have often wished that some great painter had written his autobiography, beginning with his earliest childhood. Saints and sinners have left us their memoirs in more than sufficient detail; and we have also the autobiographies of many famous writers.

As yet we have not had the confessions of the Painter; for I am sure they would be called confessions, since it would have been with a sense of shame that these men, including the magnificent Michael Angelo himself, would have confessed their failures at school to learn as other boys learned, and receive, as other boys did, instruction from their teachers.

We are all familiar with instances of boys who, exceptionally quick and clever to ordinary observation, are almost unteachable at school. It would be thought cruel, as well as impossible, to attempt teaching grammar and arithmetic to a young musical genius in a concert-room where musicians were playing; yet this is precisely what is done every time we try to teach grammar and such things to a boy with the eyes of a painter. Time and experience have at last taught us to be respectful and tender with the musical mind; we accept, and we understand it; and the boy with the wonderful ear is caught up and carried away and instructed and fondled, and the world is made smooth for him. But how about the boy with the wonderful eye? And yet the musical boy is only tempted when music is actually being played, whereas this other is never free from solicitation, since to him there is always, except in the dark, colour and form and light and shade. He will know the shape and surface of every object in his schoolroom, and how light falls on desk and table; he will know among his school-fellows all the profiles and all the front faces, what colour the eyes are, and how they are shaped; every detail of form and colour will be familiar to him, since to watch these things and to draw from them a continuous, intellectual intoxication is the very purpose for which he has been created; for with him the eyes are the gates of wisdom; and with young children these eyes are so thronged by wisdom trying to get in that all their time is taken up in opening the gates to its inrush.

In this progress of the painter—in this preparation for what, if the conditions are favourable, ought to be the solemn business of painting or sculpture—there will be various stages. At first it will be all observation; after that will come a time in which the boy will make inferences; to him the face will be the index of the mind; and, looking round on master and boy, he will be a physiognomist who has never heard of Lavater, or a craniologist or phrenologist, until some happy moment when, having exhausted his interest in scientific inquiry, there will burst upon him the glorious world of intellectual desire.

A friend of mine—an old painter, who went to school in the North of Scotland—described to me his experience. The dominie had one morning been particularly drastic in his methods, and this led to great concentration of thought among the pupils, while at the same time it did not in the least alter the usual current of their ideas. My friend, for instance, busied himself as usual, observing form and colour, only with a keener zest and, as I have said, a more concentrated purpose. It was a spring morning, and, for the first time that year, a ray of sunshine came into the room, making a square of yellow light on the dusty floor at his feet. It was only at that particular period of the year such a thing was possible: later on there would be too many leaves on the trees, and in winter the sun was not in that quarter of the heavens. My friend was an unhappy and anxious schoolboy, but the events of that morning and the menaces of the dominie, combined with the sudden sunlight at his feet, made a new boy of him, and he looked at the square of brightness which stirred his heart. He received, as it were, his mystical message; and some time afterwards, leaving school, he became a landscape-painter.

With a man like Mr. Watts the world of desire would have burst differently. He was the greatest figure-painter England has ever produced. With the exception of Blake, who hardly counts, I may say he was the one painter who worked in the grand manner and on great subjects. Years ago, by a happy accident, I met him in my studio. I remember his handsome face and a certain air, as it seemed to me, of imperious detachment; in his voice also there was a touch of austerity. He looked at my pictures without a word, till I asked him for his opinion. It then came clear, frank, and to the point. I did not tell him what, nevertheless, was the fact—that, though I had never seen him before, I had been his diligent pupil for years, and that from him first I learned the true meaning of painting, and why I, or indeed anyone else, had been induced to take up the craft.

All his days Watts was a hermit and a recluse; had he loved life and enjoyed it, he would have lived in it and painted it, as Hogarth lived and painted; yet he loved his fellow-man, and sought unweariedly whatever made for his happiness: indeed it might be said that he painted because he loved his fellow-man. With such a man the world of desire must have burst in some scene that excited his indignation or his pity, or his moral admiration and love, and from that moment he would become a dreamer who incessantly re-builds life, according to the dictates of a kindled imagination; for since the eye finds what it looks for, the world of desire becomes in the self-same moment the world of creation; the desiring eye is the creating eye: the world itself is neither beautiful nor ugly; it is a formless vast out of which we create, according to our desires, new worlds; the madman and the poet look out on the same scene, but where the one finds ugliness the other finds beauty; and the world Watts looked out on was the world of men when they suffer or when they strive together in serious purpose.

