ON THE DELIGHTS OF ANINCOGNITO

"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, indistemper, 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, ofcostume. 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 beautybegins 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 notwhich to admire the most in this picture: the breadth of composition, the precision and sweep of line, or the spiritual dignity and repose. Its mate, the half-length of Sir John More, the father, Senior Judge of the King's Bench, "homo civilis, suavis, innocens," is very nearly as superb, though it has less body. Both were done by Holbein during his happy stay at Chelsea. His presentation of More is always inestimable: you recognize, by some little accent ever and anon, that he painted him with enjoyment and understanding love. "Thy painter, dearest Erasmus," wrote More, "is an amazing artist." It was on a hint of the Earl of Arundel that Holbein went to England. When asked there who had persuaded him to cross the Channel, he could not remember the nobleman's name, though he remembered his face: one turn of the pen, and the answer was apparent. But it was Erasmus who gave him his letters of introduction, who was in reality his patron; for Erasmus sent him to More, and from the Chancellor's roof he passed to that of the King, at an honorarium of three hundred pounds a year. And as he painted these friends,so he painted their colleagues: with sympathy and authority. Our most intimate knowledge of the finer spirits among the publicists of the sixteenth century comes from Holbein's canvas. We cannot fail to observe "the weight of thought and care in these studious heads of the Reformation." Such a weight is in every Holbein of Colet and Warham and More, of Melanchthon, Froben, Erasmus himself, (borne in him, as in More, with an almost whimsical sweetness), and of "the thoroughly Erasmic being," Bonifacius Amerbach. Looking at them, and mindful of their diverse sagacities, one must corroborate the celebrated wish of Goethe that the business of the Reformation, spoiled, as a work of art, by Luther and Calvin, and as a theological issue, by the popular interference, had been left to the trained leaders: to men like these in one generation, and to men like Pole and Hugo Grotius in the next!

Wolsey and the great and quietly-handled Archbishop Warham hang here together in strange posthumous amity, parted only by the panel of Anne, Bluebeard's fourth Queen, which Holbein went to Cleves topaint. 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 criticallast 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 thatRembrandt 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-temperedHausfrauat home in Basle. The one quality they cannot convey is breeding, social distinction. Holbein's woman may have youth, goodness, capacity, even authority; but

"Wasthe 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 forever 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 ofHans Ho. pinxit!

1890.

leaf

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 namehim to another as the author ofVanity 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,aliasJackson, "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 wemay eat lotos and fern-seed, and die out of the ken ofThe 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 onObscurity: "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 overhad 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.

leaf

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 heputs 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 defenceHis 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 meethim 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 vocalwith 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 anadoring 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, isthat 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 themaxima 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. Theydig 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.

leaf

AMAN 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.

The mildest and sanest of us has a sneaking admiration for a soldier: lo, it is because his station implies a disregard of what we call the essential. The only elegant, gratifying exit of such a one is in artillery-smoke. A boy reads of Winkelried and d'Assas with a thrill of satisfaction. Hesitation, often most meritorious, is unforgivable in those who have espoused a duty and a risk. Courage is the most ordinary of our virtues: it ought to win no great plaudits; but for one who withholds it, and "dares not put it to the touch," we have tremendous vituperations. In short, that man makes but a poor show thenceforward among his fellows, who having had an eligible chance to set up as a haloed ghost, evades it, and forgets the serviceable maxim of Marcus Aurelius, that "part of the business of life is to lose it handsomely." Of like mind was Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus: "Take the first chance of dying nobly, lest, soon after, dying indeed come to thee, but noble dying nevermore." Once in a while, such counsels stir a fellow-mortal beyond reason, and persuade him "for a small flash of honor to cast away himself." And if so, it proves that at last the right perception and application of what we are has dawned upon him.

