Chapter 2

“FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS.”

much about him that is precise and courtly, and which, as I shall have occasion to remark, belongs really to a yet older period. But it is more right to reckon Watts along with them in their genuine raggedness than to suppose that the unquestionable picturesqueness with which he fronts the world has any relation with that new Bohemianism which is untidy because it is conventional, frank because it follows a fashion, careless because it watches for all its effects, and ragged and coarse in its tastes because it has too much money.

The first definite encouragement, or at least the first encouragement now ascertainable, probably came to the painter from that interesting Greek amateur, Mr. Constantine Ionides. It was under his encouragement that Watts began all his earlier work of the more ambitious kind, and it was the portrait of Mrs. Constantine Ionides which ranks among the earliest of his definite successes. He achieved immediate professional success, however, at an astonishingly early age, judged by modern standards. When he was barely twenty he had three pictures in the Royal Academy: the first two were portraits, and the third a picture calledThe Wounded Heron. There is always a very considerable temptation to fantasticality in dealing with these artistic origins: no doubt it does not always follow that a man is destined to be a military conqueror because he beats other little boys at school, nor endued with a passionate and clamorous nature because he begins this mortal life with a yell. But Watts has, to a rather unusual degree, a sincere and consistent and homogeneous nature; and this first exhibit of his has really a certain amount of symbolism about it. Portraiture, with which he thus began, he was destined to raise to a level never before attained in English art, so far as significance and humanityare concerned; and there is really something a little fascinating about the fact that along with these pictures went one picture which had, for all practical purposes, an avowedly humanitarian object. The picture ofThe Wounded Heronscarcely ever attracts attention, I imagine, in these days, but it may, of course, have been recalled for a moment to the popular mind by that curious incident which occurred in connexion with it and which has often been told. Long after the painter who produced that picture in his struggling boyhood had lost sight of it and in all probability forgotten all about its existence, a chance traveller with a taste in the arts happened to find it in the dusty curiosity-shop of a north-country town. He bought it and gave it back to the now celebrated painter, who hung it among the exhibits at Little Holland House. It is, as I have said, a thing painted clearly with a humanitarian object: it depicts the suffering of a stricken creature; it depicts the helplessness of life under the cruelty of the inanimate violence; it depicts the pathos of dying and the greater pathos of living. Since then, no doubt, Watts has improved his machinery of presentation and found larger and more awful things to tell his tale with than a bleeding bird. The wings of the heron have widened till they embrace the world with the terrible wings of Time or Death: he has summoned the stars to help him and sent the angels as his ambassadors. He has changed the plan of operations until it includes Heaven and Tartarus. He has never changed the theme.

The relations of Watts to Constantine Ionides either arose or became important about this time. The painter’s fortunes rose quickly and steadily, so far as the Academy was concerned. He continued to exhibit with a fair amount of regularity, chiefly in the form of subjects from the great romantic or

AN IDLE CHILD OF FANCY.

historic traditions which were then the whole pabulum of the young idealistic artist. In the Academy of 1840 came a picture on the old romantic subject of Ferdinand and Isabella; in the following year but one, a picture on the old romantic subject of Cymbeline. The portrait of Mrs. Constantine Ionides appeared in 1842.

But Watts’ mode of thought from the very beginning had very little kinship with the Academy and very little kinship with this kind of private and conventional art. An event was shortly to occur, the first success of his life, but an event far less important when considered as the first success of his life than it is when considered as an essential characteristic of his mind. The circumstances are so extremely characteristic of something in the whole spirit of the man’s art that it may be permissible to dwell at length on the significance of the fact rather than on the fact itself.

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 ofCaractacus led in triumph through the streets of Romewas 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 thatcan 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 wentwith the great scholarship he gained with hisCaractacusto 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 isStoicism. 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. Apicturesque 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 pictureThe Minotaur. The pictures themselves of course bear sufficient attestation to this general character:Mammonis what we call a Puritan picture, andJonah, andFata Morgana, andFor 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 dugup 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

THE COURT OF DEATH.