In speaking about Watts, I would begin with his portraits. As regards these, there is no controversy; some people harden their hearts against his pictures, but no one denies his portraits. Now it seems to me that the genius of portrait-painting is largely a genius for friendship; at any rate, I am quite sure that the best portraits will be painted where the relation of the sitter and the painter is one of friendship; and it considerably helps my argument to know that in Watts’ case he mostly painted people whom he had himself invited to sit.

The technique of portrait-painting is mainly a technique of interpretation; to get the colour, to model the face adequately, this to the practised hand is comparatively easy; to so paint that people should, perforce, see the particular curve, the particular shadow, and the particular shape of brow or eye that interest the painter; here is the true difficulty, here the true enjoyment and exquisite triumph of the painter.

In his early portraits there is little attempt at this interpretation. There is, indeed, the charm of atmosphere never absent from Watts’ work at any time, and there is a very obvious decorative purpose; but these early portraits do not grip the attention as the later portraits do, because the technique of interpretation is lacking.

I have heard people say they liked his male portraits better than his portraits of women, but I cannot share this preference; each in its degree is perfect. Watts will paint a young lady in fashionable evening attire—surely the most modern and up-to-date arrangement possible—and he will so paint her, so gild her with the heavenly alchemy of his art, that she shall appear like a Venetian beauty gazing at us from the page of history.

Indeed, over all his portraits, whether of men or women, he spreads a sort of dim religious light; so that while painted with Dutch realism, they yet seem to come to us out of the mists of memory and romance.

Before speaking of his pictures of imagination, I will discuss a little the whole purpose of art and artists.

The moralist says: I teach morality, without which society would not hold together.

The trader says: I teach trade, without which there would be no wealth, and life would not be worth living.

The religious teacher: I teach religion, without which people would forget that there was another world or a judgment to come.

And the scientist says: I teach truth, which is the basis of everything.

What can the artist say for himself in presence of this congress of teachers, before whom we stand silent with hats off in age-long reverence?

First, what is his record?

He works only to please himself, and regards it as the most egregious folly—indeed, a kind of wickedness—to try and please anybody else; he admires wrong as often as right; at one time he occupies himself with the things of the spirit, and again he turns just as eagerly to the things of sense; without conscience and without scruple he flatters in turn every passion and every instinct, good or bad; he will make the unhappy more unhappy, and the wicked he will make worse; he inculcates no lessons, and preaches no dogma; yet often the noble will become nobler for his companionship.

He is to be found in every community; among the sinners he is a sort of father confessor, whose absolution is light, so that you may confess all your sins to him, and you may still go on sinning; he will laugh at the faces of the good, finding them guilty of self-complacency, of formalism, of insincerity, of prudence, of cowardice, of half-heartedness; indeed he is often much more respectful to sinners than he is to good people of the earth; and withal is it not from the hands of the painter and the poet that, as in some royal caprice, the hero receives his crown?

This strange creature with the dubious record; what use is he in the scheme of things? He seems to stand outside the whole circle of the utilities.

Why there is morality, why there is commerce, and why there is science, and why there is religion; these questions are easy to answer. But why there are painters, and sculptors, and poets, and musicians, is another mystery; it is as if you asked me why there are billions of suns rolling through illimitable space.

Among these august teachers the mere artist stands like another Lucifer among the angels. And yet all these teachers, high and mighty though they be, pay to the artist continual court, and would fain make him one of themselves: would indeed rescue him as a very wanton from his bad surroundings, and persuade him to live with them always; and this partly because human nature is strong within them, and they love the craft we practise, and partly because they recognize that where men are gathered together the artist—that is, the poet, the painter, the musician, and the sculptor—wields, for good or evil, the mightiest power on earth. Where is the theologian that the poet does not help? Where is the moralist? At the present moment, here in this exhibition, it seems to me that, in their astute way, the theologian, the moralist, and even the metaphysician, all think that they have patched up an admirable working arrangement with one of the greatest of our artists.

The titles “Love and Death,” “Time, Death, and Judgment,” “The Temptation of Eve,” “The Penitence of Eve,” “The Contrition of Cain,” etc., do perhaps explain the facts that in Scotland Presbyterian ministers crowded the Watts’ Gallery; and also that here in Dublin, for the first time in the history of our animated city, a splendid collection of pictures has been shown, and the voice of detraction and malignant criticism remains silent.

