the Queen's loan from Windsor Library: eighty-nine drawings on tinted
paper, ranged on the screens of the West and South Galleries. Queen
Caroline, in George the Second's time, found them in a Kensington
Palace cupboard, and had them framed. (We know nothing else so nice
of that bore of a martyr.) Behold Holbein's methods running free!
In decisive and rapid chalk lines, with a mere suggestion of color,
or a touch, here and there, of India ink, he gives us his English
contemporaries: some in playful perfection commended to posterity,
as a matter of a dozen conscientious touches. How he delights in a
hollow cheek, a short silken beard, an outstanding ear, or the hair
sprouting oddly on the temples! Despite his uncompromising truth of
locality, the result is often of astounding delicacy: notably in the
heads of Lords Clinton and Vaux, and that of Prince Edward. Most
of these Windsor sheets are studies for pictures; and thus we have
Holbein's splendid roll of familiar faces over again; but that of
Sir John Godsalve is complete, and in body-colors, of grand breadth
and tone. The catalogue names were affixed much later, and are not
perfectly trustworthy: but those indicated as Sir Harry Guilford, the
Russells, Earls of Bedford, the Howards, Lord Wentworth, Sir Thomas
Eliott, and John Poins (the latter overbrimming with individual
force), lead in interest and technique. No. 514, the scholarly and
lovable Eliott, is perhaps the thing one would choose, of all here,
to win Holbein the admiration of those who have yet to appreciate
him. Its refined finish and bold conception are in unique balance.
Sir Thomas Eliott, in half profile, is grave and plain. But whoever
likes to pay homage to intelligent human goodness, will delight in
this report of him. You feel that Rembrandt would have turned from
his cloudless, treeless table-land of a countenance; and that such as
Sir Peter Lely would have found him cryptic enough, and so smothered
him in ultramarine draperies. But among Holbein's men, after the Jörg
Gyze (1532) in the Museum at Berlin, the Hubert Morett in the Dresden
Gallery (1537), and the Young Man with a Falcon (1542) in the Gallery
of the Hague, after his immortal major achievements, in short, one
might rank this little unshaded frost-fine drawing of Sir Thomas
Eliott, a sitter placed forever on this side of death.
But the ladies, again, in their close bodices and triangular
head-dresses, generally come off second-best. Holbein's elemental
candor befitted them not. Failing to be themselves in full, they are
more or less Elisabeth-Schmiddy! tinctured with reminiscences of the
artist's muddy-tempered _Hausfrau_ at home in Basle. The one quality
they cannot convey is breeding, social distinction. Holbein's woman
may have youth, goodness, capacity, even authority; but
"_Was_ the lady such a lady?"
You miss the aroma of manners. The mystery of sex is absent, too:
a thing the Florentines never missed, and which Gainsborough and
Romney found it impossible not to convey. When you see Holbein's men,
you wish you had known them; but his women merely remind you that
he was a very great painter. It is well to remember, nevertheless,
that he had no very great woman to paint: no such patroness,
for instance, as "Anne, Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery." His
organ-hand does what it can for souls frangible as lutes. Wherever
there is sincerity, kindness, or a brave soul, wherever there is
sagacity or thought in these Tudor faces, their delineator makes
it tell. Did the she-visionaries, if there were any rich enough to
engage Holbein, did the persons born in Hawthorne's "brown twilight
atmosphere," habitually avoid his studio? No kirtled aristocracy
of any age or country was ever so flat and dozy. Surrey occupied
himself in scorning "the new men" of his day; and it is conceivable
that new men abounded, to fill the places depopulated by the Wars of
the Roses, when all that was gallant and significant in the upper
ranks, seemed, in one way or another, to have gone under. But the
Wars of the Roses touched not the female succession in the ducal and
baronial houses: and the wonder remains that Honthorst and Vandyke
just after Holbein, and Jan de Mabuse just before him, could have
found, among English maids and wives, the lofty graces which he
never saw. Exceptions might be made, however, in favor of Elizabeth,
Lady Rich; for "high-erected thought" is bodily manifest in her, as
in the dark-eyed Lady Lister, and in Lady Surrey, a sweet patient
good woman who had known tears. Lady Butts is pleasingly modern. At
what four-to-six has one met her? All the ladies of the More family
are alluring acquaintances; and no one is to be envied who does not
declare for Lady Richmond, with her absurd cap and feather, the big
water-drop-shaped pearls in her ears, the downcast lids, and that
delicious, kissable, cheerful mouth!
