tts--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
spirit is with Millet. He has an intellectual conception of his moral
idea, but is not emotionally obsessed by it, and the basis of a man's
art is not to be found in his intellectual conceptions, which are light
things, but in his character or rather in his temperament. We know, for
all the poetical circumstances of Rossetti's pictures, what desire it is
that shines out of those ardent faces, and how with Leighton "the form
alone is eloquent," and that Tumer's God was light as surely as with any
Persian worshipper of the sun. Here and there they may have been tempted
otherwise, but they never strayed far from their temperamental way of
expressing themselves in art. So that the first thing to be dismissed
in trying to understand Watts is Watts' own view of his art and its
inspiration. He is not the first distinguished man whose intellect has
not proved equal to explaining rightly its sources of power. Our nex