picture of _Hope_ in conventional flowers and conventional pink robes,
the spectator came before another picture. Suppose that he found himself
in the presence of a dim canvas with a bowed and stricken and secretive
figure cowering over a broken lyre in the twilight. What would he think?
His first thought, of course, would be that the picture was called
_Despair_; his second (when he discovered his error in the catalogue),
that it has been entered under the wrong number; his third, that the
painter was mad. But if we imagine that he overcame these preliminary
feelings and that as he stared at that queer twilight picture a dim and
powerful sense of meaning began to grow upon him--what would he see? He
would see something for which there is neither speech nor language,
which has been too vast for any eye to see and too secret for any
religion to utter, even as an esoteric doctrine. Standing before that
picture, he finds himself in the presence of a great truth. He perceives
that there is something in man which is always apparently on the eve of
disappearing, but never disappears, an assurance which is always
apparently saying farewell and yet illimitably lingers, a string which
is always stretched to snapping and yet never snaps. He perceives that
the queerest and most delicate thing in us, the most fragile, the most
fantastic, is in truth the backbone and indestructible. He knows a great
moral fact: that there never was an age of assurance, that there never
was an age of faith. Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a
perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors. The
desperate modern talk about dark days and reeling altars, and the end of
Gods and angels, is the oldest talk in the world: lamentations over the
growth of agnosticism can be found in the monkish sermons of the dark
ages; horror at youthful impiety can be found in the Iliad. This is the
thing that never deserts men and yet always, with daring diplomacy,
threatens to desert them. It has indeed dwelt among and controlled all
the kings and crowds, but only with the air of a pilgrim passing by. It
has indeed warmed and lit men from the beginning of Eden with an
unending glow, but it was the glow of an eternal sunset.
Here, in this dim picture, its trick is almost betrayed. No one can name
this picture properly, but Watts, who painted it, has named it _Hope_.
But the point is that this title is not (as those think who call it
“literary”) the reality behind the symbol, but another symbol for the
same thing, or, to speak yet more strictly, another symbol describing
another part or aspect of the same complex reality. Two men felt a
swift, violent, invisible thing in the world: one said the word “hope,”
the other painted a
[Illustration: JONAH.]
picture in blue and green paint. The picture is inadequate; the word
“hope” is inadequate; but between them, like two angles in the
calculation of a distance, they almost locate a mystery, a mystery that
for hundreds of ages has been hunted by men and evaded them. And the
title is therefore not so much the substance of one of Watts’ pictures,
it is rather an epigram upon it. It is merely an approximate attempt to
convey, by snatching up the tool of another craftsman, the direction
attempted in the painter’s own craft. He calls it _Hope_, and that is
perhaps the best title. It reminds us among other things of a fact which
is too little remembered, that faith, hope, and charity, the three
mystical virtues of Christianity, are also the gayest of the virtues.
Paganism, as I have suggested, is not gay, but rather nobly sad; the
spirit of Watts, which is as a rule nobly sad also, here comes nearer
perhaps than anywhere else to mysticism in the strict sense, the
mysticism which is full of secret passion and belief, like that of Fra
Angelico or Blake. But though Watts calls his tremendous reality _Hope_,
we may call it many other things. Call it faith, call it vitality, call
it the will to live, call it the religion of to-morrow morning, call it
the immortality of man, call it self-love and vanity; it is the thing
that explains why man survives all things and why there is no such thing
as a pessimist. It cannot be found in any dictionary or rewarded in any
commonwealth: there is only one way in which it can even be noticed and
recognized. If there be anywhere a man who has really lost it, his face
out of a whole crowd of men will strike us like a blow. He may hang
himself or become Prime Minister; it matters nothing. The man is dead.
