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PATRINS
_TO WHICH IS ADDED_
An INQUIRENDO Into the WIT &
Other Good Parts of HIS LATE MAJESTY
KING CHARLES the Second
_WRITTEN BY_
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
[Illustration: SICUT LILIUM INTER SPINAS]
_BOSTON_
Printed for _Copeland and Day_
_69 Cornhill_ 1897
COPYRIGHT 1897 BY COPELAND AND DAY
[Inscription: M.R.D., from her affectionate
old friend who wrote it. 1897]
TO BLISS CARMAN
A _patrin_, according to _Romano Lavo-Lil_, is "a Gypsy trail:
handfuls of leaves or grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to
denote, to those behind, the way which they have taken." Well, these
wild dry whims are _patrins_ dropped now in the open for our tribe;
but particularly for you. They will greet you as you lazily come up,
and mean: Fare on, and good luck love you to the end! On each have I
put the date of its writing, as one might make memoranda of little
leisurely adventures in prolonged fair weather; and you will read, in
between and all along, a record of pleasant lonely paths never very
far from your own, biggest of Romanys! in the thought-country of our
common youth.
Ingraham Hill, South Thomaston, Maine,
October 19, 1896.
Contents
Page
On the Rabid _versus_ the Harmless Scholar 3
The Great Playground 13
On the Ethics of Descent 29
Some Impressions from the Tudor Exhibition 39
On the Delights of an Incognito 63
The Puppy: A Portrait 73
On Dying Considered as a Dramatic Situation 83
A Bitter Complaint of the Ungentle Reader 99
Animum non Coelum 109
The Precept of Peace 117
On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket 131
Reminiscences of a Fine Gentleman 139
Irish 153
An Open Letter to the Moon 169
The Under Dog 181
Quiet London 191
The Captives 205
On Teaching One's Grandmother How to Suck Eggs 223
Wilful Sadness in Literature 233
An Inquirendo into the Wit and Other Good Parts
of His Late Majesty, King Charles the Second 247
ON THE RABID _VERSUS_ THE HARMLESS SCHOLAR
A PHILOSOPHER now living, and too deserving for any fate but choice
private oblivion, was in Paris, for the first time, a dozen years
ago; and having seen and heard there, in the shops, parks, and
omnibus stations, much more baby than he found pleasing, he remarked,
upon his return, that it was a great pity the French, who are so in
love with system, had never seen their way to shutting up everything
under ten years of age! Now, that was the remark of an artist in
human affairs, and may provoke a number of analogies. What is in the
making is not a public spectacle. It ought to be considered very
outrageous, on the death of a painter or a poet, to exhibit those
rough first drafts, which he, living, had the acumen to conceal.
And if, to an impartial eye, in a foreign city, native innocents
seem too aggressively to the fore, why should not the seclusion
desired for them be visited a thousandfold upon the heads, let us
say, of students, who are also in a crude transitional state, and
undergoing a growth much more distressing to a sensitive observer
than the physical? Youth is the most inspiring thing on earth, but
not the best to let loose, especially while it carries swaggeringly
that most dangerous of all blunderbusses, knowledge at half-cock.
There is, indeed, no more melancholy condition than that of healthy
boys scowling over books, in an eternal protest against their father
Adam's fall from a state of relative omniscience. Sir Philip Sidney
thought it was "a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse that a man
should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue!" The throes of
education are as degrading and demoralizing as a hanging, and, when
the millennium sets in, will be as carefully screened from the laity.
Around the master and the pupil will be reared a portly and decorous
Chinese wall, which shall pen within their proper precincts the din
of _hic, hæc, hoc_, and the steam of suppers sacrificed to Pallas.
The more noxious variety of student, however, is not young. He is
"in the midway of this our mortal life"; he is fearfully foraging,
with intent to found and govern an academy; he runs in squads after
Anglo-Saxon or that blatant beast, Comparative Mythology; he stops
you on 'change to ask if one has not good grounds for believing that
there was such a person as Pope Joan. He can never let well enough
alone. Heine must be translated and Junius must be identified. The
abodes of hereditary scholars are depopulated by the red flag of
the _nouveau instruit_. He infests every civilized country; the
army-worm is nothing to him. He has either lacked early discipline
altogether, or gets tainted, late in life, with the notion that
he has never shown sufficiently how intellectual he really is. In
every contemplative-looking person he sees a worthy victim, and
his kindling eye, as he bears down upon you, precludes escape: he
can achieve no peace unless he is driving you mad with all which
you fondly dreamed you had left behind in old S.'s accursed
lecture-room. You may commend to him in vain the reminder which
Erasmus left for the big-wigs, that it is the quality of what you
know which tells, and never its quantity. It is inconceivable to him
that you should shut your impious teeth against First Principles,
and fear greatly to displace in yourself the illiteracies you have
painfully acquired.
