G. F. WATTS
[Illustration: THE HABIT DOES NOT MAKE THE MONK.]
G. F. WATTS
BY G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration]
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
HENRIETTA ST. COVENT GARDEN
_Published 1904_
_Reprinted 1906, 1909, 1913, 1914_
PRINTED AT
THE BALLANTYNE PRESS
LONDON
LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURES
_Facing p._
THE HABIT DOES NOT MAKE THE MONK _Frontispiece_
G. F. WATTS, R.A. 8
THE RIDER ON THE WHITE HORSE 10
LESLIE STEPHEN 14
WALTER CRANE 16
THE SLUMBER OF THE AGES 18
CARDINAL MANNING 20
CHAOS 22
“FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS” 26
AN IDLE CHILD OF FANCY 28
THE MINOTAUR 32
THE COURT OF DEATH 34
MATTHEW ARNOLD 36
JOHN STUART MILL 36
ROBERT BROWNING 38
LORD TENNYSON 38
THE DWELLER IN THE INNERMOST 40
GEORGE MEREDITH 42
ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE 44
HOPE 46
JONAH 48
MAMMON 52
DEATH CROWNING INNOCENCE 54
A STORY FROM BOCCACCIO 56
LORD LYTTON 58
DAWN 60
EVE REPENTANT 62
LOVE AND DEATH 64
WILLIAM MORRIS 66
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 68
THOMAS CARLYLE 70
GOOD LUCK TO YOUR FISHING 74
_The Photogravures are from photographs by Fredk. Hollyer.
Permanent photographs of works of Watts, Rossetti, Burne-Jones,
Holbein, and of pictures in the Dublin and Hague Galleries can be
obtained of Fredk. Hollyer, 9 Pembroke Square, Kensington._
[Illustration: G. F. WATTS, R.A.
Photograph from Life by Frederick Hollyer.]
George Frederick Watts was born on 23rd February 1817. His whole rise
and career synchronizes roughly with the rise and career of the
nineteenth century. As a rule, no doubt, such chronological parallels
are peculiarly fanciful and unmeaning. Nothing can be imagined more
idle, in a general way, than talking about a century as if it were some
kind of animal with a head and tail, instead of an arbitrary length cut
from an unending scroll. Nor is it less erroneous to assume that even if
a period be definitely vital or disturbing, art must be a mirror of it;
the greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity; poets,
like bricklayers, work on through a century of wars, and Bewick’s birds,
to take an instance, have the air of persons unaffected by the French
Revolution. But in the case of Watts there are two circumstances which
render the dates relevant. The first is that the nineteenth century was
self-conscious, believed itself to be an idea and an atmosphere, and
changed its name from a chronological almost to a philosophical term. I
do not know whether all centuries do this or whether an advanced and
progressive organ called “The Eleventh Century” was ever in
contemplation in the dawn of the Middle Ages. But with us it is clear
that a certain spirit was rightly or wrongly associated with the late
century and that it called up images and thoughts like any historic or
ritual date, like the Fourth of July or the First of April. What these
images and thoughts were we shall be obliged in a few minutes and in the
interests of the subject to inquire. But this is the first circumstance
which renders the period important; and the second is that it has always
been so regarded by Watts himself. He, more than any other modern man,
more than politicians who thundered on platforms or financiers who
captured continents, has sought in the midst of his quiet and hidden
life to mirror his age. He was born in the white and austere dawn of
that great reforming century, and he has lingered after its grey and
doubtful close. He is above all things a typical figure, a survival of
the nineteenth century.
It will appear to many a somewhat grotesque matter to talk about a
period in which most of us were born and which has only been dead a year
or two, as if it were a primal Babylonian empire of which only a few
columns are left crumbling in the desert. And yet such is, in spirit,
the fact. There is no more remarkable psychological element in history
than the way in which a period can suddenly become unintelligible. To
the early Victorian period we have in a moment lost the key: the Crystal
Palace is the temple of a forgotten creed. The thing always happens
sharply: a whisper runs through the salons, Mr. Max Beerbohm waves a
wand and a whole generation of great men and great achievement suddenly
looks mildewed and unmeaning. We see precisely the same thing in that
other great reaction towards art and the vanities, the Restoration of
Charles II. In that hour both the great schools of faith and valour
which had seemed either angels or devils to all men: the dreams of
Strafford and the great High Churchmen on the one hand; the Moslem
frenzy of the English Commons, the worship of the English law upon the
[Illustration: THE RIDER ON THE WHITE HORSE]
other; both seemed distant and ridiculous. The new Cavalier despised the
old Cavalier even more than he despised the Roundhead. The last stand of
English chivalry dwindled sharply to the solitary figure of the absurd
old country gentleman drinking wine out of an absurd old flagon. The
great roar of Roundhead psalms which cried out that the God of Battles
was loose in English meadows shrank to a single snuffle. The new and
polite age saw the old and serious one exactly as we see the early
Victorian era: they saw it, that is to say, not as splendid, not as
disastrous, not as fruitful, not as infamous, not as good or bad, but
simply as ugly. Just as we can see nothing about Lord Shaftesbury but
his hat, they could see nothing about Cromwell but his nose. There is no
doubt of the shock and sharpness of the silent transition. The only
difference is that accordingly as we think of man and his nature,
according to our deepest intuitions about things, we shall see in the
Restoration and the _fin de siècle_ philosophy a man waking from a
turbid and pompous dream, or a man hurled from heaven and the wars of
the angels.
