Part 3

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?

The fine flower of the picture department of the Tudor Exhibition is 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