Well! do these pictures teach anything? Has Mr. Watts been captured? Is he a theologian or a moralist, or a metaphysician? Or is he merely a highly-gifted man, working out his salvation by way of art?

Take his two pictures of Eve. In all this collection there are none more poetical.

In the first of these, “The Temptation,” what have we? A woman in the fulness of her magnificent animalism, and we have this animalism in the moment of its highest provocation. She seems to curl herself and to quiver with delight as she listens to the whispers of the subtle serpent; how voluptuously she leans over to the tempter, her body elastic with health and vitality. It is womanhood; it is splendid animalism, as yet untouched by conscience or doubt, and unchilled by the thoughts of death; all about her summer flowers and rich perfumes. At her feet a leopard rolls, itself a faint echo or reverberation of her vast personality.

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.

England likes her artists to preserve a soft, indefinite touch, because in her world of action and practical effort ideas must not be pushed too far, and compromise rules. Art, on the contrary, does not like half thoughts—she will have a positive yea or nay. If thought is not pursued to its furthest bourne and limit, the picture lacks energy, and is without effect. In Art, as in everything else, energy is the true solvent.

In my mind, pictures of this kind are meant to hang in the rooms of the idle rich—because intended for people who wish, without effort, to indulge themselves—and see all things past, present, and to come, rosily and smilingly, however falsely. There are artists, poets, and painters—and in this case Watts is among them—who seem to keep in stock a sort of pharmacopoeia of drugs and opiates and soothing mixtures to be served out as required. Michael Angelo owed his terribleness, his black melancholy, to the fact that in his pride he would not accept any soothing mixtures; he faced all the facts of life.

Now, let me say a word in reply to those who are so ready to point out defects in Watts’ technique. To find fault is easy—is at all times easy. In this vivacious city it is a special accomplishment, where, indeed, everyone has learned logic, but no one has learned enthusiasm, and few care for the ideal or for poetry.

In answer to these people I would enter a plea of confession and avoidance.

Granted all they say about these faults, I would ask, in all the roll of English painters, is there one who would have given us that magnificent Eve of the Temptation? How royally she leans forward as she stoops to her fate: what swing and what pose in her movement. In the strain, in the ecstacy of her sinning, every nerve and every muscle seems to tremble. Not Millais, nor Leighton, nor Alma Tadema—far more accomplished artists than Watts—could have done it; nor Reynolds, nor Gainsborough, nor Vandyke. None of these men had the technique to do what Watts has here done. Watts triumphs by his technique.

But it has not been always so in Watts’ work. When not roused to great exertion by his theme, he fell away into carelessness and into haste. You see, this man who lived so long a life had such a teeming mind that his hands could not work fast enough.

And here let me allude for a moment to Watts the man. All accounts that have reached us represent him as singularly humble and modest. It was so with Michael Angelo, and it is so with all men who work among great ideas. When The Last Judgment was finished, and all Italy burst into praise, and princes, cardinals, and poets, vied with each other in presenting homage, Michael Angelo waved them off with scorn. “If,” he said, “I carried Paradise in my bosom, these words would be too much”; and he wrote in reply to one of them: “I am merely a poor man, working in the Art God has given me, and trying to lengthen out my life.” When an artist or poet gives himself airs, puts on side, as we say, it is because, like Lord Byron, he is working away from great ideas, and because in all simplicity and good faith he finds nothing which asks his reverence, nothing greater than his own fortunes and his own sensations. Art for Art’s sake is for those who hate life, as many poets do, or who hate ideas, as again many poets do. The great artist is also a man like unto ourselves, and great personality is the material out of which is woven all his Art.

Now, let me offer most respectfully a startling opinion. I think that as a religious painter Watts failed; and that he failed because he was bound to fail.

The spiritual world is as much with us as it was with the people of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but we seek to explore its recesses, by tabulated observation, by sequences of thought, by scientific guesses, and carefully planned experiments: things not to be expressed in pictorial or plastic forms, even though Michael Angelo has said everything might be expressed as sculpture.

Is it that Nature never repeats herself? She has produced her religious painter; his day is over; and Watts was trying to do what was impossible.

In those far-off days people believed—and actually, with the most vivid realisation, believed—at one and the same time in angels, archangels, and saints, and gods, and goddesses, and prophets, and sybils, and fiends of the under-world, and all the machinery of the supernatural, including angels, such as that which Watts has painted in the picture “Love and Life”; and the painter who painted those images worked under the exacting criticism of an alert and expectant people. Now, in place of these beautiful or terrible personages, we have substituted the forces of nature.

