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 next difficulty in discovering the real