Chapter XXV: Lord Leighton and G. F. Watts

The Nineties were rich in painters of all kinds. People bought pictures then, and all sorts of pictures; in those days of still happy and careless barbarism there was no veto on any school, and one could hang things of almost any school in almost any surroundings. The influence of the Prince Consort was not altogether dead, and people unashamedly admired the picture with a story, as well as the portrait with a likeness. So the older-school painters were still for the most part extremely comfortable. Herkomer and the other standard portrait painters covered acres of canvas annually; Alma-Tadema brought yearly an extra polish to his marbles; the silver birch of MacWhirter put forth fresh leaves every spring; “Derby Day” Frith survived, and even did some little work, to remind the world of the brave days of victorious sentimentalism; at Christie’s, Goodall, Maclise, and Landseer still won the dealers’ respect; J. C. Horsley, protesting against the nude, was only mildly laughed at as “Clothes-Horsley.” Millais, cured of his pre-Raphaelite enthusiasms, was now more of the old gang than the new. But Mr. Sargent, the Sandow of the brush, proved that the public was by no means illiberal; it was just as much pleased to be artistically hit between the eyes as to be tickled. Whistler, still unaccountably reckoned by many a mere fop—so strong was the influence of a Ruskin yet in the flesh—was busy making cloudy masterpieces and clear-cut enmities, and a whole school of morbidity danced in grisly sort round the early tomb of Beardsley.

(_From a portrait by J. McLure Hamilton._)]

If among all the considerable painters of the Nineties I distinguish Leighton and Watts, it is not because I think them possessed of the greatest talents, or even the most interesting personalities, but because they seem between them to represent rather specially what sharply marked off the art then passing away from what has taken its place. Both were very much of the nineteenth century in the largeness of their ideas and their sense of the importance of their mission. In many ways there could have been no two men, and no two craftsmen, more distinct. Both were picturesque and stately figures. Both had features cast in the noblest mould; the grand-ducal geniality of Leighton was not less impressive in its kind than the frozen though gentle austerity of Watts. In any circle each took quite naturally a commanding position—Leighton as a kind of king, Watts as a kind of priest. Each was at bottom shy, though both were immovable in their opinions in any company. But spiritually they were so utterly unlike that the one served as a foil to the other. When they were together—they were early friends, and the friendship lasted till the end of Leighton’s life—they might have served as models for an allegory after Watts’s own heart. Leighton was the epicurean, Watts the stoic. Leighton represented the world at its gracefullest, Watts the travail of the spirit. Of Leighton it might be said that he would have been a better painter could he have thought of something really worth painting. It may certainly be said of Watts that he was at his best when he was under no obligation to decide what was worth painting. His painfully meditated allegories might now be spared without too considerable a pang; his portraits, simply as documents of the time, could not. But, strongly as they differed in other ways, both men illustrated in a remarkable degree the curious seriousness and arrogance characteristic of the Victorians. Leighton conceived that the painter should be very much of the gentleman. Watts conceived that the painter should be very much of the preacher. Neither felt that he had any affinity to the workman. When I say seriousness, I do not mean that either was a prig; I only mean that each had a profound conviction that the painting of easel pictures is an immensely important thing, whereas the painter of to-day of anything like equal stature would be the first to say that, while he paints easel pictures for a living, they are about as important as chocolates, cigars, liqueurs, circulating library novels, and vintage wines—things, that is to say, to titillate individuals rich enough to afford them. When I say arrogance, again, I do not mean that they were vulgarly conceited: Watts revealed a beautiful humility, and Leighton was always bemoaning his inadequacy. But both were full of the notion that the artist is in the world to teach something, if it is only deportment, and should be respected as a teacher. Both would have rebelled against the suggestion that the artist is a workman, and that it is his sole business, as it is any workman’s, to make the best use of his material.

It is not to the present purpose to adjudicate between the didactic and the ultra-technical ideas of art; the question, moreover, is by no means so simple as many of the controversialists have made it; no Victorian was ever fool enough to believe that bad technique was excused by good ethics, and it may be doubted whether any sane person on the other side ever believed—though some apparently sane persons have occasionally said—that technique is an end in itself. Grant that a painter has essentially the same problem, and is essentially the same kind of craftsman, as the bricklayer; grant that ethical painting is as absurd as ethical bricklaying, we are still far from admitting the wilder developments of “art for art’s sake.” The bricklayer’s business, after all, is to build houses for men and styes for pigs, and not simply to play the wizard—or the fool—with his material out of mere joy in his dexterity. So the painter, too, has a task to perform, and if he does not perform it, if he leaves unachieved the main and obvious purpose, then he has failed, whatever incidental miracles he may have performed. The difference between the Victorians and their successors is not to be measured by the stupidest of one age and the maddest of the other. Yet the difference is there, it is really considerable, and it is, I think, in the main the difference between the first and second generation of agnosticism.