have been easy and effective, as he himself often said, to make the meaning of a picture clear by the introduction of some popular and immediate image: and it must constantly be remembered that Watts does care very much for making the meaning of his pictures clear. His work indeed has, as I shall suggest shortly, a far more subtle and unnamable quality than the merely hard and didactic; but it must not be for one moment pretended that Watts does not claim to teach: to do so would be to falsify the man’s life. And it would be easy, as is quite obvious, to make the pictures clearer: to hang a crucifix over theHappy Warrior, to giveMammonsome imperial crown or typical heraldic symbols, to give a theological machinery toThe Court of Death. But this is put on one side like a temptation of the flesh, because it conflicts with this stupendous idea of painting for all peoples and all centuries. I am not saying that this extraordinary ambition is necessarily the right view of art, or the right view of life. I am only reiterating it as an absolute trait of men of the time and type and temper of Watts. It may plausibly be maintained, I am not sure that it cannot more truly be maintained, that man cannot achieve and need not achieve this frantic universality. A man, I fancy, is after all only an animal that has noble preferences. It is the very difference between the artistic mind and the mathematical that the former sees things as they are in a picture, some nearer and larger, some smaller and further away: while to the mathematical mind everything, every unit in a million, every fact in a cosmos, must be of equal value. That is why mathematicians go mad; and poets scarcely ever do. A man may have as wide a view of life as he likes, the wider the better; a distant view, a bird’s-eye view, if he will, but still a view and not a map.The one thing he cannot attempt in his version of the universe is to draw things to scale. I have put myself for a moment outside this universalism and doubted its validity because a thing always appears more sharp and personal and picturesque if we do not wholly agree with it. And this universalism is an essential and dominant feature of such great men as Watts and of his time as a whole. Mr. Herbert Spencer is a respectable, almost a dapper, figure, his theory is agnostic and his tone polite and precise. And yet he threw himself into a task more insane and gigantic than that of Dante, an inventory or plan of the universe itself; the awful vision of existence as a single organism, like an amœba on the disc of a microscope. He claimed, by implication, to put in their right places the flaming certainty of the martyrs, the wild novelties of the modern world; to arrange the eternal rock of Peter and the unbroken trance of Buddhism. It is only in this age of specialists, of cryptic experiences in art and faith like the present, that we can see how huge was that enterprise; but the spirit of it is the spirit of Watts. The man of that aggressive nineteenth century had many wild thoughts, but there was one thought that never even for an instant strayed across his burning brain. He never once thought, “Why should I understand the cat, any more than the cat understands me?” He never thought, “Why should I be just to the merits of a Chinaman, any more than a pig studies the mystic virtues of a camel?” He affronted heaven and the angels, but there was one hard arrogant dogma that he never doubted even when he doubted Godhead: he never doubted that he himself was as central and as responsible as God.

This paradox, then, we call the first element in the artistic and personal claim of Watts, that he

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

JOHN STUART MILL.

realizes the great paradox of the Gospel. He is meek, but he claims to inherit the earth. But there is, of course, a great deal more to be said before this view of the matter can be considered complete. The universalism preached by Watts and the other great Victorians was of course subject to certain specialisations; it is not necessary to call them limitations. Like Matthew Arnold, the last and most sceptical of them, who expressed their basic idea in its most detached and philosophic form, they held that conduct was three-fourths of life. They were ingrainedly ethical; the mere idea of thinking anything more important than ethics would have struck them as profane. In this they were certainly right, but they were nevertheless partial or partisan; they did not really maintain the judicial attitude of the universalist. The mere thought of Watts painting a picture calledThe Victory of Joy over Morality, orNature rebuking Conscience, is enough to show the definite limits of that cosmic equality. This is not, of course, to be taken as a fault in the attitude of Watts. He simply draws the line somewhere, as all men, including anarchists, draw it somewhere; he is dogmatic, as all sane men are dogmatic.

There is another phase of this innocent audacity. It may appear to be more fanciful, it is certainly more completely a matter of inference; but it throws light on yet another side of the character of Watts.