Our famous old friend, the great sovereign who saw fit to box the
ears of offending gentlemen, and make war upon their wives, possesses
the North Gallery. Pale, beaked, sinister; amiably shrewd, like
Becky Sharp; now as a priggish infant with a huge watery head, anon
as a parrot-like old woman; here with dogs frisking about her, and
there with a grimace which would scatter a pack of dogs to the
four winds; always swathed in inexpressible finery, Elizabetha Dei
Gratia Regina arises on the awed spectator's eye. Her vanities were
fairly inherited from her straddling sire. Any authentic portrait
of her is a mass of fluff and sparkle, an elaborate cobweb several
feet square, in which, after much search and many barricades of
haberdashery surmounted, you shall light upon the spectral spider
who inhabits them. There is nothing much more entertaining in this
world than a study of the royal and virginal wardrobe. Those were
epic clothes! They defy analysis, from the geyser of lace circling
the neck and ears in a dozen cross-currents, to the acute angles of
the diamonded, rubied stomacher, and the stiff acre of petticoat.
They brought employment and money to artists, who painted in the
significant occupant as they could, and they serve to illustrate for
ever the science of dress-making, whose heraldic shield should bear
Eve couchant on one side, and Elizabeth rampant on the other. In the
balcony above is No. 484, an appalling picture of Her Majesty, in a
ruff like isinglass. When we recall that, grown old, she had all her
mirrors broken, and all paintings of herself which were not liars
destroyed, what must have been the terrors of that countenance for
which such a copy as this proved sufficiently flattering! Despite
Zucchero, Hilliard, and Pourbus, he is the wisest man alive who
knows how that illustrious lady really looked. And as you glance
about, be it on the first visit or the twentieth, full of optical and
consequent historical bewilderment; as you see how to right and left
of Queen Bess the hosts of that wonderful reign have gathered again,
you become keenly aware that one who died in the parish of S. Andrew
Undershaft, in 1543, "should have died hereafter." Hunger for that
bygone genius is in your thought there: O for an hour of _Hans Ho.
pinxit_!
1890.
ON THE DELIGHTS OF AN INCOGNITO
PERFECT happiness, which we pretend is so difficult to get at,
lies at either end of our sentient pole: in being intimately
recognized, or else in evading recognition altogether. An actor
finds it inspiring to step forth from the wings, steeled cap-à-pie
in self-consciousness, before a great houseful of enthusiastic faces
and hands; but if he ever knows a moment yet more ecstatic, it is
when he is alone in the hill-country, swimming in a clear pool,
and undemonstratable as human save by his habiliments hanging on a
bush, and his dog, sitting on the margin under, doubtfully eyeing
now these, now the unfamiliar large white fish which has shed them.
Thackeray once said that the purest satisfaction he ever took, was
in hearing one woman name him to another as the author of _Vanity
Fair_, while he was going through a ragged and unbookish London lane.
It is at least as likely that Aristides felt pleasure in accosting
his own ostracizer, and helping him to ruin the man whom he was tired
of hearing called The Just. And the young Charles the Second, between
his defeat at Worcester, and his extraordinary escape over sea, was
able to report, with exquisite relish, the conduct of that honest
Hambletonian, who "dranke a goode glass of beare to me, and called me
Brother Roundhead." To be indeed the King, and to masquerade as Will
Jones, _alias_ Jackson, "in a green cloth jump coat and breeches worn
to shreds," in Pepys' sympathetic detail, with "little rolls of paper
between his toes," and "a long thorn stick crooked three or four
several ways" in his artificially-browned hand, has its dangers; but
it is the top, nevertheless, of mundane romance and felicity.
In fact, there is no enjoyment comparable to walking about "unwept,
unhonored, and unsung," once you have become, through your misfortune
rather than your fault, ever so little of a public personage. Lucky
was the good Haroun Al Raschid, inasmuch as, being duly himself by
day, he could stroll abroad, and be immeasurably and magnificently
himself by night. Nothing but duty dragged him back from his post of
spectator and speculator at the street-corner, to the narrow concrete
humdrum of a throne. But there are, and have always been, in every
age, men of genius who cling to the big cloak and the dark lantern,
and who travel pseudonymously from the cradle to the grave; who keep
apart, meddle not at all, have only distant and general dealings with
their kind, and, in an innocent and endearing system of thieving,
come to understand and explain everything social, without being once
understood or explained themselves, or once breaking an inviolable
privacy.
