necessary because of its sorrowful imperfections,
she will be satisfied with nothing less than a perfect love and
a perfect affection. At the same time, while resolved on liberty
she does not forget that she is born into a business community;
therefore she has adopted the business man’s creed--efficiency:
“Whatsoever thou doest, do it with all thy might.”
The young men know liberty to be a chimera--that vision has never
flattered their eyes. Life to them means hard work and obedience
and a constant struggle in circumstances where everything is
compromise, and where even honesty is not always the best policy;
and as to success and the making of money, even the greatest energy
will not suffice if there be not good luck and the opportunity.
Unlike the women, these young men have their dreams, for dreams
are the solace of labour and abstinence: dreams, first of all,
of success and fortune, of which they constantly speak; and then
another dream not so easy to talk about: that each may marry some
day the girl of his choice.
Here you have American life as it is among the young. The man
under discipline and a dreamer; the woman a triumphant egotist,
and without any dreams at all. And as to this liberty which she
haughtily demands, what is it, among the girls, except the right
to choose and dismiss her teachers, abandoning everything and
everybody as soon as she ceases to feel interested? Never having
been curbed, she has not learned to prefer another to herself.
In vain nature cries out within her for the sweet burden of
service and sacrifice; she is much too busy listening to her
own voice, repeating its new catch words: “I will be myself.
I belong to myself, I must lead my own life.” Once she enters
society and becomes a woman and meets men, she acquires a very
definite purpose, and goes straight for it. Since she will not
serve the men, let the men serve her. “The American woman,” said a
languidly insolent Englishman to me, “are interesting; the men are
nonentities.” In the Englishman’s conception, the man who does not
take the upper hand with his women is a poor creature.
The ladies in England do not like the modern American woman. Her
success with their own menkind is bitter to bear; yet they envy
her. For these men are serving woman as they never served before;
and it is precisely because, like the Englishman, the modern woman
is herself an egotist. Egoism the Englishman understands: it has
always been his honoured creed and his practice; and here at last
is a woman who, because of her frank selfishness, is perfectly
intelligible; no longer the mystery she used to be, but simple
like a child’s puzzle. Her frantic, brand-new egoism is not quite
the sober article he patronizes for himself, but it delights him
nevertheless, because it is so like his own daily contest with
antagonists whom he must overcome in business. And here is a
beautiful enemy, whom he must both overcome and capture and carry
away with him as a prize of war; to be the ornament of his house
and a delight to the eyes, to be his courtier, his worshipper,
his wife; and as to the extravagance of her egoism, he feels
that as a man he can soon teach her a different lesson, so that
she will settle back into tameness and play her woman’s part,
and be his English wife. And even if she does not, consider what
an advantage it is to have within doors a wife who is perfectly
intelligible, and with whom he knows what to do! Why, he can be
as logical in his own home as in his place of business. The woman
used to be the greatest mystery in the world--you might defy her,
or be kind and yield to her, or crush her with your iron will; but
you couldn’t understand her. No man could read that riddle. The
writers of comedy, the writers of tragedy, all tried their hands
at it. Satirists and wits were never tired of the fascinating
theme. Yet it was all guess-work. No one pretended to know, and
the husbands least of all. Henry the Eighth, who cut off the heads
of his wives, knew no more than last year’s lover. Such used to be
woman. Now she is as easy to read as an old almanac. Watch her as
she paces Fifth Avenue, with her businesslike air. How bright her
eyes, and yet hard as jewels! Her smile how thin-lipped! and her
figure that of a young athlete. Her mode of dress and of personal
array, how smart and efficient and almost military! She is the
very embodiment of briskness, and of commanding decision. But all
the lines of allurement are vanished, and she no longer undulates
with slow grace. She is not feline, neither is she deerlike; and
she no longer caresses, for her voice is as uncompromising as her
style of dress. The ordinary man, unless he was a gentleman of the
old school, or a high-placed nobleman, or an Irish peasant, has
always despised the arts of pleasing, until some charming woman has
taken him in hand; but the modern woman has ceased to instruct him,
and has become his imitator, so that her manners are almost as
intimidating as those of the successful business man. Where is that
threefold charm of mystery, subtlety and concealment, under which
womanhood was wont to veil its powers; and while so many bow down
before the conquering woman, where are the poets? The astronomers,
the mathematicians, the scientists, the men of business, the
lawyers, especially the lawyers, _are_ at her feet, but no music
comes from the poet; and she--is she so happy?
Egoism is unhappiness for man and woman. Talleyrand called Napoleon
“the unamusable.” It used to be the man who was egotist and the
woman who served, for she said: Our mission is to please. Hence her
all-prevailing charm, and hence also her invincible happiness, for
happiness is the denial of egoism. However it be at other times,
the happy woman and the happy man are righteous--in man’s sight and
in God’s.
