Very often when we think about hope, we
link it consciously or not to faith and love - thinking of Paul's letter first
letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13: Faith, hope and love abide, these
three, but the greatest of these is love. We might think of bracelets bearing a
cross, anchor and heart. So perhaps we find Watts' painting haunting because he
considers hope alone.
G. F. Watts: Hope (1886)
This painting is perhaps one of his most
popular and certainly the most famous. I spent some time at Watts Gallery on
Saturday gazing at this blindfolded young woman whose eyes couldn't meet mine.
She is wearing a pale blue robe; sitting precariously on what seemed to me at
first a rock, but perhaps it's a globe.
She is stooping awkwardly, even uncomfortably; bent almost double,
folded in on herself. She cannot see,
but she can touch and hear. She seems to
be paying absolute attention to the lyre she's holding. She is clinging on to it, straining to hear
the faint sound it makes (the note she can make) on the last remaining string.
A very melancholy, tuneless reverberation made by finger plucking a sting in
the air.
Is Watts bravely, controversially,
conceiving of hope without either faith or love? Is it perhaps a visual
representation of Arnold's 'Dover Beach' ? His words reverberate: The
Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore / Lay like
the folds of a bright girdle furled. / But now I only hear / Its melancholy,
long withdrawing roar, / Retreating, to the breath / Of the night-wind, down
the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world. I
would say not: there is a residual light and peace in Watts’ image. There may not be certitude – but amidst what
Arnold calls the darkling plain there
is a longing for help in pain, a light which breaks in.
Although the figure of the woman occupies
much of the canvas, there is an expanse of space which seems to exaggerate her
alone-ness. She is a solitary figure - abandoned, exiled, escaping or seeking
safety. Even so, that its perhaps not
wholly hopeless. As we have seen, in the
scriptural tradition hope is not absent in adversity. Even when the exiled
people of Israel hung up their harps, God's love remained faithful. They were
called to sing, as Bishop Andrew put it at his induction, a beautiful song.
Is there a sense of hope within this
young woman? Perhaps it isn't a hope that is rooted in her own emotional
resilience or inner strength; perhaps there is a hope beyond the constraints of
her circumstances. There is a single
star in the sky; a single still point.
She cannot see it. As Paul writes to the Romans: In
hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what
is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see we wait for it with patience (8:
24-25).
Hope is somehow staking a claim in a
reality beyond our senses; places our trust in God's love even when we wait for
the fulfillment of God's purposes. He goes on to describe the way in which the
Spirit helps us in our weakness for we do not know how to pray as
we ought, but that the very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words (8:26-27).
God
searches the heart; knows the Spirit. God is faithful. We know, says Paul, that all things work
together for good.
Watts’ painting wasn't unanimously well
received. K . Chesterton found it to be so bleak that it might just as well
been called ‘Despair’. Some found the
allegory obscure and the paint clumsy (N. Tromans, Hope: The Life and Times of a
Victorian Icon,
p. 20). Others like the poet Emily Pfeffer offer a Christian response: she speaks
of scattered tones which may surprise / Thee with a vision to
inform the sense; / And gift thee out of wreck and wrong withal / To see the
city of God to music rise. Its melancholic, dreamlike or tragic
qualities leave it open to interpretation.
The physical absence of a depiction of
love and faith, as feminine forms bringing harmony and balance is more honest.
Paul cries out in the midst of hardship and distress, persecution and
nakedness: who can separate us from the love of Christ? Nothing is his answer. Perhaps this image is
in effect an interpretation of that Pauline assurance: it evokes the depth of
human despair and abandonment, and yet conveys our capacity to endure, to
retain a vision of a better world. We do this because God remains faithful;
because his love in Christ reaches out to us in our fear and desolation;
because his Spirit cries out within us.
I was reminded this week of the global
impact of this painting: one young Barack Obama heard Jeremiah Wright preach a
sermon in 1990 called 'Audacity to Hope', inspired by a lecture on Watts'
painting. He said with her clothes in rags... her harp all
but destroyed... she had the audacity to make music and praise God... To take
the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope. Obama adopts this theme for his book
'Audacity of Hope'. In his speech at the Democratic National Convention in
2004, he speaks of faith in simple dreams and small miracles; the legacy of forebears and the promise of future generations.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-arnon/how-the-obama-hope-poster_b_133874.html
There are hints that this isn't just the
resuscitation of an American Dream for he says: I'm not talking about blind
optimism here, the almost willful ignorance that thinks [the]... heath care
crisis will solve itself if we just ignore... I'm talking about something more
substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom
songs...Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the
audacity of hope: in the end, that is God's greatest gift to us... a belief in
things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead [Washington
Post online].
Barack Obama found a renewed political
vision in this audacious hope: but we know the outworking of this in domestic
policy and on the national stage is fraught, complex and disappointing. Expectations were set so high; the rhetoric
so compelling: do we jettison hope or recast it? How do we hope for the right
things – living with the contingencies of our life – personal, national and
international?
© 2015 Julie Gittoes