"Not even the tenderest heart and next our own,
Knows half the reason why we smile or sigh."
The arrangement is excellent: it induces and maintains dignity. Most
of us who suffer keenly from the intolerable burden of self, are
grateful to have our fits of sanity by the hour or the week, when we
may eat lotos and fern-seed, and die out of the ken of _The Evening
Bugaboo_. To be clear of mortal contact, to resolve into grass and
brooks, to be a royal nobody, with the dim imbecile spectrum taken
to be you, by your acquaintanceship, temporarily hooted out of
existence, is the privilege which the damned on a Saratoga piazza are
not even blest enough to groan for. "Oh," cried Hazlitt, heartily
inhaling liberty at the door of a country inn, after a march, "Oh,
it is great to shake off the trammels of the world and public
opinion, to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal
identity in the elements of Nature, and to become the creature of the
moment clear of all ties; to hold to the universe only by a dish of
sweetbreads, and to owe nothing but the score of the evening; and, no
longer seeking for applause or meeting with contempt, to be known by
no other title than The Gentleman in the Parlour." Surely, surely,
to be Anonymous is better than to be Alexander, and to have no care
is a more sumptuous wealth than to have sacked ten cities. Sweetly
has Cowley said it, in his little essay on _Obscurity_: "_Bene qui
latuit, bene vixit_: he lives well, that has lain well hidden; in
which, if it be a truth, I'll swear the world has been sufficiently
deceived. For my part, I think it is; and that the pleasantest
condition of life is in incognito.... It is, in my mind, a very
delightful pastime for two good and agreeable friends to travel up
and down together, in places where they are by nobody known, nor know
anybody. It was the case of Æneas and his Achates, when they walked
invisibly about the fields and streets of Carthage. Venus herself
"'A veil of thickened air around them cast,
That none might know or see them as they passed.'"
The atmosphere was so liberally allowed, in the Middle Ages, to be
thick with spirits, that the subject arose in the debates of the
schools whether more than a thousand and fifty-seven of them could
execute a saraband on the point of a needle. We are not informed by
what prior necessity they desired to dance; but something, after all,
must be left to the imagination. Dancing, in their case, must be, as
with lambs and children, the spontaneous witness of light hearts;
and what is half so likely to make a shade whimsically frolicsome, as
the sense of his own absolute intangibility in our world of wiseacres
and mind-readers and myopic Masters of Arts? To watch, to listen, to
know the heretofore and the hereafter, and to be at the same time
dumb as a nail, and skilful at dodging a collision with flesh and
blood, must be, when you come to think of it, a delightful vocation
for ghosts. It is, then, in some sort, anticipatory of part of our
business in the twenty-sixth century of the Christian era, to becloud
now our name and nativity, and,
"Beholding, unbeheld of all,"
to move musingly among strange scenes, with the charity and
cheerfulness of those delivered from death. I am told that L.R.
had once an odd spiritual adventure, agreeable and memorable, which
demonstrated how much pleasure there is to be had out of these moods
of detachment and non-individuality. He had spent the day at a
library desk, and had grown hazy with no food and much reading. As
he walked homeward in the evening, he felt, for sheer buoyancy of
mind, like that thin Greek who had to fill his pockets with lead, for
fear of being blown away by the wind. It happened that he was obliged
to pass, on the way to his solitary lodging of the night, the house
where he was eternally the expected guest: the house of one with whom
and with whose family he was on a most open and affectionate footing.
Their window-shades were drawn, not so low but that he could see
the shining dinner-table dressed in its pomp, and the little ring
of merry faces closing it in. There was S., the bonniest of wives,
smiling, in her pansy-colored gown, with a pearl comb in her hair:
and opposite her was little S., in white, busy with the partridge;
and there was A.H., the jolly artist cousin; and, facing the window
at the head of his own conclave, (_quos inter Augustus recumbens
purpureo bibit ore nectar!_), sat dear O., with his fine serious
genial head bobbing over the poised carving-knife, as he demolished,
perhaps, some quoted sophism of Schopenhauer. There were welcome and
warmth inside there for R.: how well he knew it! But the silent day
just over had laid a spell upon his will; he looked upon them all,
in their bright lamplight, like any vagrant stranger from the street,
and hurried on, never quite so paradoxically happy in his life as
when he quitted that familiar pane without rapping, and went back to
the dark and the frost, unapprehended, impersonal, aberrant, a spirit
among men.
