Chapter II: Part 2

have been easy and effective, as he himself often said, to make the meaning of a picture clear by the introduction of some popular and immediate image: and it must constantly be remembered that Watts does care very much for making the meaning of his pictures clear. His work indeed has, as I shall suggest shortly, a far more subtle and unnamable quality than the merely hard and didactic; but it must not be for one moment pretended that Watts does not claim to teach: to do so would be to falsify the man’s life. And it would be easy, as is quite obvious, to make the pictures clearer: to hang a crucifix over the _Happy Warrior_, to give _Mammon_ some imperial crown or typical heraldic symbols, to give a theological machinery to _The Court of Death_. But this is put on one side like a temptation of the flesh, because it conflicts with this stupendous idea of painting for all peoples and all centuries. I am not saying that this extraordinary ambition is necessarily the right view of art, or the right view of life. I am only reiterating it as an absolute trait of men of the time and type and temper of Watts. It may plausibly be maintained, I am not sure that it cannot more truly be maintained, that man cannot achieve and need not achieve this frantic universality. A man, I fancy, is after all only an animal that has noble preferences. It is the very difference between the artistic mind and the mathematical that the former sees things as they are in a picture, some nearer and larger, some smaller and further away: while to the mathematical mind everything, every unit in a million, every fact in a cosmos, must be of equal value. That is why mathematicians go mad; and poets scarcely ever do. A man may have as wide a view of life as he likes, the wider the better; a distant view, a bird’s-eye view, if he will, but still a view and not a map. The one thing he cannot attempt in his version of the universe is to draw things to scale. I have put myself for a moment outside this universalism and doubted its validity because a thing always appears more sharp and personal and picturesque if we do not wholly agree with it. And this universalism is an essential and dominant feature of such great men as Watts and of his time as a whole. Mr. Herbert Spencer is a respectable, almost a dapper, figure, his theory is agnostic and his tone polite and precise. And yet he threw himself into a task more insane and gigantic than that of Dante, an inventory or plan of the universe itself; the awful vision of existence as a single organism, like an amœba on the disc of a microscope. He claimed, by implication, to put in their right places the flaming certainty of the martyrs, the wild novelties of the modern world; to arrange the eternal rock of Peter and the unbroken trance of Buddhism. It is only in this age of specialists, of cryptic experiences in art and faith like the present, that we can see how huge was that enterprise; but the spirit of it is the spirit of Watts. The man of that aggressive nineteenth century had many wild thoughts, but there was one thought that never even for an instant strayed across his burning brain. He never once thought, “Why should I understand the cat, any more than the cat understands me?” He never thought, “Why should I be just to the merits of a Chinaman, any more than a pig studies the mystic virtues of a camel?” He affronted heaven and the angels, but there was one hard arrogant dogma that he never doubted even when he doubted Godhead: he never doubted that he himself was as central and as responsible as God.

This paradox, then, we call the first element in the artistic and personal claim of Watts, that he

realizes the great paradox of the Gospel. He is meek, but he claims to inherit the earth. But there is, of course, a great deal more to be said before this view of the matter can be considered complete. The universalism preached by Watts and the other great Victorians was of course subject to certain specialisations; it is not necessary to call them limitations. Like Matthew Arnold, the last and most sceptical of them, who expressed their basic idea in its most detached and philosophic form, they held that conduct was three-fourths of life. They were ingrainedly ethical; the mere idea of thinking anything more important than ethics would have struck them as profane. In this they were certainly right, but they were nevertheless partial or partisan; they did not really maintain the judicial attitude of the universalist. The mere thought of Watts painting a picture called _The Victory of Joy over Morality_, or _Nature rebuking Conscience_, is enough to show the definite limits of that cosmic equality. This is not, of course, to be taken as a fault in the attitude of Watts. He simply draws the line somewhere, as all men, including anarchists, draw it somewhere; he is dogmatic, as all sane men are dogmatic.

There is another phase of this innocent audacity. It may appear to be more fanciful, it is certainly more completely a matter of inference; but it throws light on yet another side of the character of Watts.

Watts’ relation to friends and friendship has something about it very typical. He is not a man desirous or capable of a very large or rich or varied circle of acquaintance. There is nothing Bohemian about him. He belongs both chronologically and psychologically to that period which is earlier even than Thackeray and his Cave of Harmony: he belongs to the quiet, struggling, self-created men of the forties, with their tradition of self-abnegating individualism. Much as there is about him of the artist and the poet, there is something about him also of the industrious apprentice. That strenuous solitude in which Archbishop Temple as a boy struggled to carry a bag of ironmongery which crushed his back, in which Gladstone cut down trees and John Stuart Mill read half the books of the world in boyhood, that strenuous solitude entered to some degree into the very soul of Watts and made him independent of them. But the friends he made have as a general rule been very characteristic: they have marked the strange and haughty fastidiousness that goes along with his simplicity. His friends, his intimate friends, that is, have been marked by a certain indescribable and stately worthiness: more than one of them have been great men like himself. The greatest and most intimate of all his friends, probably, was Tennyson, and in this there is something singularly characteristic of Watts. About the actuality of the intellectual tie that bound him to Tennyson there can be little doubt. He painted three, if not four, portraits of him; his name was often on his lips; he invoked him always as the typical great poet, excusing his faults and expounding his virtues. He invoked his authority as that of the purest of poets, and invoked it very finely and well in a sharp controversial interview he had on the nature and ethics of the nude in art.

