It is not always from the closest and most accurate historian that
we receive the truest picture of an age or of a character. The
artist gives a more real picture than the photographer; and it needs
imagination and sympathy, as well as labour and research, to make a
hero of old time live again to-day. The minutest investigation will
hardly better the vivid reality of Scott's James I. or Charles II.,
or portray more truly than Mr. Shorthouse has done the fragile yet
fascinating personality of Charles I. Yet to say this is not to
undervalue history or to contemn the labour of true students. Rather,
without their aid we cannot rightly see the past at all: it comes to us
only with the distortions of our own prejudice and our narrow modern
outlook. We need both the work of the scholar and the imagination of
the artist. Without the first we could not behold the past, without the
second we could not understand it.
In religion, in politics, in art, in all that makes life beautiful and
men true, we must know the past if we would use the present or provide
for the future. And our knowledge is barren indeed if it does not touch
the intimacies of human existence. What we must know is how men lived
and thought, not merely how they acted. We must see them in the home,
and not only in the senate or the field. It is thus that the Letters
of Erasmus, or Luther's Table Talk, are worth a ton of Sleidan's
dreary commentaries or Calvin's systematic theology. And yet we cannot
dispense with either. We must study past ages as a whole, and then
bring the imagination of the artist and the poet to show us the truth
and the passion that lies nearest to their heart. It is thus, then, in
history that the imaginary portrait has its valued place.
Saturated with contemporary literature, yet alive to the influences
of a wider life, the student who is also an artist turns to a great
movement, and with the touch of genius fixes the true impression of its
soul in poetry, on canvas, or in prose. Such was the work of Walter
Pater. He taught us, through the delicate study of a secondary but most
alluring painter, to "understand to how great a place in human culture
the art of Italy had been called." In his picture of a great scholar
and a beautiful, pathetic, childlike soul, he showed the fascination
of that priceless truth--that what men have thought and done, that what
has interested and charmed them, can never wholly die--"no language
they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their
voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds,
nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and
zeal."
And more. He taught us not only how to understand the past,
but he showed us how it understood itself. "A Prince of Court
Painters"--Watteau, as he was seen by one who loved him, by a
sympathetic woman--like all such, the keenest of critics, yet the
tenderest of hearts--is given to us as not even pictures or personal
letters could give. Sebastian van Storck, Duke Carl of Rosenmold--they
are portraits, though it is only imagination that makes them live.
I remember Mr. Freeman once saying to me, as he took me his favourite
walk at Somerleaze, that he had read a study of Mr. Pater's--a strange
mediæval story of Denys l'Auxerrois--and could not be satisfied till he
knew what it meant. Was it true? It was a question befitting one who
had made the past to live again. Truth was the first, almost the only,
thing the historian prized. Denys the organ-builder may never have
watched the decoration of the Cathedral of Saint Étienne, or made, by
the mere sight of him, the old feel young again. And yet Walter Pater
had painted a true portrait, as so often did Robert Browning, though it
were imaginary; and the artist as well as the historian had imaged for
us the reality of a past age.
Mr. Pater, though the most perfect artist of this school, was not the
first. Humbler writers have long endeavoured to draw the great heroes
as they thought their contemporaries saw them, by a fiction of memoir,
or correspondence, or journal. And the "Prince of Court Painters" is a
sketch in the same medium as "The Household of Sir Thomas More."
This charming book has passed through many editions, but its author, of
her own choice, remained almost unknown. The "Dictionary of National
Biography" has strangely passed her by. Almost all that her wishes
suffer us to know is that she was sister of Mr. William Oke Manning,
to whom she affectionately dedicated the fourth edition of the book
which is now reprinted; that she was never married; and that she was a
genuine student and an indefatigable writer on historical and literary
subjects. In "Mary Powell" she touched the heart of her generation, and
few books of its day had a wider circulation. "The Household of Sir
Thomas More" is a still more painstaking study, and a more complete
and delightful portrait. Its perfect sympathy and its quaint charm
of manner secured for it a welcome even among those who claimed for
the hero and his opinions a sanctity which Miss Manning's historical
judgment did not ratify. Cardinal Manning, writing on March 11, 1887,
rejoiced at its republication, and said: "The book is a singularly
beautiful one, and I regret that I had not the pleasure of knowing the
writer, whose mental gifts were of a very high order." Miss Manning
was a keen critic of the Romanism of the Reformation period, as her
Appendices to the fourth edition of her book show; but she did not
suffer her own opinions to destroy her sympathy for him whom Reginald
Pole called "the best of all the English."