Judge, then, if the learner of this type (and in a bitterer degree,
the learneress) could but be safely cloistered, how much simpler
would become the whole problem of living! How profoundly would
it benefit both society and himself could the formationary mind,
destined, as like as not, to no ultimate development, be sequestered
by legal statute in one imperative limbo, along with babes, lovers,
and training athletes! _Quicquid ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi._
For the true scholar's sign-manual is not the midnight lamp on a
folio. He knows; he is baked through; all superfluous effort and
energy are over for him. To converse consumedly upon the weather,
and compare notes as to "whether it is likely to hold up for
to-morrow,"--this, says Hazlitt, "is the end and privilege of a life
of study." Secretly, decently, pleasantly, has he acquired his mental
stock; insensibly he diffuses, not always knowledge, but sometimes
the more needful scorn of knowledge. Among folk who break their
worthy heads indoors over Mr. Browning and Madame Blavatsky, he moves
cheerful, incurious, and free, on glorious good terms with arts and
crafts for which he has no use, with extraneous languages which he
will never pursue, with vague Muses impossible to invite to dinner.
He is strictly non-educational:
"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down."
He loathes information and the givers and takers thereof. Like Mr.
Lang, he laments bitterly that Oxford is now a place where many
things are being learned and taught with great vigor. The main
business to him is to live gracefully, without mental passion, and to
get off alone into a corner for an affectionate view of creation. A
mystery serves his turn better than a history. It is to be remembered
that had the Rev. Laurence Sterne gone to gaze upon the spandrils
of Rouen Cathedral, we should all have lost the _fille de chambre_,
the dead ass, and Maria by the brookside. Any one of these is worth
more than hieroglyphics; but who is to attain that insight that these
are so, except the man of culture, who has the courage to forget at
times even his sole science, and fall back with delight upon a choice
assortment of ignorances?
The scholar's own research, from his cradle, clothes him in privacy;
nor will he ever invade the privacy of others. It is not with a light
heart that he contemplates the kindergarten system. He himself,
holding his tongue, and fleeing from Junius and Pope Joan, from cubic
roots and the boundaries of Hindostan, from the delicate difference
between the idiom of Maeterlinck and that of Ollendorff, must be an
evil sight to Chautauquans, albeit approved of the angels. He has
little to utter which will sound wise, the full-grown, finished soul!
If he had, he would of his own volition seek a cell in that asylum
for protoplasms, which we have made bold to recommend.
The truth is, very few can be trusted with an education. In the
old days, while this was a faith, boredom and nervous prostration
were not common, and social conditions were undeniably picturesque.
Then, as now, quiet was the zenith of power: the mellow mind was
unexcursive and shy. Then, as now, though young clerical Masters
of Arts went staggering abroad with heads lolling like Sisyphus'
stone, the ideal worth and weight grew "lightly as a flower." Sweetly
wrote the good Sprat of his famous friend Cowley: "His learning sat
exceedingly close and handsomely upon him: it was not embossed on
his mind, but enamelled." The best to be said of any knowing one
among us, is that he does not readily show what deeps are in him;
that he is unformidable, and reminds whomever he meets of a distant
or deceased uncle. Initiation into noble facts has not ruined him
for this world nor the other. It was a beautiful brag which James
Howell, on his first going beyond sea, March the first, in the year
sixteen hundred and eighteen, made to his father. He gives thanks
for "that most indulgent and costly Care you have been pleased, in
so extraordinary a manner, to have had of my Breeding, (tho' but one
child of Fifteen) by placing me in a choice Methodical School so far
distant from your dwelling, under a Learned (tho' Lashing) Master;
and by transplanting me thence to Oxford to be graduated; and so
holding me still up by the chin, until I could swim without Bladders.
This patrimony of liberal Education you have been pleased to endow
me withal, I now carry along with me abroad as a sure inseparable
Treasure; nor do I feel it any burden or incumbrance unto me at all!"
There, in the closing phrase, spoke the post-Elizabethan pluck.
Marry, any man does well since, who can describe the aggregated
agonies of his brain as _no incumbrance_, as less, indeed, than
a wife and posterity! To have come to this is to have earned the
freedom of cities, and to sink the schoolmaster as if he had never
been.
1889.
THE GREAT PLAYGROUND
IT has seemed to many thoughtful readers, within the last fifty or
sixty years, that Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations_ is altogether
mistaken in its assumption that the open-air world is dearer to the
child than to the man: or that the Heaven which so easily fuses with
it in our idea lies nearer to the former than to the latter. Some
abnormally perceptive child (like the infant W.W. himself) may have
a clear sense of "glory in the grass, of splendor in the flower."
But the appreciation of natural objects is infinitely stronger, let
us say, in the babe of thirty; and so is even the appreciation of
the diversions which they provide. Were it not for the prospects of
unforeseen and adventurous company abroad, the child prefers to play
in the shed. But the post-meridian child, who is not a "grown-up,"
but only a giant, desires "the house not made with hands": he has a
delicate madness in his blood, the moment he breathes wild air.
Scipio and Laelius cannot keep, to save them, from stone-skipping on
the strand, though they have come abroad for purposes of political
conversation. Poets and bookmen are famous escapers of this sort.
