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difficulty in discovering the real Watts arises because he did not look
at nature or life directly. He was overcome by great traditions. He
almost persistently looks at nature through one or two veils. There is
a Phidian veil and a Venetian or rather an Italian veil, and almost
everything in life and nature which could not be expressed in terms of
these traditions he ignored. I might say that no artist of equal genius
ever painted pictures and brought so little fresh observation into his
art except, perhaps, Burne-Jones. Both these artists seem to have a
secret and refined sympathy with Fuseli's famous outburst, "Damn Nature,
she always puts me out!" Even when the sitter came, Watts seems to have
been uneasy unless he could turn him into a Venetian nobleman or person
of the Middle Ages, or could disguise in some way the fact that Artist
and Sitter belonged to the nineteenth century. He does not seem to be
aware that people must breathe even in pictures. His skies rest solidly
on the shoulders of his figures as if they were cut out to let the
figures be inserted. If he were not a man of genius there would have
been an end of him. But he was a man of genius, and we must try to
understand the meaning of his acceptance of tradition. If we understand
it in Watts we will understand a great deal of contemporary art and
literature which is called derivative, art issuing out of art, and
literature out of literature.

The fact is that this kind of art in which Watts and Burne-Jones were
pioneers is an art which has not yet come to its culmination or to any
perfect expression of itself. There is a genuinely individual impulse in
it, and it is not derivative merely, although almost every phase of
it can be related to earlier art. It has nothing in common with the
so-called grand school of painting which produced worthless imitations
of Michael Angelo and Raphael. It is feeling out for a new world, and it
is trying to use the older tradition as a bridge. The older art held up
a mirror to natural forms and brought them nearer to man. In the perfect
culmination of this new art one feels how a complete change might take
place and natural forms be used to express an internal nature or the
soul of the artist. Colors and forms, like words after the lapse of
centuries, enlarge their significance. The earliest art was probably
simple and literal--there may have been the outline of a figure filled
up with some flat color. Then as art becam