WATTS
^ i/
i . J\
G. F. WATTS
THE HABIT DOES NOT MAKE THE MONK.
G. F. WATTS
BY G. K. CHESTERTON
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
HENRIETTA ST. COVENT GARDEN
Published 1904
Reprinted 1906, 1909, 1913, 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 SLUMBER OF THE AGES 18
CARDINAL MANNING 20
CHAOS 22
" FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS " 26
AN IDLE CHILD OF FANCY 28
THE MINOTAUR 3*
THE COURT OF DEATH 34
MATTHEW ARNOLD 36
JOHN STUART MILL 36
ROBERT BROWNING 38
LORD TENNYSON 38
THE DWELLER IN THE INNERMOST 40
GEORGE MEREDITH 42
ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE 44
HOPE 46
JONAH
LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURES
Facing to.
MAMMON 52
DEATH CROWNING INNOCENCE 54
A STORY FROM BOCCACCIO 5 6
LORD LYTTON 5 g
DAWN 60
EVE REPENTANT 62
LOVE AND DEATH 64
WILLIAM MORRIS 66
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 68
THOMAS CARLYLE ?o
GOOD LUCK TO YOUR FISHING 74
Photogravures are from -photograph by Fredk. Hollyer.
Permanent photographs of works oj Watts, Rossetti, Burne-
Jones, Holbein, and of pictures in the Dublin and Hague
Galleries can be obtained of Fredk. Hollyer, 9 Pembroke
Square, Kensington.
8
G F. WATTS. R.A.
Photograph from Life by Frederick Hollyer.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 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. Nor 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 WATTS
of July or the First of April. What 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 Watts himself. He, more than any
other modern man, more than politicians who thun
dered on platforms or financiers who captured con
tinents, 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
happens sharply : a whisper runs through the salons,
Mr. Max Beerbohm waves a wand and a whole gene
ration of great men and great achievement suddenly
looks mildewed and unmeaning. We 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 Stratford and the great High Churchmen
on the one hand ; the Moslem frenzy of the English
Commons, the worship of the English law upon the
10
THE RIDER ON THE WHITE HORSE
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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 Jin ^ siecle philosophy a man waking from a
turbid and pompous dream, or a man hurled from
heaven 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 Watts 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 WATTS
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 treaties and reforms of the nineteenth
century.
There are at least three essential and preliminary
points on which Watts 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 w r e proceed to the narrower
but 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 Watts
work 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, " We do
not know " ; but not one of them ever ventured to
say, " We 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
that 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 was 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 Watts.
If anyone wishes to see that spirit, he will see it in
pictures painted by Watts 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 ; The 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. Its faith was
doubtful, but its doubt was faithful. And its supreme
and acute difference from most periods of scepticism,
from the later Renaissance, from the Restoration
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. It fell in love with abstrac
tions and became enamoured of great and desolate
words.
The second point of rapport between Watts 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-
GEORGE 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 capable :
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. We
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. Whistler 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 Victorian preaching difficult or alien to us.
14
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. Whistler
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. Watts, 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. Whistler suffered from an exces
sive and exaggerated modesty. And this unnatural
modesty of Mr. Whistler can scarcely be more typically
symbolized 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 Watts allegorical pictures I shall speak
later, but for the moment it is only desirable to point
out what the early and middle Victorian view of
15
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
the matter really was. According to the later
aesthetic creed which Mr. Whistler and others did
so much to preach, the state of the arts under the
reign of that Victorian view was a chaos of every
one minding everyone else s business. It 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 Watts 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
incapable 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 unity 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
relation of unimpeachable correctness : in their
scheme of things it may be true, or rather it is true,
that the aesthetic 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
ultra-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 loathsome, 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,
because we stand in awe of religion. It 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 Watts 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 ecstatic isolation of the
artistic sense would do incalculable harm to art.
This, then, was the atmosphere of Watts and
B 17
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
Victorian idealism : an atmosphere so completely
vanished from the world of art in which we 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 with
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 Watts so little is known that it
resolves itself into one hypothesis : a hypothesis which
brings with 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. Watts was born in London, but his family
had in the previous generation come from Hereford.
The vast amount of Welsh blood which is by the
nature of the case to be found in Herefordshire has
led to the statement that Watts is racially a Celt,
which is very probably true. But it is also said, in
almost every notice of his life and work, 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 WATTS
Watts may or 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 Watts may, I think, be much better
expressed as a sense of the joyful austerity of things.
The dominant passion of the artistic Celt, of Mr.
W. B. Yeats or Sir Edward Burne-Jones, is in the
word "escape": escape into a land where oranges
grow on plum-trees and men can sow what they like
and reap what they enjoy. To Watts the very word
" escape would be horrible, like an obscene word :
his ideal is altogether duty and the great wheel.
To the Celt frivolity is most truly the most serious
of things, since in the tangle of roses is always the
old serpent who is wiser than the world. To Watts
seriousness is most truly the most " joyful of things,"
since in it we come nearest to that ultimate equili
brium and reconciliation of things whereby 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 between
a kindly severity and an almost cruel love of sweetness ;
than that between a laborious and open-air charity
and a kind of Bacchic asceticism ; between a joy in
peace and a joy in disorder ; between a reduction of
existence to its simplest formula and an extension of
it to its most frantic corollary ; between a lover of
justice who accepts the real world more submissively
than a slave and a lover of pleasure who despises
the real world more bitterly than a hermit ; between
a king in battle-harness and a vagabond in elf-land ;
between Watts and Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
It is remarkable that even the technical style of
Watts gives a contradiction to this Celtic theory.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
Watts 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 apxireKroviK^ which
makes Watts a sort of sculptor of draughtsmanship.
It 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 Mr. W. 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 which is none of these things,
which is nameless and the one thing needful. In Mr.
Yeats plays there is only one character : the hero
who 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
Watts is strong, in the statuesque quality in drawing,
in the love of heavy hands like those of Mammon,
of a strong back like that of Eve Repentant, in a single
fearless and austere outline like that of the angel in
Ibe Court of Death, in the frame-filling violence of
Jonah, in the half-witted brutality of The Minotaur.
