e more complex, colors began
to have an emotional meaning quite apart from their original relation
to an object. The artist begins unconsciously to relate color more
intimately to his own temperament than to external nature. At last,
after the lapse of ages, some sensitive artist begins to imagine that
he has discovered a complete language capable of expressing any mood
of mind. The passing of centuries has enriched every color, and left
it related to some new phase of the soul. Phidian or Michael Angelesque
forms gather their own peculiar associations of divinity or power. In
fact, this new art uses the forms of the old as symbols or hieroglyphs
to express more complicated ideas than the older artists tried to
depict.

Watts never attempted, for all his admiration of these men, to
follow them in their efforts to realize perfectly the forms that they
conceived. They had done this once and for all, and repetition may have
seemed unnecessary. But the lofty temper awakened by those stupendous
creations could be aroused by a suggestion of their peculiar
characteristics. Association of ideas will in some subtle way bring us
back to the Phidian demigods when we look at forms and draperies
vaguely suggestive of the Parthenon. I do not say that Watt's did this
consciously, but instinctively he felt compelled, with the gradual
development of his own mind, to use the imaginative traditions created
by other artists as a language through which he might find expression
peculiar to himself. It is a highly intellectual art to which tradition
was a necessity, as much as it is to the poet, who when he speaks of
"beauty" draws upon a sentiment created by millions of long-dead lovers,
or who, when he thinks of the "spirit," is, in his use of the word, the
heir of countless generations who brooded upon the mysteries.

Just as in Millet, the painter of peasants, there was a religious spirit
shaping all things into austere and elemental simplicities, so in Watts
there was an intellectual spirit, seeking everywhere for the traces of
mind trying to express the bodiless and abstract. With Whitman he seems
to cry out, "The soul for ever and ever!" It is there in the astonishing
head of Swinburne, whom he reveals, if I may use a vulgar phrase, as a
poetic "bounder," but illuminated and etherealized by genius. It is in
the head of Mill, the very symbol of the moral reasoning--mind. It is in
the face of Tennyson, with its too self-conscious seersh