Though we get into this world by no request of our own, we have a great will to stay in it: our main desire, despite athousand buffets of the wind, is to hang on to the branch. The very suicide-elect, away from spectators, oftenest splashes back to the wharf. Death is the one visitor from whom we scurry like so many children, and terrors thrice his size we face with impunity at every turn. The real hurt and end-all may be in the shape of a fall, a fire, a gossamer-slight misunderstanding. Or "the catastrophe is a nuptial," as Don Adriano says in the comedy. But we can breast out all such venial calamities, so that we are safe from that which heals them. We have, too, an unconscious compassion for the men of antiquity. Few, if it came to the point, would change day for day, and be Alexander, on the magnificent consideration that, although Alexander was an incomparable lion, Alexander is dead. Herrick's ingenuous verse floats into memory:

"I joy to seeMyself alive: this age best pleaseth me."

Superfluous adorners of the nineteenth century, we have no enthusiasm to be what our doom makes us, mere gradators, little mounting buttresses of a coral-reef, atomsatop of several layers, and presently buried under several more. We would strut, live insects for ever, working and waltzing over our progenitors' bones. Seventy-five flushing years are no boon to us, if at that tender period's end, we must be pushed aside from the wheel of the universe, and swept up like so much dust and chaff. Nor does it help us, when it comes to the inevitable deposal, to recall that while there were as yet no operas, menus, nor puns, one Methusalem and his folk had nine lazy centuries of it, and that their polar day, which was our proper heritage, vanished with them, and beggared the almanac. Appreciation of life is a modern art: it seems vexing enough that just in inverse proportion to the growing capacity of ladies and gentlemen, is the ever-diminishing room allotted wherein to exhibit it to "the scoffing stars." Time has stolen from us our decades sacred to truancy and the circus, to adventure and loafing. Where is the age apiece in which to explode shams, to do vast deeds, to generalize, to learn a hawk from a hernshaw, to be good—O to be good! an hour before bedtime? Evening for us should be adogmain abstracto; seas and suns should change; horizons should stretch incalculably, cities bulge over their boundaries, deserts thicken with carriages, polite society increase and abound in caves and balloons, and in starlit tavern doorways on Matterhorn top: and still, crowded and jostled by less favored humanity, elbowing it through extinct and unborn multitudes, we would live, live! and there should be no turf broken save by the plough, and no urns except for roses.

It demonstrates what an amusing great babe a man is, that his love of life is usually equivalent to love of duration of life. To be ninety, we take to mean that one has had ninety years' worth out of the venture: a calculation born of the hoodwinking calendar, and of a piece with Dogberry's deductions. But this estimable existence of ours is measured by depths and not by lengths; it is not uncommon for those who have compassed its greatest reach to be translated young, and wept over by perspicuous orators. And the smug person who expires "full of years," and empty, forsooth, of all things else, whose life is indeed covered, in severalsenses, by a life-insurance, is thought to be the enviable and successful citizen. It is quite as well that the gods have allowed us no vote concerning our own fates: it would be too hard a riddle to guess whether it is a dignified thing to continue, or when it is a profitable hour to cease. A greedy soul, desiring to live, reaps his wish, like Endymion, between moonrise and dawn, and gapes, yet unaware, for a bank-account and octogenarianism. Why wouldst thou grow up, sirrah? "To be a philosopher? a madman. An alchemist? a beggar. A poet?esurit: an hungry jack." Mere possibility of further sensation is a curious object of worship and desire. It has no meaning, save in relation to its starry betters in whose courts it is a slave, for whose good it may become a victim. A lover protesting to his lady that she is dearer than his life, is paying her, did he but consider it, a tricksy trivial compliment: as if he had said that she was more precious than a prejudice, adorable beyond a speculation. On the negative side only, in the subjective application, life is dear. Certainly, one can conceive of no more monstrous wrong toa breathing man than to announce his demise. Swift's mortuary joke on Partridge is the supreme joke. A report that you are extinct damages your reputation beyond repair. We may picture a vision of wrath bursting into the editor's office: "I am told that yesterday you had my name, sir, in your column of Deaths. I demand contradiction." Unto whom the editor: "The Evening Bugaboonever contradicts itself. But I will, with pleasure, put you in, to-night, under the heading of Births." Some considerations are to the complainant a fiery phooka: strive as he will to adjust them, he gets thrown, and bruises his bones.