He is deficient, that is to say, in what can only be called
the god-like materialism of art. Watts, 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. Though not himself a robust
man, he loves robustness ; he loves a great bulk of
shoulder, an abrupt bend of neck, a gigantic stride,
20
CARDINAL MANNING.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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 Watts 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
Watts who painted the great stoical pictures Love
and Death, Time, Death and Judgment, The Court of
Death, Mammon, and Cain, this pictorial Watts would
probably be, must almost certainly be, simply a sad,
sane, strong, stupid Englishman. He may or may
not be Welsh 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 Milton 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 Milton and again in Watts. He has called
it, in one of his finest and most accurate phrases, " the
imaginative reason. 3
This racial legend about the Watts 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. The whole 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 knows,
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 mind to snatch
21
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
at a certainty is too impatient for the tardy processes
of real hypothesis and research. Long before heredity
has become a science, it has become a superstition.
And this curious though incidental case of the
origin of the Watts genius is just one of those cases
which make us wonder what has been the real result
of^the great rise of science. So far the result would
painfully appear to be that whereas men in the earlier
times said unscientific things with the vagueness of
gossip and legend, they now say unscientific things
with the plainness and the certainty of science.
The actual artistic education of Watts, though
thorough indeed in its way, had a somewhat 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 remember the time when 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 what 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 Waverley 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 was, 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."
We hear of a friendship between him and the sculptor
William Behnes, of Watts lounging about that artist s
studio, playing with clay, modelling busts, and staring
22
X
(J
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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 two later, even when 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, we 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 two people who have
written memoirs of Watts have used a phraseology,
probably without noticing it, which 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 will know quite well that a
man could not paint like that without having worked ;
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 Watts, or with
any technical merit at all, by simply looking at other
people s pictures and statues will seem to anyone,
with a small technical sense, like saying that a man
learnt to be a sublime violinist by staring at fiddles in
a shop window. It is as near a physical impossibility
as can exist in these matters. Work \Vatts must
have done and did do ; it is the only conclusion
possible which is consistent either with the nature
of Watts or the nature of painting ; and it is fully
supported by the facts. But what the facts do reveal
is that he worked in this curiously individual, this
curiously invisible way. He had his own notion
of when to dream and when to draw ; as he shrank
23
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
from no toil, so he shrank from no idleness. He was
something which 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.
It 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 Watts, considered as a mere artist, is that he stands
alone. He is not connected with any of the groups
of the nineteenth century : he has neither followed a
school nor founded one. He is not mediaeval ; 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 medievalism are alike upstart sects ; a style of
painting there might have been upon the tower of
Babel. He is mystical ; but he is not medieval :
we have only to compare him to Rossetti to feel the
difference. When he emerged into the artistic world,
that world was occupied by the pompous and his
torical school, that school which was so exquisitely
caricatured by Thackeray in Gandish and his
BoadisrnV; but Watts was not pompous or
historical : he painted one historical picture, which
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, Watts never has been a
Pre-Raphaelite. He has seen other fashions come
and go ; he has seen the Pre-Raphaelites 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 Whistler ;
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-Raphaelite.
He, the most mild of men, has yet never been
anything but Watts. 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 Whistler
and made him a pessimistic dandy. He has passed
them with a curious immunity, an immunity which,
if it were not so nakedly innocent, might almost be
called egotism ; but which is in fact rather the single
eye. He said once that he had not even consented
to illustrate a book ; his limitation was that he could
express no ideas but his own. He admired Tennyson ;
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 inde-
25
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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 Watts 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
flowing and voluminous dark hair : we see such a
mane in many of the portraits of the most distin
guished men of that time ; but if a man appeared
now and walked 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
that 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 Watts. His 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 saw the sunset, the great old race of
art and literature who were ragged because they
were really poor, frank because they were really free,
and untidy because they were really forgetful. It will
not do to confuse Watts 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 Watts along with them in their genuine
raggedness than to suppose that the unquestionable
picturesqueness with which he fronts the world has
any relation with that new Bohemianism which is
untidy because it is conventional, frank because it
follows a fashion, careless because it watches 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 now ascertainable, probably came
to the painter from that interesting Greek amateur,
Mr. Constantine lonides. It was under his encourage
ment that Watts began all his earlier work of the more
ambitious kind, and it was the portrait of Mrs. Con
stantine lonides 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. When he w r as barely
twenty he had three pictures in the Royal Academy :
the first two were portraits, and the third a picture
called Ike Wounded Heron. 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 with a yell. But
Watts 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, with which 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 WATTS
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 Wounded 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
with it and which 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
with 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, Watts 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
Time 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 Watts to Constantine lonides
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
AN IDLE CHILD OF FANCY.
GEORGE FREDERICK W\Tf
historic traditions which were then the whole 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 lonides
appeared in 1842.
But Watts mode of thought from the very begin
ning had very little kinship with 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 whole 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 Watts suddenly sprang into impor
tance : he won the great prize. The cartoon of
Caractacus led in triumph through the streets of Rome
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 Watts : 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 world,
like the statuesque art of Greece, like the ecclesiastical
and external Gothic art of Christianity : an 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 will 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. With a splendid and truly
religious imagination, he asked permission to decorate
Euston. The railway managers (not perceiving, in
their dull classical routine, the wild 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
ficial life. It is like saying that the public street
must be an artificial air. Men like Watts, men like
all the great heroes, only breathe in public. W T hat is
the use of abusing a man for publicity when he utters
in public the true and the enduring things ? What 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 Watts unnecessary for all practical
purposes. It is in vain to climb walls and hide in
cupboards in order to show whether Watts eats mus
tard or pepper with his curry or whether Watts takes
sugar or salt with his porridge. These things may or
may not become public : it matters little. The
innermost that the biographer could at last discover,
after all possible creepings and capers, would be what
Watts in his inmost soul believes, and that Watts
has splashed on twenty feet of canvas and given to
the nation for nothing. Like one of the great orators
of the eighteenth century, his public virtues, his
public ecstasies are far more really significant than
his private weaknesses. The rest of his life is so
simple that it is scarcely worth telling. He went
30
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 Euston 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. Watts is at one with the Puritans
in the actual objects of his attack. One of his deepest
and most enduring troubles, a matter of which 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
gambling is even more of a problem in the case of the
poorer classes than in the case of the richer. It is,
as he asserts, a far worse danger than drink. There
are many other instances of his political identity
with Puritanism. He told Mr. W. T. Stead that
he had defended and was prepared to defend the
staggering publications of the " Maiden Tribute " ;
it was the only way, 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. The pictures them
selves of course bear sufficient attestation to this
general character : Mammon is what we call a Puritan
picture, and Jonah, and Fata Morgana, and For be had
Great Possessions. It is not difficult to see that
Watts 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 Watts. 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 follow. The one self-abnegation
is more reasonable but less joyful. The 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 Watts, with 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 MINOTAUR.
