Chapter XXXII: The New Idealism in England (2)

Rossetti's women are dazzling and glorious figures of a modern and deliberately cruel beauty--sisters of Messalina, Phædra, and Faustina. He delineates them as luxuriant beings with supple and splendid bodies, long white necks, and snowily gleaming breasts; with full and fragrant hair, ardent, yearning eyes, and demoniacally passionate lips. Their mother is the Venus Verticordia whom Rossetti so often painted. Cruel in their love as one of the blind forces of nature, they are like that water-sprite with her song and her red coral mouth dragged from the sea in a fishing-net, as an old French _fabliau_ tells, and so fair that every man who beheld her was seized by the love of her, but died when he clasped her in his arms. What they love in man is his physical strength, his face and sinews of bronze. Only the strong man who loves them with overpowering madness, like a stormy wind, can bend them to his will. Swinburne has sung of "the lips intertwisted and bitten, where the foam is as blood," of

"The heavy white limbs and the cruel
Red mouth like a venomous flower."

STRUDWICK. THE TEN VIRGINS.

(_By permission of William Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]

But the women of Burne-Jones know that this fervour is no longer to be found upon the earth. The blood has been sapped, and the fire burns low, and the glorious, ancient might of love has disappeared. For these women life has lost its sunshine, and love its passion, and the world its hopes. The hue of their cheeks is pallid, their eyes are dim, their bodies sickly and without flesh and blood, and their hips are spare. With pale, quivering lips, and a melancholy smile or a strangely resigned, intensely grieved look flickering at the corners of their mouths, they live consumed by sterile longing, and pine in silent dejection, gazing into vacant space like imprisoned goldfish, or luxuriate in the vague Fata Morgana of an over-delicate, over-refined, and bashfully tremulous eroticism--

"And the chaplets of old are above us,
And the oyster-bed teems out of reach;
Old poets outsing and outlove us,
And Catullus makes mouths at our speech.
Who shall kiss in the father's own city,
With such lips as he sang with again?
Intercede with us all of thy pity,
Our Lady of Pain."

CRANE. THE CHARIOTS OF THE FLEETING HOURS.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

Swinburne's first ardent and sensuous volume of lyrics contains a poem, _The Garden of Proserpine_: it tells how a man weary of all things human and divine, and no longer able to support the intoxicating fragrance of the roses of Aphrodite, draws near with wavering steps to the throne where calm Proserpine sits silent, crowned with cold white flowers. And in the same way Rossetti's flaming and quivering passion and his volcanic desire end in Burne-Jones with sad resignation.

Whilst Christianity and Hellenism mingle in the figures of Burne-Jones, a division of labour is noticeable amongst the following artists: some addressed themselves exclusively to the treatment of ancient subjects, others to ecclesiastical romantic painting in the style of the Quattrocento, and others again recognised their chief vocation in initiating a reformation in kindred provinces of industrial art.

_R. Spencer Stanhope_, who was at Oxford, like Burne-Jones, and, indeed, received his first artistic impulses while employed on the elaboration of Rossetti's mural pictures for the Union, worked even in later days chiefly in the field of decorative painting, and is, with Burne-Jones, the principal designer for the interior decoration of churches in England. His oil-paintings are few, and in their gracious Quattrocento build they are in outward appearance scarcely different from those of Burne-Jones. In a picture belonging to the Manchester Gallery there is a maiden seated amid a flowery meadow, while a small Cupid with red pinions draws near to her; the landscape has an air of peace and happiness. Another picture--probably inspired by Catullus' _Lament for Lesbia's Sparrow_--displays a girl sitting upon an old town wall with a little dead bird. "The Temptation of Eve" is like a brilliantly coloured mediæval miniature, painted with the greatest _finesse_. As in the woodcut in the Cologne Bible, Paradise is enclosed with a circular red wall. Eve is like a slim, twisted Gothic statue. Like Burne-Jones, Stanhope is always delicate and poetic, but he is less successful in setting upon old forms of art the stamp of his individuality, and thus giving them new life and a character of their own. In their severe, archæological character his pictures have little beyond the affectation of a style which has been arrived at through imitation.