Life is legal tender, and individual character stamps its value. We are from a thousand mints, and all genuine; despite our infinitely diverse appraisements, we "make change" for one another. So many ideals planted are worth the great gold of Socrates; so many impious laws broken are worth John Brown. We may give ourselves in ha'pence fees for horses, social vogue, tobacco, books, a journey; or be lavished at once for some good outranking them all. And of the two dangers of hoarding and spending, the former seems a thousand times more imminent and appalling. Our moralists, who have done away with duels, and taught us the high science of solidarity, have deflected us from our collateral relative, the knight-errant, who seemed to go about seeking that which might devour him. But there are times when a prince is called suddenly to his coronation, and must throw largesses as he rides; when the commonest workaday life hears a summons, and wins the inalienable right to spill itself on the highway, among the crowd. We make a miserable noisy farcical entry, one by one, on the terrene stage; it is a last dramatic decency that we shall learn to bow ourselves out with gallantry, be it even among the drugs and pillows of a too frequent lot. But the enviable end is the other: some situations have inherent dignity, and exist already in the play. Death in battle is (for the commissioned officer) a gracefully effective mode of extinction; so is any execution for principle's sake. The men who fill the historic imagination are the men who strove and failed, and put into port at Traitors' Gate. The politicalscaffold, in fact, is an artistic creation. When a scholar looks up, the first eyes he meets are the eyes of those who stand there, in cheerful acquiescence, "alive, alert, immortal." "An axe," says Bishop Jeremy Taylor, "is a much less affliction than a strangury." While the headsman awaited on every original inspiration, under "hateful Henry" as under Nero, life certainly had a romance and gusto unknown to modern spirits. The rich possibilities of any career got, at some time, congested tragically into this. How readily any one might see that, and welcome the folly and ignominy which drove him to an illustrious early grave! Raleigh, at the last, kissed the yet bloodless blade "which ends this strange eventful history," saying: "'Tis a sharp medicine, but a cure for all diseases." Disguised and hunted, Campion of S. John's, following his duty, steals along the Harrow Road, by Tyburn tree, and passing it, in a sort of awful love-longing, and as if greeting the promised and foreordained, smilingly raises his hat. Not by grace only are men "so in love with death," but by habit, by humor, and through economic effort. Logic aswell as faith understands the evangel: "Whoso loseth his life shall find it." The hero can await, without a flutter, the disarming of his hand and hope; for he can never be stolen upon unawares. His prayer has always been for

"Life that dares sendA challenge to its end,And when it comes, say, 'Welcome, friend!'"

He must ceaseen gentilhomme, as he has heretofore continued. To have Azrael catch him by the leg, like a scampering spider, is not agreeable to his ideas of etiquette. At any age, after any fashion, it is only the hero who dies; the rest of us are killed off. He resembles Cartright's "virtuous young gentlewoman":

"Others are dragged away, or must be driven;She only saw her time, and stepped to Heaven."

We act out to its close our parable of the great babe, who has clutched his little treasure long and guardedly, unwilling to share it, and from whom, for discipline's sake, it must needs be taken. But the martyr-mind, in conscious disposal, is like the young Perseus, bargaining with PallasAthene for a brief existence and glory. The soul meets its final opportunity, as at a masked ball; if it cannot stand and salute, to what end were its fair faculties given? Or, we are all pedestrians in a city, hurrying towards our own firesides, eager, preoccupied, mundane. Perhaps at the turn of a steep street, there is the beauty of sunset, "brightsome Apollo in his richest pomp," the galleons of cloud-land in full sail, every scarlet pennon flying. One or two pause, as if from a sharp call or reminder, and beholding such a revelation, forget the walk and the goal, and are rapt into infinitude.Immortalitas adest!Now, most of us crawl home to decease respectably of "a surfeit of lampreys." We keep the names, however, of those who seem to make their exit to the sound of spiritual trumpets, and who fling our to-morrow's innocent gauds away, to clothe themselves with inexhaustible felicity.

