ideas which had found their place in his mind. He would have been the
first to admit that without these ideas he would be less than nothing.

If it were possible to bring together all the external acts of the
painter's life, his journeyings to and fro, his making and his losing
friends, we should have insufficient data to enable us to understand
Watts' message; his great ambitions, his constant failures, his intimate
experiences, his reflections and determinations--known to none but
himself--surely these, the internal life of Watts, are the real sources
of his message? True, he was in the midst of the nineteenth century,
breathing its atmosphere, familiar with the ideals of its great men,
doubting, questioning, and hoping with the rest. To him, as to many a
contemporary stoic, the world was in a certain sense an alien ground,
and mortal life was to be stoically endured and made the best of. It is
impossible to believe, however, that this inspiring and prophetic
painter reproduced and handed on merely that which his time and society
gave him. His day and his associates truly gave him much; the past and
his heredity made their contributions; but we must believe that the
purest gold was fired in the crucible of his inner experience, his joys
and his sufferings. In him was accomplished that great discovery which
the philosophers have called Pessimism; he not only saw in other men (as
depicted in his memorable canvas of 1849), but he experienced in himself
the transitory life's illusions. To Watts, the serious man of fifty
years, Love and Death, Faith and Hope, Aspiration, Suffering, and
Remorse, were not, as to the eighteenth-century rhymester, merely Greek
ladies draped in flowing raiment; to him they were realities, intensely
focussed in himself. Watts was giving of himself, of his knowledge and
observation of what Love is and does, and how Death appears so
variously; and who but a man who knew the melancholy of despair could
paint that picture "Hope"?