The fleshly Venetian school, with its feeling for colour and its somewhat pagan naturalism, much more successfully expressed man’s relations with Nature. It opens for us not a mere garden bower, but a huge factory of sensuous pleasure, whence ascend a thousand high-soaring aspirations and a penetrating effluence. Giorgione and Titian have wonderfully rendered the poetry of these love-filled horizons. From the smooth sea, or the foaming billows, or the flowery meadows depicted by their pencils, loud voices speak to us; and nothing but the old, imaginative mythology is wanted to personify all the unknowable and unknown unions whence we feel that the physical world is every day drawing its life and its overmastering thirst for renewal. The epicureans let themselves drift along aimlessly, resting on their oars,[220] and do no more than sing their little part, hardly audible in this colossal orchestration. The platonists, on the other hand, will not allow themselves to be seduced, and combat nature even while caressing her, preferring to keep her too much in subjection rather than to yield her too much obedience. Nature untamed or sensual would slay man, they think. She is a slave, meant to be subject to us, meditating revenge, and eager to suck or shed our blood; and she is set among the slaves. Finally, a word must be said about a life which held a place midway between country life and city life, namely, the life of the watering-places, both inland and by the sea. In France the fashion was difficult to introduce, good society preferring the large and comfortable existence of the country house; but to take the waters was all the rage in Italy. Except at church, there was no scene where people could better meet together, or take one another more seriously without hypocrisy. A public bath represented the ideal of equality. You go in, cut a figure, and come out again, and Jack is as good as his master. It is an open drawing-room, in which people who elsewhere are strangers to one another, acquaintances, and bosom friends all have one idea—to distil their soul drop by drop into the ears of kindred spirits, like the neighbouring spring.