such evasion. The human body is not degraded into an opaque shell, but neither is it reduced into a mere transparency, a mere envelope of the soul within. The attitude of the painter, in all his delineations of human form, is one of affirmation, not apology. The body may be-is-an expression of the soul-it is an imperfect expression. It is also an expression-most perfect and concise-of the whole life, of the vital essence, call it what we may, which animates nerve and muscle; which touches, tastes, sees, hears, in the organs of sense; which loves, hates, sorrows, rejoices, in the emotions; and which, finally, in the separation, the disintegration of death, abandons the fabric it has moulded into shape. Of this vital principle Mr. Watts painted the human hieroglyphic, a hieroglyphic of form more than of colour: not, one may conjecture, from any repudiation of colour in its association with sensualism in art, but by reason of its superior fitness as suggesting greater durabilities and wider universality.

Yet, whatever might be the perfect ability of human nature, creation was doomed to undergo those moral episodes allegorised in the story of the Fall. No man's 'soul is alone; the serpent has it by the heart, or the 'angel by the hand.'* And in Eve Tempted,' the angel of creation has in truth loosed his hold, the coils of the snake close round the feet of the woman, and the flowers of the blossoming apple-boughs reiterate his counsel as they whisper in her ear. It is a picture of those days chronicled in old mythological traditions whose echoes survive in the stories of all nations, the stories of Friendly (and unfriendly) Beasts, when nature's offspring, animal, plant and man, are seen in closer kinship than later years can recognise, days when in a vivid acknowledgement of the common motherhood of each living thing, Daphne might change into a laurel and Syrinx to a reed, when faun and centaur might efface the harsh lines of demarcation between man and beast-kind, without violating aggressively the possibilities of primitive scientific belief. And here in Eden the serpent's voice is heard as the voice of one who spoke a familiar speech, and his wisdom is weighed in the balance with the lesser wisdom of winged birds and the four-footed denizens of wood and field. Eve listened. She ate of the Apples of Wrath and found in the fruit the sting of the serpent. So runs the allegory. To revert to the broader outline of the

* Ruskin, 'Modern Painters.'

thought of which Mr. Watts has painted the symbol. A law typified by a command, its use and meaning unknown to the transgressor, has been set aside; the Denunciation' inevitably follows. Those eternal forces, creative spirits in the birth scene, here denunciatory angels, which take no account of excuses, which are deaf to every plea of ignorance and blindness, and whom no promise of amendment can propitiate, come into action. Their outstretched hands foreshadow calamity present and to come. Mr. Watts has used the intensity of colour belonging to his Venetian ancestry in art to heighten the emotional impressiveness of the painting. The background of the skies darkens into a blue-burning flame of gloom, the storm-cloud of the descending spirits flickers like some conflagration in the dusk. But-and here lies the individual touch of interpretationalready, beneath the divine hurricane, a new sanctity reconsecrates humanity. Pity is born; Adam's arms are outheld to shelter the bowed head of his fellow-sinner as the two crouch together under the anathema of the spiritual blast.

There, for the painter, the allegory ends. All which comes after is included in this one scene. No need to exile those sad souls from Eden; they it is who have exiled Eden from their souls. The joy-garden in which they sojourned was their own hearts; henceforth the heart's paradise, watered by the four streams, is as a parched desert, thorns grow there and briars upspring, and the aloe, bitter and sweet, and the poison weed. The Kingdom of Eden, no less than the Kingdom of God, is within you. Eve has eaten the fruit which was fair; Psyche has kindled the wick of the forbidden lamp; knowledge has brought its forfeiture of peace; joy has fled;

Sorrow, which to that house scarce knew the way,
Is now the lord of it.'

And with sorrow, death. In the pictures dealing with the slaying of Abel and the dying of Cain, as in the episodes of Eden, the artist, in electing themes so familiar to popular imagination, makes special demands on our perceptive faculties. The formulas of Bible-story are overburthened with associations, by force of incessant repetition the picture seer is apt to pass by their pictorial presentment without the effort towards individual realisation less sophisticated subjects evoke. Acute sympathetic response to any appeal of art depends to a certain extent on

freshness of sensation. Tieck asserts-and, exaggerated though the statement may seem, it strikes a vein of truththat it is not above twice or at most thrice in a man's life that he has the fortune to see in any true sense a 'sunrise.' This is to say that in the familiar our senses rarely reach the maximum of that self-conscious activity which is their full measure of enjoyment. Neither eye nor mind can be continuously intimate with any given object without outwearing the appreciative instinct. When a painter re-images well-worn subjects, he has to contend with this induced blankness of mental or visual capacities. He must efface old at the same time that he imprints new versions of ancient stories. He must present the known so that it shall take on itself the semblance of the unknown. Heaven is made up of first hours, says the proverb, and the effect of a work of genius must always include the illusion of intrinsic novelty in the conception or transmission of the idea. In Pater's phrase, the artist must break through 'the veil of familiarity,' the most dense of all impediments to true vision.