Watts’ relation to friends and friendship has something about it very typical. He is not a man desirous or capable of a very large or rich or varied circle of acquaintance. There is nothing Bohemian about him. He belongs both chronologically and psychologically to that period which is earlier even than Thackeray and his Cave of Harmony: he belongsto the quiet, struggling, self-created men of the forties, with their tradition of self-abnegating individualism. Much as there is about him of the artist and the poet, there is something about him also of the industrious apprentice. That strenuous solitude in which Archbishop Temple as a boy struggled to carry a bag of ironmongery which crushed his back, in which Gladstone cut down trees and John Stuart Mill read half the books of the world in boyhood, that strenuous solitude entered to some degree into the very soul of Watts and made him independent of them. But the friends he made have as a general rule been very characteristic: they have marked the strange and haughty fastidiousness that goes along with his simplicity. His friends, his intimate friends, that is, have been marked by a certain indescribable and stately worthiness: more than one of them have been great men like himself. The greatest and most intimate of all his friends, probably, was Tennyson, and in this there is something singularly characteristic of Watts. About the actuality of the intellectual tie that bound him to Tennyson there can be little doubt. He painted three, if not four, portraits of him; his name was often on his lips; he invoked him always as the typical great poet, excusing his faults and expounding his virtues. He invoked his authority as that of the purest of poets, and invoked it very finely and well in a sharp controversial interview he had on the nature and ethics of the nude in art.

At the time I write, there is standing at the end of the garden at Limnerslease a vast shed, used for a kind of sculptor’s studio, in which there stands a splendid but unfinished statue, on which the veteran of the arts is even now at work. It represents Tennyson, wrapped in his famous mantle, with his magnificent head bowed, gazing at something in the

ROBERT BROWNING.

LORD TENNYSON.

hollow of his hand. The subject isFlower in the Crannied Wall. There is something very characteristic of Watts in the contrast between the colossal plan of the figure and the smallness of the central object.

But while the practical nature of the friendship between Watts and Tennyson is clear enough, there is something really significant, something really relevant to Watts’ attitude in its ultimate and psychological character. It is surely most likely that Watts and Tennyson were drawn together because they both represented a certain relation towards their art which is not common in our time and was scarcely properly an attribute of any artists except these two. Watts could not have found the thing he most believed in Browning or Swinburne or Morris or any of the other poets. Tennyson could not have found the thing he most believed in Leighton or Millais or any of the other painters. They were brought together, it must be supposed, by the one thing that they had really in common, a profound belief in the solemnity, the ceremoniousness, the responsibility, and what most men would now, in all probability, call the pomposity of the great arts.

Watts has always a singular kind of semi-mystical tact in the matter of portrait painting. His portraits are commonly very faultless comments and have the same kind of superlative mental delicacy that we see in the picture ofHope. And the whole truth of this last matter is very well expressed in Watts’ famous portrait of Tennyson, particularly if we look at it in conjunction with his portrait of Browning. The head of Browning is the head of a strong, splendid, joyful, and anxious man who could write magnificent poetry. The head of Tennyson is the head of a poet. Watts has painted Tennyson with his darkdome-like head relieved against a symbolic green and blue of the eternal sea and the eternal laurels. He has behind him the bays of Dante and he is wrapped in the cloak of the prophets. Browning is dressed like an ordinary modern man, and we at once feel that it should and must be so. To dress Browning in the prophet’s robe and the poet’s wreath would strike us all as suddenly ridiculous; it would be like sending him to a fancy-dress ball. It would be like attiring Matthew Arnold in the slashed tights of an Elizabethan, or putting Mr. Lecky into a primitive Celto-Irish kilt. But it does not strike us as absurd in the case of Tennyson: it does not strike us as even eccentric or outlandish or remote. We think of Tennyson in that way; we think of him as a lordly and conscious bard. Some part of this fact may, of course, be due to his possession of a magnificent physical presence; but not, I think, all. Lord Kitchener (let us say) is a handsome man, but we should laugh at him very much in silver armour. It is much more due to the fact that Tennyson really assumed and was granted this stately and epic position. It is not true that Tennyson was more of a poet than Browning, if we mean by that statement that Browning could not compose forms as artistic and well-managed, lyrics as light and poignant, and rhythms as swelling and stirring as any in English letters. But it is true that Tennyson was more of a poet than Browning, if we mean by that statement that Tennyson was a poet in person, in post and circumstance and conception of life; and that Browning was not, in that sense, a poet at all. Browning first inaugurated in modern art and letters the notion or tradition, in many ways perhaps a more wholesome one, that the fact that a man pursued the trade or practice of poetry was his own affair and a thing apart,

THE DWELLER IN THE INNERMOST.

like the fact that he collected coins or earned his living as a hatter. But Tennyson really belonged to an older tradition, the tradition that believed that the poet, the appointed “Vates,” was a recognized and public figure like the bard or jester at the mediæval courts, like the prophet in the old Commonwealth of Israel. In Tennyson’s work appeared for the last time in English history this notion of the stately and public and acknowledged poet: it was the lay of the last minstrel.