At the time I write, there is standing at the end of the garden at Limnerslease a vast shed, used for a kind of sculptor’s studio, in which there stands a splendid but unfinished statue, on which the veteran of the arts is even now at work. It represents Tennyson, wrapped in his famous mantle, with his magnificent head bowed, gazing at something in the

hollow of his hand. The subject is _Flower in the Crannied Wall_. There is something very characteristic of Watts in the contrast between the colossal plan of the figure and the smallness of the central object.

But while the practical nature of the friendship between Watts and Tennyson is clear enough, there is something really significant, something really relevant to Watts’ attitude in its ultimate and psychological character. It is surely most likely that Watts and Tennyson were drawn together because they both represented a certain relation towards their art which is not common in our time and was scarcely properly an attribute of any artists except these two. Watts could not have found the thing he most believed in Browning or Swinburne or Morris or any of the other poets. Tennyson could not have found the thing he most believed in Leighton or Millais or any of the other painters. They were brought together, it must be supposed, by the one thing that they had really in common, a profound belief in the solemnity, the ceremoniousness, the responsibility, and what most men would now, in all probability, call the pomposity of the great arts.

Watts has always a singular kind of semi-mystical tact in the matter of portrait painting. His portraits are commonly very faultless comments and have the same kind of superlative mental delicacy that we see in the picture of _Hope_. And the whole truth of this last matter is very well expressed in Watts’ famous portrait of Tennyson, particularly if we look at it in conjunction with his portrait of Browning. The head of Browning is the head of a strong, splendid, joyful, and anxious man who could write magnificent poetry. The head of Tennyson is the head of a poet. Watts has painted Tennyson with his dark dome-like head relieved against a symbolic green and blue of the eternal sea and the eternal laurels. He has behind him the bays of Dante and he is wrapped in the cloak of the prophets. Browning is dressed like an ordinary modern man, and we at once feel that it should and must be so. To dress Browning in the prophet’s robe and the poet’s wreath would strike us all as suddenly ridiculous; it would be like sending him to a fancy-dress ball. It would be like attiring Matthew Arnold in the slashed tights of an Elizabethan, or putting Mr. Lecky into a primitive Celto-Irish kilt. But it does not strike us as absurd in the case of Tennyson: it does not strike us as even eccentric or outlandish or remote. We think of Tennyson in that way; we think of him as a lordly and conscious bard. Some part of this fact may, of course, be due to his possession of a magnificent physical presence; but not, I think, all. Lord Kitchener (let us say) is a handsome man, but we should laugh at him very much in silver armour. It is much more due to the fact that Tennyson really assumed and was granted this stately and epic position. It is not true that Tennyson was more of a poet than Browning, if we mean by that statement that Browning could not compose forms as artistic and well-managed, lyrics as light and poignant, and rhythms as swelling and stirring as any in English letters. But it is true that Tennyson was more of a poet than Browning, if we mean by that statement that Tennyson was a poet in person, in post and circumstance and conception of life; and that Browning was not, in that sense, a poet at all. Browning first inaugurated in modern art and letters the notion or tradition, in many ways perhaps a more wholesome one, that the fact that a man pursued the trade or practice of poetry was his own affair and a thing apart,

like the fact that he collected coins or earned his living as a hatter. But Tennyson really belonged to an older tradition, the tradition that believed that the poet, the appointed “Vates,” was a recognized and public figure like the bard or jester at the mediæval courts, like the prophet in the old Commonwealth of Israel. In Tennyson’s work appeared for the last time in English history this notion of the stately and public and acknowledged poet: it was the lay of the last minstrel.

Now there is in Watts, gentle and invisible as he is, something that profoundly responds to that spirit. Leighton, like Browning, was a courtier and man of the world: Millais, like Browning, was a good fellow and an ordinary gentleman: but Watts has more of Tennyson in him; he believes in a great priesthood of art. He believes in a certain pure and childish publicity. If anyone suggested that before a man ventured to paint pictures or to daub with plaster he should be initiated with some awful rites in some vast and crowded national temple, should swear to work worthily before some tremendous altar or over some symbolic flame, Millais would have laughed heartily at the idea and Leighton also. But it would not seem either absurd or unreasonable to Watts. In the thick of this smoky century he is living in a clear age of heroes.

