:... .... . .. . . ..:: .-... ... ... ..- .. .... :.-.' :.-..: :.:-:': . ....-l - . . .'O.. ". . . ,. .'O . . ' L'1@Cil I ' \' . : iif. ;::'" ::. :. ':':':'; ;. \:. WJ -;';j . :.,, ... . ::::: . L .:- . ': :j: :: - ." : '.:: .....; . \ : :. '. .::.'. ::. :.:"::" ' ': : T ", :-;.:.: ...:. ..... ..... ::= . ... : . ":,... . . .... ".' ::..-: .':: :.::. . . ... . - . . . . - . ... ..... .', ." .: .'. -.'::: :: . . , . :. . . - . .' " '.. . . ,'O . . .,. .. ..... ,'. .. :'. .. .. .':.' " .. .. ." . ,."... .... .... . " , '" '1 II) I 1 J \J.I r f' G. F. WATTS \. \ THE HABIT DOES NOT MAKE THE MONK G. F. WATTS BY G. K. CHESTERTON LONDON Due K W 0 R T H & C o. HENRIETTA ST. COVENT GARDEN Publishtd 1904 Reprinted 190 6 , 1909, 19 1 3, 1914 PRINTED AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS LONDON LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURES Facing p. THE HABIT DOES NOT MAKE THE MONK Frontispiece G. F. WATTS, R.A. 8 THE RIDER ON THE WHITE HORSE 10 LESLIE STEPHEN 14- WALTER CRANE 16 THE SLUl\1BER OF THE AGES 18 CARDINAL MANNING 20 CHAOS 22 " FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS" 26 AN IDLE CHILD OF FANCY 28 THE MINOTAUR 3 2 THE COURT OF DEATH 34- MATTHEW ARNOLD 3 6 JOHN STUART MILL 3 6 ROBERT BROWNING 3 8 LORD TENNYSON 3 8 THE DWELLER IN THE INNERMOST 4 0 GEORGE MEREDITH 4 2 ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE 44- HOPE 4- 6 JONAH +8 LIST OF PHOTOGRA \YURES MAMMON DEATH CROWNING INNOCENCE A STORY FR01\1 BOCCACCIO LORD LYTTON DAWN EVE REPENTANT LOVE AND DEATH WILLIAM MORRIS DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI THOMAS CARLYLE GOOD LUCK TO YOUR FISHING Fating þ. 52 54 56 58 60 62 64- 66 68 7 0 74 t'fhe Photogravures are from photographs hy Fredk. Hollyer. Permanent photographs of works of TVatls, Rossetit", Burne- Jones, Holhein, and of pÙtures 1:n the Duhlin and Hagu Galleries can he obtained of Fredk. BoUyer, 9 Pemhroke Square, Kensington. 8 , .. . G. F. W A TIS. R.A. Photograph from Life by Frederick Hollyer. \\ G EORGE FREDERICK \VATTS was born on 23rd February 1817. His whole rise and career synchronizes roughly with the rise and career of the nineteenth century. As a rule, no doubt, such chronological parallels are peculiarly fanciful and unmeaning. Nothing can be imagined more idle, in a general way, than talking about a century as if it were some kind of animal with a head and tail, instead of an arbitrary length cut from an un- ending scroll. N or is it less erroneous to assume that even if a period be definitely vital or disturbing, art must be a mirror of it; the greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity; poets, like brick- layers, work on through a century of wars, and Bewick's birds, to take an instance, have the air of persons unaffected by the French Revolution. But in the case of Watts there are two circumstances which render the dates relevant. The first is that the nine- teenth century was self-conscious, believed itself to be an idea and an atmosphere, and changed its name from a chronological almost to a philosophical term. I do not know whether all centuries do this or whether an advanced and progressive organ called "The Eleventh Century" was ever in contemplation in the dawn of the Middle Ages. But with us it is clear that a certain spirit was rightly or wrongly associated with the late century and that it called up images and thoughts like any historic or ritual date, like the Fourth 9 . GEORGE FREDERICK \\TATTS of July or the First of April. \ Vha t these images and thoughts were we shall be obliged in a few minutes and in the interests of the subject to inquire. But this is the first circumstance which renders the period important; and the second is that it has always been so regarded by \ Va tts himself. He, more than any other modern man, more than politicians who thun- dered on platforms or financiers who captured con- tinen ts, has sought in the midst of his quiet and hidden life to mirror his age. He was born in the white and austere dawn of that great reforming century, and he has lingered after its grey and doubtful close. He is above all things a typical figure, a survival of the nineteenth century. It will appear to many a somewhat grotesque matter to talk about a period in which most of us were born and which has only been dead a year or two, as if it were a primal Babylonian empire of which only a few columns are left crumbling in the desert. And yet such is, in spirit, the fact. There is no more remarkable psychological element in history than the way in which a period can suddenly become unin- telligible. To the early Victorian period we have in a moment lost the key: the Crystal Palace is the temple of a forgotten creed. The thing always ha ppens sharply: a whisper runs through the salons, l\1r. Max Beerbohm waves a wand and a whole gene- ration of great men and great achievement suddenly looks mildewed and unmeaning. \Ve see precisely the same thing in that other great reaction towards art and the vanities, the Restoration of Charles II. In that hour both the great schools of faith and valour which had seemed either angels or devils to all men: the dreams of Strafford and the great High Churchmen on the one hand; the lVloslem frenzy of the English Commons, the worship of the English law upon the 10 , '" \ rHE RIDER O THE WHITE HORSE GEORGE FREDERICK \VATTS other; both seemed distant and ridiculous. The new Cavalier despised the old Cavalier even more than he despised the Roundhead. The last stand of English chivalry dwindled sharply to the solitary figure of the absurd old country gentleman drinking wine out of an absurd old flagon. The great roar of Roundhead psalms which cried out that the God of Battles was loose in English meadows shrank to a single snuffle. The new and polite age saw the old and serious one exactly as we see the early Victorian era: they saw it, that is to say, not as splendid, not as disastrous, not as fruitful, not as infamous, not as good or bad, but simply as ugly. Just as we can see nothing about Lord Shaftesbury but his hat, they could see nothing about Cromwell but his nose. There is no doubt of the shock and sharpness of the silent transition. The only difference is that accordingly as we think of man and his nature, according to our deepest intuitions about things, we shall see in the Restoration and the fin de siècle philosophy a man waking from a turbid and pompous dream, or a man hurled from hea ven and the wars of the angels. G. F. Watts is so deeply committed to, and so unalterably steeped in, this early Victorian seriousness and air of dealing with great matters, that unless we sharply apprehend that spirit, and its difference from our own, we shall misunderstand his work from the outset. Splendid as is the art of V\Tatts technically or obviously considered, we shall yet find much in it to perplex and betray us, unless we understand his original theory and intention, a theory and intention dyed deeply with the colours of a great period which is gone. The great technical inequalities of his work, its bursts of stupendous simplicity in colour and design, its daring failures, its strange symbolical portraits, all will mislead or bewilder if we have not II GEORGE FREDERICK '" A TTS the thread of intention. In order to hold that, we must hold something which runs through and supports, as a string supports jewels, all the wars and trea ties and reforms of the nineteenth century. There are at least three essential and preliminary points on "vhich "Tatts is so completely at one with the nineteenth century and so completely out of accord with the twentieth, that it may be advisable to state them briefly before \ve proceed to the narrower bu t not more cogent facts of his life and growth. The first of these is a nineteenth-century atmosphere which is so difficult to describe, that we can only convey it by a sort of paradox. It is difficult to know whether it should be called doubt or faith. For if, on the one hand, real faith would have been more confident, real doubt, on the other hand, would have been more indifferent. The attitude of that age of which the middle and best parts of \'Tatts' "vork is most typical, was an attitude of devouring and concentrated interest in things which were, by their own system, impossible or unknowable. Men were, in the main, agnostics: they said, ""T e do not know"; but not one of them ever ventured to say, "'Ve do not care." In most eras of revolt and question, the sceptics reap something from their scepticism: if a man were a believer in the eighteenth century, there was Heaven; if he were an unbeliever, there was the Hell- Fire Club. But these men re- strained themselves more than hermits for a hope tha t was more than half hopeless, and sacrificed hope itself for a liberty which they would not enjoy; they were rebels without deliverance and saints without reward. There may have been and there "vas some- thing arid and over-pompous about them: a newer and gayer philosophy may be passing before us and 12 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS changing many things for the better; but we shall not easily see any nobler race of men, and of them all most assuredly there was none nobler than \\Tatts. If anyone wishes to see that spirit, he will see it in pictures painted by \Vatts in a form beyond expression sad and splendid. Hope that is dim and delicate and yet immortal, the indestructible minimum of the spirit; Love and Death that is awful and yet the reverse of horrible; cr he Court of Death that is like a page of Epictetus and might have been dreamt by a dead Stoic: these are the visions of that spirit and the incarnations of that time. I ts faith was doubtful, but its doubt was faithful. And its supreme and acute difference from most periods of scepticism, from the la ter Renaissance, from the Restora tion and from the hedonism of our own time was. this, that when the creeds crumbled and the gods seemed to break up and vanish, it did not fall back, as we do, on things yet