THE LILY 57 



traditions of Byzantine art still kept lilies at the 

 threshold of the Church till the Renaissance 

 came. It came like the spring, uncertainly at 

 first, with puffs and gusts and relapses, but every 

 day the atmosphere grew more genial, more hfe- 

 giving, till at last every branch of human thought 

 was alive and growing. The old early Christian 

 fear of beauty as a devil's lure was dying fast, and 

 as scholars and artists studied with new interest 

 the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome, the old 

 pagan joy of perfect form in art as in literature 

 revived once more. A representation of the 

 climax of the Christian tragedy could only be 

 an awful thing, but childhood and womanhood 

 had the right to beauty. The old Byzantine 

 panels of the Child-Christ and His Mother 

 were little more than a formula; the lines 

 and colour were not beautiful, though under- 

 stood to represent a thing of beauty. Now artists 

 and people required that she who, on the word 

 of Scripture, was ' the fairest among women,' ' 

 should be adequately presented, and the Church 

 gave consent. But it was understood that the 

 loveliness of the Virgin should be strictly the 



' Solomon's Song v. 9. 



