matters of taste which startled the flabby world of connoisseurship and opened a new era. He grew furious with furniture and denounced the union of wrong colours as men denounce an adultery. All this is expressed far more finely than in these clumsy sentences in that living and leonine head in the National Portrait Gallery. It is exactly the same with Carlyle. Watts’ Carlyle is immeasurably more subtle and true than the Carlyle of Millais, which simply represents him as a shaggy, handsome, magnificent old man. The uglier Carlyle of Watts has more of the truth about him, the strange combination of a score of sane and healthy visions and views, with something that was not sane, which bloodshot and embittered them all, the great tragedy of the union of a strong countryside mind and body with a disease of the vitals and something like a disease of the spirit. In fact, Watts painted Carlyle “like a mad labourer” because Carlyle was a mad labourer.
This general characteristic might of course be easily traced in all the portraits one by one. If space permitted, indeed, such a process might be profitable; for while we take careful note of all the human triviality of faces, the one thing that we all tend to forget is that divine and common thing which Watts celebrates. It is the misfortune of the nonreligious ages that they tend to cultivate a sense of individuality, not only at the expense of religion, but at the expense of humanity itself. For the modern portrait-painter not only does not see the image of God in his sitters, he does not even see the image of man. His object is not to insist on the glorious and solemn heritage which is common to Sir William Harcourt and Mr. Albert Chevalier, to Count Tolstoy and Mr. Wanklyn, that is the glorious and solemn heritage of a nose and two eyes and a mouth. The effort of the dashing modern is rather to make each of these features individual almost to the point of being incredible: it is his desire to paint the mouth whose grimace is inimitable, the eyes that could be only in one head, and the nose that never was on sea or land. There is value in this purely personal treatment, but something in it so constantly lost: the quality of the common humanity. The new art gallery is too like a museum of freaks, it is too wild and wonderful, like a realistic novel. Watts errs undoubtedly on the other side. He makes all his portraits too classical. It may seem like a paradox to say that he makes them too human; but humanity is a classis and therefore classical. He recurs too much to the correct type which includes all men. He has, for instance, a worship of great men so complete that it makes him tend in the direction of painting them all alike. There may be too much of Browning in his Tennyson, too much of Tennyson in his Browning. There is certainly a touch of Manning in his John Stuart Mill, and a touch of the Minotaur in many of his portraits of Imperial politicians. While he celebrates the individual with a peculiar insight, it is nevertheless always referred to a general human type. We feel when we look at even the most extraordinary of Watts’ portraits, as, for instance, the portrait of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, that before Lord Stratford de Redcliffe was born, and apart from that fact, there was such a thing as a human being. When we look at a brilliant modern canvas like that of Mr. Sargent’s portrait of Wertheimer, we do not feel that any human being analogous to him had of necessity existed. We feel that Mr. Wertheimer might have been created before the stars. Watts has a tendency to resume his characters into his background as if they were half returning
THOMAS CARLYLE.
to the forces of nature. In his more successful portraits the actual physical characteristics of the sitter appear to be something of the nature of artistic creations; they are decorative and belong to a whole. We feel that he has filled in the fiery orange of Swinburne’s hair as one might fill in a gold or copper panel. We know that he was historically correct in making the hair orange, but we cannot get rid of a haunting feeling that if his scheme had been a little different he would have made it green. This indescribable sentiment is particularly strong in the case of the portrait of Rossetti. Rossetti is dressed in a dark green coat which perfectly expresses his sumptuous Pre-Raphaelite affectation. But we do not feel that Rossetti has adopted the dark green coat to suit his dark red beard. We rather feel that if anyone had seized Rossetti and forcibly buttoned him up in the dark green coat he would have grown the red beard by sheer force of will.
