But the same sort of criticism was written by the younger generation in Germany, seventy years ago, on the works of Goethe, which have, none the less, remained fresher than those of Schlegel and Tieck. What is modern is not always the same as what is eternally young. And if one endeavours, disregarding the current of the age, to approach Watts as though he were an old master, one feels an increasing sense of the probability that amongst all the New Idealists of the present he has, next to Boecklin, the best prospect of becoming one. In spite of all its independence of spirit, the art of Burne-Jones has an affected mannerism in its outward garb. The sentiment of it is free, but the form is confined in the old limits. And it is not impossible that later generations, to whom his specifically modern sentiment will appeal more and more faintly, may one day rank him, on account of his archaism in drawing, as much amongst the eclectics as Overbeck and Führich are held to be at the present time. But that can never happen to Watts. His works are the expression of an artist who is as little dependent upon the past as upon the momentary tendencies of the present. His articulation of form has nothing in common with the lines of beauty of the antique, or the Quattrocento, or the Cinquecento. It is a thing created by himself and to himself peculiar. He needs no erudition, and no attributes and symbols borrowed from the Renaissance, to body forth his allegories. With him there begins a new power of creating types; and his figure of Death—that tall woman, clad in white, with hollow cheeks, livid face, and lifeless sunken eyes—is no less cogent than the genius with the torch reversed or the burlesque skeleton of the Middle Ages. Moreover, there is in his works a trace of profundity and simple grandeur which stands alone in our own period. It is precisely our more sensitive nervous system which divides us from the old painters, and has generally given the artistic productions of our day a disturbed, capricious, restless, and overstrained character, making them inferior to those of the old masters.
Watts is, perhaps, the only painter who can bear comparison with them in every respect. Here is a man who has been able to live in himself far away from the bustle of exhibitions, a man who worked when he was old as soundly and freshly as when he was young, a man, also, who is always simple in his art, lucid, earnest, grandiose, impressive, and of monumental sublimity. Though he shows no trace of imitation he might have come straight from the Renaissance, so deep is his sense of beauty, so direct and so condensed his power of giving form to his ideas. And amongst living painters I should find it impossible to name a single one who could embody such a scene as that of “Love and Death” so calmly, so entirely without rhetorical gestures and all the tricks of theatrical management. There is the mark of style about everything in Watts, and it is no external and borrowed style, but one which is his own, a style which a notable man, a thinker and a poet, has fashioned for the expression of his own ideas. That is what makes him a master of contemporary painting and of the painting of all times. And that is what will, perhaps, render him, in the eyes of later generations, one of the greatest men of our time.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE NEW IDEALISM IN FRANCE AND GERMANY
A similar change of taste occurred in France. Just as the Impressionists had held modernity alone in high honour, so now awoke the longing after the faded lustre of a bygone age of beauty. The younger generation in literature began to do homage to their spiritual ancestors not in Zola but in Charles Baudelaire, that abstracter of the quintessence; and similarly in the province of art there came to the fore two of the older masters who until then had been relegated to the background.
In pictorial art Gustave Moreau is equivalent to Charles Baudelaire. Certain of the strange and fascinating poems in the Fleurs du Mal strike alone the same note of sentiment as the tortured, subtilised, morbid, but mysterious and captivating creations of Moreau; and his figures, like those of Baudelaire, live in a mysterious world, and stimulate the spirit like eternal riddles. Every one of his works stands in need of a commentary; every one of them bears witness to a profound and peculiar activity of mind, and every one of them is full of intimate reveries. Every agitation of his inward spirit takes shape in myths of hieratical strangeness, in mysterious hallucinations, which he sets in his pictures like jewels. He gives ear to dying strains, rising faintly, inaudible to the majority of men. Marvellous beings pass before him, fantastic and yet earnest; forms of legendary story hover through space upon strange animals; a fabulous hippogriff bears him far away to Greece and the East, to vanished worlds of beauty. Upon the journey he beholds Utopias, beholds the Fortunate Islands, and visits all lands, borne upon the pinions of a dream. An age which went wild over Cabanel and Bouguereau could not possibly be in sympathy with him. The Naturalists, also, looked upon him as a singular being; it was much as if an Indian magician whose robe shone in all the hues of the rainbow had suddenly made his appearance at a ball, amongst men in black evening dress. It is only since the mysterious smile of Leonardo’s feminine figures has once more drawn the world beneath its spell that the spirit of Moreau’s pictures has become a familiar thing. Even his schooling was different from that of his contemporaries. He was the only pupil of that strange artist Théodore Chassériau, and Chassériau had directed him to the study of Bellini, Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, and all those enchanting primitive artists whose enchanting female figures are seen to move through mysterious black and blue landscapes. He was then seized with an enthusiasm for the hieratical art of India. And he was also affected by old German copper-engraving, old Venetian pottery, painting upon vases and enamel, mosaics and niello work, tapestries and old Oriental miniatures. His exquisite and expressive style, which, at a time when the flowing Cinquecento manner was in vogue, made an unpleasant effect by its archaic angularity, was the result of the fusion of these elements.
