Of the ancestry of Watts so little is known that it resolves itself into one hypothesis: a hypothesis which brings with it a suggestion, a suggestion employed by almost all his existing biographers, but a suggestion which cannot, I think, pass unchallenged, although the matter may appear somewhat theoretic and remote. Watts was born in London, but his family had in the previous generation come from Hereford. The vast amount of Welsh blood which is by the nature of the case to be found in Herefordshire has led to the statement that Watts is racially a Celt, which is very probably true. But it is also said, in almost every notice of his life and work, that the Celtic spirit can be detected in his painting, that the Celtic principle of mysticism is a characteristic of his artistic conceptions. It is in no idly antagonistic spirit that I venture to doubt this most profoundly. [Illustration: THE SLUMBER OF THE AGES] Watts may or may not be racially a Celt, but there is nothing Celtic about his mysticism. The essential Celtic spirit in letters and art may, I think, be defined as a sense of the unbearable beauty of things. The essential spirit of Watts may, I think, be much better expressed as a sense of the joyful austerity of things. The dominant passion of the artistic Celt, of Mr. W. B. Yeats or Sir Edward Burne-Jones, is in the word “escape”: escape into a land where oranges grow on plum-trees and men can sow what they like and reap what they enjoy. To Watts the very word “escape” would be horrible, like an obscene word: his ideal is altogether duty and the great wheel. To the Celt frivolity is most truly the most serious of things, since in the tangle of roses is always the old serpent who is wiser than the world. To Watts seriousness is most truly the most “joyful of things,” since in it we come nearest to that ultimate equilibrium and reconciliation of things whereby alone they live and endure life and each other. It is difficult to imagine that amid all the varieties of noble temper and elemental desire there could possibly be two exhibiting a more total divergence than that between a kindly severity and an almost cruel love of sweetness; than that between a laborious and open-air charity and a kind of Bacchic asceticism; between a joy in peace and a joy in disorder; between a reduction of existence to its simplest formula and an extension of it to its most frantic corollary; between a lover of justice who accepts the real world more submissively than a slave and a lover of pleasure who despises the real world more bitterly than a hermit; between a king in battle-harness and a vagabond in elf-land; between Watts and Sir Edward Burne-Jones.