more solid and definite, upon art and wine and high finance and industrial efficiency and vices. I t fell in love with abstrac- tions and became enamoured of great and desolate words. The second point of rapport between \Vatts and his time was a more personal matter, a matter more concerned with the man, or, at least, the type; but it throws so much light upon almost every step of his career that it may with advantage be suggested here. Those who know the man himself, the quaint and courtly old man down at Limnerslease, know that if he has one trait more arresting than another, it is his almost absurd humility. He even disparages his own talent that he may insist rather upon his aims. His speech and gesture are simple, his manner polite to the point of being depre- cating, his soul to all appearance of an almost con- 13 . GEO RGE FREDERICK WATTS founding clarity and innocence. But although these appearances accurately represent the truth about him, though he is in reality modest and even fan- tastically modest, there is another element in him, an element which was in almost all the great men of his time, and it is something which many in these days would call a kind of splendid and inspired impu- dence. It is that wonderful if simple power of preaching, of claiming to be heard, of believing in an internal message and destiny: it is the audacious faculty of mounting a pulpit. Those would be very greatly mistaken who, misled by the child-like and humble manner of this monk of art, expected to find in him any sort of doubt, or any sort of fear, or any sort of modesty about the aims he follows or the cause he loves. He has the one great certainty which marks off all the great Victorians from those who have come after them: he may not be certain that he is successful, or certain that he is great, or certain that he is good, or certain that he is ca pa ble : but he is certain that he is right. It is of course the very element of confidence which has in our day become least common and least possible. T e know we are brilliant and distinguished, but we do not know we are right. We swagger in fantastic artistic costumes; we praise ourselves; we fling epigrams right and left; we have the courage to play the egoist and the courage to play the fool, but we have not the courage to preach. If we are to deliver a philosophy it must be in the manner of the late Mr. \Vhistler and the ridentem dicere verum. If our heart is to be aimed at it must be with the rapier of Stevenson which runs us through without either pain or puncture. It is only just to say, that good elements as well as bad ones have joined in making this old 'Tictorian preaching difficult or alien to us. If '" LESLIE STEPHEN. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS Humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as cyni- cism, a sense of complexity and a kind of gay and worldly charity have led us to avoid the pose of the preacher, to be moral by ironies, to whisper a word and glide away. But, whatever may be the accidental advantage of this recoil from the didactic, it certainly does mean some loss of courage and of the old and athletic simplicity. Nay, in some sense it is really a loss of a fine pride and self-regard. Mr. \\llistler coquetted and bargained about the position and sale of his pictures: he praised them; he set huge prices on them ; but still under all disguise, he treated them as trifles. \Vatts, when scarcely more than a boy and comparatively unknown, started his great custom of offering his pictures as gifts worthy of a great nation. Thus we came to the conclusion, a conclusion which may seem to some to contain a faint element of paradox, that Mr. \\Thistler suffered from an exces- sive and exaggerated modesty. And this unnatural modesty of Mr. \Vhistler can scarcely be more typically sym bolized than in his horror of preaching. The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism. Lastly, it would be quite impossible to complete this prefatory suggestion of the atmosphere in which the mind of Watts grew and prevailed; without saying something about that weary and weather- beaten question of the relation of art to ethics on which so much has been said in connexion with him and his contemporaries. About the real aim and the real value of \Vatts' allegorical pictures I shall speak later't but for the moment it is only desirable to point out what the early and middle Victorian view of 15 . GEORGE FREDERICK \V A TTS the matter really was. According to the ]a ter æsthetic creed which ]\Ir. \\7histler and others did so much to preach, the state of the arts under the reign of that Victorian view v;as a chaos of every- one minding everyone else's business. I t was a world in which painters were trying to be novelists, and novelists trying to be historians, and musicians doing the work of schoolmasters, and sculptors doing the work of curates. That is a view which has some truth in it, both as a description of the actual state of things and as involving an interesting and suggestive philosophy of the arts. But a good deal of harm may be done by ceaselessly repeating to ourselves even a true and fascinating fashionable theory, and a great deal of good by endeavouring to realize the real truth about an older one. The thing from which England suffers just now more than from any other evil is not the assertion of falsehoods, but the endless and irrepressible repetition of half-truths. There is another side to every historic situation, and that often a startling one; and the other side of the Victorian view of art, now so out of mode, is too little considered. The salient and essential charac- teristic of \\Tatts and men of his school was that they regarded life as a whole. They had in their heads, as it were, a synthetic philosophy which put everything into a certain relation with God and the wheel of things. Thus, psychologically speaking, they were inca pable not merely of holding such an opinion, but actually of thinking such a thought as that of art for art's sake; it was to them like talking about voting for voting's sake, or amputating for amputating's sake. To them as to the ancient Jews the Spirit of the unitv of existence declared in thunder that " they should not make any graven image, or have any gods but Him. Doubtless, they did not give art a 16 \ , " , ... WALTER CRANE. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS rela tion of unim peacha ble correctness: in their scheme of things it may be true, or rather it is true, that the æsthetic was confused with the utilitarian, that good gardens were turned so to speak into bad cornfields, and a valuable temple into a useless post- office. But in so far as they had this fundamental idea that art must be linked to life, and to the strength and honour of nations, they were a hundred times more broad-minded and more right than the new ul tra - technical school. The idea of following art through everything for itself alone, through extrava- gance, through cruelty, through morbidity, is just exactly as superstitious as the idea of following theology for itself alone through extravagance and cruelty and morbidity. To deny that Baudelaire is loathson1e, or Nietzsche inhuman, because we stand in awe of beauty, is just the same thing as denying that the Court of Pope Julius was loathsome, or the rack inhuman, beca use we stand in a we of religion. I t is not necessary and it is not honest. The young critics of the Green Carnation, with their nuances and technical mysteries, would doubtless be surprised to learn that as a class they resemble ecstatic nuns, but their principle is, in reality, the same. There is a great deal to be said for them, and a great deal, for that matter, to be said for nuns. But there is nothing to be surprised at, nothing to call for any charge ot inconsistency or lack of enlightenment, about the conduct of "latts and the great men of his age, in being unable to separate art from ethics. They were nationalists and uni- versalists: they thought that the ecstatic isolation of the religious sense had done incalculable harm to religion. It is not remarkable or unreasonable that they should think that the ecsta tic isolation of the artistic sense would do incalculable harm to art. rrhis, then, was the atmosphere of \Vatts and B 17 . GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS Victorian idealism: an atmosphere so completely vanished from the world of art in which \ve now live that the above somewhat long introduction is really needed to make it vivid or human to us. These three elements may legitimately, as I have said, be predicated of it as its main characteristics: first, the sceptical idealism, the belief that abstract verities remained the chief affairs of men when theology left them; second, the didactic simplicity, the claim to teach other men and to assume one's own value and rectitude; third, the cosmic utilitarianism, the consideration of any such thing as art or philosophy perpetually \vith reference to a general good. They may be right or wrong, they may be returning or gone for ever; theories and fashions may change the face of humanity again and yet again; but at least in that one old man at Limnerslease, burned, and burned until death, these convictions, like three lamps in an old pagan temple of stoicism. Of the ancestry of \\Tatts so little is known that it resolves itself into one hypothesis: a hypothesis \vhich brings \vith it a suggestion, a suggestion employed by almost all his existing biographers, but a suggestion which cannot, I think, pass unchallenged, although the matter may appear somewhat theoretic and remote. '\'atts was born in London, but his family had in the previous generation come from Hereford. The vast amount of '\Telsh blood which is by the nature of the case to be found in Herefordshire has led to the statement that \Vatts is racially a Celt, which is very probably true. But it is also said, in almost every notice of his life and \vork, that the Celtic spirit can be detected in his painting, that the Celtic principle of mysticism is a characteristic of his artistic conceptions. It is in no idly antagonistic spirit that I venture to doubt this most profoundly. 