LORD LEIGHTON AND G. F. WATTS
The Nineties were rich in painters of all kinds. People bought pictures
then, and all sorts of pictures; in those days of still happy and
careless barbarism there was no veto on any school, and one could
hang things of almost any school in almost any surroundings. The
influence of the Prince Consort was not altogether dead, and people
unashamedly admired the picture with a story, as well as the portrait
with a likeness. So the older-school painters were still for the most
part extremely comfortable. Herkomer and the other standard portrait
painters covered acres of canvas annually; Alma-Tadema brought yearly an
extra polish to his marbles; the silver birch of MacWhirter put forth
fresh leaves every spring; “Derby Day” Frith survived, and even did
some little work, to remind the world of the brave days of victorious
sentimentalism; at Christie’s, Goodall, Maclise, and Landseer still
won the dealers’ respect; J. C. Horsley, protesting against the nude,
was only mildly laughed at as “Clothes-Horsley.” Millais, cured of his
pre-Raphaelite enthusiasms, was now more of the old gang than the new.
But Mr. Sargent, the Sandow of the brush, proved that the public was by
no means illiberal; it was just as much pleased to be artistically hit
between the eyes as to be tickled. Whistler, still unaccountably reckoned
by many a mere fop—so strong was the influence of a Ruskin yet in the
flesh—was busy making cloudy masterpieces and clear-cut enmities, and a
whole school of morbidity danced in grisly sort round the early tomb of
Beardsley.
[Illustration: LORD LEIGHTON.
(_From a portrait by J. McLure Hamilton._)]
If among all the considerable painters of the Nineties I distinguish
Leighton and Watts, it is not because I think them possessed of the
greatest talents, or even the most interesting personalities, but because
they seem between them to represent rather specially what sharply marked
off the art then passing away from what has taken its place. Both were
very much of the nineteenth century in the largeness of their ideas and
their sense of the importance of their mission. In many ways there could
have been no two men, and no two craftsmen, more distinct. Both were
picturesque and stately figures. Both had features cast in the noblest
mould; the grand-ducal geniality of Leighton was not less impressive in
its kind than the frozen though gentle austerity of Watts. In any circle
each took quite naturally a commanding position—Leighton as a kind of
king, Watts as a kind of priest. Each was at bottom shy, though both were
immovable in their opinions in any company. But spiritually they were
so utterly unlike that the one served as a foil to the other. When they
were together—they were early friends, and the friendship lasted till the
end of Leighton’s life—they might have served as models for an allegory
after Watts’s own heart. Leighton was the epicurean, Watts the stoic.
Leighton represented the world at its gracefullest, Watts the travail
of the spirit. Of Leighton it might be said that he would have been a
better painter could he have thought of something really worth painting.
It may certainly be said of Watts that he was at his best when he was
under no obligation to decide what was worth painting. His painfully
meditated allegories might now be spared without too considerable a pang;
his portraits, simply as documents of the time, could not. But, strongly
as they differed in other ways, both men illustrated in a remarkable
degree the curious seriousness and arrogance characteristic of the
Victorians. Leighton conceived that the painter should be very much of
the gentleman. Watts conceived that the painter should be very much of
the preacher. Neither felt that he had any affinity to the workman. When
I say seriousness, I do not mean that either was a prig; I only mean that
each had a profound conviction that the painting of easel pictures is
an immensely important thing, whereas the painter of to-day of anything
like equal stature would be the first to say that, while he paints easel
pictures for a living, they are about as important as chocolates, cigars,
liqueurs, circulating library novels, and vintage wines—things, that
is to say, to titillate individuals rich enough to afford them. When I
say arrogance, again, I do not mean that they were vulgarly conceited:
Watts revealed a beautiful humility, and Leighton was always bemoaning
his inadequacy. But both were full of the notion that the artist is in
the world to teach something, if it is only deportment, and should be
respected as a teacher. Both would have rebelled against the suggestion
that the artist is a workman, and that it is his sole business, as it is
any workman’s, to make the best use of his material.
It is not to the present purpose to adjudicate between the didactic
and the ultra-technical ideas of art; the question, moreover, is by
no means so simple as many of the controversialists have made it;
no Victorian was ever fool enough to believe that bad technique was
excused by good ethics, and it may be doubted whether any sane person
on the other side ever believed—though some apparently sane persons
have occasionally said—that technique is an end in itself. Grant that a
painter has essentially the same problem, and is essentially the same
kind of craftsman, as the bricklayer; grant that ethical painting is
as absurd as ethical bricklaying, we are still far from admitting the
wilder developments of “art for art’s sake.” The bricklayer’s business,
after all, is to build houses for men and styes for pigs, and not simply
to play the wizard—or the fool—with his material out of mere joy in his
dexterity. So the painter, too, has a task to perform, and if he does
not perform it, if he leaves unachieved the main and obvious purpose,
then he has failed, whatever incidental miracles he may have performed.