G. F. Watts is so deeply committed to, and so unalterably steeped in,
this early Victorian seriousness and air of dealing with great matters,
that unless we sharply apprehend that spirit, and its difference from
our own, we shall misunderstand his work from the outset. Splendid as is
the art of Watts technically or obviously considered, we shall yet find
much in it to perplex and betray us, unless we understand his original
theory and intention, a theory and intention dyed deeply with the
colours of a great period which is gone. The great technical
inequalities of his work, its bursts of stupendous simplicity in colour
and design, its daring failures, its strange symbolical portraits, all
will mislead or bewilder if we have not the thread of intention. In
order to hold that, we must hold something which runs through and
supports, as a string supports jewels, all the wars and treaties and
reforms of the nineteenth century.
There are at least three essential and preliminary points on which Watts
is so completely at one with the nineteenth century and so completely
out of accord with the twentieth, that it may be advisable to state them
briefly before we proceed to the narrower but not more cogent facts of
his life and growth. The first of these is a nineteenth-century
atmosphere which is so difficult to describe, that we can only convey it
by a sort of paradox. It is difficult to know whether it should be
called doubt or faith. For if, on the one hand, real faith would have
been more confident, real doubt, on the other hand, would have been more
indifferent. The attitude of that age of which the middle and best parts
of Watts’ work is most typical, was an attitude of devouring and
concentrated interest in things which were, by their own system,
impossible or unknowable. Men were, in the main, agnostics: they said,
“We do not know”; but not one of them ever ventured to say, “We do not
care.” In most eras of revolt and question, the sceptics reap something
from their scepticism: if a man were a believer in the eighteenth
century, there was Heaven; if he were an unbeliever, there was the
Hell-Fire Club. But these men restrained themselves more than hermits
for a hope that was more than half hopeless, and sacrificed hope itself
for a liberty which they would not enjoy; they were rebels without
deliverance and saints without reward. There may have been and there was
something arid and over-pompous about them: a newer and gayer philosophy
may be passing before us and changing many things for the better; but
we shall not easily see any nobler race of men, and of them all most
assuredly there was none nobler than Watts. If anyone wishes to see that
spirit, he will see it in pictures painted by Watts in a form beyond
expression sad and splendid. _Hope_ that is dim and delicate and yet
immortal, the indestructible minimum of the spirit; _Love and Death_
that is awful and yet the reverse of horrible; _The Court of Death_ that
is like a page of Epictetus and might have been dreamt by a dead Stoic:
these are the visions of that spirit and the incarnations of that time.
Its faith was doubtful, but its doubt was faithful. And its supreme and
acute difference from most periods of scepticism, from the later
Renaissance, from the Restoration and from the hedonism of our own time
was this, that when the creeds crumbled and the gods seemed to break up
and vanish, it did not fall back, as we do, on things yet more solid and
definite, upon art and wine and high finance and industrial efficiency
and vices. It fell in love with abstractions and became enamoured of
great and desolate words.
The second point of _rapport_ between Watts and his time was a more
personal matter, a matter more concerned with the man, or, at least, the
type; but it throws so much light upon almost every step of his career
that it may with advantage be suggested here. Those who know the man
himself, the quaint and courtly old man down at Limnerslease, know that
if he has one trait more arresting than another, it is his almost absurd
humility. He even disparages his own talent that he may insist rather
upon his aims. His speech and gesture are simple, his manner polite to
the point of being deprecating, his soul to all appearance of an almost
confounding clarity and innocence. But although these appearances
accurately represent the truth about him, though he is in reality modest
and even fantastically modest, there is another element in him, an
element which was in almost all the great men of his time, and it is
something which many in these days would call a kind of splendid and
inspired impudence. It is that wonderful if simple power of preaching,
of claiming to be heard, of believing in an internal message and
destiny: it is the audacious faculty of mounting a pulpit. Those would
be very greatly mistaken who, misled by the childlike and humble manner
of this monk of art, expected to find in him any sort of doubt, or any
sort of fear, or any sort of modesty about the aims he follows or the
cause he loves. He has the one great certainty which marks off all the
great Victorians from those who have come after them: he may not be
certain that he is successful, or certain that he is great, or certain
that he is good, or certain that he is capable: but he is certain that
he is right. It is of course the very element of confidence which has in
our day become least common and least possible. We know we are brilliant
and distinguished, but we do not know we are right. We swagger in
fantastic artistic costumes; we praise ourselves; we fling epigrams
right and left; we have the courage to play the egoist and the courage
to play the fool, but we have not the courage to preach. If we are to
deliver a philosophy it must be in the manner of the late Mr. Whistler
and the _ridentem dicere verum_. If our heart is to be aimed at it must
be with the rapier of Stevenson which runs us through without either
pain or puncture. It is only just to say, that good elements as well as
bad ones have joined in making this old Victorian preaching difficult or
alien to us.