Now there is in Watts, gentle and invisible as he is, something that profoundly responds to that spirit. Leighton, like Browning, was a courtier and man of the world: Millais, like Browning, was a good fellow and an ordinary gentleman: but Watts has more of Tennyson in him; he believes in a great priesthood of art. He believes in a certain pure and childish publicity. If anyone suggested that before a man ventured to paint pictures or to daub with plaster he should be initiated with some awful rites in some vast and crowded national temple, should swear to work worthily before some tremendous altar or over some symbolic flame, Millais would have laughed heartily at the idea and Leighton also. But it would not seem either absurd or unreasonable to Watts. In the thick of this smoky century he is living in a clear age of heroes.

Watts’ relations to Tennyson were indeed very characteristic of what was finest, and at the same time quaintest, in the two men. The painter, with a typical sincerity, took the poet seriously, I had almost said literally, in his daily life, and liked him to live up to his poetry. The poet, with that queer sulky humour which gave him, perhaps, more breadth than Watts, but less strength, said, after reading some acid and unjust criticisms, “I wish I had neverwritten a line.” “Come,” said Watts, “you wouldn’t like ‘King Arthur’ to talk like that.” Tennyson paused a moment and then spread out his fingers. “Well,” he said, “what do you expect? It’s all the gout.” The artist, with a characteristic power of juvenile and immortal hero-worship, tells this story as an instance of the fundamental essence of odd magnanimity and sombre geniality in Tennyson. It is such an instance and a very good one: but it is also an instance of the sharp logical idealism, of the prompt poetic candour of Watts. He asked Tennyson to be King Arthur, and it never occurred to him to think that he was asking Addison to be Cato, or Massinger to be Saint Dorothy. The incident is a fine tribute to a friendship.

The real difficulty which many cultivated people have in the matter of Watts’ allegorical pictures is far more difficult. It is indeed nothing else but the great general reaction against allegorical art which has arisen during the last artistic period. The only way in which we can study, with any real sincerity, the allegoric art of Watts is to ask to what is really due the objection to allegory which has thus arisen. The real objection to allegory is, it may roughly be said, founded upon the conception that allegory involves one art imitating another. This is, up to a certain point, true. To paint a figure in a blue robe and call her Necessity, and then paint a small figure in a yellow robe and call it Invention; to put the second on the knee of the first, and then say that you are enunciating the sublime and eternal truth, that Necessity is the mother of Invention, this is indeed an idle and foolish affair. It is saying in six weeks’ work with brush and palette knife what could be said much better in six words. And there can be no reasonable dispute that of this character were a considerable

GEORGE MEREDITH.

number of the allegorical pictures that have crowded the galleries and sprawled over the ceilings of ancient and modern times. Of such were the monstrous pictures of Rubens, which depicted a fat Religion and a bloated Temperance dancing before some foreign conqueror; of such were the florid designs of the eighteenth century, which showed Venus and Apollo encouraging Lord Peterborough to get over the inconvenience of his breastplate; of such, again, were the meek Victorian allegories which showed Mercy and Foresight urging men to found a Society for the Preservation of Young Game. Of such were almost all the allegories which have dominated the art of Europe for many centuries back. Of such, most emphatically, the allegories of Watts are not. They are not mere pictorial forms, combined as in a kind of cryptogram to express theoretic views or relations. They are not proverbs or verbal relations rendered with a cumbrous exactitude in oil and Chinese white. They are not, in short, the very thing that the opponents of Watts and his school say that they are. They are not merely literary. There is one definite current conception on which this idea that Watts’ allegorical art is merely literary is eventually based. It is based upon the idea that lies at the root of rationalism, at the root of useless logomachies, at the root, in no small degree, of the whole modern evil. It is based on the assumption of the perfection of language. Every religion and every philosophy must, of course, be based on the assumption of the authority or the accuracy of something. But it may well be questioned whether it is not saner and more satisfactory to ground our faith on the infallibility of the Pope, or the infallibility of the Book of Mormon, than on this astounding modern dogma of the infallibility of human speech. Every time one man says to another, “Tell us plainlywhat you mean?” he is assuming the infallibility of language: that is to say, he is assuming that there is a perfect scheme of verbal expression for all the internal moods and meanings of men. Whenever a man says to another, “Prove your case; defend your faith,” he is assuming the infallibility of language: that is to say, he is assuming that a man has a word for every reality in earth, or heaven, or hell. He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the world and doing strange and terrible service in it crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire. Whenever, on the other hand, a man rebels faintly or vaguely against this way of speaking, whenever a man says that he cannot explain what he means, and that he hates argument, that his enemy is misrepresenting him, but he cannot explain how; that man is a true sage, and has seen into the heart of the real nature of language. Whenever a man refuses to be caught by some dilemma about reason and passion, or about reason and faith, or about fate and free-will, he has seen the truth. Whenever a man declines to be cornered as an egotist, or an altruist, or any such modern monster, he has seen the truth. For the truth is that language is not a scientific thing at all, but wholly an artistic thing, a thing invented by hunters, and killers, and such artists long before science was