Happiness is the secret known only to poets and to women; and it
was the women who taught it to the poets. Mere man knows little
about it; least of all the successful man, for risking everything
he has mostly lost everything; under his prosperity there is
generally distaste. And how sorrow and disaster can at times
degrade a man we all know; he becomes gloomy, bitter, or drearily
self-contained, or he drops into dissipation and becomes vulgar.
The woman, on the other hand, finds in disaster her opportunity;
and sorrow, which the woman’s life seldom escapes, however it
be with the men, only intensifies her womanhood, so that she
anticipates a later wisdom, and luminously refuses to recognize any
distinction except that between the happy and the unhappy. There
are only two people who are perfectly content--a woman busy in
her home and a poet among his rhymes. They have the secret; they
share it between them; they break bread together, they are of the
company, even though the poet knows nothing of domestic life nor
the other of rhymes. The true, the natural woman is like a bird,
she has wings. When she is a young girl she is like a bird just
spreading her wings for flight; when she is a matured woman she
is like a bird in full flight: desire gives her wings, and stirs
within her the creative impulse; and nothing can stop her strong
flight towards happiness. She has the creative gifts--wherever her
eye lights, there is happiness--she gilds with “heavenly alchemy”
whatever she touches.
The resolute, practical man puts away the thought of happiness, and
for it substitutes pleasures, which are the gratification of the
senses, and his unquenchable thirst for variety and movement. These
gratifications he can resign with little effort--mere pleasure is
ashes in the mouth, while the other he thinks would unnerve him;
that is for poets, he will tell you. The woman does not believe in
pleasures, she believes in happiness. A supreme belief in happiness
is the woman’s soul. It awakens in her the moment she is in love
or has a child, and accompanies her everywhere. It explains, I
think, the curious self-centredness of her mind, and that strange
aloofness which seems to envelop her who has husband and children.
In her presence we talk of this and that, and do this and that, and
she watches us with eyes in which is the light of knowledge and
foreknowledge.
The man is a worker and a fighter; with strenuous effort he pushes
along the car of progress, and dies under its wheels; and we make
lamentations. But these women should be carried to their graves
with song of hope and wistful triumph; any other kind of music
would be wounding to our recollections. A man talks mysticism and
he argues; and I am bored. A woman looks and perhaps smiles, and
almost as by the touching of hands communicates her own unfading
hopes. She does not use words, and we do not oppose her with words.
Long ago people talked much of ladies’ eyes, and ancient Homer, as
we know, sang of the x-eyed Juno and the azure-eyed Minerva. Now
ladies’ eyes are too bright and too exacting to be so eloquent, so
persuading; and for all her dominating ways she is not the queen
she was, nor for all her witchlike effectiveness is she so calmly
beautiful. By turning egotist she has dropped down to our level.
She is one of us.
And yet the modern woman is right and has arrived in the nick
of time; she is needed because the modern man is not always a
gentleman. Some fifteen years ago I was witness to a strange
scene on Kew Bridge, outside London, one Sunday morning. A line
of five young ladies came riding by on cycles, wearing bloomers.
This excited the loud derision of some loafers, some half-breeds,
standing together on the side-path, and one of them said something,
I did not know what, but the last of the girls heard it and
understood. She stopped, and, carefully adjusting her machine so
that it stood up against the curb of the side-path, walked back to
the young man and asked him if he had used the offensive words; she
then knocked him down, and he fell, probably not so much because
of her strength as because of his own surprise. Sheepishly he got
up, brushing his clothes, and his companions laughed as sheepishly,
while she remounted and rode after her friends. Here was the modern
woman but immature, effective on this occasion, yet much too crude
for anything except a guerrilla war. In Belfast, famous for its
bad manners, every one tries to be “boss” over some one else; yet
if every one can’t be “boss” in Belfast, there is no man even now
who cannot find, both in Belfast and New York and everywhere else,
a woman whom he may “boss.” This is one of the solid comforts of
the masculine existence; but young ladies teaching in the public
schools are watching sympathetically the career of the modern woman.
It insults a woman nowadays to say that the woman’s destiny is
to be always dependent on some man; but we who say this know
perfectly well that it is equally true to say of the man that
it is his destiny to be dependent on some woman. These two must
patch up their differences. Man must yield to woman equality and
dignity; and she must take him back into favour. There is no such
companionship as that between a man and a woman. She brings her
wisdom, traditional with her sex, and derived from a long study
of the question how to live, and he brings his energy, derived
from his long study of how to make a living. When energy makes him
say, Let us forget the present and think about the future, she
will reply: Let us enjoy the present--am I not young? Is not the
childhood of these children exquisite?