The great Victorians were in general agnostics; Watts certainly was one. They were of an age when every advance in science seemed to confirm the philosophic rationalism of the eighteenth century. But they retained much of the spirit of faith. We have all seen those ingenious advertisements which command us to “watch the letters in red” and then close our eyes. When we obey the advertiser, and do close our eyes, the image of the object is still visible, though we no longer see the object itself. But, if the eyes remain closed for a little while, the image fades completely away. This may serve to represent the difference between the Victorians and ourselves. They were, as a whole, no longer believers in the sense that Dante and Bunyan were believers. But some, while confining themselves by no dogma, still persuaded themselves that they believed, and yet more reverenced still what they would not believe. Dickens represents the one type, Huxley the other. It is very singular to note how in Dickens rationalism jostles with his instinctive respect for the greater Christian dogmas. He talks about “the world that sets this right” as simply as about the world that wants setting right. Yet (as in the case of Joan of Arc) he is downright angry over people who would suggest that a miracle is possible. When he writes from the heart he accepts as a little child the greatest of all miracles; when he writes with the head he is as scornful as Voltaire, and scarcely less ribald.

We are conscious of this double mood through most of the nineteenth century, and it explains much of the characteristic Victorian limp. The giants of those days nearly all had one intellectual leg shorter than the other; in poise they looked majestic, but whenever they got excited the effect was always a little laughable. Thus Carlyle suddenly forgets that he is a sort of Hebrew prophet, and runs after Newman or the Pope, throwing mud, for all the world like a small boy at Portadown. Thus Kingsley, one moment quite big and universal, is the next moment a shrill sectarian. Thus Tennyson descends abrupt from Virgilian grandeur to suburban prejudice. So many of the great Victorians seemed to be really so anxious to believe in God, and so afraid that it was not an advanced thing to believe, that the fear of dogma and the yearning for faith caused them perpetually to wobble. Their attitude to all sorts of questions was one of what may be called violent indecision, and people now seem agreed to call it contemptible. But, whatever it was, it determined the character of nearly all Victorian things, and among them of much Victorian painting.

When men believe seriously they are generally not too serious about their beliefs; witness the mediæval faith and what seems to us the mediæval profanity. When a man is happily married to a woman, he does not spend his time paying her high-flown compliments; he takes it for granted that she loves him and knows that he loves her. There are exceptions, of course, like Warren Hastings, who in old age called his wife (epistolarily and to herself) “his elegant Marian.” There are exceptions also among religious people; just as there are some husbands who seem only visitors in their own houses, so there are some saints who are never quite at home in their faith. The rule, however, is that the man who is married to a woman, and the man who is married to a creed, act like spouses and not like sweethearts. But just as usually we may be sure that a man has not quite made up his mind to commit himself to matrimony with a girl if he still treats her with grave gallantry and composes laborious sonnets to her eyebrows, so we are seldom far wrong in assuming that the man who talks too solemnly about the beauty of a creed is already inclined to regard it as a myth. Tennyson, for example, could not have been so ceremonious with Arthur and his knights if he had truly felt them as real people. And if this half-faith tends to an unbalanced solemnity, it inclines a man also to an exaggerated sense of responsibility and to that kind of humility which is really a form of presumption. The man of firm faith realises his own insignificance, and is content to leave much to God. The man of no faith, and no hankering after faith, washes his hand of things in general, and “eats his pudding” without any kind of uneasiness. But the man of half-faith is exceedingly prone to imagine himself consecrated to set everything right, except possibly himself. We, having lost that half-faith of the Victorians, having no longer imprinted on our minds the image of things at one time very real, have little sympathy with their ideals and perplexities, and therefore a very imperfect understanding of their performances. We see their inconsistency of thought and feeling, and do little justice to their honesty of purpose. We sneer at their pomposity, but fail to see that it was the effect of their immense sense of their accountability—to someone or something they were not quite sure about.