1893.
THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT
HE is the sixty-sixth in direct descent, and his coat is like amber
damask, and his blue eyes are the most winning that you ever saw.
They seem to proclaim him as much too good for the vulgar world, and
worthy of such zeal and devotion as you, only you, could give to his
helpless infancy. And, with a blessing upon the Abbot of Clairvaux,
who is popularly supposed to have invented his species, you carry
him home from the Bench show, and in the morning, when you are told
that he has eaten a yard and a quarter of the new stair-carpet, you
look into those dreamy eyes again: no reproach shall reach him,
you swear, because you stand forevermore between. And he grows
great in girth, and in character the very chronicle and log-book
of his noble ancestry; he may be erratic, but he puts charm and
distinction into everything he does. Your devotedness to his welfare
keeps him healthful and honest, and absurdly partial to the squeak
of your boots, or the imperceptible aroma which, as it would seem,
you dispense, a mile away. The thing which pleases you most is his
ingenuous childishness. It is a fresh little soul in the rogue's body:
"Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence."
You see him touch pitch every day, associating with the
sewer-building Italians, with their strange oaths; with affected
and cynical "sales-ladies" in shops (she of the grape-stall being
clearly his too-seldom-relenting goddess); and with the bony
Thomas-cat down street, who is an acknowledged anarchist, and whose
infrequent suppers have made him sour-complexioned towards society,
and "thereby disallowed him," as dear Walton would say, "to be a
competent judge." But Pup loses nothing of his sweet congenital
absent-mindedness; your bringing-up sits firmly upon him and keeps
him young. He expands into a giant, and such as meet him on a lonely
road have religion until he has passed. Seven, nine, ten months go
over his white-hooded head; and behold, he is nigh a year old, and
still Uranian. He begins to accumulate facts, for his observation
of late has not been unscientific; but he cannot generalize, and on
every first occasion he puts his foot in it. A music-box transfixes
him; the English language, proceeding from a parrot in a cage, shakes
his reason for days. A rocking-horse on a piazza draws from him the
only bad word he knows. He sees no obligation to respect persons
with mumps, or with very red beards, or with tools and dinner-pails;
in the last instance, he acts advisedly against honest labor, as he
perceives that most overalls have kicks in them. Following Plato,
he would reserve his haughty demeanor for slaves and servants.
Moreover, before the undemonstrated he comes hourly to a pause. If
a wheelbarrow, unknown hitherto among vehicles, approach him from
his suburban hill, he is aware of the supernatural; but he will not
flinch, as he was wont to do once; rather will he stand four-square,
with eyebrows and crinkled ears vocal with wonder and horror. Then
the man back of the moving bulk speaks over his truck to you, in
the clear April evening: "Begorra, 'tis his furrust barry!" and you
love the man for his accurate affectionate sense of the situation.
When Pup is too open-mouthed and curious, when he dilates, in fact,
with the wrong emotion, it reflects upon you, and reveals the flaws
in your educational system. He blurts out dire things before fine
ladies. If he hear one of them declaiming, with Delsarte gestures,
in a drawing-room, he appears in the doorway, undergoing symptoms
of acutest distress, and singing her down, professedly for her own
sake; and afterward he pities her so, and is so chivalrously drawn
toward her in her apparent aberration, that he lies for hours on the
flounce of her gown, eyeing you, and calumniating you somewhat by his
vicarious groans and sighs. But ever after, Pup admits the recitation
of tragic selections as one human folly more.
He is so big and so unsophisticated, that you daily feel the
incongruity, and wish, in a vague sort of way, that there was
a street boarding-school in your town, where he could rough it
away from an adoring family, and learn to be responsible and
self-opinionated, like other dogs. He has a maternal uncle, on the
estate across the field: a double-chinned tawny ogre, good-natured as
a baby, and utterly rash and improvident, whose society you cannot
covet for your tender charge. One fine day, Pup is low with the
distemper, and evidence is forthcoming that he has visited, under his
uncle's guidance, the much-deceased lobster thrown into hotel tubs.
