with the ancient
mind. For it is needful to remember that in all movements of the
Renaissance we ever find a return in all sincerity and faith to the glory
and gladness of nature, whether in the world without or in the soul of
man. To apprehend that glory and that gladness with the pure and primitive
perceptions of the early mythopoets, was not given to the men of the new
world. Yet they did what in them lay, with senses sophisticated by many
centuries of subtlest warping, to replace the first, free joy of kinship
with primeval things. For the painters, far more than for the poets of
the sixteenth century, it was possible to reproduce a thousand forms of
beauty, each attesting to the delightfulness of physical existence, to the
inalienable rights of natural desire, and to the participation of mankind
in pleasures held in common by us with the powers of earth and sea and
air.

It is wonderful to watch the blending of elder and of younger forces in
this process. The old gods lent a portion of their charm even to Christian
mythology, and showered their beauty-bloom on saints who died renouncing
them. Sodoma's Sebastian is but Hyacinth or Hylas, transpierced with
arrows, so that pain and martyrdom add pathos to his poetry of
youthfulness. Lionardo's S. John is a Faun of the forest, ivy-crowned and
laughing, on whose lips the word "Repent" would be a gleeful paradox. For
the painters of the full Renaissance, Roman martyrs and Olympian
deities--the heroes of the _Acta Sanctorum_, and the heroes of Greek
romance--were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the
beautiful and human. What exquisite and evanescent fragrance was educed
from these apparently diverse blossoms by their interminglement and
fusion--how the high-wrought sensibilities of the Christian were added to
the clear and radiant fancies of the Greek, and how the frank sensuousness
of the Pagan gave body and fulness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic
faith--remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to
scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces. There are not
a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from
Hermaphroditus. These will always find something to pain them in the art
of the Renaissance.

Having co-ordinated the Christian and Pagan traditions in its work of
beauty, painting could advance no farther. The stock of its sustaining
motives was exhausted. A problem that preoccupied the min