We feel this to be so in the finest works of Watts, such as the “Love and Death.” It is strange, however, to find Mr. Chesterton writing of allegorical pictures as if they were as plentiful as blackberries. “Millions,” he mentions—I wonder how many he could count in any Royal Academy exhibition? I had supposed that allegorical design was almost a lost art, as well as a dead language, in the estimation of our people—except perhaps the species which goes to the making of political cartoons.

Mr. Chesterton’s discriminating appreciation of Mr. Watts’s portraits is excellent, and his remarks upon the affinity between Watts and Tennyson very true. In the comprehensiveness, but indefiniteness, of their intellectual view they are akin; but vastness involves vagueness, and vagueness is a characteristic in the painter’s work. In Mr. Watts’s cosmic and elemental designs great half defined shapes loom up out of vaporous space. His heroes belong to no definite historic time, though in his wide catholicity and sympathy his work embraces all human types. His eye is fastened on the type and slights the circumstance. The accident, the realization of the moment is nothing to him; but one never saw a drawing in pure outline by the artist, and the charm of clear silhouette does not appear to appeal to him, neither is essential to his art. And Mr. Watts himself cannot be outlined, and therefore it seems curious to find him set down as a Puritan in one place, and a democrat(!) in another. Although Mr. Chesterton speaks of clear outline or “hard black line,” as a quality not Celtic, and bases his argument that Mr. Watts is not Celtic upon the character of his line, his phrase, “sculptor of draughtsmanship,” is incisive, as it is certainly a grasp of structure rather than outline which distinguishes Mr. Watts’s work; and in this quality it may be said lies the true reason of the difference between his portraits and much modern portraiture which seeks rather the expression of the moment and the accidental lighting, as in a landscape, rather than the type and the underlying structure, the expression of which establishes a certain relation, and that fundamental family likeness between very different individuals which Mr. Chesterton has noted. For, indeed, men and women are moulded in types far more than is commonly supposed.

After all, the great merit of Mr. Chesterton’s critical remarks consists in their not quarrelling with an oak tree because it does not happen to be a pine; and in that he does not think it necessary in order that his subject may be properly appreciated to make a pavement of all other reputations, or, like the irrelevant Walrus and Carpenter on the sand—with much virtue in that “if”—“if this,”—certain essential characteristics, say, of an artist’s style—“were only cleared away it would be grand.”

For the rest, Mr. Chesterton’s sparkling style and wealth of whimsical illustration make the book uncommonly readable, which cannot always be said with regard to monographs on artists.

INDEX

Chiswick Press

Transcriber’s Notes