very soul of the painter; and when we look at the symbolic pictures in
the light of this theory of his, it is interesting and typical to
observe how consistently he pursues any intellectual rule that he laid
down for himself. An æsthetic or ethical notion of this kind is not to
him, as to most men with the artistic temperament, a thing to talk about
sumptuously, to develop in lectures, and to observe when it happens to
be suitable. It is a thing like his early rising or his personal
conscience, a thing which is either a rule or nothing. And we find this
insistence on universal symbols, this rejection of all symbols that are
local or temporary or topical, even if the locality be a whole
continent, the time a stretch of centuries, or the topic a vast
civilization or an undying church--we find this insistence looking out
very clearly from the allegories of Watts. It would
[Illustration: THE COURT OF DEATH.]
have been easy and effective, as he himself often said, to make the
meaning of a picture clear by the introduction of some popular and
immediate image: and it must constantly be remembered that Watts does
care very much for making the meaning of his pictures clear. His work
indeed has, as I shall suggest shortly, a far more subtle and unnamable
quality than the merely hard and didactic; but it must not be for one
moment pretended that Watts does not claim to teach: to do so would be
to falsify the man’s life. And it would be easy, as is quite obvious, to
make the pictures clearer: to hang a crucifix over the _Happy Warrior_,
to give _Mammon_ some imperial crown or typical heraldic symbols, to
give a theological machinery to _The Court of Death_. But this is put on
one side like a temptation of the flesh, because it conflicts with this
stupendous idea of painting for all peoples and all centuries. I am not
saying that this extraordinary ambition is necessarily the right view of
art, or the right view of life. I am only reiterating it as an absolute
trait of men of the time and type and temper of Watts. It may plausibly
be maintained, I am not sure that it cannot more truly be maintained,
that man cannot achieve and need not achieve this frantic universality.
A man, I fancy, is after all only an animal that has noble preferences.
It is the very difference between the artistic mind and the mathematical
that the former sees things as they are in a picture, some nearer and
larger, some smaller and further away: while to the mathematical mind
everything, every unit in a million, every fact in a cosmos, must be of
equal value. That is why mathematicians go mad; and poets scarcely ever
do. A man may have as wide a view of life as he likes, the wider the
better; a distant view, a bird’s-eye view, if he will, but still a view
and not a map. The one thing he cannot attempt in his version of the
universe is to draw things to scale. I have put myself for a moment
outside this universalism and doubted its validity because a thing
always appears more sharp and personal and picturesque if we do not
wholly agree with it. And this universalism is an essential and dominant
feature of such great men as Watts and of his time as a whole. Mr.
Herbert Spencer is a respectable, almost a dapper, figure, his theory is
agnostic and his tone polite and precise. And yet he threw himself into
a task more insane and gigantic than that of Dante, an inventory or plan
of the universe itself; the awful vision of existence as a single
organism, like an amœba on the disc of a microscope. He claimed, by
implication, to put in their right places the flaming certainty of the
martyrs, the wild novelties of the modern world; to arrange the eternal
rock of Peter and the unbroken trance of Buddhism. It is only in this
age of specialists, of cryptic experiences in art and faith like the
present, that we can see how huge was that enterprise; but the spirit of
it is the spirit of Watts. The man of that aggressive nineteenth century
had many wild thoughts, but there was one thought that never even for an
instant strayed across his burning brain. He never once thought, “Why
should I understand the cat, any more than the cat understands me?” He
never thought, “Why should I be just to the merits of a Chinaman, any
more than a pig studies the mystic virtues of a camel?” He affronted
heaven and the angels, but there was one hard arrogant dogma that he
never doubted even when he doubted Godhead: he never doubted that he
himself was as central and as responsible as God.
This paradox, then, we call the first element in the artistic and
personal claim of Watts, that he
[Illustration: MATTHEW ARNOLD.]