In Watts this sense of accountability was a dominating fact; it is the inner stuff of everything he did. But even Frederick Leighton, a man of much lighter make, was penetrated with an immensely serious conviction of the importance of the mission of painting in general, and of himself as a painter in particular. Leighton belonged immediately to the upper middle class, but the family was originally noble, and he could trace his descent through the female line to a considerable mediæval family in Shropshire. He was the son and the grandson of a doctor. His grandfather attained such a degree of professional eminence as to gain appointment as Court Physician to the Czar Nicholas, and but for the accident of a delicate constitution his father would have continued in Russian employment. This ill-health, and the consequent necessity for climate-hunting, led to a life of genteel vagrancy, and before Frederick Leighton had reached the age of a fifth-form lad he had seen many countries, and had acquired that fluent command of French, Italian, and German which distinguished him as the best linguist who ever presided over the Royal Academy. His general education was not neglected; at seventeen he was a good classical scholar, and he used to say afterwards that he then knew more of anatomy than when he became President.

Though his taste for art was early manifested, his father intended him for medicine, and it was with some reluctance that he at last consented to recognise facts, and permit the lad to enter on a course of serious study. In view of the seignorial grace of Leighton’s maturity it is a little piquant to find that his style as a young man caused great distress to his mother. “My child,” she writes just before his twenty-fourth birthday, “your manners are very faulty, and I am consequently much disappointed. You take so much after me, and my nearest relations had such refined manners, that I made sure you must resemble my father and brothers. There is, however,” she adds cheeringly, “nothing whatever to prevent your becoming a gentleman.” One is almost tempted to believe that one of the lady’s near relatives was Mrs. Nickleby, and another perhaps Mrs. Micawber. She certainly recalls those ladies not only in her excessive reverence for her family, but in her apparent incapacity to come to a clear judgment on the facts before her. For it is impossible to believe that at any time a man so gifted as Leighton could have been boorish: a good profile is generally worth a hundred primers on etiquette.

At twenty-five Leighton exhibited the picture which brought him a sudden fame, the immense canvas of Cimabue’s Madonna being carried in triumph through the streets of Florence to the Church of Santa Maria Novella. In the Academy of 1855 this work attracted great attention, and Queen Victoria bought it for the considerable price of six hundred guineas. “A huge thing which everybody talks about,” Rossetti describes it; “the R.A.’s have been gasping for years for someone to back against Hunt and Millais, and here they have him, a fact that makes some people do the picture injustice in return.”

The Cimabue was painted in Rome, where the young artist had for some years enjoyed himself in the Bohemian society which Thackeray deals with so happily in _The Newcomes_, qualifying himself for association with hirsute genius by growing a full beard and a “feeble moustache.” He now returned to London to make the most of his success. But he showed no eagerness to pass through all the doors obligingly thrown open to him, and it is rather curious that a man who became afterwards so complete a social success incurred resentment on the ground of what was interpreted as a supercilious aloofness. The truth was that his health was not strong, and that he always had to pay dearly for late hours and contact with general society. Indeed, this physical inadequacy was one of the main facts of his life: devotion to the social duties of the Presidency ultimately killed him, and it is hardly fanciful to suppose that a constitutional lack of vigour was responsible for one feature of his art which must have struck the most casual observer. “I have not and never shall have,” he wrote of himself, “enormous power.” He put into all his works the very best that was in him; Watts himself was not more conscientious; and among all modern painters there was none more ambitious. He deliberately challenged comparison with the masters of the golden age of Italian art; indeed, Leighton’s natural bent was to the grand manner, and in the matter of composition he had a real affinity with the great men he admired. But, apart from unfortunate methods of manipulation learned from his German masters, there was almost always a certain deficiency or a certain exaggeration peculiar to inherent want of power, which must either under-do or over-do.

But if he were not quite a great painter he was certainly a great President. The Academy never had a chief who better looked, spoke, and played the part. By the Nineties his excessive labours as President had told on his never robust health, and for some years he had had warnings of angina pectoris. But nothing would induce him to restrain his activities within the limit which advancing years had inexorably fixed; the life of the valetudinarian was impossible for him. So the round of speeches, dinners, soirées, and receptions, was kept up almost to the last, though the haggard face satirised the light grace of his manner and the rather theatrical showiness of his dress. Leighton had long been a baronet; it was one of the distresses of his life that Watts refused a like honour. On January 1, 1896, he was created a Peer, and twenty-four days later the public learned, with something of a pang, that he was dead. His last spoken words were in German, and there was some appropriateness in the fact, for no little of German pedantry tinctured his classical enthusiasms. But in character and sentiment he was wholly English, and in nothing more English than in his regrets that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it. He achieved a social position never before occupied by a British painter; he won the worship of innumerable friends; he did an enormous amount of work at a generally high technical level. Yet, two years before his death, he told a friend, “I have never got what I most wanted in this world.” The “what” he did not indicate.