1887.

leaf

AN editor, a person of authority and supposed discretion, requested a friend of mine, the other day, to write an essay with this weird title: "How to Read a Book of Poems so as to Get the Most Good out of It." My friend, "more than usual calm," politely excused himself, suffering the while from suppressed oratory. He felt that the diabolic suggestion, made in all

"Conscience and tendre herte,"

amounted to a horrible implied doubt concerning the lucidity of himself and other minor bards, publishing to-day and to-morrow. They have become difficult to read, only because a too educational world of readers is determined to find them so. Now, eating is to eat, with variations inhaste, order, quantity, quality, and nocturnal visions: with results, in short; but eating is to eat. Even thus, as it would appear to a plain mind, reading is to read. Can it be that any two or two thousand can wish to be preached at, in order that they may masticate a page correctly, in squads? that they may never forget, like Mr. Gladstone's progeny, to apportion thirty-two bites to every stanza, with the blessing before, and the grace after? No full-grown citizen is under compulsion to read; if he do so at all, let him do it individually, by instinct and favor, for wantonness, for private adventure's sake: and incidental profit be hanged, drawn and quartered! To enter a library honorably, is not to go clam-digging after useful information, nor even after emotions. The income to be secured from any book stands in exact disproportion to the purpose, as it were, of forcing the testator's hand: a moral very finely pointed inThe Taming of the Shrew, and again inAurora Leigh. To read well is to make an impalpable snatch at whatever item takes your eye, and run. The schoolmaster has a contradictory theory. He wouldhave us in a chronic agony of inquisitiveness, and with minds gluttonously receptive, not of the little we need (which it is the ideal end and aim of a university education, according to Newman, to perceive and to assimilate) but of the much not meant for us. Wherefore to the schoolmaster there may be chanted softly in chorus:Ah, mon père, ce que vous dites là est du dernier bourgeois. The Muse is dying nowadays of over-interpretation. Too many shepherd swains are trying to Get the Most Good out of her. When Caius Scriblerius prints his lyric about the light of Amatoria's eyes, which disperses his melancholy moods, the average public, at least in Boston, cares nothing for it, until somebody in lack of employment discovers that as Saint Patrick's snakes were heathen rites, and as Beatrice Portinari was a system of philosophy, so Amatoria's eyes personify the sun-myth. And Caius shoots into his eleventh edition.

Mr. Browning, perhaps, will continue to bear this sort of enlargement and interfusion; indeed, nothing proves his calibre quite so happily as the fact that his capacious phantasmal figure, swollen with thegas of much comment and expounding, has a fair and manly look, and can still carry off, as we say, its deplorable circumference. But at the present hour, there is nothing strange in imagining less opaque subjects being hauled in for their share of dissection before Browning societies. Picture, for instance, a conclave sitting from four to six over the sensations of Mrs. Boffkin,

"Waiting for the Sleary babies to develop Sleary's fits."

(For Mr. Kipling must be a stumbling-block unto some, as unto many a scandal.) Is there no fun left in Israel? Have we to endure, for our sins, that a super-civilization insists on being vaccinated by the poor little poets, who have brought, alas, no instrument but their lyre? Can we no longer sing, without the constraint of doling out separately to the hearer, what rhetoric is in us, what theory of vowel color, what origin and sequences, what occult because non-existent symbolism? without setting up for oracles of dark import, and posing romantically as "greater than we know"? To what a pass has theascendant New England readeress brought the harmless babes of Apollo! She seeks to master all that is, and to raise a complacent creation out of its lowland wisdom to her mountainous folly's level; she touches nothing that she does not adorn—with a problem; she approves of music and pictures whose reasonableness is believed to be not apparent to the common herd; she sheds scholastic blight upon "dear Matt Prior's easy jingle," and unriddles for you the theological applications of

Back to Index Next