[Illustration: JOHN STUART MILL.]
realizes the great paradox of the Gospel. He is meek, but he claims to
inherit the earth. But there is, of course, a great deal more to be said
before this view of the matter can be considered complete. The
universalism preached by Watts and the other great Victorians was of
course subject to certain specialisations; it is not necessary to call
them limitations. Like Matthew Arnold, the last and most sceptical of
them, who expressed their basic idea in its most detached and
philosophic form, they held that conduct was three-fourths of life. They
were ingrainedly ethical; the mere idea of thinking anything more
important than ethics would have struck them as profane. In this they
were certainly right, but they were nevertheless partial or partisan;
they did not really maintain the judicial attitude of the universalist.
The mere thought of Watts painting a picture called _The Victory of Joy
over Morality_, or _Nature rebuking Conscience_, is enough to show the
definite limits of that cosmic equality. This is not, of course, to be
taken as a fault in the attitude of Watts. He simply draws the line
somewhere, as all men, including anarchists, draw it somewhere; he is
dogmatic, as all sane men are dogmatic.
There is another phase of this innocent audacity. It may appear to be
more fanciful, it is certainly more completely a matter of inference;
but it throws light on yet another side of the character of Watts.
Watts’ relation to friends and friendship has something about it very
typical. He is not a man desirous or capable of a very large or rich or
varied circle of acquaintance. There is nothing Bohemian about him. He
belongs both chronologically and psychologically to that period which is
earlier even than Thackeray and his Cave of Harmony: he belongs to the
quiet, struggling, self-created men of the forties, with their tradition
of self-abnegating individualism. Much as there is about him of the
artist and the poet, there is something about him also of the
industrious apprentice. That strenuous solitude in which Archbishop
Temple as a boy struggled to carry a bag of ironmongery which crushed
his back, in which Gladstone cut down trees and John Stuart Mill read
half the books of the world in boyhood, that strenuous solitude entered
to some degree into the very soul of Watts and made him independent of
them. But the friends he made have as a general rule been very
characteristic: they have marked the strange and haughty fastidiousness
that goes along with his simplicity. His friends, his intimate friends,
that is, have been marked by a certain indescribable and stately
worthiness: more than one of them have been great men like himself. The
greatest and most intimate of all his friends, probably, was Tennyson,
and in this there is something singularly characteristic of Watts. About
the actuality of the intellectual tie that bound him to Tennyson there
can be little doubt. He painted three, if not four, portraits of him;
his name was often on his lips; he invoked him always as the typical
great poet, excusing his faults and expounding his virtues. He invoked
his authority as that of the purest of poets, and invoked it very finely
and well in a sharp controversial interview he had on the nature and
ethics of the nude in art.
At the time I write, there is standing at the end of the garden at
Limnerslease a vast shed, used for a kind of sculptor’s studio, in which
there stands a splendid but unfinished statue, on which the veteran of
the arts is even now at work. It represents Tennyson, wrapped in his
famous mantle, with his magnificent head bowed, gazing at something in
the
[Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING.]
[Illustration: LORD TENNYSON.]
hollow of his hand. The subject is _Flower in the Crannied Wall_. There
is something very characteristic of Watts in the contrast between the
colossal plan of the figure and the smallness of the central object.
But while the practical nature of the friendship between Watts and
Tennyson is clear enough, there is something really significant,
something really relevant to Watts’ attitude in its ultimate and
psychological character. It is surely most likely that Watts and
Tennyson were drawn together because they both represented a certain
relation towards their art which is not common in our time and was
scarcely properly an attribute of any artists except these two. Watts
could not have found the thing he most believed in Browning or Swinburne
or Morris or any of the other poets. Tennyson could not have found the
thing he most believed in Leighton or Millais or any of the other
painters. They were brought together, it must be supposed, by the one
thing that they had really in common, a profound belief in the
solemnity, the ceremoniousness, the responsibility, and what most men
would now, in all probability, call the pomposity of the great arts.
