intellectual conceptions. Men talked about love and liberty, patriotism,
duty, charity, and a whole host of abstractions moral and intellectual,
which they had 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 the poet utters many things which are truer than he himself
understands. The same thing applies to many a great artist, who, when he
paints tree or field, or face, or form, finds that there comes on him a
mysterious quickening of his nature, and he paints he knows not what.
It is like and unlike what his eyes have seen. It may be the same field,
but we feel there the presence of the spirit. It may be the same figure,
but it is made transcen