Watts’ relations to Tennyson were indeed very characteristic of what was finest, and at the same time quaintest, in the two men. The painter, with a typical sincerity, took the poet seriously, I had almost said literally, in his daily life, and liked him to live up to his poetry. The poet, with that queer sulky humour which gave him, perhaps, more breadth than Watts, but less strength, said, after reading some acid and unjust criticisms, “I wish I had never written a line.” “Come,” said Watts, “you wouldn’t like ‘King Arthur’ to talk like that.” Tennyson paused a moment and then spread out his fingers. “Well,” he said, “what do you expect? It’s all the gout.” The artist, with a characteristic power of juvenile and immortal hero-worship, tells this story as an instance of the fundamental essence of odd magnanimity and sombre geniality in Tennyson. It is such an instance and a very good one: but it is also an instance of the sharp logical idealism, of the prompt poetic candour of Watts. He asked Tennyson to be King Arthur, and it never occurred to him to think that he was asking Addison to be Cato, or Massinger to be Saint Dorothy. The incident is a fine tribute to a friendship.

The real difficulty which many cultivated people have in the matter of Watts’ allegorical pictures is far more difficult. It is indeed nothing else but the great general reaction against allegorical art which has arisen during the last artistic period. The only way in which we can study, with any real sincerity, the allegoric art of Watts is to ask to what is really due the objection to allegory which has thus arisen. The real objection to allegory is, it may roughly be said, founded upon the conception that allegory involves one art imitating another. This is, up to a certain point, true. To paint a figure in a blue robe and call her Necessity, and then paint a small figure in a yellow robe and call it Invention; to put the second on the knee of the first, and then say that you are enunciating the sublime and eternal truth, that Necessity is the mother of Invention, this is indeed an idle and foolish affair. It is saying in six weeks’ work with brush and palette knife what could be said much better in six words. And there can be no reasonable dispute that of this character were a considerable

number of the allegorical pictures that have crowded the galleries and sprawled over the ceilings of ancient and modern times. Of such were the monstrous pictures of Rubens, which depicted a fat Religion and a bloated Temperance dancing before some foreign conqueror; of such were the florid designs of the eighteenth century, which showed Venus and Apollo encouraging Lord Peterborough to get over the inconvenience of his breastplate; of such, again, were the meek Victorian allegories which showed Mercy and Foresight urging men to found a Society for the Preservation of Young Game. Of such were almost all the allegories which have dominated the art of Europe for many centuries back. Of such, most emphatically, the allegories of Watts are not. They are not mere pictorial forms, combined as in a kind of cryptogram to express theoretic views or relations. They are not proverbs or verbal relations rendered with a cumbrous exactitude in oil and Chinese white. They are not, in short, the very thing that the opponents of Watts and his school say that they are. They are not merely literary. There is one definite current conception on which this idea that Watts’ allegorical art is merely literary is eventually based. It is based upon the idea that lies at the root of rationalism, at the root of useless logomachies, at the root, in no small degree, of the whole modern evil. It is based on the assumption of the perfection of language. Every religion and every philosophy must, of course, be based on the assumption of the authority or the accuracy of something. But it may well be questioned whether it is not saner and more satisfactory to ground our faith on the infallibility of the Pope, or the infallibility of the Book of Mormon, than on this astounding modern dogma of the infallibility of human speech. Every time one man says to another, “Tell us plainly what you mean?” he is assuming the infallibility of language: that is to say, he is assuming that there is a perfect scheme of verbal expression for all the internal moods and meanings of men. Whenever a man says to another, “Prove your case; defend your faith,” he is assuming the infallibility of language: that is to say, he is assuming that a man has a word for every reality in earth, or heaven, or hell. He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the world and doing strange and terrible service in it crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire. Whenever, on the other hand, a man rebels faintly or vaguely against this way of speaking, whenever a man says that he cannot explain what he means, and that he hates argument, that his enemy is misrepresenting him, but he cannot explain how; that man is a true sage, and has seen into the heart of the real nature of language. Whenever a man refuses to be caught by some dilemma about reason and passion, or about reason and faith, or about fate and free-will, he has seen the truth. Whenever a man declines to be cornered as an egotist, or an altruist, or any such modern monster, he has seen the truth. For the truth is that language is not a scientific thing at all, but wholly an artistic thing, a thing invented by hunters, and killers, and such artists long before science was

dreamed of. The truth is simply that--that the tongue is not a reliable instrument, like a theodolite or a camera. The tongue is most truly an unruly member, as the wise saint has called it, a thing poetic and dangerous, like music or fire.