18 THE SLUMBER OF THE AGES GEORGE FREDERICK TATTS Watts mayor may not be racially a Celt, but there is nothing Celtic about his mysticism. The essential Celtic spirit in letters and art may, I think, be defined as a sense of the unbearable beauty of things. The essential spirit of '\Tatts may, I think, be much better expressed as a sense of the joyful austerity of things. The dominant passion of the artistic Celt, of l\1r. \tV. B. Yeats or Sir Edward Burne-Jones, is in the word "escape": escape into a land \vhere oranges grow on plum-trees and men can sow \vhat they like and reap what they enjoy. To 'Vatts the very word " escape" \vould be horrible, like an obscene word: his ideal is altogether duty and the great \vheel. To the Celt frivolity is most truly the most serious of things, since in the tangle of roses is ahvays the old serpent \vho is wiser than the world. To \,\'att5 seriousness is most truly the most" joyful of things," since in it \ve come nearest to that ultimate equili- brium and reconciliation of things \vhereby alone they live and endure life and each other. It is difficult to imagine that amid all the varieties of noble temper and elemental desire there could possibly be two exhibiting a more total divergence than that bet\veen a kindly severity and an almost cruel love of sweetness; than that bet\\cen a laborious and open-air charity and a kind of Bacchic asceticisn1; bet\veen a joy in peace and a joy in disorder; bet\veen a reduction of existence to its simplcst formula and an extension of it to its most frantic corollary; bet\veen a lover of justice \vho accepts the rcal \yorId more submissively than a slave and a lover of pleasure \vho despises the real \vorld more bitterly than a hcrlnit; bet\vecn a king in battle-harness and a vagabond in elf-land; between \\'atts and Sir Ed\vard Burne-Jones. I t i remarkable that even the technical style of \V.1tts gives .1 contradiction to this Celtic theory. 19 . GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS \Vatts is strong precisely where the Celt is weak, and weak precisely where the Celt is strong. The only thing that the Celt has lacked in art is that hard mass, that naked outline, that àPXlTEKTOVlK);, which makes Watts a sort of sculptor of draughtsmanship. I t is as well for us that the Celt has not had this: if he had, he would rule the world with a rod of iron; for he has everything else. There are no hard black lines in Burke's orations, or Tom Moore's songs, or the plays of l\1r. \V. B. Yeats. Burke is the greatest of political philosophers, because in him only are there distances and perspectives, as there are on the real earth, with its mists of morning and evening, and its blue horizons and broken skies. Moore's songs have neither a pure style nor deep realization, nor origi- nality of form, nor thought nor wit nor vigour, but they have something else vvhich is none of these things, which is nameless and the one thing needful. In Mr. Yeats' plays there is only one character: the hero \vho rules and kills all the others, and his name is Atmosphere. Atmosphere and the gleaming distances are the soul of Celtic greatness as they were of Burne- Jones, who was, as I have said, weak precisely where \Vatts is strong, in the statuesque quality in drawing, in the love of heavy hands like those of Iammoll, of a strong back like that of Eve Repentant, in a single fearless and austere outline like that of the angel in '[he Court of Death, in the frame-filling violence of 1onah, in the half-witted brutality of he Al inotaur. He is deficient, that is to say, in what can only be called the god-like materialism of art. \\1atts, on the other hand, is peculiarly strong in it. Idealist as he is, there is nothing frail or phantasmal about the things or the figures he loves. '-rhough not himself a robust man, he loves robustness; he loves a great bulk of shoulder, an abrupt bend of neck, a gigantic stride, 20 ...... þ.... .. . -..... \ : . .. , ".- , \. - . ..-- \ . ___ .4.. . . --.. " '\ \. ... . -, .....- . ...,. - .. , -, .. \, '" CARDINAL MANNING. . "" .- ......... , GEORGE FR..EDERICK \V A TTS a large and swinging limb, a breast bound as with bands of brass. Of course the deficiency in such a case is very far from being altogether on one side. There are abysses in Burne-Jones which \Vatts could not understand, the Celtic madness, older than any sanity, the hunger that will remain after the longest feast, the sorrow that is built up of stratified delights. From the point of view of the true Celt, Watts, the \Vatts who painted the great stoical pictures Love and Death, :rime, Death and Judgment, :rhe Court of Death, A/ammon, and Cain, this pictorial ,"Vatts would probably be, must almost certainly be, simply a sad, sane, strong, stupid Englishman. He mayor may not be \Velsh by extraction or by part of his extraction, but in spirit he is an Englishman, with all the faults and all the disadvantages of an Englishman. He is a great Englishman like I\lilton or Gladstone, of the type, that is to say, that were too much alive for anything but gravity, and who enjoyed themselves far too much to trouble to enjoy a joke. Matthew Arnold has come near to defining that kind of idealism, so utterly different from the Celtic kind, which is to be found in l\lilton and again in \Vatts. He has called it, in one of his finest and most accurate phrases, " the imaginative reason." 1'his racial legend about the \\Tatts family does not seem to rest upon any certain foundations, and as I have said, the deduction drawn from it is quite loose and misleading. rhe vvhole is only another example of that unfortunate, if not infamous, modern habit of talking about such things as heredity with a vague notion that science has closed the question when she has only just opened it. Nobody kno\vs, as a matter of fact, whether a Celtic mysticism can be inherited any more than a theory on the Education Bill. But the eagerness of the popular nlind to snatch 21 - GEORGE FREDERICK 'VATTS a t a certainty is too im pa tien t for the tardy processes of real hypothesis and research. Long before heredity has become a science, it has become a su rcrsti tion. And this curious though incidental case of the origin of the \\Tatts genius is just one of those cases ,vhich make us ,vonder ,vhat has been the real result of the great rise of science. So far the result "vould rainfully appear to be that ,vhercas men in the earlier times said unscientific things "vith the vagueness of gossip and legend, they now say unscientific things ,yith the plainness and the certainty of science. 1 he actual artistic education of \Vatts, though thorough indeed in its ,vay, had a son1e,vhat peculiar character, the air of something detached and private, and to the external eye something even at random. He works hard, but in an elusive and personal manner. He does not ren1en1ber the time \yhen he did not draw: he was an artist in his babyhood as he is an artist still in his old age. Like Ruskin and many other of the great and serious men of the century, he would seem to have been brought up chiefly on ,,,hat may be called the large legendary literature, on such as Homer and Scott. Among his earliest recorded works was a set of coloured illustrations to the \\Taverley Novels, and a sketch of the struggle for the body of Patroclus. He went to the Academy schools, but only stayed there about a month; never caring for or absorbing the teaching, such as it \vas, of the place. He wan- dered perpetually in the Greek galleries of the British Museum, staring at the Elgin marbles, from which he always declared he learnt all the art he knew. " There," he said, stretching out his hand towards the Ilyssus in his studio, "there is my master." \Ve hear of a friendship between him and the sculptor \Villiam Behnes, of \Vatts lounging about that artist's studio, playing vvith clay, modelling busts, and staring 22 cñ o < J: u . GEORGE FREDERICK ,V ATTS at the work of sculpture. His eyes seemed to have been at this time the largest and hungriest part of him. Even when the great chance and first triumph of his life arrived a year or t\\70 later, even \vhen he gained the great scholarship which sent him abroad to work amid the marbles of Italy, when a famous ambassador was his patron and a brilliant circle his encouragement, \ve do not find anything of the conventional student about him. He never painted in the galleries; he only dreamed in them. This must not, of course, be held to mean that he did not work; though one or t\VO people who have \vritten memoirs of \\ratts have used a phraseology, probably without noticing it, \vhich might be held to imply this. Not only is the thing ludicrously incongruous with his exact character and morals; but anyone who knows anything whatever about the nature of pictorial art \vill kno\v quite \vell that a man could not paint like that \vithout having \vorked ; just as he would know that a man could not be the Living Serpent without any previous practice with his joints. To say that he could really learn to paint and draw with the technical merit of \,ratts, or \vith any technical merit at all, by simply looking at other people's pictures and statues will seem to anyone, \vith a small technical sense, like saying that a man learnt to be a sublime violinist by staring at fiddles in a shop window. I t is as near a physical impossibility as can exist in these matters. \\Tork \\ratts must have done and did do; it is the only conclusion possible \vhich is consistent either \vith the nature of \'T atts or the nature of painting; and it is fully supported by the facts. But \vhat the facts do reveal is that he worked in this curiously individual, this curiously invisible way. He had his own notion of \vhen to dream and when to dra\v; as he shrank 23 GEORGE FREDERICK 'V A TTS from no