if he had been, it were intolerable to cast his experience in bronze.
Donatello has essayed that thing impossible for sculpture, to arrest a
moment instead of denote a permanent attribute. Art is adjectival, is it
not, O Donatello? Her business is to qualify facts, to say what things
are, not to state them, to affirm that 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