Now, of course the ordinary objection to allegory, and it is a very
sound objection, can be sufficiently well stated by saying that the
pictorial figures are mere arbitrary symbols of the words. An allegorist
of the pompous school might paint some group of Peace and Commerce doing
something to Britannia. There might be a figure of Commerce in a Greek
robe with a cornucopia or bag of gold or an argosy or any other
conventional symbol. But it is surely quite evident that such a figure
is a mere sign like the word commerce: the word might just as well be
“dandelion,” and the Greek lady with the cornucopia might just as well
be a Hebrew prophet standing on his head. It is scarcely even a
language: it is a cipher-code. Nobody can maintain that the figure,
taken as a figure, makes one think of commerce, of the forces that
effect commerce, of a thousand ports, of a thousand streets, of a
thousand warehouses and bills of lading, of a thousand excited men in
black coats who certainly would not know what to do with a cornucopia.
If we find ourselves gazing at some monument of the fragile and eternal
faith of man, at some ruined chapel, at some nameless altar, at some
scrap of old Jacobin eloquence, we might actually find our own minds
moving in certain curves that centre in the curved back of Watts’
_Hope_: we might almost think for ourselves of a bowed figure in the
twilight, holding to her breast something damaged but undestroyed. But
can anyone say that by merely looking at the Stock Exchange on a busy
day we should think of a Greek lady with an argosy? Can anyone say that
Threadneedle Street, in itself, would inspire our minds to move in the
curves which centre in a cornucopia? Can anyone say that a very stolid
figure in a very outlandish drapery is anything but a purely arbitrary
sign, like _x_ or _y_, for such a thing as modern commerce, for the
savagery of the rich, for the hunger of the satisfied, for the vast
tachycardia or galloping of the heart that has fallen on all the great
new centres of civilization, for the sudden madness of all the mills of
the world?
Watts’ _Hope_ does tell us something more about the nature of hope than
we can be told by merely noticing that hope is shown in individual
cases: that a man rehearses successful love speeches when he is in love,
and takes a return ticket when he goes out to fight a duel. But the
figure of Commerce with the cornucopia gives us less insight into what
is behind commerce than we might get from reading a circular or staring
out into the street. In the case of Commerce the figure is merely a
symbol of commerce, which is a symbol. In the case of Hope the matter is
quite the other way; the figure brings us nearer to something which is
not a symbol, but the reality behind symbols. In the one case we go
further down towards the river’s delta; in the other, further up towards
its fountain; that at least may be called a difference. And now, suppose
that our imaginary sight-seer who had seen so much of the pompous
allegory of Commerce in her Grecian draperies were to see, for the
second time, a second picture. Suppose he saw before him a throned
figure clad in splendid, heavy scarlet and gold, above the lustre and
dignity of which rose, in abrupt contrast, a face like the face of a
blind beast. Suppose that as this imperial thing, with closed eyes and
fat, sightless face, sat upon his magnificent seat, he let his heavy
hand and feet fall, as if by a mere pulverizing accident, on the naked
and god-like figures of the young, on men and women. Suppose that in the
background there rose straight into the air a raw and turgid smoke, as
if from some invisible and horrible sacrifice, and that by one final,
fantastic, and triumphal touch this all-destroying god and king were
adorned with the ears of an ass, declaring that he was royal, imperial,
irresistible, and, when all is said, imbecile. Suppose that a man sick
of argosies and cornucopias came before that picture, would he not say,
perhaps even before he looked in the catalogue and found that the
painter had called it _Mammon_, would he not say, “This is something
which in spirit and in essence I have seen before, something which in
spirit and in essence I have seen everywhere. That bloated, unconscious
face, so heavy, so violent, so wicked, so innocent, have I not seen it
at street corners, in billiard-rooms, in saloon bars, laying down the
law about Chartered shares or gaping at jokes about women? Those huge
and smashing limbs, so weighty, so silly, so powerless, and yet so
powerful, have I not seen them in the pompous movements, the morbid
health of the prosperous in the great cities? The hard, straight pillars
of that throne, have I not seen them in the hard, straight, hideous
tiers of modern warehouses and factories? That tawny and sulky smoke,
have I not seen it going up to heaven from all the cities of the coming
world? This is no trifling with argosies and Greek drapery. This is
commerce. This is the home of the god himself. This is why men hate him,
and why men fear him, and why men endure him.”