GEORGE 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. Watts 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 Watts 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. We 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 Watts ; 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
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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 walls of the Tate 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
that he laid down for himself. An aesthetic 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 Watts. It would
^
THE COURT OF DEATH-
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 Watts 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 Warrior, to give Mammon some imperial
crown or typical heraldic symbols, to give a theo
logical machinery to The Court of Death. But this
is put on one side like a temptation 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. It is the very difference between the
artistic mind and the mathematical 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 mad ; 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 WATTS
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 Watts 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 amoeba on the disc of a micro
scope. He claimed, by implication, to put in their
right places the flaming certainty of the martyrs, the
wild 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 Watts. 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, " Why should I understand the cat,
any more than the cat understands me ? : He never
thought, " Why 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 Watts, that he
36
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 Matthew 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 Watts painting a
picture called The Victory of Joy over Morality,
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.
There 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
Watts.
Watts relation to friends and friendship has
something about it very typical. He is not a man
desirous or capable 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 Harmony : 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 which
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 have 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 which 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
38
ROBERT BROWNING.
LORD TENNYSON
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 Watts attitude in its ultimate and psycho
logical character. It is surely most likely that Watts
and Tennyson were drawn together because they
both represented a certain relation towards their
art which is not common in our time and was 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 were 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 we see
in the picture of Hope. And the whole truth of this
last matter is very well expressed in Watts 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. Watts has painted Tennyson with his dark
39
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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. Browning is dressed
like an ordinary modern man, and we 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 would be like
sending him to a fancy-dress ball. It would be like
attiring Matthew Arnold in the slashed tights of an
Elizabethan, or putting Mr. Lecky into a primitive
Celto-Irish kilt. But it does not strike us as absurd
in the case of Tennyson : it does not strike us as even
eccentric or outlandish or remote. We think of
Tennyson in that way ; we 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 was granted this stately and epic
position. It is not true that Tennyson was more of
a poet than Browning, if we 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 was 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. Browning first
inaugurated in modern art and letters the notion or
tradition, in many ways perhaps a more wholesome
one, that the fact that a man pursued the trade or
practice of poetry was his own affair and a thing apart,
40
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 " Vates," was a recognized
and public figure like the bard or jester at the mediaeval
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 Watts, gentle and invisible as he is,
something that profoundly responds to that spirit.
Leighton, like Browning, was a courtier and man of
the world : Millais, like Browning, was a good fellow
and an ordinary gentleman : but Watts has more of
Tennyson 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 temple, 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 Watts. In
the thick of this smoky century he is living in a clear
age of heroes.
Watts 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 Watts, but less strength, said, after reading
some acid and unjust criticisms, " I wish I had never
41
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
written a line. 1 " Come," said Watts, " you wouldn t
like King Arthur 3 to talk like that." Tennyson
paused a moment and then spread out his fingers.
" Well," he said, " what do you expect ? It s all
the gout." The artist, with a characteristic power of
juvenile and immortal hero-worship, tells this story
as an instance of the fundamental essence of odd
magnanimity and sombre geniality in Tennyson.
It 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 Tennyson
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 Watts 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 which we can study, with any real sincerity, the
allegoric art of Watts 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 small figure in a
yellow robe and call 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. It 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
42
GEORGE MEREDITH.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
number 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 which 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
nents 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 Watts 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. It 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, " Tell us plainly
43
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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. Whenever
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
word 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 all
their blends and unions, be accurately represented
by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He
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.
Whenever, 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
that 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. Whenever 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. Whenever 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 was
44
UJ
u
5
>
a:
UJ
Q
2
UJ
X
a.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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
member, 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 Watts
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 aesthetic 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. It 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 for a. few
45
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
seconds at a slightly more lingering pace, that a
romantic old lady in a first-class carriage may admire
the scenery of the forest. 1 A tendency towards
peacock blue in the green might mean " An old
gentleman with a black necktie has just drunk a glass
of sherry at the station restaurant. 1 But however
much we modified or varied this colour sequence
or colour language, there would remain one thing
which it would be quite ridiculous and untrue to say
about it. It would be quite ridiculous and untrue
to say that this colour sequence was 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. It would not
be a symbol of language, a symbol of a symbol ; it
would be one symbol of the reality, and language
would be another. That is precisely the true position
touching allegorical art in general, and, above all, the
allegorical art of Watts.
So long as we 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. 3 He is immediately satisfied, as he would
have been if the title had run "Portrait of Lady
Warwick, 3 a " View of Kilchurn Castle. 3 It repre
sents a certain definite thing, the word " hope. 1
But what does the word " hope represent ? It
represents only a broken instantaneous glimpse of
something that is immeasurably older and wilder
HOPE.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
than language, that is immeasurably older and wilder
than man ; a mystery to saints and a reality to wolves.
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.
It 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 what would he
see ? He would see something for which there is
neither speech nor language, which has been too vast
for any eye to see and too secret for any religion to
utter, even as an esoteric doctrine. Standing before
47
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
that picture, he finds himself in the presence of a great
truth. He perceives that there is something in man
which is always apparently on the eve of disappearing,
but never disappears, an assurance which is always
apparently saying farewell and yet illimitably lingers,
a string which is always stretched to snapping and yet
never snaps. He perceives that the queerest and
most delicate thing in us, the most fragile, the most
fantastic, is in truth the backbone and indestructible.
He knows a great moral fact : that there never was an
age of assurance, that there never was an age of faith.
Faith is always at a disadvantage ; it is a perpetually
defeated thing which survives all its conquerors.
The desperate modern talk about dark days and reeling
altars, and the end of Gods and angels, is the oldest
talk in the world : lamentations over the growth of
agnosticism can be found in the monkish sermons
of the dark ages ; horror at youthful impiety can be
found in the Iliad. This is the thing that never
deserts men and yet always, with daring diplomacy,
threatens to desert them. It has indeed dwelt among
and controlled all the kings and crowds, but only
with the air of a pilgrim passing by. It has indeed
warmed and lit men from the beginning of Eden with
an unending glow, but it was the glow of an eternal
sunset.
Here, in this dim picture, its trick is almost
betrayed. No one can name this picture properly,
but Watts, who painted it, has named it Hope. But
the point is that this title is not (as those think who
call it " literary ") the reality behind the symbol,
but another symbol for the same thing, or, to speak
yet more strictly, another symbol describing another
part or aspect of the same complex reality. Two
men felt a swift, violent, invisible thing in the world :
one said the word " hope, 3 the other painted a
JONAH.