Surrey shooting his toy arrows at lighted windows; Shelley sailing
his leaves and bank-notes on the Hampstead ponds; Dr. Johnson, of
all persons, rolling down the fragrant Lincolnshire hills; Elizabeth
Inchbald ("a beauty and a virtue," as her epitaph at Kensington
prettily says) lifting knockers on April evenings and running away,
for the innocent deviltry of it;--these have discovered the fun and
the solace of out-of-doors at a stroke, and with a conscious rapture
impossible to their juniors. Master Robin Hood, Earl of Huntingdon,
probably kept to his perfectly exemplary brigandage because he
liked the "shaws shene," and objected to going home at nightfall.
No child ever tastes certain romantic joys which come of intimacies
with creation. That he may write a letter upon birchbark, that he
may eat a mushroom from the broken elm-trunk and drink the blood
of the maple, that he may woo a squirrel from the oak, a frog from
the marsh, or even a twelve-tined buck from his fastness, to be
caressed and fed, strikes him as an experiment, not as an honor. It
will not do to say that the worship of the natural world is an adult
passion: it is quite the contrary; but only certain adults exemplify
it. Coleridge, in the _Biographia Litteraria_, has a very beautiful
theory, and a profoundly true one. "To carry on the feelings of
childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of
wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day, for perhaps
forty years, have made familiar:
"'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,
And man and woman,--'
this is the character and privilege of genius." The genuine
faun-heart is the child conscious and retrieved, the child by law
established in happy natures. I knew one boy of six who met an ugly
gypsy in a lane, and who, on being asked whether he would like to
go and live with her, replied in Americanese, with slow-breathed
transports: "Oh-ee, yup!" In his mind was an instant vision of a bed
suspended among leaves; and the clatter and glitter of the sacred
leaves had nearly stolen his soul away. But he was not a common boy.
His nurse being close behind, he was providentially saved, that time,
to be abducted later by much more prosaic influences. Nor has the
love of Nature, of late so laboriously instilled into the young,
thanks to Froebel's impetus, made much progress among its small
supposed votaries. The examination-papers, which, in a lustier age,
began with--"Who dragged Which around the walls of What?" now stoop
to other essentials:
"The wood-spurge has a cup of three."
Yet unless misled by the tender cant of their elders, even the modern
Master and Missy would rather find and examine the gas-metre than the
wood-spurge.
In his best estate, the out-of-doorling hunts not, neither fishes: he
simply moves or sits, in eternal amalgamation with the eternal: an
enchanted toper of life and death, one with all that has ever been,
or shall ever be, convinced that "there is a piece of divinity in us
which is older than the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun."
He is generally silent, because his sincere speech cannot be what
we call sane. No one, however, who is truly content in the sought
presence of Nature, can be sure that it is she who gives him all, or
even most, of his comfort. It is only the poetic fashion to say so.
It is at least doubtful if Nature be not, in her last exquisiteness,
for the man already independent of her. There are those who may
accost her, not as a petitioner, but as one sovereign to another in
a congress of the Powers. Moral poise is the true passport to her
favor, not a fine eye for "the leopard-colored trees" in late autumn,
nor an ear for the bold diapasons of the surge. The man of vanities
and ambitions and agitated fears may as well go to the football game:
for the woods are cold to him. The lover, indeed, is notoriously
rural while his fit lasts; he has been known to float into a
mosquito-marsh, obliviously reading _Tristram of Lyonnesse_. But
so oblique a cult as his can count for nothing with the Mother. Her
favorite spite is to deepen melancholy, as her prayer and purpose are
to enhance joy. Not primary in her functions, she waits upon man's
anterior dispositions, and gives her delights, as Fortuna is said
to do, to the indifferent. But he shall not be indifferent after:
her praise drips, honey-bright, from his lip. If any question him,
remembering Vaughan's
"O tell me whence that joy doth spring
Whose diet is divine and fair,
Which wears Heaven like a bridal ring?"
he may say that it is the possessing love of Nature which makes his
day so rich. She meanwhile, could put a gloss upon that plausible
text. The order and peace in him had first subjugated her terrible
heart.
No babe, indeed, is born other than wild: he springs up on the
farther border of civilization. Happy for him, if he can find his
way back, with waking choice, even once a year, in his maturity, to
recapture the perfect condition, and subject to it his own developed
faculties. How many have suffered the pure epic homesickness, the
longing for decivilization, which has drawn them "to discover islands
far away," or to roam without purpose at all, like Alastor and
the Scholar Gypsy! Observe, that in all tradition the courtesies
of the countryside are showered on the race of the deliberately
glad. Magdalen of Pazzi, alone in the cloister-garden, rapturously
catching up the roses to her face, and extolling Him who made them
fair, signifies much: not only that she was dowered with the keen
perception of beauty,--hardly that at all; but that she was at the
apex of moral sanity, which has as much right to be passionate with
beauty as the sun itself. It is inconceivable that barbarians should
admire the sunset: though it is not inconceivable that barbarians in
good society should say that they do so. For one of the earmarks of
our latter-day culture is this patronal relish of the works of the
Most High. Literature is over-ballasted with "descriptive passages,"
which the reader skips, but which no self-respecting author can
afford to do without. We talk incessantly of the hills and the
sea, and the flora and fauna thereof; and insolently take it for
granted that we alone have arrived at the proper inwardness of these
subjects. In naught have we more wronged the feudal ages than in
denying to them an intimate knowledge and love of scenic detail. One
glance at their cathedral capitals, at leaves, rose-haws, antlers,
cobwebs, and shells, in stone carven since the tenth century, should
have been corrective of that foolish depreciation of a people far
nearer to the heart of things than we. The common dislike of gypsies
is another revelation of jealousy: for we are not the Mother's
favored children. Us she consigns to starched linen, and roofs,
retorts of carbonic acid gas: would we sleep again on her naked
breast, we come home to endure gibes, and the sniffles.