People forget or do not know that man’s desire for liberty is
not greater than his desire for restraint. By practising the art
of happiness he gets both. The gratification of all the desires,
tempered each by each, is happiness--hope restrained by memory and
the lust of the flesh by affection and sympathy; herein is richest
harmony and a servitude which is perfect freedom. Pleasure is the
gratification of some one desire pushed to excess and followed by
weariness and satiety; and while pleasure overwhelms intellect and
silences it, happiness makes intellect supreme. Happiness enforces
discipline spontaneously; pleasure relaxes it and brings on
licence, which is the shadow of liberty and its final destruction.
It is character, they say, that saves the world. Does this mean
the will that is strong to grasp and hold? If so, then I know of
something infinitely greater: the full and varied knowledge that
comes from the whole complex human personality--every instrument
in the orchestra--being developed in our consciousness, so that
no single desire is “refused a hearing,” as in a good democracy
where every citizen has his rights secured. Here we have the benign
wisdom of Shakespeare and of good women, and its motive is the
deliberate search for happiness; it kindles the heart and shines in
the eyes of a beautiful woman when she goes about in her home and
among her friends and neighbours--beautiful and a sceptre-bearing
queen; because in a world where every one runs mad after this and
that falsehood, she stands for the simple truth of human happiness
and all its possibilities. Wisdom is better than force, and
supersedes it.
WATTS AND THE METHOD OF ART.[1]
I have often wished that some great painter had written his
autobiography, beginning with his earliest childhood. Saints and
sinners have left us their memoirs in more than sufficient detail;
and we have also the autobiographies of many famous writers.
As yet we have not had the confessions of the Painter; for I am
sure they would be called confessions, since it would have been
with a sense of shame that these men, including the magnificent
Michael Angelo himself, would have confessed their failures at
school to learn as other boys learned, and receive, as other boys
did, instruction from their teachers.
We are all familiar with instances of boys who, exceptionally
quick and clever to ordinary observation, are almost unteachable
at school. It would be thought cruel, as well as impossible,
to attempt teaching grammar and arithmetic to a young musical
genius in a concert-room where musicians were playing; yet this is
precisely what is done every time we try to teach grammar and such
things to a boy with the eyes of a painter. Time and experience
have at last taught us to be respectful and tender with the
musical mind; we accept, and we understand it; and the boy with
the wonderful ear is caught up and carried away and instructed and
fondled, and the world is made smooth for him. But how about the
boy with the wonderful eye? And yet the musical boy is only tempted
when music is actually being played, whereas this other is never
free from solicitation, since to him there is always, except in the
dark, colour and form and light and shade. He will know the shape
and surface of every object in his schoolroom, and how light falls
on desk and table; he will know among his school-fellows all the
profiles and all the front faces, what colour the eyes are, and how
they are shaped; every detail of form and colour will be familiar
to him, since to watch these things and to draw from them a
continuous, intellectual intoxication is the very purpose for which
he has been created; for with him the eyes are the gates of wisdom;
and with young children these eyes are so thronged by wisdom trying
to get in that all their time is taken up in opening the gates to
its inrush.
In this progress of the painter--in this preparation for what, if
the conditions are favourable, ought to be the solemn business
of painting or sculpture--there will be various stages. At first
it will be all observation; after that will come a time in which
the boy will make inferences; to him the face will be the index
of the mind; and, looking round on master and boy, he will be a
physiognomist who has never heard of Lavater, or a craniologist
or phrenologist, until some happy moment when, having exhausted
his interest in scientific inquiry, there will burst upon him the
glorious world of intellectual desire.
A friend of mine--an old painter, who went to school in the North
of Scotland--described to me his experience. The dominie had one
morning been particularly drastic in his methods, and this led
to great concentration of thought among the pupils, while at the
same time it did not in the least alter the usual current of their
ideas. My friend, for instance, busied himself as usual, observing
form and colour, only with a keener zest and, as I have said,
a more concentrated purpose. It was a spring morning, and, for
the first time that year, a ray of sunshine came into the room,
making a square of yellow light on the dusty floor at his feet. It
was only at that particular period of the year such a thing was
possible: later on there would be too many leaves on the trees,
and in winter the sun was not in that quarter of the heavens. My
friend was an unhappy and anxious schoolboy, but the events of that
morning and the menaces of the dominie, combined with the sudden
sunlight at his feet, made a new boy of him, and he looked at the
square of brightness which stirred his heart. He received, as it
were, his mystical message; and some time afterwards, leaving
school, he became a landscape-painter.
