his peculiar type of marvellous spirituality, has the Platonic, the
philosophic, rather than the Catholic order of mysticism. And it can
scarcely be a coincidence that here again we feel it to be something
that could almost be deduced from the colours if they were splashed at
random about a canvas. The colours are mystical, but they are not
transparent; that is, not transparent in the very curious but
unmistakable sense in which the colours of Botticelli or Rossetti are
transparent. What they are can only be described as iridescent. A
curious lustre or glitter, conveyed chiefly by a singular and individual
brushwork, lies over all his great pictures.
[Illustration: DAWN.]
It is the dawn of things: it is the glow of the primal sense of wonder;
it is the sun of the childhood of the world; it is the light that never
was on sea or land; but still it is a light shining on things, not
shining through them. It is a light which exhibits and does honour to
this world, not a light that breaks in upon this world to bring it
terror or comfort, like the light that suddenly peers round the corner
of some dark Gothic chapel with its green or golden or blood-red eyes.
The Gothic artists, as I say, would have liked men’s bodies to become
like burning glass (as the figures in their windows do), that the light
might pass through them. There is no fear of light passing through
Watts’ _Cain_.
These analogies must inevitably appear fantastic to those who do not
accept the general hypothesis of a possible kinship between pictorial
and moral harmonies in the psychology of men; but to those who do accept
this not very extravagant hypothesis, it may, I think, be repeated by
way of summary, that the purely technical question of Watts’ colour
scheme does provide us, at least suggestively, with these two parallels.
Watts, so far as his moral and mental attitude can be expressed by any
phrases of such brevity, has two main peculiarities: first, a large
infantile poetry which delights in things fresh, raw, and gigantic;
second, a certain Greek restraint and agnostic severity, which throws a
strong light on this world as it is. The colours he uses have also two
main peculiarities: first, a fresh, raw, and, as it were, gigantic
character; secondly, an opaque reflected light, unlike the mediæval
lighting, a strong light thrown on this world as it is.
Similar lines of comparison, so far as they appear to possess any value,
could, of course, be very easily pointed out in connexion with the
character of Watts’ draughtsmanship. That his lines are simple and
powerful, that both in strength and weakness they are candid and
austere, that they are not Celtic, not Catholic, and not romantic lines
of draughtsmanship, would, I think, appear sufficiently clear to anyone
who has any instinct for this mode of judgment at all. In the matter of
line and composition, of course, the same general contention applies as
in the case of colour. The curve of the bent figure of _Hope_,
considered simply as a curve, half repeating as it does the upper curve
of the globe, suggests a feeling, a sense of fear, of simplicity, of
something which lies near to the nature of the idea itself, the idea
which inspires the title of the picture. The splendid rushing whirlpool
of curves which constitutes, as it were, the ellipse of the two figures
in _Diana and Endymion_ is a positive inspiration. It is, simply as a
form for a picture, a mere scheme of lines, the very soul of Greece. It
is simple; it is full and free; it follows great laws of harmony, but it
follows them swiftly and at will; it is headlong, and yet at rest, like
the solid arch of a waterfall. It is a rushing and passionate meeting of
two superb human figures; and it is almost a mathematical harmony.
Technically, at least, and as a matter of outlines, it is probably the
artist’s masterpiece.
Before we quit this second department of the temperament of Watts, as
expressed in his line, mention must be made of what is beyond all
question the most interesting and most supremely personal of all the
elements in the painter’s designs and draughtsmanship. That is, of
course, his magnificent discovery of the artistic effect of the human
back. The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in the universe:
it is impossible to speak about it. It is the part of man that he knows
nothing of; like an
[Illustration: EVE REPENTANT.]
outlying province forgotten by an emperor. It is a common saying that
anything may happen behind our backs: transcendentally considered the
thing has an eerie truth about it. Eden may be behind our backs, or
Fairyland. But this mystery of the human back has again its other side
in the strange impression produced on those behind: to walk behind
anyone along a lane is a thing that, properly speaking, touches the
oldest nerve of awe. Watts has realized this as no one in art or letters
has realized it in the whole history of the world: it has made him
great. There is one possible exception to his monopoly of this
magnificent craze. Two thousand years before, in the dark scriptures of
a nomad people, it had been said that their prophet saw the immense
Creator of all things, but only saw Him from behind. I do not know
whether even Watts would dare to paint that. But it reads like one of
his pictures, like the most terrific of all his pictures, which he has
kept veiled.