Well may the "sylvan" (a dear Elizabethan word gone into the
dust-heap) feel that he is manumitted and exempt. He has no occasion
to grow up. He looks with affectionate strangeness on his life past,
as on his life to come, thinking it a solecism to anticipate decay
where hitherto no decay has been, or where indeed, if it have been,
he "has had the wit never to know it." The Heaven which lies around
us in our infancy is always there afterwards, waiting in vain, for
the most part, for reciprocations. Symbolisms, sacraments, abound
in the natural world, and to avail oneself of them is to regain
and retain fleeting good, and to defy the time-dragon's tooth with
a smile as of immortality. Devotion to a blackberry pasture and a
swimming-pool confers youth on the devotee, provided he has not to
pick fruit nor rescue ribald little boys for a living. A travelled
man, a man of the world, has a ripe expert look: one says of him,
admiring his talk and his manners, that he bears his age with grace.
But nothing is so ageless as a sailor: he can bear his age neither
well nor ill, for the obvious reason. In his hard cheek and blue
eye are innocence, readiness, zest, taciturnity, daring, shyness,
truth: all the fine wild qualities which "they that sit in parlors
never dream of." It is not a physiological fact alone, that for
health's sake you must be in league with the open. Whoever clings to
it for love, is known by his superior simplicity and balance. Many
a coast-guardsman, or scout in the Canadian forest, has achieved
the complete power which is mistakenly supposed to come, like an
imposition of hands, upon the educated; and he gets this inestimable
accolade, mark you, merely by smelling sea-kelp and sassafras, and
welcoming a rainstorm as a pleasant sort of fellow: by the exercise
of sheer natural piety, whose processes turn about and hit back by
keeping him young. Would you perpetrate an elfin joke on such a one,
present him with a calendar: the urban and domestic accuser. To
register time, and consult its phases scientifically, is to give it
a deplorable advantage over you. A brook scoffs at birthdays: and
many a violet errs in chronology, and sidles forth at Martinmas. It
is the shepherd-boy in the _Arcadia_ who "pipes as if he should never
grow old": marry, it is not anybody in a theatre orchestra! Which,
think you, died with her girlhood yet unconsumed within her, Madame
Récamier or the Nut-brown Maid? The victory is not with cosmetics.
To the soirées of the hermit thrush, tan is your only wear. The
"sylvan" is anti-chronological. He who comes close to the heart-beat
of progress and dissolution in the wilderness, the vicissitudes of
the vegetable world, must feel that, save in an allegory, these
things are not for him: they go under him as a swimmer's wave.
"Change upon change: yet one change cries out to another, like the
alternate seraphim, in praise and glory of their Maker." The human
atom gets into the mood of the according leaf, caring not how long
it has hung there, how soon it may fall. God's will, in short, is
nowhere so plain and acceptable as on a lonely stretch of moor or
water. Who can feel it so keenly in the town? The town has never
allowed man to guess his superiority to it: creature of his own
exaggerations, it cows him, and compels him to remember, in his
unrest, that he is no longer a spirit, no longer a child.
At Hampton Court, in the Great Hall, in the right lower corner of the
rich pagan borderings of one of the Old Testament tapestries (that of
the Circumcision of Isaac), there is a tiny delicate faded figure of
a lad, all in soft duns and dusty golds. He wears curious sandals;
a green chaplet is on his brows; a hare hangs over his shoulder;
he carries a stocked quiver, and a spear. His look is one of sweet
sensuous idleness and delight. He is centuries old, but to him the
same sun is shining in the aromatic alleys of the forest. He does
not know that there is a very fine Perpendicular roof over him, and
he has never noticed the kings and their courts who have been blown
away like smoke from before his path. The parent and the schoolmaster
who sought him have also fallen to dust. But for him the hunt and the
moist morning: for him the immortal pastoral life. We used to see him
often, and we saw him once again, after a long interval. His charm
was all that it had ever been: but at the encounter, he brought hot
tears of envy to the eyes. All those years, those years of ours and
the world's, wasted in prison on casuist industries, he had been at
large with the wind, he had been playing! How some of us have always
meant to do just that for ever, and that only! for why not do the
sole thing one can do perfectly? But an indoor demon, one Duty,
a measly Eden-debarring angel armed with platitudes, has somehow
clogged our career. Were it not for a cloud of responsibilities,
a downpour of Things to Do, one might be ever at the other side
of window-panes, and see Pan twelve hours a day. Ah, little Vita
Silvestris! Blamelessly may we feel that you have found the way, and
that we have missed it, growing gray at the silly desk, and sure
only of this: that presently we shall indeed find ourselves inside
sycamore planks, so that all the dryads in their boles, watching our
very best approximation to their coveted estate, shall smile to see.