The third member of this Oxford Circle, the poet _William Morris_, has exercised great influence over English taste by the institution of an industrial establishment for embroidery, painting upon glass, and household decoration. Keeping in mind that close union which existed in the fifteenth century between art and the manual crafts, he and certain of his disciples did not hesitate to provide designs for decorative stuffs, wall-papers, furniture, and household embellishments of every description. They were largely indebted to the Japanese, to say nothing of the old Italians, though they succeeded in creating a thoroughly modern and independent style, in spite of all they borrowed. The whole range of industrial art in England received a new lease of life, and household decoration became blither and more cheerful in its appearance. Only light, delicate, and finely graduated colours were allowed to predominate, and they were combined with slender, graceful, and vivacious form. The heavy panelling which was popular in the sixties gave way to bright papers ornamented with flowers; narrow panes made way for large plate-glass windows with light curtains, in which long-stemmed flowers were entwined in the pattern. Slim pillars supported cabinets painted in exquisite hues or gleaming with lacquer-work and enamel. Seats were ornamented with soft cushions shining in all the delicate splendour of Indian silks. And the pre-Raphaelite style of ornamentation was even extended to the embellishment of books, so that England created the modern book, at a time when other nations adhered altogether to the imitation of old models.

In his early years _Arthur Hughes_ attracted much attention by an Ophelia, a delicate, thoroughly English figure of soft pre-Raphaelite grace; but in later years he rarely got beyond sentimental Renaissance maidens suggestive of Julius Wolff, and humorous work in the style of _genre_.

_J. N. Strudwick_, who worked first under Spencer Stanhope and then under Burne-Jones, was more consistent in his fidelity to the pre-Raphaelite principles. His pictures have the same delicate, enervated mysticism, and the same thoughtful, dreamy poetry, as those of his elders in the school. By preference he paints slender, pensive girlish figures, with the sentiment of Burne-Jones, taking his motive from some passage in a poet. In a picture called "Elaine" the heroine is mournfully seated in a lofty room of a mediæval palace. Another of his works reveals three girls occupied with music. Or a knight strewn with roses lies asleep in a maiden's lap. Or again, there is St. Cecilia standing with her Seraphina before a Roman building. Strudwick does not possess the spontaneity of his master. The childlike, angular effect at which he aims often seems slightly weak and mawkish; and occasionally his painting is somewhat diffident, especially when he paints in the architectural detail and rich artistic accessories, and stipples with a very fine brush. But his works are so exquisite and delicate, so precious and æsthetic, that they must be reckoned amongst the most characteristic performances of the New pre-Raphaelitism. One of his larger compositions he has named "Bygone Days." There is a man musing over the memories of his life, as he sits upon a white marble throne in front of a long white marble wall, amid an evening landscape. He stretches out his arms after the vanished years of his youth, the years when love smiled upon him; but Time, a winged figure like Orcagna's _Morte_, divides him from the goddess of love, swinging his scythe with a threatening gesture. "The Past," a slender matron in a black robe, covers her face lamenting. In Strudwick's most celebrated picture, "The Ramparts of God's House," there is a man standing at the threshold of heaven, naked as a Greek athlete. His earthly fetters lie shattered at his feet. Angels receive him, marvellously spiritual beings filled with a lovely simplicity and revealing ineffable profundity of soul, beings who partake of Fra Angelico almost as much as of Ellen Terry. Their expression is quiet and peaceful. Instead of marvelling at the new-comer, they gaze with their eyes green as a water-sprite's meditatively into illimitable space. The architecture in the background is entirely symbolical, as in the pictures of Giotto. A little house with a golden roof and gilded mediæval reliefs is inhabited by a dense throng of little angels, as if it were a Noah's-ark. The colour is rich and sonorous, as in the youthful works of Carlo Crivelli.

(_By permission, from a photograph by A. Frazer-Tytler, Esq._)]

_Henry Holliday_, who has of late devoted himself largely to decorative tasks, seems in these works to be the _juste-milieu_ between Burne-Jones and Leighton. And the youngest representative of this group tinged with religious and romantic feelings is _Marie Spartali-Stillman_, who lives in Rome and paints as a rule pictures from Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, after the fashion of Rossetti.

WATTS. LADY LINDSAY.

(_By permission of Lady Lindsay, the owner of the picture._)]

Others, who turned to the treatment of antique subjects, were led by these themes more towards the Idealism of the Cinquecento as regards the form of their work; and in this way they lost the severe stamp of the pre-Raphaelites.