Now we can easily imagine an alternative state of things, roughly similar to that produced in Watts’ allegories, a system, that is to say, whereby the moods or facts of the human spirit were conveyed by something other than speech, by shapes or colours or some such things. As a matter of fact, of course, there are a great many other languages besides the verbal. Descriptions of spiritual states and mental purposes are conveyed by a variety of things, by hats, by bells, by guns, by fires on a headland, or by jerks of the head. In fact there does exist an example which is singularly analogous to decorative and symbolic painting. This is a scheme of æsthetic signs or emblems, simple indeed and consisting only of a few elemental colours, which is actually employed to convey great lessons in human safety and great necessities of the commonwealth. It need hardly be said that I allude to the railway signals. They are as much a language, and surely as solemn a language, as the colour sequence of ecclesiastical vestments, which sets us red for martyrdom, and white for resurrection. For the green and red of the night-signals depict the two most fundamental things of all, which lie at the back of all language. Yes and no, good and bad, safe and unsafe, life and death. It is perfectly conceivable that a degree of flexibility or subtlety might be introduced into these colours so as to suggest other and more complex meanings. We might (under the influence of some large poetic station-masters) reach a state of things in which a certain rich tinge of purple in the crimson light would mean “Travel for a few seconds at a slightly more lingering pace, that a romantic old lady in a first-class carriage may admire the scenery of the forest.” A tendency towards peacock blue in the green might mean “An old gentleman with a black necktie has just drunk a glass of sherry at the station restaurant.” But however much we modified or varied this colour sequence or colour language, there would remain one thing which it would be quite ridiculous and untrue to say about it. It would be quite ridiculous and untrue to say that this colour sequence was simply a symbol representing language. It would be another language: it would convey its meaning to aliens who had another word for forest, and another word for sherry, and another word for old lady. It would not be a symbol of language, a symbol of a symbol; it would be one symbol of the reality, and language would be another. That is precisely the true position touching allegorical art in general, and, above all, the allegorical art of Watts.

So long as we conceive that it is, fundamentally, the symbolizing of literature in paint, we shall certainly misunderstand it and the rare and peculiar merits, both technical and philosophical, which really characterize it. If the ordinary spectator at the art galleries finds himself, let us say, opposite a picture of a dancing flower-crowned figure in a rose-coloured robe, he feels a definite curiosity to know the title, looks it up in the catalogue, and finds that it is called, let us say, “Hope.” He is immediately satisfied, as he would have been if the title had run “Portrait of Lady Warwick,” a “View of Kilchurn Castle.” It represents a certain definite thing, the word “hope.” But what does the word “hope” represent? It represents only a broken instantaneous glimpse of something that is immeasurably older and wilder

than language, that is immeasurably older and wilder than man; a mystery to saints and a reality to wolves. To suppose that such a thing is dealt with by the word “hope,” any more than America is represented by a distant view of Cape Horn, would indeed be ridiculous. It is not merely true that the word itself is, like any other word, arbitrary; that it might as well be “pig” or “parasol”; but it is true that the philosophical meaning of the word, in the conscious mind of man, is merely a part of something immensely larger in the unconscious mind, that the gusty light of language only falls for a moment on a fragment, and that obviously a semi-detached, unfinished fragment of a certain definite pattern on the dark tapestries of reality. It is vain and worse than vain to declaim against the allegoric, for the very word “hope” is an allegory, and the very word “allegory” is an allegory.

Now let us suppose that instead of coming before that hypothetical picture of _Hope_ in conventional flowers and conventional pink robes, the spectator came before another picture. Suppose that he found himself in the presence of a dim canvas with a bowed and stricken and secretive figure cowering over a broken lyre in the twilight. What would he think? His first thought, of course, would be that the picture was called _Despair_; his second (when he discovered his error in the catalogue), that it has been entered under the wrong number; his third, that the painter was mad. But if we imagine that he overcame these preliminary feelings and that as he stared at that queer twilight picture a dim and powerful sense of meaning began to grow upon him--what would he see? He would see something for which there is neither speech nor language, which has been too vast for any eye to see and too secret for any religion to utter, even as an esoteric doctrine. Standing before that picture, he finds himself in the presence of a great truth. He perceives that there is something in man which is always apparently on the eve of disappearing, but never disappears, an assurance which is always apparently saying farewell and yet illimitably lingers, a string which is always stretched to snapping and yet never snaps. He perceives that the queerest and most delicate thing in us, the most fragile, the most fantastic, is in truth the backbone and indestructible. He knows a great moral fact: that there never was an age of assurance, that there never was an age of faith. Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors. The desperate modern talk about dark days and reeling altars, and the end of Gods and angels, is the oldest talk in the world: lamentations over the growth of agnosticism can be found in the monkish sermons of the dark ages; horror at youthful impiety can be found in the Iliad. This is the thing that never deserts men and yet always, with daring diplomacy, threatens to desert them. It has indeed dwelt among and controlled all the kings and crowds, but only with the air of a pilgrim passing by. It has indeed warmed and lit men from the beginning of Eden with an unending glow, but it was the glow of an eternal sunset.