But thereafter, at least, and for good, we are where we belong, "_sub
dio_, under the canopy of Heaven," and ready for the elemental game.
1895.
ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT
IT will never do for a biographer to look too narrowly into his
hero's genealogy; for speculation is at all times fatal to an
accepted pedigree. Every man is presumably deduced from male and
female, from generation to generation; and from these only. There
is more of superstition than of science in this mode of reckoning:
it has no great philosophic bearing, and it is very illiberal. The
truth is, we belong, from the beginning, to many masters, and are
unspeakably beholden to the forming hands of the phenomena of the
universe, rather than to the ties of blood. What really makes one
live, gives him his charter of rights, and clinches for him the
significance without which he might as well be unborn, is, often
enough, no human agency at all. Where it happens to be human, it
is glorious and attested: "I owe more to Philip, my father, than to
Aristotle, my preceptor."
But it may be debated that the climbing spider was considerably
more to her appointed observer, Robert Bruce, than his own father;
inasmuch as she alone put heart into his body, and revivified him
into the doer whose deeds we know. A moral relation like that, at
the critical moment, establishes the ineffable bond; annuls, as it
were, every cause but the First, whereby the lesser causes arise;
and makes men over new. No mere soldiering Bruce, but the spider's
Bruce, the victor of Scotland; no mere Newton, but the dedicated
heir of the falling apple and her laws; no mere young rhetorician of
Carthage, but Austin the saint, perfected by the _Tolle, lege_, from
Heaven. Many a word, many an event, has so, in the fullest sense,
started a career, and set up a sort of paternity and authority over
the soul. We are all "under influence," both of the natural and the
supernatural kingdom. Far from being the domestic product we take
ourselves to be, we are strangely begotten of the unacknowledged,
the fortuitous, and the impossible; we lead lives of astonishing
adventure, consort with eternity, and owe the thing we are to
the most trivial things we touch. We are poor relations of every
conceivable circumstance, alike of our sister the Feudal System, and
of our sister the rainbow. We are interwoven, ages before our birth,
and again and again after, with what we are pleased to call our
accidents and our fates.
"For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God."
There is real dutifulness in the recognition of all this by the
science of heraldry; for heraldry exists but to commemorate some
personal contact with marvels, and a generative occasion without
which the race would not be itself; as if to reprove the boy who
believes himself descended from Sir Magnifico, whose big shield hangs
in the hall, and from nothing else in particular. Sir Magnifico's
cat may, in reality, account for the continuity of the house; and
a spindle or a vesper-bell come to the front in the history of its
averted perils, and get handsomely quartered upon the baronial arms.
But heraldry avails very little; for she was always limited to the
minority, and being old, has ceased to watch to-day and design for
to-morrow, as she was wont. The best she can do is to suggest how it
depends upon trifles and interferences whether we get here at all,
or whether we cut a figure in the crowd; and how foolish it is in us
to scorn anything that happens. The road is long from Adam to his
present estimable and innumerable brood, and our past has been full
of rescuing events. What has preserved us, under Providence, in the
successive persons of our progenitors? Clearly, more items than are
easily numbered, or could be set down in symbols and devices on the
escutcheon: so that it is well to maintain an attitude of great and
general deference toward creation at large, for fear of not honoring
our father and our mother.
Stradella's kinsfolk yet in Italy may know, or may not know, the hymn
which once saved his life. They may pass over the hymn as a tiresome
affair, necessary on holy-days, or they may look upon it as a lucky
omen--how lucky!--for them. But what they ought to do is to pay it
excessive ancestral honors; and canon law, the wide world over, would
acquit them of the idolatry. Music, indeed, has been potent, first
and last, in the crises of men. It becomes a factor of enormous
importance in more than one history, if you search for it. Never
do some of us hear that plaintive old song of Locke's, _My Lodging
is on the Cold Ground_, without thinking of James Radcliffe, third
Earl of Derwentwater, who had apparently no connection with it, but
whom one finds himself regarding as its very harmony forwarded into
another age, like Arethusa stream returned from underground. Fresh
from the composer's meditations, it was sung on the stage by the
comely Moll Davies (said to be daughter to the Earl of Berkshire),
before the notorious Persian person who then graced the English
throne, and who was struck immediately with an excellence new as
Locke's, and hardly of a contrapuntal nature. Time conjured up, from
the bonnie comedian and the bad king, the innocent figure of a girl,
Mary, who duly married a great noble, and vanished into history as
the early-dying mother of the most stainless knight outside of a
romance. Derwentwater was grandson, indeed, to vagabonds; but was
he not great-grandson to the sweetest of the fine arts? His present
representative, Lord Petre, may not openly refer one branch of his
lineage to an origin which might seem more frankly fabulous than any
divine descent of the ancients. At any rate, here is music of the
seventeenth century, going its operative channel through imperfect
humanity, and upspringing in the wild days of the Jacobite '15, into
corporate beauty again: into a young life, dowered to the full with
the strange winning charm of the Stuarts, and with a halo about it
which they can scarcely boast. And therefore, reverting to "the
source and spring of things," one is free to cry: "Well done, Master
Matthew Locke, in F minor!" which is indeed reputed by tradition,
the right heroic key. But who, writing of the darling of the legends
of the North, will be bold enough to set _My Lodging is on the Cold
Ground_ in full song, on his genealogical tree? James the First and
Charles the First will be sure to show up there, and so will a
number of other Britons not especially germane to the matter. This
is how we forge pedigrees, in our blunt literal way, skipping over
the vital forces, and laboriously reckoning the mediums and the
tools of our own species. Any hard-headed encyclopedia will accredit
an advocate of Ajaccio and his wife Letitia with the introduction
into the nineteenth century of its most amazing man; but to William
Hazlitt, an expert among paradoxes, Bonaparte was "the child and
champion" of the Revolution.
