they are. A sculptured _Judith_
was done not long afterwards, carved, as we shall see, with a burin on a
plate; and the man who so carved her was a painter.

[Illustration: JUDITH.
_Botticelli._]

Meantime, _pari passu_, almost, a painter who was a poet was trying his
hand; a man who knew his Bible and his mythology and was equally at home
with either. Perhaps it is not extravagant to say that you cannot be an
artist unless you are at home with mythology, unless mythology is the
swiftest and most direct expression of your being, so that you can be
measured by it as a man is known by his books, or a woman by her
clothes, her way of bowing, her amusements, or her charities. For
mythopoeia is just this, the incarnating the spirit of natural fact;
and the generic name of that power is Art. A kind of creation, a
clothing of essence in matter, an hypostatizing (if you will have it) of
an object of intuition within the folds of an object of sense. Lessing
did not dig so deep as his Greek Voltaire (whose "dazzling antithesis,"
after all, touches the root of the matter), for he did not see that
rhythmic extension in time or space, as the case may be, with all that
that implies--colour, value, proportion, all the convincing incidents of
form--is simply the mode of all arts, the thing with which Art's
substance must be interpenetrated, until the two form a whole, lovely,
golden, irresistible, and inevitable as Nature's pieces are. This
substance, as I have said, is the spirit of natural fact. And so
mythology is Art at its simplest and barest (where the bodily medium is
neither word, nor texture of stone, nor dye), the parent art from which
all the others were, so to speak, begotten by man's need. This much of
explanation, I am sorry to say, is necessary, before we turn to our
mytho-poet of Florence, to see what he made out of the story of Judith.

First of all, though, what has the story of Judith to do with mythology?
It is a legend, one of the finest of Semitic legends; and between legend
and myth there is as great a gulf as between Jew and Greek. I believe
there are no myths proper to Israel--I do not see how such magnificent
egoists could contract to the necessary state of awe--and I do not know
that there are any legends proper to Greece which are divorced from real
myths. For where a myth is the incarnation of the spirit of natural
fact, a legend is the embellishment of an historical event: a very
different thing