In these days _William Blake Richmond_, in particular, no longer shows any trace of having once belonged to the mystic circle of Oxonians. The Ariadne which he painted in the old days was a lean and tall woman with fluttering black mantle, casting up her arms in lamentation and gazing out of those deep, gazelle-like eyes which Burne-Jones gave his Vivien. Even the scheme of colour was harmonised in the bronze, olive tone which marked the earliest works of Burne-Jones. But soon afterwards his views underwent a complete revolution in Italy. Influenced by Alma Tadema in form, and by the French in colour, he drew nearer to the academic manner, until he became, at length, a Classicist without any salient peculiarity. The allegory "Amor Vincit Omnia" is characteristic of this phase of his art. Aphrodite, risen from her bath, is standing naked in a Grecian portico, through which a purple sea is visible. Her maidens are busied in dressing her; and they are, one and all, chaste and noble figures of that classic grace and elegant fluency of line which Leighton usually lends to his ideal forms. In a picture which became known in Germany through the International Exhibition of 1891, Venus, a clear and white figure, floats down with stately motion towards Anchises. It is only in the delicate pictures of children which have been his chief successes of late years that he is still fresh and direct. Girls with thick hair of a _blonde cendrée_, finely moulded lips, and large gazelle-like eyes full of sensibility, are seen in these works dreamily seated in white or blue dresses against a red or a blue curtain. And the æsthetic method of painting, which almost suggests pastel work in its delicacy, is in keeping with the ethereal figures and the bloom of colour.

_Walter Crane_ has been far more successful in uniting the pre-Raphaelite conception with a sentiment for beauty formed upon the antique, Burne-Jones's "paucity of flesh and plenitude of feeling" with a measured nobility of form. Born in Liverpool in 1845, he received his first impressions of art at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1857, where he saw Millais' "Sir Isumbras at the Ford." The chivalrous poetry of this master became the ideal of his youth, and it rings clearly throughout his first pictures, exhibited in 1862. One of these has as its subject "The Lady of Shalott" approaching the shore of her mysterious island in a boat, and the other St. George slaying the dragon. Meanwhile, however, he had come to know Walker, through W. J. Linton, the wood-engraver, for whom he worked from 1859 to 1862, and the former led him to admire the beauty of the sculptures of the Parthenon. After this he passed from romantic to antique subjects, and there is something notably youthful, a fresh bloom as of old legends, in these compositions, which recall the sculpture of Phidias. "The Bridge of Life," belonging to the year 1875, was like an antique gem or a Grecian bas-relief. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1878 he had a "Birth of Venus," noble and antique in composition, and of a severity of form which suggested Mantegna. The suave and poetic single figures which he delights in painting are at once Greek and English: girls, with branches of blossom, in white drapery falling into folds, and enveloping their whole form while indicating every line of the body. His "Pegasus" might have come straight from the frieze of the Parthenon. "The Fleeting Hours" at once recalls Guido Reni's "Aurora" and Dürer's apocalyptic riders.

WATTS. HOPE.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

WATTS. PAOLO AND FRANCESCA.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

WATTS. LOVE AND DEATH.

(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
picture._)]

Later he turned to decorative painting, like all the representatives of the pre-Raphaelite group. He is one of the most original designers for industrial work in tapestry, next to Morris the most influential leader of the English arts and crafts, and he has collaborated in founding that modern naturalistic tendency of style which will be the art of the future. His designs are always based upon naturalistic motives--the English type of womanhood and the English splendour of flowers. There always predominates a sensitive relationship between the æsthetic character of the forms and their symbolical significance. He always adapts an object of nature so that it may correspond in style with the material in which he works. The way in which he makes use of the noblest models of antiquity and of the Renaissance, and yet immediately transposes them into an English key of sentiment and into available modern forms, is entirely peculiar. And last, but not least, he is a marvellous illustrator. Every one went wild with delight at the close of the sixties over the appearance of his first children's books, _The Faerie Queene_, _The Little Pig who went to Market_, and _King Luckiboy_, the pictures of which were soon displayed upon all patterns for embroidery. And they were followed by others: after 1875 he published _Tell me a Story_, _The First of May--a Fairy Masque_, _The Sirens Three_, _Echoes of Hellas_, and so forth. The two albums _The Baby's Bouquet_ and _The Baby's Opera_ of 1879 are probably the finest of them all.