Here, in this dim picture, its trick is almost betrayed. No one can name this picture properly, but Watts, who painted it, has named it _Hope_. But the point is that this title is not (as those think who call it “literary”) the reality behind the symbol, but another symbol for the same thing, or, to speak yet more strictly, another symbol describing another part or aspect of the same complex reality. Two men felt a swift, violent, invisible thing in the world: one said the word “hope,” the other painted a

picture in blue and green paint. The picture is inadequate; the word “hope” is inadequate; but between them, like two angles in the calculation of a distance, they almost locate a mystery, a mystery that for hundreds of ages has been hunted by men and evaded them. And the title is therefore not so much the substance of one of Watts’ pictures, it is rather an epigram upon it. It is merely an approximate attempt to convey, by snatching up the tool of another craftsman, the direction attempted in the painter’s own craft. He calls it _Hope_, and that is perhaps the best title. It reminds us among other things of a fact which is too little remembered, that faith, hope, and charity, the three mystical virtues of Christianity, are also the gayest of the virtues. Paganism, as I have suggested, is not gay, but rather nobly sad; the spirit of Watts, which is as a rule nobly sad also, here comes nearer perhaps than anywhere else to mysticism in the strict sense, the mysticism which is full of secret passion and belief, like that of Fra Angelico or Blake. But though Watts calls his tremendous reality _Hope_, we may call it many other things. Call it faith, call it vitality, call it the will to live, call it the religion of to-morrow morning, call it the immortality of man, call it self-love and vanity; it is the thing that explains why man survives all things and why there is no such thing as a pessimist. It cannot be found in any dictionary or rewarded in any commonwealth: there is only one way in which it can even be noticed and recognized. If there be anywhere a man who has really lost it, his face out of a whole crowd of men will strike us like a blow. He may hang himself or become Prime Minister; it matters nothing. The man is dead.

Now, of course the ordinary objection to allegory, and it is a very sound objection, can be sufficiently well stated by saying that the pictorial figures are mere arbitrary symbols of the words. An allegorist of the pompous school might paint some group of Peace and Commerce doing something to Britannia. There might be a figure of Commerce in a Greek robe with a cornucopia or bag of gold or an argosy or any other conventional symbol. But it is surely quite evident that such a figure is a mere sign like the word commerce: the word might just as well be “dandelion,” and the Greek lady with the cornucopia might just as well be a Hebrew prophet standing on his head. It is scarcely even a language: it is a cipher-code. Nobody can maintain that the figure, taken as a figure, makes one think of commerce, of the forces that effect commerce, of a thousand ports, of a thousand streets, of a thousand warehouses and bills of lading, of a thousand excited men in black coats who certainly would not know what to do with a cornucopia. If we find ourselves gazing at some monument of the fragile and eternal faith of man, at some ruined chapel, at some nameless altar, at some scrap of old Jacobin eloquence, we might actually find our own minds moving in certain curves that centre in the curved back of Watts’ _Hope_: we might almost think for ourselves of a bowed figure in the twilight, holding to her breast something damaged but undestroyed. But can anyone say that by merely looking at the Stock Exchange on a busy day we should think of a Greek lady with an argosy? Can anyone say that Threadneedle Street, in itself, would inspire our minds to move in the curves which centre in a cornucopia? Can anyone say that a very stolid figure in a very outlandish drapery is anything but a purely arbitrary sign, like _x_ or _y_, for such a thing as modern commerce, for the savagery of the rich, for the hunger of the satisfied, for the vast tachycardia or galloping of the heart that has fallen on all the great new centres of civilization, for the sudden madness of all the mills of the world?