[Illustration: LESLIE STEPHEN.]
Humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as cynicism, a sense of
complexity and a kind of gay and worldly charity have led us to avoid
the pose of the preacher, to be moral by ironies, to whisper a word and
glide away. But, whatever may be the accidental advantage of this recoil
from the didactic, it certainly does mean some loss of courage and of
the old and athletic simplicity. Nay, in some sense it is really a loss
of a fine pride and self-regard. Mr. Whistler coquetted and bargained
about the position and sale of his pictures: he praised them; he set
huge prices on them; but still under all disguise, he treated them as
trifles. Watts, when scarcely more than a boy and comparatively unknown,
started his great custom of offering his pictures as gifts worthy of a
great nation. Thus we came to the conclusion, a conclusion which may
seem to some to contain a faint element of paradox, that Mr. Whistler
suffered from an excessive and exaggerated modesty. And this unnatural
modesty of Mr. Whistler can scarcely be more typically symbolized than
in his horror of preaching. The new school of art and thought does
indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into
blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is
only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a
truism.
Lastly, it would be quite impossible to complete this prefatory
suggestion of the atmosphere in which the mind of Watts grew and
prevailed, without saying something about that weary and weather-beaten
question of the relation of art to ethics on which so much has been said
in connexion with him and his contemporaries. About the real aim and the
real value of Watts’ allegorical pictures I shall speak later, but for
the moment it is only desirable to point out what the early and middle
Victorian view of the matter really was. According to the later
æsthetic creed which Mr. Whistler and others did so much to preach, the
state of the arts under the reign of that Victorian view was a chaos of
everyone minding everyone else’s business. It was a world in which
painters were trying to be novelists, and novelists trying to be
historians, and musicians doing the work of schoolmasters, and sculptors
doing the work of curates. That is a view which has some truth in it,
both as a description of the actual state of things and as involving an
interesting and suggestive philosophy of the arts. But a good deal of
harm may be done by ceaselessly repeating to ourselves even a true and
fascinating fashionable theory, and a great deal of good by endeavouring
to realize the real truth about an older one. The thing from which
England suffers just now more than from any other evil is not the
assertion of falsehoods, but the endless and irrepressible repetition of
half-truths. There is another side to every historic situation, and that
often a startling one; and the other side of the Victorian view of art,
now so out of mode, is too little considered. The salient and essential
characteristic of Watts and men of his school was that they regarded
life as a whole. They had in their heads, as it were, a synthetic
philosophy which put everything into a certain relation with God and the
wheel of things. Thus, psychologically speaking, they were incapable not
merely of holding such an opinion, but actually of thinking such a
thought as that of art for art’s sake; it was to them like talking about
voting for voting’s sake, or amputating for amputating’s sake. To them
as to the ancient Jews the Spirit of the unity of existence declared in
thunder that they should not make any graven image, or have any gods but
Him. Doubtless, they did not give art a
[Illustration: WALTER CRANE.]
relation of unimpeachable correctness: in their scheme of things it may
be true, or rather it is true, that the æsthetic was confused with the
utilitarian, that good gardens were turned so to speak into bad
cornfields, and a valuable temple into a useless post-office. But in so
far as they had this fundamental idea that art must be linked to life,
and to the strength and honour of nations, they were a hundred times
more broad-minded and more right than the new ultra-technical school.
The idea of following art through everything for itself alone, through
extravagance, through cruelty, through morbidity, is just exactly as
superstitious as the idea of following theology for itself alone through
extravagance and cruelty and morbidity. To deny that Baudelaire is
loathsome, or Nietzsche inhuman, because we stand in awe of beauty, is
just the same thing as denying that the Court of Pope Julius was
loathsome, or the rack inhuman, because we stand in awe of religion. It
is not necessary and it is not honest. The young critics of the Green
Carnation, with their nuances and technical mysteries, would doubtless
be surprised to learn that as a class they resemble ecstatic nuns, but
their principle is, in reality, the same. There is a great deal to be
said for them, and a great deal, for that matter, to be said for nuns.
But there is nothing to be surprised at, nothing to call for any charge
of inconsistency or lack of enlightenment, about the conduct of Watts
and the great men of his age, in being unable to separate art from
ethics. They were nationalists and universalists: they thought that the
ecstatic isolation of the religious sense had done incalculable harm to
religion. It is not remarkable or unreasonable that they should think
that the ecstatic isolation of the artistic sense would do incalculable
harm to art.
