G. F. Watts

by G. K. Chesterton

The fact is that this indescribable primalism, which we have noted as coming out in the designs, in the titles, and in Watts’ very oil-colours, is present in this matter in a most extraordinary way. Watts does not copy men at all: he makes them over again. He dips his hand in the clay of chaos and begins to model a man named William Morris or a man named Richard Burton: he is assisted, no doubt, in some degree by a quaint old text-book called Reality, with its stiff but suggestive woodcuts and its shrewd and simple old hints. But the most that can be said for the portraiture is that Watts asks a hint to come and stop with him, puts the hint in a chair in his studio and stares at him. The thing that comes out at last upon the canvas is not generally a very precise picture of the sitter, though, of course, it is almost always a very accurate picture of the universe.

And yet while this, on the one side, is true enough, the portraits are portraits, and very fine portraits. But they are dominated by an element which is the antithesis of the whole tendency of modern art, that tendency which for want of a better word we have to call by the absurd name of optimism. It is not, of course, in reality a question of optimism in the least, but of an illimitable worship and wonder directed towards the fact of existence. There is a great deal of difference between the optimism which says that things are perfect and the optimism which merely says (with a more primeval modesty) that they are very good. One optimism says that a one-legged man has two legs because it would be so dreadful if he had not. The other optimism says that the fact that the one-legged was born of a woman, has a soul, has been in love, and has stood alive under the stars, is a fact so enormous and thrilling that, in comparison, it does not matter whether he has one leg or five. One optimism says that this is the best of all possible worlds. The other says that it is certainly not the best of all possible worlds, but

WILLIAM MORRIS.

it is the best of all possible things that a world should be possible. Watts, as has been more than once more or less definitely suggested, is dominated throughout by this prehistoric wonder. A man to him, especially a great man, is a thing to be painted as Fra Angelico painted angels, on his knees. He has indeed, like many brilliant men in the age that produced Carlyle and Ruskin, an overwhelming tendency to hero-worship. That worship had not, of course, in the case of these men any trace of that later and more denaturalized hero-worship, the tendency to worship madmen—to dream of vast crimes as one dreams of a love-affair, and to take the malformation of the soul to be the only originality. To the Carlylean (and Watts has been to some by no means inconsiderable extent a Carlylean), to the Carlylean the hero, the great man, was a man more human than humanity itself. In worshipping him you were worshipping humanity in a sacrament: and Watts seems to express in almost every line of his brush this ardent and reverent view of the great man. He overdoes it. Tennyson, fine as he was both physically and mentally, was not quite so much of a demi-god as Watts’ splendid pictures would seem to suggest. Many other sitters have been subjected, past all recognition, to this kind of devout and ethereal caricature. But the essential of the whole matter was that the attitude of Watts was one which might almost be called worship. It was not, of course, that he always painted men as handsome in the conventional sense, or even as handsome as they were. William Morris impressed most people as a very handsome man: in Watts’ marvellous portrait, so much is made of the sanguine face, the bold stare, the almost volcanic suddenness of the emergence of the head from the dark green background, that the effect of ordinary good looks, on which many of Morris’s intimates would probably have prided themselves, is in some degree lost. Carlyle, again, when he saw the painter’s fine rendering of him, said with characteristic surliness that he “looked like a mad labourer.” Conventionally speaking, it is of course, therefore, to be admitted that the sitters did not always come off well. But the exaggeration or the distortion, if exaggeration or distortion there were, was always effected in obedience to some almost awestruck notion of the greatness or goodness of the great or good sitter. The point is not whether Watts sometimes has painted men as ugly as they were painted by the primary religious painters; the point is, as I have said, that he painted as they did, on his knees. Now no one thinks that Mr. Sargent paints the Misses Wertheimer on his knees. His grimness and decision of drawing and colouring are not due to a sacred optimism. But those of Watts are due to this: are due to an intense conviction that there is within the sitter a great reality which has to give up its secret before he leaves the seat or the model’s throne. Hence come the red violent face and minatory eyes of William Morris: the painter sought to express, and he did most successfully express, the main traits and meaning of Morris—the appearance of a certain plain masculine passion in the realm of decorative art. Morris was a man who wanted good wall-papers, not as a man wants a coin of the Emperor Constantine, which was the cloistered or abnormal way in which men had commonly devised such things: he wanted good wall-papers as a man wants beer. He clamoured for art: he brawled for it. He asserted the perfectly virile and ordinary character of the appetite for beauty. And he possessed and developed a power of moral violence on pure

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.