Watts has always a singular kind of semi-mystical tact in the matter of
portrait painting. His portraits are commonly very faultless comments
and have the same kind of superlative mental delicacy that we see in the
picture of _Hope_. And the whole truth of this last matter is very well
expressed in Watts’ famous portrait of Tennyson, particularly if we look
at it in conjunction with his portrait of Browning. The head of Browning
is the head of a strong, splendid, joyful, and anxious man who could
write magnificent poetry. The head of Tennyson is the head of a poet.
Watts has painted Tennyson with his dark dome-like head relieved
against a symbolic green and blue of the eternal sea and the eternal
laurels. He has behind him the bays of Dante and he is wrapped in the
cloak of the prophets. Browning is dressed like an ordinary modern man,
and we at once feel that it should and must be so. To dress Browning in
the prophet’s robe and the poet’s wreath would strike us all as suddenly
ridiculous; it would be like sending him to a fancy-dress ball. It would
be like attiring Matthew Arnold in the slashed tights of an Elizabethan,
or putting Mr. Lecky into a primitive Celto-Irish kilt. But it does not
strike us as absurd in the case of Tennyson: it does not strike us as
even eccentric or outlandish or remote. We think of Tennyson in that
way; we think of him as a lordly and conscious bard. Some part of this
fact may, of course, be due to his possession of a magnificent physical
presence; but not, I think, all. Lord Kitchener (let us say) is a
handsome man, but we should laugh at him very much in silver armour. It
is much more due to the fact that Tennyson really assumed and was
granted this stately and epic position. It is not true that Tennyson was
more of a poet than Browning, if we mean by that statement that Browning
could not compose forms as artistic and well-managed, lyrics as light
and poignant, and rhythms as swelling and stirring as any in English
letters. But it is true that Tennyson was more of a poet than Browning,
if we mean by that statement that Tennyson was a poet in person, in post
and circumstance and conception of life; and that Browning was not, in
that sense, a poet at all. Browning first inaugurated in modern art and
letters the notion or tradition, in many ways perhaps a more wholesome
one, that the fact that a man pursued the trade or practice of poetry
was his own affair and a thing apart,
[Illustration: THE DWELLER IN THE INNERMOST.]
like the fact that he collected coins or earned his living as a hatter.
But Tennyson really belonged to an older tradition, the tradition that
believed that the poet, the appointed “Vates,” was a recognized and
public figure like the bard or jester at the mediæval courts, like the
prophet in the old Commonwealth of Israel. In Tennyson’s work appeared
for the last time in English history this notion of the stately and
public and acknowledged poet: it was the lay of the last minstrel.
Now there is in Watts, gentle and invisible as he is, something that
profoundly responds to that spirit. Leighton, like Browning, was a
courtier and man of the world: Millais, like Browning, was a good fellow
and an ordinary gentleman: but Watts has more of Tennyson in him; he
believes in a great priesthood of art. He believes in a certain pure and
childish publicity. If anyone suggested that before a man ventured to
paint pictures or to daub with plaster he should be initiated with some
awful rites in some vast and crowded national temple, should swear to
work worthily before some tremendous altar or over some symbolic flame,
Millais would have laughed heartily at the idea and Leighton also. But
it would not seem either absurd or unreasonable to Watts. In the thick
of this smoky century he is living in a clear age of heroes.
Watts’ relations to Tennyson were indeed very characteristic of what was
finest, and at the same time quaintest, in the two men. The painter,
with a typical sincerity, took the poet seriously, I had almost said
literally, in his daily life, and liked him to live up to his poetry.
The poet, with that queer sulky humour which gave him, perhaps, more
breadth than Watts, but less strength, said, after reading some acid and
unjust criticisms, “I wish I had never written a line.” “Come,” said
Watts, “you wouldn’t like ‘King Arthur’ to talk like that.” Tennyson
paused a moment and then spread out his fingers. “Well,” he said, “what
do you expect? It’s all the gout.” The artist, with a characteristic
power of juvenile and immortal hero-worship, tells this story as an
instance of the fundamental essence of odd magnanimity and sombre
geniality in Tennyson. It is such an instance and a very good one: but
it is also an instance of the sharp logical idealism, of the prompt
poetic candour of Watts. He asked Tennyson to be King Arthur, and it
never occurred to him to think that he was asking Addison to be Cato, or
Massinger to be Saint Dorothy. The incident is a fine tribute to a
friendship.