This, then, was the atmosphere of Watts and Victorian idealism: an
atmosphere so completely vanished from the world of art in which we now
live that the above somewhat long introduction is really needed to make
it vivid or human to us. These three elements may legitimately, as I
have said, be predicated of it as its main characteristics: first, the
sceptical idealism, the belief that abstract verities remained the chief
affairs of men when theology left them; second, the didactic simplicity,
the claim to teach other men and to assume one’s own value and
rectitude; third, the cosmic utilitarianism, the consideration of any
such thing as art or philosophy perpetually with reference to a general
good. They may be right or wrong, they may be returning or gone for
ever; theories and fashions may change the face of humanity again and
yet again; but at least in that one old man at Limnerslease, burned, and
burned until death, these convictions, like three lamps in an old pagan
temple of stoicism.
Of the ancestry of Watts so little is known that it resolves itself into
one hypothesis: a hypothesis which brings with it a suggestion, a
suggestion employed by almost all his existing biographers, but a
suggestion which cannot, I think, pass unchallenged, although the matter
may appear somewhat theoretic and remote. Watts was born in London, but
his family had in the previous generation come from Hereford. The vast
amount of Welsh blood which is by the nature of the case to be found in
Herefordshire has led to the statement that Watts is racially a Celt,
which is very probably true. But it is also said, in almost every notice
of his life and work, that the Celtic spirit can be detected in his
painting, that the Celtic principle of mysticism is a characteristic of
his artistic conceptions. It is in no idly antagonistic spirit that I
venture to doubt this most profoundly.
[Illustration: THE SLUMBER OF THE AGES]
Watts may or may not be racially a Celt, but there is nothing Celtic
about his mysticism. The essential Celtic spirit in letters and art may,
I think, be defined as a sense of the unbearable beauty of things. The
essential spirit of Watts may, I think, be much better expressed as a
sense of the joyful austerity of things. The dominant passion of the
artistic Celt, of Mr. W. B. Yeats or Sir Edward Burne-Jones, is in the
word “escape”: escape into a land where oranges grow on plum-trees and
men can sow what they like and reap what they enjoy. To Watts the very
word “escape” would be horrible, like an obscene word: his ideal is
altogether duty and the great wheel. To the Celt frivolity is most truly
the most serious of things, since in the tangle of roses is always the
old serpent who is wiser than the world. To Watts seriousness is most
truly the most “joyful of things,” since in it we come nearest to that
ultimate equilibrium and reconciliation of things whereby alone they
live and endure life and each other. It is difficult to imagine that
amid all the varieties of noble temper and elemental desire there could
possibly be two exhibiting a more total divergence than that between a
kindly severity and an almost cruel love of sweetness; than that between
a laborious and open-air charity and a kind of Bacchic asceticism;
between a joy in peace and a joy in disorder; between a reduction of
existence to its simplest formula and an extension of it to its most
frantic corollary; between a lover of justice who accepts the real world
more submissively than a slave and a lover of pleasure who despises the
real world more bitterly than a hermit; between a king in battle-harness
and a vagabond in elf-land; between Watts and Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
It is remarkable that even the technical style of Watts gives a
contradiction to this Celtic theory. Watts is strong precisely where
the Celt is weak, and weak precisely where the Celt is strong. The only
thing that the Celt has lacked in art is that hard mass, that naked
outline, that ἀρχιτεκτονική, which makes Watts a sort of sculptor of
draughtsmanship. It is as well for us that the Celt has not had this: if
he had, he would rule the world with a rod of iron; for he has
everything else. There are no hard black lines in Burke’s orations, or
Tom Moore’s songs, or the plays of Mr. W. B. Yeats. Burke is the
greatest of political philosophers, because in him only are there
distances and perspectives, as there are on the real earth, with its
mists of morning and evening, and its blue horizons and broken skies.
Moore’s songs have neither a pure style nor deep realization, nor
originality of form, nor thought nor wit nor vigour, but they have
something else which is none of these things, which is nameless and the
one thing needful. In Mr. Yeats’ plays there is only one character: the
hero who rules and kills all the others, and his name is Atmosphere.
Atmosphere and the gleaming distances are the soul of Celtic greatness
as they were of Burne-Jones, who was, as I have said, weak precisely
where Watts is strong, in the statuesque quality in drawing, in the love
of heavy hands like those of _Mammon_, of a strong back like that of
_Eve Repentant_, in a single fearless and austere outline like that of
the angel in _The Court of Death_, in the frame-filling violence of
_Jonah_, in the half-witted brutality of _The Minotaur_. He is
deficient, that is to say, in what can only be called the god-like
materialism of art. Watts, on the other hand, is peculiarly strong in
it. Idealist as he is, there is nothing frail or phantasmal about the
things or the figures he loves. Though not himself a robust man, he
loves robustness; he loves a great bulk of shoulder, an abrupt bend of
neck, a gigantic stride,
[Illustration: CARDINAL MANNING.]
a large and swinging limb, a breast bound as with bands of brass. Of
course the deficiency in such a case is very far from being altogether
on one side. There are abysses in Burne-Jones which Watts could not
understand, the Celtic madness, older than any sanity, the hunger that
will remain after the longest feast, the sorrow that is built up of
stratified delights. From the point of view of the true Celt, Watts, the
Watts who painted the great stoical pictures _Love and Death_, _Time,
Death and Judgment_, _The Court of Death_, _Mammon_, and _Cain_, this
pictorial Watts would probably be, must almost certainly be, simply a
sad, sane, strong, stupid Englishman. He may or may not be Welsh by
extraction or by part of his extraction, but in spirit he is an
Englishman, with all the faults and all the disadvantages of an
Englishman. He is a great Englishman like Milton or Gladstone, of the
type, that is to say, that were too much alive for anything but gravity,
and who enjoyed themselves far too much to trouble to enjoy a joke.