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.

dreamed of. The truth is simply that—that the tongue is not a reliable instrument, like a theodolite or a camera. The tongue is most truly an unruly member, as the wise saint has called it, a thing poetic and dangerous, like music or fire.

Now we can easily imagine an alternative state of things, roughly similar to that produced in Watts’ allegories, a system, that is to say, whereby the moods or facts of the human spirit were conveyed by something other than speech, by shapes or colours or some such things. As a matter of fact, of course, there are a great many other languages besides the verbal. Descriptions of spiritual states and mental purposes are conveyed by a variety of things, by hats, by bells, by guns, by fires on a headland, or by jerks of the head. In fact there does exist an example which is singularly analogous to decorative and symbolic painting. This is a scheme of æsthetic signs or emblems, simple indeed and consisting only of a few elemental colours, which is actually employed to convey great lessons in human safety and great necessities of the commonwealth. It need hardly be said that I allude to the railway signals. They are as much a language, and surely as solemn a language, as the colour sequence of ecclesiastical vestments, which sets us red for martyrdom, and white for resurrection. For the green and red of the night-signals depict the two most fundamental things of all, which lie at the back of all language. Yes and no, good and bad, safe and unsafe, life and death. It is perfectly conceivable that a degree of flexibility or subtlety might be introduced into these colours so as to suggest other and more complex meanings. We might (under the influence of some large poetic station-masters) reach a state of things in which a certain rich tinge of purple in the crimson light would mean “Travel for a fewseconds at a slightly more lingering pace, that a romantic old lady in a first-class carriage may admire the scenery of the forest.” A tendency towards peacock blue in the green might mean “An old gentleman with a black necktie has just drunk a glass of sherry at the station restaurant.” But however much we modified or varied this colour sequence or colour language, there would remain one thing which it would be quite ridiculous and untrue to say about it. It would be quite ridiculous and untrue to say that this colour sequence was simply a symbol representing language. It would be another language: it would convey its meaning to aliens who had another word for forest, and another word for sherry, and another word for old lady. It would not be a symbol of language, a symbol of a symbol; it would be one symbol of the reality, and language would be another. That is precisely the true position touching allegorical art in general, and, above all, the allegorical art of Watts.

So long as we conceive that it is, fundamentally, the symbolizing of literature in paint, we shall certainly misunderstand it and the rare and peculiar merits, both technical and philosophical, which really characterize it. If the ordinary spectator at the art galleries finds himself, let us say, opposite a picture of a dancing flower-crowned figure in a rose-coloured robe, he feels a definite curiosity to know the title, looks it up in the catalogue, and finds that it is called, let us say, “Hope.” He is immediately satisfied, as he would have been if the title had run “Portrait of Lady Warwick,” a “View of Kilchurn Castle.” It represents a certain definite thing, the word “hope.” But what does the word “hope” represent? It represents only a broken instantaneous glimpse of something that is immeasurably older and wilder

HOPE.

than language, that is immeasurably older and wilder than man; a mystery to saints and a reality to wolves. To suppose that such a thing is dealt with by the word “hope,” any more than America is represented by a distant view of Cape Horn, would indeed be ridiculous. It is not merely true that the word itself is, like any other word, arbitrary; that it might as well be “pig” or “parasol”; but it is true that the philosophical meaning of the word, in the conscious mind of man, is merely a part of something immensely larger in the unconscious mind, that the gusty light of language only falls for a moment on a fragment, and that obviously a semi-detached, unfinished fragment of a certain definite pattern on the dark tapestries of reality. It is vain and worse than vain to declaim against the allegoric, for the very word “hope” is an allegory, and the very word “allegory” is an allegory.

