cings, and urges on his steel-covered horse. He
visits even the best, even Luther in the Wartburg; but the good men open
their Bibles, cry "Vade retro!" and throw their inkstands at him,
showing themselves terrified and ruffled after the combat. And these
Germans of Luther's are disgustingly fond of blood and horrors: they
like to see the blood spirt from the decapitated trunk, to watch its
last contortions; they hammer with a will (in Duerer's "Passion") the
nails of the cross, they peel off strips of skin in the flagellation.
But then they can master all that; they can be pure, charitable; they
have gentleness for the hare and the rabbit, like Luther; they kneel
piously before the cross-bearing stag, like Saint Hubert. Not so the
Italians. They rarely or never paint horrors, or death, or abominations.
Their flagellated Christ, their arrow-riddled Sebastian, never writhe or
howl with pain; indeed, they suffer none. Judith, in Mantegna's print,
puts the head of Holophernes into her bag with the serenity of a muse;
and the head is quite clean, without loathsome drippings or torn
depending strings of muscle; unconvulsed, a sort of plaster cast. The
tragedy of Christ, the tragedy of Judith; the physical agency shadowing
the moral agony; the awfulness of victim and criminal--the whole tragic
meaning was unknown to the light and cheerful contemporaries of Ariosto,
the cold and cynical contemporaries of Machiavelli.

The tragic passion and imagination which, in the noble and grotesque
immaturity of the Middle Ages, had murmured confusedly in the popular
legends which gave to Ezzelin the Fiend as a father, and Death and Sin
as adversaries at dice; which had stammered awkwardly but grandly in the
school Latin of Mussato's tragedy of "Eccerinis;" which had wept and
stormed and imprecated and laughed for horror in the infinite
tragedy--pathetic, grand, and grotesque, like all great tragedy--of
Dante; this tragic passion and imagination, this sense of the horrible
and the terrible, had been forfeited by the Italy of the Renaissance,
lost with its sense of right and wrong. The Italian Renaissance, supreme
in the arts which require a subtle and strong perception of the
excellence of mere lines and colours and lights and shadows, which
demand unflinching judgment of material qualities; was condemned to
inferiority in the art which requires subtle and strong perception of
the excellence of human emotion and action; in the art which dem