opposed to the historical, fleeting) fact? It is murder. Judith's deed
was what the old Scots law incisively calls _slauchter_. It may be
glossed over as assassination or even execution--in fact, in Florence,
where Giuliano was soon to be taken off, it did not fail to be so
called: it remains, however, just murder. Botticelli, not shirking the
position at all, judged murder to be a natural fact, and its spirit or
essence swiftness and stealth. Chaucer, let us note, had been of the
same mind:

"The smyler with the knyf under his cloke,"

and so on, in lines not be matched for hasty and dreadful suggestion.
Swiftness and stealth, the ambush, the averted face and the sudden stab,
are the standing elements of murder: pare off all the rest, you come
down to that. Your staring looks, your blood, your "chirking," are
accidentals. They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase), but
the horror of sudden death is above them: a man may strangle with his
thoughts cleaner than with his pair of hands. And as "matter" is but the
stuff wherewith Nature works, and she is only insulted, not defied, when
we flout or mangle it, so it is against the high dignity of Art to
insist upon the carrion she must use. She will press, here the terror,
there the radiance, of essential fact; she will leave to us, seeing it
in her face, to add mentally the poor stage properties we have grown to
trust. No blood, if you please. Therefore, in Botticelli's _Judith_,
nothing but the essentials are insisted on; the rest we instantly
imagine, but it is not there to be sensed. The panel is in a tremor. So
swift and secret is Judith, so furtive the maid, we need no hurrying
horsemen to remind us of her oath,--"Hear me, and I will do a thing
which shall go throughout all generations to the children of our
nation." Sudden death in the air; nature has been outraged. But there is