Matthew Arnold has come near to defining that kind of idealism, so
utterly different from the Celtic kind, which is to be found in Milton
and again in Watts. He has called it, in one of his finest and most
accurate phrases, “the imaginative reason.”
This racial legend about the Watts family does not seem to rest upon any
certain foundations, and as I have said, the deduction drawn from it is
quite loose and misleading. The whole is only another example of that
unfortunate, if not infamous, modern habit of talking about such things
as heredity with a vague notion that science has closed the question
when she has only just opened it. Nobody knows, as a matter of fact,
whether a Celtic mysticism can be inherited any more than a theory on
the Education Bill. But the eagerness of the popular mind to snatch at
a certainty is too impatient for the tardy processes of real hypothesis
and research. Long before heredity has become a science, it has become a
superstition. And this curious though incidental case of the origin of
the Watts genius is just one of those cases which make us wonder what
has been the real result of the great rise of science. So far the result
would painfully appear to be that whereas men in the earlier times said
unscientific things with the vagueness of gossip and legend, they now
say unscientific things with the plainness and the certainty of science.
The actual artistic education of Watts, though thorough indeed in its
way, had a somewhat peculiar character, the air of something detached
and private, and to the external eye something even at random. He works
hard, but in an elusive and personal manner. He does not remember the
time when he did not draw: he was an artist in his babyhood as he is an
artist still in his old age. Like Ruskin and many other of the great and
serious men of the century, he would seem to have been brought up
chiefly on what may be called the large legendary literature, on such as
Homer and Scott. Among his earliest recorded works was a set of coloured
illustrations to the Waverley Novels, and a sketch of the struggle for
the body of Patroclus. He went to the Academy schools, but only stayed
there about a month; never caring for or absorbing the teaching, such as
it was, of the place. He wandered perpetually in the Greek galleries of
the British Museum, staring at the Elgin marbles, from which he always
declared he learnt all the art he knew. “There,” he said, stretching out
his hand towards the Ilyssus in his studio, “there is my master.” We
hear of a friendship between him and the sculptor William Behnes, of
Watts lounging about that artist’s studio, playing with clay, modelling
busts, and staring
[Illustration: CHAOS.]
at the work of sculpture. His eyes seemed to have been at this time the
largest and hungriest part of him. Even when the great chance and first
triumph of his life arrived a year or two later, even when he gained the
great scholarship which sent him abroad to work amid the marbles of
Italy, when a famous ambassador was his patron and a brilliant circle
his encouragement, we do not find anything of the conventional student
about him. He never painted in the galleries; he only dreamed in them.
This must not, of course, be held to mean that he did not work; though
one or two people who have written memoirs of Watts have used a
phraseology, probably without noticing it, which might be held to imply
this. Not only is the thing ludicrously incongruous with his exact
character and morals; but anyone who knows anything whatever about the
nature of pictorial art will know quite well that a man could not paint
like that without having worked; just as he would know that a man could
not be the Living Serpent without any previous practice with his joints.
To say that he could really learn to paint and draw with the technical
merit of Watts, or with any technical merit at all, by simply looking at
other people’s pictures and statues will seem to anyone, with a small
technical sense, like saying that a man learnt to be a sublime violinist
by staring at fiddles in a shop window. It is as near a physical
impossibility as can exist in these matters. Work Watts must have done
and did do; it is the only conclusion possible which is consistent
either with the nature of Watts or the nature of painting; and it is
fully supported by the facts. But what the facts do reveal is that he
worked in this curiously individual, this curiously invisible way. He
had his own notion of when to dream and when to draw; as he shrank from
no toil, so he shrank from no idleness. He was something which is one of
the most powerful and successful things in the world, something which is
far more powerful and successful than a legion of students and prizemen:
he was a serious and industrious truant.
