before it grew." A man may sit in an armchair and travel farther than
ever Columbus traveled; and no one can say how far Turner, in his search
after light, had not journeyed into the lost Eden, and he himself may
have been there most surely at the last when his pictures had become a
blaze of incoherent light.
You may say now that I have objected to literature dominating the arts,
and yet I have drawn from pictures a most complicated theory. I have
felt a little, indeed, as if I was marching through subtleties to
the dismemberment of my mind, but I do not think I have anywhere
contradicted myself or suggested that an artist should work on these
speculations. These may rightly arise in the mind of the onlooker who
will regard a work of art with his whole nature, not merely with the
aesthetic sense, and who will naturally pass from the first delight
of vision into a psychological analysis. A profound nature will always
awaken profound reflections. There are heads by Da Vinci as interesting
in their humanity as Hamlet. When we see eyes that tempt and allure with
lips virginal in their purity, we feel in the face a union of things
which the dual nature of man is eternally desiring. It is the marriage
of heaven and hell, the union of spirit and flesh, each with their
uncurbed desires; and what is impossible in life is in his art, and is
one of the secrets of its strange fascination. It may seem paradoxical
to say of Watts--a man of genius, who was always preaching through his
art--that it is very difficult to find what he really expresses. No
one is ever for a moment in doubt about what is expressed by Rossetti,
Turner, Millet, Corot, or many contemporary artists who never preached
at all, but whose mood or vision peculiar to themselves is easily
definable. With Watts the effort at analyses is confused: first by his
own statement about the ethical significance of his works, which I think
misleading, because while we may come away from his pictures with many
feelings of majesty or beauty or mystery, the ethical spirit is not
the predominant one. That rapturous winged spirit which he calls Love
Triumphant might just as easily be called Music or Song, and another
allegory be attached to it without our feeling any more special fitness
or unfitness in the explanation. I see a beautiful exultant figure, but
I do not feel love as the fundamental mood in the painter, as I feel the
religious mood is fundamental in the Angelus of Millet. I do not need to
look for a title to that or for the painting of The Shepherdess to feel
how earth and her children have become one in the vision of the painter;
that the shepherdess is not the subject, nor the sheep, nor the still
evening, but altogether are one mood, one being, in which all things
move in harmony and are guided by the Great Shepherd. Well, I do not
feel that Love; or Charity, or Hope are expressed in this way in Watts,
and that the ethical spirit is not fundamental with him as the religious
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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