Now let us suppose that instead of coming before that hypothetical picture ofHopein conventional flowers and conventional pink robes, the spectator came before another picture. Suppose that he found himself in the presence of a dim canvas with a bowed and stricken and secretive figure cowering over a broken lyre in the twilight. What would he think? His first thought, of course, would be that the picture was calledDespair; his second (when he discovered his error in the catalogue), that it has been entered under the wrong number; his third, that the painter was mad. But if we imagine that he overcame these preliminary feelings and that as he stared at that queer twilight picture a dim and powerful sense of meaning began to grow upon him—what would he see? He would see something for which there is neither speech nor language, which has been too vast for any eye to see and too secret for any religion to utter, even as an esoteric doctrine. Standing beforethat picture, he finds himself in the presence of a great truth. He perceives that there is something in man which is always apparently on the eve of disappearing, but never disappears, an assurance which is always apparently saying farewell and yet illimitably lingers, a string which is always stretched to snapping and yet never snaps. He perceives that the queerest and most delicate thing in us, the most fragile, the most fantastic, is in truth the backbone and indestructible. He knows a great moral fact: that there never was an age of assurance, that there never was an age of faith. Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors. The desperate modern talk about dark days and reeling altars, and the end of Gods and angels, is the oldest talk in the world: lamentations over the growth of agnosticism can be found in the monkish sermons of the dark ages; horror at youthful impiety can be found in the Iliad. This is the thing that never deserts men and yet always, with daring diplomacy, threatens to desert them. It has indeed dwelt among and controlled all the kings and crowds, but only with the air of a pilgrim passing by. It has indeed warmed and lit men from the beginning of Eden with an unending glow, but it was the glow of an eternal sunset.

Here, in this dim picture, its trick is almost betrayed. No one can name this picture properly, but Watts, who painted it, has named itHope. But the point is that this title is not (as those think who call it “literary”) the reality behind the symbol, but another symbol for the same thing, or, to speak yet more strictly, another symbol describing another part or aspect of the same complex reality. Two men felt a swift, violent, invisible thing in the world: one said the word “hope,” the other painted a

JONAH.

picture in blue and green paint. The picture is inadequate; the word “hope” is inadequate; but between them, like two angles in the calculation of a distance, they almost locate a mystery, a mystery that for hundreds of ages has been hunted by men and evaded them. And the title is therefore not so much the substance of one of Watts’ pictures, it is rather an epigram upon it. It is merely an approximate attempt to convey, by snatching up the tool of another craftsman, the direction attempted in the painter’s own craft. He calls itHope, and that is perhaps the best title. It reminds us among other things of a fact which is too little remembered, that faith, hope, and charity, the three mystical virtues of Christianity, are also the gayest of the virtues. Paganism, as I have suggested, is not gay, but rather nobly sad; the spirit of Watts, which is as a rule nobly sad also, here comes nearer perhaps than anywhere else to mysticism in the strict sense, the mysticism which is full of secret passion and belief, like that of Fra Angelico or Blake. But though Watts calls his tremendous realityHope, we may call it many other things. Call it faith, call it vitality, call it the will to live, call it the religion of to-morrow morning, call it the immortality of man, call it self-love and vanity; it is the thing that explains why man survives all things and why there is no such thing as a pessimist. It cannot be found in any dictionary or rewarded in any commonwealth: there is only one way in which it can even be noticed and recognized. If there be anywhere a man who has really lost it, his face out of a whole crowd of men will strike us like a blow. He may hang himself or become Prime Minister; it matters nothing. The man is dead.