1892.
SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM THE TUDOR EXHIBITION
THE New Gallery on Regent Street, filled, at this time last year,
with the memories of the Stuarts and with the graded grace of
Vandyke and Lely, has taken a step backward into history to show us
a hardier and less enchanting society. The luckless, weak, romantic
race are everlastingly dear, as Chopin cleverly said of his own
music, to "the _cognoscenti_ and the poets." But this present plunge
into the sixteenth century is excellent cold water. The Stuarts
are myths to these hard facts of Tudors, these strong-minded and
dominant familiars, who destroyed, annexed, altered, and were
deposed from nothing except from the Lord Pope's opinion of some of
them. Everything here is wide-awake, matter-of-course, bracing: the
spectator's mind tempers itself to the indicative present of Queen
Bess, and
"to trampling horses' feet,
More oft than to a chamber melody."
The men and women on the walls are neither sophisticated nor complex.
They are vehement in oath as in compliment, and hit at Fate straight
from the shoulder. The best among them has a certain fierce zest
of habit. Sidney and Sir Thomas More, each in his stainless soul,
would have put the other in the pillory for blunders of piety. And
such characters, with their stormy circumstance, their distinct
homogeneous look and mien, get to be fully understood. Nobody
pretends to know the involutions of James the Second; but bluff
Hal is no riddle. Wolsey and Drake, Archbishop Parker and Anne
Boleyn, even Shakespeare, are more comprehensible units than, say,
Dr. Donne, or the Duke of Monmouth. They stand in the red morning
light, tangible as trees. They are the bread-and-cheese realities who
have made English literature, English policy and manners, English
religion. The heartbreak for Essex; that other heartbreak for Calais;
Wyatt's succoring cat; Raleigh's cloak in the mud; Sidney's cup or
water;--
"Battle nor song can from oblivion save,
But Fame upon a white deed loves to build:
From out that cup of water Sidney gave,
Not one drop has been spilled!"
Christina of Milan's reply to her suitor, the asking and axeing
monarch: "Had I a second head in reserve, sire, I might dare to
become your wife;"--all these are nursery tales, the very fibre of
our earliest memory, as of our adult speculation. Old friends, these
painted folk! You look at them on canvases which Evelyn admired
at Weybridge; which Pepys longed to buy; to which Horace Walpole
provided a date and a name; which brushed Ben Jonson and Carew
passing towards the masques of Whitehall; which have seen change
and the shadow of change, and are themselves ever richer for the
remembered eyes which have looked up at them, during three hundred
years.
As you glance from the entrance of the New Gallery, this London
January of 1890, the first thing to take the eye is a loan from
Hampton Court, the full-length of the pioneer poet, Henry Howard,
Earl of Surrey: a young powerful figure all in red, poised on a
hill-top above a vexed white-and-blue sky. He steps forward there,
as if in dramatic confirmation of the little known of his proud,
obstinate, disinterested career, straight through love, scholarship,
adventure, to the Tower axe. One can hardly look at this stripling,
with his jewelled cap's white blown feather, and hands laid airily
but meaningly on hip and hilt, without remembering the most jocose
and off-hand of his verses, written in the spring:
"When I felt the air so pleasant round about,
Lord! to myself how glad I was that I had gotten out."
This is No. 73, the authorship of it hanging undetermined between
Holbein and Gwillim Stretes. No. 51, a famous and much-reproduced
portrait of Surrey under an archway, is certainly Stretes'; but
you covet this other for "Hans the Younger." Its vistas are not
uncharacteristic of him; and what a daring bugle-blast of color it
is! Masterfully does it light the room, and call you into the Tudor
company, and make you glad, likewise, that you have "gotten out." It
is great so to find a certain Howard, which is a possible Holbein,
the key-note of this exhibition. And the race crops out on the walls
every here and there, making trouble in your thoughts, as once in
thoughts long quieted. They are shown thus contemporaneously, from
"Jocky of Norfolk" to the Philip who died for conscience' sake in the
Beauchamp Tower; and wherever they are, there is a free wind, a rebel
sunshine. Roam about a little; and you return with gratification to
these lean, tense, greyhound personalities. The visitor wearies of
the _Fidei Defensor_, the much-connected-by-marriage, and of the
kinsmen and servants, the Brandons and Cromwells, who flatter him by
fat approximate resemblance, and of the same dimly-recurrent aspect
in the timid burgess noblewomen of the hour; so that his first and
last impressions are fain to spring from the spectacle of these
firm-chinned soldierly Howards, thin and bright as their own swords,
with the conscious look of gentlemen among cads. From the dazzle of
history it is a bit difficult, at first, to turn the inward eye upon
art alone. But it is Hans Holbein whom we have really come to see.