toil, so he shrank from no idleness. He was something \vhich is one of the most powerful and successful things in the world, something which is far more powerful and successful than a legion of students and prizemen: he was a serious and industrious truant. I t is worth while to note this in his boyhood, partly, of course, because from one end of his life to the other there IS this queer note of loneliness and liberty. But it is also more immediately and prac- tically important because it throws some light on the development and character of his art, and even especially of his technique. The great singularity of \Vatts, considered as a mere artist, is that he stands alone. He is not connected wi th any of the groups of the nineteenth century: he has neither followed a school nor founded one. He is not mediæval; but no one could exactly call him classical: we have only to compare him to Leighton to feel the difference at once. His artistic style is rather a thing more primi- tive than paganism; a thing to which paganism and mediævalism are alike upstart sects; a style of painting there might have been upon the tower ot Babel. He is mystical; but he is not mediæval: \ve have only to com pare him to Rossetti to feel the difference. \Vhen he emerged into the artistic world, that world \vas occupied by the pompous and his- torical school, that school which was so exquisitely caricatured by Thackeray in Gandish and his " Boadishia "; but 'Vatts was not pompous or historical: he painted one historical picture, vvhich brought him a youthful success, and he has scarcely painted another. He lived on through the great Pre-Raphaelite time, that very noble and very much undervalued time, when men found again what had been hidden since the thirteenth century under loads 24- GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS of idle civilization, the truth that simplicity and a monastic laboriousness is the happiest of all things; the great truth that purity is the only atmosphere for passion; the great truth that silver is more beautiful than gold. But though there is any quantity of this sentiment in Watts himself, 'Vatts never has been a Pre-Raphaelite. He has seen other fashions come and go; he has seen the Pre- Ra phaelites overwhelmed by a heavy restoration of the conventional, headed by Millais with his Scotch moors and his English countesses; but he has not heeded it. He has seen these again overturned by the wild lancers of 'lFhistler ; he has seen the mists of Impressionism settle down over the world, making it weird and delicate and non- committal: but he thinks no more of the wet mist of the Impressionist than he thought of the dry glare of the Pre- Ra phaeli tee He, the most mild of men, has yet never been anything but \Vatts. He has followed the gleam" like some odd modern Merlin. He has escaped all the great atmospheres, the divine if deluding intoxi- cations, which have whirled one man one way and one another; which flew to the head of a perfect stylist like Ruskin and made him an insane scientist; which flew to the head of a great artist like 'Vhistler and made him a pessimistic dandy. He has passed them "\vith a curious immunity, an immunity which, if it were not so nakedly innocent, might almost be called egotism; but \vhich is in fact ra thcr the single eye. He said once that he had not cvcn consented to illustrate a book; his limitation was that he could express no ideas but his own. He admired 1"cnnyson ; he thought him the greatest of poets; he thought him a far greater man than himself; he read him, he adored him, but he could not illustrate him. This is the curious secret strength which kept him in de- 25 GEORG E FREDERICK 'VA TTS pendent in his youth and kept him independent through the great roaring triumph of the Pre- Raphaelite and the great roaring triumph of the Impressionist. He stands in the world of art as he stood in the studio of Behnes and in the Uffizi Gallery. He stands gazing, but not copying. Of \Vatts as he was at this time there remains a very interesting portrait painted by himself. It represents him at the age of nineteen, a dark, slim, and very boyish-looking creature. Something in changed conditions may no doubt account for the flo\ving and voluminous dark hair: \ve see such a mane in many of the portraits of the most distin- guished men of that time; bu t if a man appeared now and \valked down Fleet Street with so neglected a hure, he would be mistaken for an advertisement of a hair-dresser, or by the more malicious for a minor poet. But there is about this picture not a trace of affectation or the artistic immunity in these matters: the boy's dress is rough and ordinary, his expression is simple and unconscious. From a modern standpoint we should say without hesitation tha t if his hair is long it is because he has forgotten. to have it cut. And there is something about this contrast between the unconsciously leonine hair and the innocent and almost bashful face, there is something like a parable of \Vatts. I-lis air is artistic, if you will. His famous skull cap, which makes him look like a Venetian senator, is as pictorial and effective as the boyish mane in the picture. But he belongs to that older race of .Bohemians, of which even Thackeray only sa\v the sunset, the great old race of art and literature \vho \vere ragged because they \yere really poor, frank because they were really free, and untidy because they were really forgetful. It will not do to confuse lVatts with these men; there is 26 ........... ...... ............. .... \ .. FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS:- GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS much about him that is precise and courtly, and which, as I shall have occasion to remark, belongs really to a yet older period. But it is more right to reckon \Vatts along with them in their genuine raggedness than to suppose that the unquestionable picturesqueness with \vhich he fronts the \vorld has any relation with that new Bohemianism which is untidy because it is conventional, frank because it follows a fashion, careless because it \vatches for all its effects, and ragged and coarse in its tastes because it has too much money. The first definite encouragement, or at least the first encouragement nu\v ascertainable, probably came to the painter from that interesting Greek amateur, Ivlr. Constantine Ionides. It \vas under his encourage- ment that \Vatts began all his earlier work of the more ambitious kind, and it \vas the portrait of 1\lrs. Con- stantine Ionides which ranks among the earliest of his definite successes. He achieved immediate profes- sional success, however, at an astonishingly early age, judged by modern standards. \Vhen he was barely twenty he had three pictures in the Royal Academy: the first two were portraits, and the third a picture called 'The Wounded lIeroll. There is always a very considerable temptation to fantasticality in dealing with these artistic origins: no doubt it does not always follow that a man is destined to be a military conqueror because he beats other little boys at school, nor endued with a passionate and clamorous nature because he begins this mortal life \vith a yell. But \Vatts has, to a rather unusual degree, a sincere and consistent and homogeneous nature; and this first exhibit of his has really a certain amount of symbolism about it. Portraiture, \vith \vhich he thus began, he was destined to raise to a level never before attained in English art, so far as significance and humanity 27 . GEORGE FREDERICK "'T A TTS are concerned; and there is really something a little fascinating about the fact that along with these pictures went one picture which had, for all practical purposes, an avowedly humanitarian object. The picture of 'The TPounded Heron scarcely ever attracts attention, I imagine, in these days, but it may, of course, have been recalled for a moment to the popular mind by that curious incident which occurred in connexion wi th it and \vhich has often been told. Long after the painter who produced that picture in his struggling boyhood had lost sight of it and in all probability for- gotten all about its existence, a chance traveller with a taste in the arts happened to find it in the dusty curiosity-shop of a north-country town. He bought it and gave it back to the now celebrated painter, who hung it among the exhibits at Little Holland House. It is, as I have said, a thing painted clearly \vith a humanitarian object: it depicts the suffering of a stricken creature; it depicts the helplessness of life under the cruelty of the inanimate violence; it depicts the pathos of dying and the greater pathos of living. Since then, no doubt, \Vatts has improved his machinery of presentation and found larger and more awful things to tell his tale with than a bleeding bird. The wings of the heron have widened till they embrace the world with the terrible wings of r-rime or Death: he has summoned the stars to help him and sent the angels as his ambassadors. He has changed the plan of operations until it includes Heaven and Tartarus. He has never changed the theme. The relations of \Vatts to Constantine Ionides either arose or became important about this time. The painter's fortunes rose quickly and steadily, so far as the Academy was concerned. He continued to exhibit with a fair amount of regularity, chiefly in the form of subjects from the great romantic or 28 t ...... " AI\J IDLE CHILD OF FANCY. GEO RGE FREDERICK \V \ T C } historic traditions which were then the \vhole pabulum of the young idealistic artist. In the Academy of 1840 came a picture on the old romantic subject of Ferdinand and Isabella; in the following year but one, a picture on the old romantic subject of Cymbe- line. The portrait of Mrs. Constantine Ionides appeared in 1842. But \Vatts' mode of thought from the very begin- ning had very little kinship \vith the Academy and very little kinship with this kind of private and conventional art. An event was shortly to occur, the