It is worth while to note this in his boyhood, partly, of course,
because from one end of his life to the other there is this queer note
of loneliness and liberty. But it is also more immediately and
practically important because it throws some light on the development
and character of his art, and even especially of his technique. The
great singularity of Watts, considered as a mere artist, is that he
stands alone. He is not connected with any of the groups of the
nineteenth century: he has neither followed a school nor founded one. He
is not mediæval; but no one could exactly call him classical: we have
only to compare him to Leighton to feel the difference at once. His
artistic style is rather a thing more primitive than paganism; a thing
to which paganism and mediævalism are alike upstart sects; a style of
painting there might have been upon the tower of Babel. He is mystical;
but he is not mediæval: we have only to compare him to Rossetti to feel
the difference. When he emerged into the artistic world, that world was
occupied by the pompous and historical school, that school which was so
exquisitely caricatured by Thackeray in Gandish and his “Boadishia”; but
Watts was not pompous or historical: he painted one historical picture,
which brought him a youthful success, and he has scarcely painted
another. He lived on through the great Pre-Raphaelite time, that very
noble and very much undervalued time, when men found again what had been
hidden since the thirteenth century under loads of idle civilization,
the truth that simplicity and a monastic laboriousness is the happiest
of all things; the great truth that purity is the only atmosphere for
passion; the great truth that silver is more beautiful than gold. But
though there is any quantity of this sentiment in Watts himself, Watts
never has been a Pre-Raphaelite. He has seen other fashions come and go;
he has seen the Pre-Raphaelites overwhelmed by a heavy restoration of
the conventional, headed by Millais with his Scotch moors and his
English countesses; but he has not heeded it. He has seen these again
overturned by the wild lancers of Whistler; he has seen the mists of
Impressionism settle down over the world, making it weird and delicate
and noncommittal: but he thinks no more of the wet mist of the
Impressionist than he thought of the dry glare of the Pre-Raphaelite.
He, the most mild of men, has yet never been anything but Watts. He has
followed the gleam, like some odd modern Merlin. He has escaped all the
great atmospheres, the divine if deluding intoxications, which have
whirled one man one way and one another; which flew to the head of a
perfect stylist like Ruskin and made him an insane scientist; which flew
to the head of a great artist like Whistler and made him a pessimistic
dandy. He has passed them with a curious immunity, an immunity which, if
it were not so nakedly innocent, might almost be called egotism; but
which is in fact rather the single eye. He said once that he had not
even consented to illustrate a book; his limitation was that he could
express no ideas but his own. He admired Tennyson; he thought him the
greatest of poets; he thought him a far greater man than himself; he
read him, he adored him, but he could not illustrate him. This is the
curious secret strength which kept him independent in his youth and
kept him independent through the great roaring triumph of the
Pre-Raphaelite and the great roaring triumph of the Impressionist. He
stands in the world of art as he stood in the studio of Behnes and in
the Uffizi Gallery. He stands gazing, but not copying.
Of Watts as he was at this time there remains a very interesting
portrait painted by himself. It represents him at the age of nineteen, a
dark, slim, and very boyish-looking creature. Something in changed
conditions may no doubt account for the flowing and voluminous dark
hair: we see such a mane in many of the portraits of the most
distinguished men of that time; but if a man appeared now and walked
down Fleet Street with so neglected a _hure_, he would be mistaken for
an advertisement of a hair-dresser, or by the more malicious for a minor
poet. But there is about this picture not a trace of affectation or the
artistic immunity in these matters: the boy’s dress is rough and
ordinary, his expression is simple and unconscious. From a modern
standpoint we should say without hesitation that if his hair is long it
is because he has forgotten to have it cut. And there is something about
this contrast between the unconsciously leonine hair and the innocent
and almost bashful face, there is something like a parable of Watts. His
air is artistic, if you will. His famous skull cap, which makes him look
like a Venetian senator, is as pictorial and effective as the boyish
mane in the picture. But he belongs to that older race of Bohemians, of
which even Thackeray only saw the sunset, the great old race of art and
literature who were ragged because they were really poor, frank because
they were really free, and untidy because they were really forgetful. It
will not do to confuse Watts with these men; there is
[Illustration: “FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS.”]
much about him that is precise and courtly, and which, as I shall have
occasion to remark, belongs really to a yet older period. But it is more
right to reckon Watts along with them in their genuine raggedness than
to suppose that the unquestionable picturesqueness with which he fronts
the world has any relation with that new Bohemianism which is untidy
because it is conventional, frank because it follows a fashion, careless
because it watches for all its effects, and ragged and coarse in its
tastes because it has too much money.
