“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.
CHAPTER XXVI
CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON—WILLIAM BOOTH
I have remarked in another place that the man who takes his religion too seriously stands suspect of not quite believing in it. Those who are never troubled with doubts are prone to a wild hilarity which often exposes them to the charge of irreverence and coarse handling of sacred things. Since Nonconformity has widened, and new theologies have been propounded, it has become almost oppressively refined. When it was very narrow and dogmatic, and assured of itself, its chief exponents were often condemned as vulgar people. They were not really vulgar; they were only so much on terms with their belief that they could take liberties with it and all things.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a man of that type. He was an unlearned man, and if he had been learned it is not at all likely that he would have been a profound or exact thinker; it is much more probable that he would have been dulled into mere mediocrity. But if he did not know much of bookish things, he knew a good deal about things in general, and he knew (or thought he knew) absolutely one thing in particular, namely, that he was right in his conception of the purpose of Providence. It was this certitude, rather than any ingrained coarseness, that made him so boisterous and rollicking in his dealings with the most solemn subjects. He looked on “soul-saving” with the same sense of reality that a bricklayer looks on bricklaying, and he joked about it as a bricklayer jokes when anything funny is suggested to him by an incident in his work.
Spurgeon did not survive long into the Nineties, but his influence did not altogether cease to count till the end of the decade. By the new century it was dying, and to-day it is dead—at any rate, so far as the high places of Nonconformity are concerned. The name Spurgeon is Dutch, and the great preacher was a Hollander in his remote origin; he descended from a refugee who came to this country to escape the Alva persecution. Spurgeon’s father was an Independent Minister, and he himself was “converted” by the Primitive Methodists, but at an early age he embraced the Baptist faith, and he preached as a Baptist his first sermon, delivered at sixteen, in a Cambridgeshire cottage. His family wished him to have some sort of “college” education, but he went his own way, believing then as always that practical work in “soul-saving” was more important than scholarship.