The difference between the Victorians and their successors is not to be
measured by the stupidest of one age and the maddest of the other. Yet
the difference is there, it is really considerable, and it is, I think,
in the main the difference between the first and second generation of
agnosticism.
The great Victorians were in general agnostics; Watts certainly was one.
They were of an age when every advance in science seemed to confirm the
philosophic rationalism of the eighteenth century. But they retained much
of the spirit of faith. We have all seen those ingenious advertisements
which command us to “watch the letters in red” and then close our eyes.
When we obey the advertiser, and do close our eyes, the image of the
object is still visible, though we no longer see the object itself.
But, if the eyes remain closed for a little while, the image fades
completely away. This may serve to represent the difference between the
Victorians and ourselves. They were, as a whole, no longer believers in
the sense that Dante and Bunyan were believers. But some, while confining
themselves by no dogma, still persuaded themselves that they believed,
and yet more reverenced still what they would not believe. Dickens
represents the one type, Huxley the other. It is very singular to note
how in Dickens rationalism jostles with his instinctive respect for the
greater Christian dogmas. He talks about “the world that sets this right”
as simply as about the world that wants setting right. Yet (as in the
case of Joan of Arc) he is downright angry over people who would suggest
that a miracle is possible. When he writes from the heart he accepts as a
little child the greatest of all miracles; when he writes with the head
he is as scornful as Voltaire, and scarcely less ribald.
We are conscious of this double mood through most of the nineteenth
century, and it explains much of the characteristic Victorian limp.
The giants of those days nearly all had one intellectual leg shorter
than the other; in poise they looked majestic, but whenever they got
excited the effect was always a little laughable. Thus Carlyle suddenly
forgets that he is a sort of Hebrew prophet, and runs after Newman or
the Pope, throwing mud, for all the world like a small boy at Portadown.
Thus Kingsley, one moment quite big and universal, is the next moment a
shrill sectarian. Thus Tennyson descends abrupt from Virgilian grandeur
to suburban prejudice. So many of the great Victorians seemed to be
really so anxious to believe in God, and so afraid that it was not an
advanced thing to believe, that the fear of dogma and the yearning for
faith caused them perpetually to wobble. Their attitude to all sorts
of questions was one of what may be called violent indecision, and
people now seem agreed to call it contemptible. But, whatever it was, it
determined the character of nearly all Victorian things, and among them
of much Victorian painting.
When men believe seriously they are generally not too serious about
their beliefs; witness the mediæval faith and what seems to us the
mediæval profanity. When a man is happily married to a woman, he does
not spend his time paying her high-flown compliments; he takes it for
granted that she loves him and knows that he loves her. There are
exceptions, of course, like Warren Hastings, who in old age called his
wife (epistolarily and to herself) “his elegant Marian.” There are
exceptions also among religious people; just as there are some husbands
who seem only visitors in their own houses, so there are some saints who
are never quite at home in their faith. The rule, however, is that the
man who is married to a woman, and the man who is married to a creed,
act like spouses and not like sweethearts. But just as usually we may
be sure that a man has not quite made up his mind to commit himself to
matrimony with a girl if he still treats her with grave gallantry and
composes laborious sonnets to her eyebrows, so we are seldom far wrong
in assuming that the man who talks too solemnly about the beauty of a
creed is already inclined to regard it as a myth. Tennyson, for example,
could not have been so ceremonious with Arthur and his knights if he
had truly felt them as real people. And if this half-faith tends to an
unbalanced solemnity, it inclines a man also to an exaggerated sense of
responsibility and to that kind of humility which is really a form of
presumption. The man of firm faith realises his own insignificance, and
is content to leave much to God. The man of no faith, and no hankering
after faith, washes his hand of things in general, and “eats his pudding”
without any kind of uneasiness. But the man of half-faith is exceedingly
prone to imagine himself consecrated to set everything right, except
possibly himself. We, having lost that half-faith of the Victorians,
having no longer imprinted on our minds the image of things at one time
very real, have little sympathy with their ideals and perplexities, and
therefore a very imperfect understanding of their performances. We see
their inconsistency of thought and feeling, and do little justice to
their honesty of purpose. We sneer at their pomposity, but fail to see
that it was the effect of their immense sense of their accountability—to
someone or something they were not quite sure about.