In spite of their childish subjects, the drawings of Walter Crane have such a monumental air that they have the effect of "grand painting." Without imitation he reproduces spontaneously the grace and character of the primitive Florentines. Some of his plates recall "The Dream of Polifilo," and might bear the monogram of Giovanni Bellini. They owe their origin to a profound Germanic sentiment mingled with pagan reminiscences; they are an almost Grecian and yet English art, where fancy like a foolish, dreamy child plays with a brilliant skein of forms and colours.

That great artist _George Frederick Watts_ stands quite apart as a personality in himself. In point of substance he is divided from others by not leaning upon poets, but by inventing independent allegories for himself; and in point of form by courting neither the Quattrocento nor the Roman Cinquecento, but rather following the Venice of the later Renaissance. Instead of the marble precision of Squarcione or Mantegna, what predominates in his work is something soft and melting, which might recall Correggio, Tintoretto, or Giorgione, were it not that there is a cooler grey, a subdued light fresco tone in Watts, in place of the Venetian glory of colour.

As a man, Watts was one of those artists who are only to be found in England--an artist who, from his youth upwards, has been able to live for his art without regard to profit. Born in London in the year 1820, he left the Academy after being a pupil there for a brief period, and began to visit the Elgin Room in the British Museum. The impression made upon him by the sculptures of the Parthenon was decisive for his whole life. Not merely are numerous plastic works due to his study of them, but several of his finest paintings. When he was seventeen he exhibited his first pictures, which were painted very delicately and with scrupulous pains; and in 1843 he took part in the competition for the frescoes of the Houses of Parliament, amongst which the representation of St. George and the Dragon was from his hand. With the proceeds of the prize which he received at the competition he went to Italy, and there he came to regard the great Venetians Titian and Giorgione as his kin and his contemporaries. The pupil of Phidias became the worshipper of Tintoretto. In Italy he produced "Fata Morgana," a picture of a warrior vainly catching at the airy white veil of a nude female figure which floats past. This work already displays him as an accomplished artist, though it is wanting in the large, Classical tranquillity of his later paintings. He returned home with plans demanding more than human energy. Like the Frenchman Chenavard, he cherished the purpose of representing the history of the world in a series of frescoes, which were to adorn the walls of a building specially adapted for the purpose. "Chaos," "The Creation," "The Temptation of Man," "The Penitence," "The Death of Abel," and "The Death of Cain" were the earliest pictures which he designed for the series. It was through fresco painting alone, as he believed, that it was possible to school English art to monumental grandeur, nobleness, and simplicity. But it was not possible for him to remain long upon this path in England, where painting has but little space accorded to it upon the walls of churches, while in other public buildings decoration is not in demand. Moreover, it is doubtful whether Watts would have achieved anything great in this province of art. At any rate, a work which he executed for the dining-hall at Lincoln's Inn--an assembly of the lawgivers of all times from Moses down to Edward I--is scarcely more than a mixture of Raphael's "School of Athens" and the "Hemicycle" of Delaroche. In magnificent allegories in the form of oil-paintings he first found the expression of his individuality. Like Turner, Watts did not paint pictures for sale. Yet he has lent one or other of his pictures to almost every public exhibition. A whole room is devoted to him in the Tate Gallery. But to know his work thoroughly one had to go to his house. His studio in Little Holland House contained almost all his important creations, and was visited by the public upon Saturday and Sunday afternoons as freely as if it were a museum.

WATTS. ARIADNE.

(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]

WATTS. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

As a landscape painter Watts is a visionary like Turner, though in addition to the purely artistic effect of his pictures he always endeavoured to awaken remoter feelings and ideas of some kind or another. His landscape "Corsica" reveals a grey expanse, with very slight vibrations of tone which suggest that out to sea a distant island is emerging from the mist. His "Mount Ararat," a picture entirely filled with the play of light blue tones, represents a number of barren rocky cones bathed in the intense blue of a pure transparent starry night. Above the highest peak there is one star sparkling more brilliantly than the others. In his "Deluge: the Forty-first Day," he attempted to depict, after an interpretation of his own, the power "with which light and heat, dissipating the darkness and dissolving the multitude of the waters into mist and vapour, give new life to perished nature." What is actually placed before the eye is a delicate symphony of colours which would have delighted Turner: wild, agitated sea, clouds gleaming like liquid gold, and mist behind which the sun rises in a magical glow, like a red ball of fire.