When he appeared, the special characteristic of French art was its seeking after violent agitations of the spirit, émotions fortes. The spirit was to be roused by stormy vehemence, as a relaxed system is braced by massage. But the generation at the close of the nineteenth century wanted to be soothed rather than stirred by painting. It could not endure shrill cries, loud, emphatic speech, or vehement gestures. It desired subdued and refined emotions, and Moreau’s distinction is that he was the first to give expression to this weary décadent humour. In his work a complete absence of motion has taken the place of the striding legs, the attitudes of the fencing-master, the arms everlastingly raised to heaven, and the passionately distorted faces which had reigned in French painting since David. He makes spiritual expression his starting-point, and not scenic effect; he keeps, as it were, within the laws which rule over classical sculpture, where vehemence was only permitted to intrude from the period of decline, from the Pergamene reliefs, the Laocoön, and the Farnese Bull. Everything bears the seal of sublime peace; everything is inspired by inward life and suppressed passion. Even when the gods fight there are no mighty gestures; with a mere frown they can shake the earth like Zeus.
His spiritual conception of the old myths is just as peculiar as his grave articulation of form; it is a conception such as earlier generations could not have, one which alone befits the spiritual condition of the close of the nineteenth century. During the most recent decades archæological excavations and scientific researches have widened and deepened our conceptions of the old mythology in a most unexpected manner. Beside the laughter of the Grecian Pan we hear the sighs and behold the convulsions of Asia, in her anguish bearing gods, who perish young like spring flowers, in the loving arms of Oriental goddesses. We have heard of chryselephantine statues covered with precious stones from top to bottom; and we know the graceful terra-cotta figures of Tanagra. Before there was a knowledge of the Tanagra statuettes no archæologist could have believed that the Eros of Hesiod was such a charming, wayward little rascal. Before the discovery of the Cyprus statues no artist would have ventured to adorn a Grecian goddess with flowers, pins for the head, and a heavy tiara. Prompted by these discoveries, Moreau has been swayed by strangely rich inspirations. He is said to have worked in his studio as in a tower opulent with ivory and jewels. He has a delight in arraying the figures of his legends in the most costly materials, as the discoveries at Cyprus give him warrant for doing, in painting their robes in the deepest and most lustrous hues, and in being almost too lavish in his manner of adorning their arms and breasts. Every figure of his is a glittering idol, enveloped in a dress of gold brocade embroidered with precious stones. His love of ornamentation is even extended to his landscapes. They are improbable, far too fair, far too rich, far too strange to exist in the actual world, but they are in close harmony with the character of these sumptuously clad figures which wander in them like the mystic and melancholy shapes of a dream. The capricious generation that lived in the Renaissance occasionally handled classical subjects in this manner, but there is the same difference between Filippino Lippi and Gustave Moreau as there is between Botticelli and Burne-Jones: the former, like Shakespeare in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, transformed the antique into a blithe and fantastic fairy world, whereas that fire of yearning romance which once flamed from poor Hölderlin’s poet heart burns in the pictures of Moreau.