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.  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.