The real difficulty which many cultivated people have in the matter of
Watts’ allegorical pictures is far more difficult. It is indeed nothing
else but the great general reaction against allegorical art which has
arisen during the last artistic period. The only way in which we can
study, with any real sincerity, the allegoric art of Watts is to ask to
what is really due the objection to allegory which has thus arisen. The
real objection to allegory is, it may roughly be said, founded upon the
conception that allegory involves one art imitating another. This is, up
to a certain point, true. To paint a figure in a blue robe and call her
Necessity, and then paint a small figure in a yellow robe and call it
Invention; to put the second on the knee of the first, and then say that
you are enunciating the sublime and eternal truth, that Necessity is the
mother of Invention, this is indeed an idle and foolish affair. It is
saying in six weeks’ work with brush and palette knife what could be
said much better in six words. And there can be no reasonable dispute
that of this character were a considerable
[Illustration: GEORGE MEREDITH.]
number of the allegorical pictures that have crowded the galleries and
sprawled over the ceilings of ancient and modern times. Of such were the
monstrous pictures of Rubens, which depicted a fat Religion and a
bloated Temperance dancing before some foreign conqueror; of such were
the florid designs of the eighteenth century, which showed Venus and
Apollo encouraging Lord Peterborough to get over the inconvenience of
his breastplate; of such, again, were the meek Victorian allegories
which showed Mercy and Foresight urging men to found a Society for the
Preservation of Young Game. Of such were almost all the allegories which
have dominated the art of Europe for many centuries back. Of such, most
emphatically, the allegories of Watts are not. They are not mere
pictorial forms, combined as in a kind of cryptogram to express
theoretic views or relations. They are not proverbs or verbal relations
rendered with a cumbrous exactitude in oil and Chinese white. They are
not, in short, the very thing that the opponents of Watts and his school
say that they are. They are not merely literary. There is one definite
current conception on which this idea that Watts’ allegorical art is
merely literary is eventually based. It is based upon the idea that lies
at the root of rationalism, at the root of useless logomachies, at the
root, in no small degree, of the whole modern evil. It is based on the
assumption of the perfection of language. Every religion and every
philosophy must, of course, be based on the assumption of the authority
or the accuracy of something. But it may well be questioned whether it
is not saner and more satisfactory to ground our faith on the
infallibility of the Pope, or the infallibility of the Book of Mormon,
than on this astounding modern dogma of the infallibility of human
speech. Every time one man says to another, “Tell us plainly what you
mean?” he is assuming the infallibility of language: that is to say, he
is assuming that there is a perfect scheme of verbal expression for all
the internal moods and meanings of men. Whenever a man says to another,
“Prove your case; defend your faith,” he is assuming the infallibility
of language: that is to say, he is assuming that a man has a word for
every reality in earth, or heaven, or hell. He knows that there are in
the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than
the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the
world and doing strange and terrible service in it crimes that have
never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he
seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their
tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately
represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes
that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own
inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the
agonies of desire. Whenever, on the other hand, a man rebels faintly or
vaguely against this way of speaking, whenever a man says that he cannot
explain what he means, and that he hates argument, that his enemy is
misrepresenting him, but he cannot explain how; that man is a true sage,
and has seen into the heart of the real nature of language. Whenever a
man refuses to be caught by some dilemma about reason and passion, or
about reason and faith, or about fate and free-will, he has seen the
truth. Whenever a man declines to be cornered as an egotist, or an
altruist, or any such modern monster, he has seen the truth. For the
truth is that language is not a scientific thing at all, but wholly an
artistic thing, a thing invented by hunters, and killers, and such
artists long before science was
[Illustration: ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.]
dreamed of. The truth is simply that--that the tongue is not a reliable
instrument, like a theodolite or a camera. The tongue is most truly an
unruly member, as the wise saint has called it, a thing poetic and
dangerous, like music or fire.