GEORGE FREDERICK 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 Watts 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 attempted in the
painter s own craft. He calls it Hope, and that is
perhaps the best title. It reminds us among other
things of a fact which is too little remembered, that
faith, hope, and charity, the three mystical virtues
of Christianity, are also the gayest of the virtues.
Paganism, as I have suggested, is not gay, but rather
nobly sad; the spirit of Watts, which is as a rule
nobly sad also, here comes nearer perhaps than 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 Watts calls
his tremendous reality Hope, we may call it many other
things. Call it faith, call it vitality, call it the will
to live, call it the religion of to-morrow morning,
call it the immortality of man, call it self-love and
vanity ; it is the thing that explains why man survives
all things and why the~re 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 WATTS
and it is a very sound objection, can be sufficiently
well stated by saying that the pictorial figures are mere
arbitrary symbols of the words. An allegorist of the
pompous school might paint some group of Peace
and Commerce doing something to Britannia. There
might be a figure of Commerce in a Greek robe with
a cornucopia or bag of gold or an argosy or any other
conventional symbol. But it is surely quite evident
that such a figure is a mere sign like the word com
merce : the word might just as well be " dandelion, 5
and the Greek lady with the cornucopia might just
as well be a Hebrew prophet standing on his head.
It is scarcely even a language : it is a cipher-code.
Nobody can maintain that the figure, taken as a figure,
makes one think of commerce, of the forces that
effect commerce, of a thousand ports, of a thousand
streets, of a thousand warehouses and bills of lading,
of a thousand excited men in black coats who certainly
would not know what to do with a cornucopia. If
we find ourselves gazing at some monument of the
fragile and eternal faith of man, at some ruined chapel,
at some nameless altar, at some scrap of old Jacobin
eloquence, we might actually find our own minds
moving in certain curves that centre in the curved
back of Watts Hope: we might almost think for
ourselves of a bowed figure in the twilight, holding
to her breast something damaged but undestroyed.
But can anyone say that by merely looking at the
Stock Exchange on a busy day we should think of a
Greek lady with an argosy ? Can anyone say that
Threadneedle Street, in itself, would inspire our minds
to move in the curves which centre in a cornucopia ?
Can anyone say that a very stolid figure in a very
outlandish drapery is anything but a purely arbitrary
sign, like x or y, for such a thing as modern commerce,
for the savagery of the rich, for the hunger of the
50
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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 imperial thing,
with closed eyes and fat, sightless face, sat upon his
magnificent seat, he let his heavy hand and feet fall,
as if by a mere pulverizing accident, on the naked
and god-like figures of the young, on men and women.
Suppose that in the background there rose straight
into the air a raw and turgid smoke, as if from some
invisible and horrible sacrifice, and that by one final,
fantastic, and triumphal touch this all-destroying god
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 Mammon,
would he not say, " This is something which in spirit
and in essence I have seen before, something which in
spirit and in essence I have seen everywhere. That
bloated, unconscious face, so heavy, so violent, so
wicked, so innocent, have I not seen it at street
corners, in billiard-rooms, in saloon bars, laying down
the law about Chartered shares or gaping at jokes
about women ? Those huge and smashing limbs,
so weighty, so silly, so powerless, and yet so powerful,
have I not seen them in the pompous movements, the
morbid health of the prosperous in the great cities ?
The hard, straight pillars of that throne, have I not
seen them in the hard, straight, hideous tiers of modern
warehouses and factories ? That tawny and sulky
smoke, have I not seen it going up to heaven from all
the cities of the coming world ? This is no trifling
with argosies and Greek drapery. This is commerce.
This is the home of the god himself. This is why men hate
him, and why men fear him, and why men endure him. :
Now, of course, it is at once obvious that this view
would be very unjust to commerce ; but that modi
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
are in commerce, there is, beyond all reasonable
S 2
MAMMON
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
question, in it this powerful and enduring spirit
which Watts has painted. There is, as a ruling element
in modern life, in all life, this blind and asinine
appetite for mere power. There is a spirit abroad
among the nations of the earth which drives men
incessantly on to destroy what they cannot under
stand, and to capture what they cannot enjoy. This,
and not commerce, is what Watts has painted. He has
painted, not the allegory of a great institution, but the
vision of a great appetite, the vision of a great motive.
It is not true that this is a picture of Commerce ;
but that Commerce and Watts picture spring from
the same source. There does exist a certain dark and
driving force in the world ; one of its products is
this picture, another is Commerce. The picture is
not Commerce, it is Mammon. And, indeed, so
powerfully and perfectly has Watts, in this case,
realized the awful being whom he was endeavouring
to call up by his artistic incantation, that we may
even say the common positions of allegory and reality
are reversed. The fact is not that here we have an
effective presentation under a certain symbol of red
robes and smoke and a throne, of what the financial
world is, but rather that here we have something
of the truth that is hidden behind the symbol of
white waistcoats and hats on the back of the head, of
financial papers and sporting prophets, of butter
closing quiet and Pendragon being meant to win.
This is not a symbol of commerce : commerce is a
symbol of this.
In sketching this general and necessary attitude
towards the art of Watts, particularly in the matter
of allegory, I have taken deliberately these two very
famous and obvious pictures, and I have occupied,
equally deliberately, a considerable amount of space
in expounding them. It is far better in a subject so
53
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
subtle and so bewildering as the relation between
art and philosophy, that we should see how our con
ceptions and hypotheses really get on when applied
systematically and at some length to some perfectly
familiar and existent object. A philosopher cannot
talk about any single thing, down to a pumpkin,
without showing whether he is wise or foolish ; but
he can easily talk about everything with anyone having
any views about him beyond gloomy suspicions.
But at this point I become fully conscious of another
and most important kind of criticism, which has
been and can be levelled against the allegories of
Watts ; and which must be, by the nature of things,
evoked by the particular line of discussion or reflection
that I have here adopted.
It may be admitted that Watts art is not merely
literary in the sense in which I have originally used the
term. It may be admitted that there is truth in the
general position I have sketched out that Watts
is not a man copying literature or philosophy, but
rather a man copying the great spiritual and central
realities which literature and philosophy also set out
to copy. It may be admitted that Mammon is 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 little more than a difference between a mean and
a magnificent blunder. Pictorial art, it will be said,
has no more business, as such, to portray great ideas
than small ideas. Its affair is with its own technique,
with the love of a great billowing line for its own
sake, of a subtle and perfect tint for its own sake.