"The Household of Sir Thomas More" is an imaginary portrait of a noble
character. It professes to be the journal begun by Margaret, More's
eldest daughter, most learned and best beloved, when she was but
fifteen years old, and continued till she had taken her father's head
from the pole whereon it was exposed, to treasure it till she should
lay it on her breast as she too passed into the peace of God. Among
"fair women" the heroic daughter is immortal:--
"Morn broaden'd on the borders of the dark
Ere I saw her, who clasped in her last trance
Her murder'd father's head."
So Tennyson recorded the pathetic legend with which Miss Manning ended
her beautiful book.
When she wrote, it was not so hard as it is now to recall the London of
Henry VIII. Miss Manning herself described very happily in 1859 what
she remembered many years before.
"When we say," she wrote, "that some of our happiest and earliest
years were spent on the site of Sir Thomas More's country house in the
'village of palaces,' some of our readers will hardly believe we can
mean Chelsea. But, in those days, the gin-palace and tea-garden were
not; Cremorne was a quiet, aristocratic seclusion, where old Queen
Charlotte
'Would sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.'
"A few old, quiet streets and rows, with names and sites dear to the
antiquary, ran down to the Thames, then a stranger to steamboats; a row
of noble elms along its strand lent their deep shade to some quaint
old houses with heavy architraves, picturesque flights of steps, and
elaborate gates; while Queen Elizabeth's Walk, the Bishop's Walk,
and the Bishop's Palace gave a kind of dignity to the more modern
designations of the neighbourhood.
"When the Thames was the great highway, and every nobleman had his six
or eight oared barge, the banks of the river as high as Chelsea were
studded with country houses. At the foot of Battersea Bridge, which
in those days did not disfigure the beautiful reach, Sir Thomas More,
then a private gentleman and eminent lawyer in full practice, built
the capital family house which was afterwards successively occupied
by the Marquis of Winchester, Lord Dacre, Lord Burleigh, Sir Robert
Cecil, the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Arthur Gorges, Lord Middlesex, the
first Duke of Buckingham, Sir Bulstrode Whitlock, the second Duke of
Buckingham, the Earl of Bristol, and the Duke of Beaufort. It stood
about a hundred yards from the river; its front exhibited a projecting
porch in the centre, and four bay windows alternating with eight large
casements; while its back presented a confused assemblage of jutting
casements, pent-houses, and gables in picturesque intricacy of detail,
affording 'coigns of vantage,' we doubt not, to many a tuft of golden
moss and stone-crop. This dwelling, which for convenience and beauty
of situation and interior comfort was so highly prized by its many and
distinguished occupants, appears at length to have been pulled down
when it became rickety and untenantable from sheer old age--in Ossian's
words, 'gloomy, windy, and full of ghosts.'"
Nor was Miss Manning obliged to rely only on her memory for a picture
of More's house as it had been. The site, when she knew it, was like
the New Place at Stratford-on-Avon, where only a few stones and
foundations enable us to picture how stood the house where Shakespeare
died. But while the household was still fresh in men's minds, and More
was beginning to be reverenced as a martyr and a saint, Ellis Heywood
published at Florence, in 1556, his sketch, "Il Moro," in which he set
in a true description of the Chelsea garden an imaginary picture of
the Chancellor and his friends talking on matters of high import to
soul and spirit. "From one part of the garden," he tells us, "almost
the whole of the noble city of London was visible, and from another
the beautiful Thames, with green meadows and wooded hills all around."
The garden had its own charm too. "It was crowned with an almost
perpetual verdure, and the branches of the fruit-trees that grew near
were interwoven in a manner so beautiful that it seemed like a living
tapestry worked by Nature herself."
