CHAOS.
at the work of sculpture. His eyes seemed to have been at this time the largest and hungriest part of him. Even when the great chance and first triumph of his life arrived a year or two later, even when he gained the great scholarship which sent him abroad to work amid the marbles of Italy, when a famous ambassador was his patron and a brilliant circle his encouragement, we do not find anything of the conventional student about him. He never painted in the galleries; he only dreamed in them. This must not, of course, be held to mean that he did not work; though one or two people who have written memoirs of Watts have used a phraseology, probably without noticing it, which might be held to imply this. Not only is the thing ludicrously incongruous with his exact character and morals; but anyone who knows anything whatever about the nature of pictorial art will know quite well that a man could not paint like that without having worked; just as he would know that a man could not be the Living Serpent without any previous practice with his joints. To say that he could really learn to paint and draw with the technical merit of Watts, or with any technical merit at all, by simply looking at other people’s pictures and statues will seem to anyone, with a small technical sense, like saying that a man learnt to be a sublime violinist by staring at fiddles in a shop window. It is as near a physical impossibility as can exist in these matters. Work Watts must have done and did do; it is the only conclusion possible which is consistent either with the nature of Watts or the nature of painting; and it is fully supported by the facts. But what the facts do reveal is that he worked in this curiously individual, this curiously invisible way. He had his own notion of when to dream and when to draw; as he shrank from no toil, so he shrank from no idleness. He was something which is one of the most powerful and successful things in the world, something which is far more powerful and successful than a legion of students and prizemen: he was a serious and industrious truant.
It is worth while to note this in his boyhood, partly, of course, because from one end of his life to the other there is this queer note of loneliness and liberty. But it is also more immediately and practically important because it throws some light on the development and character of his art, and even especially of his technique. The great singularity of Watts, considered as a mere artist, is that he stands alone. He is not connected with any of the groups of the nineteenth century: he has neither followed a school nor founded one. He is not mediæval; but no one could exactly call him classical: we have only to compare him to Leighton to feel the difference at once. His artistic style is rather a thing more primitive than paganism; a thing to which paganism and mediævalism are alike upstart sects; a style of painting there might have been upon the tower of Babel. He is mystical; but he is not mediæval: we have only to compare him to Rossetti to feel the difference. When he emerged into the artistic world, that world was occupied by the pompous and historical school, that school which was so exquisitely caricatured by Thackeray in Gandish and his “Boadishia”; but Watts was not pompous or historical: he painted one historical picture, which brought him a youthful success, and he has scarcely painted another. He lived on through the great Pre-Raphaelite time, that very noble and very much undervalued time, when men found again what had been hidden since the thirteenth century under loads of idle civilization, the truth that simplicity and a monastic laboriousness is the happiest of all things; the great truth that purity is the only atmosphere for passion; the great truth that silver is more beautiful than gold. But though there is any quantity of this sentiment in Watts himself, Watts never has been a Pre-Raphaelite. He has seen other fashions come and go; he has seen the Pre-Raphaelites overwhelmed by a heavy restoration of the conventional, headed by Millais with his Scotch moors and his English countesses; but he has not heeded it. He has seen these again overturned by the wild lancers of Whistler; he has seen the mists of Impressionism settle down over the world, making it weird and delicate and noncommittal: but he thinks no more of the wet mist of the Impressionist than he thought of the dry glare of the Pre-Raphaelite.
He, the most mild of men, has yet never been anything but Watts. He has followed the gleam, like some odd modern Merlin. He has escaped all the great atmospheres, the divine if deluding intoxications, which have whirled one man one way and one another; which flew to the head of a perfect stylist like Ruskin and made him an insane scientist; which flew to the head of a great artist like Whistler and made him a pessimistic dandy. He has passed them with a curious immunity, an immunity which, if it were not so nakedly innocent, might almost be called egotism; but which is in fact rather the single eye. He said once that he had not even consented to illustrate a book; his limitation was that he could express no ideas but his own. He admired Tennyson; he thought him the greatest of poets; he thought him a far greater man than himself; he read him, he adored him, but he could not illustrate him. This is the curious secret strength which kept him independent in his youth and kept him independent through the great roaring triumph of the Pre-Raphaelite and the great roaring triumph of the Impressionist. He stands in the world of art as he stood in the studio of Behnes and in the Uffizi Gallery. He stands gazing, but not copying.
Of Watts as he was at this time there remains a very interesting portrait painted by himself. It represents him at the age of nineteen, a dark, slim, and very boyish-looking creature. Something in changed conditions may no doubt account for the flowing and voluminous dark hair: we see such a mane in many of the portraits of the most distinguished men of that time; but if a man appeared now and walked down Fleet Street with so neglected a hure, he would be mistaken for an advertisement of a hair-dresser, or by the more malicious for a minor poet. But there is about this picture not a trace of affectation or the artistic immunity in these matters: the boy’s dress is rough and ordinary, his expression is simple and unconscious. From a modern standpoint we should say without hesitation that if his hair is long it is because he has forgotten to have it cut. And there is something about this contrast between the unconsciously leonine hair and the innocent and almost bashful face, there is something like a parable of Watts. His air is artistic, if you will. His famous skull cap, which makes him look like a Venetian senator, is as pictorial and effective as the boyish mane in the picture. But he belongs to that older race of Bohemians, of which even Thackeray only saw the sunset, the great old race of art and literature who were ragged because they were really poor, frank because they were really free, and untidy because they were really forgetful. It will not do to confuse Watts with these men; there is