The first definite encouragement, or at least the first encouragement
now ascertainable, probably came to the painter from that interesting
Greek amateur, Mr. Constantine Ionides. It was under his encouragement
that Watts began all his earlier work of the more ambitious kind, and it
was the portrait of Mrs. Constantine Ionides which ranks among the
earliest of his definite successes. He achieved immediate professional
success, however, at an astonishingly early age, judged by modern
standards. When he was barely twenty he had three pictures in the Royal
Academy: the first two were portraits, and the third a picture called
_The Wounded Heron_. There is always a very considerable temptation to
fantasticality in dealing with these artistic origins: no doubt it does
not always follow that a man is destined to be a military conqueror
because he beats other little boys at school, nor endued with a
passionate and clamorous nature because he begins this mortal life with
a yell. But Watts has, to a rather unusual degree, a sincere and
consistent and homogeneous nature; and this first exhibit of his has
really a certain amount of symbolism about it. Portraiture, with which
he thus began, he was destined to raise to a level never before attained
in English art, so far as significance and humanity are concerned; and
there is really something a little fascinating about the fact that along
with these pictures went one picture which had, for all practical
purposes, an avowedly humanitarian object. The picture of _The Wounded
Heron_ scarcely ever attracts attention, I imagine, in these days, but
it may, of course, have been recalled for a moment to the popular mind
by that curious incident which occurred in connexion with it and which
has often been told. Long after the painter who produced that picture in
his struggling boyhood had lost sight of it and in all probability
forgotten all about its existence, a chance traveller with a taste in
the arts happened to find it in the dusty curiosity-shop of a
north-country town. He bought it and gave it back to the now celebrated
painter, who hung it among the exhibits at Little Holland House. It is,
as I have said, a thing painted clearly with a humanitarian object: it
depicts the suffering of a stricken creature; it depicts the
helplessness of life under the cruelty of the inanimate violence; it
depicts the pathos of dying and the greater pathos of living. Since
then, no doubt, Watts has improved his machinery of presentation and
found larger and more awful things to tell his tale with than a bleeding
bird. The wings of the heron have widened till they embrace the world
with the terrible wings of Time or Death: he has summoned the stars to
help him and sent the angels as his ambassadors. He has changed the plan
of operations until it includes Heaven and Tartarus. He has never
changed the theme.
The relations of Watts to Constantine Ionides either arose or became
important about this time. The painter’s fortunes rose quickly and
steadily, so far as the Academy was concerned. He continued to exhibit
with a fair amount of regularity, chiefly in the form of subjects from
the great romantic or
[Illustration: AN IDLE CHILD OF FANCY.]
historic traditions which were then the whole pabulum of the young
idealistic artist. In the Academy of 1840 came a picture on the old
romantic subject of Ferdinand and Isabella; in the following year but
one, a picture on the old romantic subject of Cymbeline. The portrait of
Mrs. Constantine Ionides appeared in 1842.
But Watts’ mode of thought from the very beginning had very little
kinship with the Academy and very little kinship with this kind of
private and conventional art. An event was shortly to occur, the first
success of his life, but an event far less important when considered as
the first success of his life than it is when considered as an essential
characteristic of his mind. The circumstances are so extremely
characteristic of something in the whole spirit of the man’s art that it
may be permissible to dwell at length on the significance of the fact
rather than on the fact itself.
The great English Parliament, the Senate that broke the English kings,
had just moved its centre of existence. The new Houses of Parliament had
opened with what seemed to the men of that time an opening world. A
competition was started for the decoration of the halls, and Watts
suddenly sprang into importance: he won the great prize. The cartoon of
_Caractacus led in triumph through the streets of Rome_ was accepted
from this almost nameless man by the great central power of English
history. And until we have understood that fact we have not understood
Watts: it was (one may be permitted to fancy) the supreme hour of his
life. For Watts’ nature is essentially public--that is to say, it is
modest and noble, and has nothing to hide. His art is an outdoor art,
like that of the healthy ages of the world, like the statuesque art of
Greece, like the ecclesiastical and external Gothic art of Christianity:
an art that can look the sun in the face. He ought to be employed to
paint factory chimneys and railway stations. I know that this will sound
like an insolence: my only answer is that he, in accordance with this
great conception of his, actually offered to paint a railway station.
With a splendid and truly religious imagination, he asked permission to
decorate Euston. The railway managers (not perceiving, in their dull
classical routine, the wild poetry of their own station) declined. But
until we have understood this immense notion of publicity in the soul of
Watts, we have understood nothing. The fundamental modern fallacy is
that the public life must be an artificial life. It is like saying that
the public street must be an artificial air. Men like Watts, men like
all the great heroes, only breathe in public. What is the use of abusing
a man for publicity when he utters in public the true and the enduring
things? What is the use, above all, of prying into his secrecy when he
has cried his best from the house-tops?
This is the real argument which makes a detailed biography of Watts
unnecessary for all practical purposes. It is in vain to climb walls and
hide in cupboards in order to show whether Watts eats mustard or pepper
with his curry or whether Watts takes sugar or salt with his porridge.
These things may or may not become public: it matters little. The
innermost that the biographer could at last discover, after all possible
creepings and capers, would be what Watts in his inmost soul believes,
and that Watts has splashed on twenty feet of canvas and given to the
nation for nothing. Like one of the great orators of the eighteenth
century, his public virtues, his public ecstasies are far more really
significant than his private weaknesses. The rest of his life is so
simple that it is scarcely worth telling. He went with the great
scholarship he gained with his _Caractacus_ to Italy. There he found a
new patron--the famous Lord Holland, with the whole of whose great
literary circle he rapidly became acquainted. He painted many of his
most famous portraits in connexion with this circle, both in Italy and
afterwards in Paris. But this great vision of the public idea had
entered his blood. He offered his cartoons to Euston Station; he painted
St. George and the Dragon for the House of Lords; he presented a fresco
to the great hall at Lincoln’s Inn. Of his life there is scarcely more
to say, except the splendid fact that he three times refused a title. Of
his character there is a great deal more to say.
