impart in a satisfactory way are the moral ideas naturally associated
with beauty in its higher or lower forms. But I think, some of you
are confuting me in your own minds at this moment. You say to
yourselves: "But we have all about us the works of great artists
whose inspiration not one will deny. He used his art to express
great ethical ideas. He spoke again and again about these ideas.
He was proud that his art was dedicated to their expression." I am
sorry to say that he did say many things which would have endeared
him to Tolstoi and Ruskin, and for which I respect him as a man,
and which as an artist I deplore. I deplore his speaking of ethical
ideas as the inspiration of his art, because I think they were only
the inspiration of his life; and where he is weakest in his appeal
as an artist is where he summons consciously to his aid ethical
ideas which find their proper expression in religion or literature
or life.

Watts wished to ennoble art by summoning to its aid the highest
conceptions of literature; but in doing so he seems to me to imply
that art needed such conceptions for its justification, that the
pure artist mind, careless of these ideas, and only careful to make
for itself a beautiful vision of things, was in a lower plane, and
had a less spiritual message. Now that I deny. I deny absolutely
that art needs to call to its aid, in order to justify or ennoble
it, any abstract ideas about love or justice or mercy.

It may express none of these ideas, and yet express truths of its
own as high and as essential to the being of man; and it is in
spite of himself, in spite of his theories, that the work of Watts
will have an enduring place in the history of art. You will ask
then, "Can art express no moral ideas? Is it unmoral?" In the