I need not instance the admirable and innumerable cases of this fine and
individual effect. _Eve Repentant_ (that fine picture), in which the
agony of a gigantic womanhood is conveyed as it could not be conveyed by
any power of visage, in the powerful contortion of the muscular and yet
beautiful back, is the first that occurs to the mind. The sad and
sardonic picture painted in later years, _For He had Great
Possessions_--showing the young man of the Gospel loaded with his
intolerable pomp of garments and his head sunken out of sight--is of
course another. Others are slighter instances, like _Good Luck to your
Fishing_. He has again carried the principle, in one instance, to an
extreme seldom adopted, I should fancy, either by artist or man. He has
painted a very graceful portrait of his wife, in which that lady’s face
is entirely omitted, the head being abruptly turned away. But it is
indeed idle to multiply these instances of the painter’s hobby (if one
may use the phrase) of the worship of the human back, when all such
instances have been dwarfed and overshadowed by the one famous and
tremendous instance that everyone knows. _Love and Death_ is truly a
great achievement: if it stood alone it would have made a man great. And
it fits in with a peculiar importance with the general view I am
suggesting of the Watts technique. For the whole picture really hangs,
both technically and morally, upon one single line, a line that could be
drawn across a blank canvas, the spine-line of the central figure of
Death with its great falling garment. The whole composition, the whole
conception, and, I was going to say, the whole moral of the picture,
could be deduced from that single line. The moral of the picture (if
moral were the right phrase for these things) is, it is scarcely
necessary to point out, the monument of about as noble a silence and
suppression as the human mind ever bent itself to in its pride. It is
the great masterpiece of agnosticism. In that picture agnosticism--not
the cheap and querulous incredulity which abuses the phrase, but loyal
and consistent agnosticism, which is as willing to believe good as evil
and to harbour faith as doubt--has here its great and pathetic place and
symbol in the house of the arts. It is the artistic embodiment of
reverent ignorance at its highest, fully as much as the Divine Comedy is
the artistic embodiment of Christianity.
Technically, in a large number of cases, it is probably true that Watts’
portraits, or some of them at least, are his most successful
achievements. But here also we find our general conclusion: for if his
portraits are his best pictures, it is certainly not because they
[Illustration: LOVE AND DEATH.]
are merely portraits; if they are in some cases better than his symbolic
designs, it is certainly not because they are less symbolic. In his
gallery of great men, indeed, we find Watts almost more himself than
anywhere else. Most men are allegorical when they are painting
allegories, but Watts is allegorical when he is painting an old
alderman. A change passes over that excellent being, a change of a kind
to which aldermen are insufficiently inured. He begins to resolve into
the primal elements, to become dust and the shadow, to become the red
clay of Adam and the wind of God. His eyes become, in spite of his
earnest wish, the fixed stars in the sky of the spirit; his complexion
begins to show, not the unmeaning red of portraits and miniatures, but
that secret and living red which is within us, and which is the river of
man. The astounding manner in which Watts has, in some cases, treated
his sitters is one of the most remarkable things about his character. He
is not (it is almost absurd to have to mention such a thing about the
almost austere old democrat) a man likely to flatter a sitter in any
worldly or conventional sense. Nor is he, for the matter of that, a man
likely to push compliments far from any motive: he is a strict, and I
should infer a candid, man. The type of virtues he chiefly admires and
practises are the reverse of those which would encourage a courtier or
even a universalist. But he scarcely ever paints a man without making
him about five times as magnificent as he really looks. The real men
appear, if they present themselves afterwards, like mean and
unsympathetic sketches from the Watts original.
The fact is that this indescribable primalism, which we have noted as
coming out in the designs, in the titles, and in Watts’ very
oil-colours, is present in this matter in a most extraordinary way.
Watts does not copy men at all: he makes them over again. He dips his
hand in the clay of chaos and begins to model a man named William Morris
or a man named Richard Burton: he is assisted, no doubt, in some degree
by a quaint old text-book called Reality, with its stiff but suggestive
woodcuts and its shrewd and simple old hints. But the most that can be
said for the portraiture is that Watts asks a hint to come and stop with
him, puts the hint in a chair in his studio and stares at him. The thing
that comes out at last upon the canvas is not generally a very precise
picture of the sitter, though, of course, it is almost always a very
accurate picture of the universe.
And yet while this, on the one side, is true enough, the portraits are
portraits, and very fine portraits. But they are dominated by an element
which is the antithesis of the whole tendency of modern art, that
tendency which for want of a better word we have to call by the absurd
name of optimism. It is not, of course, in reality a question of
optimism in the least, but of an illimitable worship and wonder directed
towards the fact of existence. There is a great deal of difference
between the optimism which says that things are perfect and the optimism
which merely says (with a more primeval modesty) that they are very
good. One optimism says that a one-legged man has two legs because it
would be so dreadful if he had not. The other optimism says that the
fact that the one-legged was born of a woman, has a soul, has been in
love, and has stood alive under the stars, is a fact so enormous and
thrilling that, in comparison, it does not matter whether he has one leg
or five. One optimism says that this is the best of all possible worlds.
