of the early mythopoets, was not given to the men of the new world.  Yet they did what in them lay, with senses sophisticated by many centuries of subtlest warping, to replace the first, free joy of kinship with primeval things.  For the painters, far more than for the poets of the sixteenth century, it was possible to reproduce a thousand forms of beauty, each attesting to the delightfulness of physical existence, to the inalienable rights of natural desire, and to the participation of mankind in pleasures held in common by us with the powers of earth and sea and air.

It is wonderful to watch the blending of elder and of younger forces in this process.  The old gods lent a portion of their charm even to Christian mythology, and showered their beauty-bloom on saints who died renouncing them.  Sodoma’s Sebastian is but Hyacinth or Hylas, transpierced with arrows, so that pain and martyrdom add pathos to his poetry of youthfulness.  Lionardo’s S. John is a Faun of the forest, ivy-crowned and laughing, on whose lips the word “Repent” would be a gleeful paradox.  For the painters of the full Renaissance, Roman martyrs and Olympian deities—­the heroes of the Acta Sanctorum, and the heroes of Greek romance—­were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the beautiful and human.  What exquisite and evanescent fragrance was educed from these apparently diverse blossoms by their interminglement and fusion—­how the high-wrought sensibilities of the Christian were added to the clear and radiant fancies of the Greek, and how the frank sensuousness of the Pagan gave body and fulness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic faith—­remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces.  There are not a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from Hermaphroditus.  These will always find something to pain them in the art of the Renaissance.

Having co-ordinated the Christian and Pagan traditions in its work of beauty, painting could advance no farther.  The stock of its sustaining motives was exhausted.  A problem that preoccupied the minds of thinking men at this epoch was how to harmonise the two chief moments of human culture, the classical and the ecclesiastical.  Without being as conscious of their hostility as we are, men felt that the Pagan ideal was opposed to the Christian, and at the same time that a reconciliation had to be effected.  Each had been worked out separately; but both were needed for the modern synthesis.  All that aesthetic handling, in this region more precocious and more immediately fruitful than pure thought, could do towards mingling them, was done by the impartiality of the fine arts.  Painting, in the work of Raphael, accomplished a more vital harmony than philosophy in the writings of Pico and Ficino.  A new Catholicity, a cosmopolitan orthodoxy of the beautiful, was manifested in his pictures.  It lay outside his power, or