Artists -- England -- Biography; Watts, George Frederick, 1817-1904
Therefore I make no apology if I have asked the reader, in the course of
these remarks, to think about things in general. It is not I, but George
Frederick Watts, who asks the reader to think about things in general.
If he has not done this, he has failed. If he has not started in us such
trains of reflection as I am now concluding and many more and many
better, he has failed. And this brings me to my last word. Now and again
Watts has failed. I am afraid that it may possibly be inferred from the
magniloquent language which I have frequently, and with a full
consciousness of my act, applied to this great man, that I think the
whole of his work technically triumphant. Clearly it is not. For I
believe that often he has scarcely known what he was doing; I believe
that he has been in the dark when the lines came wrong; that he has been
still deeper in the dark and things came right. As I have already
pointed out, the vague lines which his mere physical instinct would
make him draw, have in them the curves of the Cosmos. His automatic
manual action was, I think, certainly a revelation to others, certainly
a revelation to himself. Standing before a dark canvas upon some quiet
evening, he has made lines and something has happened. In such an hour
the strange and splendid phrase of the Psalm he has literally fulfilled.
He has gone on because of the word of meekness and truth and of
righteousness. And his right hand has taught him terrible things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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