G. F. Watts

by G. K. Chesterton

The great English Parliament, the Senate that broke the English kings, had just moved its centre of existence. The new Houses of Parliament had opened with what seemed to the men of that time an opening world. A competition was started for the decoration of the halls, and Watts suddenly sprang into importance: he won the great prize. The cartoon of Caractacus led in triumph through the streets of Rome was accepted from this almost nameless man by the great central power of English history. And until we have understood that fact we have not understood Watts: it was (one may be permitted to fancy) the supreme hour of his life. For Watts’ nature is essentially public—that is to say, it is modest and noble, and has nothing to hide. His art is an outdoor art, like that of the healthy ages of the world, like the statuesque art of Greece, like the ecclesiastical and external Gothic art of Christianity: an art that can look the sun in the face. He ought to be employed to paint factory chimneys and railway stations. I know that this will sound like an insolence: my only answer is that he, in accordance with this great conception of his, actually offered to paint a railway station. With a splendid and truly religious imagination, he asked permission to decorate Euston. The railway managers (not perceiving, in their dull classical routine, the wild poetry of their own station) declined. But until we have understood this immense notion of publicity in the soul of Watts, we have understood nothing. The fundamental modern fallacy is that the public life must be an artificial life. It is like saying that the public street must be an artificial air. Men like Watts, men like all the great heroes, only breathe in public. What is the use of abusing a man for publicity when he utters in public the true and the enduring things? What is the use, above all, of prying into his secrecy when he has cried his best from the house-tops?

This is the real argument which makes a detailed biography of Watts unnecessary for all practical purposes. It is in vain to climb walls and hide in cupboards in order to show whether Watts eats mustard or pepper with his curry or whether Watts takes sugar or salt with his porridge. These things may or may not become public: it matters little. The innermost that the biographer could at last discover, after all possible creepings and capers, would be what Watts in his inmost soul believes, and that Watts has splashed on twenty feet of canvas and given to the nation for nothing. Like one of the great orators of the eighteenth century, his public virtues, his public ecstasies are far more really significant than his private weaknesses. The rest of his life is so simple that it is scarcely worth telling. He went with the great scholarship he gained with his Caractacus to Italy. There he found a new patron—the famous Lord Holland, with the whole of whose great literary circle he rapidly became acquainted. He painted many of his most famous portraits in connexion with this circle, both in Italy and afterwards in Paris. But this great vision of the public idea had entered his blood. He offered his cartoons to Euston Station; he painted St. George and the Dragon for the House of Lords; he presented a fresco to the great hall at Lincoln’s Inn. Of his life there is scarcely more to say, except the splendid fact that he three times refused a title. Of his character there is a great deal more to say.

There is unquestionably about the personal attitude of Watts something that in the vague phraseology of modern times would be called Puritan. Puritan, however, is very far from being really the right word. The right word is a word which has been singularly little used in English nomenclature because historical circumstances have separated us from the origin from which it sprang. The right word for the spirit of Watts is Stoicism. Watts is at one with the Puritans in the actual objects of his attack. One of his deepest and most enduring troubles, a matter of which he speaks and writes frequently, is the prevalence of gambling. With the realism of an enthusiast, he has detected the essential fact that the problem of gambling is even more of a problem in the case of the poorer classes than in the case of the richer. It is, as he asserts, a far worse danger than drink. There are many other instances of his political identity with Puritanism. He told Mr. W. T. Stead that he had defended and was prepared to defend the staggering publications of the “Maiden Tribute”; it was the only way, he said, to stem the evil. A picturesque irradiation asserts indeed that it was under the glow of Hebraic anger against these Babylonian cruelties of Piccadilly and the Strand that he painted as a symbol of those cruelties that brutal and magnificent picture The Minotaur. The pictures themselves of course bear sufficient attestation to this general character: Mammon is what we call a Puritan picture, and Jonah, and Fata Morgana, and For he had Great Possessions. It is not difficult to see that Watts has the Puritan vigilance, the Puritan realism, and the Puritan severity in his attitude towards public affairs. Nevertheless, as I have said, he is to be described rather as a Stoic than a Puritan. The essential difference between Christian and Pagan asceticism lies in the fact that Paganism in renouncing pleasure gives up something which it does not think desirable; whereas Christianity in giving up pleasure gives up something which it thinks very desirable indeed. Thus there is a frenzy in Christian asceticism; its follies and renunciations are like those of first love. There is a passion, and as it were a regret, in the Puritanism of Bunyan; there is none in the Puritanism of Watts. He is not Bunyan, he is Cato. The difference may be a difficult one to convey, but it is one that must not be ignored or great misunderstandings will follow. The one self-abnegation is more reasonable but less joyful. The Stoic casts away pleasure like the parings of his nails; the Mystic cuts it off like his right hand that offends him. In Watts we have the noble self-abnegation of a noble type and school; but everything, however noble, that has shape has limitation, and we must not look in Watts, with his national self-mastery, either for the nightmare of Stylites or the gaiety of Francis of Assisi.