If a man mistakes his trade and attends to the tech
nique of another, the sublimity of his mind is only a
very slight consolation. If I summon a paperhanger
54
DEATH CROWNING INNOCENCE.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
to cover the walls, and he insists on playing the piano,
it matters little whether he plays Beethoven or
" The Yachmak." If I charter a pianist, and he is
found drinking in the wine cellar, it matters little
whether he has made his largest hole in good Burgundy
or bad Marsala. If the whole of this question of
great ideas and small ideas, of large atmospheres
and superficial definitions, of the higher and the
lower allegory if all this be really irrelevant to the
discussion of the position of a painter, then, indeed,
we have been upon an idle track. As I think I shall
show in a moment, this is a very inadequate view of the
matter. But it does draw our attention to an aspect
of the matter which must, without further delay, be
discussed. That aspect, as I need hardly say, is the
technique of Watts.
There is of course a certain tendency among all
interesting and novel critical philosophers to talk
as if they had discovered things which it is perfectly
impossible that any human being could ever have
denied ; to shout that the birds fly, and declare
that in spite of persecution they will still assert that
cows have four legs. In this way some raw pseudo-
scientists talk about heredity or the physical basis
of life as if it were not a thing embedded in every
creed and legend, and even the very languages of men.
In this way some of the new oligarchists of to-day
imagine they are attacking the doctrine of human
equality by pointing out that some men are stronger
or cleverer than others ; as if they really believed
that Danton and Washington thought that every
man was the same height and had the same brains.
And something of this preliminary cloud of folly or
misunderstanding attaches doubtless to the question
of the technical view- -that is, the solely technical
view of painting. If the principle of " art for art s
SS
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, it appears a piece of pure madness to
suppose it other than true. Surely there never was
really a man who held that a picture that was vile in
colour and weak in drawing was a good picture because
it was a picture of Florence Nightingale ! Surely
there never was really a man who said that when
one leg in a drawing was longer than another, yet
they were both the same length because the artist
painted it for an altar-piece ! When the new critics
with a burst of music and a rocket shower of epigrams
enunciated their new criticism, they must at any rate
have meant something more than this. Undoubtedly
they did mean something more ; they meant that a
picture was not a good vehicle for moral sentiment
at all ; they meant that not only was it not the better
for having a philosophic meaning, but that it was
worse. This, if it be true, is beyond all question a
real indictment of Watts.
^ About the whole of this Watts controversy about
didactic art there is at least one perfectly plain and
preliminary thing to be said. It is said that art
cannot teach a lesson. This is true, and the only
proper addition is the statement that neither, for the
matter of that, can morality teach a lesson. For a
thing to be didactic, in the strict and narrow and
scholastic sense, it must be something about facts or
the physical sciences : you can only teach a lesson
about such a thing as Euclid or the making of paper
boats. The thing is quite inapplicable to the great
needs of man, whether moral or aesthetic. Nobody
ever held a class in philanthropy with fifteen million
aires in a row writing cheques. Nobody ever held
evening continuation classes in martyrdom, or drilled
boys in a playground to die for their country. A
5 6
o
u
<
u
CJ
o
CO
O
o:
u.
cc
O
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. It taught
people how to keep bees.
Since we find, therefore, that ethics is like art, a
mystic and intuitional affair, the only question that
remains is, have they any kinship ? If they have not,
a man is not a man, but two men and probably more :
if they have, there is, to say the least of it, at any rate
a reasonable possibility that a note in moral feeling
might have affinity with a note in art, that a curve
in law, so to speak, may repeat a curve in 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.
It is not so much the fact that there is no such thing
as allegorical art, but rather the fact that there is
no art that is not allegorical. But the meanings
expressed in high and delicate art are not to be classed
under cheap and external ethical formulae, they deal
with strange vices and stranger virtues. Art is
only unmoral in so far as most morality is immoral.
Thus Mr. Whistler when he drops a spark of perfect
yellow or violet into some glooming pool of the
nocturnal Thames is, in all probability, enunciating
some sharp and wholesome moral comment. When
the young Impressionists paint dim corners of meadows
or splashes of sunlight in the wood, this does not mean
necessarily that they are unmoral ; it may only mean
that they are a very original and sincere race of stern
young moralists.
Now if we adopt this general theory of the exist
ence of genuine correspondences between art and
57
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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
own sphere to the pleasure in the spiritual suggestion,
then it is a mechanical and unlawful union, and
this philosophy, at any rate, forbids the banns. If
the intellectual conceptions uttered in Michel Angelo s
Day of Judgment in the Sistine Chapel were the effect
of a perfect and faultless workmanship, but the work
manship such as we should admire in a Gothic missal
or a picture by Gerard Dow, we should then say
that absolute excellence in both departments did not
excuse their being joined. The thing would have
been a mere accident, or convenience. Just as two
plotters might communicate by means of a bar or
two of music, so these subtle harmonies of colour and
form would have been used for their detached and
private ends by the dark conspirators of morality.
Now there is nothing in the world that is really
so thoroughly characteristic of Watts technique as
the fact that it does almost startlingly correspond
to the structure of his spiritual sense. If such pictures
as The Dweller in the Innermost and Mammon and
Diana and Endymion and Eve Repentant had neither
title nor author, if no one had heard of Watts or
heard of Eve ; if, for the matter of that, the 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 Watts painted an
arabesque, it would be moral ; if he designed a Turkey
58
LORD LYTTON.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
carpet, it would be stoical. So individual is his
handling that his very choice and scale of colours
betray him. A man with a keen sense of the spiritual
and symbolic history of colours could guess at some
thing about Watts from the mess on his palette. He
would see giants and the sea and cold primeval dawns
and brown earth-men and red earth-women lying
in the heaps of greens and whites and reds, like forces
in chaos before the first day of creation. A certain
queer and yet very simple blue there is, for instance,
which is like Titian s and yet not like it, which is
more lustrous and yet not less opaque, and which
manages to suggest the north rather than Titian s
south, in spite of its intensity ; which suggests also
the beginning of things rather than their maturity ;
a hot spring of the earth rather than Titian s opulent
summer. Then there is that tremendous autoch
thonous red, which was the colour of Adam, whose
name was Red Earth. It is, if one may say so, the
clay in which no one works, except Watts and the
Eternal Potter. There are other colours that have
this character, a character indescribable except by
saying that they come from the palette of Creation
a green especially that reappears through portraits,
allegories, landscapes, heroic designs, but always has
the same fierce and elfish look, like a green that has
a secret. It may be seen in the signet ring of Owen
Meredith, and in the eyes of the Dweller in the Inner
most. But all these colours have, as I say, the first
and most characteristic and most obvious of the
mental qualities of Watts ; they are simple and like
things just made by God. Nor is it, I think, altogether
fanciful to push this analogy or harmony a step
further and to see in the colours and the treatment
of them the other side or typical trait which I have
frequently mentioned as making up the identity
59
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
of the painter. He is, as I say, a stoic ; therefore to
some extent, at least, a pagan ; he has no special
sympathy with Celtic intensity, with Catholic 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 whole Pre-Raphaelite colouring trans
parent. The very sky 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 wood in the wonderful Nativity of Botticelli.
