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