Examine his picture called “Love and Life.” It is a vast subject. The whole mind of the civilized world is groping a way among its problems. But this picture is wholly inadequate. Life is represented as a feeble mendicant sort of creature, blindly stumbling up rocky stairs. This is a poor image of life. Milton would have scorned it. Watts should have remembered his own “Eve.” And “Love” is represented as a strong angel. It is precisely because Love is not a strong angel that all the trouble is upon us. If his picture of “Hope” should be placed in a lady’s boudoir, this picture should hang in the cabinets of those who think life is to be saved merely by the clasping of hands and turning eyes heavenward.

In “Eve’s Repentance” there is a cold light bursting through the blue clouds, and shining over the back and shoulders. We have here the old Venetian harmony of blue and yellow and white; and because of it, in some subtle way, we have an enhanced sense of the warmth of the palpitating, naked flesh. But, bless you! this is not all. By this light breaking through the clouds, Watts symbolizes that there is redemption for sinners. And who is interested? Compare this symbolism with that in Michael Angelo’s picture, where the just-created and half-awakened Adam raises his arm in superb languor to receive Divine knowledge by the touching of God’s forefinger. I do not here include the picture “Love and Death,” because it does not seem to me in any sense a religious picture. It suggests no dogma nor mystical theory, nor is there any kind of sentiment. The artist, by his labour, has placed before us in monumental effectiveness certain facts now and always with us. It is a great picture, but it is not a religious picture.

Watts is a portrait-painter beyond all praise; he is singular among all painters for the interest he imparts to his subject. Before most portraits people stand and say, “What dull things portraits are! why are they ever exhibited?” or perhaps they say, “What a clever painter! but what an ugly man to paint!” In presence of a Watts we are interested in a face; we feel liking or aversion, or a tantalizing curiosity.

In Watts’ portraits craftsmanship attains its perfection, because here he worked in an atmosphere of exacting criticism; everyone understands a portrait, and the stupidest is interested when it is his own portrait.

When Watts painted his imaginative work, it was done in an atmosphere of polite indifference. It is a strange paradox that Watts lived surrounded by the most distinguished and intellectual society of his time, and yet he worked in solitude. When he went wrong, there was no one to tell him; and when he was right, equally there was no response. They were interested in the artist, but not in his art. This lofty-minded recluse, who laboured by his painting to give the world great thoughts, impressed these cultivated worldlings: they were interested in the man, but neither in his thoughts nor in his pictures. At a private view in the Grosvenor Gallery a friend of mine overheard Watts saying to a lady: “Everyone is interested in my velvet coat, but no one asks me about my pictures.”

It was not so in ancient Italy. When Michael Angelo, at the imperious command of the impetuous Pope Julius, uncovered half his work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he stood to receive the judgment of a people who were superstitious, ignorant men of violence, men of war, homicidal, but each one of them impassioned for Art.

“Italy,” said the Spanish painter to Michael Angelo, “produces the best Art, because Italians hate mediocrity.” We are clay in the hands of the potter. We may affect to be proud and solitary as Lucifer, but in vain; the artist gives that he may receive; to seek sympathy and desire companionship is as instinctive as hunger and thirst. To the true artist exacting criticism is comforting as mother’s love; and, wanting this exacting criticism, Watts fell away into slackness of work and of thought.

We can only say that had he lived in Dublin his fate would have been worse. Indifference, however polite and respectful, is bad: but destructive criticism kills.

There was once a small but mighty nation, now numerous as the sands of the seashore, and no longer so interesting. To this nation was born a poet, and they made him the poet of all time. They took him and taught him all they knew—and they had great things to teach; and when, at their command, he made great dramas, they stood at his elbow; and everything they gave him he gave back to them tenfold.

England was then Shakespeare’s land.

The poet is always amongst us: the difficulty is how to find him; he is like the proverbial needle in a bundle of hay.

But one thing is certain—logicians without love will not find him; they leave a desolation, and call it peace—nay, they call it culture. Critics of this sort will allow nothing to exist except themselves. No; I am wrong. There is one thing they admire more even than themselves—the fait accompli, a mundane success. Had Watts been born in Dublin, he would have read for the “Indian Civil,” and perhaps—passed.

J. B. Yeats, r.h.a.

1907.

[1] A report of a lecture delivered in the spring of 1907 at the Hibernian Academy, Dublin.