So wrote Ellis Heywood of the external beauty of the scene. Of
the inner harmony Erasmus had written years before to Ulrich von
Hutten:--"More has built himself a house at Chelsea. There he lives
with his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, his three daughters and
their husbands, with eleven grandchildren. There is not a man alive
so loving as he: he loves his old wife as if she were indeed a young
maiden." For Dame Alice, whom More had wedded very soon after the
death of his first child-wife, was _nec bella nec puella_--neither a
beauty nor a girl. And besides these, in the year when little Margaret,
according to Miss Manning, began to write in her "fayr Libellus" which
her tutor, Master Gunnel, gave her, there were dwelling in the house
the aged father, Sir John More, good judge and humorous man, with his
third wife.
"And the household," said Erasmus, "was a very 'platonic academy'--were
it not," he adds, "an injustice to compare it with an academy where
disputations concerning numbers and figures were only occasionally
mingled with discussion on the moral virtues. I should rather call his
house a school of Christianity; for though there is no one in it who
does not study the liberal sciences, the special care of all is piety
and virtue. No quarrelling or ill-tempered words are ever heard, and
idleness is never seen."
In such a household it was that Margaret, More's dearest and most
heroic child, was nurtured:--
"As it were
An angel-watered lily, that near God
Grows and is quiet."
She was one of those fine souls to whom come alike learning and love,
and in whom religion shows its fairest fruits. Holbein draws her with
a Seneca in her hand, but not far away is her prayer-desk. All the
children answered to their father's careful culture, for it is an idle
tale that makes young John More but a silly fellow. Elizabeth, who
married Mr. Dancey, Cecily, who became the wife of Giles Heron, a ward
of her father's, the step-daughter Alice, who became Lady Alington, and
the adopted child, Margaret Giggs, whom young Clement, sometime their
fellow-scholar, wedded, were all instructed in humane letters. But
Margaret was the flower of them all. To her her father wrote when she
was still but a child:--
"I cannot tell you, dearest Margaret, how pleasant to me are your most
delightful letters. Now, as I was reading them there chanced to be with
me that noble youth, Reginald Pole--not so highly ennobled, indeed,
by birth as by learning and every virtue. To him your letter seemed a
miracle, even before he knew how you were beset by shortness of time
and other hindrances. And hardly would he believe that you had no help
from your master, till I told him seriously that you had not only no
master in the house, but that also there was no man in it that had not
more need of your help in writing than you of his."
Indeed a good father and a good teacher made the household the wonder
of learned Europe. See what More wrote to the tutor he had chosen, when
he was himself abroad on an embassy:--
"I have received, my dear Gunnel, your letters, such as they are wont
to be, full of elegance and affection. Your love for my children I
gather from your letters; their diligence from their own. I rejoice
that little Elizabeth has shown as much modesty of deportment in her
mother's absence as she could have done in her presence. Tell her that
this delights me above all things; for, much as I esteem learning,
which, when joined with virtue, is worth all the treasures of kings,
what doth the fame of great scholarship, apart from well-regulated
conduct, bring us, except distinguished infamy? Especially in women,
whom men are ready enough to assail for their knowledge, because it is
uncommon and casts a reproach on their own sluggishness. Among other
notable benefits which solid learning bestows, I reckon this among the
first, that we acquire it not for the mere sake of praise or the esteem
of learned men, but for its own true value and use. Thus have I spoken,
my Gunnel, somewhat the more in respect of not coveting vainglory,
because of those words in your letter wherein you deem that the high
quality of Margaret's wit is not to be depressed, which, indeed, is
mine own opinion; but I think that they the most truly depress and
affront their wit who accustom themselves to practise it on vain and
base objects, rather than raise their minds by the study and approval
of what is good in itself. It mattereth not in harvest-time whether
the corn were sown by a man or a woman, and I see not why learning in
like manner may not equally agree with both sexes; for by it reason
is cultivated, and, as a field, sown with wholesome precepts, which
bring forth good fruit. Even if the soil of a woman's brain be of its
own nature bad, and apter to bear fern than corn, by which saying men
oft terrify women from learning, I am of opinion that a woman's mind
is, for that very reason, all the more in need of manure and good
husbandry, that the defect of nature may be redressed."
