It is true that he has on rare occasions attempted pictures merely
reproducing the externals of the ordinary earth. It is characteristic of
him that he should have once, for no apparent reason in particular,
painted a picture of two carthorses and a man. It is still more
characteristic of him that this one picture of a trivial group in the
street should be so huge as to dwarf many of his largest and most
transcendental canvases; that the incidental harmless drayman should be
more gigantic than the Prince of this World or Adam or the Angel of
Death. He condescends to a detail and makes the detail more vast than a
cosmic allegory. One picture, called “The First Oyster,” he is reported
to have painted in response to a challenge which accused him or his art
of lacking altogether the element of humour. The charge is interesting,
because it suggests a comparison with the similar charge commonly
brought against Gladstone. In both charges there is an element of truth,
though not complete truth. Watts proved no doubt that he was not wholly
without humour by this admirable picture. Gladstone proved that he was
not wholly without humour by his reply to Mr. Chaplin, by his singing of
“Doo-dah,” and by his support of a grant to the Duke of Coburg. But both
men were singularly little possessed by the mood or the idea of humour.
To them had been in peculiar fullness revealed the one great truth which
our modern thought does not know and which it may possibly perish
through not knowing. They knew that to enjoy life means to take it
seriously. There is an eternal kinship between solemnity and high
spirits, and almost the very name of it is Gladstone. Its other name is
Watts. They knew that not only life, but every detail of life, is most a
pleasure when it is studied with the gloomiest intensity. They knew that
the men who collect beetles are jollier than the men who kill them, and
that the men who worshipped beetles (in ancient Egypt) were probably the
jolliest of all. The startling cheerfulness of the old age of Gladstone,
the startling cheerfulness of the old age of Watts, are both entirely
redolent of this exuberant seriousness, this uproarious gravity. They
were as happy as the birds, because, like the birds, they were untainted
by the disease of laughter. They are as awful and philosophical as
children at play: indeed they remind us of a truth true for all of us,
though capable of misunderstanding, that the great aim of a man’s life
is to get into his second childhood.
Of his work we have concluded our general survey. It has been hard in
conducting such a survey to avoid the air of straying from the subject.
But the greatest hardness of the subject is that we cannot stray from
the subject. This man has attempted, whether he has succeeded or no, to
paint such pictures of such things that no one shall be able to get
outside them; that everyone should be lost in them for ever like
wanderers in a mighty park. Whether we strike a match or win the
Victoria Cross, we are still giants sprawling in Chaos. Whether we hide
in a monastery or thunder on a platform, we are still standing in the
Court of Death. If any experience at all is genuine, it affects the
philosophy of these pictures; if any halfpenny stamp supports them, they
are the better pictures; if any dead cat in a dust-bin contradicts them,
they are the worse pictures. This is the great pathos and the great
dignity of philosophy and theology. Men talk of philosophy and theology
as if they were something specialistic and arid and
[Illustration: GOOD LUCK TO YOUR FISHING.]
academic. But philosophy and theology are not only the only democratic
things, they are democratic to the point of being vulgar, to the point,
I was going to say, of being rowdy. They alone admit all matters; they
alone lie open to all attacks. All other sciences may, while studying
their own, laugh at the rag-tag and bobtail of other sciences. An
astronomer may sneer at animalculæ, which are very like stars; an
entomologist may scorn the stars, which are very like animalculæ.
Physiologists may think it dirty to grub about in the grass; botanists
may think it dirtier to grub about in an animal’s inside. But there is
nothing that is not relevant to these more ancient studies. There is no
detail, from buttons to kangaroos, that does not enter into the gay
confusion of philosophy. There is no fact of life, from the death of a
donkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to dance and
sing in, in the glorious Carnival of theology.
Therefore I make no apology if I have asked the reader, in the course of
these remarks, to think about things in general. It is not I, but George
Frederick Watts, who asks the reader to think about things in general.
If he has not done this, he has failed. If he has not started in us such
trains of reflection as I am now concluding and many more and many
better, he has failed. And this brings me to my last word. Now and again
Watts has failed. I am afraid that it may possibly be inferred from the
magniloquent language which I have frequently, and with a full
consciousness of my act, applied to this great man, that I think the
whole of his work technically triumphant. Clearly it is not. For I
believe that often he has scarcely known what he was doing; I believe
that he has been in the dark when the lines came wrong; that he has been
still deeper in the dark and things came right. As I have already
pointed out, the vague lines which his mere physical instinct would
make him draw, have in them the curves of the Cosmos. His automatic
manual action was, I think, certainly a revelation to others, certainly
a revelation to himself. Standing before a dark canvas upon some quiet
evening, he has made lines and something has happened. In such an hour
the strange and splendid phrase of the Psalm he has literally fulfilled.
He has gone on because of the word of meekness and truth and of
righteousness. And his right hand has taught him terrible things.