After weeks of anxious nursing, rubbings in oil, and steamings with
vinegar, during which time he coughs and wheezes in a heartbreaking
imitation of advanced consumption, he is left alone a moment on his
warm rug, with the thermometer in his special apartment steady at
seventy-eight degrees, and plunges out into the winter blast. Hours
later, he returns; and the vision of his vagabond uncle, slinking
around the house, announces to you in what companionship he has been.
Plastered to the skull in mud and icicles, wet to the bone, jaded,
guilty, and doomed now, of course, to die, Pup retires behind the
kitchen table. The next morning he is well. The moral, to him at
least, is that our uncle is an astute and unappreciated person, and
a genuine man of the world.
Yet our uncle, with all his laxity, has an honorable heart, and
practises the _maxima reverentia puero_. It is not from him that Pup
shall learn his little share of iniquity. Meanwhile, illumination
is nearing him in the shape of a little old white bull-terrier
of uncertain parentage, with one ear, and a scar on his neck,
and depravity in the very lift of his stumped tail. This active
imp, recently come to live in the neighborhood, fills you with
forebodings. You know that Pup must grow up sometime, must take his
chances, must fight and be fooled, must err and repent, must exhaust
the dangerous knowledge of the great university for which his age
at last befits him. The ordeal will harm neither him nor you: and
yet you cannot help an anxious look at him, full four feet tall from
crown to toe, and with a leg like an obelisk, preserving unseasonably
his ambiguous early air of exaggerated goodness. One day he follows
you from the station, and meets the small Mephisto on the homeward
path. They dig a bone together, and converse behind trees; and when
you call Pup, he snorts his initial defiance, and dances away in
the tempter's wake. Finally, your whistle compels him, and he comes
soberly forward. By this time the ringleader terrier is departing,
with a diabolical wink. You remember that, a moment before, he stood
on a mound, whispering in your innocent's beautiful dangling ear, and
you glance sharply at Pup. Yes, it has happened! He will never seem
quite the same again, with
----"the contagion of the world's slow stain"
beginning in his candid eyes. He is a dog now. He knows.
1893.
ON DYING CONSIDERED AS A DRAMATIC SITUATION
A MAN of thought wears himself out, standing continually on the
defensive. The more original a character, the more it is at war
with common conditions, the more it wastes its substance scourging
the tides and charging windmills; and this being recognized, the
exceptional person, your poet or hero, is expected to show an ascetic
pallor, to eat and sleep little, to have a horrible temper, and to
die at thirty-seven. Has he an active brain, he must pay for it by
losing all the splendid passivity, inner and outer, which belongs to
oxen and philosophers. Nor, on the other hand, will stupidity and
submission promote longevity: for this is a bullying world. A wight
with no mind to end himself by fretting and overdoing, is charitably
ended by the action of his superiors, social or military. How many
privates had out of Balaklava but a poor posthumous satisfaction!
The Saxon soldier does not shed his skin in times of peace: he is
the same in garrisons and barracks as amid the roar of guns; and his
ruling passion is still to stand in herds and be killed. A few years
ago, an infantry company, in the south of England, were marching into
the fields for rifle-practice. Filing through a narrow lane, they saw
two runaway horses, half-detached from their carriage, round the bend
and rush towards them. The officer in charge either did not perceive
them so soon as the others, or else he was slow to collect his wits,
and give the order to disperse into the hedgerows for safety. As the
order, for whichever cause, was not uttered, not a single recruit
moved a muscle; but the ranks strode on, with as solid and serene
a front as if on dress-parade, straight under those wild hoofs and
wheels: and afterwards, what was left of eleven men was cheerfully
packed off, not to the cemetery, by great luck, but to the hospital.
And in Germany, only the other day, the sergeant who superintends
the daily gymnastic exercises of a certain camp, marched a small
detachment of men, seven or eight in number, into the lake to swim.
In went the men, up to their necks and over their heads, and made an
immediate and unanimous disappearance. The sergeant, impatient to
have them finish their bath, returned presently, and was shocked to
discover that they were all drowned! Now, it happened that the seven
or eight could not swim a stroke between them, but they thought it
unnecessary to make any remark to that effect. Is it not evident that
these fine dumb fellows can beat the world at a fight? Yet their
immense practical value has no artistic significance. They strike
the unintelligent attitude. It is no part of a private's business
to exert his choice, his volition; and without these, he loses
pertinence. Therefore, to wear the eternal "piece of purple" in a
ballad, you must be at least a corporal.