With a man like Mr. Watts the world of desire would have burst
differently. He was the greatest figure-painter England has ever
produced. With the exception of Blake, who hardly counts, I may say
he was the one painter who worked in the grand manner and on great
subjects. Years ago, by a happy accident, I met him in my studio. I
remember his handsome face and a certain air, as it seemed to me,
of imperious detachment; in his voice also there was a touch of
austerity. He looked at my pictures without a word, till I asked
him for his opinion. It then came clear, frank, and to the point. I
did not tell him what, nevertheless, was the fact--that, though I
had never seen him before, I had been his diligent pupil for years,
and that from him first I learned the true meaning of painting, and
why I, or indeed anyone else, had been induced to take up the craft.
All his days Watts was a hermit and a recluse; had he loved life
and enjoyed it, he would have lived in it and painted it, as
Hogarth lived and painted; yet he loved his fellow-man, and sought
unweariedly whatever made for his happiness: indeed it might be
said that he painted because he loved his fellow-man. With such a
man the world of desire must have burst in some scene that excited
his indignation or his pity, or his moral admiration and love,
and from that moment he would become a dreamer who incessantly
re-builds life, according to the dictates of a kindled imagination;
for since the eye finds what it looks for, the world of desire
becomes in the self-same moment the world of creation; the desiring
eye is the creating eye: the world itself is neither beautiful
nor ugly; it is a formless vast out of which we create, according
to our desires, new worlds; the madman and the poet look out on
the same scene, but where the one finds ugliness the other finds
beauty; and the world Watts looked out on was the world of men when
they suffer or when they strive together in serious purpose.
In speaking about Watts, I would begin with his portraits. As
regards these, there is no controversy; some people harden their
hearts against his pictures, but no one denies his portraits. Now
it seems to me that the genius of portrait-painting is largely a
genius for friendship; at any rate, I am quite sure that the best
portraits will be painted where the relation of the sitter and the
painter is one of friendship; and it considerably helps my argument
to know that in Watts’ case he mostly painted people whom he had
himself invited to sit.
The technique of portrait-painting is mainly a technique of
interpretation; to get the colour, to model the face adequately,
this to the practised hand is comparatively easy; to so paint that
people should, perforce, see the particular curve, the particular
shadow, and the particular shape of brow or eye that interest the
painter; here is the true difficulty, here the true enjoyment and
exquisite triumph of the painter.
In his early portraits there is little attempt at this
interpretation. There is, indeed, the charm of atmosphere never
absent from Watts’ work at any time, and there is a very obvious
decorative purpose; but these early portraits do not grip the
attention as the later portraits do, because the technique of
interpretation is lacking.
I have heard people say they liked his male portraits better than
his portraits of women, but I cannot share this preference; each in
its degree is perfect. Watts will paint a young lady in fashionable
evening attire--surely the most modern and up-to-date arrangement
possible--and he will so paint her, so gild her with the heavenly
alchemy of his art, that she shall appear like a Venetian beauty
gazing at us from the page of history.
Indeed, over all his portraits, whether of men or women, he spreads
a sort of dim religious light; so that while painted with Dutch
realism, they yet seem to come to us out of the mists of memory and
romance.
Before speaking of his pictures of imagination, I will discuss a
little the whole purpose of art and artists.
The moralist says: I teach morality, without which society would
not hold together.
The trader says: I teach trade, without which there would be no
wealth, and life would not be worth living.
The religious teacher: I teach religion, without which people would
forget that there was another world or a judgment to come.
And the scientist says: I teach truth, which is the basis of
everything.
What can the artist say for himself in presence of this congress
of teachers, before whom we stand silent with hats off in age-long
reverence?
First, what is his record?
He works only to please himself, and regards it as the most
egregious folly--indeed, a kind of wickedness--to try and please
anybody else; he admires wrong as often as right; at one time
he occupies himself with the things of the spirit, and again he
turns just as eagerly to the things of sense; without conscience
and without scruple he flatters in turn every passion and every
instinct, good or bad; he will make the unhappy more unhappy,
and the wicked he will make worse; he inculcates no lessons, and
preaches no dogma; yet often the noble will become nobler for his
companionship.
He is to be found in every community; among the sinners he is a
sort of father confessor, whose absolution is light, so that you
may confess all your sins to him, and you may still go on sinning;
he will laugh at the faces of the good, finding them guilty of
self-complacency, of formalism, of insincerity, of prudence, of
cowardice, of half-heartedness; indeed he is often much more
respectful to sinners than he is to good people of the earth; and
withal is it not from the hands of the painter and the poet that,
as in some royal caprice, the hero receives his crown?