ong those
whose spiritual part will never die. Walter Pater died July 1894: a
man whose sense of loveliness and dignity made him, in mature life,
as learned in moral beauty as he had been in visible.]

But the imagination born of the love of beautiful and suggestive detail
soars higher; become what I would call the lyric art of the Renaissance,
the art which not merely gives us beauty, but stirs up in ourselves as
much beauty again of stored-up impression, reaches its greatest height
in certain Venetian pictures of the early sixteenth century. Pictures of
vague or enigmatic subject, or no subject at all, like Giorgione's Fete
Champetre and Soldier and Gipsy, Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, The
Three Ages of Man, and various smaller pictures by Bonifazio, Palma,
Basaiti; pictures of young men in velvets and brocades, solemn women
with only the glory of their golden hair and flesh, seated in the grass,
old men looking on pensive, children rolling about; with the solemnity
of great, spreading trees, of greenish evening skies: the pathos of
the song about to begin or just finished, lute or viol or pipe still
lying hard by. Of such pictures it is best, perhaps, not to speak. The
suggestive imagination is wandering vaguely, dreaming; fumbling at
random sweet, strange chords out of its viol, like those young men and
maidens. The charm of such works is that they are never explicit; they
tell us, like music, deep secrets, which we feel, but cannot translate
into words.

IV

The first new factor in art which meets us at the beginning of the
sixteenth century is not among the Italians, and is not a merely
artistic power. I speak of the passionate individual fervour for
the newly recovered Scriptures, manifest among the German engravers,
Protestants all or nearly all, and among whose works is for ever turning
up the sturdy, passionate face of Luther, the enthusiastic face of
Melanchthon. The very nature of these men's art is conceivable only
where the Bible has suddenly become the reading, and the chief reading,
of the laity. These prints, large and small, struck off in large numbers,
are not church ornaments like frescoes or pictures, nor aids to monastic
devotion like Angelico's Gospel histories at St. Mark's--they are
illustrations to the book which every one is reading, things to be
framed in the chamber of every burgher or mechanic, to be slipped into
the prayer-book of every housewife, to be conned over during th