And he is here in his plenary pomp: in chalk drawings, miniatures in
hone-stone, burnt wood, and enamel, and in easel-pictures of every
sort.
No. 42, in the West Gallery, is an immense cartoon with outlines
pricked, made for a fresco in the old Whitehall, comprising a
life-sized group of the two Henries and their respective queens, the
estate of only one of whom, had, as the modern world knows, finality.
It dates from the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Henry the
Eighth. His admirable housekeeper of a father, long dead, is, as in
Lord Braye's comely picture (No. 33), a white-haired, mild, austerely
gracious presence, at physical variance, at every point, from his
burly heir. The latter stands _à califourchon_, well to the front,
his arms akimbo: a figure familiar to us as the alphabet, and with
the force and value of spoken truth. There are many authentic Holbein
portraits of the King in this collection, and their unanimity is
without parallel. In the masterpiece labelled No. 126, Waagen "finds
a brutal egotism, an obstinacy and a harshness of feeling such as I
have never yet seen in any human countenance. In the eyes, too, there
is the suspicious watchfulness of a wild beast; so that I became
quite uncomfortable from looking at it." Holbein's greedy instinct
for form wreaks itself on Henry's characteristic contours: everywhere
you recognize the puffy flesh, the full jaw and beady eyes, the
level close-shaven head; and, more than all, the round, protuberant,
malformed chin, like an onion set in the thin growth of carroty
beard. Other artists slur over that ugly little chin, but not the man
from Augsburg. Hardly do the elaborations of embroidered doublets and
jewelled surcoats with barrel sleeves, laughably misplaced on this
hogshead Majesty, give the great court-painter such easy pleasure in
the handling. Yet as Vandyke,
"Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,"
is prone to temper the commonplace to his chivalrous ideals; as
Sir Joshua "sees partially, slightly, tenderly, catches the flying
lights of things, the momentary glooms, paints also partially,
tenderly, never with half his strength,"--so here is one too much
bent on his accuracy and his reporter's conscience. Nobody who
has seen these thirty or more versions of the hero of matrimony
according to Holbein, will ever forget his power in clinching an
impression. High, low, east, west, straddles the royal Harry: a
magnificent piece of pork, arrayed like Solomon in all his glory.
There is no contradiction from first to last; the testimony is not
patched. No historiographer, in face of them, has any option to
think of Henry but as Holbein's brush thought of him. Mr. Froude is
hereby checkmated: his idol crumbles. The perfectly square florid
countenance, the little crowded features, the indomitable leer under
the flat hat and feather, the expanding velvets, the sturdy calves
of which their owner was vain, the whole air of an aggressive and
successful personality,--these are your statistics, "State papers,"
as Hazlitt once happily called them. They do not allege; they
convict. This, they seem to say, is he who celebrated his wedding on
his old love's burial-day, who sacrificed the truest liegemen in his
islands, and who made war on the architecture of monastic England in
a maintained fit of crazy and vulgar spite. The ornate No. 55 is also
a terrific "human document." Yet the special plea, for all that, is
not fair; it is only as fair as Holbein can make it. He had not the
centrifugal mind. To look before and after is not his wont. The royal
sitter is impeached unjustly.
"Tell Isabel the Queen I looked not thus,
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France."
Was this the mirror of chivalry in his youth? the handsome Henry
of joust and debate, who walked by choice with thinking men, in an
atmosphere of Christian statecraft and the fine arts? he who wrote
devotional essays, and composed winning music? If so, that Henry has
no survival here. Something of him must have lingered about the later
aspect of the tyrant King, as good is sure to do wherever its shrine
has been; but Holbein failed (for we cannot think he refused) to bear
it witness.
It is pleasant to find Holbein himself looking from No. 52: a noble
portrait, in distemper, from his own hand, in his prime. It makes
one revert, however, to the prior Holbein, also done by himself, now
in the Museum at Basle: a sweet sketch, which, judged by the face
alone, could instantly be relegated to the era where it belongs, that
of the dawn of humanism. There, the straight hair has yet a soft
ring or two over the brow; the mouth is sensitive, but ironic; the
young neck full of power; the eyebrows diversely arched, as if in a
passing press of thought; the whole mien already suggests, as Woltman
says, "seriousness and mental superiority." This picture before us is
very splendid, but it is not so reassuring. Holbein's body-color at
Berlin, of the chunk-headed, thick-bearded, small-eyed Englishman,--a
miracle of a drawing,--may be accepted as the crass original John
Bull. With all manner of exception in favor of the painter, Holbein
was rather that sort of a man. His work had the warrant of his
genius: what he saw was what his whole habit fitted him to see. Each
century has its own casts of physiognomy, greatly accentuated once
by the passive individuality, now, alas, vanished, of costume.
