less than two years before his death, he exchanged it for a stall at
Westminster. These historic cities with their old buildings and
associations attracted him very strongly: preaching in the Abbey was
even dangerously exciting to a man of his temperament. But while he gave
his services generously during his months of office, as at Chester in
founding a Natural History Society, he never deserted his old work and
his old parish. Eversley continued to be his home, and during the
greater part of each year to engross his thoughts.
Literature, science, and sport were, as we have seen, the three
interests which absorbed his leisure hours. A fourth, partaking in some
measure of all three, was travel, a hobby which the strenuous pursuit of
duty rarely permitted him to indulge. Ill-health or a complete breakdown
sometimes sent him away perforce, and it is to this that he chiefly owed
his knowledge of other climes. He has left us some fascinating pictures
of the south of France, the rocks of Biarritz, the terrace at Pau, the
blue waters of the Mediterranean, and the golden arches of the Pont du
Gard; but the voyages that thrilled him most were those that he took to
America, when he sailed the Spanish main in the track of Drake and
Raleigh and Richard Grenville. The first journey in 1870 was to the West
Indies; the second and longer one took him to New York and Quebec, and
across the continent to the Yosemite and San Francisco. This was in
1874, the last year of his life, and he was received everywhere with the
utmost respect and goodwill. His name was now famous on both sides of
the Atlantic, and the voice of opposition was stilled. The public had
changed its attitude to him, but he himself was unchanged. He had the
same readiness to gather up new knowledge, and to get into friendly
touch with every kind of man, the same reluctance to talk about himself.
Only the yearning towards the unseen was growing stronger. The poet
Whittier, who met him at Boston, found him unwilling to talk about his
own books or even about the new cities which he was visiting, but
longing for counsel from his brother poet on the high themes of a future
life and the final destiny of the human race.
While he was in California he was taken ill with pleurisy; and when he
came back to England he had so serious a relapse in the autumn that he
could hardly perform his duties at Westminster. He had never wished for
long life, his strength was exhausted, the ardent soul had worn out its
sheath. A dangerous illness of his wife's, threatening to leave him
solitary, hastened the end. For her sake he fought a while against the
pneumonia which set in, but the effort was in vain, and on January 23,
in his own room at Eversley, he met his death contented and serene.
Twenty years before he had said, 'God forgive me if I am wrong, but I
look forward to it with an intense and reverent curiosity'.
These words of his sum up some of his most marked characteristics. Of
his 'curiosity' there is no need to say more: all his life he was
pursuing eager researches into rocks, flowers, animals, and his
fellow-men. 'Intensity' has been picked out by many of his friends as
the word which, more than any other, expresses the peculiar quality of
his nature. This does not mean a weak excitability. His letters to J. S.
Mill on the women-suffrage movement show that this hysterical element,
which was often to be found in the women supporting it, was what most he
feared. He himself defines it well--'my blessed habit of intensity. I go
at what I am about as if there was nothing else in the world for the
time being.' This quality, which many great men put into their work,
Kingsley put both into his work and into his play-time. Critics will say
that he paid for it: it is easy to quote the familiar line: 'Neque
semper arcum tendit Apollo.' But Horace is not the poet to whom Charles
Kingsley would go for counsel: he would only say that he got full value
in both, and that he never regretted the bargain.
But it would be no less true to say that 'Reverence' is the key-note of
his character. This fact was impressed on all who saw him take the
services in his parish church, and it was an exaltation of reverence
which uplifted his congregation and stamped itself on their memories. It
is seen, too, in his political views. The Radical Parson, the upholder
of Chartism, was in many ways a strong Tory. He had a great belief in
the land-owning classes, and an admiration for what remained of the
Feudal System. He believed that the old relation between squire and
villagers, if each did his duty, worked far better than the modern
pretence of Equality and Independence. Like Disraeli, like Ruskin, and
like many other men of high imagination, he distrusted the Manchester
School and the policy that in the labour market each class should be
left to fend for itself. Radical as he was, he defended the House of
Lords and the hereditary system. So, too, in Church questions, though he
was an anti-Tractarian, he had a great reverence for the Athanasian
Creed and in general was a High Churchman. He had none of the fads which
we associate with the Radical party. Total abstinence he condemned as a
rigid rule, though there was no man more severe in his attitude to
drunkenness. He believed that God's gifts were for man's enjoyment, and
he set his face against asceticism. He trained his own body to vigorous
manhood and he had remarkable self-control; and he wished to help each
man to do this for himself and not to be driven to it by what he
considered a false system. Logically it may be easy to find
contradictions in the views which he expressed at different times; but
his life shows an essential unity in aim and practice.
It has been the fashion to label Charles Kingsley and his teaching with
the nickname of 'Muscular Christianity', a name which he detested and
disclaimed. It implied that he and his school were of the full-blooded
robust order of men, who had no sympathy for weakness, and no message
for those who could not follow the same strenuous course as themselves.