Now, of course the ordinary objection to allegory,and it is a very sound objection, can be sufficiently well stated by saying that the pictorial figures are mere arbitrary symbols of the words. An allegorist of the pompous school might paint some group of Peace and Commerce doing something to Britannia. There might be a figure of Commerce in a Greek robe with a cornucopia or bag of gold or an argosy or any other conventional symbol. But it is surely quite evident that such a figure is a mere sign like the word commerce: the word might just as well be “dandelion,” and the Greek lady with the cornucopia might just as well be a Hebrew prophet standing on his head. It is scarcely even a language: it is a cipher-code. Nobody can maintain that the figure, taken as a figure, makes one think of commerce, of the forces that effect commerce, of a thousand ports, of a thousand streets, of a thousand warehouses and bills of lading, of a thousand excited men in black coats who certainly would not know what to do with a cornucopia. If we find ourselves gazing at some monument of the fragile and eternal faith of man, at some ruined chapel, at some nameless altar, at some scrap of old Jacobin eloquence, we might actually find our own minds moving in certain curves that centre in the curved back of Watts’Hope: we might almost think for ourselves of a bowed figure in the twilight, holding to her breast something damaged but undestroyed. But can anyone say that by merely looking at the Stock Exchange on a busy day we should think of a Greek lady with an argosy? Can anyone say that Threadneedle Street, in itself, would inspire our minds to move in the curves which centre in a cornucopia? Can anyone say that a very stolid figure in a very outlandish drapery is anything but a purely arbitrary sign, likexory, for such a thing as modern commerce, for the savagery of the rich, for the hunger of thesatisfied, for the vast tachycardia or galloping of the heart that has fallen on all the great new centres of civilization, for the sudden madness of all the mills of the world?

Watts’Hopedoes tell us something more about the nature of hope than we can be told by merely noticing that hope is shown in individual cases: that a man rehearses successful love speeches when he is in love, and takes a return ticket when he goes out to fight a duel. But the figure of Commerce with the cornucopia gives us less insight into what is behind commerce than we might get from reading a circular or staring out into the street. In the case of Commerce the figure is merely a symbol of commerce, which is a symbol. In the case of Hope the matter is quite the other way; the figure brings us nearer to something which is not a symbol, but the reality behind symbols. In the one case we go further down towards the river’s delta; in the other, further up towards its fountain; that at least may be called a difference. And now, suppose that our imaginary sight-seer who had seen so much of the pompous allegory of Commerce in her Grecian draperies were to see, for the second time, a second picture. Suppose he saw before him a throned figure clad in splendid, heavy scarlet and gold, above the lustre and dignity of which rose, in abrupt contrast, a face like the face of a blind beast. Suppose that as this imperial thing, with closed eyes and fat, sightless face, sat upon his magnificent seat, he let his heavy hand and feet fall, as if by a mere pulverizing accident, on the naked and god-like figures of the young, on men and women. Suppose that in the background there rose straight into the air a raw and turgid smoke, as if from some invisible and horrible sacrifice, and that by one final, fantastic, and triumphal touch this all-destroying godand king were adorned with the ears of an ass, declaring that he was royal, imperial, irresistible, and, when all is said, imbecile. Suppose that a man sick of argosies and cornucopias came before that picture, would he not say, perhaps even before he looked in the catalogue and found that the painter had called itMammon, would he not say, “This is something which in spirit and in essence I have seen before, something which in spirit and in essence I have seen everywhere. That bloated, unconscious face, so heavy, so violent, so wicked, so innocent, have I not seen it at street corners, in billiard-rooms, in saloon bars, laying down the law about Chartered shares or gaping at jokes about women? Those huge and smashing limbs, so weighty, so silly, so powerless, and yet so powerful, have I not seen them in the pompous movements, the morbid health of the prosperous in the great cities? The hard, straight pillars of that throne, have I not seen them in the hard, straight, hideous tiers of modern warehouses and factories? That tawny and sulky smoke, have I not seen it going up to heaven from all the cities of the coming world? This is no trifling with argosies and Greek drapery. This is commerce. This is the home of the god himself. This is why men hate him, and why men fear him, and why men endure him.”

Now, of course, it is at once obvious that this view would be very unjust to commerce; but that modification, as a matter of fact, very strongly supports the general theory at the moment under consideration. Commerce is really an arbitrary phrase, a thing including a million motives, from the motive which makes a man drink to the motive which makes him reform; from the motive that makes a starving man eat a horse to the motive which makes an idle man chase a butterfly. But whatever other spirits there are in commerce, there is, beyond all reasonable

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