. A natural fact is permanent and elemental, an
historical event is transient and superficial. Take one instance out of
a score. The rainbow links heaven and earth. Iris, then, to the
myth-making Greek, was Jove's messenger, intermediary between God and
Man. That is to incarnate a constant, natural fact. Plato afterwards,
making her a daughter of Thaumas, incarnated a fact, psychological, but
none the less constant, none the less natural. But, to say, as the
legend-loving Jew said, that Noah floated his ark over a drowning world
and secured for his posterity a standing covenant with God, who then and
once for all set his bow in the heavens; that is to indicate, somewhere,
in the dim backward and abysm of time, an historical event. The rainbow
is suffered as the skirt of the robe of Noah, who was an ancestor of
Israel. So the Judith poem may be a decorated event, or it may be the
barest history in a splendid epical setting: the point to remember is
that it cannot be, as legend, a subject for creative art. The artist, in
the language of Neo-Platonism, is a demiurge; he only of men can convert
dead things into life. And now we will go into the Uffizi.

Mr. Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has touched upon the feeling of
amaze most people have who look for the first time at Botticelli's
_Judith_ tripping smoothly and lightly over the hill-country, her
steadfast maid dogging with intent patient eyes every step she takes.
You say it is flippant, affected, pedantic. For answer, I refer you to
the sage himself, who, from his point of view--that painting may fairly
deal with a chapter of history--is perfectly right. The prevailing
strain of the story is the strength of weakness--_ex dulci fortitudo_,
to invert the old enigma. "O God, O my God, hear me also, a widow. Break
down their stateliness by the hand of a woman!" It is the refrain that
runs through the whole history of Israel, that reasonable complacency of
a little people in their God-fraught destiny. And, withal, a streak of
savage spite: that the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to
death. There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too. So "she smote twice
upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him,
and tumbled his body down from the bed." Ho! what a fate for the
emissary of the Great King. Wherefore, once more, the jubilant paradox,
"The Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman!" That is it: the
amazing, thrilling antithesis ins