As a fact Kingsley had his full share of bodily illnesses and suffered
at all times from a highly-wrought nervous organization; when pain to
others was involved, he was as tender and sympathetic as a woman. He was
a born fighter, too reckless in attack, as we see in his famous dispute
with Cardinal Newman about the honesty of the Tractarians. But he was
not bitter or resentful. He owned himself that in this case he had met a
better logician than himself: later he expressed his admiration for
Newman's poem, 'The Dream of Gerontius', and in his letters he praises
the tone in which the Tractarians write--'a solemn and gentle
earnestness which is most beautiful and which I wish I may ever attain'.
The point which Matthew Arnold singles out in estimating his character
is the width of his sympathies. 'I think', he says, 'he was the most
generous man I have ever known, the most forward to praise what he
thought good, the most willing to admire, the most incapable of being
made ill-natured or even indifferent by having to support ill-natured
attacks himself. Among men of letters I know nothing so rare as this.'
To the gibe about 'Muscular Christianity' Kingsley had his own answer.
He said that with his tastes and gifts he had a special power of
appealing to the wild rough natures which were more at home in the
country than the town, who were too self-forgetful, and too heedless of
the need for culture and for making use of their opportunities. Jacob,
the man of intellect, had many spiritual guides, and the poor outcast,
Esau, was too often overlooked. As he said, 'The one idea of my life was
to tell Esau that he has a birthright as well as Jacob'. When he was
laid to his rest in Eversley churchyard, there were many mourners who
represented the cultured classes of the day; but what gave its special
character to the occasion was the presence of keepers and poachers, of
gipsies, country rustics, and huntsmen, the Esaus of the Hampshire
village, which was the fit resting-place for one who above all was the
ideal of a parish priest.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
1817-1904
1817. Born in London, February 23.
1827. Begins to frequent the studio of William Behnes.
1835. Enters Royal Academy Schools.
1837. Working in his own studio. 'Wounded Heron' and two portraits
in Royal Academy exhibition.
1842. Success in Parliament House competition: 'Caractacus' cartoon.
1843-7. Living with Lord and Lady Holland at Florence.
1847. Success in second competition: 'Alfred' cartoon.
1848. Early allegorical pictures.
1850. Friendship with the Prinseps. Little Holland House.
1851. National series of portraits begun.
1852. Begins Lincoln's Inn Hall fresco: finished 1859.
1856. With Sir Charles Newton to Halicarnassus.
1865. Correspondence with Charles Rickards of Manchester.
1867. Elected A.R.A. and R.A. in same year. Portraits. Carlyle. W.
Morris.
1872. New home at Freshwater, Isle of Wight. 'The Briary.'
Little Holland House sold.
1877. Grosvenor Gallery opened. 1881. Watts exhibition there
(200 pictures).
1882. D.C.L., Oxford; LL.D., Cambridge.
1886. November; marries Miss Fraser Tytler. Winter in Egypt.
1890. New home at Limnerslease, Compton.
1895. National Portrait Gallery opened.
1896. New Gallery exhibition (155 pictures).
1897. Gift of pictures to new Tate Gallery.
1902. Order of Merit.
1904. Death at Compton, July 1.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
ARTIST
The great age of British art was past before Queen Victoria began her
long and memorable reign. Reynolds and Gainsborough had died in the
last years of the eighteenth century, Romney and Hoppner in the first
decade of the nineteenth; Lawrence, the last of the Georgian
portrait-painters, did not live beyond 1830. Of the landscapists Crome
died in 1821 and Constable in 1837. Turner, the one survivor of the
Giants, had done three-quarters of his work before 1837 and can hardly
be reckoned as a Victorian worthy.
[Illustration: GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
From a painting by himself in the National Portrait Gallery]
In the reign of Queen Victoria many thousands of trivial anecdotic
pictures were bought and sold, were reproduced in Art Annuals and
Christmas Numbers and won the favour of rich amateurs and provincial
aldermen--so much so that Victorian art has been a favourite target for
the shafts of critics formed in the school of Whistler and the later
Impressionists. But however just some of their strictures may be, it is
foolish to condemn an age wholesale or to shut our eyes to the great
achievements of those artists who, rising above the general level,
dignified the calling of the painter just when the painters were most
rare. These men formed no single movement progressing in a uniform
direction. The study of pure landscape is best seen in the water-colour
draughtsmen, Cotman, Cox, and de Wint; of landscape as a setting for the
life of the people, in Fred Walker and George Mason. Among
figure-painters the 'Pre-Raphaelites', Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and
Millais, with their forerunner Madox Brown, are the first to win
attention by their earnestness, their romantic imagination, and their
intense feeling for beauty: in these qualities Burne-Jones carried on
their work and retained the allegiance of a cultured few to the very end
of the century. Two solitary figures are more difficult to class, Alfred
Stevens and Watts. Each learnt fruitful lessons from prolonged study of
the great art of the past; yet each preserves a marked originality in
his work. More than any other artists of their age they realized the
unity of art and the dependence of one branch upon another. Painting
should go hand in hand with sculpture, and both minister to
architecture. So the world might hope once more to see public buildings
nobly planned and no less nobly decorated, as in the past it saw the
completion of the Parthenon and the churches of mediaeval Italy. It was
unfortunate that they received so little encouragement from the public,
and that their example had so narrow an influence. St. Paul's can show
its Wellington monument, Lincoln's Inn its fresco; but year after year
subject-pictures continued to be painted on an ambitious scale, which
after a few months' exhibition on the walls of Burlington House passed
to their tomb in provincial museums, or reappeared as ghosts in the
sale-room only to fetch a derisory price and to illustrate the fickle
vagaries in the public taste.