first success of his life, but an event far less important when con- sidered as the first success of his life than it is when considered as an essential characteristic of his mind. The circumstances are so extremely characteristic of something in the \vhole spirit of the man's art that it may be permissible to dwell at length on the sig- nificance of the fact rather than on the fact itself. The great English Parliament, the Senate that broke the English kings, had just moved its centre of existence. The new Houses of Parliament had opened with what seemed to the men of that time an opening world. A competition was started for the decoration of the halls, and \Vatts suddenly sprang into impor- tance: he won the great prize. The cartoon of Caractacus led in triu1/lph through the streets of R01Jlt was accepted from this almost nameless man by the great central power of English history. And until we have understood that fact we have not under- stood \Vatts: it was (one may be permitted to fancy) the supreme hour of his life. For Watts' nature is essentially public-that is to say, it is modest and noble, and has nothing to hide. His art is an out- door art, like that of the healthy ages of the \vorld.. like the statuesque art of Greece, like the ecclesiastical and external Gothic art of Christianity: In art that 29 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS can look the sun in the face. He ought to be em- ployed to paint factory chimneys and railway stations. I know that this \vill sound like an inso- lence: my only answer is that he, in accordance with this great conception of his, actually offered to paint a railway station. "Tith a splendid and truly religious imagination, he asked permission to decorate Euston. The railway managers (not perceiving, in their dull classical routine, the \vild poetry of their own station) declined. But until we have understood this immense notion of publicity in the soul of Watts, we have understood nothing. The fundamental modern fallacy is that the public life must be an arti- ficia] life. I t is like saying that the public street must be an artificial air. I\Ien like \Vatts, men like all the great heroes, only breathe in public.. \\Jhat is the use of abusing a man for publicity \vhen he utters in public the true and the enduring things? \"hat is the use, above all, of prying into his secrecy when he has cried his best from the house-tops ? This is the real argument which makes a detailed biography of \\Tatts unnecessary for all practical purposes. It is in vain to climb \valls and hide in cupboards in order to show \vhether 'Vatts eats mus-- tard or pepper with his curry or whether \\'atts takes sugar or salt with his porridge. These things mayor may not become public: it matters little. The innermost that the biographer could at last discover, after all possible creepings and capers, would be \vhat \\Tatts in his inmost soul believes, and that \Vatts has splashed on twenty feet of canvas and given to the nation for nothing. I.like one of the great orators of the eighteenth century, his public virtues, his public ecstasies are far more really significant than his private \veaknesses. The rest of his life is so simple that it is scarcely worth telling. He \vent 3 0 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS with the great scholarship he gained with his Caractacus to Italy. There he found a new patron-the famous Lord Holland, with the whole of whose great literary circle he rapidly became acquainted. He painted many of his most famous portraits in connexion with this circle, both in Italy and afterwards in Paris. But this great vision of the public idea had entered his blood. He offered his cartoons to E uston Station; he painted St. George and the Dragon for the House of Lords; he presented a fresco to the great hall at Lincoln's Inn. Of his life there is scarcely more to say, except the splendid fact that he three times refused a title. Of his character there is a great deal more to say. There is unquestionably about the personal attitude of Watts something that in the vague phraseology of modern times would be called Puritan. Puritan, however, is very far from being really the right word. The right word is a word which has been singularly little used in English nomenclature because historical circumstances have separated us from the origin from which it sprang. The right word for the spirit of Watts is Stoicism. \Vatts is at one with the Puritans in the actual objects of his attack. One of his deepest and most enduring troubles, a matter of \vhich he speaks and writes frequently, is the prevalence of gambling. With the realism of an enthusiast, he has detected the essential fact that the problem of gam bling is even more of a pro blelll in the case of the poorer classes than in the case of the richer. I tis, as he asserts, a far worse danger than drink. There are many other instances of his political identity with Puritanism. He told Mr. \V. T. Stead that he had defended and was prepared to defend the staggering publications of the "Maiden Tribute" ; it was the only ,vay, he said, to stem the evil. A 3 1 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS picturesque irradiation asserts indeed that it was under the glow of Hebraic anger against these Babylonian cruelties of Piccadilly and the Strand that he painted as a symbol of those cruelties that brutal and mag- nificent picture The Minotaur. 'fhe pictures them- selves of course bear sufficient attestation to this general character: l'rf anlmon is what we call a Puritan picture, and 'Jonah, and Fata Morgana, and For he had Great Possessions. I t is not difficult to see that \Vatts has the Puritan vigilance, the Puritan realism, and the Puritan severity in his attitude towards public affairs. Nevertheless, as I have said, he is to be described rather as a Stoic than a Puritan. The essential difference between Christian and Pagan asceticism lies in the fact that Paganism in renouncing pleasure gives up something which it does not think desirable; whereas Christianity in giving up pleasure gives up something which it thinks very desirable indeed. Thus there is a frenzy in Christian asceticism ; its follies and renunciations are like those of first love. There is a passion, and as it were a regret, in the Puritanism of Bunyan; there is none in the Puri- tanism of \Vatts. He is not Bunyan, he is Cato. The difference may be a difficult one to convey, but it is one that must not be ignored or great mis- understandings will follovv. r-fhe one self-abnegation is more reasonable but less joyful. 'I'he Stoic casts away pleasure like the parings of his nails; the Mystic cuts it off like his right hand that offends him. In Watts we have the noble self-abnegation of a noble type and school; but everything, however noble, that has shape has limitation, and we must not look in \Vatts, \vith his national self-mastery, either for the nightmare of Stylites or the gaiety of Francis of Assisi. It has already been remarked that the chief note 3 2 "" , THE MI OT AUR. GEO RGE FREDERICK WATTS of the painter's character is a certain mixture of personal delicacy and self-effacement with the most immense and audacious aims. But it is so essential a trait that it will bear a repetition and the intro- duction of a curious example of it. \Vatts in his quaint and even shy manner of speech often let fall in conversation words which hint at a certain principle or practice of his, a principle and practice which are, when properly apprehended, beyond expression impressive and daring. The spectator who studies his allegorical paintings one after another will be vaguely impressed with something uniquely absent, something which is usual and familiar in such pictures conspicuous by its withdrawal; a blank or difference which makes them things sundered alto- gether from the millions of allegorical pictures that throng the great and small galleries of painting. At length the nature of this missing thing may suddenly strike him: in the whole range of \Vatts' symbolic art there is scarcely a single example of the ordinary and arbitrary current symbol, the ecclesiastical symbol, the heraldic symbol, the national symbol. A primeval vagueness and archaism hang over all the canvases and cartoons, like frescoes from some prehistoric temple. There is nothing there but the eternal things, clay and fire and the sea, and motherhood and the dead. \Ve cannot imagine the rose or the lion of England; the keys or the tiara of Rome; the red cap of Liberty or the crescent of Islam in a picture by \Vatts; we cannot imagine the Cross itself. And in light and broken phrases, carelessly and humbly ex- pressed, as I have said, the painter has admitted that this great omission was observed on principle. Its object is that the pictures may be intelligible if they survive the whole modern order. Its object is, that is to say, that if some savage in a dim futurity dug C 33 .. G E 0 R G E F RED E R I C K \V A T T S up one of these dark designs on a lonely mountain, though he worshipped strange gods and served laws yet unwritten, it might strike the same message to his soul that it strikes upon clerks and navvies from the ,valls of the Tat.e Gallery. It is impossible not to feel a movement of admiration for the magnitude of the thought. Here is a man whose self-depreciation is internal and vital; whose life is cloistered, whose character is childlike, and he has yet within such an unconscious and colossal sense of greatness that he paints on the assumption that his work may outlast the cross of the Eternal City. As a boy he scarcely expected worldly success: as an old man he still said that his worldly success had astonished him. But in his nameless youth and in his silent old age he paints like one upon a tower looking down the appalling per- spective of the centuries towards fantastic temples and inconceivable republics. This union of small self-esteem with a vast ambition is a paradox in the 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 tha t 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 'Va tts. I t would 3+ " &, \ \ . \ - . fHE COURT OF DEATH. 