Before we quit the subject of portraiture a word ought to be said about two exceedingly noble portraits, those of Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Manning. The former is interesting because, as an able critic said somewhere (I wish I could remember who he was or where he wrote), this is the one instance of Watts approaching tentatively a man whom he in all reasonable probability did not understand. In this particular case the picture is a hundred times better for that. The portrait-painter of Matthew Arnold obviously ought not to understand him, since he did not understand himself. And the bewilderment which the artist felt for those few hours reproduced in a perfect, almost in an immortal, picture the bewilderment which the sitter felt from the cradle to the grave. The bewilderment of Matthew Arnold was more noble and faithful than most men’s certainty, and Watts has not failed to give that nobility a place even greater perhaps than that which he would have given to it had he been working on that fixed theory of admiration in which he dealt with Tennyson or Morris. The sad sea-blue eyes of Matthew Arnold seemed to get near to the fundamental sadness of blue. It is a certain eternal bleakness in the colour which may for all I know have given rise to the legend of blue devils. There are times at any rate when the bluest heavens appear only blue with those devils. The portrait of Cardinal Manning is worth a further and special notice, because it is an illustration of the fact to which I have before alluded: the fact that while Watts in one sense always gets the best out of his sitters, he does not by any means always get the handsomest out of them. Manning was a singularly fine-looking man, even in his emaciation. A friend of mine, who was particularly artistic both by instinct and habits, gazed for a long time at a photograph of the terrible old man clad in those Cardinal’s robes and regalia in which he exercised more than a Cardinal’s power, and said reflectively, “He would have made his fortune as a model.” A great many of the photographs of Manning, indeed almost any casual glimpses of him, present him as more beautiful than he appears in Watts’ portrait. To the ordinary onlooker there was behind the wreck of flesh and the splendid skeleton the remains of a very handsome English gentleman; relics of one who might have hunted foxes and married an American heiress. Watts has no eyes for anything except that sublime vow which he would himself repudiate, that awful Church which he would himself disown. He exaggerates the devotionalism of Manning. He is more ascetic than the ascetics; more Catholic than Catholicism. Just so, he would be, if he were painting the Sheik-el-Islam, more Moslem than the Mohammedans. He has no eyes but for ideas.
Watts’ allegories and Watts’ portraits exhaust the subject of his art. It is true that he has on rare occasions attempted pictures merely reproducing the externals of the ordinary earth. It is characteristic of him that he should have once, for no apparent reason in particular, painted a picture of two carthorses and a man. It is still more characteristic of him that this one picture of a trivial group in the street should be so huge as to dwarf many of his largest and most transcendental canvases; that the incidental harmless drayman should be more gigantic than the Prince of this World or Adam or the Angel of Death. He condescends to a detail and makes the detail more vast than a cosmic allegory. One picture, called “The First Oyster,” he is reported to have painted in response to a challenge which accused him or his art of lacking altogether the element of humour. The charge is interesting, because it suggests a comparison with the similar charge commonly brought against Gladstone. In both charges there is an element of truth, though not complete truth. Watts proved no doubt that he was not wholly without humour by this admirable picture. Gladstone proved that he was not wholly without humour by his reply to Mr. Chaplin, by his singing of “Doo-dah,” and by his support of a grant to the Duke of Coburg. But both men were singularly little possessed by the mood or the idea of humour. To them had been in peculiar fullness revealed the one great truth which our modern thought does not know and which it may possibly perish through not knowing. They knew that to enjoy life means to take it seriously. There is an eternal kinship between solemnity and high spirits, and almost the very name of it is Gladstone. Its other name is Watts. They knew that not only life, but every detail of life, is most a pleasure when it is studied with the gloomiest intensity. They knew that the men who collect beetles are jollier than the men who kill them, and that the men who worshipped beetles (in ancient Egypt) were probably the jolliest of all. The startling cheerfulness of the old age of Gladstone, the startling cheerfulness of the old age of Watts, are both entirely redolent of this exuberant seriousness, this uproarious gravity. They were as happy as the birds, because, like the birds, they were untainted by the disease of laughter. They are as awful and philosophical as children at play: indeed they remind us of a truth true for all of us, though capable of misunderstanding, that the great aim of a man’s life is to get into his second childhood.