But if he were not quite a great painter he was certainly a great President. The Academy never had a chief who better looked, spoke, and played the part. By the Nineties his excessive labours as President had told on his never robust health, and for some years he had had warnings of angina pectoris. But nothing would induce him to restrain his activities within the limit which advancing years had inexorably fixed; the life of the valetudinarian was impossible for him. So the round of speeches, dinners, soirées, and receptions, was kept up almost to the last, though the haggard face satirised the light grace of his manner and the rather theatrical showiness of his dress. Leighton had long been a baronet; it was one of the distresses of his life that Watts refused a like honour. On January 1, 1896, he was created a Peer, and twenty-four days later the public learned, with something of a pang, that he was dead. His last spoken words were in German, and there was some appropriateness in the fact, for no little of German pedantry tinctured his classical enthusiasms. But in character and sentiment he was wholly English, and in nothing more English than in his regrets that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it. He achieved a social position never before occupied by a British painter; he won the worship of innumerable friends; he did an enormous amount of work at a generally high technical level. Yet, two years before his death, he told a friend, “I have never got what I most wanted in this world.” The “what” he did not indicate.
“His was a nature the most beautiful of any I have ever known,” was Leighton’s epitaph by his friend Watts. Leighton died long before he had become old-fashioned. It was Watts’s fate to linger in a world of which he could not possibly have approved. The recluse of Limnerslease—the very name smacks eloquently of the Victorian mood—seemed to those who caught a glimpse of him like some stern old Puritan brooding in retirement over the jiggings and Jezebelisms of the Restoration. The nineteenth-century seriousness which Leighton had, but could put on and off like a garment, was the very soul of Watts; he was probably the most serious painter who ever lived. That nineteenth-century “cheek” which made Leighton pit himself against all the old masters on their own ground was wildly exaggerated in Watts; he set himself to paint things which were to be not only the greatest of paintings, but the most powerful of sermons—sermons, too, addressed not to a sect or even a faith, but to the whole human race, now and yet to be. Mr. Chesterton, I think, has remarked in his interesting monograph on Watts that he avoided of set purpose all conventional imagery, from the cross downwards, so that his allegories should have universal appeal, and should be intelligible to the cultured Bantu or Papuan of five thousand years hence who happens to disinter them from the ruins of the Tate Gallery. The painter who takes his work like that may be, as Watts was, humble as a human individual, but as an artist we can only feel his colossal arrogance.