WALTER CRANE.
relation of unimpeachable correctness: in their scheme of things it may be true, or rather it is true, that the æsthetic was confused with the utilitarian, that good gardens were turned so to speak into bad cornfields, and a valuable temple into a useless post-office. But in so far as they had this fundamental idea that art must be linked to life, and to the strength and honour of nations, they were a hundred times more broad-minded and more right than the new ultra-technical school. The idea of following art through everything for itself alone, through extravagance, through cruelty, through morbidity, is just exactly as superstitious as the idea of following theology for itself alone through extravagance and cruelty and morbidity. To deny that Baudelaire is loathsome, or Nietzsche inhuman, because we stand in awe of beauty, is just the same thing as denying that the Court of Pope Julius was loathsome, or the rack inhuman, because we stand in awe of religion. It is not necessary and it is not honest. The young critics of the Green Carnation, with their nuances and technical mysteries, would doubtless be surprised to learn that as a class they resemble ecstatic nuns, but their principle is, in reality, the same. There is a great deal to be said for them, and a great deal, for that matter, to be said for nuns. But there is nothing to be surprised at, nothing to call for any charge of inconsistency or lack of enlightenment, about the conduct of Watts and the great men of his age, in being unable to separate art from ethics. They were nationalists and universalists: they thought that the ecstatic isolation of the religious sense had done incalculable harm to religion. It is not remarkable or unreasonable that they should think that the ecstatic isolation of the artistic sense would do incalculable harm to art.
This, then, was the atmosphere of Watts and Victorian idealism: an atmosphere so completely vanished from the world of art in which we now live that the above somewhat long introduction is really needed to make it vivid or human to us. These three elements may legitimately, as I have said, be predicated of it as its main characteristics: first, the sceptical idealism, the belief that abstract verities remained the chief affairs of men when theology left them; second, the didactic simplicity, the claim to teach other men and to assume one’s own value and rectitude; third, the cosmic utilitarianism, the consideration of any such thing as art or philosophy perpetually with reference to a general good. They may be right or wrong, they may be returning or gone for ever; theories and fashions may change the face of humanity again and yet again; but at least in that one old man at Limnerslease, burned, and burned until death, these convictions, like three lamps in an old pagan temple of stoicism.
Of the ancestry of Watts so little is known that it resolves itself into one hypothesis: a hypothesis which brings with it a suggestion, a suggestion employed by almost all his existing biographers, but a suggestion which cannot, I think, pass unchallenged, although the matter may appear somewhat theoretic and remote. Watts was born in London, but his family had in the previous generation come from Hereford. The vast amount of Welsh blood which is by the nature of the case to be found in Herefordshire has led to the statement that Watts is racially a Celt, which is very probably true. But it is also said, in almost every notice of his life and work, that the Celtic spirit can be detected in his painting, that the Celtic principle of mysticism is a characteristic of his artistic conceptions. It is in no idly antagonistic spirit that I venture to doubt this most profoundly.
THE SLUMBER OF THE AGES