There is unquestionably about the personal attitude of Watts something
that in the vague phraseology of modern times would be called Puritan.
Puritan, however, is very far from being really the right word. The
right word is a word which has been singularly little used in English
nomenclature because historical circumstances have separated us from the
origin from which it sprang. The right word for the spirit of Watts is
_Stoicism_. Watts is at one with the Puritans in the actual objects of
his attack. One of his deepest and most enduring troubles, a matter of
which he speaks and writes frequently, is the prevalence of gambling.
With the realism of an enthusiast, he has detected the essential fact
that the problem of gambling is even more of a problem in the case of
the poorer classes than in the case of the richer. It is, as he asserts,
a far worse danger than drink. There are many other instances of his
political identity with Puritanism. He told Mr. W. T. Stead that he had
defended and was prepared to defend the staggering publications of the
“Maiden Tribute”; it was the only way, he said, to stem the evil. A
picturesque irradiation asserts indeed that it was under the glow of
Hebraic anger against these Babylonian cruelties of Piccadilly and the
Strand that he painted as a symbol of those cruelties that brutal and
magnificent picture _The Minotaur_. The pictures themselves of course
bear sufficient attestation to this general character: _Mammon_ is what
we call a Puritan picture, and _Jonah_, and _Fata Morgana_, and _For he
had Great Possessions_. It is not difficult to see that Watts has the
Puritan vigilance, the Puritan realism, and the Puritan severity in his
attitude towards public affairs. Nevertheless, as I have said, he is to
be described rather as a Stoic than a Puritan. The essential difference
between Christian and Pagan asceticism lies in the fact that Paganism in
renouncing pleasure gives up something which it does not think
desirable; whereas Christianity in giving up pleasure gives up something
which it thinks very desirable indeed. Thus there is a frenzy in
Christian asceticism; its follies and renunciations are like those of
first love. There is a passion, and as it were a regret, in the
Puritanism of Bunyan; there is none in the Puritanism of Watts. He is
not Bunyan, he is Cato. The difference may be a difficult one to convey,
but it is one that must not be ignored or great misunderstandings will
follow. The one self-abnegation is more reasonable but less joyful. The
Stoic casts away pleasure like the parings of his nails; the Mystic cuts
it off like his right hand that offends him. In Watts we have the noble
self-abnegation of a noble type and school; but everything, however
noble, that has shape has limitation, and we must not look in Watts,
with his national self-mastery, either for the nightmare of Stylites or
the gaiety of Francis of Assisi.
It has already been remarked that the chief note
[Illustration: THE MINOTAUR.]
of the painter’s character is a certain mixture of personal delicacy and
self-effacement with the most immense and audacious aims. But it is so
essential a trait that it will bear a repetition and the introduction of
a curious example of it. Watts in his quaint and even shy manner of
speech often let fall in conversation words which hint at a certain
principle or practice of his, a principle and practice which are, when
properly apprehended, beyond expression impressive and daring. The
spectator who studies his allegorical paintings one after another will
be vaguely impressed with something uniquely absent, something which is
usual and familiar in such pictures conspicuous by its withdrawal; a
blank or difference which makes them things sundered altogether from the
millions of allegorical pictures that throng the great and small
galleries of painting. At length the nature of this missing thing may
suddenly strike him: in the whole range of Watts’ symbolic art there is
scarcely a single example of the ordinary and arbitrary current symbol,
the ecclesiastical symbol, the heraldic symbol, the national symbol. A
primeval vagueness and archaism hang over all the canvases and cartoons,
like frescoes from some prehistoric temple. There is nothing there but
the eternal things, clay and fire and the sea, and motherhood and the
dead. We cannot imagine the rose or the lion of England; the keys or the
tiara of Rome; the red cap of Liberty or the crescent of Islam in a
picture by Watts; we cannot imagine the Cross itself. And in light and
broken phrases, carelessly and humbly expressed, as I have said, the
painter has admitted that this great omission was observed on principle.
Its object is that the pictures may be intelligible if they survive the
whole modern order. Its object is, that is to say, that if some savage
in a dim futurity dug up one of these dark designs on a lonely
mountain, though he worshipped strange gods and served laws yet
unwritten, it might strike the same message to his soul that it strikes
upon clerks and navvies from the walls of the Tate Gallery. It is
impossible not to feel a movement of admiration for the magnitude of the
thought. Here is a man whose self-depreciation is internal and vital;
whose life is cloistered, whose character is childlike, and he has yet
within such an unconscious and colossal sense of greatness that he
paints on the assumption that his work may outlast the cross of the
Eternal City. As a boy he scarcely expected worldly success: as an old
man he still said that his worldly success had astonished him. But in
his nameless youth and in his silent old age he paints like one upon a
tower looking down the appalling perspective of the centuries towards
fantastic temples and inconceivable republics.