There seem to have been, in Holbein's day, but two physical values:
the grave, alert, "sunnily-ascetic" men, who were dissatisfied with
the time; and the able bold time-servers, who kept their flesh upon
them, and their peace. Henry himself, at his best, was the second
type, as Erasmus was the first. It is with a sigh of relief that one
turns from the imperious presence which chases you through the West
Gallery, and "lards the lean earth as he walks along," to confront,
in another room, the memorials of his little son.
Of these, there are some sixteen portraits, exclusive of the
drawings, and five of them are from Holbein's hand. The half-length
lent by the Earl of Yarborough, No. 174, shows a charming child with
a great hat tied under his chin; No. 182, Lord Petre's, is a spirited
bust on a misty green ground; in No. 190, a gem of the first water,
belonging to the Earl of Denbigh's collection, the Prince stands,
lovely as a lily, habited in white and cloth-of-gold, with a long
fur-lined crimson surcoat, his slender beautifully-modelled hand
closed on a dagger. The family beauty begins and ends with Edward,
in his grave at sixteen; there is no Edward, by Holbein, older than
six. As usual, the master draws you from his own art to the root
of the thing before you, even as he drew Ruskin from counting his
skeleton's clacking ribs in the Dance of Death: and forthwith you
begin speculating on the moral qualities of the royal bud, "the
boy-patron of boys." There is no denying that he looks like Another.
Yes, he is very Henry-the-Eighthy! when you study him at short range.
And he had a unique talent, you suddenly remember, for signing the
death-warrants of uncles. Princess Mary, from the same hand, is
decorously dressed; she has flat hair and brown eyes. Acid and dismal
as she is, you would say at once of her, that she is sincere,--_sine
cera_, without wax. She also resembles a parent: but it is Katharine
of Aragon. No. 94 (one mentally thanks Mr. Huth for a sight of it in
the original!) is the warmest thing in the room: the famous portrait
of Sir Thomas More. The nap of his claret velvet sleeves appears
never to have lost a particle of its lustre. One knows not which
to admire the most in this picture: the breadth of composition, the
precision and sweep of line, or the spiritual dignity and repose.
Its mate, the half-length of Sir John More, the father, Senior Judge
of the King's Bench, "_homo civilis, suavis, innocens_," is very
nearly as superb, though it has less body. Both were done by Holbein
during his happy stay at Chelsea. His presentation of More is always
inestimable: you recognize, by some little accent ever and anon,
that he painted him with enjoyment and understanding love. "Thy
painter, dearest Erasmus," wrote More, "is an amazing artist." It
was on a hint of the Earl of Arundel that Holbein went to England.
When asked there who had persuaded him to cross the Channel, he
could not remember the nobleman's name, though he remembered his
face: one turn of the pen, and the answer was apparent. But it was
Erasmus who gave him his letters of introduction, who was in reality
his patron; for Erasmus sent him to More, and from the Chancellor's
roof he passed to that of the King, at an honorarium of three hundred
pounds a year. And as he painted these friends, so he painted their
colleagues: with sympathy and authority. Our most intimate knowledge
of the finer spirits among the publicists of the sixteenth century
comes from Holbein's canvas. We cannot fail to observe "the weight
of thought and care in these studious heads of the Reformation."
Such a weight is in every Holbein of Colet and Warham and More, of
Melanchthon, Froben, Erasmus himself, (borne in him, as in More,
with an almost whimsical sweetness), and of "the thoroughly Erasmic
being," Bonifacius Amerbach. Looking at them, and mindful of their
diverse sagacities, one must corroborate the celebrated wish of
Goethe that the business of the Reformation, spoiled, as a work of
art, by Luther and Calvin, and as a theological issue, by the popular
interference, had been left to the trained leaders: to men like these
in one generation, and to men like Pole and Hugo Grotius in the next!
Wolsey and the great and quietly-handled Archbishop Warham hang
here together in strange posthumous amity, parted only by the
panel of Anne, Bluebeard's fourth Queen, which Holbein went to
Cleves to paint. A very undistinguished person No. 108 must have
been, quite worthy of her safe suburban pensioner's life, and the
humorous commuting title of the King's Sister. All her forerunners
and successors are here to the life, limned by Holbein's brush and
pencil. The dearth of female beauty, from 1509 to 1547, was truly
extraordinary, if we are to believe the believable pigments before
us. The women of the court have the fullest possible representation,
with the adjunct of exceptionally picturesque, though stiff, attire.
But among them all, it would be a hard task to bestow the apple upon
the belle, for a reason quite other than any known to Paris on Ida.
Even Anne Boleyn, full-lipped and gay, has but an upper-housemaid
prettiness. It is small compensation that most of them were learned.
The best female portrait, admirably hung, is No. 92: the young
Duchess of Milan, in Holbein's latest and largest manner. The demure
girl, set in novel blacks and whites of her widow's mourning, posed
with consummate simplicity, has always an admiring crowd in front
of her. Wornum's critical last word echoes: it is "a stupendous
picture." But the Duchess might be Lancelot Gobbo's sweetheart,
so far as the actual bearing and expression are concerned. No
wonder that the fright Gloriana passed for all that was comely and
thoroughbred! Could it be that her subjects had no loftier criterion
in the memory of their own mothers?