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 intellectual conceptions. Men talked
about love and liberty, patriotism, duty, charity, and a whole
host of abstractions moral and intellectual, which they had