'Ii GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 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 \"Vatts 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 TVarrior, to give A/ammon some imperial crown or typical heraldic symbols, to give a theo- logical machinery to 'The Court of Death. But this is pu t on one side like a tern pta tion 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. I t is the very difference between the artistic mind and the ma thema tical 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 maq; 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. 35 " GEORGE FREDERICK \V A TTS 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 "Tatts 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 amæba on the disc of a micro- scope. He claimed, by implication, to put in their fight places the flaming certainty of the martyrs, the '\Jvild 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 "Tatts. 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, "\Vhy should I understand the cat, any more than the cat understands me ?" He never thought, "\\7hy 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 \,ratts, that he 3 6 "" -. " .. MATTHEW ARNOLD. , JOHN STUART MILL. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 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 limi- tations. Like l\latthew 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 in- grainedly 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 uni- versalist. The mere thought of \Vatts painting a picture called 'l he 17 ictory of 10y over AIorality, 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. r-rhere 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 \Vatts. Watts' relation to friends and friendship has something a bou tit very typical. He is not a man desirous or ca pa ble 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 I Iarmony : he belongs 37 . GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS to the quiet, struggling, self-created men of the forties, with their tradition of self-abnegating indi- vidualism. 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 \vhich 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 ha ve 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 inter- view 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 \vhich 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 3 8 , " .. \ ROBERT BROWNING. . ... .. LORD TE:'\J NYSON GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS hollow of his hand. The subject is Flower in the Crannied Wall. There is something very charac- teristic 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 rele- vant to \Vatts' attitude in its ultimate and psycho- logical character. It is surely most likely that \Vatts and Tennyson were drawn together because they both represented a certain relation towards their art which is not common in our time and \vas 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 \vere 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 \ve see in the picture of Hope. And the whole truth of this last matter is very well expressed in \Vatts' 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. \Vatts has painted 'fennyson with his dark 39 GEORGE FREDERICK \VATTS 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. Bro\vning is dressed like an ordinary modern man, and ,ve 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 \vould be like sending him to a fancy-dress ball. It \vould be like attiring l\1atthew Arnold in the slashed tights of an Elizabethan, or putting 1\1r. Lecky into a primitive Celto-Irish kilt. But it does not strike us as absurd in the casc of Tcnnyson: it does not strike us as even eccentric or outlandish or remotc. "1 e think of Tennyson in that way; \ve 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 ,vas granted this stately and epic position. It is not true that Tennyson was more of a poet than Browning, if \ve 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 \vas more of a poet than Browning, if we mean by that statement that Tennyson was a poet in person, in post and cir- cumstance and conception of life; and that Browning was not, in that sense, a poet at all. Bro\vning first inaugurated in modern art and letters the notion or tradition, in many ways perhaps a more \vholesome one, that the fact that a man pursued the trade or practice of poetry "Tas his o\vn affJir Jnd a thing apart, 4 0 \. , - . THE DWELLER IN THE INNERMOST. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 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 "V ates," 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 \Vatts, gentle and invisible as he is, something that profoundly responds to that spirit. Lcighton, like Browning, was a courtier and man of the world: Millais, like Browning, \vas a good fello\v and an ordinary gentleman: but Watts has more of rrennyson 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 tern pIe, 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 \Vatts. In the thick of this smoky century he is living in a clear age of heroes. VVatts' 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 \\1atts, but less strength, said, after reading some acid and unjust criticisms, " I wish I had ne\ cr 4 1 . GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS ,vritten a line." "Come," sai l \Y'atts, " you ,vouldn't like 'King Arthur' to talk like that." Tennyson paused a moment and then spread out his fingers. "\Vell," he said, "what do you expect? It's all the gout." The artist, with a characteristic power of juvenile and imnlortal hero-worship, tclls this story as an instance of the fundamental essence of odd magnanimity and sombre geniality in Tennyson. I t 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 Tcnnyson 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 \\Tatts' 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 ,vhich \ve can study, with any real sincerity, the allegoric art of \Vatts 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 sman figure in a yellow robe and can 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. I t 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 4 2 GEORGE MEREDITH. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS n urn ber 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 \vhich 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 oppo- nen ts 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 \Vatts' 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. I t 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 infalli- bility of the Book of Mormon, than on this astounding modern dogma of the infallibility of human speech. Every time one man says to another, "'fell us plainly 4-3 . GEORGE FREDERIC K 'V A TTS 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. \Vhenever a man says to another, "Prove your case; defend your faith," he is assuming the infallibility of lan- guage: that is to say, he is assuming that a man has a ,vord 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 an their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. lIe 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. \Vhenever, 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 tha t he hates argument, that his enemy is misrepre- senting him, but he cannot explain how; that man is a true sage, and has seen into the heart of the real nature of language. \Vhenever 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. V\?henever 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 ,vas 44- tJ u 0 >- 0:: ::> Lr.J 0 Z . .. en \. ( ::> Lr.J :r: a... 0::: 0 ,. . .. , ... .. GEORGE FREDERICK \V A TTS 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 mem ber, 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 \Vatts' allegories, a.system, that is to say, whereby the moods or facts of the human spirit were conveyed by some- thing 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 singu- larly 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 common- wealth. 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 martyr- dom, and white for resurrection. For the green and red of the night-signals depict the two most funda- mental things of all, which lie at the back of all lan- guage. Yes and no, good and bad, safe and unsafe, life and death. I t 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 tOJ; a few 15 G EO RGE F REDER I CK \V A TTS 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 gen tleman 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 \vhich it would be quite ridiculous and untrue to say about it. It would be quite ridiculous and untrue to say that this colour sequence ,vas simply a symbol representing language. It would be another lan- guage: it would convey its meaning to aliens who had another word for forest, and another word for sherry, and another word for old lady. I t would not be a symbol of language, a symbol of a symbol; it would be one symbol of the reality, and language ,vould be another. That is precisely the true position touching allegorical art in general, and, above all, the allegorical art of \Vatts. So long as ,ve 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 charac- terize 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 \Varwick," a "View of Kilchurn Castle." It repre- sents a certain definite thing, the word "hope." But what does the word "hope" represent? It represents only a broken instantaneous glimpse of something tha t is immeasurably older and wilder 4 6 . \... .... HOPE. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS than language, that is immeasurably older and wilder than man; a mystery to saints and a reality to wol ves. 