Watts’ _Hope_ does tell us something more about the nature of hope than we can be told by merely noticing that hope is shown in individual cases: that a man rehearses successful love speeches when he is in love, and takes a return ticket when he goes out to fight a duel. But the figure of Commerce with the cornucopia gives us less insight into what is behind commerce than we might get from reading a circular or staring out into the street. In the case of Commerce the figure is merely a symbol of commerce, which is a symbol. In the case of Hope the matter is quite the other way; the figure brings us nearer to something which is not a symbol, but the reality behind symbols. In the one case we go further down towards the river’s delta; in the other, further up towards its fountain; that at least may be called a difference. And now, suppose that our imaginary sight-seer who had seen so much of the pompous allegory of Commerce in her Grecian draperies were to see, for the second time, a second picture. Suppose he saw before him a throned figure clad in splendid, heavy scarlet and gold, above the lustre and dignity of which rose, in abrupt contrast, a face like the face of a blind beast. Suppose that as this imperial thing, with closed eyes and fat, sightless face, sat upon his magnificent seat, he let his heavy hand and feet fall, as if by a mere pulverizing accident, on the naked and god-like figures of the young, on men and women. Suppose that in the background there rose straight into the air a raw and turgid smoke, as if from some invisible and horrible sacrifice, and that by one final, fantastic, and triumphal touch this all-destroying god and king were adorned with the ears of an ass, declaring that he was royal, imperial, irresistible, and, when all is said, imbecile. Suppose that a man sick of argosies and cornucopias came before that picture, would he not say, perhaps even before he looked in the catalogue and found that the painter had called it _Mammon_, would he not say, “This is something which in spirit and in essence I have seen before, something which in spirit and in essence I have seen everywhere. That bloated, unconscious face, so heavy, so violent, so wicked, so innocent, have I not seen it at street corners, in billiard-rooms, in saloon bars, laying down the law about Chartered shares or gaping at jokes about women? Those huge and smashing limbs, so weighty, so silly, so powerless, and yet so powerful, have I not seen them in the pompous movements, the morbid health of the prosperous in the great cities? The hard, straight pillars of that throne, have I not seen them in the hard, straight, hideous tiers of modern warehouses and factories? That tawny and sulky smoke, have I not seen it going up to heaven from all the cities of the coming world? This is no trifling with argosies and Greek drapery. This is commerce. This is the home of the god himself. This is why men hate him, and why men fear him, and why men endure him.”

Now, of course, it is at once obvious that this view would be very unjust to commerce; but that modification, as a matter of fact, very strongly supports the general theory at the moment under consideration. Commerce is really an arbitrary phrase, a thing including a million motives, from the motive which makes a man drink to the motive which makes him reform; from the motive that makes a starving man eat a horse to the motive which makes an idle man chase a butterfly. But whatever other spirits there are in commerce, there is, beyond all reasonable

question, in it this powerful and enduring spirit which Watts has painted. There is, as a ruling element in modern life, in all life, this blind and asinine appetite for mere power. There is a spirit abroad among the nations of the earth which drives men incessantly on to destroy what they cannot understand, and to capture what they cannot enjoy. This, and not commerce, is what Watts has painted. He has painted, not the allegory of a great institution, but the vision of a great appetite, the vision of a great motive. It is not true that this is a picture of Commerce; but that Commerce and Watts’ picture spring from the same source. There does exist a certain dark and driving force in the world; one of its products is this picture, another is Commerce. The picture is not Commerce, it is Mammon. And, indeed, so powerfully and perfectly has Watts, in this case, realized the awful being whom he was endeavouring to call up by his artistic incantation, that we may even say the common positions of allegory and reality are reversed. The fact is not that here we have an effective presentation under a certain symbol of red robes and smoke and a throne, of what the financial world is, but rather that here we have something of the truth that is hidden behind the symbol of white waistcoats and hats on the back of the head, of financial papers and sporting prophets, of butter closing quiet and Pendragon being meant to win. This is not a symbol of commerce: commerce is a symbol of this.

In sketching this general and necessary attitude towards the art of Watts, particularly in the matter of allegory, I have taken deliberately these two very famous and obvious pictures, and I have occupied, equally deliberately, a considerable amount of space in expounding them. It is far better in a subject so subtle and so bewildering as the relation between art and philosophy, that we should see how our conceptions and hypotheses really get on when applied systematically and at some length to some perfectly familiar and existent object. A philosopher cannot talk about any single thing, down to a pumpkin, without showing whether he is wise or foolish; but he can easily talk about everything with anyone having any views about him beyond gloomy suspicions. But at this point I become fully conscious of another and most important kind of criticism, which has been and can be levelled against the allegories of Watts; and which must be, by the nature of things, evoked by the particular line of discussion or reflection that I have here adopted.

It may be admitted that Watts’ art is not merely literary in the sense in which I have originally used the term. It may be admitted that there is truth in the general position I have sketched out--that Watts is not a man copying literature or philosophy, but rather a man copying the great spiritual and central realities which literature and philosophy also set out to copy. It may be admitted that _Mammon_ is obviously an attempt to portray, not a twopenny phrase, but a great idea. But along with all these admissions it will certainly be said, by the most powerful and recent school in art criticism, that all this amounts to little more than a difference between a mean and a magnificent blunder. Pictorial art, it will be said, has no more business, as such, to portray great ideas than small ideas. Its affair is with its own technique, with the love of a great billowing line for its own sake, of a subtle and perfect tint for its own sake. If a man mistakes his trade and attends to the technique of another, the sublimity of his mind is only a very slight consolation. If I summon a paperhanger

to cover the walls, and he insists on playing the piano, it matters little whether he plays Beethoven or “The Yachmak.” If I charter a pianist, and he is found drinking in the wine cellar, it matters little whether he has made his largest hole in good Burgundy or bad Marsala. If the whole of this question of great ideas and small ideas, of large atmospheres and superficial definitions, of the higher and the lower allegory--if all this be really irrelevant to the discussion of the position of a painter, then, indeed, we have been upon an idle track. As I think I shall show in a moment, this is a very inadequate view of the matter. But it does draw our attention to an aspect of the matter which must, without further delay, be discussed. That aspect, as I need hardly say, is the technique of Watts.

