convinced themselves were the essence of religion and the real
cause of its power over man. Whether Watts lost faith like his
contemporaries I do not know, but their spirit infected his art.
He set himself to paint these abstractions; and because we cannot
imagine these abstractions with a form, we feel something
fundamentally false in this side of his art. He who paints a man,
an angelic being, or a divine being, paints something we feel may
have life. But it is impossible to imagine Time with a body as it
is to imagine a painting embodying Newton's law of gravitation. It
is because such abstractions do not readily take shape that Watts
drew so much on the imaginative tradition of his predecessors.
Where these pictures are impressive is where the artist slipped by
his conscious aim, and laid hold of the nobility peculiar to the
men and women he used as symbols. It is not Time or Death which
awes us in Watts' picture, but majestical images of humanity; and
Watts is at his greatest as an inventor when humanity itself most
occupies him when he depicts human life only, and lets it suggest
its own natural infinity, as in those images of the lovers drifting
through the Inferno, with whom every passion is burnt out and
exhausted but the love through which they fell.

Life itself is more infinite, noble, and suggestive than thought.
We soon come to the end of the ingenious allegory. It tells only
one story but where there is a perfect image of life there is
infinitude and mystery. We do not tire considering the long
ancestry of expression in a face. It may lead us back through
the ages; but we do tire of the art which imprisons itself within
formulae, and says to the spectator: "In this way and in no other
shall you regard what is before you." No man is profound enough
to explain the nature of his own inspiration. Socrates says that