It is the merest sophistry to call this moral teaching; it celebrates the deliciousness of temptation as Pindar, the ancient poet, celebrates the wine-cup. In both these pictures Watts celebrates the beauty of the nude and the beauty of the flesh. Leighton would have painted Eve grand and statuesque—a figure out of the penumbra of that decorative world where nothing is quite real. But this woman, colossal and demi-god though she be, is as real as one of his portraits—that of J. S. Mill, for instance, or the Earl of Ripon. She is so real, that you feel almost that you could touch her golden flesh, and hear her cries and murmurs of delight; while the other Eve is so realistically painted that it might be said she weeps audibly.
Next take his picture of Paolo and Francesca. Of all pictures in this gallery it is the most complete, possibly because his friends liked it, and gave him the encouragement all artists need. It is at once beautifully imaginative and a piece of charming decoration. But these poor guilty lovers, these wrecks of humanity, these fragments of tenuity, afloat on the winds like dead leaves, like lightest gossamer, teach no moral lesson. This picture illustrates afresh the sad fate of true lovers, and makes their punishment tender and beautiful. I should like to have had John Knox’s opinion of this picture. There was a certain grimness, a certain severity in the painter. A meeting between these two champions would have been interesting.
Yet we are so hemmed about with difficulty, and so bewildered by a multitude of counsellors, and have got so much into the pestilent habit of seeking guidance everywhere, that one must needs find a moral even in the bosom of a rose.
Therefore—although it be quite unnecessary to the true appreciation of art—I will, reluctantly as it were, entirely on my own responsibility, pluck some moral guidance from imaginative art.
If morality frames for our guidance rules of conduct which, if we do not obey, we are to be punished—if it bids us shun temptation and remove temptation from our path and from the paths of all the world—Art, on the contrary, seems to say, with all its strength and with all its voices: “Seek temptation; run to meet it; we are here to be tempted.” Art does not say—“Be happy, or be miserable, or be wise, or be prudent”; but it says—“Live, have it out with fortune, don’t spare yourself, be no laggard or coward, have no fear.” And this also is part of the message: “Abide where Watts lived, and where the true artist always lived—on the high table-lands, in the unshaded sunshine of intellectual happiness—never descending into the valleys, where hang, mist-like, the languors and lethargies, the low miseries, sensualities, and adulteries which afflict human nature when it is defeated, discouraged, disintegrated.”
At the end of this room there is a large picture enormously impressive—“Time, Death and Judgment.” To be impressive is itself a great artistic merit; yet I do not think this a great picture; there is, indeed, a fine arrangement of colour, and mass, and line, yet behind it all there is no energy of conviction.
Time moves forward, a striding figure, carrying a scythe; beside him walks Death, his wife, a weary woman, tenderly gathering into her lap the flowers of life; above these two figures is Judgment. These figures are vague and conventional as regards any meaning or intention they might convey. If this picture has any meaning, it is as if Watts had said to himself: “I am a figure-painter and will, by my craft of figure-painting, translate into a picture the kind of pleasing terror which is excited by watching a fine sunset or listening to an oratorio.” This is not art, as Michael Angelo gave it. Blake said a picture should be like a lawyer presenting a writ.
“Love and Death” seems much finer—it grips the attention at once. Before the other picture we stand idly pensive; but here we want to get at the root of the matter—to grope our way into the very heart of the picture. There is the naked figure of Love, wavering, falling backwards; and then Death, this huge bulk; draped, and hooded, and horrid. Is it man? Is it woman? and its face is hidden; and is this because it was in the thought of the painter that no one has ever seen the face of Death except the piteous dead, who carry their knowledge into the grave?
As regards a famous picture not in this collection—the picture called “Hope”—I would say that pleasing though it be, it owes its success mainly to its faults; and that people like it because no one can say exactly what it means. A man who really lived by hope—a Krapotkin or a William Morris—would find its vagueness utterly displeasing.