But what the facts do reveal is that he worked in this curiously individual, this curiously invisible way. He had his own notion of when to dream and when to draw; as he shrank from no toil, so he shrank from no idleness. He was something which is one of the most powerful and successful things in the world, something which is far more powerful and successful than a legion of students and prizemen: he was a serious and industrious truant. It is worth while to note this in his boyhood, partly, of course, because from one end of his life to the other there is this queer note of loneliness and liberty. But it is also more immediately and practically important because it throws some light on the development and character of his art, and even especially of his technique. The great singularity of Watts, considered as a mere artist, is that he stands alone. He is not connected with any of the groups of the nineteenth century: he has neither followed a school nor founded one. He is not mediæval; but no one could exactly call him classical: we have only to compare him to Leighton to feel the difference at once. His artistic style is rather a thing more primitive than paganism; a thing to which paganism and mediævalism are alike upstart sects; a style of painting there might have been upon the tower of Babel. He is mystical; but he is not mediæval: we have only to compare him to Rossetti to feel the difference. When he emerged into the artistic world, that world was occupied by the pompous and historical school, that school which was so exquisitely caricatured by Thackeray in Gandish and his “Boadishia”; but Watts was not pompous or historical: he painted one historical picture, which brought him a youthful success, and he has scarcely painted another. He lived on through the great Pre-Raphaelite time, that very noble and very much undervalued time, when men found again what had been hidden since the thirteenth century under loads of idle civilization, the truth that simplicity and a monastic laboriousness is the happiest of all things; the great truth that purity is the only atmosphere for passion; the great truth that silver is more beautiful than gold. But though there is any quantity of this sentiment in Watts himself, Watts never has been a Pre-Raphaelite. He has seen other fashions come and go; he has seen the Pre-Raphaelites overwhelmed by a heavy restoration of the conventional, headed by Millais with his Scotch moors and his English countesses; but he has not heeded it. He has seen these again overturned by the wild lancers of Whistler; he has seen the mists of Impressionism settle down over the world, making it weird and delicate and noncommittal: but he thinks no more of the wet mist of the Impressionist than he thought of the dry glare of the Pre-Raphaelite.