i-. i GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS PORTRAIT BY HIMSELF GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS J. E. PHYTHIAN WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PREFACE From the first two paragraphs of the third chapter of this little book the reader will learn why it has been added to the books already published on Watts and his work. The subject is one of interest not easily exhausted ; and, perhaps, other things equal, only varied point of view and emphasis are needed to justify the writing of many books upon it. The reader will judge better than the writer how fiir this one fulfils the requirement. I am permitted to express to Mrs. Watts my grate- ful thanks for giving me much interesting informa- tion, also for looking through the book before its publication, and pointing out several errors in matters of fact which 1 have thus been able to correct. One such error is more easily set right here than in the text. The pamphlet. What should a Picture say I was not actually written by Mr. Watts, but was compiled vi PREFACE from shorthand notes, made at the time, of a con- versation between Mr. Watts and Mrs. Barnett. It should be added that the reproduction of The Good Samaritan — that fine portrayal of weakness confiding in gentle, kindly strength — is taken from a picture at Limnerslease, not from the one at Manchester. J. ERNEST PHYTHIAN. Holmes Chapel, Cheshire, September 1906. CONTENTS PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY . . . . I II. CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL . . • III. MYTH AND LEGEND . . . 6o IV. CHIVALRY . . . . 83 V. AN EPIC OF HUMANITY . . . 9I VI. LIFE, LOVE, DEATH AND JUDGMENT . . I I 5 VII. FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY . . I28 VIII. LANDSCAPE . . . . I32 IX. PORTRAITURE . . . . 1 49 X. CONCLUSION . ■ . . *175 INDEX 85 \ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS . . FronttSpicce LOVE AND DEATH . . . . 20 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. . . . 42 PHYSICAL ENERGY . . . . 54 THE CHILDHOOD OF ZEUS . . . 68 GOOD LUCK TO YOUR FISHING ! . . .JO DAWN . . ... 74 DAPHNE . . . . . y 6 ASPIRATIONS . . . . 84 SIR GALAHAD . . . . 86 THE HAPPY WARRIOR . * . . . 88 ‘ FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS ’ . . 90 THE SLUMBER OF THE AGES . . . 96 MAMMON . . . . . 102 EVE TEMPTED . . . . I O4 EVE REPENTANT . . . . I06 ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE . . .112 ARIADNE IN NAXOS . . . . II4 X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS LOVE AND LIFE . PAGE I l 6 TIME, DEATH AND JUDGMENT Il 8 LOVE TRIUMPHANT 120 PRAYER 124 HOPE 128 NAPLES 00 ST. AGNESE, MENTONE . 140 A RAIN CLOUD 142 CARDINAL MANNING 154 HON. MRS. PERCY WYNDHAM 156 THOMAS CARLYLE 166 ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON 168 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 170 HERR JOACHIM . 172 The abo-ve pictures are reproduced from photographs taken by F. HoUyer. I INTRODUCTORY When Watts, while yet little more than a youth, set himself to use the art of painting rather to suggest great thoughts than to give pleasure to the eye, he was far from creating a precedent in English art. A certain school of criticism would probably say that he was only furnishing the clearest proof that he was an Englishman. William Hogarth, who has been de- scribed, not by his countrymen alone, as the father of modern painting, used the art to lash vice and to stimulate virtue. At a later date, William Blake expressed the desire to be the Swedenborg of painting, and much of his art was a record of his visions of the spiritual world. ‘ As long as humanity is humanity,’ said Watts, ‘man will yearn to ascend the heights human footsteps may not tread, and long to lift the veil that shrouds the enigma of being, and he will most prize the echo of this longing in even the incoherent expression of literature, music, and art.’ It was even B 2 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS more than this that Blake believed himself to be doing in his painting. Hogarth and Blake, the one positive, the other imaginative, in mental temperament, are only extreme cases of the marked tendency of English art to go beyond mere jesthetic aims. It would fain cultivate the wliole field of life ; and, if the phrase may be allowed, would trench it deeply. English portrait painting in the eighteenth century showed a fuller interpretation of character than the contemporary art of other countries ; our landscape painters were the first close students of nature ; our subject painters could not rest content with the beautiful presentation of matter of little interest or importance in itself ; they must tell a story, illustrate literature or history, enforce religion and morals. This is not to say that such purposes have been absent from the art of other countries. It is a question of degree. In England the importance of the subject of a picture receives unusual emphasis, and themes are admitted which else- where would be deemed suitable only for literature, and are treated with an expressiveness that elsewhere would be held to go beyond the limits of a work of art in which aesthetic considerations had their proper place. Thus M. Chesneau describes some of Watts’s pictures as ‘ complicated and laboured compositions. INTRODUCTORY 3 in which the plastic element is overpowered by the subject, and which, according to the Latin conception of art, can only be regarded as errors/ Here is matter for much controversy ; but these things are only mentioned by way of approach to Watts’s point of view with regard to art. His predecessors in this country had given to English art its distinctive character. Among his older contemporaries were men such as Dyce and Haydon, who sought in their various ways to put art to lofty purpose. About Turner, whose career was closing when that of Watts was opening, more will be said shortly. Among Watts’s younger contemporaries were Holman Hunt, Millais and Dante Rossetti, who initiated and carried on, in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, a vigorous revolt against academic tradition and routine, and who, together with Madox Brown, helped to deliver English art from a triviality, both of subject and treat- ment, into which it was lapsing. Watts was not, then, a solitary innovator in this country when he asserted for the artist the right, nay, almost laid upon him the duty, of having aims going beyond the bounds of art considered merely as the giving of gesthetic pleasure, and of putting those aims in the very forefront of his endeavour. No saying of his has been oftener quoted than the following, in 4 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS which he has stated the main purpose of his own work : ‘ My intention has not been so much to paint pictures that will charm the eye, as to suggest thoughts that will appeal to the imagination and the heart, and kindle all that is best and noblest in humanity.’ This has been interpreted to mean that Watts did not much care whether or not his pictures were beautiful in themselves so long as their meaning was clearly and forcibly expressed. In an ultimate sense this may be true. If he had been put to choice between beauty and clear and forcible expression of thought and feel- ing, he would have chosen the latter — at least, for some of his works. But he was rarely put to this choice. In fact it is easier for the painter of symbolic and allegorical pictures to make his work beautiful than it is for the landscape, genre, historical, or por- trait painter ; because he is more independent of mere facts which are far from being necessarily beautiful. The following passage, which has been quoted against Watts, as showing him indiiferent to art ns such^ is really in his favour. * Then there is another class of picture, whose purpose it is to convey suggestion and idea. You are not to look at that picture as an actual repre- sentation of facts, for it comes under the same category as dreams, visions, aspirations, and we have nothing very distinct except the sentiment, the thought, which INTRODUCTORY 5 the artist produces by the whole effect. If the paint- ing is bad — the writing, the language of art — it is a pity. The picture is not so good as it should be, but the thought is there, and the thought is what the artist wanted to express, and it is, or should be, impressed upon the spectator.^ Here is the clear assertion that, if the art be bad, the picture is not so good as it might and ought to be ; and, elsewhere, W atts has shown that he well knew that thought was best expressed — as it certainly is, whether in literature or painting — by good art ; for he says : ‘ Heroic art must be noble in its treatment of the means at its disposition, line, colour and texture, and must have a correspondingly noble subject, though subject has perhaps less to do with it than character of utterance ’ ; and, again : ‘ A great work of art is a noble theme treated in a noble manner, awakening our best and most reverential feelings, touching our generosity, our tenderness, or disposing us generally to seriousness — a subject of human endur- ance, of human justice, of human aspiration and hope, depicted worthily by the special means art has in her power to use ’ ; and, again : * The highest subjects demand the noblest treatment ; otherwise there results some shock to our sense of congruity.’ That a lofty appeal to thought and feeling must inevitably be in- compatible with good art in painting, would have been 6 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS as absurd a statement to Watts, as to his friend Tenny- son would have been a similar statement with regard to the relation of thought and feeling to good art in poetry. It is worth while, I think, in order further to em- phasise Watts’s regard for art as such, and it will also be otherwise interesting, to quote one or two passages from his estimate of the art of Haydon, appended to Tom Taylor’s edition of the Autobiography of that unhappy painter. ‘ I think we shall find, upon examination,’ says Watts, ‘that all art v/hich has been really and permanently successful has been the exponent of some great principle of mind or matter, — the illustration of some great truth, — the translation of some paragraph out of the book of nature. If Haydon read therein and strove to expound the lesson, he read too hastily to understand fully, and did not, like Demosthenes, take pains to perfect a defective utter- ance. His art is defective in principle and wanting in attractiveness, — not sufficiently beautiful to please, — not possessing those qualities of exact imitation which attract, amuse, give confidence, and even flatter, be- cause they, in a manner, take the spectator into partner- ship, and make him feel as if they were almost suggestions of his own. — “This is what I have seen, and what I would do, if I had time to paint ; a7ich^ to INTRODUCTORY 7 son pittore.'^'^ He further says of Haydon : ‘To particularise — I should say that his touch is generally woolly, and his surface disagreeable ; that the dabs of white on the lights and the dabs of red in the shadows are untrue and unpleasing ; that his draperies are deficient in richness and dignity, and his general effect much less good than one would expect from the good- ness of parts, which I think arises principally from the coarseness of the handling ; that his expressions of anatomy and general perception of form are the best by far that can be found in the English school ; and I feel even a direction towards something that is only to be found in Phidias. But this is not true invariably : his proportion is very often defective, especially in the arms of his figures, and his hands and feet, though well understood, are often dandified and uncharacter- istic.’ All the passages quoted above are, of course, of general interest, as showing how Watts thought both about the principles and the practice of his art. They are of particular interest with reference to the point we are considering at the moment ; because they show that Watts was the reverse of indifferent to appro- priateness and beauty of expression and to good crafts- manship. His chief aim might be to suggest great thoughts rather than to charm the eye ; but he knew 8 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS that the latter was essential to the complete success of the former. Dull painting is of no more use than dull talking or writing. One is reminded of a verse in Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House : “ Beauty deludes.” O shaft well shot, To strike the mark’s true opposite ! That ugly good is scorn’d proves not ’Tis beauty lies, but lack of it. To whatever extent any one may think that Watts’s work fails in beauty, this at least is certain : it is not because beauty was undervalued by him. At the same time, he would not make it the be-all and the end-all of art ; and we shall find him, more than once, when moved to give expression to his horror of evil, imagin- ing for its personification, such creatures as Pope must surely have conjured up when he wrote Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As, to be hated, needs but to be seen. With regard to this, one ventures to say that it will be an evil day when the grotesque and the horrible are banished from the domain of art, and evil is tolerated, and even welcomed, as so often now, if only it be seductively beautiful in appearance. And even in such pictures as Mammon and The Minotaur, where these monstrous creatures appear, we find a dignity in the treatment, a power in the design, and a harmony in INTRODUCTORY 9 the colour, that satisfy the aesthetic sense, even while a moral revulsion is being aroused. But such pictures as these are exceptional with W atts ; and, in the great majority of his imaginative works, the thoughts and feelings that inform them are such as are not merely compatible with, but even require, without reserve or exception, beauty of expression, sometimes resplendent, sometimes restrained, and sometimes subdued to a quietude that will go hand in hand with sadness. We have to consider, however, that while this may be true, and while Watts may have recognised its truth, he may, oftener than not, have failed to wed truth and beauty in practice. The appeal must finally be, not to what he has thought and said, but to what he has done. Are his pictures, we have to ask, beautiful in tone, colour, line, etc., apart from the quality of their subject-matter ? The answer is a clear affirma- tive. I'he following incident is instructive in this connexion. The present writer was on one occasion in St. PauRs Cathedral with a friend who was skilled in both' architecture and painting, and who caught sight of Wattses TimCy Deaths and Judgment^ hung against one of the great piers of the nave, before he was near enough to distinguish the figures in it, much less their purport. ‘ What is that ? ’ he exclaimed. ‘ I can’t see what it is, and I don’t care ; but it is a wonderfully o GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS fine thing !’ This is true of Watts’s works with few if any exceptions : they play upon the emotions through the sight as music through hearing ; and — an important point, to be considered later, with reference to individual pictures — the art fits the thought as sym- pathetically written music fits the words of a song. To accomplish this was his desire. Sir William Rich- mond quotes Watts as saying: ‘I would like my work to appeal to the eye and mind as music appeals to the ear and heart. I have something that I want to say which may be useful to and touch mankind, and to say it as well as I can in form and colour is my endea- vour ; more than that I cannot do.’ At the Tate Gallery, Watts’s Psyche, having been purchased under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest, hangs apart from the pictures given by himself. F acing it on the opposite wall is another Psyche, by Lord Leighton. More than any other pictures in the same room these two arouse at first glance aesthetic emotion. We shall shortly compare Turner and Watts with regard to the subject of their paintings. We may compare them also with regard to the quality we are now considering. It is their pictures at the Tate Gallery, more than those of all but a few other painters, with the beauty or impressiveness of which we could well rest content apart from INTRODUCTORY 1 1 any question as to what they mean or what they represent. One cannot but think that some critics have ap- proached Watts’s work with an insurmountable preju- dice. * He has tried to suggest great thoughts,’ they seem to say, ‘therefore his art must be bad.’ They are angry because the artist asks them to think ; and the anger disturbing both their vision and their logic, they conclude that, because they see that which they do not wish to see, what they wish to see cannot be there. Such questions as these cannot be settled by appeal to authority. It may be useful, however, to quote v/hat a fellow -painter, one whose work is not of the didactic kind, has to say of the art of Watts as such. In a lecture delivered in connexion with the Manchester Watts Exhibition in 1905, Mr. George Clausen says : ‘ Every tone, every suggestion has its meaning ; take for instance the dark and threatening sky in the picture, Can these Bones Live ? But these artifices are not at first apparent. They are used so splendidly that the pictures are in themselves beautiful as decorations, were there no meaning in them at all ; and if it is possible to name one governing quality in Watts, I should say that it is this sense of beauty, a conscious- ness of the presence of beauty in everything, except 12 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS when we take the trouble to mar it ourselves ; and that his aim in all he did was to bring others to a con- sciousness of this that the world might in some way be bettered by his great gifts/ There are other points that would have to be con- sidered if we were attempting a complete discussion of the relation of meaning to beauty in works of art, and in the work of Watts in particular. Not to prove or disprove theories, however, but to make it clear that Watts sought to unite thought with beauty, and did, in fact, bring them together generally, if not always and in every particular, is sufficient for our immediate purpose. Let us pass now to some general remarks about the subject-matter of his works ; and, little likely as this might be thought beforehand, we shall find it instructive briefly to compare his work with that of Turner, whose day, as already said, was closing when that of Watts was opening. Both Turner and Watts enriched the public art collections of their country by the gift of a consider- able portion of their life-work. This might have meant no more than that each of them was public- spirited and had confidence in the great and lasting value of what he had wrought. But the two gifts share a further, and, for the purpose of this book, a most instructive significance. The work of Turner INTRODUCTORY *3 and the work of Watts have much in common, both as art, and in those aims that go beyond the aims of art in the narrow acceptation of the word. The two artists are complementary to each other. We call Turner a landscape painter. The word is a poor one at the best ; but we have not a better one and it has to serve. At its highest, landscape painting is one means of expressing the thought and emotion awakened in men by the beauty and grandeur of earth and sea and sky. Strictly, perhaps, all animal, in- cluding human, life ought to be excluded from its domain. Few landscape painters do this ; and, such life once admitted, we pass, by insensible degrees, to a point where its interest becomes equal to or greater than that of the landscape. Comparatively few of T urner’s finished drawings and paintings are without some human interest. Pure landscape is to be found mainly in his studies and sketches. And in many, and among those some of the most important, of his finished works, the human interest predominates. Many of his pictures, perhaps most of them, may be compared to the bird^s- eye views with the aid of which Mr. Thomas Hardy carries on the action of his drama “The Dynasts.’’ He takes us to an exceeding high place and shows us, far below, the actors in the drama as they pass from one scene of action to another. In like manner 14 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS Turner paints the drama of human life as seen from the outside, from afar, on its stage of earth and sea, with the sky over all ; often, indeed, with little or no other surrounding than the shelters and store-houses man has formed for himself with varied ingenuity far exceeding that with which the bees build cells for their honey-stores, and the birds, nests for their young. Turner’s feeling for the human drama was constant ; his treatment of it was casual. He made no attempt to build up a formal epic ; but he collected an immense amount of material for one ; and the epic takes form in the mind of the student of his works. At times a strong appeal to his imagination would compel a methodical and concentrated expression. In particular was this the case with the story of Carthage, which he told, in his way, in a succession of pictures. He was similarly moved by the fortunes and the fate of Rome and of Venice. Myth and legend find their place in his work, in such oil paintings as T/.'C Garden of the Hesperidcsj Apollo and the Python y and Ulysses deriding PolyphemuSy and in such Liber Studiorum plates as Aesacus and Hesperky Procris and Cephalus and Jason, We may, in estimating Turner’s work, have to emphasise his portrayal of the world in which man lives ; though, even then, the beauty and the grandeur of that world were, for him, a INTRODUCTORY 15 revelation to man of the deep harmonies of his own nature ; but man in the midst of his world was never far from Turner’s thought, and was rarely omitted from his drawings and paintings. What resemblance and what difference is there between Turner and Watts? They both interpreted human life and destiny ; but that which Turner treated casually, Watts treated systematically; his main pur- pose, only partially attained, being to build up a formal epic of humanity. Again, that which Turner looked on and showed us from a distance. Watts looked at and showed us from close at hand ; nay, we may say, from within. Such a myth as that of Procris and Cephalus, when painted by Turner, touches us with but a gentle melancholy; Watts’s Orpheus and Eurydtce awakens a poignant sympathy. It is in this way that the two artists, the two poets, the two seers — for they were all these, as all these are finally one — were complementary to each other. Watts underestimated, perhaps, the human interest in Turner’s work. Comparing Turner with Michel Angelo, Raphael and Titian, he says : ‘ lacking the directly human appeal to human sympathies, his work must be put on a lower level.’ We are not concerned either to accept or reject such a standard of worth. The saying is instructive to us as evidence of Watts’s con- i6 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS sciousness of the intensity of his own realisation of the human drama. What with Turner is general, with him is individual. His work is to Turner’s what Shakespeare’s plays are to mere historical narrative. Where Turner reminds us that man goeth forth unto his labour until the evening, Watts drives home the final significance of the labour : that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. At times Turner gets almost, if not quite, on W atts’s ground. The young god in Apollo and the Python is a Sir Galahad fighting ; and the emotion stirred by The Old Temeraire is quick and individual, the ship, though a thing without life, calling out our sympathy as if it could be conscious that the day of its strength and pride had gone by. Watts strikes the same note in the old horse of his 'Patient Life of Un- requited Toil, In his landscapes he is on Turner’s ground, though, when there, he reports things with less formal art and in more general terms. A full realisation of the human drama, the constant thought of men not merely as units, but as members one of another, the living and the dead and the generations yet unborn, is the feature of Watts’s work upon which we must seize at the outset and not let go until the end. It is the guiding thought that gives to all the rest unity and direction. No lessening of the INTRODUCTORY 17 significance of the individual is implied by it, but quite the reverse. The individual is raised immeasur- ably above what he could otherwise be, because he can help to make or mar the lives of others, because he has entered into an inheritance, and, in due time, must leave it to others, diminished or increased. It is to this that Wattses portraits owe much of their impres- siveness ; for he did not merely or mainly paint the portraits of those who came to him, with money in their hands, to have their features and their dress recorded, for pride or the pleasure of their friends ; he singled out those of whom he believed that, by reason of their thoughts or deeds, the people of the days to come would be grateful to have a visible record, revealing the spirit through form and expression. So the meaning of the portraits which he has given to the national collection is deepened, if, as we stand before them, we think of the subject-pictures in the National Gallery of British Art ; and the full significance of any work of Watts is only to be grasped by reference to all else that he has done. Happily he has himself made it easy, for any one that will take a little trouble, to study his life-work as a whole, not merely by means of reproductions, but through the original paintings ; for, in addition to the gifts to the national collections in London, and to various provincial galleries and c 1 8 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS museums, a large and representative collection of his works is to be retained in the gallery specially built for it, close by his country-home near Guildford, and there, those who care to do so will be able, amid beautiful surroundings, closely associated with the artist, quietly to enjoy his generous gift. It is customary to call a man with aims such as W atts had, a teacher. The term is not inappropriate, but it is inadequate. It is not sufficiently sympathetic. It suggests mere instruction, with only an external relation between the instructed and the instructor. Bunyan’s ‘ Mr. Interpreter ’ is more what we need. An artist does not only give us information ; if he be worth his name, he appeals to our emotions. So Tolstoy in ‘ What is Art ? ’ says that imitation, the mere statement of facts cannot serve as a measure of the quality of art, ‘for the chief characteristic of art is the infection of others with the feelings the artist has experienced, and infection with a feeling is not only not identical with description of the accessories of what is transmitted, but is usually hindered by super- fluous details. The attention of the receiver of the artistic impression is diverted by all these well-observed details, and they hinder the transmission of feeling even when it exists.’ M. de la Sizeranne, who denies beauty to much, at any rate, of W^atts’s work, admits INTRODUCTORY 19 that it has the power thus described by Tolstoy. ‘And yet you linger,’ he says, in English Conternporary Paintings ‘ for whilst W atts’s colour distracts the eye, his ideas penetrate to the depths of the soul, and slowly arouse something that was sleeping there. These myths, so laboriously brought forth by the artist apart from all picturesque feeling, by the mere strength of his character and the single energy of his heart, we recognise with surprise are human, are of the present day, are alive.’ The French writer has, so I think, both misjudged Watts’s art, and often mis- understood his meaning ; but it is clear that W atts has stirred his feeling. Would not Watts have expressed his main purpose better, if instead of saying that he wished to suggest great thoughts, he had said that he wished to awaken deep and pure emotions ? He has done both ; but one thinks that the former is always subordinate to the latter. When, for example, he suggests the thought that death is really the friend, both of love and of life, it is not that we may be convinced of this as a fact, but that recognition of the fact may change our feeling with regard to death, in the same way as the thought of St. Paul about the meaning of the sacrifice of Christ made him exclaim, in a rush of emotion ; ‘ O death, where is thy sting ? O grave, where is thy victory ? ’ 20 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS Watts painted what he thought he had seen clearly, because he had also felt it deeply, and wished to arouse like thought and feeling in others. It was quite simple thought and feeling that Watts thus sought to awaken. He was not a philosopher building up an elaborate system. If his language be understood, that which he has to say will be heard by the common people gladly. His pictures gave real pleasure in Canon Barnett’s Whitechapel Exhibitions, and it was a great satisfaction to him to know this. The gift of so much of his work to public galleries shows that he hoped to be of use to the many. He might, of course, have used an art-language that would have made his meaning more immediately and easily intelligible. One often sees people of the kind he desired to influence, leaving his pictures after a brief stare of bewilderment. They w'ould have no such difficulty with Sir Luke Fildes’s picture The Doctor, or Mr. Frank Bramley’s Hopeless Dazvn, Was Watts justified in putting initial difficulties in the way of large numbers, indeed, of the great majority, of the people who would see his works ? Take, for example, the picture. Love and Death. The story of the incident that led to the painting of this picture has often been told. Watts was painting the portrait of a young nobleman of great promise, who, however, was LOVE AND DEATH INTRODUCTORY 21 suffering from incurable disease. All that human skill could do for him, was done. Every care was lavished upon him ; but the disease would not be denied. Each time that Watts saw him its ravages were more apparent ; and then came the inevitable end. This sorrowful incident so wrought upon him that he felt impelled to express his emotion, and so he painted, not the picture of a dying youth, with loving, sorrowing friends around him, but an allegory of Death : a grey-robed figure, gently but firmly putting aside Love, who would fain prevent Death’s entry into the house of Life. It was said a few sentences back that Watts could have made his meaning more easily and immediately intelligible. This is true, perhaps, only as to part of his meaning. In this instance he could have shown that death was a sorrowful thing ; he could have evoked feelings of sympathy as is done by Sir Luke Fildes’s picture. But how better than by the gentle mien and bowed head of the Death in his picture could he have said, as he wanted to say, that death, could we know all that it means, would be found no foe to love and life ; and that love should meet death calmly, not with frantic resistance ? Its language understood, such a picture as this will come up before the mental vision in time of sorrow, bearing a message of healing. 