Portraits of the Nineties

by E. T. Raymond

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.

G. F. WATTS IN HIS STUDIO.

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.