In the second 'Denunciation' (the death of Abel), where Cain, first child of the world, has slain his brother, without any re-arrangement of conventional formula and by sheer force of emotional power, Mr. Watts rent that veil. To the tragedy he paints he has given universality; it is not of Genesis, but of yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. It is the deepest of all tragedies: the tragedy of the revenges of the dead. It portrays that ultimate, dumb vengeance, the wronged, the weak, the outraged take, sæcula sæculorum, upon the oppressor. They suffer, they fall, they are slain, but their sufferings, their overthrow, their dying, writes his doom upon the wall. In the picture, as in the first 'Denunciation,' those infinite Potencies by whom man's path is encompassed, and of which he is the voluntary servant or the impotent tool, come forth from their ambuscade of invisibility. They bear witness with downstretched hands of condemnation, where the blaze of sacrifice rises with drifting smoke-clouds, to the evil of the deed. Abel's white figure lies motionless in the first deathsleep of God's green forest. Cain stands, his face in shadow, a dark form with upraised hands against the pitiless light-shaft which illuminates his consummated sin. And is it by pictorial accident only that for us the face of the slain is made visible, and the face of his slayer is in obscurity? The whole tragedy is in those two figures.

Blot out the nimbus of the angelic host; let the voices of their Dies ira be mute; leave Cain solitary under the great silence of the trees, leave him amidst the cold neutralities of nature. What need to proclaim his sentence? Abel's dumb lips, his unseeing eyes, his limbs that weigh heavily upon the darkened earth, the flint wound-can life escape by so small a door?-these pronounce Cain's doom. Abel is dead. No cry of man or woman, howsoever bitter, can penetrate the shroud of that long slumber. Cain, the shadowed figure of the living beside the pale unshadowed figure of the dead, is confronted by the penalty of his own act. The soul of Abel has flitted to Hades, but the soul of Cain has entered Hell. He has looked on death, and in Abel's dying he has beheld his own.

Some years later Mr. Watts painted the sequel. To Cain the sun-bronzed outcast, who has borne the burthen, the heat, the toil and the terror of life, death comes at length, lenity after judgement, light after the darkness of day, supreme peace after the storm. There is no echo, in the desert place where Cain sinks upon the hewn altarstone, of Coleridge's marvellous vision of the Titan wanderer —a sinister vision of limbs wasted as by fire, of a rank tangled mass of matted curls, stained and scorched as though a burning iron hand had striven to rend them, of a countenance telling in strange and terrible language of agonies that had been, and were, and were to be. A vision where the ghost who calls himself Abel pierces the heart of Cain with his wail: Woe is me, for I was well-beloved by the 'God of the Living, but the dead have another God; and where, amongst the naked rocks in that land without water, Cain's misery adopts the new despair of doubt, and his answer is a reiteration of the phantom's cry: 'The curse of 'the Lord is on me, but who is the God of the Dead?'

No such menace has place in the painter's conception. Here and throughout all his works he has constituted himself a resolute herald of peace, a messenger of good hope and patient courage. The wanderer's agony ends in deep repose. Esau and Jacob the Supplanter meet in renewed fraternity of love. The overwhelming waters of the Flood sink in undulations of subsiding waves, unbroken by friction of rock or cliff, the smooth curved lines uncrested by spray or foam in the windless, sunless daylight. Nothing tells us that the long pulsations of that shoreless sea entomb

*S. T. Coleridge, 'The Wanderings of Cain.'

a whole generation, uncounted myriads of the drowned children of a submerged world. After the Flood the Ebbtide, and after the Ebb a great calm. The Dove that ' returned not' has found his footing, a broken bough hung with seadrift of floating treasure, poor vanities of women, toys of folly and pleasure, where she may rest her wings. APentecostal Earth' of light and radiance shall emerge from that second Chaos of grey drowning, from that 'Bap'tistery of a new birth.' On all these themes-the imaginative property of the multitude-Mr. Watts has set the seal of his genius. They served him as readymade formulas, comprehensible to the multitude, of his own moral and idealistic conceptions. Beyond these incidents, drawn from Mosaic tradition, he never appears to have returned to primitive periods or prehistoric episode. One little idyl only, a painting belonging to some side mood of the grave painter's musings, may be taken as a fragment of homely literalism set in those remote and longforgotten ages of the world's history. It is a picture not familiar to most; yet in its wistful gaiety, in the gentle savagery of the two denizens of the wild earth depicted, it is so alien to Mr. Watts's customary idealisation that it claims an interest of its own. It is an idyl of soft-eyed, destructive, boy and girl playmates; their riddle-a nursery puzzle the shut envelope of the First Oyster-shell. Their playground is the seashore, their toys the delicate sea-shells they have threaded in armlet and necklace, fragile ornaments for their free, wind-blown, wave-washed limbs. The colours are dim and faint, as befits a scene viewed through the gauze of centuries, but the boy and the girl live amongst the dull hues of green and grey, and the wondering laughter of their lips is the sound of the laughter of the lost childhoods of long ago.

With the Genius of Greek Poetry,' and the group of pictures whose subjects are adapted from classic myths and legends of poets, Mr. Watts enters a second marked epoch in what he designates the evolution of mankind. In this symbolic representation of the birth of Greek mythology, we have, as it were, a supplementary version of the emergence, the egress from chaos, of the phenomena and properties of nature; but this time we see them re-created by the mind of man into definite shapes of personified elementary beings, shapes of dryad and sylph and naiad, spirits of air and water. It is an intellectual creation succeeding to the material creation. In the first Chaos the painter saw the