22 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS A brief comparison has been made between Watts and Turner ; it will be useful, I think, before closing this introductory chapter to make a still more brief comparison between Watts and another painter already mentioned : William Blake. Both of them sought, through their art, to interpret the deep things of life ; they gave form to thought and feeling. There was, however, this great difference between them : Blake saw visions ; they came before him unbidden ; visions not only of the life we are now living, and of the world we see with the outward sight, but of the life beyond death, and of the world that is hidden from mortal gaze. Of these visions many of Blake’s pictures and designs were a mere record. Like Dante, he gave form both to heaven and to hell. Watts was no less earnest than Blake, but he was not a visionary. He gives form in his own allegorical and symbolic inven- tions almost exclusively to that which comes within the range of common human experience. Other than this, the utmost he will do is to affirm that beyond the darkness of death there is light ; but Mystery and Silence guard the portal through which men will pass into it. He was too intensely conscious of the spirituality of the present life to use his imagina- tive gifts in picturing a life to come. The field of time is in the land of eternity; our immediate work is. INTRODUCTORY 23 or may be, wholly spiritual; and the things about us are all aids to such a life if only we know how to use them. To miss their use, and idly dream of life and work in other fields beyond our sight, is by no means a sign of spirituality. Excess of such dreaming was one of the cardinal errors of the Middle Ages. Belief in evolution is slowly but surely correcting it. The work immediately to hand is not only more than we manage to accomplish, but greater than we can conceive. ‘We are but,’ said Watts, in one of his essays, ‘as tools in the hands of the unthinkable Designer, for the work- ing out of, to us, an unseen, great purpose. . . .We know our solar system is impelled onward towards some point of space. Humanity seems to be subject to the same law, impelled by an irresistible impulse onward.’ W atts has been quoted as saying that ‘ as long as hu- manity is humanity men will yearn to ascend the heights that human footsteps may not tread, and long to lift the veil that shrouds the enigma of being.’ He himself, in his art at least, held such yearning and longing under severe control, and found and proclaimed eternity in time, and the spiritual in the actual. The place whereon we stand is holy ground. Watts said that, if he could have done so, he would have expressed himself in words rather than in painting. None but those who think that literature is the only art 24 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS which can legitimately be used to convey a meaning, will regret that Watts found it easier to paint than to write. More heed is given in these days to speech and writing than to the work of the painter. Probably it always was, and always will be so. Yet we need not regret that one of the most earnest, generous, sympathetic, imaginative, and eloquent men of his time, found that it was in painting chiefly that he could be eloquent. We get swifter impressions from paintings than from books and poems, a glance is enough, if they are before us ; and the thought that recalls them is often easier than that which calls up words. And, despite the criticism that lays down a hard-and-fast rule, not based on the history of art> and ignoring facts at every turn, to the effect that art should only be concerned with beauty, most of those who read these pages probably will not think that art cannot and should not be the medium for a life- endeavour to suggest great thoughts, and to quicken deep and pure emotions. II CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL The biography of George Frederick Watts is little more than the story of how he formed, and then, through the years of a long life, carried out the purpose of making an inborn art-gift of the utmost value to his fellow-men. A life devoted to such a task cannot be filled with stirring incident ; or if there were such incident, it would be accidental, not an outcome of the man’s character and work. Watts, in fact, lived from beginning to end a retired life, almost the life of a recluse ; not that, like hermit or monk, he might forget this world in the contemplation of a world to come ; but that, by reserving his time and strength for his work, he might be of more use to his fellows. He was born in London on the 23rd of February, 1817, and lived until the ist of July, 1904. Almost as early as his hand could hold a pencil he began to draw and to paint ; and he only laid down his work when he laid down his life. During the intervening 25 26 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS years how many things happened in the world of art ! When his friends smiled with pleasure at his earliest drawings, Turner, Constable, John Crome, Lawrence, and many others of what was little more than the second generation of the English school of paint- ing, were still at work. He was already a painter of repute when Holman Hunt, Millais and Rossetti began their Pre-Raphaelite crusade. He lived to see, and to form his own estimate of, the impressionism of our own day. But, whatever changes might take place, he only narrowed and deepened the channel he had made for his art in early days. A few years before his birth, his father had migrated from Herefordshire to London ; and the family is said to have been Welsh in origin. It can neither be proved nor disproved that he became the artist he was because of the Celtic blood in his veins. It is not to our purpose to argue the point here. The qualities, both of the man and of his art are suggestive of a mixed, rather than of a purely Celtic, descent. Though imaginative, he was yet positive in mental temperament. The aim of many of his subject- pictures was the promotion of practical reforms ; he did not, as already noted, see visions and dream dreams. He was intensely methodical in work and tenacious of purpose. There was much in him, therefore, with CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 27 which the average Englishman likes to credit himself. Probably he was not more given to melancholy than was Tennyson, an East- Anglian both by birth and descent, whom in many ways he closely resembled, and whose influence is evident in much of his work. We even find him reproving Tennyson for despondency, and telling the poet that he would not have let King Arthur ‘ talk like that.* All we can say is that he ma'j have been a Celt by ancestry and that this may account in part for what he was and did. Ill-health, however, almost chronic, was an indisputable factor in his life and work, and may have accounted for some of the ‘ Celtic * characteristics often attributed to him. As to neither general education nor art did Watts go through the ordinary routine. He was a delicate child, subject to prostrating headaches ; and it was with the help, not of schoolmasters, but of his father, that he climbed the first rounds of the ladder of learn- ing. Here we inquire solely about those parts of his early training that may have stimulated his imagination. The Bible figures early and late in the education of Celt and Saxon alike, and the young Watts was no exception to this rule. In addition to the Bible we hear of Homer and Sir Walter Scott. Readers of Ruskin*s Pra’terita will recollect that he, born only two years later than Watts, places the Bible, Homer 28 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS and Sir Walter Scott’s novels in the forefront of the literature with which he was made acquainted in early years. From the Bible, and from home-teaching based on the Bible, Watts, like Ruskin, would derive that sense of life and its powers and opportunities as a trust to be used in accordance with the will of the giver of life, and for the good of his fellow-creatures, that pervades his life and work. If this be conven- tional language, the justification for it lies in the fact that Watts’s life was in this sense conventional, as, also, was Ruskin’s. By his own confession he sought to be a worthy modern successor of the man whom our English Bible calls ‘ Ecclesiastes ; or. The Preacher.’ It is clear that he received powerful impressions from the drama of creation and the early history oi mankind as set forth in the book of Genesis. We cannot doubt, in view of his after-work, that, when he first read that story, the persons in it, and the parts they played, rose up before him in mental picture ; and that then, as afterwards, there was, for him, behind the human agents, a supreme actor, not to be portrayed. No one can read the Old Testament without realising the linking together of the generations of men, of which the Preacher says that ‘one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh : but the earth CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 29 abideth for ever/ Such a realisation of human life we have seen that Watts and Turner had in common though the former gave it the more intimate, the more individual, and therefore the more intense, interpreta- tion. We shall more fully appreciate Watts’s indebted- ness to the Bible, and also find how much he owed to Homer, when we come to the consideration of his subject-pictures. From Sir Walter Scott he could not but gain a view of life, in the best sense of the words, romantic and chivalrous. Illustrations of Scott’s poems and novels are the earliest of his essays in art of which there is record ; and it seems to have come as naturally to him to express himself through form and colour as Pope said it came naturally to him to lisp in numbers. The bent of the boy’s genius and inclination seems to have been too obvious for there to have been at any time the thought of training him for a commercial or pro- fessional career. We miss, in this case, the common story of opposition between sober parental plans and youthful enthusiasm. But though it was early settled, by him and for him, that he was to be an artist, his artistic training was destined to be as unconventional as had been his general education. He was almost entirely self-trained, or, to put it more correctly, he chose his own masters and learned from them in his own way. A very few weeks’ experience in the 30 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS schools of the Royal Academy seems to have brought the conviction that their routine could be of little use to him. But Homer had made him familiar with the myths and legends of the gods and heroes of Greece ; and, in the British Museum, he could see, in the figure- sculptures of the Parthenon, which Lord Elgin had brought to this country in 1812, how Pheidias and his fellow-sculptors had given noble form to those gods and heroes, and also how they had represented the actual people of their own day going up to the temple on the sacred hill, there to sacrifice to the chief pro- tectress-deity of their state and city. The Elgin marbles were, in fact, the chief teachers of his student- days, and a comparison of the noble severity, the impressive dignity, of these figure-sculptures of the best period of Greek art, with the figures of Watts’s own pictures and sculpture, shows that they were to him silent instructors from whom he acquired a sense of style, a sure grasp of what was essential, and an unerring rejection of all that was not material to the portrait, subject-picture, or landscape he had to paint, or the figure he had to model. Always, like a good story-teller. Watts allowed himself to be drawn aside by nothing that was irrelevant to his theme. It is not unimportant to bear in mind with reference to the influence of the Elgin marbles on the art of CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 31 Watts, that not a few of the figures are headless, and even armless, thus leaving for study such expression only as can be conveyed by the attitude or suggested movement of the body and lower limbs. Such expres- sion is far from being a negligible quantity, and so it is with Watts’s figures; they are alive in every part of them, and every part is conceived in true expressive relation to the whole. In the central figure of Ariadne in Naxos, for example, the listlessness of despair is shown in the droop of the head and neck on the shoulders, the heavy leaning of the body against the attendant maiden, and the arms and legs that only do not sink to the ground because of support they find but have not sought, as much as in the vacant, woe- begone expression of the face. When to the silent teaching of the greatest works of Greek sculpture Watts sought to add that of a living master, it was to a sculptor that he went. It seems, indeed, that in those days he rather leaned to- wards sculpture than towards painting. He frequented the studio of the sculptor William Behnes, watched him at work, did some modelling himself ; and though he was destined in the main to be a painter, he did sufficient, and sufficiently distinguished, work in sculp- ture to have kept his name alive had he practised no other art. His physical condition was such that model- 32 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS ling in wet clay, nay, even a damp atmosphere, was sufficient to induce rheumatism ; and it may be that this consideration had some influence in determining him to pursue painting rather than sculpture as his chief means of expression. However this may be, he so developed his skill in painting that a portrait of himself, executed when he was only seventeen years of age, surprises both by its realisation of character and its technical qualities ; and he was no more than twenty years old, as a comparison of dates will show, when two portraits and a picture by him were hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1837. The picture was The Wounded Heron. Again the technical skill is remarkable for one so young. The stricken bird, whose outstretched wings can no longer bear it aloft, falls heavily to the ground. In the distance a horseman is seen riding up to secure the prey. The picture has all the sense of space so necessary to its subject. Portraits and subject-pictures of the historical and classical kind then in vogue were the staple of his art for some years afterwards. His work as a portrait painter we shall consider at some length in a later chapter. We need say no more here than that, in these early days, it shows the influence of Vandyck and Gainsborough, and in some respects of Reynolds. But this, in the case of a young English CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 33 painter who had not yet been abroad, almost goes with- out saying. His figure-subjects might have been chosen by any other painter of his day ; they have so far no more individuality than if they had been drawn by lot. V ertumnus and Pomona^ GuideriuSy Arviragus and BelariuSy and Aurora — shades of the historical painters and of Etty we might say, and quickly pass along. But such a picture as the Aurora — we shall have to refer to it again — already attests a spirit and a technical quality that hold promise of great things. We might be accused of judging after the event ; but we can point to the fact that the picture was at once appreciated, and became the property of Mr. lonides, of whom and whose family Watts painted numerous portraits, through five generations, the last of them. Miss AgathoniJ^e lonidesy being as late in date as 1893. Nor was the ability of the young artist to receive the recognition of private patronage alone. The new Houses of Parliament having been completed, a Royal Commission was appointed to prepare a scheme for their decoration with historical pictures. A competi- tion was decided upon, and prizes were offered for cartoons for mural paintings. In July, 184.3, a hundred and forty designs were submitted to the Com- missioners by many artists, some of repute, and others with their reputation still to make. Among the latter n GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 34 was Watts ; and when the awards were published, it was found that his design, having for its subject Caractacus led in triumph through the streets of Rome, had gained for him a first prize of £,l,oo. He was at this time, we may note, twenty-six years of age. Watts was not asked to carry out his design. The Royal Commission was neither the first nor the last to lead to little practical result. The Caractacus was sold to a dealer, who dealt with it as a butcher deals with a carcase : cut it up, sold what parts of it were saleable, and made away with the remainder. Some fragments of it were exhibited in the Royal Academy Exhibition of Watts’s work in 1905. Indirectly, however, it had an important effect upon the artist’s career. The prize-money he had obtained for it enabled him to visit Italy. To the study of the masterpieces of Greek sculpture he was now to add the study of the master- pieces of Italian art. Many an artist has gone to Italy only to lose his individuality : to become a mere imitator of an older art instead of an interpreter of life and nature. It was not to be so with Watts. His individuality was too distinct to be merged in that of any master or masters, however great. He could learn from them, but in a better way than that of mere imitation. His stay in Italy was intended to be only a brief CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 35 one. In effect it lasted four years. He went first to Paris ; remained there a few weeks, and then went direct to Florence. He had a letter of introduction to Lord Holland, at that time British Minister at the Court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. So great was Watts’s diffidence that he did not present himself to Lord Holland until the day before he intended to leave Florence. The Minister was an enlightened patron of art, and, recognising the young painter’s merit, persuaded him to prolong his visit, as his own guest ; and, in the result, the stay in Italy lasted, as already stated, for four years instead of, perhaps, for as many months. As the guest of Lord Holland he met many people whose acquaintance or friendship meant much for him in after years in England. Not only this ; he painted numerous portraits while in Florence; and at Lord Holland’s country house, the Villa Careggi, he executed a fresco, the subject of which was a tragic incident in the history of the villa : the physician of Lorenzo dei Medici, suspected of poison- ing his master, being thrown down a well in punishment for his alleged crime. It was at this villa that Lorenzo died, so suddenly, as to give rise to the suspicion of murder. While in Italy Watts also painted several subject pictures, including a small Fata Morgana, His method of studying the works of the Italian 36 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS masters was not to make elaborate copies of them, but to live with them, as he had already lived with the Elgin marbles : to analyse them ; carefully to examine their technique ; and to make such studies as would help him the better both to catch their spirit and to understand their method. In his estimate of Haydon’s art, from which I have already quoted, we find the following echo of these early experiences : ‘ The Art of Phidias translated and expressed perfection of form in its full dignity and beauty ; that of Angelico, Perugino, F rancia and Raffaele, religion ; that of Michel Angelo the might of imagination ; the greater of the Venetians were the exponents of the power of nature in its rich harmony of colour ; Correggio is all sweetness ; Tintoretto is the Michel Angelo of colour and effect ; Rubens is profuse and generous as autumn ; and, if he is sometimes slovenly, he is so jovial and high-spirited that one forgives everything.^ These are not merely conclusions at which Watts arrived as to the great masters of art, but qualities in their work which, in varying degree, he felt and assimilated. He had lived with them, and, in a measure, he felt, saw and wrought as they did, yet remaining always himself. So Herr Muther, in his History of Modern Tainting^ referring to the old painters, says that W atts ‘ is, perhaps, the only painter CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 37 who can support an approach to them in every respect. Here is a man who has been able to live in himself far away from the bustle of exhibitions, a man who works now that he is old as soundly and freshly as when he was young, a man, also, who is always simple in his art, lucid, earnest, grandiose, impressive, and of monu- mental sublimity. Though he shows no trace of imita- tion he might have come straight from the Renaissance, so deep is his sense of beauty, so direct and so condensed is his power of giving form to his ideas.’ As to particular influences, we shall find Watts adopting a Raphaelesque arrangement for his great fresco at Lincoln’s Inn. Such men as Masaccio and Michel Angelo, however, would move him more than Raphael. The set of his genius and purpose, like theirs, was intensely dramatic ; and, to effect it, he needed to add force and movement to the static con- ceptions of form he had learned from the Elgin marbles. The enormous force of Tintoretto, also, did not escape him. The Venetians drove home to him, as to many other painters, the difference between colour and colours^ which may be compared with the difference between striking all the notes of a chord together and in succession. Colour does not merely enhance colour in Venetian painting, but each seems to merge into the harmony of all. In Florentine 38 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS painting the colours lie side by side, and we enjoy difference in unity rather than unity in difference. Watts’s colour was Venetian in this general sense. It had often, also, the Venetian glow and splendour ; but it had also qualities of northern gloom and mystery, and thus had a wider emotional range than that of Venice. The following reminiscence of a work of Titian, which appears in a pamphlet written years after the visit to Italy, answering the question ‘What should a Picture say?’ is instructive in view of the great intensity of Watts’s own work in portraiture. In the course of a discussion of literal and suggestive truth he says : ‘ In Titian’s great portrait of a man, in Florence, there is the sense of balance, in the highest degree. I cannot describe the picture. It is a man with grey eyes, and black clothing, with ordinary features, and standing straight before you. But I never forgot that man. You don’t think of the shape of his nostril, nor the light and shade on his forehead. Points in his nature have been ignored. Facts in his character have been accentuated — the whole man is there. That is art. The artist has seen and painted a truth other than material truth. In the case of Titian the language is as true and as beautiful as the idea. Sometimes the language is the only beauty, and in CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 39 other cases the idea is the only truth/ Such study of the old masters as is exemplified in the above quotations was far from being calculated to stifle individuality, but would rather stimulate and uplift it. We can find evidence again of the result of his stay in Italyin an essay written by him in the summer of 1 879, and contributed to the Nhieteenth Century of February in the following year. He asks if a great school of art is possible at the present day, not merely a number of individual artists, ‘ but a school, a group of painters, sculptors and architects, whose work collectively would have a force marking the age in which they live, becoming part of the history of the country to which they belong, and existing in the future as a last- ing monument of the best feelings and thoughts of the present time ? Will the people, say, of the twenty- third century be able to read what is best in our English history of the nineteenth century, its highest feeling, its purest and subtlest thought, by the light of those monuments of art now being produced or capable of being produced, as we read the history of Egypt, Greece and Italy in the legacies of art those countries have left for us ? W atts had travelled in Greece and Asia Minor, as well as in Italy, when he wrote this passage ; but we may be sure it was in Italy that the right of art to the large place in life that he here 40 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS claims for it was first impressed upon him. For there it had held that place for centuries, during the period we know as the Renaissance. ‘ Nothing notable was produced in Italy,’ says John Addington Symonds, ‘ between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries that did not bear the stamp and character of fine art. If the methods of science may be truly said to regulate our modes of thinking at the present time, it is no less true that, during the Renaissance, art exercised a like controlling influence. Not only was each department of the fine arts practised with singular success ; not only was the national genius to a very large extent absorbed in painting, sculpture, and architecture ; but the aesthetic impulse was more subtly and widely diffused than this alone would imply. It possessed the Italians in the very centre of their intellectual vitality, imposing its conditions on all the manifestations of their thought and feeling. So that even their shortcomings may be ascribed in a great measure to their inability to quit the aesthetic point of view.’ It was among the works of art of a people thus endowed, works of architecture, sculpture, painting, and the lesser arts, in cathedral, church, and palace, and even, we may say, in street and market-place, that W atts spent four years of the most impressionable time of his life ; when he had already achieved some success in art; the CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL -fi very means that had enabled him to visit Italy having been earned by work of the very kind in which Italian painters had greatly excelled. We must bear in mind also that, from an early age, Watts had felt it was his duty to use his powers for the good of his fellows. At the age of fifteen he had felt self-condemned because he had achieved nothing. Little wonder, then, that he returned from Italy fired with the hope of doing something to make art take in modern England a place at least not very far below that which it had held in the life of the Italy of the Renaissance. During his stay in Italy there was a second competi- tion for designs for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament. In this. Watts took no part. A third competition was arranged in 1846, and, on Lord Holland’s advice, he sent in a design having for its subject. King Alfred incithig the Saxons to prevent the Landing of the Danes. Again he was awarded a first prize, this time of 500. As before, he was not called upon to carry out his design ; but he was com- missioned to paint, in the Upper Waiting Hall of the Flouse of Lords, a fresco of St. George and the Dragon, which still exists, though in a very faded con- dition. The King Alfred cartoon was painted m Florence. After his return to England Watts continued to paint 42 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS portraits and subject-pictures : the main lines of work he had followed both before and during his visit to Italy. Already he had formed the purpose of painting for gift to the nation a series of portraits of his most distinguished contemporaries ; and the idea of a great series of historical and imaginative pictures was taking shape in his mind. The subject-pictures of 1 848 and the two following years, Lifers Illusions^ The People that sat in Darkness have seen a great Light — which was a design for a fresco — and The Good Samaritan^ show him already engrossed by the deeper questions of life which were to occupy his thought, and find expression in his art, to the end. The Good Samaritan was painted as a tribute of respect to Thomas Wright, a Manchester philanthropist who devoted himself to prison mission-work, and it was presented by the artist to the city of Manchester, where it now has a place of honour in the Municipal Art Gallery. This inci- dent is significant of Watt’s broad, human sympathy. To this period also belong several pictures the aim of which was to arouse sympathy with the poor and out- cast. They are as uncompromisingly realistic as Tom Hood’s ‘ Song of the Shirt ’ and ‘ The Bridge of Sighs.’ They are in fact a translation of these poems into painting. Their titles : Found Drowned^ The Se ms tress, Under a Dry Archway, and Irish Peasants I'HE GOOD SAMARITAN I 1 CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 43 during the Famine are sufficient almost to make them visible to any one who has not seen them, and unmis- takably suggest their intention. Watts may have lived apart from the multitude, but its labour and its sorrows were never far from his thought and sympathy. These were the years of the Pre-Raphaelite move- ment. Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti were ex- ploding their artistic bombs in the hitherto tranquil halls of Academic art. Their revolutionary principles had been formed by the study of nature, and they had been inspired by the Italian painters who preceded Raphael. While they were fighting for bare existence, W atts, by his portrait painting, was acquiring sufficient money to make it easier for him in after years to paint whom he liked and what he liked, and to devote his art to what he believed to be the highest ends. He was influenced but little by the Pre-Raphaelite movement. There are signs of increased attention to detail in por- traits he painted while the champions of nature were fighting their battle and Ruskin was cheering them on. Mr. Holman Hunt, in his ‘ Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,’ says : ‘ In respect to his fulness of rendering of the human form, I was fain to regard Watts as an ideal Pre-Raphaelite.’ The wish, one thinks, in mentally comparing the work of the two painters, was here the father to the thought — or at least 4 + GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS to some of it, if the parentage may be thus divided. Watts’s attitude towards Pre-Raphaelitism is perhaps more accurately gauged by Mr. Holman Hunt in a passage immediately following the above quotation ; ‘ He soon came to see my oft-retarded picture. I felt ashamed of its smallness, but he had the catholicity of interest for other work than his own that all true artists retain.’ Ruskin, who is said to have spoken of Watts as an artist ruined by studying the Greeks, tried to persuade him, if not to abandon Greek sculpture, at least to study botany. The patient never had the pre- scription so much as made up. In Ruskin’s ‘ Art of England ’ lecture on the ‘ Mythic Schools of Painting,’ with Watts and Burne-Jones as the painters selected for particular reference, little is said about W atts ; but ‘ his constant reference to the highest examples of Greek art in form ’ is mentioned in terms of praise. In 1857, Ruskin wrote : ‘ We have as far as I knozv^ at present among us, only one painter, G. F. Watts, who is capable of design in colour on a large scale. He stands alone among our artists of the old school in his perception of the value of breadth in distant masses, and in the vigour of invention by which such breadth must be sustained ; and his power of expression and depth of thought are not less remarkable than his bold conception of colour effect.’ In speaking of Watts as CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 45 ‘ an artist of the old ’ school, Ruskin must be understood to mean that he had not adopted the principle of close fidelity to nature, to which, of the three leaders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Mr. Holman Hunt was the only one to remain faithful ; Rossetti abandoning it almost before he had adopted it ; and Millais after the lapse of only a few years. Wattses own view of such matters is expressed in his pamphlet, ‘What should a Picture say?’ in which he maintains that ‘truths are of different kinds. Truth in painting of still life is not the same thing as truth in an ideal picture. The latter may represent no detail perfectly, and yet may be true ; may convey a greater truth than that picture which is fault- less in form, and accurate as science.’ The weakness of the more rigid theory of Pre-Raphaelitism was that it went very near, if not all the way, to a confusion of nature with art. The weakness of classical art is that it often divorces art from nature and life. Watts safely steered a middle course. In 1856 Watts accompanied Sir Charles Newton’s expedition to explore the site of the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, and the chances of his ever abandon- ing Greek sculpture for botany were much diminished by this journey, when not only did he see more examples of Greek art, but he saw them amid their own natural surroundings, in the lands where that art had its 46 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS birth ; and the sea and rivers, the valleys, hills and groves of which, and the sky above them, had been personified in the Greek mythology. If Watts never forgot Titian’s portrait of a man at Florence, his art in after years shows that he never forgot the beauty of the lands of ancient Hellas, that its mythology became to him vividly alive, an interpretation of life and nature with which he felt men could not wholly dispense, even though it might in one sense be ‘ a creed outworn.’ We shall have more to say about these things, and about the landscapes he painted during these journeys, in later chapters. Some time previous to this expedition he had com- menced what was to be his largest work, a fresco in the Hall of Lincoln’s Inn, representing The School oj Legislature^ or to give its alternative title. Justice: a Hemlcycle of Lazv-givers. He had offered to execute the work at his own cost, and the Benchers of the Inn had accepted the offer. The fresco, which was com- pleted in 1859, occupies the north wall of the hall, and is forty-five feet long and forty feet high. It is interesting to note that though the hall is Gothic in style, the fresco is Raphaelesque in character. When Ford Madox Brown returned from Italy, eager to emulate the Italian painters by devoting his art to the celebration of the history and poetry of his own land. CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 47 he placed the compositions he executed with this intent within painted Gothic arches, and the work all through is reminiscent of the quattrocento. Watts adopted the later manner even at the cost of sonie incongruity between the fresco and its surroundings. It contains thirty-three figures. The design is crowned by three figures representing Justice, Truth, and Mercy. Immediately beneath them stands Moses, with the Tables of the Law ; then, at each side of him, and in the tiers below, are such legislators and philosophers as Zoroaster, Confucius, Lycurgus, Solon, Numa, Charlemagne, Alfred the Great, and Edward I. The individual figures are both expressive and dignified, worthy to represent those v/hose names stand out in history and legend. There is also much skilful group- ing ; while the draperies are interestingly varied and the colour is harmonious. The chief defect in the work is that many of the figures and groups have the appearance of having been thought out separately, without being afterwards brought into due relation with the others. This may be owing, in part, to the lack of dramatic unity in the subject itself. All these people of various ages, countries and costumes, are not united in any common action ; the bond between them is the non-pictorial one that they were all legislators. They have rather the air of 48 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS waiting, of ‘hanging about,’ until some ^action, in which they are all to take part, shall begin. The de- fect may also be due to the lack of a national tradition in work of this kind. Watts was not merely adding another to a long succession of mural paintings, done by masters from one or more of whom he had learned the craft. He was making an experiment; attempting what, for his own country, was rather an importation than a revival ; and we wonder more at the extent of his success than at his partial failure. Many of the' heads were portraits. Tennyson figures as Minos ; Holman Hunt as Ina ; Lord L.awrence as a Magna Charta baron — an admirable part for him; Sir William Harcourt is Justinian ; and Lady Lilford changes her sex and becomes King Alfred. The work is thus, in many ways, one of very great interest ; and it is satis- factory to know that careful measures have been taken for its preservation. Before this, however, it had suffered considerably. When it was completed the Benchers, gratified with the result, generously went beyond the letter of the compact — gave an equitable decision, we may say— -and presented Watts with a gold cup and a purse of ^^oo. An offer to execute a larger scheme of mural painting, made about this time, was, fortunately, one may think, rejected. Watts proposed to the Directors CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 49 of the London and North Western Railway Company that he should be allowed, at his own cost, to decorate the large waiting hall of Euston Station with a series of mural paintings representing The Progress of Cosmos. The choice of such a building for such a purpose looks like keen satire at the expense of Royal Commissions and other authorities, lay and ecclesiastical, having under their control’ buildings really suitable for the purpose, and making no offer of them. Anyhow, the railway directors were not willing to have The Progress of Cosmos, even as a gift ; and, no other place being forthcoming, the project fell through. Watts, how- ever, carried out, as easel pictures, a number of the designs which would have formed part of his great scheme ; and these constitute, as we shall see later, an important part of his life-work. He did execute a few other mural paintings ; one, representing Briseis being taken from Achilles, is at Bowood, the Wiltshire seat of the Marquis of Lansdowne ; another, in the church of St. James -the -Less, near Vauxhall Bridge, has been replaced by a copy in mosaic ; and the Sl Matthew and 5/. Mark, in two of the spandrels' under the dome of St. PauPs Cathedral, are mosaic reproductions of his designs. The large painting, A Story from Boccaccio, now at the Tate Gallery, was also designed for mural decoration. His hope of doing E GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 50 so much work of this kind as to make an important contribution to its more general adoption in this country was not, however, to be realised. Lord Holland’s four years’ hospitality to Watts in Florence shows that the painter had personal qualities that attached people to him, and made it a delight to do him such service as would keep him with them. This was evidenced, soon after his return to England, by his becoming, and remaining for many years, a guest in the family of Mr. Thoby Prinsep, at Little Holland House, Kensington. Watts, indeed, needed friends who would care for him almost, one may say, as for a child ; his devotion to his art being so intense that other, mundane concerns, the necessary foundations of life and work, were apt not to receive due attention. Millais surprised and pained him on one occasion by refusing to discuss art matters — to ‘ talk shop ’ as he put it — out of studio hours. Mr. Spielmann quotes him as saying, in reply to the question why he worked so hard, that he had nothing else to do. He used to begin work at four or live o’clock in the morning, and has been known to spend sixteen or seventeen hours in the studio in one day. To a man thus wrapped up in his work, it must have meant much to have friends willing to relieve him of cares that count for much in most men’s lives. Only by abstinence and carefully CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 5 * regulated exercise could Watts hope to escape from frequent illness and so not be hindered in his work. That he lived so long and accomplished so much was due to his own self-discipline and to the constant care and watchfulness of those around him. To his intimate friends he was known as ‘Signor,’ a tribute to his knowledge of Italy and things Italian ; and the portraits of him in early middle life, when his manner was generally grave, suggest that the title must have seemed a very appropriate one. Not that he was always grave in hours of relaxation. There may not have been much of the laughter that is like the crack- ling of thorns under a pot ; but we find it on record that he could, even at a later date, tell ridiculous stories, would even condescend to play on words, and that among his favourite songs were ‘Tom Bowl- ing,’ ‘The Vicar of Bray,’ and ‘Sally in our Alley.’ We call to mind that another grave signor, Mr. Gladstone, used to sing ‘ Camptown Races ’ and other nigger songs. In 1876, when Little Holland House had to be pulled down, and its site and grounds to take their part in finding room for London’s growth. Watts had another house built for him, close by, in the newly made Melbury Road, and gave to it the old, familiar name. It was the studio of this Little Holland 52 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS House, with finished and partly finished works by the master for contents, that was thrown open to visitors on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. To follow Watts’s work year by year, and to enumerate his paintings in the order of their produc- tion, is not within the scope of this little book. Quite early, as we have seen, he mapped out his life-work ; and the exact date at v/hich he filled in this or that detail of his scheme is not material to an adequate general appreciation of it, though necessary to the close student of his technical progress. It has already been said that his art covered a wide range of subject. Greek mythology retained its hold upon him ; it was not to him, as already said, merely ‘ a creed outworn ’ ; and many of his pictures are Greek in form, and largely Greek in spirit. We shall find also that he interpreted nature, as already incidentally mentioned in comparing his work with that of Turner, in landscape paintings of markedly individual character. Occasion- ally he would paint a quite simple genre picture, such as The Rain it raineth every 'Day. The poets — Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, Tennyson — suggested not a few subjects to him ; and we have also a number of idyllic fancies of his own, which may, perhaps, have had a more than superficial meaning. Then there is the long series of pictures that treat of the evolution of the CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 53 world and of man, and human history, and the powers of good and evil, and love and life and death, and religion, in the broad sense alone in which Watts would interpret it. And, lastly, there are the por- traits, and chief among them, thovsc that he painted to be a record of the best and wisest of his own time. Such a life-work as this, carried through with steady persistence, despite physical hindrances, until he was eighty-seven years of age, with powers of thought and work seemingly little impaired until the end, strikes us with admiration. The man himself, in his long devo- tion to a lofty purpose, rises high above his work ; though that finds nothing to compare with it, in amount and range and quality, in its own kind and time. This is an appropriate place for what it seems desirable to say formally about technical matters in a book not primarily intended for the art student. This will be but little, and will be directed to points that are likely to interest and help the general reader. Watts disapproved of laborious drawing from the living model. He himself, in his early days, used to watch acrobatic performances in order to study the human body in action ; and he also made rapid studies from life. In his own work he was much less depen- dent on the model than are most painters, calling in its aid, not so much for the figure and its action as a 54 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS whole, as for points of detail in which he found him- self at fault. He thought that too close dependence on the model interfered with the full expression of the ideas to which he wished to give form. Not dis- similar in principle was his objection to close, realistic imitation of life and nature in imaginative works. He thought that exact rather than suggestive representation distracted attention from the idea of the picture. At the same time, his canvases are never bald and uninter- esting. There is as much detail as we should be conscious of, if we were actually before the scene represented, and engrossed in its central interest. For a similar reason he discarded obvious dexterities of craftsmanship ; he wished the painter to be forgotten in the painting, and the painting in the subject. He used to paint on a light ground so that, when the under-painting began to show through with lapse of time, his pictures would gain in brilliancy. He dis- liked an ‘ oily, painty ’ surface, which he thought to be incompatible with suggestion of atmospheric vibration. Hence he used to dry out much of the oil from his pigments, and the result was a slightly rough surface, allowing so much variety of reflection, that, to the eye, it almost ceased to be a surface, and the figures and objects in the picture seemed to be in a world of their own, and not merely on a canvas stretched within PHYSICAL ENERGY CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 55 the four angles of a frame. As another result there was vibration, not only in the suggested atmosphere, but also in the actual colour. His methods helped to give to his pictures, not only a sense of life, but also a concentration that greatly increases their impressive- ness. More than this about technical matters would be beyond our scope. Watts’s painting so much outweighs his sculpture, in amount, and therefore also in importance as a medium of self-expression, that the latter demands no more than a paragraph here. The sense of form is obvious in his paintings. The influence of the Elgin marbles is to be seen in many if not most of them ; though the treatment is always pictorial, never sculpturesque. The same sense of form, and a sense of style, together with power to represent vigorous action when needed, are evident in his sculpture ; and, as in his painting, though he learned much from the great masters of the art, from the Italians as well as from the Greeks, he still retained his own individuality. A head of Medusa^ a bust of Clytie — poor, love-lorn Clytie, almost torturing herself as she turns her head to gaze on Apollo, journeying through the heavens — an equestrian statue of Hugh Lupus, at Eaton Hall, and the magnificent Physical Energy^ of which the youthful rider on the powerful steed, shading his eyes so that he may see what lies 56 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS before him, may be compared with the rider in the picture Progress — these are the best known, and the most notable of Watts’s works in sculpture. Monu- ments to the Marquess of Lothian, in Blickling Church, to Bishop IvOnsdale, in Lichfield Cathedral, and to Tennyson, outside Lincoln Cathedral, should also be mentioned. When Watts decided to give most of his time and energy to painting, he was probably deny- ing himself a foremost place among modern sculptors. We now pass to what remains to be recorded in the way of biographical detail. In 1886, Watts married Miss Mary Fraser-Tytler, and to her unceasing care and devotion it was largely due that for another eigh- teen years he was able steadily to pursue the practice of his art. Immediately after their marriage Watts and his wife started for Eg)'^pt, whither he had long wished to go ; the immediate occasion of the journey being the prospect of the dry climate benefiting his health. ^The return journey was made by way of Constantinople. Greece and Naples, the Riviera and Switzerland were visited the following year, and some of his finest landscape painting was done at this time. Scotland, his wife’s home, also contributed to this part of his work. Although Watts was so deeply engrossed in his work as an artist, he took a keen interest in con- CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 57 temporary life and affairs. Many of his pictures show how deeply he was moved by the social and economic problems of the day, most of which, indeed, have been problems throughout history. The little churchyard of St. Botolph’s, now used as an open space, behind the London General Post Office, bears witness to his admiration for heroism however displayed. A few small slabs in a wall, under a lean-to shelter, bear inscriptions recording the risk or loss of life incurred in the endeavour to save life. It was Watts’s hope that this kind of memorial would be adopted in the cities and towns throughout the country. He also watched the course of public affairs, as is evidenced by an article, entitled ‘ Our Race as Pioneers,’ contributed to the 'Nineteenth Century in May, 1901. He contends in this article that the British race is marked out by Providence for a great pioneer-work in the spread of civilisation, and that it would be well if other nations recognised this and made no attempt to interfere with British expansion. Here we have an explanation of his gift of the statue Physical Energy to stand on the Matoppo Hills, near the grave of Cecil Rhodes. The argument in the article goes dangerously near to the justification of the means by the end. A safer, if less imposing interest, was the Home Arts and In- dustries Association, to which both V/atts and his wife 58 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS rendered much assistance. A pottery was established at Limnerslease, his country-house near Guildford, during his lifetime and is still carried on under the superintendence of Mrs. Watts. All these activities and interests are side-lights upon the main work of his life, which, though we must finally judge it, in and for itself, cannot but more fully command our respect when we find from other sources how deeply earnest its author was in the whole of his life and activity. Dante Rossetti, in his poem Soothsay, bids men beware lest their work should be greater than themselves, and rise up to condemn them. The man, Watts, as already said, rises in every way above his work. That he was the last to see merit in what he himself was and did only sets the seal to his worth. The worth, both of the man and the artist, was fully recognised by others. That, without having sought the distinction, he was elected first an Associate, and then a Member, of the Royal Academy, in 1867, should be recorded here, even though it was an event of at least as much importance to the Academy as to Watts. In his early days he had found the Academy Schools of no use to him. Of its annual exhibitions of works by living artists he said : ‘An Academy Exhi- bition room is no place for a grave deliberate work of art. It is seen to no advantage there, being out of CHIEFLY BIOGRAPHICAL 59 place’; and he also said : ‘Modern public exhibitions are most unfavourable, it may be said disastrous, to the best interests of art — good perhaps for industry, but injurious to art as art.’ Watts certainly preferred the Grosvenor Gallery, and afterwards the New Gallery, to the Academy Exhibitions. All things considered, the Academy was fortunate to be able to count him as one of its members. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and many foreign academies, conferred honorary distinctions upon him. His portrait, painted by himself, finds a place, by invitation, in the Uffizi Galleries at Florence. He twice declined a baronetcy, but, in 1902, the King conferred upon him the newly- instituted Order of Merit. The later years of his life were passed partly at Little Holland House and partly at Limnerslease. He continued to work almost to the end, which came, after a brief illness, on the ist of July, 1904. Ill MYTH AND LEGEND It was the writer’s good fortune, while preparing hand- books of the Watts Exhibitions at Manchester and Edinburgh in 1905, to spend many hours alone with the representative collections of the master’s works then brought together ; and, the outer world being for the time banished from sight and mind, what he saw in the pictures seemed to become real, and he felt to have been privileged to mingle with a company of people of great distinction, with whom were a number of very delightful children and young people — enjoying themselves very much without being noisy — all living in a very beautiful world, and the older people holding converse about things of deepest import to humanity. It is perhaps presumptuous, having had this privilege, to attempt to tell others what one saw and ‘heard.’ Many, also, of those into whose hands this book will come, will have themselves seen Watts’s work almost in its entirety. Still, they may not be sorry to compare what it has meant to them with what it has meant even 60 MYTH AND LEGEND 6 to one who may well have no better right to talk about it than themselves. And if this book should be read by any one who has hitherto seen little of Wattses work, it may perchance send such an one to the Tate Gallery, to the National Portrait Gallery, on a delightful pil- grimage to Limnerslease, and to any of the provincial galleries where a picture or pictures by Watts may be found. F or his pictured world and thoughts and people are well worth the knowing. AVhere shall we commence, now, to talk for a while about them ? We will take the world and the thoughts first and the people afterwards. One hesitates before deciding where to make a beginning and how to group pictures that cannot always be arranged according to strictly exclusive categories. Still there is no need for overmuch hesitation. This is not a treatise; and Watts was not a systematic philosopher. Fie was an artist and a poet. But, as we have already seen, he did not work* wildly, ‘ without a conscience or an aim.’ He himself lived, thought and felt nobly ; and the aim that binds his work into a whole is that of reporting to others what he holds to be essential, to be elemental, in nature and in human life. As we already know, he early became acquainted with both Homer and the Bible, and his interpretation of nature and life is largely a product * of his early 62 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS reading. He thought and felt about nature both as the Greek and the Hebrew thought and felt ; and in this is the clue to the understanding of many of his pictures. The Greeks saw gods everywhere ; the Hebrew saw God everywhere. The Greek pantheon culminated in Zeus; and above Zeus there was Fate. Below him were lesser deities, controlling human life and affairs, and air and earth and sea, and ‘ all that in them is,’ and these had their attendant spirits, the nymphs. To the Hebrew there was one God ; he had angels, messengers, to do his bidding. The powers of nature were tools or weapons in his hand, as in the thunder-storm described by Habbakuk : ‘ God came from Teman, and the Holy One from mount Paran. His glory covereth the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise. And his brightness was as the light ; he had horns coming out of his hand : and there was the hiding of his power. Before him went the pestilence, and burning coals went forth at his feet. He stood, and measured the earth : he beheld, and drove asunder the nations ; and the everlasting moun- tains were scattered, the perpetual hills did bow : his ways are everlasting. . . . The mountains saw thee, and they trembled : the overflowing of the water ])assed by : the deep uttered his voice, and lifted up his hands on high. The sun and moon stood still in their MYTH AND LEGEND 63 habitation : at the light of thine arrows they went, and at the shining of thy glittering spear.’ Some of Watts’s ‘ Hebraic ’ pictures come up before us as we read this description of God going forth, splendid and terrible. There is a third view of life and nature, chiefly modern : the one that banishes gods and God alike, and replaces them with matter and motion. We need say no more than that this last interpretation was impossible to Watts. But why the Greek interpretation : ‘ a creed out- worn ’ ? Because there was something lacking in that of the Hebrew. Matthew Arnold says that ‘ the governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of conscious- ness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience^ Hebraism, in some at least of its modern develop- ments, undervalues the beauty of nature, as gradually man has learned to see it : beauty of light and colour and form in infinite degree and variety. It also under- values joyousness : the mere pleasure of being alive with others in a beautiful world. To quote Matthew Arnold again : ‘ At the bottom of both the Greek and the Hebrew notion is the desire, native in man, for reason and the will of God, the feeling after the uni- versal order, — in a word, the love of God. But, while Hebraism seizes upon certain plain capital intimations of the universal order, and rivets itself, one may say. 6| GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS with unequalled grandeur of earnestness and intensity on the study and observance of them, the bent of Hellenism is to follow, with flexible activity, the whole play of the universal order, to be apprehensive of missing any part of it, of sacrificing one part to another, to slip away from resting in this or that intimation of it, however capital/ This criticism goes beyond, but includes, what we are considering here. It makes clear the reason why poet, painter and sculptor have turned again and again to the poetry and art of Greece for delight and in- spiration. Science only would chill them to the bone. The Hebrew literature leaves much of life and nature unexplored ; and until we arrive at something that will replace both, we need to see things from the Greek as well as from the Hebrew point of view. Wordsworth felt this; and Watts’s picture The Spirit of Greek Poetry, in which we see a figure, personifying that spirit, gazing on other figures, floating through the air, and personifying the various natural powers and forms of life, was suggested to him by the sonnet in which Wordsworth laments that the world is too much with us, that we do not feel nature akin to us, and cries out for a vision of the gods of old ; so that he may even Catch sight of Proteus rising from the sea Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. MYTH AND LEGEND 65 Watts felt as Mrs. Browning felt when she wrote A tree’s mere firewood, unless humanised, — Which well the Greeks knew when they stirred its bark With close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs. And made the forest-rivers garrulous With babble of gods. It has often been observed that Watts painted no portrait of a man of science, using the term in the sense of a man who seeks to interpret all things in terms of matter and motion. Such interpretation has its place and value : and men of poetic temperament may easily undervalue it. On the other hand it may be pressed too far. Sir Oliver Lodge has recently uttered the warning ‘that science is one thing, and philosophy another : that science most properly con- cerns itself with matter and motion, and reduces phenomena, as far as it can, to mechanism. The more successfully it does that, the more it fulfils its end and aim ; but when, on the strength of that achievement, it seeks to blossom into a philosophy, when it en- deavours to conclude that its scope is complete and all-inclusive, that nothing exists in the universe but mechanism, and that the aspect of things from a scientific point of view is their only aspect, — then it is becoming narrow and bigoted and deserving of rebuke.’ Carlyle stigmatised such a philosophy as ‘ a gospel of dirt.’ F 66 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS Ruskin contemptuously put it aside. Tennyson seemed at times almost overwhelmed by it, and cried out in agony. Watts’s answer to it v/as the humanising of everything in the heavens above and in the earth beneath. He paints three figures, floating in the air, and, both by their nearness to each other, and by a suggestion of related movement, as well as by the light and shade upon them, appearing to be united by some invisible bond. These figures, so the title of the picture tells us, represent the Sun, the Earth, and Earth’s dead daughter, the Moon. The arms of the Sun are outstretched in the attitude of drawing a bow. He is ruddy in hue. Earth is less so. The Moon is pallid, and lies, a limp, inanimate form across her mother’s knee. This, to Watts, is truth if not reality. He has himself made this distinction in the pamphlet, Wkat should a Picture say ? ‘ It is difficult,’ he says, ‘ to explain in easy terms the difference between truth and reality. It might be said that there is a truth that has to do with material things, and a truth that relates to ideas and noble thoughts. The Psalmist speaks truth when he says “the little hills clapped their hands” or “ the morning star sang.” The hills have not hands, nor the stars throats, but the Psalmist has forcibly con- veyed the thought that Nature rejoices and has delight’. MYTH AND LEGEND 67 The union of the members of a planetary system by physical attraction is the reality, according to science ; the truth, according to Watts, is more adequately expressed by three human figures in related movement. It is his way of asserting that the universe can only be adequately interpreted in terms, not of mere matter and motion, but of emotion, will and intelligence. It is his affirmation that the universe, of which man is a part, is, as a whole, not less than the part. It is more than this ; for these symbolical figures in Watts’s paint- ings, though human in form, have a dignity that shows the artist to intend a nature higher than the human. The Assyrian, imagining the perfect being, united the intelligence of the man with the strength of the beast and the flight of the bird. The Greek, to the same end, wrought human figures of surpassing beauty and dignity; and Watts, as we have already learned, used the language of Greek art. He used it, but he also modified it, adapting it to the needs of his own time. There is no such figure in Greek art as the Love of Watts’s Love and Life. He uses also another language than that of Greece, as in the pictures Prayer and The Dweller in the Innermost, which assert a deeper union of the human with the universal spirit than was ever conceived by the religion that Greek art sought to embody. 68 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS One has heard it said, and said by a teacher of religion, that Wattses pictures give no evidence of belief in a personal God. W e will not pause to discuss so strange a statement. The words must surely have been used in some narrowly restricted sense. One is inclined to accuse him who used them of the pro- verbial inability to see wood for trees. As clearly as he could. Watts asked men to see nothing anywhere but personality. He personified Love and Life, and Time and Death and Judgment ; and, as his final inter- pretation of existence, he showed Love arising triumph- ant above Time, Death, and Judgment that were no more. This at least is sure, that any one who has understood Watts’s pictures, and become convinced of the truth of what he sought to express by them, can never feel himself and his fellows to be but temporary sojourners in a universe that, in more or fewer years, will know them not and miss them not ; but will believe beyond all possibility of doubt or denial, that personality is the ultimate and enduring fact. We are ready now to look at those of Watts’s pictures that reveal the need he felt of the Greek inter- pretation of nature and life as a complement to that of the Hebrew. One of the most beautiful of them is The Childhood of Zeus. The gods, men thought, entered life like human beings, and grew through THE CHILDHOOD OF ZEUS MYTH AND LEGEND 69 infancy and childhood to maturity ; only they were immortal. Zeus, after his birth, was hidden from his father Cronos, who swallowed all his children, and to whom was given to eat, instead of Zeus, a stone wrapped in a cloth. Zeus was nursed in Crete by Amalthea ; and the Curetes guarded him, clashing their cymbals, so that Cronos should not hear his cries and discover his whereabouts. Thus, hidden away from Time, Zeus could be immortal. The story has to the full what Matthew Arnold calls the freshness of the early world ; and Watts’s picture has fully caught its spirit. Under a tree-crowned bank, the child — so beautiful that we can well believe him to be a god — is clasped in the embrace of a nymph ; and she and other nymphs, except one who is asleep, are looking at him with wonder and delight. On the ground lies fruit, and just outside the group is a goat with whose milk Amalthea fed the child. His beauty, and that of the nymphs, the graceful attitudes of their unclothed forms and the love- liness of their surroundings, all combine to make an idyllic scene from which, even though it be but a picture, one finds it hard to turn away. In another picture, called simply e/ a merry company, some old, some young, are disport- ing themselves in the sea, close by the shore ; and one youngster, whom Watts painted separately as Vm 70 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS Afloat^ balances himself upon the waves, apparently in fearful doubt as to his buoyancy and the stability of his equilibrium. A beautiful, or, rather, a handsome child was painted by Watts as Ganymede, whose beauty so charmed the gods that he was carried up to Olympus to be the cup-bearer of Zeus. He is so like the Zeus in the picture already described, that one suspects the same child of having been made to play both parts. He certainly does equally well, if this be so, for the child- hood of both the father of the gods and the most beautiful of mortals. Perhaps we cannot more fittingly than in connexion with these pictures mention that Watts painted quite a number of pictures of delightful little people of the Cupid type. They form as numerous and as distinctive a group of pictures as any other that he painted. Are they to be looked upon as the mere amusement of hours of relaxation from more serious work ? Vfn Afloat has already been mentioned. One of the best known of them is Good Luc\ to your Fishing / where a chubby little person, with quite dainty wings, is just skimming the waves, as he holds his fishing-line, and eagerly expects a bite. Another winged youngster, with face all smiles, and hands laden with roses, is called Promises, When we see Cupid peeping out with mischievous glee from under a cowl, we are quite GOOD LUCK rO YOUR FISHING ! MYTH AND LEGEND 71 ready to agree that, as the title of the picture says, the habit does not make the monk. Two chubby infants, wandering in evident wonderment through a flowery land under the brightest and bluest of bright blue skies are said to be in the land of Weissnlcktwo ; and it must be in the same land that there has happened the minor tragedy, bringing brief sorrow to childish hearts, of the escape of a captive bird. In Jt Fugue and Trifles light as j[ir, a veritable rout of these little people is playing in the air. Are we to see here nothing more than that Watts was fond of small people and their ways and loved to make idyllic pictures of them ? This would be much, and, were there nothing else to do so, would alone forbid us to think of his being, as some have repre- sented him, one who brooded unduly, indeed, almost exclusively, on the ills of life and the inevitability of death. But may we not think that beyond this healthy pleasure in the innocent joyousness of childhood there is also expressed the faith that the spirit of the universe is eternally young ? We find one of these children, a chubby, smiling one, peeping out from under the shroud- like drapery that falls from the knee of Death, as she sits, holding her court, to which young and old alike must come. But the child does no homage to Death, though an infant is lying in her lap ; and he might 72 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS seem to say that Death, though throned in state, has no terror for him that he should cease from smiling. It may be replied that this is but the happy ignorance of childhood. Yes, but is not the knowledge that brings fear only the ignorance of an older and less happy childhood? Surely, Watts, in picturing these children, who seem endowed with eternal youth, was thinking, or, rather, feeling, what Wordsworth felt, when he wrote of the children culling flowers in a thousand valleys, of Delight and liberty, the simple creed of Childhood, whether busy or at rest. With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast : — and when, farther in the poem, he wrote Hence in a season of calm w'eather Though inland far w'c be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither. Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. Child-life brought to Watts, as to Wordsworth, in- timations of immortality. Returning to myth and legend, Wattses Oh^mpiis on Ida is a splendid interpretation of Greek mythology. The three goddesses, Hera, the spouse of Zeus, Athena MYTH AND LEGEND 73 and Aphrodite, appeared on Mount Ida to the beauti- ful youth Paris — another picture shows him looking up at the vision — who was to give to the one he thought the most beautiful the apple which Eris or Strife, enraged because she had not been invited to the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, had thrown among the guests to be a source of discord. Hera promised that Paris should rule over Asia, and have great wealth ; Athena that he should be renowned in war ; Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful of women for his wife. He gave the apple to Aphrodite ; and, out of the jealousy thus aroused, came the ten years’ siege of Troy. Thus Eris had her will. Watts chose for his picture the moment when the goddesses were unveiling themselves before Paris, their forms softened by the sunlit mountain mist. They are distinguished by no symbols, but only by difference of beauty and bearing. Hera stands in the centre, the very ideal of queenly stateliness ; Athena to her right has the haughtiness of expression and bearing that befits a goddess who is wise in counsel, and skilled in the arts both of peace and of war. The face of Aphrodite looks out softly from beneath the shade of her unbound hair. She steps forward confidently,* trusting to her bodily charms, which are displayed without reserve. These splendid beings are worthy to be goddesses ; 74 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS and, let us not forget : mortals have fashioned their deities, in both form and character, in their own likeness. It is interesting to compare this picture with Blake’s treatment of the same subject. He tells the story more fully. Paris is giving the apple to Aphrodite, urged thereto by Eros, her child, who is just behind him. Again we can distinguish each goddess by her beauty and bearing ; though Athena can also be known by her carrying the jegis. Hera already raises her arm with a gesture of wrath. Mercury is passing be- hind them to bear tidings of this fateful choice. Eris, or Ate, is already appearing with a sword in her hand. Blake tells us more ; but, in one sense, moves us less ; there are not in his figures the subtle beauty and the illusion of life that distinguish those of Watts. Watts twice took as a subject the goddess of the dawn. The Aurora has already been mentioned as one of the most beautiful of his early pictures, with figures like those of Etty floating in a Turnerian sky. The harmonious grouping, the sense of graceful movement, the swathing of the figures in the hazy atmosphere, the contrast of growing light and waning gloom, all unite to make a veritable hymn in praise of the light of the early day. 'Dawn is a yet more impressive picture. On a lofty peak, the spirit of the light that comes before DAWN MYTH AND LEGEND 75 the sun has risen, halts as if to gaze for a moment on the land and sea over which she has soon to pass ; and in the sky above which are already stealing first the crimson and then the gold of the early morning. Her hair and her drapery are gently stirred by the breeze that comes from the rising sun, towards which an eagle is about to take his flight. Soon the dawnlight will have passed into sunlight on this summit, to appear again on others farther in the west ; and there again to pass into the full splendour of day. The picture is a lovely allegory of the ceaseless passing of light over the surface of the globe. In Hyperion we see the sun-god in his power. He is represented as a youth of magnificent physique, seated on the clouds, holding his bow and arrow in his hands. His hair rises above his brow like a corona of flame, and a circle of flame breaks out behind him. Eos, the Dawn, was his sister; so was Artemis or Selene, the moon-goddess, who is here seen resting her arm upon his stalwart thigh. Beneath the clouds appears part of the circle of the earth. Hyperion gazes upwards, with a rapt expression, towards the source of light that falls upon him. Even this glorious being had a birth ; and we might take the picture to suggest that the light he gives is derived from the source of all light and life. Artemis is dim-sighted; and an old Greek story. ;6 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS which W atts had in mind when he painted this picture, says that she angered her brother by falling in love with a mortal. Whereupon, Hyperion taunted her with her feeble sight, and told her she could not hit a certain mark. She aimed, and hit the mark ; but it was her mortal lover, and the arrow killed him. No more than mortals must immortals ‘marry beneath them’; and, it may be added, there are probably still people in this country, ignorant of either Hellenism or Greek mythology, who would fear to sleep with the direct light of the moon falling upon them. Watts’s Endymmiy inevitably called to mind by what has just been said, rivals on its own ground whatever the poets have written of the beautiful shepherd-youth who loved the Moon and was loved by her in return. As he lies asleep, his staff in his hand, his dog sleeping also, at his feet, the moon-goddess comes down to him, and, bending in crescent-form above him, places a hand beneath his 'head and kisses him upon the lips. It is as if the beauty of the night-time had become sentient and felt and obtained response to love, passionate, yet pure and calm. Iris, the spirit of the rainbow, and one of the swift missive-’oearers of the gods, in the picture that bears her name, seems to tremble amid the iridescent colour wrought by the sunlight in the myriad particles of DAPHNE MYTH AND LEGEND 77 water. It is interesting to compare this brightly fugitive figure with the figure in one of Watts’s rare excursions into Northern mythology, the picture of Uldra, the Scandinavian spirit of the rainbow in the waterfall. The two spirits, as Watts has pictured them, and the very names they bear, seem to suggest the difference between the brightness and warmth of the South and the gloom and cold of the North; a difference that is echoed in the two mythologies. Besides that of Diana and Endymion, Watts told in picture at least two other stories of the love of the gods. One of them is of the love of Zeus for Europa, the beautiful daughter of Agenor, king of Phoenicia, of whom the god became so enamoured that he disguised himself as a bull, and when Europa had playfully leaped on to his back, swam with her across the sea to Crete. We see her when her strange voyage has just begun ; she grasps the horns of the bull, and, filled with fear, looks back in vain hope of help to her companions on the shore from which she is being swiftly borne away. In a second picture we see her when the journey is over, and the bull is wading ashore. He glances back at her proudly, and she seems to be losing her fear. The other story is that of the love of Apollo for Daphne, the daughter of a river-god. When Apollo was pursuing her she prayed for help and was changed 78 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS into a laurel-bush. Watts shows her, a beautiful maiden partly hidden by the laurel-leaves, which we can fancy, as we look at her and think of her story, to be visibly spreading themselves around her; while she, with her head leaning against her upraised arm, closed eyes, and expression as of calm after storm, seems already to be passing into an untroubled world where anxious care and pain and passion are unknown. The picture gives a sense of such quiet as we feel when we leave the crowded city for field and woodland. It calls to mind Tennyson^s longing for such calm, when, in the first bitter sorrow for the death of his friend, he envies the yew, which neither glows, nor blooms, nor changes in any gale, and, sick for its stubborn hardihood, he would gladly become Incorporate in it, and leave for ever a life that is only pain. Watts’s telling of the story of Cupid and Psyche will be referred to elsewhere, among the pictures which have human sorrow for their theme ; and for that place we will leave also the story of Orpheus and his lost Eurydice. One of the most pregnant of Greek myths is that of Prometheus who stole fire from heaven for the use of mortals. Zeus, in anger, chained him to a rock, where, each day, his liver was devoured by an eagle and restored to him at night. From this torment, which otherwise MYTH AND LEGEND 79 would have been endless, the fire-stealer, with the consent of Zeus, was delivered by Heracles who slew the eagle. The name Prometheus means forethought, and the bearer of it was the fabled instructor of men in science and in the arts and crafts. What a strange chapter in human history this story opens out ! In fear and trembling, lest they should thereby incur the anger and jealousy of the gods, have men added knowledge to knowledge, developed skill in art and craft ; and used the powers of nature to add to their own well-being and comfort. Nor have such thoughts ceased among us even yet. There are those who think we ought to supplicate God for health rather than make intelligent use of the curative powers which science has discovered in nature. To such people, the gods, we will put it, are like foolish parents who want their children always to remain chil- dren, and are offended by the thought that they have come of age and can speak and act for themselves. Medicine, by the by, was said to have been taught to men by Prometheus. W atts shows us this daring bene- factor of mankind, who even defied great Zeus in its behalf, as a huge Titanic form, lying uneasily upon the rock to which he is bound ; while spirits who bemoan his fate are circling round him. He turns his head towards the vast globe of the earth upon which is the race for whose sake he is being tortured. 8o GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS ‘The Wife of Plutus is a picture that may well have been painted with a modern reference ; indeed with one for all time. The spouse of the god of wealth has had lavished upon her all that mere selfish desire could dream of ; and she lies asleep, the hand that is laid upon her breast grasping jewels. She is the very incarnation of satiety. She has her reward. It is good to turn from her to The Wife of Pygmalion^ beautiful alike in body, face, and the sweet purity of soul that reveals itself through her gentle mien and expression, and is symbol- ised by the lilies behind her. Well might a sculptor who had created a form so lovely and so noble as this pray to the goddess of love that life might be granted to the semblance of life, the ideal become the real. May not this picture, and the story that suggested it, also have their modern reference ? If we have and hold to an imaginative ideal of life and love will they not indeed become real ? W e end this series of pictures with one that breathes the very spirit of Hellas, an idyll of health and beauty : Arcadia, The name of the most secluded of the states of ancient Greece has become synonymous with a life amid natural surroundings, remote from the turmoil of town and city ; the peaceful life of village and hamlet, with the care of cattle and the tillage of the soil for labour, and simple pleasures for recreation, W atts’s MYTH AND LEGEND 8 picture hardly suggests such simplicity as this. It is rather an epitome of the Greek ideal of a highly civilised life from which the freshness of beauty and of nature have not been banished. The climate and the traditions of Greece permitted an open-air life such as is impossible for us. Youths and maidens could bathe their unclothed bodies in the sunlight, until they glowed with health and beauty. This it is that Watts shows to us. A maiden, lovely in form and feature, stands in the sunshine, preparing to enter a marble bath, with a background of tree-stems and foliage and, beyond, a bright, blue sky. She seems lost in pleasant reverie as she loosens and lets fall her garments. It would be idle to search for words with which to describe the sense this picture gives of perfect health and purity of body and mind, trained amid the beauty of nature and of noble art. It is not a mere dream of the past. It is also a criticism of the present. We cannot, perhaps, live as near to nature as they lived in ancient Greece ; but we need not almost banish nature from our lives. W atts painted not a few pictures in stern reproof of evil. This one, and others of the pictures taken from Greek life and story, would seem to reprove us by their brightness and beauty because we either wilfully or heedlessly yield ourselves to hideousness and gloom. Arcadia ; the name sounds almost sadly to us, because G 82 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS it reminds us of what we might be and are not. ‘ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ’ ; and the joys of health, and the companionship of unsullied nature, and the perfecting of lovely art, are not for us. This picture alone might well persuade us to think on these things, and, thinking on them, to nerve ourselves to win them back again. Neglected it may be, but not outworn, is the best, at least, of the creed of ancient Greece ; and we may well be grateful to the artist who felt its truth and beauty and made them live again for our behoof. IV CHIVALRY W ATTs painted a number of pictures that can perhaps be most fitly grouped together under such a heading as Chivalry ; and it is a convenient arrangement to give them a brief chapter to themselves. Some of them are devoted to the ardent enthusiasm of youth and early man- hood, and others to the base refusal of noble quests. They are related to the stories of the heroes of Greece, as the 5/. George of Donatello is related to a statue of a Greek athlete. Let us approach them by way of a remarkable statement of M. de la Sizeranne, which exactly strikes ‘ the mark’s true opposite.’ It will help by contrast to bring out clearly their prevailing note. The French critic says that ‘ thinking over all the artists who work in England, it is Watts, the gloomiest of them, who makes a mark on the memory. He has painted nothing to amuse us. He has been the executioner of all dreams of joy, of all illusions, of all fresh graceful forms, of all delicate shades, of all pleasure.’ We have already 83 84 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS met with much in the pictures of Greek myth and legend that contradicts this statement. The pictures grouped together in this chapter will make the contradic- tion more emphatic. For though in some of them Watts treats of death and evil, it is but to throw joyous and noble life into higher relief. First in the group we take Aspirations^ a title hardly needed to explain what the painter meant by a handsome youth, with a wealth of auburn hair, a clear unclouded brow, wide-opened eyes, and mouth that tells of high resolve, fearful of nothing but failure in the knightly quest to which the armour he wears, and the spear he firmly grasps, declare him to be committed. In Watch- man^ zvhat of the Night ? we see another youth, grasping with both hands the hilt of his sword, and gazing with rapt expression out into the night. The moonlight illumines his face and flowing hair, and gleams from the plate armour in which he is clad. In Una and the Red Cross Knight^ the youth of the first picture is doing his knightly devoir ; fully clothed in armour, except that his head is bare, with his shield at his back and his spear in his hand, he rides a war-horse and towers over Una, who rides the humbler beast of burden. Watts here gives a free pictorial translation of the lines in The Fairy Queen in which Spenser tells of the ASPIRATIONS ! i CHIVALRY 85 . knight and Una riding forth together, the former eager to pursue the adventure that Gloriana had given him ; And ever, as he rode, his heart did yearn To prove his puissance in battle brave Upon his foe, and his new force to learn ; Upon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stern. Of the knight’s companion the poem says : A lovely Lady rode him fair beside. Upon a lowly ass more white than snow ; Yet she much whiter ; but the same did hide Under a veil, that wimpled was full low ; And over all a black stole she did throw : As one that inly mourn’d, so was she sad, And heavy sate upon her palfrey slow ; Seemed in heart some hidden care she had ; And by her in a line a milk-white lamb she lad. Watts has faithfully interpreted the spirit of the poem. The lady bends down her head, depressed by sorrowful thoughts; the youthful knight bears himself erect, as becomes her protector, yet looks down at her with silent, respectful sympathy. So Holiness and T ruth pass out into the world, there to meet with many perils, and in the end to be united With sacred rites and vows for ever to abide. Britomart is another free translation of a passage in The^ Fairy Queen, which tells how the maiden who, in 86 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS the poem, stands for Chastity, looked one day in her father’s magic mirror, and saw there Sir Artegall, A comely Knight, all arm’d in complete wise, Through whose bright ventail lifted up on high His manly face, that did his foes agrise. And friends to terms of gentle truth entice, Look’d forth, as Phcebus’ face out of the east Hetwixt two steady mountains doth arise : Portly his person was, and much increast Through his heroic grace and honourable gest. Watts, as suggested above, does not confine himself to exact illustration of the poem, ‘ but imagines Britomart returning to her mirror, where, reading from the book of Magic, she calls up the shadowy apparitions; but daring not to look herself lest the beloved vision fail, she prays her nurse to tell her what is passing there.’ This use of a pictorial licence gave the painter much more scope than a literal rendering of the poem would have afforded. Britomart sits facing us with the book of Magic on her knee ; she listens eagerly to what her nurse, whose hand she nervously grasps, is telling her. Behind her is the mirror, in which can be seen Una and the various knights who appear in the poem. In front of Britomart is a lily growing in a vase: the symbol of purity. Sir Galahad, to whom alone of the Knights of the Round Table it was granted to see the Holy Grail, is the subject of one of W atts’s most beautiful pictures. SIR GALAHAD CHIVALRY «7 He has been passing through a wood in the glorious sunshine of a lovely summer’s day, and the sunlight is reflected from cloud, and tree, and armour, and shines full on the face of the youthful knight, and on his milk- white steed, from which he has dismounted. His sword is at his side, his shield on his back ; his head is bare ; he stands with his hands one within the other and rested just above his knee. Thus, in an attitude that suggests worship, he gazes with rapt expression as the mystic vision of the grail passes before him. Words could convey no hint of the beauty of this idyll of purity. Watts repeated the subject and gave one copy of it to Eton College; and it hangs in the chapel there, where many generations of English boys will see and consciously or unconsciously be inspired by it. Not every one who fights for an ideal lives to see the victory won. The hardest part of the struggle, indeed, falls to the lot of those who cannot hope to see the end attained. Is the fate of such as these a pitiable one? Wordsworth thought not. He wrote of the warrior Who, whether praise of him must walk the eartli For ever, and to noble deeds give birth, Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame. And leave a dead unprofitable name — Finds comfort in himself and in his cause ; And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws His breath in confidence of Heaven’s applause : This is the happy Warrior; this is He That every man in arms should wish to be. 88 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS Watts painted a picture of the Happy Warrior — it is now in the gallery of modern paintings at Munich. It is our youthful knight again; and he has received a fatal wound in battle. The helmet has fallen from his head ; he himself is falling backwards ; the mortal mist is gathering ; but just as consciousness is fading away, the ideal for which he has fought takes the shape of a woman, who kisses him upon the brow. Watts did not borrow from literature the thought of the warrior thus consoled in the moment of death ; but years afterwards he met with it in an Eastern poem. Life, as we know it, draws all its worth from the risk and final certainty of death. All the meaning would be gone from courage and high endeavour if they could never be put to the supreme test of renouncing life itself. Such a picture as The Happy Warrior is needed to give full value to Aspiratmis or Sir Galahad; and other pictures are also needed fully to bring out their meaning : pictures of those who have never taken, or who have taken and not kept, the vows of knightly quest. The true and the false stand over against each other in life; and they must do so in both literature and art if life is to be truly interpreted. Against Watts’s Aspirations we may put The Idle Child of Fanc^; gay, careless Cupid, seated on the globe, and ready to make mischievous play with his arrows. In I’HE HAPPY WARRIOR CHIVALRY 89 the same opposition we may put Mischiefs in which a wanton sprite is drawing a youth, by a wreath of flowers round his neck, down from his strong castle on the height, into the valley below, where the roses turn into a tangle of briars about him. His bow and arrows have fallen from his hands ; already he is the defence- less prey of evil. Over against 8ir Galahad^ we may put the two pictures entitled Fata Morgaua. Upon Sir Galahad, the light of the Holy Grail shines brightly among the trees; the soldier in the other pictures is beguiled to his doom by the lovely form of an enchantress, fleeing ever before him, just beyond his reach, deeper and deeper into the gloom of the forest. Over against the Happy Warrior, dying for his ideal, and knowing that his sacrifice is not in vain, we may put Watts’s picture of the young man, who, because he had great possessions, with which he could not bear to part, turned away from Christ himself. We do not see his face, for he has already turned away. But the head, bowed in shame he cannot hide from himself, the rich apparel, and the jewelled hand, are enough. He is neither for God nor for God’s enemy, but only for himself. He has asked the wrong question to begin with : ‘ W hat can I do for myself ? ’ not ‘ W hat can I do to help others?’ Let us sadly mark him, and pass him by, and return to Sir Galahad, who heartens us, and 90 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS gladdens and makes pure our thoughts, as we look at him. Watts’s pictures of sin and sorrow and death are but the necessary contrast to those of holiness and joy and life. To say he is the gloomiest of our painters is to ignore the greater part of his work, and to mistake the purport of the rest. The Childhood of Zeus, Dazvn, Arcadia, Aspirations, Sir Galahad — let us not forget later on that Watts painted such pictures as these, as well as Mammon smA The Minotaur and the pictures of which the subject is death. FOR HE FIAD GREA'I’ POSSESSIONS V AN EPIC OF HUMANITY W E have seen that W atts^s hope of painting a great epic of humanity on the walls of some appropriate building was destined never to be realised. We may regret this ; though, at the same time, it is well to consider that most of the mural painting done in this country, including that of Watts himself, has suffered both from climatic conditions and from the lack of an adequate technical tradition. He did paint his epic, only on canvas ; and it is almost certain to endure longer in this form than it would have done in any method of mural painting available fifty years ago. The alliance of painting with architecture gives monumental grandeur and impressive- ness ; and the Lincoln’s Inn fresco shows that Watts was capable .of design on the largest scale ; though, in that case, the non-pictorial nature .of his subject made against complete success. But how magnificent such a picture as Chaos would have looked on a monumental scale, and in a dignified architectural setting ! 91 92 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS It is idle, however, to lament that we have not every- thing we might have desired when, in fact, we have so much. Watts accomplished his task, though not in its most appropriate form. And there are compensations ; for the student of his works can link together pictures that could never have formed a single series of mural paintings. Art has lost much by the non-realisation of his scheme ; but the interpretation of life has lost little, if anything ; and the permanent exhibition of a representative collection of his works at Limnerslease, in a building, simple in form, but sumptuous in colour, amid beautiful surround- ings full of associations with the painter and his work, greatly lessens our regret, and certainly fills us with gratitude to the railway directors whose rigid com- mercialism prevented Watts from spending years of work at Euston Station. W atts was well equipped for conceiving and painting a great epic. He was neither a man of science, nor a systematic philosopher ; but the deep things of life are not hidden from those who are but babes in respect to abstruse learning. It was not because he was a philosopher that Kant was filled with wonder when contemplating the starry universe without and the conscience within. Such noble emotion is the common birthright of us all. The child can terrify himself with thoughts of infinity and eternity. It is only if we AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 93 live too much in the light of common day, occupied always with the trivialities of a material civilisation, that the early sense of wonder fails, instead of ever increasing, as childish fear changes to a confidence which no difficulty, doubt or mystery can even momentarily disturb. Watts, like Tennyson, pondered much upon human life and destiny, and the universe in which they are wrought out, until the need for giving expression to the thoughts and emotions which took form within his mind became irresistibly urgent. Already, when he was passing into manhood, geology and astronomy were opening out the great vistas of evolution ; and, again like Tennyson, he was not too old to accept the new knowledge and to reconcile it with his human, spiritual need. The thoughts that Tennyson expressed in words. Watts expressed in form and colour. Tenny- son asked the heavens if his tiny spark of being would wholly vanish in their deeps and heights, and if his day must needs be dark by reason of their boundless nights, and rush of suns and roll of systems ; and he heard, in answer : ‘ Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state, Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is great. Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the silent opener of the gate.’ GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 94 Such, in effect were the questionvS that Watts also asked ; and such was the answer, in effect, that he received — or, if the reader will have it so, gave. He could not think of the myriad world apart from an all-pervading spirit. The vaster the universe, the vaster he of whom it is the shadow. Looking up into the great star-field at night, there must have come to him the conviction that such tillage and plant- ing needed a husbandman ; hence he painted T/v ^ozcer of the Systemsy a vast figure, in a robe in which green plays amid intensest blue, sweeping through space, and scattering behind him the golden star-seed. Solemn as the midnight sky is the picture ; and the Sower, whom we see and yet see not, but only his ample robe and the hand with which he sows, does not fail as a vision of ‘that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our knowledge and imagination,^ and of which the agnostic philosopher whose words are here quoted predicated a nature not lower but inconceivably higher than personality. Chaosy the picture that should have begun the great series of mural paintings, is an allegory of evolution. The science of the first chapter of Genesis tells of a beginning in which God created the heaven and the earth, and declares that the earth was then without form and void.. The science of to-day pushes back to AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 95 no beginning of all things, but only ventures a nebular hypothesis, a theory that vast areas of whirling gases are condensed into solar systems, and, in particular, that the system of which our earth is a unit, was thus formed ; a chaos such as are the nebulae the telescope discloses, slowly changing into the cosmos in the midst of which we find a home. Wattses picture shows chaos thus changing into cosmos. At one side of it, are rocks rent by fire, and huge titanic figures writhe there in torment ; at the other side the moun- tains have taken form and are at rest, and the titanic figures are tranquilly seated upon them. An evolution both in material and human conditions is symbolised by the picture. The painter’s own account of it, con- tained in the catalogue of the New Gallery Exhibi- tion of his works, is that ‘the conditions of the several periods are more or less distinctly described by the movement of the presiding genius of each ; and the modifications may be traced from the earliest periods, on the left of the picture, to where the reposeful giants on the right are suggestive of a state of stability and order. From the centre of the picture, at first separately, denoting an interrupted record, the forms representing the cycles of time become linked in an unbroken chain, to indicate a perception of the permanent establishment of order.’ A large version 96 GEORGE, FREDERICK WATTS of the picture hangs in the T ate Gallery ; and there is also a quite small one ; but such is Watts’s mastery of form and of the symbolic use of colour, and his power to suggest vast spatial dimensions, that the small picture is hardly less impressive than the large one. The tiny figures, writhing or at rest, are Titans in effect. Within an oblong measured by inches we see a world in the making. St. Paul, this picture moves one to say, were he living now, would assuredly be an evolutionist. Nay, he zcas an evolutionist. ‘ How- beit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.’ ‘ The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adop- tion, to wit, the redemption of our body.’ This is at least the germ of evolution; and Watts’s Chaos, and the other pictures we are about to consider, are but pictorial versions of this theme. Far back beyond the days of the cave-dweller, roughly shaping flints into tool and weapon, lie the ages when man was slowly emerging from the brute, and beyond again lie the measureless distances of time during which life was being evolved, not by stages, but by minute gradations. We might picture those long. FHE SLUMBER OF THE AGES AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 97 long ages in various ways. Watts thought of them as a sleep, as a time when no rational being was awake in the world ; and so he painted a picture, The Clumber oj the Agei^ in which we see a woman seated against a mass of rock, her head fallen upon her shoulder, in a sleep that looks like the sleep into which a god might have put her. Light is falling on her ; it is passing over her ; it has almost reached her eyes ; when it does reach them she will awake. There is a child in her lap ; the light shines fully upon him. It has awakened him ; and he turns his head from the woman’s breast to gaze in uncomprehending wonder at what the light reveals. ‘In this picture,’ said the painter, ‘the great stretches of time, since the earth ceased to be a formless mass, are represented as a mighty mother, with man, the child upon her lap, grow- ing to conscious knowledge of himself and of his place in the scheme of creation.’ In W hence y W hither Watts pictured humanity as an infant, who has just come from the great ocean and is making his first steps on the land. Mr. Clausen is quoted later on as saying that, even had the picture no title, we should know that it was not a mere material ocean from which the child had emerged. Once more we inevitably think of one of Tennyson’s poems : H 98 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, From that great deep, before our world begins, Whereon the spirit of God moves as he will — Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep From that true world within the world we see. Whereof our world is but the bounding shore — Out of the deep. Spirit, out of the deep, With this ninth moon, that sends the hidden sun Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy. In another picture, Destiny — the two hang together in the Limnerslease gallery — the child has passed a short distance inland, and already the dark sea begins to look remote. He is seated, and hovering over him, shadowing him with her garments, is Destiny, clothed in blue and scarlet and gold, and looking into the book of futurity. What is the future to be? Watts him- self would probably have quoted, in answer, the closing lines of Tennyson^s poem : Live thou ! and of the grain and husk, the grape And ivyberry, choose ; and still depart From death to death thro’ life and life, and find Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite. But this main-miracle, that thou art thou. With power on thine own act and on the world. The colour, in Destiny^ has a solemn note. In Evolution the pervading hue, only emphasised by the blue of the sky, is a melancholy drab. A gaunt-look- ing woman shades her eyes with her hands, anxiously AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 99 peering into the distance. She cannot, like Destiny, read the book of the future She is drab ; and the children playing about her knee, some of them quarrel- ling as they play, are drab also. She is ‘ the primeval mother of Conflict and Harmony, herself uncertain of the future of her offspring.^ The moral of this picture does not apply only to the far-off past. Man has long since left the — to him — dark ocean that rounds this life ; he has long awakened from the slumber of the ages, long, at least, as we count length of time ; yet still Conflict as well as Harmony is with us. The latter may have waxed and the former may have waned ; or it may be thought that Conflict is still as strong as ever, only taking less brutal, less murderous ways of satisfying her desire. W atts painted a picture of a woman with a child upon her lap ; she has sunk down worn out with weary tramping from place to place ; she holds in her hand a sprig of olive ; afar off on the night-horizon she sees a light ; the child also looks or listens. This outcast woman, ‘ Peace, the rightful sovereign of an intellectual world, with Good Will, symbolised by an innocent child, wearied and footsore, regards through the dim atmosphere a distant glimmer, dawn or conflagration.’ Which is it i It may be that not even disarmament and universal arbitration would put an end to essential conflict. There is still, and it seems as if there will ICO GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS long be, strife and contention in the world. The evo- lution of man is not yet completed. His peace is war: the war of selfish competition. Watts painted Goodwill by himself, an outcast child, lying against a bank of earth, over v/hich we see long trails of smoke coming from factory chimneys. ‘ I confess I am not charmed,’ wrote John Stuart Mill, ‘ with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human things is that of struggling to get on ; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each others’ heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or any- thing but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.’ The thinker, and the artist to whom alone he sat for his portrait, were at one in this matter. Once more we turn from painter to poet, and then from poet back to painter. In Tennyson’s Idyll of the Holy Grail, Sir Percivale describes to the monk Ambrosius the mighty hall that Merlin the wise had built for King Arthur, and the four great zones of sculpture which gird the hall, with mystic symbols set betwixt them. And in the lowest beasts are slaying men, And in the second men are slaying beasts, And on the third are warriors, perfect men. And on the fourth are men with growing wings. AN EPIC OF HUMANITY loi This epitome of human evolution, like the passages quoted from St. Paul, might serve also as an epitome of the purport of some of the most important of Watts’s subject-pictures. It is the contest of good and evil, of the higher and the lower nature, that they portray. That contest is not yet over ; and at times it seems as if evil rather than good were gaining ground ; as if the beasts were still slaying men. In several pictures Watts sought to arouse men to the need for strenuous warfare with evil : with evil en- throned among us to-day, and to bring home to those who yield to evil the fearful degradation it means for them, and the cruel suffering it imposes on others. Revelations of the social sins of our great cities are said to have caused him to paint The Minotaur ; to show the bestial monster of Crete, leaning over the rampart of his castle, crushing a helpless bird beneath his hoofs, and watching with impatient eagerness the approaching vessel bringing him the youths and maidens upon whose flesh he longs to glut his brutal appetite. In Cruel Vengeajice, a vulture - headed monster, clutching at the neck of a naked man, whom it holds down with a misshapen foot, is a horrible, but accurately appropriate symbol of an evil passion from which humanity is far as yet from being free. In picture after picture Watts rebuked the love of 102 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS money in which so many evils, often unsuspectedly, have their root. A loathsome creature is the Mammon he depicts in the picture bearing that name. The bullet head is supported by a neck that is but folds of flesh, and the expression of the face, of which the repulsive features seem to fall below the human to the brute, denotes a horrible gloating over success gained by the crushing down of others. It is the incarnation of cruelly aggressive selfishness Hand and foot are ministering to the passion expressed by the face : they are crushing out the life of a man and a woman already reduced to nakedness. A golden crown encircles the brow of this inhuman monarch. Sculls ornament his throne. Bags of gold lie in his lap ; his outer gar- ment is the colour of gold ; his under garment is the colour of blood. This, then, is the real meaning of the greed of gain. Again, in Labour arid Greedy Watts contrasts the stalwart form and simple, honest face of a labourer, carrying various implements of toil, with the shrunken form and meanly contracted features of a miser clutching money bags. As Nathan turned upon David with his sternly accusing ‘ thou art the man,’ so W atts, in the picture Can these Bones live ? tells us, his countrymen, that Mammon Worship prevails amongst us and that we are becoming a prey to its inevitable ills. A heavy MAMMON 1 AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 103 pall of gold has weighed down some of the branches of England’s oak, on the stem of which the words ‘Alfred me planted’ are well-nigh effaced. Beneath the pall are human skeletons ; and the drunkard’s cup, the gambler’s dice, and the assassin’s knife, witness to the evils that have accompanied Mammon Worship, dragged men down to death, and threatened the nation with decay ; v/hile implements of labour lie broken and disused. Such, with but little variation of phrase, is the painter’s own explanation of this picture. Its meaning is emphasised by a cloud of ominous blackness, which hangs, another pall, over a dreary, far-spreading waste. One can almost hear the prophet-painter say- ing : ‘ He that hath eyes to see, let him see ' ; just as in Jonah he almost forces us to hear denunciation. The prophet’s form is contorted by the fierceness with which he delivers his message. On the wall behind him are sculptures, Babylonian in form, but in meaning applicable to our own day ; for they depict such evils as those rebuked by the pictures we have just con- sidered. Yet though the beasts be still slaying men, men are also slaying beasts. Evolution means advance. At least, such was Watts’s belief. We find it in his picture Trogress, where from a blaze of light comes a bowman riding his steed through the air. On the ground 104 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS beneath are four men ; one of them fails to see the oncoming horseman because he is poring by feeble candle-light over the letter that kills ; another, because he is grubbing for gold in a muck-heap ; a third, because he is asleep ; but a fourth looks up and sees the rider and the light of a better day of which he is the herald. The beasts will perish. The dry bones will live. In the pictures already considered in this chapter, humanity is regarded in the mass ; it is looked upon, as far as a man can so look upon it, from the outside. It is the race, not the individual, whose fortunes we have followed. We have now to see humanity from within, to have laid bare to us the inner life of men and women in all ways like ourselves. That we may have to do with legend as well as fact is of no moment. The legends are the outcome of actual human ex- perience. They have truth if not reality, a distinction drawn by Watts to which reference has already been made. The tragedy of the Garden of Eden has been a theme for many a painter as well as for many poets. It comes pictorially to us all as we read of it ; it v/as inevitable that the painters should seek to picture it. Masaccio, one of the founders of modern realism, did so with great power. Art has never perhaps more EVE TEMPTED I I. AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 105 surely accomplished its end than in his fresco at Florence of Adam and Eve passing out through the portal of the garden into the wilderness, hastening from a condemnation they cannot escape, wailing as they go ; while the angel with drawn sword, both bids them forth and bars the possibility of return. Watts has interpreted the tragedy with great intensity. In a series of paintings he has shown the Creation and the Temptation of Eve, the Denunciation of Adam and Eve, and the Repentance of Eve. In one picture. The "Birth of Eve^ Adam lies asleep upon the ground ; Eve rises, fully formed, from his side, and, in a very swirl, angels sweep upward, with outstretched arms, to acclaim the wonder of the creative act in which they have taken part. In The Creation of Eve, she is taking form in a flood of descending light, in which she seems half-consciously, with head thrown back, to bathe herself ; and around her is a mist of illumined vapour, and of leaves and flowers and birds. Then comes the temptation ; her form is half hidden, her face wholly hidden, amid foliage, flowers and fruit ; a panther rolls fawningly at her feet ; she has wholly yielded to the pleasures, of sense, and the inevitable doom is coming upon her. Fallen, she drags Adam down with her, and so we see them both * crouching at the foot of a tree ; above, God the F ather, with io6 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS outstretched arms in the act or denunciation/ and angels, not now rejoicing, as at the birth of Eve, but joining in the condemnation. Then, again, we see Eve, leaning against a tree, her back turned towards us, not now enjoying the pleasures of sense — for all the luxuriance of fruit and flower has gone, and the very leaves are withered and tortured by a bitter blast — but wrung, as her whole frame shows, with the agony of remorse. Without comment yet, let us pass to the second great tragedy of the Book of Genesis, for Watts also retold in picture the story of Cain. In The T)eath of Abel^ Cain stands over the body of his murdered brother — stands, but leans as if to fall, covering his head with his arms ; for a stream of avenging fire comes down upon him from heaven, and angels by repellant gestures — so vivid that we almost think we also hear their stern denunciation — bring home to him the meaning of his deed and the condemnation of God. Watts took the story of Eve no further than her re- pentance ; and it was enough ; for repentance means that the higher nature has again made good its claim. He pictured also the repentance of Cain, the moment of his death, and the removal of his curse. It will suffice to quote Wattses own description of the picture : ‘ The first murderer is here shown as an aged pilgrim. EVE REPENTANT 1 .* 1 I AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 107 broken by his long journey. He has returned to die upon AbePs altar, and as he sinks upon it, in repent- ance and contrition, the black cloud of his curse is removed from him by his accompanying angel, and the light of heaven once more shines upon him.’ We pause, as in a previous instance, to compare the treatment of these subjects by Watts with that of Blake. There is terrible power in Blake’s rendering of these stories from the Book of Genesis. He does not shrink from giving the Spirit of Evil his temporary victory. In the pictures of Adam and Eve it is the serpent that we chiefly remember as we think of them. He rises above Eve at her creation ; he gives her the apple from his own mouth ; when he has triumphed, he lies upon her body in horrible content. The heart sickens at the loathsomeness. In Blake’s pictures we see the tragedy from the outside. We are spectators of a far-off, but undivine event. W atts’s Eve is a woman actually before us ; and the heart yearns for her, as it would yearn for a living person suffering the bitter agony of remorse. Sometimes Blake strikes a more personal note. One of his drawings shows Cain, who has dug a grave in which to bury the body of Abel. Before his gruesome task is completed his parents have come upon him. Eve throws herself upon the body of her murdered io8 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS son. Cain turns to flee. Adam casts upon him a look in which are mingled horror, wonder, and, we think, understanding. He himself has sinned. The murder of Abel is in part his own doing. In respect of its cold, deliberate selfishness, the wrong done by Jacob to Esau was worse than the murder of Abel by Cain. The present writer is one of those who do not look round to see who is near before saying that ail through the birthright and bless- ing transactions they think better of Esau than of Jacob. We must, of course, shake our heads ‘at Esau for selling his birthright for a mess of pottage ; but it was a deeper wrong for the younger brother to take it from him at the price, and to supplant him by deception and lying. No one who had thus outwitted Jacob — if such an achievement is even to be deemed possible — would ever have been forgiven ; but Esau forgave Jacob. Perhaps it was his easy-going disposition that made this possible for him. Anyhow he did it ; and many of us, probably, only hope we could have done the same thing in the same circumstances. Watts seems to have admired Esau. He painted him as a powerfully built, sun-browned herdsman, leaning on his spear ; and he painted that memorable meeting, when the supplantcr cringingly sought his brother’s favour, ‘and Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 109 fell on his nock, and kis.scd him : and they wept. Jacob, in the picture, is puny and pale ; he is trembling and his legs are ready to fail under him ; his face wears an abject expression. Is it prejudice that makes one read insincerity into it ? Great, burly, bronzed Esau, comes to him with big strides ; and it seems as if his hands, laid upon Jacob’s shoulders, would be enough to weigh the supplanter to the ground. Between the two, in the middle distance, we see one of Jacob’s wives, with a child in her arms ; and we might read into her expression something not far removed from contempt at the sorry figure her husband is cutting. But, in the end, while looking at this picture, we think of little but Esau’s forgiveness ; he is the embodi- ment of the unstrained quality of mercy. Once again Watts retold a biblical story of sin and repentance. This time it is the Prodigal son we see, in two pictures. In one of them he is seated on the ground, in ragged garments and bare-footed, with a sleeping hog close by him. Every feature shows the bitterness of his thoughts. He has squandered his in- heritance only in the end to be glad to share the food of the unclean beasts he has been set to keep. Hope of forgiveness he has none, otherwise his face would not be wholly dark. It is merely to escape from abject misery, not that he thinks life can ever again be what no GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS it should have been, that he permits himself to recollect that the servants in his father’s house have bread enough and to spare while he is perishing with hunger. In the other picture he is looking sadly, hopelessly, towards home. We know who is looking out there, and could almost wish to tell the Prodigal how ex- haustless is a father’s love. There is no more awful story of sin and punishment than that which Dante tells of Paolo and F rancesca da Rimini, who, sinning together, and slain in their sin, had no chance of repentance, and, therefore, of salva- tion. Their love uniting them even in hell, together they were swept along by the burning blast ; the bitterest of all their bitter pangs being surely the knowledge that each had wrought the other’s ruin. When Dante had imagined the sad wailing uttered by each of them, after F rancesca had told him their story, well might he imagine further that, when he had heard the wail, he swooned away. Is it any less harrowing to look at Watts’s picture of Paolo and Francesca than to read Dante’s story ? Standing before it one has felt that though a Dante in the Middle Ages might be com- pelled to imagine such a doom, a Watts, in this later day, ought not perhaps to have pictured it. Such a feeling is a tribute to the power of his work. We can only not feel it to be intolerable by again distinguishing AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 1 1 1 between truth and reality. It warns us that a crueller fate than to fall oneself is, in falling, to have dragged a loved one down. That even such a fate can be absolute, that remorse will never lead to repentance, and repentance to redemption, surely Dante’s swoon, and the pity that mere picture and story arouse in us, unerringly deny. We pass now from these vividly imagined tragedies of the human soul. Watts would have fallen below the demands of a poet painter’s calling had he left these awful regions unexplored. Aeschylus had to write the Oresteia, Shakespeare had to write Macbeth^ that tragedy of mutual sin driving husband and wife each, in the end, to a lonely and unlamented death. Dante Rossetti’s sonnet and drawing, Foundy torture us through the realisation of another downfall of the soul from which we hope rather than see the possibility of any uprising. Only by the most solemn words can our sense of the awful clearness of poet and painter’s vision be expressed : ‘Fear not them which kill the body only, but are not able to kill the soul : but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.’ We pass out from darkness into shade when we leave sin and retribution to come to sorrow. There is, however, a debatable ground between the two. There 2 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS are sorrows that come from some neglect, or thought- less disobedience ; from lapses followed by immediate recovery; and yet deep loss has been sustained. Such was the legendary fate of Orpheus and Eurydice, whose pitiful story Watts made the subject of two pictures. Orpheus followed his lost wife into the underworld, and so charmed its ruler. Hades, by his music, as to obtain consent to take her back to the world above. One condition only was imposed : that he should not turn to look at her until they had passed the boundary between the two realms. * They had just reached the fateful point, but had not passed it, when Orpheus, unable longer to restrain his desire to be sure that Eurydice was following him, turned to look, and at once she was lost to him, fading away into the dark- ness. It was this moment that Watts chose for his pictures. The pallor and the powerlessness of death have come upon Eurydice ; Orpheus strives to hold her, but we can see that his effort must be in vain. Another moment, and he will be left alone with his sorrow and his self-reproach. He has mistrusted the king of the underworld, and this is the direful penalty. Of similar, though perhaps deeper import, is the story of Psyche. Her lover, Cupid, who came to her at night, and left her in the day, forbade her to look upon him or to ask who he was. Her jealous sisters ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE AN EPIC OF HUMANITY 113 told her that if she could see this nightly visitor she would find him to be some dreadful rhonster ; so, one night, she took a lamp and looked upon him, and was amazed at his beauty. But a drop of oil from the lamp fell upon him ; he awoke, and finding that Psyche had distrusted him, left her. Watts, in his picture, shows her standing before a couch ; on the floor is an overturned lamp, still smoking. There lie also two feathers from Lovers plumage, at which Psyche sadly gazes. Her flesh is pallid ; the hues of every- thing we see about her are dimmed in sympathy with her sadness. The shade is near to darkness here. Of all that Psyche — the human soul — had to pass through, before love and happiness could return to her, this is not the place to tell. Not for any fault or failing of her own was Ariadne, daughter of Minos, King of Crete, deserted in the Isle of Naxos by the Greek hero Theseus. W atts shows her, seated upon the shore, sadly watch- ing the ship of Theseus growing less and less in the distance. There are two such pictures. In one of them, Ariadne in Naxos, mentioned in an earlier chapter, there are two leopards beside her ; and an attendant maiden seeks to rouse her from her listless- ness, pointing to the land behind, where a growing clamour tells of the approach of Bacchus and his rout. I 1 14 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS We do not feel the less the human pathos of the story — it is the ‘ Never morning wore to evening but some heart did break’ of the English poet — because we know it to be a nature-myth, symbolising the earth robbed of joy and beauty in the winter, to have them both restored in the springtime. That sad spectacle, which the King in Hamlet^ smitten with remorse and fear, describes as ‘Poor Ophelia, divided from herself and her fair judgment,’ with its sequel of untimely death, is the subject of another of Watts’s pictures. Ophelia has come to the willow growing aslant the brook, and lies upon it. So expressionless is her down-turned face, that we can hardly say she is looking at the water beneath. She has lost touch with the world outside, and the world within is all confused. For such disease there is but one remedy, but one allaying of such a fever : the peaceful sleep of death. Is the reader by this time ready to agree with M. de la Sizeranne ? Let him turn to the reproduc- tion of Sir Galahad. We must not forget the bright- ness ; for our next chapter will keep us still in the shade ; but for a time only : we shall pass through it to the light as we follow the human epic to its close. ARIADNE IN NAXOS VI LIFE, LOVE, DEATH AND JUDGMENT We can ask about any seer, prophet or poet, who offers to explain life to us, no more searching question than what he would have us think of death. For, until, with or without help, we have faced and answered this question for ourselves, we have not properly begun to live. There are few stranger contrasts in life than that between the keen suffering of those who know the difference that death has wrought for all their after years, and the light-heartedness of the child from whom the meaning of death, as yet, is mercifully hidden. The contrast at first brings pain ; in time it brings relief. We have already seen the child playing with the shroud-like drapery in The Court of Death and doing no homage to the monarch to whom all must submit themselves ; and we have thought of him as unconsciously bidding us not to be fearful even in liS i6 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS that dark presence. And is not this true to ex- perience ? But even though death, like danger which is the shadow of death, should not be feared, it must still be faced ; and when we do face and question it, we find that, so far from being the enemy of life, it is from death that life derives all in it that is worth the having. When we strive v/ith another with the aim of increas- ing our own skill or strength, is our opponent not our friend ? So it is with life and death. Life is one long contest with death, and can no more be con- ceived apart from death than a game of chess with but one player. Think of the intense significance of religion, having postulated a deathless God, finding herself under the necessity of making him for a space both human and mortal, so that, though the high priest is passed into the heavens, he yet can be touched with the feeling of human infirmities ! It is not for us, here, to try how far our plummet-line can sound the mysterious depths of being ; but we are put to solemn questioning by the poet-painter who has painted so many pictures that have life and death for their theme. Even where death is not named we shall find that it is implied. There is no mention of it in Love and Life, Yet it is there, lurking in the precipices from LOVE AND LIFE LIFE, LOVE, DEATH AND JUDGMENT 117 the dangerous edge of which Love is gently leading Life. When Life is in danger then comes Love’s opportunity. Life without danger, without suffering, without death, would be, so far as wt have any power to imagine it, life without love. In the heaven of the Apocalypse the rejoicing and thanksgiving are for deliverance from sin and sorrow, remembered though for ever past, wrought by love that did not shrink from death. It is not the Love of Love and Life that, in the companion picture, seeks to bar Death’s entry into the house of Life. He who would, but cannot, stop the inevitable passage of the solemn, grey-robed figure, is a lesser, a less noble. Love. We need to say that Love has two natures, a higher and a lower ; and that the lower nature must serve, and sacrifice itself for, the higher. When Death has passed. Love will find that he has been raised, not crushed to the ground. Death can only cast a shadow on Love ; when the shadow has passed the light will still be there, only more intense than before. It is thus that our poet-painter asks us to think of death. He will not have it thought of otherwise than as gentle, like a woman easing pain, or a nurse putting the children to sleep. It has been urged against him that he makes death more to be desired than life. Even in the closing of life before it has well begun he ii8 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS sees but Death crowning Innocence. The thought is perhaps not a profound one. It seems, indeed, not wholly consistent with other things the seer has seen and reported. It is perhaps a concession ; for how often has a mother found comfort in the thought that the child it has been so hard to lose is safe from evil and the ills of life. If we will we may ask how it can be known that after life’s fitful fever men sleep well. We may be right, though not always for the right reasons, in rejecting the thought that death, whenever it comes, is an untimely evil, subserving no good end. The love that finds consolation in thinking the child is safe could not, so far as we can see, have been called forth but for the need of watchfulness and care — again : it is death that makes love possible and so gives life its supreme worth. Among the most impressive of Watts’s pictures are The Messenger and the Court of Death. As messenger. Death is a woman of stately mien, who holds an infant on one arm, and stretching out the other, touches gently with her finger, as if she were bidding the pulsa- tion of life to cease, the wrist of an aged man, who has sunk back in his chair. At his feet lie the symbols of human work — of the arts that Prometheus taught to mortals — a globe, a violin, a palette, a book, a hammer. Light, the light of this life, falls upon the TIME, DEATH AND JUDGMENT LIFE, LOVE, DEATH AND JUDGMENT 1 19 dying man and his surroundings ; the messenger stands in the shade ; behind her is blue-black night. Yet so gentle is her mien that none would fear to obey her summons and follow her out into the dark. No less gentle, in the second picture, seems the dark angel- queen before whose throne the woman and the soldier in their prime, the woman and the monarch old in years, the beggar leaning on his crutch, and even the strong lion, have come to do homage ; and in whose lap a new-born infant lies. It seems as if without re- luctance, nay quite willingly, all these courtiers have come to this solemn presence-chamber, the young and strong, as well as the old and feeble. And do we not know why ? Life, we have seen, the only life worth having, the life that rises to the highest love, cannot dispense with death, not as the mere end after lapse of many years ; but as the sacrifice that love may need, even in earliest days. And what is Death ? No absolute monarch, but only a viceroy, an angel, a messenger ; and though Silence and Mystery may stand beside her, yet they are but the guardians of an open portal. The light of this world falls upon those who do homage to Death ; she and her atten- dants are in the gloom ; beyond, through the portal, there is light again. ‘ It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this 20 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS the judgment/ This solemn, dramatic statement was translated by Watts into painting, and his rendering of it is to be seen among the pictures that he gave to the nation, also, through his gift, in London’s great cathedral, and again at Limnerslease. Time, in the guise of a stalwart man in the prime of life, carries in one hand a scythe, and with the other holds the hand of Death, a woman, pallid in hue, and robed in grey, who looks sadly at the fading flowers in her lap. Be- hind them, in crimson garments, in one hand a pair of balances, in the other a flaming sword, follows Judg- ment, whose face is hidden from us by his outstretched arm. With this picture should be grouped — in thought — four others, of the horsemen who appeared on the opening of the seals in the Revelation ; and the significance ot them all will be deepened if we think also of T^he Dweller in the Innermost, Conscience, upon whose knee lies a trumpet, whose warning if we will not hear we must bear the sting of the arrows that lie beside it. Now, with all these in our mind, let us turn to still another ; Sic transit Gloria Mundi — So passeth the glory of this world. Here, in part at least, is not imaginative drama, but mere fact ; a pall that sinks and rises along a human body lying beneath it. We are in the presence of death, that awfully silent presence, . LOVE IRIUMPIIANT LIFE, LOVE, DEATH AND JUDGMENT 121 just as it is known to us. But to this there are imagina- tive additions. On the ground before the bier lie an ermine garment, gold vessels, a lute, a book, a spear, armour, a palmer’s cloak, a peacock’s feather Wealth, song, learning, war, devotion — all these, as this world knows them, have no longer any meaning for the dead. There is more. A voice is given to the dead, who passes judgment on himself. On a curtain behind the bier are written these brief sentences, of shortest words, but of deepest import; What I spent I had — What I saved 1 lost — What I gave I have. This then is what Judgment will weigh in his balances. The measure of what men spend and save is the measure of their selfishness ; the measure of what they give is the measure of their love. Now let us pass to another picture. Three figures lie prostrate on the ground. We know them well. One of them is Time. He has lost his ruddy hue, and his scythe is broken. Time is dead. The second figure is Death ; the faded flowers have fallen from her lap. Death is no more. Beyond Death we see a crimson robe. Judgment is at an end. But above these prostrate forms another springs erect, raises his arms, spreads out his wings for flight ; a blaze of light shines down upon his upturned face. Him also we know. We have seen him lead- ing Life up to the sunlit mount. It is Love, who has 22 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS triumphed over Time and Death and Judgment — W hat 1 gave I have. We do not know when first men thought there would be judgment after death. Many centuries ago, before the art of Greece had arisen, Watts had his predecessors who worked in the tombs and temples of Egypt, and carved and painted on their walls the judg- ment of the soul by Osiris. There also we see the balances ; there, if not the flaming sword, yet the monster who will hound the guilty soul to torment. There also, it is truth, and justice between man and his fellows, that will avail before the judge. ‘ I have not done iniquity, I have not done violence to any man, I have not made light the bushel, I have not stolen the things which belong to God, I have not set my mouth in motion against any man, I have not made another person to weep ’ ; such were the things a man must be able truthfully to say, unless his soul, being weighed in the balances, were to be found wanting. There is an Egyptian solemnity in the very appear- ance of the pictures in the Watts room at the Millbank Gallery. It is like passing from the busy street into the quiet of a temple when we leave the miscellaneous contents of the other rooms and enter this one. So slow are the changes that come about in human thought that Watts has only deepened the meaning of some of LIFE, LOVE, DEATH AND JUDGMENT 123 the oldest forms of civilised art. But he has deepened their meaning ; and he has varied the emphasis. The weakness of threats of future judgment — when applied by parents to children or by preachers to men and women — is that they tend to procrastination, and establish only an arbitrary, external connexion between wrong-doing and punishment. The Egyptian confes- sion, it will have been observed, is negative in form. Probably the young man who turned away from Chris» could have honestly subscribed to every item in it. Watts deepened the meaning of old forms of art when he made, not good deeds, or the absence of misdeeds — both of which, up to a certain standard, are compatible with selfishness — but love, the test in the day of judg- ment. This was the test applied to the rich young man ; who wished to know what he must do that ht might inherit eternal life. The commandments he had kept ; but did he love ? Could he sell all he had to give to the poor, and become a follower of him who, for love’s sake, had not where to lay his head ? We know his answer ; and Watts has made more vivid to us his great refusal. The thought in Watts’s pictures is deeper than the thought in the art of Egypt and of Greece because since their day religion itself has been deepened ; in the same way as — I quote a Positivist writer, Frederic Harrison — olu~ tioa^ where the anxious mother of Discord and Har- mony is in doubt as to what will be the future of her offspring. The picture, we recollect, is mere drab monotony. ‘ Flow horrible ! ’ was a lady^s comment on it to the present writer. Watts’s Charity is a rich, full harmony of blue and green and crimson and gold. He was content to treat the theme conventionally. A gentle Madonna has a child in her lap, and two others standing at her knee. They are happy in her care, and at peace with one another. This is the goal of evolution, this the essential element • And one far-off divine event To vv'hich the whole creation moves. ‘ And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three ; but the greatest of thevse is charity.’ VIII LANDSCAPE The consideration of Watts’s landscape paintings has been left until now, because, as we shall see, there will be need to refer to many of the subject-pictures with which we have become familiar in earlier pages. The unwisdom of assuming without inquiry that something we do not happen to have seen does not exist, is well exemplified by M. de la Sizeranne, who \ says, in English Contemporary Paintings that Watts painted ‘ no landscapes, because landscapes prove no- thing.’ The French writer, to whom we are indebted for much valuable criticism of English art, has man- aged in this case to give an absurd reason for something that is not true ; for W atts did paint landscapes ; and he did not paint portraits and subject-pictures only because he wished to prove something. It is true that he did not paint many landscapes ; but to draw from this fact the conclusion that he thought lightly of landscape painting would be as foolish as to conclude that a landscape painter, because he painted few or no 132 LANDSCAPE *33 portraits or subject-pictures, considered them of little importance. Watts did, indeed, rank landscape lower than portraiture and subject-painting ; I have already quoted him as comparing the art of Turner with that of Michel Angelo, Raphael and Titian, and saying that ‘lacking the directly human appeal to human sympathies, his work must be put on a lower level. ^ Such a dictum as this invites discussion upon which we must not enter here. We must restrict ourselves to noting its significance with regard to Watts’s attitude towards nature. We have already seen reasons for saying that even if we agree with this estimate of landscape painting it is not applicable to the work of Turner, which is full of human interest. And, conversely, we find some noble landscape painting in many of Watts’s subject-pictures. This happens, in- deed, so often, that, when we have added this accessory landscape to that of the pictures in which it is the only or chief interest, we have a quite considerable body of landscape painting. It will be both convenient and instructive to consider separately, and in the first instance, the landscape accessory to figures ; which is often not merely the appropriate natural setting for them, but is tuned to and echoes the mood of the subject, gay, grave, or sad. What, for example, could be more appropriate, and 134 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS at the same time more beautiful in itself, than the blue sky and white cloud, and the brilliant sunshine gleam- ing and glistening on man and horse, on armour and leafage, in Sir Galahad? In The Creation of Eve there is a blaze of palpitating sunlight, and a swirl of leafage and flowers and birds, as if all the powers of nature were conscious that the creation of which they were a part was now complete, and all their being consummated in humanity. Similar to the landscape in Sir Galahad is that in* the two Fata Morgana pictures, and in Mischief; only in them, in harmony with their subject, the shade seems to be gaining on the light. There is beautiful, tranquil landscape in The Childhood of Zeus^ Ariadne in Naxos and Una and the Red Cross Knight, In Building the Ark, we have a coming storm. The clothing and the beard of Noah are caught by the wind ; the sea is rising, and growing dark beneath a sky in which the clouds are gathering fast. Watts makes use here of a dark horizon, with a thin gleam of light just above it, and the effect is to surround the figures, even more to the imagination than to the sight, with the two infinities of sea and sky. In Love steering the Boat of Humanity, a storm is raging, and is powerfully rendered, though without any attempt at close realism. There is impressive landscape — again we have to LANDSCAPE 135 say how inadequate is this word — in all the pictures of the deluge ; in The 'Dove that returned^ where we see the frail bird winging its flight over the great, monotonous waste of waters ; in The Dove that re^ turned not^ where, though the waters are still there, the terror is gone from them, when they are seen through the boughs of the tree in which the dove has found a resting-place ; and, again, in After the Deluge^ where above the waters there is a glory of misty, golden light encircling the sun, which is the symbol as it is the agent of the Deity ; for, now that their awful purpose has been fulfilled, the waters are being drawn again to the sky from which they came when the in- visible vapours formed themselves into the clouds that, overburdened, broke into avenging rain. Here we may fitly interpolate one of Watts’s pure landscapes, Ararat. Shoulder beyond shoulder of naked rock rises out of a deep, dark abyss, until the highest peak stands out, shadowy against the cloudless sky, illumined by the moon, just rising from behind the mighty mountain’s crest. It is a solemn picture, filled also with solemn, if legendary associations. So high and higher, thought the men of the early world, would the waters rise, if need were, for the execution of the judgments of God. But, above again, the stars are shining. Again and again Watts gives to his allegorical sub- 136 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS jects, as did also Blake, a setting of little or nothing beyond almost featureless sea or land and sky, with the horizon-line, or dark outline of hill, so powerfully sug- gestive of mystery and infinity, clearly marked, as in Building the by a narrow gleam of light above it. Thus the meaning of the picture seems to escape the limits of time and space : to become inward and spiritual though external and visible in presentment. We find this in such other pictures as Whence^ W hither I ; Destiny; and Love Triumphant. Of the first of these Mr. Clausen says : ‘ W hat is it we see in this picture ? W hat are the facts presented ? A little naked child running up from the sea-beach. Well, one may see this by the sea at any time ; but yet this picture does not remind us of so ordinary an incident. The key is, of course, given us by the title, but I think if we had the picture before us for a time without any title, we should begin to realise that the sea was not the ordinary blue sea, but that he had made it to convey, as fully as he could, all that the sea and sky can express of mystery, loneliness and power. W e feel it is something terrible and strong, and the child, coming up from it towards us, gives us the sense of life, taking shape and consciousness out of formless things.’ This, let us bear in mind, is the tribute of a landscape painter, himself keenly awake to the sugges- LANDSCAPE 137 tions, in nature, of beauty and power. Similarly, Mr. Clausen notes how the ills that must come to a wealth- corrupted land are forcibly suggested by the dark and threatening sky in the picture Caii these Bones live ? Several of the pictures of biblical subjects are made more impressive by the figures being placed in a bare upland country where the eye ranges over a wide pros- pect of hills, billowy as if a sea had been changed into solid ground. Such is the landscape in Sa??ison, Esau, Jacob and Esau, The Good Samaritan, and The Prodigal Son, The vastness of the surroundings helps to give that sense of far-off time and place which fits them ; and yet they are living, and their happenings might be things of to-day. The stories, and those who told them, belong to the past ; but the meaning of the stories is for all time. If, then. Watts had never painted landscape other- wise than as an accessory in his figure-subjects, we should have owed to him not a few impressions, with a distinctive value of their own, of the beauty and power of nature. But, being thus sensitive to the moods of nature that answer to moods of the human spirit, it was almost inevitable that he should at times give them in- dependent interpretation, for their own sake only ; and this, in fact he did. And these landscapes are what we might expect after seeing what use he made of 138 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS landscape in his figure-subjects. They are not realistic, they are impressions ; as much so as the landscapes of Whistler, though usually with less feeling for subtlety of light and atmosphere and more feeling for colour. During h;s stay in Florence he painted the hill- sides of Val d’Arno, with the white-walled villas dotted amid the greenery. He painted several land- scapes when he was with Sir Charles Newton’s ex- pedition ; one that comes to mind being Asia Minor ^ in which a rocky coastline is silhouetted against a glowing sky. The Isle of Cos is an exquisitely beautiful pic- ture of an island seen across the water in misty light, vibrating in tone and colour. Egypt he summarised, we may say, in two of the pictures he painted there ; The Sphinx, in which that dateless monument looms vast in grey, uncertain light ; and The Nile, the river on whose fertile shores there slowly grew, beginning we know not when, the civilisation whose records the excavator to-day is carrying further and ever further into the past. This second picture is not one of the best, technically, of Watts’s landscapes ; he has not quite succeeded in giving to his yellow pigment the illusion of glowing light ; but still it is impressive ; and no better moment could be chosen for calling up the pro- found emotions that the very name of the river arouses. NAPLES - LANDSCAPE 139 than when its waters are darkening under the fading though still richly glowing light of a cloudless sky. There are yet other pictures by Watts of the Mediterranean and the lands that enclose it. Off Corsica, and J Sea Ghost — the ghost being a ship looming out of a sea-mist — are impressions quite in the spirit of Whistler. There is a little picture of a grey Vesuvius seen over an only less grey Naples ; a larger Naples gives a wider view over the city and bay and mountain where beauty and terror are in such close association ; while a Bay of Naples is not the tradi- tional brilliantly sunlit scene, but a momentary effect of gleam, and gloom and weirdly contrasted colour. The Mountains of Carrara Watts painted rising tier upon tier into the sky, the distance mellowing their slopes and peaks into softly blended and divided hues. For foreground we have part of a building, weather-worn and overrun with creepers ; the stones of which were hewn out centuries ago from those far-away mountain- flanks. If we travel to the north we come to the scene of one of Watts’s finest landscapes, St. Agnese, Mentone, Beyond the nearer, wooded hills, with houses on their slopes and summits, rise, high into the clear air, great, rugged mountain masses, outliers of the mighty Alpine chain. It is as a label for such a picture as this that 140 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS the word landscape is so inadequate. The picture is a great nature-poem, a solemn ode to the mighty powers that, working through incalculable years, have shaped these majestic forms out of vaster, simpler masses of rock thrust up beyond the general level of the earth in earlier ages still. How puny look the dwellings of man over against these broad-based, towering heights ! And huge as the mountains look to us, we know that it is but our littleness that makes them seem to press far into the vast abysm of space. One of the most striking features of this picture is its wonderful colour. Sir Wyke Bayliss said of the colours in Watts’s pic- tures : ‘ They cannot be adequately described by the words we use to describe the paints upon a palette.’ There is such a colour in this picture ; a blue, on the mountains and in the sky, that has not to do with material things, but with awe, with mystery, with infinity. It is not enough, before such a scene as this, to talk, with Pope, of rising from nature up to nature’s God ; the God of splendour and majesty is present here, immanent in what we see, speaks to us and raises us towards Him through the splendid vision. The place whereon we stand is holy ground. Another mountain scene. Savoy, is a picture that would probably go unnoticed in a big exhibition. In fact, we have to get the scale of it before we adequately ST. AGNES E, MENTION E LANDSCAPE 41 realise its power. Then we find ourselves face to face, not merely with nearer or more distant Alpine ranges and peaks, separated from each other by deep valleys^ but we can almost people this vast solitude with the Titans of Chaos ; for we know that the clouds that pass over or shroud the summits are still agents in the long process of evolution. In yet another mountain sub- ject, Sunset on the Jllps^ a recollection of an almost momentarily witnessed effect, the painter has actually given vaguely human form to the glowing clouds that rise high above the peak, illumined by the slowly sinking sun. In Scotland Watts could hardly escape from things that moved him strongly : light and colour and massive form. An Afterglow^ Scotland^ is an impressive render- ing of a common but far from commonplace effect of glowing sky beyond the darkening moorland. In two pictures of Loch Ness, upon which we look down from one of the wooded hills that almost enclose it, the light seems rather to pervade and sublimate both land and water, than merely to illumine them. A third High- land subject. Loch Ruthven, is strongly reminiscent of the Savoy already mentioned. The loch is in the forefront of the picture, and beyond we see range after range of hills. Once more it is a record of the ages that we read in this vista of Titan-sculptured hills and 142 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS valleys. And, at the same time, there is full apprecia- tion of the beauty of form and colour. It is significant of the intensity of Watts’s imagina- tion that we can follow him, with only change, not lessening, of interest of the highest kind, from such subjects as those we have just rapidly passed in review, to English fields and woodlands and gently sloping, tree-clad hills. This is as it should be, for the tiniest plant, living and passing on its life, is a more wonder- ful thing than the hugest, inert mountain mass. The sun himself is not so great a marvel as the life he helps to nourish. Such a picture as A Rain Cloud is a con- necting link between lifeless and living nature. High into the air rises the great, billowy cloud, formed of the vapours drawn from the sea beneath it ; and, borne inland, it will make fertile the soil that has been carried down from the hills by rivers formed of the rain of clouds innumerable through unnumbered years. Thus the sun and the rain and the rock, which we say have no life, yet render possible the myriad forms of life around us, in which we also find our place and rank. For his pictures of field and woodland. Watts did not need to travel far in search of material. He found enough in the country immediately around his Surrey home, and about the home of another nature-poet, his friend Tennyson, in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson, A RAIN-CLOUD LANDSCAPE H3 we may note here, might have learned to describe nature from seeing W atts’s pictures ; or W atts might have learned to picture nature from reading Tennyson^s poems. The parallels between the work of the two men are numerous. In writing of Watts one is tempted to quote Tennyson at every turn. Their minds had much in common ; they grew up under the influence of the same traditions and surroundings ; they were friends, and there was much interchange of thought between them. The ‘Freshwater’ pictures painted by Watts are quite in the character of Tennyson’s intimate land- scape descriptions : homely scenes amid which we can almost see living and loving, rejoicing or sorrowing, the people in Tennyson’s poems of English village-life. Picturesquely irregular farm - buildings, with high- pitched roofs of thatch ; wattled fences ; the water- butt under the eaves ; the ladder against the wall ; old, straggling, twisted fruit-trees ; great elms towering high above the buildings ; the distance hidden by trees that line the hedge-rows or are scattered about the fields : of such material is made ‘ England’s green and pleasant land ’ in which even the great dreamer Blake could re- joice, and which Tennyson — to yield to temptation and quote him — makes vivid to sight and feeling, in the description of the pictured arras in the Palace of Art, which showed many kinds of landscape. 