It is an indescribable hermaphroditic genius, the genius of carnal fascination, with outspread downy rose-plumed wings, and flaming bracelets on the full but sinewy arms, who kneels and lifts aloft great stones, smiling entreatingly to the sad, grey Christ seated beneath a rugged pent-house of the desert.  No one again but Tintoretto could have dashed the hot lights of that fiery sunset in such quivering flakes upon the golden flesh of Eve, half hidden among laurels, as she stretches forth the fruit of the Fall to shrinking Adam.  No one but Tintoretto, till we come to Blake, could have imagined yonder Jonah, summoned by the beck of God from the whale’s belly.  The monstrous fish rolls over in the ocean, blowing portentous vapour from his trump-shaped nostril.  The prophet’s beard descends upon his naked breast in hoary ringlets to the girdle.  He has forgotten the past peril of the deep, although the whale’s jaws yawn around him.  Between him and the outstretched finger of Jehovah calling him again to life, there runs a spark of unseen spiritual electricity.

To comprehend Tintoretto’s touch upon the pastoral idyll we must turn our steps to San Giorgio again, and pace those meadows by the running river in company with his Manna-Gatherers.  Or we may seek the Accademia, and notice how he here has varied the ’Temptation of Adam by Eve,’ choosing a less tragic motive of seduction than the one so powerfully rendered at San Rocco.  Or in the 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.