In his portraits he is earnest and sincere. Just as fifty years ago David d'Angers devoted half a lifetime to getting together a portrait gallery of famous contemporaries, so to Watts belongs the glory of having really been the historian of his time. The collection of portraits, many of which are to be seen in the National Portrait Gallery, comprises about forty likenesses, all of them half-length pictures, all of them upon the same scale of size, all of them representing very famous men. Amongst the poets comprised in this gallery of genius are Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, William Morris, and Sir Henry Taylor; amongst prose-writers, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Lecky, Motley, and Leslie Stephen; amongst statesmen, Gladstone, Sir Charles Dilke, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Salisbury, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Lyndhurst, and Lord Sherbrooke; amongst the leaders of the clergy, Dean Stanley, Dean Milman, Cardinal Manning, and Dr. Martineau; amongst painters, Rossetti, Millais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, and Calderon; and amongst notable foreigners, Guizot, Thiers, Joachim the violinist, and many others. In the matter of technique Watts is excelled by many of the French. His portraits have something heavy, nor are they eminent either for softness of modelling, or for that momentary and animated effect peculiar to Lenbach. But few portraits belonging to the nineteenth century have the same force of expression, the same straightforward sureness of aim, the same grandeur and simplicity. Before each of the persons represented one is able to say, That is a painter, that a poet, and that a scholar. All the self-conscious dignity of a President of the Royal Academy is expressed in the picture of Leighton, and his look is as cold as marble; while the eyes of Burne-Jones seem mystically veiled, as though they were gazing into the past. Indeed, the way in which Watts grasps his characters is masterly beyond conception. Amongst the old painters Tintoretto and Moroni might be compared with him most readily, while Van Dyck is the least like him of all.

In opposition to the poetic fantasy of Burne-Jones dallying with legendary lore, an element of brooding thought is characteristic of the large compositions of Watts, a meditative absorption in ideas which provoke the intellect to further activity by their mysterious allegorical suggestions. Just as he makes an approach to the old Venetians in external form, he is divided from them in the inward burden of his work by a severity and hardiness characteristic of the Northern spirit, a predominance of idea seldom met with amongst Southern masters, and a profoundly sad way of thought in which one sees the stamp of the nineteenth century. Apart from the purely artistic effect of his work, he tried to make his pictures serve as a stimulus to deeper thought and meditation: "The end of art," he writes, "must be the exposition of some weighty principle of spiritual significance, the illustration of a great truth."

"The Spirit of Christianity," the only one of his works which has a religious tone, displays a youth throned upon the clouds, with children nestling at his feet. His powerful head is bent upwards, and his right hand opened wide. In "Orpheus and Eurydice" he has chosen the moment when Orpheus turns round to behold Eurydice turning pale and sinking to the earth, to be once more swallowed by Hades. The lyre drops from his hands, and with a gesture of despair he draws the form of his wife to his heart in a last, eternal embrace. "Artemis and Endymion" is a scene in which a tall female figure in silvery shining vesture bends over the sleeping shepherd, throwing herself into the curve of a sickle.

But, as a rule, he neither makes use of Christian nor of ancient ideas, but embodies his own thoughts. In "The Illusions of Life," a picture belonging to the year 1847, beautiful, dreamy figures hover over a gulf, spreading at the verge of existence. At their feet lie the shattered emblems of greatness and power, and upon a small strip of the earth hanging over an abyss those illusions are visible which have not yet been destroyed: Glory, in the shape of a knight in harness, chases the bubble of resounding fame; Love is symbolised by a pair who are tenderly embracing; Learning, by an old man poring over manuscripts in the dusk; Innocence, by a child grasping at a butterfly. "The Angel of Death" is a picture of a winged and mighty woman throned at the entrance of a way which leads to eternity. Upon her knees there rests, covered with a white cloth, the corpse of a new-born child. Men and women of every station lay reverently down at the feet of the angel the symbols of their dignity and the implements of their earthly toil.

WATTS. ARTEMIS AND ENDYMION.