And that is why, again, Christianity, which has been
attacked so strangely as dull and austere, invented
the thing which is more intoxicating than all the wines
of the world, stained-glass windows.
Now Watts, 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. What they
are can only be described as iridescent. A curious
lustre or glitter, conveyed chiefly by a singular and
individual brushwork, lies over all his great pictures.
60
DAWN.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
It is the dawn of things : it is the glow of the primal
sense of wonder ; it is the sun of the childhood of
the world ; it is the light that never was on sea or
land ; but still it is a light shining on things, not
shining through them. It is a light which exhibits
and does honour to this world, not a light that breaks
in upon this world to bring it terror or comfort,
like the light that suddenly peers round the corner
of some dark Gothic chapel with its green or golden
or blood-red eyes. The Gothic artists, as I say,
would have liked men s bodies to become like burning
glass (as the figures in their windows do), that the
light might pass through them. There is no fear of
light passing through Watts Cain.
These analogies must inevitably appear fantastic
to those who do not accept the general hypothesis
of a possible kinship between pictorial and moral
harmonies in the psychology of men ; but to those
who do accept this not very extravagant hypothesis,
it may, I think, be repeated by way of summary,
that the purely technical question of Watts colour
scheme does provide us, at least suggestively, with
these two parallels. Watts, so far as his moral and
mental attitude can be expressed by any phrases of
such brevity, has two main peculiarities : first, a
large infantile poetry which delights in things fresh,
raw, and gigantic ; second, a certain Greek restraint
and agnostic severity, which throws a strong light on
this world as it is. The colours he uses have also
two main peculiarities : first, a fresh, raw, and, as it
were, gigantic character ; secondly, an opaque reflected
light, unlike the mediaeval 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
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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 who has any instinct for this mode of judgment
at all. In the matter of line and composition, of course,
the same general contention applies as in the case of
colour. The curve of the bent figure of Hope, 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 which inspires
the title of the picture. The splendid rushing
whirlpool of curves which constitutes, as it were, the
ellipse of the two figures in Diana and Endymion
is a positive inspiration. It is, simply as a form for
a picture, a mere scheme of lines, the very soul of
Greece. It is simple ; it is full and free ; it follows
great laws of harmony, but it follows them swiftly
and at will ; it is headlong, and yet at rest, like the
solid arch of a waterfall. It is a rushing and passionate
meeting of two superb human figures ; and it is
almost a mathematical harmony. Technically, at
least, and as a matter of outlines, it is probably the
artist s masterpiece.
Before we quit this second department of the
temperament of Watts, as expressed in his line,
mention must be made of what is beyond all question
the most interesting and most supremely personal
of all the elements in the painter s designs and
draughtsmanship. That is, of course, his magnificent
discovery of the artistic effect of the human back.
The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in
the universe : it is impossible to speak about it. It is
the part of man that he knows nothing of ; like an
62
EVE REPENTANT.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
outlying province forgotten by an emperor. It is
a common saying that anything may happen behind
our backs : transcendentally considered the thing
has an eerie truth about it. Eden may be behind
our backs, or Fairyland. But this mystery of the
human back has again its other side in the strange
impression produced on those behind : to walk
behind anyone along a lane is a thing that, properly
speaking, touches the oldest nerve of awe. Watts
has realized this as no one in art or letters has realized
it in the whole history of the world : it has made him
great. There is one possible exception to his monopoly
of this magnificent craze. Two thousand years
before, in the dark scriptures of a nomad people,
it had been said that their prophet saw the immense
Creator of all things, but only saw Him from behind.
I do not know whether even Watts would dare to
paint that. But it reads like one of his pictures,
like the most terrific of all his pictures, which he has
kept veiled.
I need not instance the admirable and innumerable
cases of this fine and individual effect. Eve Repentant
(that fine picture), in which the agony of a gigantic
womanhood is conveyed as it could not be conveyed
by any power of visage, in the powerful contortion of
the muscular and yet beautiful back, is the first that
occurs to the mind. The sad and sardonic picture
painted in later years, For He had Great Possessions
showing the young man of the Gospel loaded with
his intolerable pomp of garments and his head sunken
out of sight is of course another. Others are
slighter instances, like Good Luck to your Fishing. He
has again carried the principle, in one instance, to
an extreme seldom adopted, I should fancy, either
by artist or man. He has painted a very graceful
portrait of his wife, in which that lady s face is entirely
63
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
omitted, the head being abruptly turned away.
But it is indeed idle to multiply these instances of
the painter s hobby (if one may use the phrase) of
the worship of the human back, when all such 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 with a peculiar importance with the
general view I am suggesting of the Watts technique.
For the whole picture really hangs, both technically
and morally, upon one single line, a line that could
be drawn across a blank canvas, the spine-line of the
central figure of Death with its great falling garment.
The whole composition, the whole conception, and,
I was going to say, the whole moral of the picture,
could be deduced from that single line. The moral
of the picture (if moral were the right phrase for
these things) is, it is scarcely necessary to point out,
the monument of about as noble a silence and 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, which is as willing to
believe good as evil and to harbour faith as doubt-
has here its great and pathetic place and symbol
in the house of the arts. It is the artistic embodiment
of reverent ignorance at its highest, fully as much as
the Divine Comedy is the artistic embodiment of
Christianity.
