Part 2

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!