Part 1

G. F. WATTS

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 32

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 48

MAMMON 52

DEATH CROWNING INNOCENCE 54

A STORY FROM BOCCACCIO 56

LORD LYTTON 58

DAWN 60

EVE REPENTANT 62

LOVE AND DEATH 64

WILLIAM MORRIS 66

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 68

THOMAS CARLYLE 70

GOOD LUCK TO YOUR FISHING 74

_The Photogravures are from photographs by Fredk. Hollyer. Permanent photographs of works of Watts, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holbein, and of pictures in the Dublin and Hague Galleries can be obtained of Fredk. Hollyer, 9 Pembroke Square, Kensington._

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 unending 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 bricklayers, 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 nineteenth 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 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 thundered on platforms or financiers who captured continents, 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 unintelligible. 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 generation 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 Strafford and the great High Churchmen on the one hand; the Moslem frenzy of the English Commons, the worship of the English law upon the

other; both seemed distant and ridiculous. The new Cavalier despised the old Cavalier even more than he despised the Roundhead. The last stand of English chivalry dwindled sharply to the solitary figure of the absurd old country gentleman drinking wine out of an absurd old flagon. The great roar of Roundhead psalms which cried out that the God of Battles was loose in English meadows shrank to a single snuffle. The new and polite age saw the old and serious one exactly as we see the early Victorian era: they saw it, that is to say, not as splendid, not as disastrous, not as fruitful, not as infamous, not as good or bad, but simply as ugly. Just as we can see nothing about Lord Shaftesbury but his hat, they could see nothing about Cromwell but his nose. There is no doubt of the shock and sharpness of the silent transition. The only difference is that accordingly as we think of man and his nature, according to our deepest intuitions about things, we shall see in the Restoration and the _fin de siècle_ philosophy a man waking from a turbid and pompous dream, or a man hurled from 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 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 we 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 restrained 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 something arid and over-pompous about them: a newer and gayer philosophy may be passing before us and 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 abstractions 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 deprecating, his soul to all appearance of an almost confounding clarity and innocence. But although these appearances accurately represent the truth about him, though he is in reality modest and even fantastically 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 impudence. 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 childlike 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.

Humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as cynicism, 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 excessive 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 the matter really was. According to the later æsthetic 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 everyone 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 characteristic 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

relation of unimpeachable correctness: in their scheme of things it may be true, or rather it is true, that the æsthetic was confused with the utilitarian, that good gardens were turned so to speak into bad cornfields, and a valuable temple into a useless post-office. But in so far as they had this fundamental idea that art must be linked to life, and to the strength and honour of nations, they were a hundred times more broad-minded and more right than the new ultra-technical school. The idea of following art through everything for itself alone, through extravagance, 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 of 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 universalists: 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 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.

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 equilibrium 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.