In Watts this sense of accountability was a dominating fact; it is
the inner stuff of everything he did. But even Frederick Leighton,
a man of much lighter make, was penetrated with an immensely serious
conviction of the importance of the mission of painting in general, and
of himself as a painter in particular. Leighton belonged immediately to
the upper middle class, but the family was originally noble, and he could
trace his descent through the female line to a considerable mediæval
family in Shropshire. He was the son and the grandson of a doctor. His
grandfather attained such a degree of professional eminence as to gain
appointment as Court Physician to the Czar Nicholas, and but for the
accident of a delicate constitution his father would have continued in
Russian employment. This ill-health, and the consequent necessity for
climate-hunting, led to a life of genteel vagrancy, and before Frederick
Leighton had reached the age of a fifth-form lad he had seen many
countries, and had acquired that fluent command of French, Italian, and
German which distinguished him as the best linguist who ever presided
over the Royal Academy. His general education was not neglected; at
seventeen he was a good classical scholar, and he used to say afterwards
that he then knew more of anatomy than when he became President.
[Illustration: G. F. WATTS IN HIS STUDIO.]
Though his taste for art was early manifested, his father intended
him for medicine, and it was with some reluctance that he at last
consented to recognise facts, and permit the lad to enter on a course of
serious study. In view of the seignorial grace of Leighton’s maturity
it is a little piquant to find that his style as a young man caused
great distress to his mother. “My child,” she writes just before
his twenty-fourth birthday, “your manners are very faulty, and I am
consequently much disappointed. You take so much after me, and my nearest
relations had such refined manners, that I made sure you must resemble my
father and brothers. There is, however,” she adds cheeringly, “nothing
whatever to prevent your becoming a gentleman.” One is almost tempted
to believe that one of the lady’s near relatives was Mrs. Nickleby, and
another perhaps Mrs. Micawber. She certainly recalls those ladies not
only in her excessive reverence for her family, but in her apparent
incapacity to come to a clear judgment on the facts before her. For it is
impossible to believe that at any time a man so gifted as Leighton could
have been boorish: a good profile is generally worth a hundred primers on
etiquette.
At twenty-five Leighton exhibited the picture which brought him a sudden
fame, the immense canvas of Cimabue’s Madonna being carried in triumph
through the streets of Florence to the Church of Santa Maria Novella.
In the Academy of 1855 this work attracted great attention, and Queen
Victoria bought it for the considerable price of six hundred guineas.
“A huge thing which everybody talks about,” Rossetti describes it; “the
R.A.’s have been gasping for years for someone to back against Hunt and
Millais, and here they have him, a fact that makes some people do the
picture injustice in return.”
The Cimabue was painted in Rome, where the young artist had for some
years enjoyed himself in the Bohemian society which Thackeray deals with
so happily in _The Newcomes_, qualifying himself for association with
hirsute genius by growing a full beard and a “feeble moustache.” He
now returned to London to make the most of his success. But he showed
no eagerness to pass through all the doors obligingly thrown open to
him, and it is rather curious that a man who became afterwards so
complete a social success incurred resentment on the ground of what was
interpreted as a supercilious aloofness. The truth was that his health
was not strong, and that he always had to pay dearly for late hours and
contact with general society. Indeed, this physical inadequacy was one
of the main facts of his life: devotion to the social duties of the
Presidency ultimately killed him, and it is hardly fanciful to suppose
that a constitutional lack of vigour was responsible for one feature of
his art which must have struck the most casual observer. “I have not
and never shall have,” he wrote of himself, “enormous power.” He put
into all his works the very best that was in him; Watts himself was not
more conscientious; and among all modern painters there was none more
ambitious. He deliberately challenged comparison with the masters of the
golden age of Italian art; indeed, Leighton’s natural bent was to the
grand manner, and in the matter of composition he had a real affinity
with the great men he admired. But, apart from unfortunate methods of
manipulation learned from his German masters, there was almost always a
certain deficiency or a certain exaggeration peculiar to inherent want of
power, which must either under-do or over-do.
But if he were not quite a great painter he was certainly a great
President. The Academy never had a chief who better looked, spoke, and
played the part. By the Nineties his excessive labours as President
had told on his never robust health, and for some years he had had
warnings of angina pectoris. But nothing would induce him to restrain
his activities within the limit which advancing years had inexorably
fixed; the life of the valetudinarian was impossible for him. So the
round of speeches, dinners, soirées, and receptions, was kept up almost
to the last, though the haggard face satirised the light grace of his
manner and the rather theatrical showiness of his dress. Leighton had
long been a baronet; it was one of the distresses of his life that Watts
refused a like honour. On January 1, 1896, he was created a Peer, and
twenty-four days later the public learned, with something of a pang, that
he was dead. His last spoken words were in German, and there was some
appropriateness in the fact, for no little of German pedantry tinctured
his classical enthusiasms. But in character and sentiment he was wholly
English, and in nothing more English than in his regrets that one cannot
have one’s cake and eat it. He achieved a social position never before
occupied by a British painter; he won the worship of innumerable friends;
he did an enormous amount of work at a generally high technical level.
