Artistic glory donned the conventional garb; no one had the preposterous notion of lamenting in Raphael the exquisite interpreter of Madonnas; what was deplored was the rival of Nature, the painter after the antique. “Raphael has resuscitated ancient Rome,” exclaims Castiglione, “he has recalled to life and glory that Rome of old, that corpse devoured by sword and fire and time.” That was the language of the courts, the ladies and the princes of the church; they had said all when they compared Raphael to the painters of the Augustan age (with whose works we are not very well acquainted), and when they remembered that the new Rome was only a degenerate if not a moribund Rome. We dwell at some length on a state of mind of such peculiarity and complexity as this, and from which contradictory deductions were sometimes drawn, because we find in it the only possible explanation of the movement about to arise in France. Platonism was an impression, an essence of free-thought, purely aesthetic, Christian in principle though sometimes pagan in its results, warranted platonic in label and origin though somewhat eclectic in composition; a mystic incense in the worship of Venus, a subtle aroma floating in the air both of churches and of theatres; breathed in assemblies in the city; dominating the effluences of Nature under the shadow of country villas; open a book, and one caught a breath of it; even painting and music strove to interpret it fittingly; at the dinners and dances and in the thousand avocations of fashionable life it filled the air; it exhaled as it were an immortal savour of orange blossoms; this was what they called a philosophy. The platonist spirit, as Plato understood it, was often exactly the opposite. The women and the poets whom Plato condemned,[145] the prelates who were the heads of Christendom, were its propagators. They were not greatly enamoured of Plato’s somewhat socialistic theories. They went to Plato as we go to Nice, to obtain a little sunshine and escape the incessant din of controversy. It is a profound saying of Plato that “those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to know, and not to have opinion only.” That is what men desired: they would have run after illusions and even errors if only they made for happiness. What is the good of pursuing mutabilities? The wise man clings to that which tranquillises. Others may wear themselves out with anxiety and restlessness, but he enjoys his life of placid ease; in the end they die and he dies, and there is nothing to choose between them.