In these letters, and in many like them, there is given the best, and
the most authentic picture of the household of the great Chancellor.
Of More himself it is difficult to speak without using language which
seems extravagant. His character was so beautiful, his life so simple
and so pure, his conscientiousness so complete, his end so heroic, that
he stands out among the sordid meannesses of the sixteenth century like
a single star in the darkness of the world. Sinful popes and wicked
kings, greedy statesmen and timid clergy, who will accept the king's
supremacy one day and then burn what once they adored--among these
More has no place. His is a steadfast soul, happy in prosperity and
triumphant in the furnace of affliction. "O ye holy and humble men of
heart, O ye spirits and souls of the righteous, bless ye the Lord:
praise Him and magnify Him for ever."
And the position of More in the age of the Reformation is the more
remarkable because he belonged so clearly to the new as well as to
the old. He was, in the best sense, a Humanist. He was a scholar and
a bitter foe of all obscurantism. He fought the battle of Greek, and
so gave to England the scholarship of the succeeding generation to
which true religion and sound learning owe so great a debt. He could
take no part with those who could defend the old faith only with the
rusty weapons of a philosophic system which had failed to meet the
aspirations of the new age. No one laughed more readily than he at
the sallies of Erasmus against ignorant monks and illiterate clergy.
_Encomium Moriæ, Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, spoke his sentiments as
well as those of their authors. But while he loved the new learning
and adopted the new methods, he saw that there remained something
among the old things that was priceless and imperishable. It may be
that he did not clearly distinguish between the essentials and the mere
offshoots of a divine faith. It may be--we should say it must be--that
if he had lived a hundred years later, or in our own day, he would have
thought differently on some matters. The cause of intellectual freedom
was presented to him in its worst aspect, and the command to cast away
the childish things of mediævalism came in a revolting form from the
lips of a coarse and brutal tyrant. Had Colet lived, or Erasmus been a
stronger man, all might have been different. As it was, More saw but
one side of the new world, and that the worst, and he said, "The old is
better."
But while, in his final choice, he seemed to belong rather to the old
world than to the new, he had absorbed all the best spirit of the
Italian Renaissance, and he belonged as a social reformer to an age in
the far future. The _Utopia_, it is true, was the work of his youth,
and it is doubtful if much of it was meant seriously, and certain
that some was distinctly contrary to its author's mature convictions.
But nevertheless it sets forth an exquisite ideal picture of equality
in opportunity and of simplicity of life. Its whole tone speaks a
protest against the selfishness and the competition of the age that
degraded art and divided society. And this protest was enforced by the
asceticism of the author's own life and the purity of his household.
More's life was not a long one. He was born on February 7, 1478. His
family was "honourable, not illustrious." His father came to be an
eminent judge. As a boy he went to school in London, and then was
taken into the household of the famous Cardinal Morton, Archbishop
of Canterbury and Lord High Chancellor of England, the statesman who
advised the best measures of Henry VII., who began to reform the
monasteries, who heavily taxed the rich and took care for the poor.
There the young More was known as a bright lad, who would often speak a
piece in Christmas games for the guests' entertainment with a wit and
readiness which made the Archbishop prophesy for him a great career.
He went to Oxford; he studied at New Inn, and then at Lincoln's Inn.
He became a lawyer; he went into Parliament; he lectured publicly in
London on theology. When a young man he was widely known as a scholar
and a wit. He was a friend of all the learned men of his day, a member
of that little circle of students to which Colet and Grocyn and Linacre
belonged. Though he plunged into practical life, politics, and law,
and exchanged epigrams with the best wits of the time, his deepest
thoughts were always with religion. He was near becoming a Carthusian;
he had serious thoughts of refraining from marriage; he lived very
strictly, and was with difficulty won from a solitary life. When he
decided to marry and conform outwardly to the customs of the society of
his day, he did not abandon the secret rules by which his personal life
was restrained. He was outwardly of the world, but in spirit he was
always a recluse.