Now we can easily imagine an alternative state of things, roughly
similar to that produced in Watts’ allegories, a system, that is to say,
whereby the moods or facts of the human spirit were conveyed by
something other than speech, by shapes or colours or some such things.
As a matter of fact, of course, there are a great many other languages
besides the verbal. Descriptions of spiritual states and mental purposes
are conveyed by a variety of things, by hats, by bells, by guns, by
fires on a headland, or by jerks of the head. In fact there does exist
an example which is singularly analogous to decorative and symbolic
painting. This is a scheme of æsthetic signs or emblems, simple indeed
and consisting only of a few elemental colours, which is actually
employed to convey great lessons in human safety and great necessities
of the commonwealth. It need hardly be said that I allude to the railway
signals. They are as much a language, and surely as solemn a language,
as the colour sequence of ecclesiastical vestments, which sets us red
for martyrdom, and white for resurrection. For the green and red of the
night-signals depict the two most fundamental things of all, which lie
at the back of all language. Yes and no, good and bad, safe and unsafe,
life and death. It is perfectly conceivable that a degree of flexibility
or subtlety might be introduced into these colours so as to suggest
other and more complex meanings. We might (under the influence of some
large poetic station-masters) reach a state of things in which a certain
rich tinge of purple in the crimson light would mean “Travel for a few
seconds at a slightly more lingering pace, that a romantic old lady in a
first-class carriage may admire the scenery of the forest.” A tendency
towards peacock blue in the green might mean “An old gentleman with a
black necktie has just drunk a glass of sherry at the station
restaurant.” But however much we modified or varied this colour sequence
or colour language, there would remain one thing which it would be quite
ridiculous and untrue to say about it. It would be quite ridiculous and
untrue to say that this colour sequence was simply a symbol representing
language. It would be another language: it would convey its meaning to
aliens who had another word for forest, and another word for sherry, and
another word for old lady. It would not be a symbol of language, a
symbol of a symbol; it would be one symbol of the reality, and language
would be another. That is precisely the true position touching
allegorical art in general, and, above all, the allegorical art of
Watts.
So long as we conceive that it is, fundamentally, the symbolizing of
literature in paint, we shall certainly misunderstand it and the rare
and peculiar merits, both technical and philosophical, which really
characterize it. If the ordinary spectator at the art galleries finds
himself, let us say, opposite a picture of a dancing flower-crowned
figure in a rose-coloured robe, he feels a definite curiosity to know
the title, looks it up in the catalogue, and finds that it is called,
let us say, “Hope.” He is immediately satisfied, as he would have been
if the title had run “Portrait of Lady Warwick,” a “View of Kilchurn
Castle.” It represents a certain definite thing, the word “hope.” But
what does the word “hope” represent? It represents only a broken
instantaneous glimpse of something that is immeasurably older and
wilder
[Illustration: HOPE.]
than language, that is immeasurably older and wilder than man; a mystery
to saints and a reality to wolves. To suppose that such a thing is dealt
with by the word “hope,” any more than America is represented by a
distant view of Cape Horn, would indeed be ridiculous. It is not merely
true that the word itself is, like any other word, arbitrary; that it
might as well be “pig” or “parasol”; but it is true that the
philosophical meaning of the word, in the conscious mind of man, is
merely a part of something immensely larger in the unconscious mind,
that the gusty light of language only falls for a moment on a fragment,
and that obviously a semi-detached, unfinished fragment of a certain
definite pattern on the dark tapestries of reality. It is vain and worse
than vain to declaim against the allegoric, for the very word “hope” is
an allegory, and the very word “allegory” is an allegory.