Now Watts, with all his marvellous spirituality, or rather because of his peculiar type of marvellous spirituality, has the Platonic, the philosophic, rather than the Catholic order of mysticism. And it can scarcely be a coincidence that here again we feel it to be something that could almost be deduced from the colours if they were splashed at random about a canvas. The colours are mystical, but they are not transparent; that is, not transparent in the very curious but unmistakable sense in which the colours of Botticelli or Rossetti are transparent. What they are can only be described as iridescent. A curious lustre or glitter, conveyed chiefly by a singular and individual brushwork, lies over all his great pictures. [Illustration: DAWN.] It is the dawn of things: it is the glow of the primal sense of wonder; it is the sun of the childhood of the world; it is the light that never was on sea or land; but still it is a light shining on things, not shining through them. It is a light which exhibits and does honour to this world, not a light that breaks in upon this world to bring it terror or comfort, like the light that suddenly peers round the corner of some dark Gothic chapel with its green or golden or blood-red eyes. The Gothic artists, as I say, would have liked men’s bodies to become like burning glass (as the figures in their windows do), that the light might pass through them. There is no fear of light passing through Watts’ _Cain_. These analogies must inevitably appear fantastic to those who do not accept the general hypothesis of a possible kinship between pictorial and moral harmonies in the psychology of men; but to those who do accept this not very extravagant hypothesis, it may, I think, be repeated by way of summary, that the purely technical question of Watts’ colour scheme does provide us, at least suggestively, with these two parallels. Watts, so far as his moral and mental attitude can be expressed by any phrases of such brevity, has two main peculiarities: first, a large infantile poetry which delights in things fresh, raw, and gigantic; second, a certain Greek restraint and agnostic severity, which throws a strong light on this world as it is. The colours he uses have also two main peculiarities: first, a fresh, raw, and, as it were, gigantic character; secondly, an opaque reflected light, unlike the mediæval lighting, a strong light thrown on this world as it is.