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