ip, and in
all those vague faces of the imaginative paintings, into which, to use
Pater's phrase, "the soul with all its maladies has passed." In his
pictures he draws on the effects of earlier art, and throws his sitters
back until they seem to belong to some nondescript mediaeval country,
like the Bohemia of the dramatists; and he darkens and shuts out the
light of day that this starlight of soul may be more clearly seen, and
destroys, as far as he can, all traces of the century they live in, for
the mind lives in all the ages, and he would show it as the pilgrim of
eternity. Because Watts' art was necessarily so brooding and meditative,
looking at life with half-closed eyes and then shutting them to be alone
with memory and the interpreter, his painting, so beautiful and full
of surety in early pictures like the Wounded Heron, grows to be often
labored and muddy, and his drawing uncertain. That he could draw and
paint with the greatest, he every now and then gave proof; but the
surety of beautiful craftsmanship deserts those who have not always
their eye fixed on an object of vision; and Watts was not, like Blake
or Shelley, one of the proud seers whose visions are of "forms more real
than living man." He seemed to feel what his effects should be rather
than to see them, or else his vision was fleeting and his art was a
laborious brooding to recapture the lost impression. In his color he
always seems to me to be second-hand, as if the bloom and freshness of
his paint had worn off through previous use by other artists. It
seemed to be a necessity of his curiously intellectual art that only
traditional colors and forms should be employed, and it is only rarely
we get the shock of a new creation, and absolutely original design, as
in Orpheus, where the passionate figure turns to hold what is already a
vanishing shadow.

Watts' art was an effort to invest his own age, an age of reason, with
the nobilities engendered in an age of faith. At the time Watts was
at his prime his contemporaries were everywhere losing belief in
the spiritual conceptions of earlier periods; they were analyzing
everything, and were deciding that what was really true in religion,
what gave it nobility, was its ethical teaching; retain that, and
religion might go, illustrating the truth of the Chinese philosopher
who said: "When the spirit is lost, men follow after charity and duty
to one's neighbors." The unity of belief was broken up into diverse