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 seership, and in all those vague faces
of the imaginative paintings, into which, to use Pater's phrase,
"the soul with all its maladies has passed." In his pictures he
draws on the effects of earlier art, and throws his sitters back
until they seem to belong to some nondescript mediaeval country,
like the Bohemia of the dramatists; and he darkens and shuts out
the light of day that this starlight of soul may be more clearly
seen, and destroys, as far as he can, all traces of the century
they live in, for the mind lives in all the ages, and he would show
it as the pilgrim of eternity. Because Watts' art was necessarily
so brooding and meditative, looking at life with half-closed eyes
and then shutting them to be alone with memory and the interpreter,