In the early life of George Frederick Watts, who was born in a quiet
street in West Marylebone, there are few incidents to narrate, there is
little brightness to enliven the tale. His father, a maker of musical
instruments, was poor; his mother died early; his home-life was
overshadowed by his own ill-health and the uncertain moods of other
members of the family. His education was casual and consisted mostly of
reading books under the guidance of his father, who had little solid
learning, but refined tastes and an inventive disposition. In his
Sundays at home, where the Sabbatarian rule limited his reading, he
became familiar with the stories of the Old Testament; he discovered for
himself the Waverley Novels and Pope's translation of the _Iliad_; and
he began from early years to use his pencil with the eager and
persistent enthusiasm which marks the artist born.
For a rich artistic nature it was a starved life, but he made the most
of such chances as came in his way. He was barely ten years old when he
found his way to the studio of a sculptor named William Behnes, a man
of Hanoverian extraction, an indifferent sculptor but possessed of a
real talent for drawing; and from his more intellectual brother, Charles
Behnes, he learnt to widen his interest in literature. In this halting
and irregular process of education he received help, some years later,
from another friend of foreign birth, Nicholas Wanostrocht, a Belgian,
who under the assumed name of 'Felix' became a leading authority on the
game of cricket. Wanostrocht was a cultivated man of very wide tastes,
and it was largely through his encouragement that Watts gave to the
study of the French and Italian languages, and to music, what little
time he could spare from his professional work. London was to render him
greater services than this. Thanks to his visits to the British Museum,
he had, while still in his teens, come under a mightier spell. Though
few Englishmen had yet learnt to value their treasures, the Elgin
Marbles had been resting there for twenty years. But now, two years
before Queen Victoria's accession, there might be seen, standing rapt in
admiration before the works of Phidias, a boy of slender figure with
high forehead, delicately moulded features, and disordered hair, one
who, as we can see from the earliest portrait which Mrs. Watts has
preserved in her biography, had something of the unearthly beauty of the
young Shelley. He was physically frail, marked off from ordinary men by
a grace that won its way quickly to the hearts of all who were
susceptible to spiritual charm. Untaught though he was, he had the eye
to see for himself the grandeur of these relics of Greece, and
throughout his life they remained one of the guiding influences in his
development, one of the standards which he set up before himself, though
all too conscious that he could not hope to reach that height. We see
their influence in his treatment of drapery, of horses, of the human
figure, in his idealization of types, in the flowing lines of his
compositions, and in the grouping of his masses. Compared to the hours
which he spent in the British Museum, the lessons in the Royal Academy
schools seem unimportant. He attended classes there for some months in
1835, but the teaching was poor and its results disappointing. William
Hilton, R.A., who then occupied the post of Keeper, gave him some kind
words of encouragement, but in general he came and went unnoticed, and
he soon returned to his solitary self-training in his own studio. If we
know little of his teaching in art, we know still less of his personal
life during the time when he was laying the foundations of his success
by study and self-discipline. Early rising was an art which he acquired
early, and maintained throughout life; long after he felt the spur of
necessity, even after the age of 80, he could rise at four when there
was work to be done; and, living as he did on the simplest diet, he
often achieved his best results at an hour when other men were still
finishing their slumbers. His shyness and sensitiveness, combined with
precarious health and weak physique, would seem to equip him but poorly
in the struggle for life; but his steady persistence, his high
conception of duty, his faith in his art, joined to that power which he
had of winning friends among the noblest men and women of his day, were
to carry him triumphantly through to the end.