It has already been remarked that the chief note

THE MINOTAUR.

of the painter’s character is a certain mixture of personal delicacy and self-effacement with the most immense and audacious aims. But it is so essential a trait that it will bear a repetition and the introduction of a curious example of it. Watts in his quaint and even shy manner of speech often let fall in conversation words which hint at a certain principle or practice of his, a principle and practice which are, when properly apprehended, beyond expression impressive and daring. The spectator who studies his allegorical paintings one after another will be vaguely impressed with something uniquely absent, something which is usual and familiar in such pictures conspicuous by its withdrawal; a blank or difference which makes them things sundered altogether from the millions of allegorical pictures that throng the great and small galleries of painting. At length the nature of this missing thing may suddenly strike him: in the whole range of Watts’ symbolic art there is scarcely a single example of the ordinary and arbitrary current symbol, the ecclesiastical symbol, the heraldic symbol, the national symbol. A primeval vagueness and archaism hang over all the canvases and cartoons, like frescoes from some prehistoric temple. There is nothing there but the eternal things, clay and fire and the sea, and motherhood and the dead. We cannot imagine the rose or the lion of England; the keys or the tiara of Rome; the red cap of Liberty or the crescent of Islam in a picture by Watts; we cannot imagine the Cross itself. And in light and broken phrases, carelessly and humbly expressed, as I have said, the painter has admitted that this great omission was observed on principle. Its object is that the pictures may be intelligible if they survive the whole modern order. Its object is, that is to say, that if some savage in a dim futurity dug up one of these dark designs on a lonely mountain, though he worshipped strange gods and served laws yet unwritten, it might strike the same message to his soul that it strikes upon clerks and navvies from the walls of the Tate Gallery. It is impossible not to feel a movement of admiration for the magnitude of the thought. Here is a man whose self-depreciation is internal and vital; whose life is cloistered, whose character is childlike, and he has yet within such an unconscious and colossal sense of greatness that he paints on the assumption that his work may outlast the cross of the Eternal City. As a boy he scarcely expected worldly success: as an old man he still said that his worldly success had astonished him. But in his nameless youth and in his silent old age he paints like one upon a tower looking down the appalling perspective of the centuries towards fantastic temples and inconceivable republics.

This union of small self-esteem with a vast ambition is a paradox in the very soul of the painter; and when we look at the symbolic pictures in the light of this theory of his, it is interesting and typical to observe how consistently he pursues any intellectual rule that he laid down for himself. An æsthetic or ethical notion of this kind is not to him, as to most men with the artistic temperament, a thing to talk about sumptuously, to develop in lectures, and to observe when it happens to be suitable. It is a thing like his early rising or his personal conscience, a thing which is either a rule or nothing. And we find this insistence on universal symbols, this rejection of all symbols that are local or temporary or topical, even if the locality be a whole continent, the time a stretch of centuries, or the topic a vast civilization or an undying church—we find this insistence looking out very clearly from the allegories of Watts. It would