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. I t 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. Now let us suppose that instead of coming before that hypothetical 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-\vhat 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 47 G E 0 R G E F RED E R I C K 'V A T T S tha t picture, he finds himself in the presence of a grea t truth. I:Je perceives that there is something in man \vhich 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 kno\vs 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. Noone 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 4 8 .. --- \. .1: .. I \\_ \s . 1\ \ \ . - \ , . '........' , \. JONAH. .; .. \ ", II>. , -.. GEORGE FREDERÍCK WATTS 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 \Vatts' pictures, it is rather an epigram upon it. It is merely an approxi- mate attempt to convey, by snatching up the tool of another craftsman, the direction a ttem pted 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 vVatts, which is as a rule nobly sad also, here comes nearer perhaps than any- where else to mysticism in the strict sense, the mysti- cism which is full of secret passion and belief, like that of Fra Angelico or Blake. But though \Vatts 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 thére is no such thing as a pessi- mist. 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, D 49 GEORGE FREDERICK \V A TTS and it is a very sound objection, can be sufficiently \vell 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 com- merce: 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 \\Tatts' 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 50 GEORGE FREDERICK "'ATTS 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 Com- merce 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 impcrjal 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 ,vornen. 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 51 . GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 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 lJIam7J10n, 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 every\vhere. That bloated, unconscious face, so heavy, so violent, so "vicked, so innocent, have I not seen it at street corners, in billiard-rooms, in saloon bars, laying do\vn 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 \vhy men ha te him, and why men fear him, and why men endure him." Now, of course, it is at once obvious that this yiew would be very unjust to commerce; but that n10di- fication, 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 a re in commerce, there is, beyond all reasonable 52 MAMMON GEORGE FREDERICK ,V A TTS question, in it this po\verful and enduring spirit which \Vatts 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 under- stand, and to capture what they cannot enjoy. This, and not commerce, is what \Vatts 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. I t is not true that this is a picture of Commerce; but that Commerce and "ratts' picture spring from the same source. There does exist a ce!"tain dark and driving force in the \vorld; one of its products is this picture, another is Commerce. The picture is not Commerce, it is 1\ lammon. And, indeed, so powerfully and perfectly has "'atts, in this case, realized the awful being \vhom he was endeavouring to call up by his artistic incantation, that we may even say the common positions of allegory and reality are reversed. 1 he fact is not that here we have an effective presentation under a certain symbol of red robes and smoke and a throne, of \vhat 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 ván. 'fhis is not a symbol of commerce: commerce is a symbol of this. In sketching this general and necessary attitude towards the art of \Vatts, 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 53 " G E 0 I{ G E F RED E R I C K "T A T T S subtle and so bevdldering as the relation bet\\'een art and philosophy, that "Te should see ho\v our con- ceptions and hypotheses really get on \vhen a prlied systematically and at some length to some perfectly familiar and existent object. j\ philosopher cannot talk about any single thing, down to a pumpkin, \vithout sho\ving \vhether he is wise or foolish; but he can easily talk about everything \vith 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 "T atts; 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 \Vatts' art is not merely literary in the sense in \vhich I have originally used the term. It may be admitted that there is truth in the general position I have sketched out-that "Tatts is not a man copying literature or philosophy, but rather a man copying the great spiritual and central realities \vhich literature and philosophy also set out to copy. It may be admitted that 111ammon is ob- viously 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 littl 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, wi th 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 tech- nique of another, the sublimity of his mind is only a very slight consolation. If I summon a paperhanger 54- \. - " Of_r\TH CROW:\IING INNOCENCE. " G EO R G E F RED E R I C K \V A T T S to cover the walls, and he insists on playing the piano, it matters little whether he plays Beethoven or "The Y achmak." 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 grea t 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 \Vatts. 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 \"Vashington 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 5S GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS sake" means simply that there is a solely technical view of painting, and that it must be supreme on its own ground, ita ppears a piece of pure madness to suppose it other than true. Surely there never ,vas really a man who held that a picture that ,vas 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! \Vhen 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 r al indictment of \Vatts. About the vvhole of this \Vatts controversy about didactic art there is at least one perfectly plain and preliminary thing to be said. I t 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 million- aires in a ro,v writing cheques. Nobody ever held evening continuation classes in martyrdom, or drilled boys in a playground to die for their country. A 56 ... 0 ü u <( u u 0 c:c 0 0:: t.L. 'v >- 0:: ..... 0 f- en <( .. " '--- GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 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 civili- zation, but as a matter of fact it scarcely ever professed to teach people how to live the higher life. I t 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 draughts- manship, 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. I t 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 form ulæ, they deal with strange vices and stranger virtues. Art is only unmoral in so far as most morality is immoral. Thus Mr. \Vhistler 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. \Vhen the young Impressionists paint dim corners of meado\vs or splashes of sunlight in the wood, this does not mean necessarily that they are unmoral; it may only mean tha t they are a very original and sincere race of stern young moralists. N ow if we adopt this general theory of the exist- ence of genuine correspondences between art and 57 G E 0 R G E F RED E R I C K \V A T T S 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 tech- nique, 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 o,vn 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 1udgment in the Sistine Chapel were the effect of a perfect and faultless workmanship, but the work- manship such as \ve 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 \vould have been a mere accident, or convenience. Just as two plotters might communicate by means of a bar or t,vo 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 "ratts' technique as the fact that it does almost startlingly correspond to the structure of his spiritual sense. If such pictures as 'I he Dweller in the I nnermost and Al ammon and Diana and Endyrnion and Eve Repentant had neither title nor author, if no one had heard of \Vatts or heard of Eve; if, for the matter of that, the pic- tures 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 "\Tatts painted an arabesque, it would be moral; if he designed a Turkey 58 LORD LYITON. GEORGE FREDERICK ,V A TTS carpet, it \vould 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 some- thing about "Tatts from the mess on his palette. He \\rould see giants and the sea and cold primeval dawns and bro\vn 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 thcir maturity; a hot spring of the earth rather than Titian's opulent summer. Then there is that tremendous autoch- thonous red, which "vas the colour of Adam, whose name was Red Earth. I t is, if one may say so, the clay in which no one works, except \Vatts 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 l'v1eredith, and in the eyes of the Dweller in the I nner- 11l0St. But all these colours have, as I say, the first and most characteristic and most obyious of the mental qualities of 'Vatts; 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 treatnlent of them the other side or typical trait which I have frequently mentioned as making up the identity 59 GEO RGE FREDERICK ,V A TTS of the painter. He is, as I say, a stoic; therefore to some extent, at least, a pagan; he has no special sympathy \vith Celtic intensity, \yith Catholic mysti- cism, 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 \\'hole Pre-Raphaelite colouring trans- parent. The very sly of Rubens is more solid than the rocks of Giotto: it is like a noble cliff of imme- morial 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 \\Tood in the wonderful Nativity of Botticelli. And that is why, again, Christianity, ,vhich has been attacked so strangely as dull and austere, invented the thing which is more intoxicating than an the wines of the world, stained-glass \vindows. Now \Vatts, with all his marvellous spirituality, or rather because of 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. \Vhat they are can only be described as iridescent. A curious lustre or glitter, conveyed chiefly by a singular and individual brush\vork, lies over all his great pictures. 