There is of course a certain tendency among all interesting and novel critical philosophers to talk as if they had discovered things which it is perfectly impossible that any human being could ever have denied; to shout that the birds fly, and declare that in spite of persecution they will still assert that cows have four legs. In this way some raw pseudo-scientists talk about heredity or the physical basis of life as if it were not a thing embedded in every creed and legend, and even the very languages of men. In this way some of the new oligarchists of to-day imagine they are attacking the doctrine of human equality by pointing out that some men are stronger or cleverer than others; as if they really believed that Danton and Washington thought that every man was the same height and had the same brains. And something of this preliminary cloud of folly or misunderstanding attaches doubtless to the question of the technical view--that is, the solely technical view--of painting. If the principle of “art for art’s sake” means simply that there is a solely technical view of painting, and that it must be supreme on its own ground, it appears a piece of pure madness to suppose it other than true. Surely there never was really a man who held that a picture that was vile in colour and weak in drawing was a good picture because it was a picture of Florence Nightingale! Surely there never was really a man who said that when one leg in a drawing was longer than another, yet they were both the same length because the artist painted it for an altar-piece! When the new critics with a burst of music and a rocket shower of epigrams enunciated their new criticism, they must at any rate have meant something more than this. Undoubtedly they did mean something more; they meant that a picture was not a good vehicle for moral sentiment at all; they meant that not only was it not the better for having a philosophic meaning, but that it was worse. This, if it be true, is beyond all question a real indictment of Watts.

About the whole of this Watts controversy about didactic art there is at least one perfectly plain and preliminary thing to be said. It is said that art cannot teach a lesson. This is true, and the only proper addition is the statement that neither, for the matter of that, can morality teach a lesson. For a thing to be didactic, in the strict and narrow and scholastic sense, it must be something about facts or the physical sciences: you can only teach a lesson about such a thing as Euclid or the making of paper boats. The thing is quite inapplicable to the great needs of man, whether moral or æsthetic. Nobody ever held a class in philanthropy with fifteen millionaires in a row writing cheques. Nobody ever held evening continuation classes in martyrdom, or drilled boys in a playground to die for their country. A

picture cannot give a plain lesson in morals; neither can a sermon. A didactic poem was a thing known indeed among the ancients and the old Latin civilization, but as a matter of fact it scarcely ever professed to teach people how to live the higher life. It taught people how to keep bees.

Since we find, therefore, that ethics is like art, a mystic and intuitional affair, the only question that remains is, have they any kinship? If they have not, a man is not a man, but two men and probably more: if they have, there is, to say the least of it, at any rate a reasonable possibility that a note in moral feeling might have affinity with a note in art, that a curve in law, so to speak, may repeat a curve in draughtsmanship, that there may be genuine and not artificial correspondences between a state of morals and an effect in painting. This would, I should tentatively suggest, appear to be a most reasonable hypothesis. It is not so much the fact that there is no such thing as allegorical art, but rather the fact that there is no art that is not allegorical. But the meanings expressed in high and delicate art are not to be classed under cheap and external ethical formulæ, they deal with strange vices and stranger virtues. Art is only unmoral in so far as most morality is immoral. Thus Mr. Whistler when he drops a spark of perfect yellow or violet into some glooming pool of the nocturnal Thames is, in all probability, enunciating some sharp and wholesome moral comment. When the young Impressionists paint dim corners of meadows or splashes of sunlight in the wood, this does not mean necessarily that they are unmoral; it may only mean that they are a very original and sincere race of stern young moralists.

Now if we adopt this general theory of the existence of genuine correspondences between art and moral beauty, of the existence, that is to say, of genuine allegories, it is perfectly clear wherein the test of such genuineness must consist. It must consist in the nature of the technique. If the technique, considered as technique, is calculated to evoke in us a certain kind of pleasure, and there is an analogous pleasure in the meaning considered as meaning, then there is a true wedding of the arts. But if the pleasure in the technique be of a kind quite dissimilar in its own sphere to the pleasure in the spiritual suggestion, then it is a mechanical and unlawful union, and this philosophy, at any rate, forbids the banns. If the intellectual conceptions uttered in Michel Angelo’s _Day of Judgment_ in the Sistine Chapel were the effect of a perfect and faultless workmanship, but the workmanship such as we should admire in a Gothic missal or a picture by Gerard Dow, we should then say that absolute excellence in both departments did not excuse their being joined. The thing would have been a mere accident, or convenience. Just as two plotters might communicate by means of a bar or two of music, so these subtle harmonies of colour and form would have been used for their detached and private ends by the dark conspirators of morality.