Now, of course, it is at once obvious that this view would be very
unjust to commerce; but that modification, as a matter of fact, very
strongly supports the general theory at the moment under consideration.
Commerce is really an arbitrary phrase, a thing including a million
motives, from the motive which makes a man drink to the motive which
makes him reform; from the motive that makes a starving man eat a horse
to the motive which makes an idle man chase a butterfly. But whatever
other spirits there are in commerce, there is, beyond all reasonable
[Illustration: MAMMON.]
question, in it this powerful and enduring spirit which Watts has
painted. There is, as a ruling element in modern life, in all life, this
blind and asinine appetite for mere power. There is a spirit abroad
among the nations of the earth which drives men incessantly on to
destroy what they cannot understand, and to capture what they cannot
enjoy. This, and not commerce, is what Watts has painted. He has
painted, not the allegory of a great institution, but the vision of a
great appetite, the vision of a great motive. It is not true that this
is a picture of Commerce; but that Commerce and Watts’ picture spring
from the same source. There does exist a certain dark and driving force
in the world; one of its products is this picture, another is Commerce.
The picture is not Commerce, it is Mammon. And, indeed, so powerfully
and perfectly has Watts, in this case, realized the awful being whom he
was endeavouring to call up by his artistic incantation, that we may
even say the common positions of allegory and reality are reversed. The
fact is not that here we have an effective presentation under a certain
symbol of red robes and smoke and a throne, of what the financial world
is, but rather that here we have something of the truth that is hidden
behind the symbol of white waistcoats and hats on the back of the head,
of financial papers and sporting prophets, of butter closing quiet and
Pendragon being meant to win. This is not a symbol of commerce: commerce
is a symbol of this.
In sketching this general and necessary attitude towards the art of
Watts, particularly in the matter of allegory, I have taken deliberately
these two very famous and obvious pictures, and I have occupied, equally
deliberately, a considerable amount of space in expounding them. It is
far better in a subject so subtle and so bewildering as the relation
between art and philosophy, that we should see how our conceptions and
hypotheses really get on when applied systematically and at some length
to some perfectly familiar and existent object. A philosopher cannot
talk about any single thing, down to a pumpkin, without showing whether
he is wise or foolish; but he can easily talk about everything with
anyone having any views about him beyond gloomy suspicions. But at this
point I become fully conscious of another and most important kind of
criticism, which has been and can be levelled against the allegories of
Watts; and which must be, by the nature of things, evoked by the
particular line of discussion or reflection that I have here adopted.
It may be admitted that Watts’ art is not merely literary in the sense
in which I have originally used the term. It may be admitted that there
is truth in the general position I have sketched out--that Watts is not
a man copying literature or philosophy, but rather a man copying the
great spiritual and central realities which literature and philosophy
also set out to copy. It may be admitted that _Mammon_ is obviously an
attempt to portray, not a twopenny phrase, but a great idea. But along
with all these admissions it will certainly be said, by the most
powerful and recent school in art criticism, that all this amounts to
little more than a difference between a mean and a magnificent blunder.
Pictorial art, it will be said, has no more business, as such, to
portray great ideas than small ideas. Its affair is with its own
technique, with the love of a great billowing line for its own sake, of
a subtle and perfect tint for its own sake. If a man mistakes his trade
and attends to the technique of another, the sublimity of his mind is
only a very slight consolation. If I summon a paperhanger
[Illustration: DEATH CROWNING INNOCENCE.]
to cover the walls, and he insists on playing the piano, it matters
little whether he plays Beethoven or “The Yachmak.” If I charter a
pianist, and he is found drinking in the wine cellar, it matters little
whether he has made his largest hole in good Burgundy or bad Marsala. If
the whole of this question of great ideas and small ideas, of large
atmospheres and superficial definitions, of the higher and the lower
allegory--if all this be really irrelevant to the discussion of the
position of a painter, then, indeed, we have been upon an idle track. As
I think I shall show in a moment, this is a very inadequate view of the
matter. But it does draw our attention to an aspect of the matter which
must, without further delay, be discussed. That aspect, as I need hardly
say, is the technique of Watts.