Gradually he came prominently before his contemporaries. His books made
him known to scholars. Wolsey may have known him at Oxford, and now
found him useful on embassies and at Court. The King sought him out
and made a friend of him, would talk with him of theological matters,
obtained his help for that book against Luther which won him the title
of "Defender of the Faith," and often at night "would have him up
to the leads, there to consider with him the courses, motions, and
operations of the stars and planets." So, when Wolsey fell, More, who
had already been Speaker of the House of Commons, and won great praise
alike from King and Cardinal, became Lord Chancellor--the first great
layman and lawyer who held that high office. As judge men spoke of him
with admiration for centuries. He was a statesman, too, as well as a
lawyer, and his aid was sought in all Henry's foreign negotiations.
He might have been the greatest man in England after the King if he
would have strained his conscience. But this he would not do. He never
approved the Divorce; he was known to be a champion of the injured
Queen Katherine, and a friend to her nephew, the Emperor Charles. As
Church questions, too, came in dispute, he took more and more the
conservative side. He would not repudiate the Pope's supremacy, or
separate himself from the imposing unity of Christendom, which it
seemed to him was threatened by the nationalism of Henry VIII., as well
as by the heresy of Luther. And so at last it came that the lion felt
his strength: it was More's own prophecy, and he was one of the first
victims.
On Monday, April 13, 1534, he was required to take oath to the
succession of the issue of Anne Boleyn, and in repudiation of the
validity of the first marriage of the King. He at once refused. He
would not deny to swear to the succession, but the oath put before
him he could not reconcile with his conscience. In this he persisted.
Imprisonment, trial, death, came naturally and inevitably; and of these
Miss Manning, with the letters and memoirs before her, has made the
faithful Margaret write as from a full heart.
On Tuesday, July 6, 1535, he was executed on Tower Hill. "He bore in
his hands a red cross, and was often seen to cast his eyes towards
heaven." He died as he had lived, with saintly calm, and still playing
with a gentle humour. "That at least," he said, as he drew aside his
beard from the block, "has committed no treason."
The King's wrath did not cease with the execution of his faithful
counsellor. Dame Alice More lost all, and had hard stress for the few
years that remained to her of life. Happily his son and his daughters
had all been married before the troubles came. Margaret's marriage was
a happy one. Will Roper was soon weaned from his "Lutheran" fancies,
and lived, thirty-four years after his wife, to write an exquisite
and pathetic memoir of the great Chancellor. When the tyrant was dead
More's family seemed almost sacred in the eyes of the nation. His
memory was cherished, and memorials of all kinds poured forth during
the years of Mary's reign; and when Elizabeth had been twenty years on
the throne Roper died in peace, desiring to be buried with his "dear
wife," where his father-in-law "did mind to be buried."
Margaret Roper herself died in 1544, and was buried in Chelsea Church.
Her monument is, with the Ropers', in S. Dunstan's, Canterbury. In
that ancient city the family of her husband had long dwelt, and the
house itself lasted till this century. Of it Miss Manning very prettily
wrote:--
"My friend, Mrs. George Frederick Young, who was born in the Ropers'
house at Canterbury, tells me that it was of singular antiquity, full
of queer nooks, corners, and passages, with a sort of dungeon below,
that went by the name of 'Dick's Hole,' the access to which was so
dangerous that it at length was forbidden to descend the staircase.
The coach-house and harness-room were curiously antique; the chapel
had been converted into a laundry, but retained its Gothic windows. At
length it became needful to rebuild the house, only the old gateway
of which remains. While the workmen were busy, an old gentleman in
Canterbury sent to beg Mrs. Young's father to dig in a particular
part of the garden, for that he had dreamed there was a money-chest
there. This request was not attended to, and he sent a more urgent
message, saying his dream had been repeated. A third time he dreamed,
and renewed his request, which at length was granted; and, curiously
enough, a chest _was_ found, with a few coins in it, chiefly of
antiquarian value, which, accordingly, were given to an archæologist
of the place. Here my information ceases."
More and his favourite daughter are those of whom we first think when
we try to recall some memories of the "Christian academy;" but their
famous guests must not be forgotten. I cannot speak now of the soldiers
and diplomatists, the priests and scholars, who pass across the scene
so rapidly as we read the letters of the Chancellor himself or the
memoirs of his son-in-law and his great-grandson. But two names stand
out as famous above the rest, and as both among the closest of those
friends whom More delighted to honour,--Erasmus the scholar and Holbein
the painter.