The career of Watts as a public man began in 1843 when he had reached
the age of 26. The British Government, not often guilty of fostering art
or literature, may claim at least the credit for having drawn him out of
his seclusion at the very moment when his genius was ripening to bear
fruit. In 1834 the Palace of Westminster, so long the home of the Houses
of Parliament, had been burnt to the ground. The present buildings were
begun by Sir Charles Barry in 1840, and, with a view to decorating them
with wall-paintings, the Board of Works wisely offered prizes for
cartoons, hoping thereby to attract the best talent of the country. In
June 1843 they had to judge between 140 designs by various competitors,
and to award prizes varying in value from £300 to £100. Of the three
first prizes one fell to Watts, hitherto unknown beyond the narrow
circle of his friends, for a design displaying 'Caractacus led in
triumph through the streets of Rome'. This cartoon, however, was not
employed for its original purpose: it fell into the hands of an
enterprising, if inartistic, dealer, who cut it up and sold such
fragments as he judged to be of value in the state of the picture market
at the time. What was far more important was the encouragement given to
the artist by such a success at a critical time of his life, and the
opportunity which the money furnished him to travel abroad and enrich
his experiences before his style was formed. He had long wished to visit
Italy; and, after spending a few weeks in France, he made his leisurely
way (at a pace incredible to us to-day) to Florence and its picture
galleries. On the steamer between Marseilles and Leghorn he was
fortunate in making friends with a Colonel Ellice and his wife, and a
few weeks later they introduced him to Lord Holland, the British
Minister at Florence.
The story goes that Watts went to be the guest of Lord and Lady Holland
for four days and remained there for four years--a story which is a
tribute to the discernment of the latter and not a satire upon Watts,
who was the last man in the world to take advantage of hospitality or to
thrust himself into other people's houses. No doubt it is not to be
taken too literally, but at least it is so far true that he very quickly
became intimate with his host and hostess and found a home where he
could pursue his art under ideal conditions. The value and the danger of
patronage have been often discussed. Democracy may provide a discipline
for artists and men of letters which is often salutary in testing the
sincerity of their devotion to art and literature; but, in such a stern
school, men of genius may easily founder and miss their way.
However that may be, Watts found just the haven which was needed for a
nature like his. So far he had known but little appreciation, and had
lived with few who were his peers. Now he was cheered by the favour of
men and women who had known the best and whose favour was well worth the
winning. But he kept his independence of spirit. He lived in a palace,
but his diet was as sparing as that of a hermit. He feasted his eyes on
the great works of the Renaissance, but he preserved his originality,
and continued to work, with fervour and enhanced enthusiasm, on the
lines which he had already marked out for himself. He did not copy with
the hand, but he drank in new lessons with the eyes and dreamed new
dreams with the spirit.
The Hollands had two houses, one in the centre of the city, the other,
the Villa Medicea di Careggi, lying on the edge of the hills some two or
three miles to the north. This latter had been a favourite residence of
the first Cosimo; here Lorenzo had died, turning his face to the wall,
unshriven by Savonarola; and here Watts decorated an open _loggia_ in
fresco, to bear witness to its latest connexion with the patronage of
Art. Between the two houses he passed laborious but tranquil days,
studying, planning, training his hand to mastery, but enjoying in his
leisure all that such a home could give him of varied entertainment.
Music and dancing, literature and good company, all had their charms for
him, though none of them could beguile him into neglecting his work.
Fortune had tried him with her frowns and with her smiles; under
temptations of both sorts he remained but more faithful to his calling.
His health gave cause for anxiety from time to time, but he delighted in
the sunshine and the genial climate of the South, and in general he was
well enough to enjoy what Florence could give him of beautiful form and
colour, and even to travel farther afield. One year he pushed as far as
Naples, stopping on the way for a hurried glance at Rome. On this
memorable day the Sistine chapel and its paintings were kept to the
last; and Watts, high though his expectations were, was overwhelmed at
what he saw. 'Michelangelo', he said, 'stands for Italy, as Shakespeare
does for England.' So the four years went by till in 1847 this halcyon
period came to an end. The Royal Commission of Fine Arts was offering
prizes for fresco-painting, and Watts felt that he must put his growing
powers to the test and utilize what he had learnt. This time he chose
for his subject 'Alfred inciting the English to resist the Danes by
sea'. He was busy at work in the early months of 1847 making many
sketches in pencil for the figures, and by April he was on his way home,
bringing with him the 'Alfred' almost finished and five other canvases
in various stages of completion. The picture was placed in Westminster
Hall for competition in June, and soon after he was announced to be the
winner of one of the three £500 prizes. When the Commissioners decided
to purchase his picture for the nation, he refused to take more than
£200 for it, though he might easily have obtained a far higher price.
This is one of the earliest instances in which he displayed that signal
generosity which marked his whole career.
During the next three years his life was rather desultory. He was hoping
to return to Italy and did not find it easy to settle down in London. He
changed his studio two or three times. He planned various works, but
felt chilled at the absence of any clear encouragement from new patrons
or from the general public. His success in 1847 had not been followed
by any commissions for the sort of work he loved: interest in the
decoration of public buildings was still spasmodic and too rare.