There is of course a certain tendency among all interesting and novel
critical philosophers to talk as if they had discovered things which it
is perfectly impossible that any human being could ever have denied; to
shout that the birds fly, and declare that in spite of persecution they
will still assert that cows have four legs. In this way some raw
pseudo-scientists talk about heredity or the physical basis of life as
if it were not a thing embedded in every creed and legend, and even the
very languages of men. In this way some of the new oligarchists of
to-day imagine they are attacking the doctrine of human equality by
pointing out that some men are stronger or cleverer than others; as if
they really believed that Danton and Washington thought that every man
was the same height and had the same brains. And something of this
preliminary cloud of folly or misunderstanding attaches doubtless to the
question of the technical view--that is, the solely technical view--of
painting. If the principle of “art for art’s sake” means simply that
there is a solely technical view of painting, and that it must be
supreme on its own ground, it appears a piece of pure madness to suppose
it other than true. Surely there never was really a man who held that a
picture that was vile in colour and weak in drawing was a good picture
because it was a picture of Florence Nightingale! Surely there never was
really a man who said that when one leg in a drawing was longer than
another, yet they were both the same length because the artist painted
it for an altar-piece! When the new critics with a burst of music and a
rocket shower of epigrams enunciated their new criticism, they must at
any rate have meant something more than this. Undoubtedly they did mean
something more; they meant that a picture was not a good vehicle for
moral sentiment at all; they meant that not only was it not the better
for having a philosophic meaning, but that it was worse. This, if it be
true, is beyond all question a real indictment of Watts.
About the whole of this Watts controversy about didactic art there is at
least one perfectly plain and preliminary thing to be said. It is said
that art cannot teach a lesson. This is true, and the only proper
addition is the statement that neither, for the matter of that, can
morality teach a lesson. For a thing to be didactic, in the strict and
narrow and scholastic sense, it must be something about facts or the
physical sciences: you can only teach a lesson about such a thing as
Euclid or the making of paper boats. The thing is quite inapplicable to
the great needs of man, whether moral or æsthetic. Nobody ever held a
class in philanthropy with fifteen millionaires in a row writing
cheques. Nobody ever held evening continuation classes in martyrdom, or
drilled boys in a playground to die for their country. A
[Illustration: A STORY FROM BOCCACCIO.]
picture cannot give a plain lesson in morals; neither can a sermon. A
didactic poem was a thing known indeed among the ancients and the old
Latin civilization, but as a matter of fact it scarcely ever professed
to teach people how to live the higher life. It taught people how to
keep bees.
Since we find, therefore, that ethics is like art, a mystic and
intuitional affair, the only question that remains is, have they any
kinship? If they have not, a man is not a man, but two men and probably
more: if they have, there is, to say the least of it, at any rate a
reasonable possibility that a note in moral feeling might have affinity
with a note in art, that a curve in law, so to speak, may repeat a curve
in draughtsmanship, that there may be genuine and not artificial
correspondences between a state of morals and an effect in painting.
This would, I should tentatively suggest, appear to be a most reasonable
hypothesis. It is not so much the fact that there is no such thing as
allegorical art, but rather the fact that there is no art that is not
allegorical. But the meanings expressed in high and delicate art are not
to be classed under cheap and external ethical formulæ, they deal with
strange vices and stranger virtues. Art is only unmoral in so far as
most morality is immoral. Thus Mr. Whistler when he drops a spark of
perfect yellow or violet into some glooming pool of the nocturnal Thames
is, in all probability, enunciating some sharp and wholesome moral
comment. When the young Impressionists paint dim corners of meadows or
splashes of sunlight in the wood, this does not mean necessarily that
they are unmoral; it may only mean that they are a very original and
sincere race of stern young moralists.
