Watts may or may not be racially a Celt, but there is nothing Celtic about his mysticism. The essential Celtic spirit in letters and art may, I think, be defined as a sense of the unbearable beauty of things. The essential spirit of Watts may, I think, be much better expressed as a sense of the joyful austerity of things. The dominant passion of the artistic Celt, of Mr. W. B. Yeats or Sir Edward Burne-Jones, is in the word “escape”: escape into a land where oranges grow on plum-trees and men can sow what they like and reap what they enjoy. To Watts the very word “escape” would be horrible, like an obscene word: his ideal is altogether duty and the great wheel. To the Celt frivolity is most truly the most serious of things, since in the tangle of roses is always the old serpent who is wiser than the world. To Watts seriousness is most truly the most “joyful of things,” since in it we come nearest to that ultimate equilibrium and reconciliation of things whereby alone they live and endure life and each other. It is difficult to imagine that amid all the varieties of noble temper and elemental desire there could possibly be two exhibiting a more total divergence than that between a kindly severity and an almost cruel love of sweetness; than that between a laborious and open-air charity and a kind of Bacchic asceticism; between a joy in peace and a joy in disorder; between a reduction of existence to its simplest formula and an extension of it to its most frantic corollary; between a lover of justice who accepts the real world more submissively than a slave and a lover of pleasure who despises the real world more bitterly than a hermit; between a king in battle-harness and a vagabond in elf-land; between Watts and Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
It is remarkable that even the technical style of Watts gives a contradiction to this Celtic theory. Watts is strong precisely where the Celt is weak, and weak precisely where the Celt is strong. The only thing that the Celt has lacked in art is that hard mass, that naked outline, that ἀρχιτεκτονική, which makes Watts a sort of sculptor of draughtsmanship. It is as well for us that the Celt has not had this: if he had, he would rule the world with a rod of iron; for he has everything else. There are no hard black lines in Burke’s orations, or Tom Moore’s songs, or the plays of Mr. W. B. Yeats. Burke is the greatest of political philosophers, because in him only are there distances and perspectives, as there are on the real earth, with its mists of morning and evening, and its blue horizons and broken skies. Moore’s songs have neither a pure style nor deep realization, nor originality of form, nor thought nor wit nor vigour, but they have something else which is none of these things, which is nameless and the one thing needful. In Mr. Yeats’ plays there is only one character: the hero who rules and kills all the others, and his name is Atmosphere. Atmosphere and the gleaming distances are the soul of Celtic greatness as they were of Burne-Jones, who was, as I have said, weak precisely where Watts is strong, in the statuesque quality in drawing, in the love of heavy hands like those of Mammon, of a strong back like that of Eve Repentant, in a single fearless and austere outline like that of the angel in The Court of Death, in the frame-filling violence of Jonah, in the half-witted brutality of The Minotaur. He is deficient, that is to say, in what can only be called the god-like materialism of art. Watts, on the other hand, is peculiarly strong in it. Idealist as he is, there is nothing frail or phantasmal about the things or the figures he loves. Though not himself a robust man, he loves robustness; he loves a great bulk of shoulder, an abrupt bend of neck, a gigantic stride,
CARDINAL MANNING.
a large and swinging limb, a breast bound as with bands of brass. Of course the deficiency in such a case is very far from being altogether on one side. There are abysses in Burne-Jones which Watts could not understand, the Celtic madness, older than any sanity, the hunger that will remain after the longest feast, the sorrow that is built up of stratified delights. From the point of view of the true Celt, Watts, the Watts who painted the great stoical pictures Love and Death, Time, Death and Judgment, The Court of Death, Mammon, and Cain, this pictorial Watts would probably be, must almost certainly be, simply a sad, sane, strong, stupid Englishman. He may or may not be Welsh by extraction or by part of his extraction, but in spirit he is an Englishman, with all the faults and all the disadvantages of an Englishman. He is a great Englishman like Milton or Gladstone, of the type, that is to say, that were too much alive for anything but gravity, and who enjoyed themselves far too much to trouble to enjoy a joke. Matthew Arnold has come near to defining that kind of idealism, so utterly different from the Celtic kind, which is to be found in Milton and again in Watts. He has called it, in one of his finest and most accurate phrases, “the imaginative reason.”
This racial legend about the Watts family does not seem to rest upon any certain foundations, and as I have said, the deduction drawn from it is quite loose and misleading. The whole is only another example of that unfortunate, if not infamous, modern habit of talking about such things as heredity with a vague notion that science has closed the question when she has only just opened it. Nobody knows, as a matter of fact, whether a Celtic mysticism can be inherited any more than a theory on the Education Bill. But the eagerness of the popular mind to snatch at a certainty is too impatient for the tardy processes of real hypothesis and research. Long before heredity has become a science, it has become a superstition. And this curious though incidental case of the origin of the Watts genius is just one of those cases which make us wonder what has been the real result of the great rise of science. So far the result would painfully appear to be that whereas men in the earlier times said unscientific things with the vagueness of gossip and legend, they now say unscientific things with the plainness and the certainty of science.
The actual artistic education of Watts, though thorough indeed in its way, had a somewhat peculiar character, the air of something detached and private, and to the external eye something even at random. He works hard, but in an elusive and personal manner. He does not remember the time when he did not draw: he was an artist in his babyhood as he is an artist still in his old age. Like Ruskin and many other of the great and serious men of the century, he would seem to have been brought up chiefly on what may be called the large legendary literature, on such as Homer and Scott. Among his earliest recorded works was a set of coloured illustrations to the Waverley Novels, and a sketch of the struggle for the body of Patroclus. He went to the Academy schools, but only stayed there about a month; never caring for or absorbing the teaching, such as it was, of the place. He wandered perpetually in the Greek galleries of the British Museum, staring at the Elgin marbles, from which he always declared he learnt all the art he knew. “There,” he said, stretching out his hand towards the Ilyssus in his studio, “there is my master.” We hear of a friendship between him and the sculptor William Behnes, of Watts lounging about that artist’s studio, playing with clay, modelling busts, and staring