Technically, in a large number of cases, it is probably
true that Watts portraits, or some of them at least,
are his most successful achievements. But here also
we find our general conclusion : for if his portraits
are his best pictures, it is certainly not because they
LOVE AND DEATH
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
are merely portraits ; if they are in some cases better
than his symbolic designs, it is certainly not because
they are less symbolic. In his gallery of great men,
indeed, we find Watts almost more himself than
anywhere else. Most men are allegorical when
they are painting allegories, but Watts is allegorical
when he is painting an old alderman. A change
passes over that excellent being, a change of a kind
to which aldermen are insufficiently inured. He
begins to resolve into the primal elements, to become
dust and the shadow, to become the red clay of
Adam and the wind of God. His eyes become, in
spite of his earnest wish, the fixed stars in the sky of
the spirit ; his complexion begins to show, not
the unmeaning red of portraits and miniatures, but
that secret and living red which is within us, and
which is the river of man. The astounding manner
in which Watts has, in some cases, treated his sitters
is one of the most remarkable things about his
character. He is not (it is almost absurd to have to
mention such a thing about the almost austere old
democrat) a man likely to flatter a sitter in any
worldly or conventional sense. Nor is he, for the
matter of that, a man likely to push compliments
far from any motive : he is a strict, and I should
infer a candid, man. The type of virtues he chiefly
admires and practises are the reverse of those which
would encourage a courtier or even a universalist.
But he scarcely ever paints a man without making
him about five times as magnificent as he really
looks. The real men appear, if they present them
selves afterwards, like mean and unsympathetic sketches
from the Watts original.
The fact is that this indescribable primalism,
which we have noted as coming out in the designs,
in the titles, and in Watts very oil-colours, is present
65
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
in this matter in a most extraordinary way. Watts
does not copy men at all : he makes them over again.
He dips his hand in the clay of chaos and begins to
model a man named William Morris or a man named
Richard Burton : he is assisted, no doubt, in some
degree by a quaint old text-book called Reality,
with its stiff but suggestive woodcuts and its shrewd
and simple old hints. But the most that can be said
for the portraiture is that Watts asks a hint to come
and stop with him, puts the hint in a chair in his
studio and stares at him. The thing that comes out
at last upon the canvas is not generally a very precise
picture of the sitter, though, of course, it is almost
always a very accurate picture of the universe.
And yet while this, on the one side, is true enough,
the portraits are portraits, and very fine portraits.
But they are dominated by an element which is the
antithesis of the whole tendency of modern art, that
tendency which for want of a better word we have
to call by the absurd name of optimism. It is not,
of course, in reality a question of optimism in the
least, but of an illimitable worship and wonder
directed towards the fact of existence. There is a
great deal of difference between the optimism which
says that things are perfect and the optimism which
merely says (with a more primeval modesty) that they
are very good. One optimism says that a one-legged
man has two legs because it would be so dreadful
if he had not. The other optimism says that the fact
that the one-legged was born of a woman, has a
soul, has been in love, and has stood alive under
the stars, is a fact so enormous and thrilling that, in
comparison, it does not matter whether he has one
leg or five. One optimism says that this is the best
of all possible worlds. The other says that it is
certainly not the best of all possible worlds, but
66
WILLIAM MORRIS.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
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 Watts marvellous
portrait, so much is made of the sanguine face, the
bold stare, the almost volcanic suddenness of the
emergence of the head from the dark green background,
E2 67
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
that the effect of ordinary good looks, on which many
of Morris s intimates would probably have prided
themselves, is in some degree lost. Carlyle, again,
when he saw the painter s fine rendering of him, said
with characteristic surliness that he " looked like a
mad labourer. 1 Conventionally speaking, it is of
course, therefore, to be admitted that the sitters
did not always come off well. But the exaggeration
or the distortion, if exaggeration or distortion there
were, was always effected in obedience to some
almost awestruck notion of the greatness or goodness
of the great or good sitter. The point is not whether
Watts sometimes has painted men as ugly as they
were painted by the primary religious painters ; the
point is, as I have said, that he painted as they did,
on his knees. Now no one thinks that Mr. Sargent
paints the Misses Wertheimer on his knees. His
grimness and decision of drawing and colouring are
not due to a sacred optimism. But those of Watts
are due to this : are due to an intense conviction
that there is within the sitter a great reality which
has to give up its secret before he leaves the seat or
the model s throne. Hence come the red violent
face and minatory eyes of William Morris : the
painter sought to express, and he did most successfully
express, the main traits and meaning of Morris
the appearance of a certain plain masculine passion
in the realm of decorative art. Morris was a man
who wanted good wall-papers, not as a man wants
a coin of the Emperor Constantine, which was the
cloistered or abnormal way in which men had commonly
devised such things : he wanted good wall-papers as
a man wants beer. He clamoured for art : he brawled
for it. He asserted the perfectly virile and ordinary
character of the appetite for beauty. And he possessed
and developed a power of moral violence on pure
68
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
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. Watts Carlyle is immeasurably more subtle
and true than the Carlyle of Millais, which simply
represents him as a shaggy, handsome, magnificent
old man. The uglier Carlyle of Watts has more of
the truth about him, the strange combination of
a score of sane and healthy visions and views, with
something that was not sane, which bloodshot and
embittered them all, the great tragedy of the union
of a strong countryside mind and body with a disease
of the vitals and something like a disease of the spirit.
In fact, Watts painted Carlyle " like a mad labourer
because Carlyle was a mad labourer.
This general characteristic might of course be
easily traced in all the portraits one by one. If
space permitted, indeed, such a process might be
profitable ; for while we take careful note of all the
human triviality of faces, the one thing that we all
tend to forget is that divine and common thing which
Watts celebrates. It is the misfortune of the 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 William
Harcourt and Mr. Albert Chevalier, to Count Tolstoy
and Mr. Wanklyn, that is the glorious and solemn
heritage of a nose and two eyes and a mouth. The
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
effort of the dashing modern is rather to make each
of these features individual almost to the point of
being incredible : it is his desire to paint the mouth
whose grimace is inimitable, the eyes that could
be only in one head, and the nose that never was on
sea or land. There is value in this purely personal
treatment, but something in it so constantly lost :
the quality of the common humanity. The new art
gallery is too like a museum of freaks, it is too wild
and wonderful, like a realistic novel. Watts errs
undoubtedly on the other side. He makes all his
portraits too classical. It may seem like a paradox
to say that he makes them too human ; but humanity
is a classis and therefore classical. He recurs too
much to the correct type which includes all men.