Now if we adopt this general theory of the existence of genuine
correspondences between art and moral beauty, of the existence, that is
to say, of genuine allegories, it is perfectly clear wherein the test of
such genuineness must consist. It must consist in the nature of the
technique. If the technique, considered as technique, is calculated to
evoke in us a certain kind of pleasure, and there is an analogous
pleasure in the meaning considered as meaning, then there is a true
wedding of the arts. But if the pleasure in the technique be of a kind
quite dissimilar in its own sphere to the pleasure in the spiritual
suggestion, then it is a mechanical and unlawful union, and this
philosophy, at any rate, forbids the banns. If the intellectual
conceptions uttered in Michel Angelo’s _Day of Judgment_ in the Sistine
Chapel were the effect of a perfect and faultless workmanship, but the
workmanship such as we should admire in a Gothic missal or a picture by
Gerard Dow, we should then say that absolute excellence in both
departments did not excuse their being joined. The thing would have been
a mere accident, or convenience. Just as two plotters might communicate
by means of a bar or two of music, so these subtle harmonies of colour
and form would have been used for their detached and private ends by the
dark conspirators of morality.
Now there is nothing in the world that is really so thoroughly
characteristic of Watts’ technique as the fact that it does almost
startlingly correspond to the structure of his spiritual sense. If such
pictures as _The Dweller in the Innermost_ and _Mammon_ and _Diana and
Endymion_ and _Eve Repentant_ had neither title nor author, if no one
had heard of Watts or heard of Eve; if, for the matter of that, the
pictures had neither human nor animal form, it would be possible to
guess something of the painter’s attitude from the mere colour and line.
If Watts painted an arabesque, it would be moral; if he designed a
Turkey
[Illustration: LORD LYTTON.]
carpet, it would be stoical. So individual is his handling that his very
choice and scale of colours betray him. A man with a keen sense of the
spiritual and symbolic history of colours could guess at something about
Watts from the mess on his palette. He would see giants and the sea and
cold primeval dawns and brown earth-men and red earth-women lying in the
heaps of greens and whites and reds, like forces in chaos before the
first day of creation. A certain queer and yet very simple blue there
is, for instance, which is like Titian’s and yet not like it, which is
more lustrous and yet not less opaque, and which manages to suggest the
north rather than Titian’s south, in spite of its intensity; which
suggests also the beginning of things rather than their maturity; a hot
spring of the earth rather than Titian’s opulent summer. Then there is
that tremendous autochthonous red, which was the colour of Adam, whose
name was Red Earth. It is, if one may say so, the clay in which no one
works, except Watts and the Eternal Potter. There are other colours that
have this character, a character indescribable except by saying that
they come from the palette of Creation--a green especially that
reappears through portraits, allegories, landscapes, heroic designs, but
always has the same fierce and elfish look, like a green that has a
secret. It may be seen in the signet ring of Owen Meredith, and in the
eyes of the _Dweller in the Innermost_. But all these colours have, as I
say, the first and most characteristic and most obvious of the mental
qualities of Watts; they are simple and like things just made by God.
Nor is it, I think, altogether fanciful to push this analogy or harmony
a step further and to see in the colours and the treatment of them the
other side or typical trait which I have frequently mentioned as making
up the identity of the painter. He is, as I say, a stoic; therefore to
some extent, at least, a pagan; he has no special sympathy with Celtic
intensity, with Catholic mysticism, with Romanticism, with all the
things that deal with the cells of the soul, with agonies and dreams.
And I think a broad distinction between the finest pagan and the finest
Christian point of view may be found in such an approximate phrase as
this, that paganism deals always with a light shining on things,
Christianity with a light shining through them. That is why the whole
Renaissance colouring is opaque, the whole Pre-Raphaelite colouring
transparent. The very sky of Rubens is more solid than the rocks of
Giotto: it is like a noble cliff of immemorial blue marble. The artists
of the devout age seemed to regret that they could not make the light
show through everything, as it shows through the little wood in the
wonderful _Nativity_ of Botticelli. And that is why, again,
Christianity, which has been attacked so strangely as dull and austere,
invented the thing which is more intoxicating than all the wines of the
world, stained-glass windows.