harger of Paris browses beneath some stunted larches; the Trojan
knight's helmet, with its monstrous beak and plume, lies on the ground;
and near it reclines Paris himself, lazy, in complete armour, with
frizzled fashionable beard. To him, all wrinkled and grinning with
brutal lust, comes another bearded knight, with wings to his vizored
helmet, Sir Mercury, leading the three goddesses, short, fat-cheeked
German wenches, housemaids stripped of their clothes, stupid, brazen,
indifferent. And Paris is evidently prepared with his choice: he awards
the apple to the fattest, for among a half-starved, plague-stricken
people like this, the chosen of gods and men must needs be the fattest.

No, such pagan scenes are mere burlesques, coarse mummeries, such as may
have amused Nuernberg and Augsburg during Shrovetide, when drunken louts
figured as Bacchus and sang drinking songs by Hans Sachs. There is no
reality in all this; there is no belief in pagan gods. If we would see
the haunting divinity of the German Renaissance, we shall find him
prying and prowling in nearly every scene of real life; him, the ever
present, the king of the Middle Ages, whose triumph we have seen on the
cloister wall at Pisa, the lord "Death." His fleshless face peers from
behind a bush at Zatzinger's stunted, fever-stricken lady and imbecile
gentleman; he sits grinning on a tree in Orso Graf's allegory, while the
cynical knights, with haggard, sensual faces, crack dirty jokes with the
fat, brutish woman squatted below; he puts his hand into the basket of
Duerer's tattered pedlar; he leers hideously at the stirrup of Duerer's
armed and stalwart knight. No gods of youth and Nature; no Hercules, no
Hermes, no Venus, have invaded his German territories, as they invaded
even his own palace, the burial-ground at Pisa; the antique has not
perverted Duerer and his fellows, as it perverted Masaccio, and
Signorelli, and Mantegna, from the mediaeval worship of Death.

The Italians had seen the antique and had let themselves be seduced by
it, despite their civilization and their religion. Let us only rejoice
thereat. There are indeed some, and among them the great English critic,
who is irrefutable when he is a poet and irrational when he becomes a
philosopher;--there are some who tell us that in its union with antique
art, the art of the followers of Giotto embraced death, and rotted away
ever after; there are others, more moderate but less logical, who would
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