144 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS And one, an English home — grey twilight pour’d On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep — all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace. The neighbourhood of Watts’s country-home, the house standing on a knoll in a secluded hollow in the North Downs, and well-nigh surrounded by Scots pines, afforded many varieties of scene. From the top of the Hog’s Back ridge, there are wide views over rolling country, alternately field and woodland, under a wide expanse of sky. Sandy lanes, between tangled hedge-rows, wind down into the hollows, where stream- lets babble, and where the wild-flowers peep out from among the grasses amid the dappled light and shade beneath the trees. From his own house-windows Watts could paint Green Summer, where the gaunt, bare pine — riven probably by lightning in some storm of years ago — stands apart from and towers above its fellows, as if defiant of the fate that inevitably awaits it — which, indeed, has come upon it ; for it fell. to the ground about a year after the painter’s death. In another picture, painted from a Limnerslease - window, M. de la Sizeranne could find argument for his contention that Watts was not happy unless he was proving something, but only at the expense of his own dictum that landscape proves nothing. Three tree- LANDSCAPE M5 stems occupy nearly all the canvas, and around the central and stoutest one ivy has thickly entwined itself. Parasite is the brief, suggestive title of the picture. Between the tree-stems we get delightful peeps into one of the hollows described above. In A yiezu in Surrey we look dov/n into one of them without interruption of trees, or even any foreground. Immediately below is a field across which a ploughman is leading home his slow-pacing horses ; beyond is a tree-clad hill-side ; and the sky, carried high above, suggests, once more, the sun and rain without which all ploughing, sowing and planting would be profitless. Passing to some general matters we see from his pictures that Watts cared more for trees than for flowers. It would be difficult to think of his ever being what we have in mind when we speak of a flower painter. When he did paint flowers it was usually in masses, and the individual form was only suggested. We find the lily more carefully delineated; but this was for symbolic purpose. We might put it that flowering appealed to Watts more than flozvers: the general, rather than the individual life. It w'as so, again, with foliage. If he particularised leaves, it was for a special purpose, as with the oak-leaves in Can these Bones live ? or because they were individually large and handsome, like the leaves of the horse-chestnut, of 146 GEORGE FREDERICK* WATTS which he was evidently particularly fond ; for they appear again and again in his pictures : so often, indeed, that it would be superfluous to give examples. So we may say that he cared more for leafage than for leaves. Indeed, in more than one picture, the trees give little sense even of leafage : they are only so many masses of varied colour. In Sur?'ey Woodlands it is the rich green foliage and ruddy stems of the Scots pines, against a blue sky, that have attracted the painter ; while The End of the Day is a veritable ode or hymn in colour, a glory of green and gold and red and purple. Is not this,' at least, a near approach to the grand style? Sir Joshua Reynolds says that the artist who has a true appreciation of that style ‘will leave the meaner artist servilely to suppose that those are the best pictures, which are most likely to deceive the spec- tator. He will permit the lower painter, like the florist or collector of shells, to exhibit the minute discriminations, which distinguish one object of the same species from another ; while he, like the philoso- pher, will consider nature in the abstract, and represent in every one of his figures the character of its species.’ We have not mentioned the grand style, and quoted Sir Joshua Reynolds, in order to embark on contro- versy,' but as an aid to making clear what it was that LANDSCAPE H7 Watts aimed at in landscape painting. Nature aroused in him certain thoughts and feelings, and he painted such pictures as seemed to him to express them and likely to arouse them in others. What do his land- scapes say to us ? They say that Nature is vast in time and in space ; is mysterious, and, in turns, awful, fierce, mild, bright, dark ; now fills us with joy, and now with sadness, fear or strange, vague longing. Nature is prolific ; life abundant and myriad-formed pours out from her womb ; and there is death also, so that life itself is, or seems to be, but a succession of lives. Nature, also, is full of beauty, of beauty of light and colour and form, which reaches us through sight, as the beauty of sound, whether the music of nature or of art, reaches us through hearing. If these pictures speak to us in this wise shall we ask curiously whether the painter goes sufficiently into detail ; shall we refuse him the right to single out from many facts those which have particularly impressed him ? This is how he puts it himself. ‘ I must produce an effect, and so I must ignore something, and accentuate some- thing else. Thus only can I make the representation.’ Again he says : ‘ The photographer represents the material truth as no painter can do. His truth-render- ing beats the greatest of dead or living artists ; yet his object twenty yards away is not the same as his object 1+8 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS close to. Which is the truth ? Both ; and there is yet another truth, through the microscope.^ Truth of feeling is not the same as minutely accurate truth of fact. We may not care to talk with Sir Joshua about seeing nature in the abstract, and about individuals and species. Has not Ruskin warned us that there is no such thing as an abstract cow ? There is a time for everything. There is a time to discriminate ; and there is a time to crowd together until we cannot discriminate ; until wt become conscious only of a general fact or a common life, and feel that we are in the presence of one ultimate life and energy from w'hich all things proceed. This is what the land- scapes of Watts can do for us. IX PORTRAITURE We might seem to be at least risking an anti-climax in turning to the quietude of portraiture after all the varied and intense interest of Watts’s subject-pictures. We have learned to say, of course, that art can achieve nothing higher than the portrayal of the features and the interpretation of the character of a human being. Ruskin sought to show his Oxford hearers ‘ how much more useful, because more humble, the labour of great masters might have been, had they been content to bear record of the souls that were dwelling with them on earth, instead of striving to give a deceptive glory to those they dreamed of in heaven.’ W e have seen that Watts was of this positive temper. We get from him no saints and angels, no plains of heaven and deeps of hell ; only noble men and good women, deep sym- pathy with human faith and hope and fear, joy in the purest human love, and faithful denunciation of human evil. It was to the setting forth of these immediately 149 150 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS pressing realities that his imaginative powers were de- voted. To what is beyond them he did not try to give form. Still it might be said that surely mere portraiture cannot rival in interest even such restrained imagination as there is in Watts’s subject-pictures. But we must not forget the associations that a portrait may have. Had Watts merely pictured those who could pay him well for his work, even though, like Dante’s visitors, they were people of importance in the city, we might not have cared to end with his portraits. But his record is chiefly that of men of whom, if we do not say rhetorically that the world was not worthy, yet we do say that they were and are among the worthiest of their time ; men the mere mention of whose names calls up the highest achievements in active life, in thought, in poetry, in music, in all the arts. We must know little of the best that has been done and thought and said in the world if such a range of portraits as that by W atts in the National Portrait Gallery do not move us pro- foundly. We have seen that he early formed the purpose of leaving a record of the greatest men of his own day. It was no light undertaking for a mere youth to set before himself. We know now that he was worthy of it. He himself was diffident. Others had more con- PORTRAITURE 151 fidence in him than he had in himself. All he knew was that the task was laid upon him and that he must do what was in him to accomplish it. He had a call, and must respond. And now that what he did under so deep a sense of responsibility is before us, we need no mean comparison to measure its value for us and for posterity. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, wishful to stimulate his brethren, told, in eloquent lan- guage, the story of the long line of the heroes and heroines of the Hebrew people ; and, then, likening them to old athletes watching young runners, he be- sought those to whom he wrote to run well their race, inspired by the thought of the great company of on- lookers who also had run well in their day. In like manner, with art that we may rightly call eloquent, W atts painted the portraits of many of the finest ‘ runners ’ of his own time, for the inspiration of those who should come after them. When quite a boy Watts made an admirable copy in oil of an unfinished Head of a Lady by Sir Peter Lely, and eked out his slender income by painting small portraits. The portrait of himself, at the age of seven- teen, with long hair, and Byronic collar and tie, is a remarkably clever sketch for one so young, and shows him as an eager, and intelligently observant youth. Two years later he painted the portrait of his father ; 152 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS and again we note the competent workmanship, and the realisation of an earnest, intelligent personality, deeply tinged with melancholy. The influence of Vandyck’s T an der Geest portrait in the National Gallery has been seen in this early w'ork. The encouragement that Watts received from the Greek merchant, Mr. Constantine lonides, and the long succession of por- traits of members of his family painted by Watts, have already been mentioned, as have, also, the numer- ous portraits he painted while the guest of Lord Holland at Florence. The Lady Dorothy Nevill of this time is a vivid portrait ; but in colour it only serves now to show how much Watts improved in later years in this important particular of his art. In the early and middle years of his career, we may note, he painted many more portraits of women than in later years. We might be sure that Watts, who chose his own masters, and learned from them in his own way, would form his own ideal of portrait painting. The master by whom he was influenced most was undoubtedly Titian. On an earlier page I have quoted what he said as to the impression made upon him by one of the great Venetian master’s portraits at Florence. He felt, as who has not felt of Titian’s portraits, that the man almost lived again in the likeness. We look, and half expect a movement, a change of expression, a spoken PORTRAITURE 153 word. We lose all thought of the painter. In fact, it requires an effort to think of the portrait as some- thing that has been done with hand and brush and pigment. Artists will speak of their work as having ‘ come right ’ ; and a great portrait, like any great work of art, seems to have come, simply to be there, rather than to have been produced. It is one thing of course to see that this is what portraiture should be : it is another thing to be able to rise to this height. Must we say that a portrait painter is born not made ? W atts’s early work points to a natural gift. But, however this may be, he consciously developed his power. For one thing he resolutely set himself to make his portraits real, individual, not typical or ideal. For the time being he almost became ‘ possessed’ by the person whom he was painting. Mr. Spielmann quotes him as saying : ‘ In my imaginative work I feel myself perfectly free as to detail so long as I do not violate any law ; but not so in portrait painting, when, while giving my mental faculties full play so as to seize my sitter’s intellectual characteristics, I observe equally the physical minutiae. To assist myself I con- verse with him, note his turn of thought, his disposition, and I try to find out by inquiry or otherwise (if he is not a public man, or if he is otherwise unknown to me) his character and so forth, and having made myself 154 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS master of these details, I set myself to place them upon the canvas, and so reproduce not only his face, but his character and nature/ It was after hearing from Watts some such description as this of portrait painting, that Tennyson wrote the well-known lines in Lancelot and Elaine : And all night long his face before her lived, As -when a painter, poring on a face. Divinely thro’ all hindrance finds the man Behind it, and so paints him that his face. The shape and colour of a mind and life. Lives for his children, ever at its best And fullest. This is all quite familiar and well understood to-day. Here we must not forget that it was chiefly Watts who made it so. He sought to lose himself in his subject, and thereby became perhaps the greatest of modern portrait painters, and by his example raised the general status of the art. ‘ I have wished to oblige the be- holder,’ he said, ‘ on looking at the portrait, to think wholly of the face in front of him and nothing of the man who painted it.’ He succeeded ; and because he succeeded we think hardly more highly of any among the men whose portraits he painted than we think of himself. What higher aim can a man have than to leave to posterity portraits that shall almost make the best and greatest of their age live again ? And if he succeeds, how high must we rank his success ! CARDINAL MANNING PORTRAITURE 155 In nearly all W atts’s portraits of men the accessories are of the simplest. Occasionally we have a lawyer painted in his robes, or a soldier in his uniform ; but so unusual is this that when we see it we are inclined to say it is unlike Watts. A conspicuous exception to the rule is the portrait of Cardinal Manning ; though here it may be urged that the magnificence of the robes only serves- to emphasise the ascetic thinness and pallor of the face. Certainly the face dominates the accessories ; and we say to ourselves it is because this man, in what he believed to be the truest service of God, wore him- self almost to the bone, that he came to such high place in the ranks of the priesthood, and necessarily bore the traditional symbols of his high office. Another ex- ception to the rule is the portrait of Lord Leighton, who appears in academic robes, and with objects of art about him. Watts regretted that modern dress did not lend itself to the picturesque portraiture of men. I once heard a distinguished painter, fearless in the expression of his views, astonish the inmates of a club-room by crying out : ‘ There is no chance for art so long as men wear trousers ! ’ Watts must have had in mind the low level to which the art of tailoring has fallen in these days when he wrote : ‘ Portraiture now its [art’s] most real expression, is deprived (speaking of masculine 156 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS portraits) of nearly all that from an artistic point of view can render it valuable to posterity. It will not do to say that a portrait picture cannot be made a good and interesting piece of work ; but a man’s portrait can scarcely be made as a picture beautiful, or be cared for in the future as we now care for a Venetian or Vandyck portrait, without knowing anything about the original.’ This is interesting as showing that Watts would have rejoiced if the men who sat to him could have come, as the sitters to the older masters of portrait painting came to them, in garments beautiful both in form and in colour. He was too much an artist to have any sympathy with bald simplicity in dress, much less with ugliness ; and remembering this, we can understand his regret that the majority of his portraits, great as they might be as interpretations of character, could never in complete artistic effect hold their own with those of the masters who lived and worked when men were picturesquely dressed. Considering Watts’s portraits in detail we will turn first to those of women and children. It is often said that W atts was not so great a painter of women as of men. It is not necessarily a denial of this statement to say that there are portraits of women by Watts that we would not give for a wilderness of portraits by some men who rank high as painters of women. HON. MRS. PERCY WYNDHAM PORTRAITURE 157 The masculine critic is wont to account for the alleged inferiority of this side of Watts’s work by saying that the faces of women reveal less character and mind than those of men, and that Watts cared little for mere beauty of features and complexion. Such a portrait as the Lady Lilford^ in which the charm is that of a faultless beauty that Watts praised in words as well as with his brush, is sufficient to show that the second part of this explanation is inadequate. As to the first part of it, the character and mind of women are not less than those of men, but different from them ; and the merit of Watts’s portraits of women is that they faithfully represent and make clear this difference. No other women than those of Watts look so well fitted to be the companions of his men : to be complementary to them in the necessary division of the work of life. Pure, gentle, loving, thoughtful, purposeful — such are the words that suggest themselves as we look at or call to mind such portraits as The Sisters, Countess Somers, The Ladies Talbot, Mrs. Nassau Senior, Lady Carvagh, Mrs. Percy Wyndham, The Countess of Darnley, and many others ; while the drawing of Lady Mount Temple seems to reach the limit of what art could hope to do in portraying a woman whose intelligence, brightness and graciousness age has only intensified, not dimmed. We may admit that it will be by his 158 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS portraits of men chiefly that W atts will be remembered — as a portrait painter, that is ; and this is not to be wondered at in view of the task he undertook of leaving a record of the greatest men of his time. But we shall certainly do injustice to his portraits of women if our criterion be only that while men should be profound it is the peculiar and almost the only privilege of women to be pretty. Watts could see the prettiness, and he not unseldom painted it ; but he preferred to emphasise character ; and there is in his portraits a sympathetic interpretation of what is best in womanhood that is often lacking in the work of even Reynolds and Gainsborough and is rarely present in that of Romney. Watts painted portraits of children and young people, not merely because to do so came within the scope of his craft, but because he was fond of them and liked to have them about him. We have seen the young of all ages, from infancy up to early manhood and womanhood playing many parts in his subject- pictures. The infants, Zeus and Ganymede, the youth- ful knight of Aspirations^ Sir Galahad and many others, were portraits little if at all idealised. Here the young people were, in part, a means to an end ; but in many other pictures, portraits pure and simple, they were an end in themselves. There is a delightful portrait of a baby, as soundly asleep as little Ganymede or the PORTRAITURE 159 strollers in the land of Weissnichtwo are wide awake. Spring is a most charming picture of a child of a few years only, who is gathering flowers in the woodland, and stands, at the moment, with the quaint stiffness that is one of the marks of childish absence of self- consciousness. Pr^//y Lucy ^ond and Katie are por- traits of children of older growth. Still older are the girl who has dropped her book, and wearily looks out of the window, in The Rain it raineth every Day, Miss Dorothy Dene, and Miss Lilian Macintosh ; the last of whom we recognise again in In the Highlands, and as the Lilian of the brilliant picture only painted in the last year of Watts’s life. Val Prinsep, in after years a fellow-member of the Royal Academy, and his two brothers, Lt.-General Arthur Prinsep, c.b., and Sir Henry Thoby Prinsep, were all drawn by W atts when they were youths. It is the soldier-brother whom we see again in Aspirations and 5/r Galahad. Once more, while noting all these portraits of children and young people, we think how far astray M. de la Sizeranne went when he called Watts the gloomiest of all our painters. When we come to Watts’s portraits of men we reach that part of his work to which the highest praise is unanimously accorded. Those who see conflict between the spiritual and the sensuous elements in his i6o GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS subject-pictures find nothing discordant here. It is at the National Portrait Gallery, through the artist’s own gift to the nation, already mentioned, that the largest number of these portraits is to be seen. There are others at Limnerslease, some of which will remain there permanently, while some of them will eventually find a place in the national collection. Other portraits are in private hands, in Oxford and Cambridge colleges and elsewhere. With few exceptions, the important ones are accessible to the public. Those at the Portrait Gallery are not too well shown in one of the small rooms of that curiously designed building. They are crowded together ; and some of them are skied almost out of sight. It would be kinder to them, and very much kinder to most of the other portraits in the same room, to hang them separately. Most of those that will bear comparison with them are by men to whom no wrong is done by saying that they came under W atts’s influence ; but of these, few if any have the illusion of life ; they are more or less successful likenesses that have obviously been painted. As we have said of Titian’s portraits, we do not think of the majority of those by Watts as having been produced. The men are there, and if we were asked to explain their presence, the natural thing to say would seem to be simply that they must have come PORTRAITURE i6i there. Not merely have their features been correctly drawn, and — the supreme test — an expression seized that reveals the character and not a mere passing mood ; but the skin and the flesh and the bone beneath the flesh have been individually seen and recorded. Each portrait has its own formula ; the only thing they have in common is individual truth. The men themselves have this in common : they are all highly endowed, some of them in more than one respect. W atts has been called a hero worshipper. If by this be meant that he overestimated the value of the great man as against the collective force of humanity it is probably not true. The subject-pictures we have studied in earlier chapters forbid us to think it. All the same it would be as absurd, in general life, not to take note of exceptional gifts, and allot them proper place and power, as it would be for a recruiting sergeant to take no note of chest measurement, or a butcher of big flanks of beef. True worship is the recognition of worth, both for its own effectiveness and for its capacity to inspire and uplift others. The best worship is not obeisance, but emulation. The great ones are the first of many brethren. It is to such worship that Wattses portraits move us. They portray intelligence, earnestness, zeal, enthusiasm. These men are great ; but they are too great to know it. They are too M i 62 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS deeply conscious of what is above them to be disdain- ful of what is beneath them. There may be excep- tions among them. Watts may not have been in- fallible as a hero worshipper. The future may have some corrections to make in his relative estimates of men. His selection may well prove to have had faults in both inclusion and exclusion. Still, all these men have played important parts while on the stage, and posterity will be glad to know all of them through portraiture as well as through history, biography, and accomplishment. There are notable omissions, even of whole classes. The drama is not represented among the portraits of men. Nor, again, is science, as associated with such men as Darwin, Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, and others of their contemporaries and successors. It is said that Watts regretted not to have painted the por- trait of Darwin. Perhaps, as already suggested, the field in which such men worked was one in which Wattses interest was deficient. It may be significant, in this connexion, to recall the fact that Darwin lost all taste for poetry, came to find even Shakespeare dull and nauseating, and almost lost his taste for pictures and music. There is loss as well as gain in specialising. Of individual gaps in the list of Watts’s portraits the most remarkable, and perhaps the most regrettable. PORTRAITURE 163 is that of Ruskin. There was a pathetic reason for the omission. So great was the admiration of the ‘ Signor ’ for the * Master/ that he shrank from the attempt to paint his portrait. Then, when at last Watts had nerved himself to the task, Ruskin was too old to journey to London, and Watts to go to Coniston ; and a portrait that would have had the same kind of interest as those of Tennyson and Leighton remained unpainted. What a strangely eloquent tribute of esteem ! But when all omissions, either purposed or acci- dental, have been taken into account, the net still proves to have been widely cast. Nearly every im- portant sphere of action and of thought is worthily represented. Among the men of action is Sir John Hawkshaw, who looks a man capable of conceiving and counting the cost of great engineering undertakings, of fighting Bills through Parliament, and of carrying out schemes in face of the opposition of men and of difficulties imposed by nature. As we look at this face, strong, resolute, cheery, we think of Carlyle’s rugged, un- conquerable Brindley, who retired to bed to think when difficulties accumulated upon him. ‘The in- eloquent Brindley, behold he has chained seas together ; his ships do visibly float over valleys, invisibly througli 164 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS the hearts of mountains ; the Mersey and the Thames, the Humber and the Severn have shaken hands : Nature most audibly answers, Yea ! ’ So we may say : ‘ The trains do disappear into Hawkshaw’s tunnel, they do speed along, deep down beneath the shining waters of the Severn, and they do pass into daylight again ; and the counties of Monmouth and Gloucester are no longer divided/ Lord Lawrence looks as if history would have had to be rewritten had it been recorded that any other man than he had held the Punjab through the Indian Mutiny. But for the kindly light in the eyes, such brute-strength and dogged resoluteness, obvious in every line and contour of the massive head and swarthy face, would make us thankful that only a portrait and not the man himself was before us. The unfinished portrait of Cecil Rhodes, one of the latest additions to the national collection, might well confirm the estimate of those who do not allow their admiration for his indisputable energy, force of will, and imagination of a grandiose type, to blind them to what they believe to be grave deficiencies. There is something Carlylean in Watts’s tribute to Rhodes. As already suggested, the old problem of the means and the end presents itself when we think of empire-building. But such questions are not for discusvsion here. PORTRAITURE 165 The soldierly qualities of energy, decision and alert- ness are obvious in the portrait of Lord Roberts. From Garibaldi, who was an idealist as well as a soldier. Watts was only able to obtain a single sitting when the great Italian patriot was in this country in 1864. He purposely, therefore, left his work vague and undefined ; and it is now as if the spirit rather than the form of the man were before us ; but the strength, the determination and the lofty character are all there. Our naval service is represented by Admiral, Lord Lyons; whose portrait Watts painted at Constantinople in 1856. It bears evidence of Pre- Raphaelite influence ; and, in its technique, reminds one of the work of Holman Hunt. In close proximity, in the national collection, hang the portraits of Gladstone and Lord Salisbury, the Conservative driven into Liberalism, and the Con- servative whom nothing could have driven into Liberalism. The former looks just the man to make excursions into many fields of thought and action, not always with as much discretion as zeal, but ever with a lofty purpose. Lord Salisbury looks equally the man to sit on the safety-valve ; to find his work in maintaining the status quo, and his recreation in the patient pursuit of science. A third force in contem- porary English politics is — would some Labour men 1 66 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS say was'i — represented by John Burns. In Watts’s portrait he looks wiry, eager; not so much ill-groomed as ungroomed : the man to take his coat off. He is later in date than the other two ; and represents political forces which, though not unknown to them, have come to a head since their active day. So the old order changes ; and with it change parties, alliances and antagonisms. These three men may stand for statesmanship and politics ; though Gladstone refuses to be confined within these limits. Letters, in a minor degree, and politics, diplomacy and administration, all found a place in the life of Lord Dufferin, of whose clear- cut, forceful, intellectual face Watts has left an admir- able record. Diplomacy can claim one of the finest of Watts’s portraits, that of Lord Stratford de Red- cliffe. It is a marvellous study of a man in whom the fires of life are beginning to burn low. The shrewd- ness and keenness are still there. This is a man to see and know more than he speaks. But the flesh is failing; the bone almost shows beneath the skin on the finely modelled brow, over which the hair that casts a delicate shade is soft and silvery white. It is a portrait to delight the student of character and to be the despair of the painter. As representing medicine we may name the finely fHOMAS CARLYLE PORTRAITURE 167 expressive portrait of Sir William Bowman ; and for the law, we have Lord Campbell, whose small full- length portrait is one of the few in which Watts permitted himself the use of official costume and appropriate surroundings, and Lord Davey and Mr. Russell Gurney. The superb portrait of the last-named hangs in the National Gallery. It is a masterpiece of interpretation and subtle workmanship, and one has often stood long before it, nothing less than spell-bound. Work among the people, for the people, is repre- sented by a drawing of Thomas Wright, the prison philanthropist, who has been already mentioned in connexion with The Good Samaritan ; and by Lord Shaftesbury and Sir Charles Booth. Of students, philosophers and divines, the portraits are almost legion, and they include some of Watts’s finest work. There is Carlyle, who complained because Watts represented him truthfully — the phrase being interpreted — as a mad Scotch farmer. There is Carlyle’s friend, though his opposite in philosophy, John Stuart Mill, of whom Watts alone painted a portrait, twice repeated ; and as we look at the broad expanse of forehead, the thoughtful eyes, which seem rather to look inward than outward, the aquiline nose, the finely drawn, sensitive mouth, we are ready to say that there would have been a mistake somewhere if 1 68 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS this man had not written the Lo^c and the Political Economy, One cannot but link with this portrait the fine one of the philosophical divine, Dr. James Martineau. There is much in common between the two men. There is evident asceticism, not morbid, but natural ; a healthy condition of their life and work. But Martineau has clearly the more emotional nature ; there is enthusiasm, none the less deep because restrained ; the positive philosophy could not content such an one ; his mind reached after a higher mind ; his soul sought communion with an Over-Soul ; he might here be thinking out, with joyous emotion, one of his own sentences : ‘ The causality of the world, therefore, is at the disposal of the all-holy Will ; and whether within us or without us, in the distant stellar spaces or in the self-conscious life of the tempted or aspiring mind, we are in one divine embrace, — “ God over all, blessed for ever.’’ ’ The portrait of Cardinal Manning has already been incidentally mentioned. Here asceticism is pushed to an extreme : has become almost an end rather than a means. Here is one in authority, yet under authority ; proud and strong in will, yet submissive ; his robes, of scarlet and lace, are the emblems of service; so is the cross that hangs from the chain of gold cast round his neck. Mill is calm, recognising the authority of reason ; ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON i I J i I I ; PORTRAITURE 169 ! Manning is calm, recognising the authority of the ! Church ; Martineau is perturbed, recognising the I limitations of all authority, and the duty of mind and I spirit ever to reach after higher things. ‘A man’s reach I should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for I ’ We must not dwell at equal length on all these I' portraits, or even attempt so much as to name them all. But Lecky and Leslie Stephen must be named, and Motley, the historian of the Dutch Republic, whose large blue eyes, thoughtful almost to sadness, arrest the attention and haunt the memory ; and W atts did little if anything finer than his portrait of Panizzi, the Italian refugee who became Chief Librarian of the British Museum. This reader, engrossed in his book, to utter oblivion of any other world than that within its pages, with his pen waiting to inscribe the note his mind is unconsciously framing, is represented with amazing insight and executive skill. It might be anticipated that W atts would achieve some of his greatest successes in painting the portraits of poets and artists ; and this was so. First among the poets, for reasons that preceding pages have made clear, we take Tennyson, whom Watts painted no fewer than six times, as early as 1856 and as late as 1890. All the portraits are not equally good, not equally subtle in interpretation and workmanship ; but lyo GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS they all set forth the sensitive, reserved poet and thinker, with the broad and lofty brow, the well-formed features, and the eyes which, like those of Mill, seem to look inward rather than outward. Watts himself, whose thought we have so often compared with that of Tennyson, came to have this introspective look in later years. In marked contrast from the portraits of Tennyson is that of Robert Browning. If the former look like a lion at rest, the latter looks like a lion going about — seeking material for poetry ; at least seeking something, though we may not be quite sure what that something is ; for neither in any portrait of him, except in young days, nor in the living look of him, could we be sure of making a good first guess at Browning’s vocation. Power is evident ; but not so certainly the kind of power. Sir Henry Taylor, on the other hand, is even more obviously the poet than Tennyson ; the portrait is almost described by saying, not poet, but bard. Intelligence warmed by emotion is stamped on his face. Swinburne looks all quiver, flash and flame — as he ought to look. Sadness touched with irony plays about the firmly chiselled features of Matthew Arnold. This is the essayist and poet who felt himself Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born. DAN'l'E GABRIEL ROSSETT PORTRAITURE 171 To George Meredith we attribute at once a keen and subtle intelligence. Dante Rossetti is a link between the poets and the painters. There is sadness here, but also latent lire and enthusiasm ; and one can well expect that the thought and emotion of such a man would clothe themselves in sensuous garb. Burne-Jones, the pupil, almost the devotee of Rossetti, is here seen as the lover of beauty and romance, who failed to find them in what Ruskin called ‘ this machine and devil-driven country,’ and sought them in the beliefs and legends of other days, yet with the desire, as he once said to the present writer, of telling those around him things that it seemed to him necessary for the people of j>ny age or clime to know. In the portrait of William Morris, Burne-Jones’s lifelong friend, we see Watts at his best ; or, rather, we do not see him at all, but only Morris, who looks what he was ; a very Viking of poetry and art. To his great delight he was once hailed by a mariner as the skipper of the Nancy Jane ! The keen-sightedness, full-bloodedness, passionateness, and determination of the man are all here. Art was not to him a thing for studios, drawing-rooms and galleries ; it was indispensable in the daily life of the lowest as well as the highest ; and if it could not be thus prevalent under existing social and economic con- 172 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS ditions, why, then, those conditions must be changed, forcibly if need were. Lord Leighton, on the other hand, looks like what he was ; the constitutional monarch of academic art ; and we see him amid the splendours — very beautiful, which all splendours are not — of his aesthetic court. This portrait explains I.eighton’s art ; and we almost hear him telling the Academy students that although ‘ the loftiest moral purport can add no jot or tittle to the merits of a work of art as such^ yet the ethos ^ the moral quality of the artist, will reveal itself in his art and help to determine its value. Walter Crane takes us away from the court into the house and the cottage again, and even up into the nursery. He also, like Morris, practising art in decorative as well as pictorial form, would have it enter into all work and every life. I may be permitted to quote what Mr. Clausen has said of the technical merits of this portrait : ‘ Apart from its truth as a por- trait, all artists admire this picture for the beautiful way its colour is managed. All the different elements, the white collar, the flesh, the coat, and the background are in such true relation to each other ; and though the range from light to dark is very great, yet the collar — the brightest light — is not actually white paint, and the shadows have no suggestion of black. This picture shows how delicate and true were W atts’s per- ceptions ; and also how strong and clear.’ HERR JOACHIM PORTRAITURE 73 Music must not be forgotten ; for it gave us one of Watts’s masterpieces. The portrait of Sir Charles Halle, painted in earlier days than most of us can recollect, should not be overlooked ; but that of Dr. Joachim, a lamplight study made at Little Holland House, while the great master was actually playing the violin, is the very soul of music : the face is thinking and feeling it ; the fingers that lightly hold the bow, and those that touch the strings, are expressing it. The portraits that Watts painted of himself, those of the master of all this marvellous show, have, perhaps not unfitly, been reserved to the last. The one of the eager, wide-eyed youth of seventeen years has already been mentioned. Passing without com- ment one of himself in armour, painted during his stay in Florence, we come to the one of 1853, in an Italian robe. This is the grave, thoughtful ‘ Signor,’ and the picture is known as ‘The Venetian Senator.’ In 1864 was painted the portrait now in the Tate Gallery, as the gift of Sir William Bowman. A reproduction of it forms the frontispiece to this volume, and one need only note the earnest, gentle kindliness of the expression. Finally there is the portrait of 1904, left unfinished when death had bidden the hand to cease from work, and still lovingly retained, as well it may be, in the studio at Limnerslease. It is the 174 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS spirit rather than the form of the master. The eyes look inward now. There is the calm of one who without fear awaits the summons of the Messenger ; the final solemnity of one who has long kept watch over man’s mortality, and whose thoughts are turning now towards the light beyond the shadow. X CONCLUSION The first thing to be done in this concluding chapter — which the reader will find to be concerned with various things, like an ‘ omnibus ^ Act of Parliament — is to make reference to several pictures hitherto un- mentioned. We have been grouping Watts’s works according to their subject-matter ; and like those who string beads together, we find at the end that some have not been easy to fit in. It is not intended to refer in this little book to every one of Watts’s pictures ; but there are several that would always reproach us were they left unnamed. First among these is The Teople that sat in Darkness, illustrating a passage in the Book of Isaiah that will be familiar to every reader. The picture, like the prophet’s words, is a message to all who have been without light and without hope — or with only the ho])e that is akin to despair. Light has roused those who have long been in darkness ; it is so glorious that they 175 176 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS arc bewildered by it ; and they look towards it, in- credulous as yet that it can really be rising upon them. The picture has more than an individual reference ; indeed, primarily so. Its appeal is to those who work together for the uplifting of humanity, in faith that always and in all things night must pass into day. The subject is treated as only a Watts could treat it. The light is one that must prevail, that will drive the dark- ness utterly away, not allowing it to lurk in any hole or corner. This picture is perhaps the most important of those that had to be mentioned here. Three figure subjects, A Roman Lady — in the Birmingham Art Gallery — A Venetian Lady, and A Condottiere, are pictorial epitomes of history. The Roman lady has all the haughtiness and the barbaric splendour — the Romans were only relatively not barbarians — of the imperial city ; the V enetian lady recalls the wealth and glorious colour of Venice; the Condottiere, ‘like the armour he wears, represents the fighting spirit of the middle ages.’ Another picture relating to this period, and entitled A Venetian Nobleman, might well have for a sub-title A Souvenir of Titian. This was how Watts gave expression to the effect that the story of Rome and of the great Italian cities had upon him. Turner did so by means of magnificent architectural composi- CONCLUSION 77 tions, with crowds of people, and galleys or gondolas, and, at times, representations of momentous events, as in his Hannibal crossing the Alps, Three other pictures by Watts may be linked into a short chain : T he Daughter of Herodias, in the splendour of sensuality and pride ; The Magdalen,^ in the sad hues of spiritual abasement ; and Lad;p Godiz^a, a picture of a woman’s chivalry ; she faints away into the arms of her attendants, after the fearful strain of her devoted heroism ; but the colour is bright,* because the moment, after all, is a joyous one. The last picture we must mention here is A Dedica- tion^ a solemn-hued picture, in which a woman bends, weeping, over slaughtered birds, lying on an altar. It is dedicated ‘ to all who love the beautiful and mourn over the senseless and cruel destruction of bird life and beauty.’ Probably some would say that the choice of such a subject, while giving evidence of Watts’s kindliness, is an instance of his tendency to strain the didactic use of art. W e will not argue the point ; but will rather quote Tennyson once more : Sweet St. Francis of Assisi, would that he were here again, He that in his Catholic wholeness used to call the very flowers Sisters, brothers — and the beasts — whose pains are hardly less than ours ! No, we have not finished yet. Mid-day Rest must M 178 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS be mentioned, the huge picture — there is a small version of it at Limnerslease— of dray-horses and their driver, which reminds us that Watts seems to have been attracted, as painter and sculptor, to no animal except the horse ; but this, man’s chief companion, along with the dog, among the lower animals. Watts in several pictures has finely rendered, in its strength and its beauty, and also, we may say, in its pride. Having thus quietened conscience with regard to pictures not mentioned in earlier chapters we turn to a minor, but still, probably, for some readers, important point. Reference has repeatedly been made to the pictures by W atts in the national collection at the T ate Gallery, most of them there by his own gift ; to the portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, also by his gift ; and to the collection of pictures at Limnerslease, accessible to the public in accordance with his desire and the provisions of his will. There are many people, however, in the populous districts of the north of England who may seldom, if ever, be able to see these collections, and who may be glad to know that in the art galleries of Manchester they can see The Good Samaritan, Love and Death, a large cartoon of The Court of Death, Prayer, portraits of Motley, the historian, and Mr. Charles Rickards, who was a collector of W atts’s works ; and also several drawings CONCLUSION 179 from his paintings, done by himself in red chalk, and, representing his sculpture, the Medusa, in marble. The first three of these works were given to Manchester by W atts. He never lost his interest in the native city of Thomas Wright, the prison philanthropist, whose good deeds, as already stated, aroused his admiration, and led to the painting of T^he Good Samaritan, Three drawings, including T^he People that sat in Darkness^ were presented by his executors to the Manchester Whitworth Institute — where are the Love and Death, and the other chalk drawings — under the provisions of his will. Salford has a Meeting of Jacob and Esau. Not much need be said in the way of recapitulation and emphasis. It has been shown, one may venture to hope, that only by the singling out of a few of Watts’s pictures, and by a mistaken interpretation even of these, can he be regarded, as some have regarded him, as hardly more than a hypochondriac preacher, bidding men think little but evil of life. It is true that ill-health weighed upon his spirits and aggravated the frequent depression he shared with all who feel deeply the consequences of wrong-doing and error. But his outlook on life was perfectly wholesome. The passage already quoted from M. de la Sizeranne, in which Watts is described as the gloomiest of all our painters, is a mere caricature. 8o GEORGE EREDERICK WATTS We have already seen that the love of children, and song and playfulness, found their place in his private life ; and, once at least, he let the world at large see that he was not lacking in the sense of humour ; for did he not, in one instance, depart from the serious treatment of the human drama and paint a picture showing the anxiety of the faithful spouse of the first man who, in far-off prehistoric times, ventured upon so unlikely-looking an article of food as an oyster ? That he was far from morbid asceticism in thought and temperament we might gather, if from no other source, yet from this passage in one of his essays : ‘ Light, amusing writing and playful art are not undervalued, these being often admirable, and having a very v/holesome influence not to be spared in a hard- working world.’ It was to strengthen the foundations of goodness, joy and beauty in this hard-w'orking world that Watts toiled ceaselessly through the years of a long life. And if we need further evidence of his essential sanity and courage, we shall find it in the witness borne by those who knew him well, parti- cularly his fellow-artists, to the bracing effect of inter- course with him. This is the late Sir Wyke Bayliss’s tribute to him; ‘Temperate, intrepid, generous, pat- riotic, strong, courageous, tender, compassionate, loyal in friendship — these are the characteristics of the man.’ And the man reveals himself in his art. CONCLUSION 8i Need anything more be said about the alleged sacri- fice of beauty to meaning in his work ? The conten- tion here is that even if there were such sacrifice, it was only rare ; and that, in most instances, where the sacrifice is alleged, there is, in fact, only subordination. That in every work of art, beauty should be the first and last consideration, and that ethical or spiritual aim should ever take a second place — if this be the criterion, then Watts’s work will often fail to meet the test. But if, while beauty is present, the purpose of the picture so engrosses our attention that the beauty is felt rather than seen, until we set ourselves studiously to observe it, then it is only rarely that any fault can be found. This is not to say that, from the aesthetic point of view, his work was always, or almost always faultless ; but only that purpose and beauty of expression went together in it, in due relation. His work was not ‘faultily faultless.’ He was no stylist, though style was con- spicuous in his art. There is much that is tentative, experimental in his work. He was ever reaching out after better things. He had largely to find his own way in art. No one knew' this better than himself. His greatness would have been much more obvious had he lived in the great days of art, when architecture, sculpture and painting were in close alliance, and art- 82 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS workers of every kind were supported by widespread public interest ; when, indeed, art pervaded the life and work of the people. "W atts and his contemporaries were pulling against the stream. He was himself obliged to say : ‘ If with increased acuteness in some directions, sense of beauty is passing away as a natural possession (and the ugliness of modern life points to it), art must die in spite of every conscious effort that can be made.^ The highest genius cannot fully express itself under such conditions. From a comparative estimate of his work one may well shrink ; and, indeed, it is beyond the purpose of this little book to attempt to make one. Cer- tainly in lofty appeal to thought and feeling — and appeal that goes home — he falls behind no artist of this, or perhaps any, age. In his own country his art, both in colour and design, was surpassed by that of no painter of his time, and his accomplishment in sculp- ture, though not great in amount, was fine in quality. We may, perhaps, most readily grasp the value of his contribution to English art in the nineteenth century by considering what loss that art would suffer had we to strike out his name from its annals, even though we retained the names of such subject and portrait painters as Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Millais, Leighton, Rossetti and Burne-Jones. We could ill spare any CONCLUSION 183 of them ; for each made his peculiar contribution, differing from that of the others in subject, force, style or beauty. But Watts we could spare, perhaps, least of all. If we look for his compeers abroad, we pause at such names as Boecklin and Lenbach in Germany and Puvis de Chavannes in France. We need not add name to name, or elaborate either contrast or comparison ; it is enough to say that it is only the foremost artists in any country whose names we can link with that of Watts. In his life and thought and art, he ever strove, with powers to which such strife ensured a high achievement, to be faithful to the motto of his choice : ‘ The utmost for the highest.’ Permanent Reproductions of the portraits and pictures by G. F. Pf'attSy R.A.^ can be obtained from Fredk. Holly er at his Studio^ 9 , Pembroke Square, Kensington, JV. ■All the reproductions ’were submitted to and appronjed by Mr. Watts, and pub- lished with his consent. Illustrated Catalogue One Shilling. INDEX The titles of pictures, portraits and statuary are printed in italics A jibely The Death ofy io6 Academy, Royal, 58 Adam and Eve^ The Denuncia- tion ofy 10^ After the T)elugey 135 After glotVy Scotlandy 14 1 Alfred inciting the Saxons j etc., 4 * All-Tervadingy They 125 AlpSy Sunset on they 141 Araraty 135 Arcadioy 80, 90 Ariadne in Naxosy 31, 113, 134 Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 63 Arnoldy Matthe'Wy 170 Asia Minor y 138 Aspirationsy 84, 88, 90, 158, 159 Auroray 33, 74 11 Bayliss, Sir Wyke, quoted, 140, 180 Behnes, William, sculptor, 31 Blake, William, aim of his art, I ; his art compared with that of Watts, 22, 74, 107, 126; and English greenery, H3 Boccaccioy *A Story fromy 49 Boothy Sir Charlesy 167 Boivmany Sir fP'illiam, 167 Bramley, Mr. Frank, his pic- ture tA Hopeless Danvtiy 20 Britomarty 85 Brown, Ford Madox, 3, 46 Browning, Mrs., quoted, 65 Broiuningy Robert, 170 Building the *Ark, 134, 136 Burne-jonesy Sir Edward, 171 BurnSy Johny 166 c Cainy The Death of, 106 Campbell, Lord, 167 Can these Bones live? ii, 102, »37. H5 i86 INDEX Carlyle, Thomas, on Brindley, 163 Carlyle, Thomas, 167 Chaos, 91,9+ Chcsncau, M., quoted, 2 Childhood of Zeus, The, 68 Clausen, Mr. George, quoted, II, 172 Clytie, 55 Condottiere, tA, 176 Corsica, 139 Court af Death, The, 71, 115, 118 Crane, Walter, 172 Cruel Vengeance, loi, 124 D Dante, quoted, 127 Daphne, 77 Darnley, The Countess of, Darwin, Charles, 162 Daughter of Herodias, The, 177 Davey, Lord, 167 Daivn, 74, 90 Death Crowning Innocence, 1 1 8 Dedication, A, 177 Dene, Miss Dorothy, 1 59 Destiny, 98, 136 Dove that returned. The, 135 Dove that returned not. The, 135 Dufferin, Lord, 166 Dweller tn the Innermost, The, 67, 120, 125 E End of the T)ay, 146 Endymion, 76 Esau, 108, 137 Europa, 77 Eve, The Creation of, 105, 134 j Eve, Tppentant, 106 j Eve, Tempted, 105 F Faith, 129 Fata Morgana, 89, 134 Fildes, Sir Luke, his picture The Doctor, 20 ‘For he had Great Possessions,’ 89 Found Drowned, 42 Freshwater, 143 Fugue, 71 G Gainsborough, Thomas, 32 Qalahad, Sir, 86, 89, 90, 134, 158, 159 Qaribaldi, 165 Qarvagh, Lady, 157 Giotto, his picture Hope 128 Qladstone, W. E., 165 (jodiva. Lady, 177 INDEX 187 Qood Luc\ to your Fishing ! 70 Qood Samaritan^ The, 42, 137 Qood’will^ 100 Qrtek^ Idyll, ^,69 (jreen Summer, 144 Quiderlus, Arviragus, and ^e- larius, 33. Qurney, Mr. Russell, 167 ] H Habit does not ma\e the Monk, The, 71 Halls, Sir Charles, 173 Hapf>y Warrior, The, 88 Hardy, Mr. Thomas, . his Dynasts referred to, 13 j Harrison, Frederic, quoted, 1 23 1 Ha’ivksha’iv, Sir John, 163 ! Haydon, B. R., Watts on the j art of, 6, 7 j Hebraism and Hellenism, 62- ; 65 Highlands, In the, 159 Hogarth, William, 1 Holland, Lord, 35, 41, 50 Homer, 27 Hood, Thomas, 42 Hope, 128 Hunt, W. Holman, 3, 43, 44, 45 Hyperion, 75 I Idle Child of Fancy, The, 88 , 128 Vm Afloat, 69 In the Land of Weissnichtwo, 7 1 lonides. Miss Agathonike, 33 lonides, Mr. Constantine, 33 Iris, 76 Irish Peasants during the Famine, 42 Isle of Cos, The, 138. J Jacob and Esau, Meeting 0^ 108, 137 Joachim, Herr, 173 Jonah, 103 K Katie, 159 L Labour and Greed, 1 24 Laivrence, Lord, 164 Lecky, IV. E. H., 169 Leighton, Lord, 155, 172 Lely, Sir Peter, Head of a Lady after, 151 Life's Illusions, 42 Lilford, Lady, 157 Lilian, 159 Limnerslease, collection of works by Watts at, 18 i88 INDEX Lincoln’s Inn, mural painting at, 37 , 46-48, 91 Lcc/i ^uth'veny 141 Lodge, Sir Oliver, quoted, 65 Lonsdale, Bishop, monument to, 56 Lothian, Marquess of, monu- ment to, 56 Lovt and Deaths 20, 117 Lo’ve and Life, 67, 116 Lo’ve steering the Boat of Hu- manity, 134 Love Triumphant, 121, 136 Lyons, ^Admiral Lord, 165 M Macintosh, Miss Lilian, 159 Alagdalen, The, 177 Mammon, 8, 90, 102, 124 Manchester, 42, 178 Manning, Cardinal, 155, 168 Martineau, "Dr, James, 168 Masaccio, 104 Medusa, 55, 179 Meredith, Qeorge, 171 Messenger, The, n8 Mid-day Rest, 177 Mill, John Stuart, quoted, 100 Mill, John Stuart, 167 Millais, Sir J. E., 3, 43, 45 Minotaur, The, 8, 90, 101, 124 Mischief, 89, 134 Morris, William, 171 Motley, J. L., 169, 178 Mount Temple^ Lady, 157 Muther, Herr, quoted, 36 N Naples, 139 Naples, ^ay of, Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 152 Nile, The, 138 O Olympus on Ida, 72 Ophelia, 114 Orpheus and Eurydice, 15, 112 P Panioizi, Sir Anthony, 169 Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, 1 10 ! Parasite, 145 Parliament, Houses of, compe- titions for decoration of, 33, 41 Patient Life of Unrequited Toil, ante G., 171 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 3, 43, 45 j Soothsay, referred to. 58 ; his sonnet and drawing Found, III Ruskin, John, 27, 44, 148, 149, 163 I I i i S St. tAgnese, Mentone, 139 St, George and the Dragon, 4 1 Salisbury, Lord, 165 Samson, 137 Savoy, 140 Scott, Sir Walter, 27 Sems tress. The, 42 Senior, Mrs. PCassau, 157 Shaftsbury, Lord, 167 Sic transit gloria mundi, 120 Sisters, The, 157 Sizeranne, M. de la, quoted, 18, 83, 132 Slumber of the *Ages, The, 97 Somers, Countess, 157 Sower of the Systems, The, 94 Sphinx, The, 138 Spielmann, Mr. M, H., quoted, 50 Spirit of Christianity, The, 1 30 Spirit of Qreel^ Toetry, The, 64 Spring, 159 Stephen, Leslie, 169 Stratford de Tpdelife, L ord, 1 6 6 Sun, Earth and Moon. 66 Surrey Woodlands, 146 INDEX 190 Swinhurney t/i. G., 170 Symonds, John Addington, quoted, 40 T Talbotf The Ladies^ 157 TayloTf Sir Henry ^ 1 70 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, and Watts, 143 ; quoted, 93, 98, 100, 125, 126, 1 3 1, 144, 154, 177 Tennysony tAlfredy Lardy 169 ; monument to, 56 Time, Death and Judgmenty 9, 120 Titian, Watts on portrait paint- ing of, 38 Tolstoy, his What is *Art ? quoted, 18 Trifles light as tAiry 7 1 Turner, J. M.W., 12-16, 133, 176 U Uldray 77 Una and the Red Cross Knight, 84, 134 Under a Dry tArchivay, 42 V Vandycky 32 Fenetian Lady, A, 176 Venetian Noblemany tA, 176 Vertumnus and Pomonay 33 Vie%v in Surrey y 145 W Watchmany What of the Night ? 84 Watts, George Frederick, aims of art of, 1-24; on Turner’s art, 15 ; subject-matter of art of compared with Turner’s, 12-16 j compared with Blake, 22 j birth, 25 ; prede- cessors and contemporaries, 26 ; ancestry, 26 5 a Celt ? 26 J chronic ill-health, 27 ; education, 27 ; the Bible, Homer, Scott, 27-29 j early art-training, 29 ; the Elgin Marbles and Behnes the sculptor, 30-32 ; first pic- tures at Royal Academy, 32 J early pictures, 32 and 33 ; Houses of Parliament competitions, 33, 41 ; visit to Italy, 34 and 35 ; Italian art, criticism and influences, 35-41 ; work on return to England, 42 ; accompanies expedition to Halicarnassus, 45 ; mural paintings at Lin- coln’s Inn and elsewhere, INDEX 46-50 ; recreations, 51 j Little Holland House, 51 j maps out life-work, 52 j technical methods, 53-55 ; sculpture, 55 and 56 j mar- riage, 56 ; travels in Italy and the East, 56 ; interests outside art, 56-58} honours, 58 and 59 } death, 59 ; Hebraism and Hellenism, 61-68; conceived epic of human life and destiny, 91-93; compared with Tennyson, 143 ; portraits of himself, 173 ; gifts and bequests of works to public galleries, 178 and 179; wholesome outlook on life, 179 and 180; character- istics, 180; expression and 191 beauty in art of, 181 ; place among modern artists, 182 and 183 ; quoted, i, 4, 5, 6, 7» »5» 23, 36, 38, 39,45, 58, 59, 66, 153, 154, 180, 182 Watts, Mrs., 56, 57 Whence^ Whither? 97, 136 Whitechapel Exhibitions, Canon Barnett’s, 20 Wordsworth, William, quoted, 64, 72, 87 IVounded Heroriy Thcj 32 Wright, Thomas, 42, 167 Wyndhanty Hon. c 3 /rr, *Percyy >57 Z ZenSf The Childhood ofy 90, 1 34 PLYMOUTH W. BRHNDON AND SON, , LIMITEP FRINTEUS