outlying province forgotten by an emperor. It is a common saying that anything may happen behind our backs: transcendentally considered the thing has an eerie truth about it. Eden may be behind our backs, or Fairyland. But this mystery of the human back has again its other side in the strange impression produced on those behind: to walk behind anyone along a lane is a thing that, properly speaking, touches the oldest nerve of awe. Watts has realized this as no one in art or letters has realized it in the whole history of the world: it has made him great. There is one possible exception to his monopoly of this magnificent craze. Two thousand years before, in the dark scriptures of a nomad people, it had been said that their prophet saw the immense Creator of all things, but only saw Him from behind. I do not know whether even Watts would dare to paint that. But it reads like one of his pictures, like the most terrific of all his pictures, which he has kept veiled. I need not instance the admirable and innumerable cases of this fine and individual effect. _Eve Repentant_ (that fine picture), in which the agony of a gigantic womanhood is conveyed as it could not be conveyed by any power of visage, in the powerful contortion of the muscular and yet beautiful back, is the first that occurs to the mind. The sad and sardonic picture painted in later years, _For He had Great Possessions_--showing the young man of the Gospel loaded with his intolerable pomp of garments and his head sunken out of sight--is of course another. Others are slighter instances, like _Good Luck to your Fishing_. He has again carried the principle, in one instance, to an extreme seldom adopted, I should fancy, either by artist or man. He has painted a very graceful portrait of his wife, in which that lady’s face is entirely omitted, the head being abruptly turned away. But it is indeed idle to multiply these instances of the painter’s hobby (if one may use the phrase) of the worship of the human back, when all such instances have been dwarfed and overshadowed by the one famous and tremendous instance that everyone knows. _Love and Death_ is truly a great achievement: if it stood alone it would have made a man great. And it fits in with a peculiar importance with the general view I am suggesting of the Watts technique. For the whole picture really hangs, both technically and morally, upon one single line, a line that could be drawn across a blank canvas, the spine-line of the central figure of Death with its great falling garment. The whole composition, the whole conception, and, I was going to say, the whole moral of the picture, could be deduced from that single line. The moral of the picture (if moral were the right phrase for these things) is, it is scarcely necessary to point out, the monument of about as noble a silence and suppression as the human mind ever bent itself to in its pride. It is the great masterpiece of agnosticism. In that picture agnosticism--not