Yet, two years before his death, he told a friend, “I have never got what
I most wanted in this world.” The “what” he did not indicate.
“His was a nature the most beautiful of any I have ever known,” was
Leighton’s epitaph by his friend Watts. Leighton died long before he had
become old-fashioned. It was Watts’s fate to linger in a world of which
he could not possibly have approved. The recluse of Limnerslease—the very
name smacks eloquently of the Victorian mood—seemed to those who caught
a glimpse of him like some stern old Puritan brooding in retirement over
the jiggings and Jezebelisms of the Restoration. The nineteenth-century
seriousness which Leighton had, but could put on and off like a garment,
was the very soul of Watts; he was probably the most serious painter
who ever lived. That nineteenth-century “cheek” which made Leighton
pit himself against all the old masters on their own ground was wildly
exaggerated in Watts; he set himself to paint things which were to be not
only the greatest of paintings, but the most powerful of sermons—sermons,
too, addressed not to a sect or even a faith, but to the whole human
race, now and yet to be. Mr. Chesterton, I think, has remarked in his
interesting monograph on Watts that he avoided of set purpose all
conventional imagery, from the cross downwards, so that his allegories
should have universal appeal, and should be intelligible to the cultured
Bantu or Papuan of five thousand years hence who happens to disinter
them from the ruins of the Tate Gallery. The painter who takes his work
like that may be, as Watts was, humble as a human individual, but as an
artist we can only feel his colossal arrogance.
But this arrogance was the great fact of the time. When I see a Watts
picture—I am not speaking of his admirable portraits, but of his didactic
allegories—it seems to conjure up, not so much the noble reflections
that appear to rise in some other men, but odd memories of all sorts of
Victorian things. I think of Kingsley setting out to crush the unbeliever
and solve the social problem by writing _Hypatia_ and _Alton Locke_; of
Herbert Spencer (when his circulation did not give him too much trouble)
confidently measuring the Knowable and the Unknowable with his synthetic
inch-tape; of Browning settling the nature of Providence in an abrupt
sentence and then going jollily off to dinner; of Tennyson dismissing
the French nation with a wave of his kingly hand as victims of “red-fool
fury”; of Carlyle hurling thunderbolts at everybody who did not feel like
a Scotch peasant or think like a German philosopher. These Victorians
were wonderful men and did wonderful things, and we have not earned the
right of easy scorn for them and theirs. But in few ages have men, almost
all of whom were bewildered in one way or another, been so supremely
confident of their power to settle everything. The nineteenth century,
in fact, left nearly everything unsettled through that wondrous faith in
the power of talk. It hated dogma, and gave birth to perhaps the most
dogmatic people who have ever lived.
The mixture of humility and audacity in Watts was partly of the time
and partly of his nature, but also partly of his circumstances. Watts
lived all his life in the kind of detachment which, while it makes men
personally shy and diffident, gives them a gigantic confidence in their
own ideas. He was a born draughtsman: he never remembered the time he
could not draw. But he had scarcely any formal education in art before
he won with his cartoon of “Caractacus” the scholarship which permitted
him to study in Italy; and no master, dead or living, ever seems to
have exerted any real influence on his style. He had many friends and
comrades, but only one real hero, Tennyson, with whom he could not
compete, and who could not compete with him. Sympathies he had with many
movements and many kinds of men, even on certain points with politicians
and publicists whom he must have regarded generally with a certain
distaste; something of a Radical in politics and much of a Puritan in
temperament, he occasionally intervened in political and social causes
on which he felt strongly. But he led no one, and he allowed no one to
lead him; acknowledging no master, he left no pupil. This isolation was
favourable to an exaggeration of the general tendency of the Victorian
great men to take themselves with immoderate seriousness, and the
solemnity of Watts was a little oppressive to the natural man who chanced
to come into his majestic presence. He had to be a very bold youngster
who could venture on any flippancy within the range of “those pure eyes,”
which, in company with a nose of splendid line, a fine white beard,
and a black silk skull-cap, suggested the “perfect witness,” if not of
“all-judging Jove,” at least of the very archetype of a Puritanical
Evangelical Chairman of Quarter Sessions.
If Watts was a great painter, he was assuredly a greater man, and one
really felt in his presence the vastness of the possibilities of the
race. But as a small human individual one also felt very small indeed.
That is the effect of the Puritan. Probably most people felt small when
they met Milton. But I can imagine that nobody could be in the same room
with Shakespeare without feeling great.