e Ducal Palace we may
take our station, hour by hour, before the 'Marriage of Bacchus and
Ariadne.' It is well to leave the very highest achievements of art
untouched by criticism, undescribed. And in this picture we have the
most perfect of all modern attempts to realise an antique myth--more
perfect than Raphael's 'Galatea,' or Titian's 'Meeting of Bacchus
with Ariadne,' or Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus from the Sea.' It may
suffice to marvel at the slight effect which melodies so powerful and
so direct as these produce upon the ordinary public. Sitting, as is my
wont, one Sunday morning, opposite the 'Bacchus,' four Germans with a
cicerone sauntered by. The subject was explained to them. They waited
an appreciable space of time. Then the youngest opened his lips and
spake: 'Bacchus war der Wein-Gott.' And they all moved heavily away.
_Bos locutus est_. 'Bacchus was the wine-god!' This, apparently,
is what a picture tells to one man. To another it presents divine
harmonies, perceptible indeed in nature, but here by the painter-poet
for the first time brought together and cadenced in a work of art. For
another it is perhaps the hieroglyph of pent-up passions and desired
impossibilities. For yet another it may only mean the unapproachable
inimitable triumph of consummate craft.

Tintoretto, to be rightly understood, must be sought all over
Venice--in the church as well as the Scuola di San Rocco; in
the 'Temptation of S. Anthony' at S. Trovaso no less than in the
Temptations of Eve and Christ; in the decorative pomp of the Sala del
Senato, and in the Paradisal vision of the Sala del Gran Consiglio.
Yet, after all, there is one of his most characteristic moods, to
appreciate which fully we return to the Madonna dell' Orto. I have
called him 'the painter of impossibilities.' At rare moments he
rendered them possible by sheer imaginative force. If we wish to
realise this phase of his creative power, and to measure our own
subordination to his genius in its most hazardous enterprise, we
must spend much time in the choir of this church. Lovers of art who
mistrust this play of the audacious fancy--aiming at sublimity in
supersensual regions, sometimes attaining to it by stupendous effort
or authentic revelation, not seldom sinking to the verge of bathos,
and demanding the assistance of interpretative sympathy in the
spectator--such men will not take the point of view required of them
by Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in t