“His was a nature the most beautiful of any I have ever known,” was Leighton’s epitaph by his friend Watts. Leighton died long before he had become old-fashioned. It was Watts’s fate to linger in a world of which he could not possibly have approved. The recluse of Limnerslease—the very name smacks eloquently of the Victorian mood—seemed to those who caught a glimpse of him like some stern old Puritan brooding in retirement over the jiggings and Jezebelisms of the Restoration. The nineteenth-century seriousness which Leighton had, but could put on and off like a garment, was the very soul of Watts; he was probably the most serious painter who ever lived. That nineteenth-century “cheek” which made Leighton pit himself against all the old masters on their own ground was wildly exaggerated in Watts; he set himself to paint things which were to be not only the greatest of paintings, but the most powerful of sermons—sermons, too, addressed not to a sect or even a faith, but to the whole human race, now and yet to be. Mr. Chesterton, I think, has remarked in his interesting monograph on Watts that he avoided of set purpose all conventional imagery, from the cross downwards, so that his allegories should have universal appeal, and should be intelligible to the cultured Bantu or Papuan of five thousand years hence who happens to disinter them from the ruins of the Tate Gallery. The painter who takes his work like that may be, as Watts was, humble as a human individual, but as an artist we can only feel his colossal arrogance.

But this arrogance was the great fact of the time. When I see a Watts picture—I am not speaking of his admirable portraits, but of his didactic allegories—it seems to conjure up, not so much the noble reflections that appear to rise in some other men, but odd memories of all sorts of Victorian things. I think of Kingsley setting out to crush the unbeliever and solve the social problem by writing _Hypatia_ and _Alton Locke_; of Herbert Spencer (when his circulation did not give him too much trouble) confidently measuring the Knowable and the Unknowable with his synthetic inch-tape; of Browning settling the nature of Providence in an abrupt sentence and then going jollily off to dinner; of Tennyson dismissing the French nation with a wave of his kingly hand as victims of “red-fool fury”; of Carlyle hurling thunderbolts at everybody who did not feel like a Scotch peasant or think like a German philosopher. These Victorians were wonderful men and did wonderful things, and we have not earned the right of easy scorn for them and theirs. But in few ages have men, almost all of whom were bewildered in one way or another, been so supremely confident of their power to settle everything. The nineteenth century, in fact, left nearly everything unsettled through that wondrous faith in the power of talk. It hated dogma, and gave birth to perhaps the most dogmatic people who have ever lived.

The mixture of humility and audacity in Watts was partly of the time and partly of his nature, but also partly of his circumstances. Watts lived all his life in the kind of detachment which, while it makes men personally shy and diffident, gives them a gigantic confidence in their own ideas. He was a born draughtsman: he never remembered the time he could not draw. But he had scarcely any formal education in art before he won with his cartoon of “Caractacus” the scholarship which permitted him to study in Italy; and no master, dead or living, ever seems to have exerted any real influence on his style. He had many friends and comrades, but only one real hero, Tennyson, with whom he could not compete, and who could not compete with him. Sympathies he had with many movements and many kinds of men, even on certain points with politicians and publicists whom he must have regarded generally with a certain distaste; something of a Radical in politics and much of a Puritan in temperament, he occasionally intervened in political and social causes on which he felt strongly. But he led no one, and he allowed no one to lead him; acknowledging no master, he left no pupil. This isolation was favourable to an exaggeration of the general tendency of the Victorian great men to take themselves with immoderate seriousness, and the solemnity of Watts was a little oppressive to the natural man who chanced to come into his majestic presence. He had to be a very bold youngster who could venture on any flippancy within the range of “those pure eyes,” which, in company with a nose of splendid line, a fine white beard, and a black silk skull-cap, suggested the “perfect witness,” if not of “all-judging Jove,” at least of the very archetype of a Puritanical Evangelical Chairman of Quarter Sessions.

If Watts was a great painter, he was assuredly a greater man, and one really felt in his presence the vastness of the possibilities of the race. But as a small human individual one also felt very small indeed. That is the effect of the Puritan. Probably most people felt small when they met Milton. But I can imagine that nobody could be in the same room with Shakespeare without feeling great.