The other says that it is certainly not the best of all possible worlds,
but
[Illustration: WILLIAM MORRIS.]
it is the best of all possible things that a world should be possible.
Watts, as has been more than once more or less definitely suggested, is
dominated throughout by this prehistoric wonder. A man to him,
especially a great man, is a thing to be painted as Fra Angelico painted
angels, on his knees. He has indeed, like many brilliant men in the age
that produced Carlyle and Ruskin, an overwhelming tendency to
hero-worship. That worship had not, of course, in the case of these men
any trace of that later and more denaturalized hero-worship, the
tendency to worship madmen--to dream of vast crimes as one dreams of a
love-affair, and to take the malformation of the soul to be the only
originality. To the Carlylean (and Watts has been to some by no means
inconsiderable extent a Carlylean), to the Carlylean the hero, the great
man, was a man more human than humanity itself. In worshipping him you
were worshipping humanity in a sacrament: and Watts seems to express in
almost every line of his brush this ardent and reverent view of the
great man. He overdoes it. Tennyson, fine as he was both physically and
mentally, was not quite so much of a demi-god as Watts’ splendid
pictures would seem to suggest. Many other sitters have been subjected,
past all recognition, to this kind of devout and ethereal caricature.
But the essential of the whole matter was that the attitude of Watts was
one which might almost be called worship. It was not, of course, that he
always painted men as handsome in the conventional sense, or even as
handsome as they were. William Morris impressed most people as a very
handsome man: in Watts’ marvellous portrait, so much is made of the
sanguine face, the bold stare, the almost volcanic suddenness of the
emergence of the head from the dark green background, that the effect
of ordinary good looks, on which many of Morris’s intimates would
probably have prided themselves, is in some degree lost. Carlyle, again,
when he saw the painter’s fine rendering of him, said with
characteristic surliness that he “looked like a mad labourer.”
Conventionally speaking, it is of course, therefore, to be admitted that
the sitters did not always come off well. But the exaggeration or the
distortion, if exaggeration or distortion there were, was always
effected in obedience to some almost awestruck notion of the greatness
or goodness of the great or good sitter. The point is not whether Watts
sometimes has painted men as ugly as they were painted by the primary
religious painters; the point is, as I have said, that he painted as
they did, on his knees. Now no one thinks that Mr. Sargent paints the
Misses Wertheimer on his knees. His grimness and decision of drawing and
colouring are not due to a sacred optimism. But those of Watts are due
to this: are due to an intense conviction that there is within the
sitter a great reality which has to give up its secret before he leaves
the seat or the model’s throne. Hence come the red violent face and
minatory eyes of William Morris: the painter sought to express, and he
did most successfully express, the main traits and meaning of
Morris--the appearance of a certain plain masculine passion in the realm
of decorative art. Morris was a man who wanted good wall-papers, not as
a man wants a coin of the Emperor Constantine, which was the cloistered
or abnormal way in which men had commonly devised such things: he wanted
good wall-papers as a man wants beer. He clamoured for art: he brawled
for it. He asserted the perfectly virile and ordinary character of the
appetite for beauty. And he possessed and developed a power of moral
violence on pure
[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.]
matters of taste which startled the flabby world of connoisseurship and
opened a new era. He grew furious with furniture and denounced the union
of wrong colours as men denounce an adultery. All this is expressed far
more finely than in these clumsy sentences in that living and leonine
head in the National Portrait Gallery. It is exactly the same with
Carlyle. Watts’ Carlyle is immeasurably more subtle and true than the
Carlyle of Millais, which simply represents him as a shaggy, handsome,
magnificent old man. The uglier Carlyle of Watts has more of the truth
about him, the strange combination of a score of sane and healthy
visions and views, with something that was not sane, which bloodshot and
embittered them all, the great tragedy of the union of a strong
countryside mind and body with a disease of the vitals and something
like a disease of the spirit. In fact, Watts painted Carlyle “like a mad
labourer” because Carlyle was a mad labourer.
This general characteristic might of course be easily traced in all the
portraits one by one. If space permitted, indeed, such a process might
be profitable; for while we take careful note of all the human
triviality of faces, the one thing that we all tend to forget is that
divine and common thing which Watts celebrates. It is the misfortune of
the nonreligious ages that they tend to cultivate a sense of
individuality, not only at the expense of religion, but at the expense
of humanity itself. For the modern portrait-painter not only does not
see the image of God in his sitters, he does not even see the image of
man. His object is not to insist on the glorious and solemn heritage
which is common to Sir William Harcourt and Mr. Albert Chevalier, to
Count Tolstoy and Mr. Wanklyn, that is the glorious and solemn heritage
of a nose and two eyes and a mouth. The effort of the dashing modern is
rather to make each of these features individual almost to the point of
being incredible: it is his desire to paint the mouth whose grimace is
inimitable, the eyes that could be only in one head, and the nose that
never was on sea or land. There is value in this purely personal
treatment, but something in it so constantly lost: the quality of the
common humanity. The new art gallery is too like a museum of freaks, it
is too wild and wonderful, like a realistic novel. Watts errs
undoubtedly on the other side. He makes all his portraits too classical.