(_By permission of Mr. Robert Dunthorne, the owner of the copyright._)]

"Love and Death" represents the two great sovereigns of the world wrestling together for a human life. With steps which have a mysterious majesty, pallid Death draws near, demanding entrance at the door of a house, whilst Love, a slight, boyish figure with bright wings, places himself in the way; but with one great, irresistible gesture the mighty genius of Death sweeps the shrinking child to one side. In another picture, "Love and Life," the genius of Love, in the form of a slim, powerful youth, helps poor, weak, clinging Life, a half-grown, timid, faltering girl, to clamber up the stony path of a mountain, over which the sun rises golden. "Hope" is a picture in which a tender spirit, bathed in the blue mist, sits upon the globe, blindfold, listening in bliss to the low sound vibrating from the last string of her harp. "Mammon" is embodied by Watts in a coarse and bloated satyr brutally setting his heel upon a youth and a young girl, as upon a footstool.

In 1893, when the committee of the Munich Exhibition were moved by the writings of Cornelius Gurlitt to have some of these works sent over to Germany, a certain disappointment was felt in artistic circles. And any one who is accustomed to gauge pictures by their technique is justified in missing the genuine pictorial temperament in Watts. The sobriety of his scheme of colour, his preference for subdued tones, his distaste for all "dexterity" and freedom from all calculated refinement, are not in accord with the desires of our time. Even his sentiment is altogether opposed to that which predominates in the other New Idealists. Burne-Jones and Rossetti found sympathy because their repining lyricism, their psychopathic subtlety, their wonderful mixture of archaic simplicity and _décadent hautgoût_, stand in direct touch with the present. Watts' pictures seem cold and wanting in temperament because he made no appeal to the vibrating life of the nerves.

But the same sort of criticism was written by the younger generation in Germany, seventy years ago, on the works of Goethe, which have, none the less, remained fresher than those of Schlegel and Tieck. What is modern is not always the same as what is eternally young. And if one endeavours, disregarding the current of the age, to approach Watts as though he were an old master, one feels an increasing sense of the probability that amongst all the New Idealists of the present he has, next to Boecklin, the best prospect of becoming one. In spite of all its independence of spirit, the art of Burne-Jones has an affected mannerism in its outward garb. The sentiment of it is free, but the form is confined in the old limits. And it is not impossible that later generations, to whom his specifically modern sentiment will appeal more and more faintly, may one day rank him, on account of his archaism in drawing, as much amongst the eclectics as Overbeck and Führich are held to be at the present time. But that can never happen to Watts. His works are the expression of an artist who is as little dependent upon the past as upon the momentary tendencies of the present. His articulation of form has nothing in common with the lines of beauty of the antique, or the Quattrocento, or the Cinquecento. It is a thing created by himself and to himself peculiar. He needs no erudition, and no attributes and symbols borrowed from the Renaissance, to body forth his allegories. With him there begins a new power of creating types; and his figure of Death--that tall woman, clad in white, with hollow cheeks, livid face, and lifeless sunken eyes--is no less cogent than the genius with the torch reversed or the burlesque skeleton of the Middle Ages. Moreover, there is in his works a trace of profundity and simple grandeur which stands alone in our own period. It is precisely our more sensitive nervous system which divides us from the old painters, and has generally given the artistic productions of our day a disturbed, capricious, restless, and overstrained character, making them inferior to those of the old masters.

Watts is, perhaps, the only painter who can bear comparison with them in every respect. Here is a man who has been able to live in himself far away from the bustle of exhibitions, a man who worked when he was old as soundly and freshly as when he was young, a man, also, who is always simple in his art, lucid, earnest, grandiose, impressive, and of monumental sublimity. Though he shows no trace of imitation he might have come straight from the Renaissance, so deep is his sense of beauty, so direct and so condensed his power of giving form to his ideas. And amongst living painters I should find it impossible to name a single one who could embody such a scene as that of "Love and Death" so calmly, so entirely without rhetorical gestures and all the tricks of theatrical management. There is the mark of style about everything in Watts, and it is no external and borrowed style, but one which is his own, a style which a notable man, a thinker and a poet, has fashioned for the expression of his own ideas. That is what makes him a master of contemporary painting and of the painting of all times. And that is what will, perhaps, render him, in the eyes of later generations, one of the greatest men of our time.