Of Erasmus who shall speak in a few words? Are not the libraries of
Europe full of his books, and are not his witticisms still repeated
to-day as if they were but the new thoughts of the newest of moderns?
The intellectual life of his age seems summed up in his person. It
had no interest in which he did not mingle, nor any opinion which he
did not weigh and test. If he held himself above its passions, it
was simply because his was a keen critical nature, loving in its own
fashion, but too cold to sympathise deeply with any combatant or to
thrill with any passion. "He had no mind," said Miss Manning rather
sharply, "to be a martyr, but only to suggest doubts which led braver
men to be such."
"This worthy man," says his eighteenth century biographer, Jortin,
"spent a laborious life in an uniform pursuit of two points: in
opposing barbarous ignorance and blind superstition, and in promoting
useful literature and true piety. These objects he attempted in a mild,
gentle manner, never attacking the persons of men, but only the faults
of the age. He knew his own temper and talents, and was conscious he
was not fitted for the rough work of a reformer."
Jortin's, indeed, is the juster estimate. It was Erasmus's keen sight,
not his want of moral courage, which prevented his being a martyr. He
could not sympathise with the foreign reformers; he had no taste for
antinomianism, still less for ignorance, and he saw that the Church
abroad, with all its accretions,--which none ridiculed so wittily as
he,--still preserved a treasure that the human mind could not afford to
lose.
Erasmus was a lifelong friend of More. They had met originally in
England while Henry VII. was still on the throne. Erasmus stayed at
More's house, and together they discussed the wrongs and follies of
the time. _Encomium Moriæ_--"The Praise of Folly"--was written by
Erasmus under More's roof, and the title had a punning reference to
the author's host. Later books, especially the great edition of the
New Testament which made the sacred text, said More, "shine with a new
light," had all of them the sanction of the faithful English friend. He
had to suffer rough handling from the obscurantists of his day. Greek
seemed to savour of heresy, just as now to some it seems a relic of
mediævalism unworthy of the study of a scientific age. Erasmus, indeed,
was in a position which has its parallel to-day. He stood boldly forth
to fight for a large and liberal education, and for wide and rational
methods of instruction, against those who would narrow the teaching of
the young to a merely technical and professional training. He fought
against the effort to sacrifice sound learning to utilitarian ends;
and he found the warmest sympathy, and the best expression of his
educational ideal, in the household of his English friend.
With More he bore reproach for a good cause. While the English lawyer
pleaded for the study of Greek at the English universities, the Dutch
scholar met the assaults of those who would check the publication of
the New Testament in the original tongue. He was justly indignant at
the treatment he received.
"There are none," he said, "that bark at me more furiously than those
who have never even seen the outside of my books. When you meet with
one of these brawlers, let him rave on at my New Testament till he
has made himself hoarse. Then ask him gently whether he has read it.
If he has the impudence to say yes, urge him to produce one passage
that deserves to be blamed. You will find that he cannot. Consider,
now, whether this be the behaviour of a Christian, to blacken a man's
reputation, which he cannot restore to him again if he would. Of all
the vile ways of defaming him, none is more villainous than to accuse
him of heresy; and yet to this they have recourse on the slightest
provocation!"
A Dominican friar at Strasburg, who had spitefully attacked Erasmus's
Testament, was compelled to own that he had not read one word of it.
"These men," exclaims Erasmus, "first hate, next condemn, and, lastly,
seek for passages to justify their censures. And then, if any one
opposes them, and calls them what they are, they say he is a disturber
of the public peace; which is just as if you gave a man a blow in the
face, and then bid him be quiet, and not make a noise about nothing."
But all through the babel of contending voices Erasmus kept his own
course. He could neither be coerced to give up his liberal scholarship
nor lured to ally with Luther and the Protestant doctors. To him the
way of sound learning seemed the path of the Catholic Church. And here
too he was of one mind with More. The Englishman had to meet dangers
which never beset the foreign scholar, and he met them, it may be, as
Erasmus would not have dared to do. But it cannot be doubted that in
their opinions, as in their hearts, they were never really divided.