It may seem like a paradox to say that he makes them too human; but
humanity is a _classis_ and therefore classical. He recurs too much to
the correct type which includes all men. He has, for instance, a worship
of great men so complete that it makes him tend in the direction of
painting them all alike. There may be too much of Browning in his
Tennyson, too much of Tennyson in his Browning. There is certainly a
touch of Manning in his John Stuart Mill, and a touch of the Minotaur in
many of his portraits of Imperial politicians. While he celebrates the
individual with a peculiar insight, it is nevertheless always referred
to a general human type. We feel when we look at even the most
extraordinary of Watts’ portraits, as, for instance, the portrait of
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, that before Lord Stratford de Redcliffe was
born, and apart from that fact, there was such a thing as a human being.
When we look at a brilliant modern canvas like that of Mr. Sargent’s
portrait of Wertheimer, we do not feel that any human being analogous to
him had of necessity existed. We feel that Mr. Wertheimer might have
been created before the stars. Watts has a tendency to resume his
characters into his background as if they were half returning
[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE.]
to the forces of nature. In his more successful portraits the actual
physical characteristics of the sitter appear to be something of the
nature of artistic creations; they are decorative and belong to a whole.
We feel that he has filled in the fiery orange of Swinburne’s hair as
one might fill in a gold or copper panel. We know that he was
historically correct in making the hair orange, but we cannot get rid of
a haunting feeling that if his scheme had been a little different he
would have made it green. This indescribable sentiment is particularly
strong in the case of the portrait of Rossetti. Rossetti is dressed in a
dark green coat which perfectly expresses his sumptuous Pre-Raphaelite
affectation. But we do not feel that Rossetti has adopted the dark green
coat to suit his dark red beard. We rather feel that if anyone had
seized Rossetti and forcibly buttoned him up in the dark green coat he
would have grown the red beard by sheer force of will.
Before we quit the subject of portraiture a word ought to be said about
two exceedingly noble portraits, those of Matthew Arnold and Cardinal
Manning. The former is interesting because, as an able critic said
somewhere (I wish I could remember who he was or where he wrote), this
is the one instance of Watts approaching tentatively a man whom he in
all reasonable probability did not understand. In this particular case
the picture is a hundred times better for that. The portrait-painter of
Matthew Arnold obviously ought not to understand him, since he did not
understand himself. And the bewilderment which the artist felt for those
few hours reproduced in a perfect, almost in an immortal, picture the
bewilderment which the sitter felt from the cradle to the grave. The
bewilderment of Matthew Arnold was more noble and faithful than most
men’s certainty, and Watts has not failed to give that nobility a place
even greater perhaps than that which he would have given to it had he
been working on that fixed theory of admiration in which he dealt with
Tennyson or Morris. The sad sea-blue eyes of Matthew Arnold seemed to
get near to the fundamental sadness of blue. It is a certain eternal
bleakness in the colour which may for all I know have given rise to the
legend of blue devils. There are times at any rate when the bluest
heavens appear only blue with those devils. The portrait of Cardinal
Manning is worth a further and special notice, because it is an
illustration of the fact to which I have before alluded: the fact that
while Watts in one sense always gets the best out of his sitters, he
does not by any means always get the handsomest out of them. Manning was
a singularly fine-looking man, even in his emaciation. A friend of mine,
who was particularly artistic both by instinct and habits, gazed for a
long time at a photograph of the terrible old man clad in those
Cardinal’s robes and regalia in which he exercised more than a
Cardinal’s power, and said reflectively, “He would have made his fortune
as a model.” A great many of the photographs of Manning, indeed almost
any casual glimpses of him, present him as more beautiful than he
appears in Watts’ portrait. To the ordinary onlooker there was behind
the wreck of flesh and the splendid skeleton the remains of a very
handsome English gentleman; relics of one who might have hunted foxes
and married an American heiress. Watts has no eyes for anything except
that sublime vow which he would himself repudiate, that awful Church
which he would himself disown. He exaggerates the devotionalism of
Manning. He is more ascetic than the ascetics; more Catholic than
Catholicism. Just so, he would be, if he were painting the
Sheik-el-Islam, more Moslem than the Mohammedans. He has no eyes but
for ideas.