tradition as a bridge. The older art held up a mirror to natural
forms and brought them nearer to man. In the perfect culmination
of this new art one feels how a complete change might take place
and natural forms be used to express an internal nature or the
soul of the artist. Colors and forms, like words after the lapse
of centuries, enlarge their significance. The earliest art was
probably simple and literal--there may have been the outline of a
figure filled up with some flat color. Then as art became 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