In Mistress Margaret's _Libellus_, Erasmus appears chiefly as a fellow
of infinite jest, but wise withal, chatting at table as he chats in his
letters, and saying, indeed, much that we have under the safe warrant
of his own pen.
If Erasmus was the typical scholar of that age which stood between
the Renaissance and the Reformation, Hans Holbein was typical of its
art. In his hand painting has come down from its high estate, its
Madonnas and its great Doges, its classic pageants and its heroic
legends, and treats of common life as men saw it every day. The German
artist descended from the lofty themes which had inspired the great
master of Italy, and took even the humbler work of illustrating books.
Botticelli, it is true, had drawn studies of the _Divina Commedia_,
but Holbein was ready to work for a printer, and to design letters and
tail-pieces for the _Libelli_ of his friends. It was through Froben,
the great Basle painter, no doubt, that More and Erasmus and Holbein
first came together. Holbein illustrated the _Utopia_, and came to
England with an introduction from the author of the _Encomium Moriæ_.
He was thirty years younger than the Dutch scholar, and twenty years
younger than More, but they became his chiefest friends. He tarried
some while in More's house, and it was there that he drew some of those
marvellous sketches now preserved at Windsor, that give us our truest
knowledge of the Court of Henry VIII. Fisher and Warham, the Earl
of Surrey and Sir Nicholas Poins, Colet and Godsalve, each in their
way representative of a class, but keenly individual and vigorously
characteristic, are preserved for us by those few sharp, bold strokes
with a power and reality which no portrait-painter has ever surpassed.
The luxury and the meanness, the treachery and the cold selfishness,
that form the background of the great struggles of the sixteenth
century are expressed for all time in those master-sketches which
Holbein drew and Margaret Roper, it may be, often looked upon.
And for More's own household we have, besides the letters and the
memoirs, the very form and pressure from the great artist's own hand.
The original design for the famous picture of the patriarchal family,
the three generations living together in love and reverence in their
"Platonic Academy," is at Basle; but in England, at Nostell and at
Cokethorpe, we have very fair presentments of the great picture as it
must have been. More sits by his shrewd old father in his habit as he
lived. The gentle, delicate son stands by, book in hand, and near his
affianced bride. The stepmother sits stately at one side of the group,
and the daughters cluster around. The sorrowful eyes of the great
Chancellor, and his pensive, meditative brow, speaking sound conscience
and a firm resolve, are not lightly to be forgotten; and the plain,
homely face of Margaret Roper, refined and thoughtful through all its
solid strength, may well linger in the memories of those who know her
beautiful life.
To the number of these Miss Manning's book has added many. She teaches
others to love her heroes because she loved them herself. Erasmus and
More and Holbein, Gunnel and Clement, Will Roper and faithful Patteson,
she knew as if she had lived among them. These, and such as these, are
the characters of whom she so skilfully drew portraits which were much
more than the fictions of imagination. She wrote from a considerable
knowledge of the literature of the time, and with a genuine love of all
things beautiful and good. In her style she imitated the quaintness
of old English without any precise restriction to the period of Henry
VIII.; and in the same way the vocabulary and the spelling which
she adopted were not claimed by her as minutely accurate. Over her
book and her characters I would gladly linger. But the first speaks
for itself, and my office is only to direct readers to it; and for
the characters, what I can say is said in my own Life of the great
Chancellor and Saint himself, the father of the gentle Margaret whom
Miss Manning so happily drew.
But there is a special feature in this reprint of which I must needs
say a word. Mr. Herbert Railton and Mr. John Jellicoe show that they
too are skilled in the drawing of imaginary portraits--that they have
seen More's house as indeed we think it must have been, and his family
in their habits as they lived. As the barge brings us past old London
Bridge to the Chelsea stairs, the mansion of the Chancellor stands
before us in the warm sun as when Ellis Heywood saw it three centuries
and a half ago. The children play in the garden, the Jew tells his
story, the peacocks flaunt their gay colours, and More reads his old
books and cracks his jests, as if the old time had come back again.
Bright pictures indeed, and a worthy setting; and the old story is told
anew as More himself and Holbein might have loved to think of it. But
good wines need no bush, and good pictures no prologue.