The fact is that this indescribable primalism, which we have noted as coming out in the designs, in the titles, and in Watts’ very oil-colours, is present in this matter in a most extraordinary way. Watts does not copy men at all: he makes them over again. He dips his hand in the clay of chaos and begins to model a man named William Morris or a man named Richard Burton: he is assisted, no doubt, in some degree by a quaint old text-book called Reality, with its stiff but suggestive woodcuts and its shrewd and simple old hints. But the most that can be said for the portraiture is that Watts asks a hint to come and stop with him, puts the hint in a chair in his studio and stares at him. The thing that comes out at last upon the canvas is not generally a very precise picture of the sitter, though, of course, it is almost always a very accurate picture of the universe. And yet while this, on the one side, is true enough, the portraits are portraits, and very fine portraits. But they are dominated by an element which is the antithesis of the whole tendency of modern art, that tendency which for want of a better word we have to call by the absurd name of optimism. It is not, of course, in reality a question of optimism in the least, but of an illimitable worship and wonder directed towards the fact of existence. There is a great deal of difference between the optimism which says that things are perfect and the optimism which merely says (with a more primeval modesty) that they are very good. One optimism says that a one-legged man has two legs because it would be so dreadful if he had not. The other optimism says that the fact that the one-legged was born of a woman, has a soul, has been in love, and has stood alive under the stars, is a fact so enormous and thrilling that, in comparison, it does not matter whether he has one leg or five. One optimism says that this is the best of all possible worlds. The other says that it is certainly not the best of all possible worlds, but [Illustration: WILLIAM MORRIS.]