Now there is nothing in the world that is really so thoroughly characteristic of Watts’ technique as the fact that it does almost startlingly correspond to the structure of his spiritual sense. If such pictures as _The Dweller in the Innermost_ and _Mammon_ and _Diana and Endymion_ and _Eve Repentant_ had neither title nor author, if no one had heard of Watts or heard of Eve; if, for the matter of that, the pictures had neither human nor animal form, it would be possible to guess something of the painter’s attitude from the mere colour and line. If Watts painted an arabesque, it would be moral; if he designed a Turkey

carpet, it would be stoical. So individual is his handling that his very choice and scale of colours betray him. A man with a keen sense of the spiritual and symbolic history of colours could guess at something about Watts from the mess on his palette. He would see giants and the sea and cold primeval dawns and brown earth-men and red earth-women lying in the heaps of greens and whites and reds, like forces in chaos before the first day of creation. A certain queer and yet very simple blue there is, for instance, which is like Titian’s and yet not like it, which is more lustrous and yet not less opaque, and which manages to suggest the north rather than Titian’s south, in spite of its intensity; which suggests also the beginning of things rather than their maturity; a hot spring of the earth rather than Titian’s opulent summer. Then there is that tremendous autochthonous red, which was the colour of Adam, whose name was Red Earth. It is, if one may say so, the clay in which no one works, except Watts and the Eternal Potter. There are other colours that have this character, a character indescribable except by saying that they come from the palette of Creation--a green especially that reappears through portraits, allegories, landscapes, heroic designs, but always has the same fierce and elfish look, like a green that has a secret. It may be seen in the signet ring of Owen Meredith, and in the eyes of the _Dweller in the Innermost_. But all these colours have, as I say, the first and most characteristic and most obvious of the mental qualities of Watts; they are simple and like things just made by God. Nor is it, I think, altogether fanciful to push this analogy or harmony a step further and to see in the colours and the treatment of them the other side or typical trait which I have frequently mentioned as making up the identity of the painter. He is, as I say, a stoic; therefore to some extent, at least, a pagan; he has no special sympathy with Celtic intensity, with Catholic mysticism, with Romanticism, with all the things that deal with the cells of the soul, with agonies and dreams. And I think a broad distinction between the finest pagan and the finest Christian point of view may be found in such an approximate phrase as this, that paganism deals always with a light shining on things, Christianity with a light shining through them. That is why the whole Renaissance colouring is opaque, the whole Pre-Raphaelite colouring transparent. The very sky of Rubens is more solid than the rocks of Giotto: it is like a noble cliff of immemorial blue marble. The artists of the devout age seemed to regret that they could not make the light show through everything, as it shows through the little wood in the wonderful _Nativity_ of Botticelli. And that is why, again, Christianity, which has been attacked so strangely as dull and austere, invented the thing which is more intoxicating than all the wines of the world, stained-glass windows.

Now Watts, with all his marvellous spirituality, or rather because of his peculiar type of marvellous spirituality, has the Platonic, the philosophic, rather than the Catholic order of mysticism. And it can scarcely be a coincidence that here again we feel it to be something that could almost be deduced from the colours if they were splashed at random about a canvas. The colours are mystical, but they are not transparent; that is, not transparent in the very curious but unmistakable sense in which the colours of Botticelli or Rossetti are transparent. What they are can only be described as iridescent. A curious lustre or glitter, conveyed chiefly by a singular and individual brushwork, lies over all his great pictures.

It is the dawn of things: it is the glow of the primal sense of wonder; it is the sun of the childhood of the world; it is the light that never was on sea or land; but still it is a light shining on things, not shining through them. It is a light which exhibits and does honour to this world, not a light that breaks in upon this world to bring it terror or comfort, like the light that suddenly peers round the corner of some dark Gothic chapel with its green or golden or blood-red eyes. The Gothic artists, as I say, would have liked men’s bodies to become like burning glass (as the figures in their windows do), that the light might pass through them. There is no fear of light passing through Watts’ _Cain_.

These analogies must inevitably appear fantastic to those who do not accept the general hypothesis of a possible kinship between pictorial and moral harmonies in the psychology of men; but to those who do accept this not very extravagant hypothesis, it may, I think, be repeated by way of summary, that the purely technical question of Watts’ colour scheme does provide us, at least suggestively, with these two parallels. Watts, so far as his moral and mental attitude can be expressed by any phrases of such brevity, has two main peculiarities: first, a large infantile poetry which delights in things fresh, raw, and gigantic; second, a certain Greek restraint and agnostic severity, which throws a strong light on this world as it is. The colours he uses have also two main peculiarities: first, a fresh, raw, and, as it were, gigantic character; secondly, an opaque reflected light, unlike the mediæval lighting, a strong light thrown on this world as it is.