He has, for instance, a worship of great men so 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 poli
ticians. While he celebrates the individual with a
peculiar insight, it is nevertheless always referred to
a general human type. We feel when we look at
even the most extraordinary of Watts portraits,
as, for instance, the portrait of Lord Stratford de
Redcliffe, that before Lord Stratford de Redcliffe
was born, and apart from that fact, there was such a
thing as a human being. When we look at a brilliant
modern canvas like that of Mr. Sargent s portrait of
Wertheimer, we do not feel that any human being
analogous to him had of necessity existed. We feel
that Mr. Wertheimer might have been created before
the stars. Watts has a tendency to resume his char
acters into his background as if they were half returning
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. We know that he was historically correct in
making the hair orange, but we cannot get rid of a
haunting feeling that if his scheme had been a little
different he would have made it green. This 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. We rather feel that if anyone had
seized Rossetti and forcibly buttoned him up in the
dark green coat he would have grown the red beard
by sheer force of will.
Before we quit the subject of portraiture a word
ought to be said about two exceedingly noble portraits,
those of Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Manning.
The former is interesting because, as an able critic
said somewhere (I wish I could remember who he was
or where he wrote), this is the one instance of Watts
approaching tentatively a man whom he in all 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,
71
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
and Watts has not failed to give that nobility a place
even greater perhaps than that which he would have
given to it had he been working on that fixed theory of
admiration in which he dealt with Tennyson or
Morris. The sad sea-blue eyes of Matthew Arnold
seemed to get near to the fundamental sadness of blue.
It is a certain eternal bleakness in the colour which
may for all I know have given rise to the legend of
blue devils. There are times at any rate when the
bluest heavens appear only blue with those devils.
The portrait of Cardinal Manning is worth a further
and special notice, because it is an illustration of the
fact to which I have before alluded : the fact that
while Watts in one sense always gets the best out of
his sitters, he does not by any means always get the
handsomest out of them. Manning was a singularly
fine-looking man, even in his emaciation. A friend of
mine, who was particularly artistic both by instinct and
habits, gazed for a long time at a photograph of the
terrible old man clad in those Cardinal s robes and
regalia in which he exercised more than a Cardinal s
power, and said reflectively, " He would have made his
fortune as a model." A great many of the photo
graphs of Manning, indeed almost any casual glimpses
of him, present him as more beautiful than he appears
in Watts portrait. To the ordinary onlooker there
was behind the wreck of flesh and the splendid skeleton
the remains of a very handsome English gentleman ;
relics of one who might have hunted foxes and married
an American heiress. Watts has no eyes for anything
except that sublime vow which he would himself
repudiate, that awful Church which he would himself
disown. He exaggerates the devotionalism of 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 Moslem
72
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
than the Mohammedans. He has no eyes but for
ideas.
Watts allegories and Watts 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. It 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 World or Adam or the Angel
of Death. He condescends to a detail and makes the
detail more vast than a cosmic allegory. One picture,
called " The First Oyster," he is reported to have
painted in response to a challenge which accused him
or his art of lacking altogether the element of humour.
The charge is interesting, because it suggests a 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
73
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
name is Watts. They knew that not only life, but
every detail of life, is most a pleasure when it is
studied with the gloomiest intensity. They knew
that the men who collect beetles are jollier than the
men who kill them, and that the men who worshipped
beetles (in ancient Egypt) were probably the j oiliest
of all. The startling cheerfulness of the old age of
Gladstone, the startling cheerfulness of the old age
of Watts, are both entirely redolent of this exuberant
seriousness, this uproarious gravity. They were as
happy as the birds, because, like the birds, they were
untainted by the disease of laughter. They are as
awful and philosophical as children at play : indeed
they remind us of a truth true for all of us, though
capable of misunderstanding, that the great aim of a
man s life is to get into his second childhood.
Of his work we have concluded our general survey.
It has been hard in conducting such a survey to
avoid the air of straying from the subject. But the
greatest hardness of the subject is that we cannot
stray from the subject. This man has attempted,
whether he has succeeded or no, to paint such pictures
of such things that no one shall be able to get outside
them ; that everyone should be lost in them for ever
like wanderers in a mighty park. Whether we strike
a match or win the Victoria Cross, we are still giants
sprawling in Chaos. Whether we hide in a monastery
or thunder on a platform, we are still standing in the
Court of Death. If any experience at all is genuine,
it affects the philosophy of these pictures ; if any
halfpenny stamp supports them, they are the better
pictures ; if any dead cat in a dust-bin contradicts
them, they are the worse pictures. This is the great
pathos and the great dignity of philosophy and
theology. Men talk of philosophy and theology as
if they were something specialistic and arid and
>-> \
/i
.OOD LUCK TO YOUR FISHING.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
academic. But philosophy and theology are not only
the only democratic things, they are democratic to
the point of being vulgar, to the point, I was going
to say, of being rowdy. They alone admit all matters ;
they alone lie open to all attacks. All other sciences
may, while studying their own, laugh at the rag-tag
and bobtail of other sciences. An astronomer may
sneer at animalcule, which are very like stars ; an
entomologist may scorn the stars, which are very like
animalculae. Physiologists may think it dirty to
grub about in the grass ; botanists may think it dirtier
to grub about in an animal s inside. But there is
nothing that is not relevant to these more ancient
studies. There is no detail, from buttons to kangaroos,
that does not enter into the gay confusion of philosophy.
There is no fact of life, from the death of a donkey
to the General Post Office, which has not its place to
dance and sing in, in the glorious Carnival of theology.
Therefore I make no apology if I have asked the
reader, in the course of these remarks, to think about
things in general. It is not I, but George Frederick
Watts, who asks the reader to think about things in
general. If he has not done this, he has failed. If he
has not started in us such trains of reflection as I am
now concluding and many more and many better, he
has failed. And this brings me to my last word.
Now and again Watts has failed. I am afraid that it
may possibly be inferred from the magniloquent
language which I have frequently, and with a full
consciousness of my act, applied to this great man,
that I think the whole of his work technically
triumphant. Clearly it is not. For I believe that
often he has scarcely known what he was doing ; I
believe that he has been in the dark when the lines
came wrong ; that he has been still deeper in the dark
and things came right. As I have already pointed out,
75
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
the vague lines which his mere physical instinct would
make him draw, have in them the curves of the Cosmos.
His automatic manual action was, I think, certainly
a revelation to others, certainly a revelation to himself.
Standing before a dark canvas upon some quiet
evening, he has made lines and something has happened.
In such an hour the strange and splendid phrase of
the Psalm he has literally fulfilled. He has gone on
because of the word of meekness and truth and of
righteousness. And his right hand has taught him
terrible things.