60 - \ \ þ \. , "'\ \. '\ ' .. , .. DAWN, GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS I t 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; bu t still it is a light shining on things, not shining through them. I t 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 "7 tts' 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 \Vatts' colour scheme does provide us, at least suggestively, with these two parallels. \Vatts, 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. 1 he 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 61 GEO RGE FREDERICK ,V A TTS 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 draughts- manship, would, I think, appear sufficiently clear to anyone \vho has any instinct for this mode of judgment at all. In the matter of line and composition, of course, the same general con ten tion applies as in the case of colour. 1'he curve of the bent figure of [lope, con- sidered 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 \vhich 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 E ndymion 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 \vaterfall. It is a rushing and passionate meeting 01 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 \ve quit this second department of the temperament of \\Tatts, 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 Inan that he knows nothing of; like an 62 , - - EVE REPENTANT. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS outlying province forgotten by an emperor. I t 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 63 GEORGE FREDERICK Wl\.TTS 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 \vorship of the human back, when all such in- stances 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 \vith a peculiar importance \vith the general view I am suggesting of the \Vatts technique. F or 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 sup- pression 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 queru- lous incredulity which abuses the phrase, but loyal and consistent agnosticism, \vhich 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 6+ ..... . ... LOVE AND DEATH. ,. .. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS are merely por raits; 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 \Va tts almost more himself than anywhere else. 1\lost men are' allegorical when they are painting allegories, but \Vatts 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 them- selves afterwards, like mean and unsympathetic sketches from the \Vatts 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 E 65 GEORGE FREDERICK ,V A TTS in this matter in a most extraordinary way. \\Tatts 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 \Yilliam l\Iorris or a man named Richard Burton: he is assisted, no doubt, in some degree by a quaint old text-book called Reality, ,vith its stiff but suggestive woodcuts and its shrewd and <;imple old hints. But the most that can be said for the portraiture is that \\'atts 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. I t 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 stóod 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 66 " WILLIAM MORRIS. - \ GEORGE FREDERICK \V A TTS 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 sub- jected, 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 \Vatts' 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, E2 67 GFORGE FREDERICK \V A TTS that the effect of ordinary good looks, on which many of Morris's intimates would probably have prided themselves, is in some degree lost. Car lyle, again, \vhen 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 ,veIl. 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 \Vatts 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 \Vertheimer on his knees. His grimness and decision of dravving and colouring are not due to a sacred optimism. But those of \Vatt are due to this: are due to an intense conviction that there is within the sitter a great reality which has to gi ve up its secret before he leaves the seat or the model's throne. Hence come the red violent face and minatory eyes of \Villiam 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 \vants a coin of the Emperor Constantine, \vhich was the cloistered or abnormal way in which men had commonly devised such things: he wanted good ,vall-papers as a man \vants 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 violcnce on pure 68 . DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETfI. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 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. \Vatts' Carlyle is immeasurably more subtle and true than the Carlyle of 1Ylillais, which simply represents him as a shaggy, handsome, magnificent old man. The uglier Carlyle of \'Tatts 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 dÌ$ease of the vitals and something like a disease of the spirit. In fact, \Vatts 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 \Vatts celebrates. It is the misfortune of the non- religious 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 \Villiam Harcourt and Mr. Albert Chevalier, to Count Tolstoy and Mr. \Vanklyn, that is the glorious and solemn heritage of a nose and t\VO eyes and a mouth. The 69 GEORGE FREDERICK \\'ATTS 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. \Vatts errs undoubtedly on the other side. He makes all his portraits too classical. I t may seem like a paradox to say that he makes them too human; but humanity is a cIa ss is 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 com- plete 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 po}i- ticians. \Vhile he celebrates the individual with a peculiar insight, it is nevertheless always referred to a general human type. "'e 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. "Then 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. \Ve feel that Mr. Wertheimer might have been created before the stars. \Vatts has a tendency to resume his char- acters into his background as if they \\'ere half returning 7 0 THOMAS CARLYLE. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS to the forces of nature. In his more successful por- traits 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 Swin- burne's hair as one might fill in a gold or copper panel. \Ve 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 inde- scribable 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. 'Ve 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 reason- able probability did not understand. In this par- ticular case the picture is a hundred times better for that. The portrait-painter of Matthew Arnold ob- viously 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, 7 1 G E 0 R G E F RED E R I C K \V A T T S and \Vatts 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 l\lorris. The sad sea-blue eyes of Matthew Arnold seemed to get near to the fundamental sadness of blue. I t 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 \Vatts 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 photo- graphs of Manning, indeed almost any casual glimpses of him, present him as more beautiful than he appears in \Vatts' 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. "'Tatts 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 Man- ning. 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 lVloslem 7 2 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS than the Mohammedans. He has no eyes but for ideas. vVatts' allegories and vVatts' portraits exhaust the subject of his art. It is true that he has on rare occasions attempted pictures merely reproducing the externals of the ordinary earth. I t is characteristic of him that he should have once, for no apparent reason in particular, painted a picture of two cart- horses 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 vVorld 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 com- parison 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 ï3 G EO R G E F RED E R I C K 'V.L\ T T S name is \Vatts. 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 tha t the men who collect beetles are j oIlier 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 \Vatts, are both entirely redolent of this exuberant seriousness, this uproarious gravity. They were as ha ppy as the birds, because, like the birds, they ,vere 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. I t 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. \Vhether 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. rhis 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 ï+ ... --- t OOD LUCK TO YOUR FISHING GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS ácademic. 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. rrhere 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, is GEORGE FREDERICK 'V A TTS the vague lines '\vhich his mere physical instinct \vould make him dra,v, have in them the curves of the Cosmos. His automatic manual action ,vas, 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 terri ble things. ... . ..... ... ....... ..... :. -. .' .. .. .... ... . . .. .. .. .... .. ...... . . . ..'c-.. . " . . - .. . ". ..... .. ", ....'O .-.-. . ..- . : I :': ::' . :: ..' . ............ . . . .. . . . . . . . . I . ... . ... .. . . ... ... .. . . . . . . . . . ...::::" .:..:::.::'O.:.:..::-.:: . :.:: .. .' :: .. ;: . . . . '.' . - - . . ':. .- .:'- " , . -: .. .. ::. -. :. :. : !.'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ' .'. .. .-.. . . }, :' '::' , , . . :7 : . ..... . '. . . . . . . . . . .. . - . . . . .. - " - ...... :- . . . .. .. . .. - ".' . . ...... '. I::::::": .:. .. . . . . .. . '.: .'. . . ..... .... . . -. '. ... .'. ':-. :.: :.;. ..:;:.. : ',' ..: ::: .. .... ...... .-: .... ...... .... . . .'. -.' . . . . . . \? .", . . '. .:' . - . .. ... . . . - . . " . . ... '. . . .. .... .. .' .' - .