The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPatrins

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPatrinsThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: PatrinsAuthor: Louise Imogen GuineyRelease date: April 22, 2018 [eBook #57024]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Emmy, MFR, Linda Cantoni, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive). This project is dedicated withlove to Emmy's memory.*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PATRINS ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: PatrinsAuthor: Louise Imogen GuineyRelease date: April 22, 2018 [eBook #57024]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Emmy, MFR, Linda Cantoni, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive). This project is dedicated withlove to Emmy's memory.

Title: Patrins

Author: Louise Imogen Guiney

Release date: April 22, 2018 [eBook #57024]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Emmy, MFR, Linda Cantoni, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive). This project is dedicated withlove to Emmy's memory.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PATRINS ***

CONTENTS

author inscription

M.R.D., from her affectionateold friend who wrote it. 1897

title page

PATRINSTO WHICH IS ADDEDAn INQUIRENDO Into the WIT &Other Good Parts of HIS LATE MAJESTYKING CHARLES the SecondWRITTEN BYLOUISE IMOGEN GUINEYBOSTONPrinted forCopeland and Day69 Cornhill1897COPYRIGHT 1897 BY COPELAND AND DAY

WRITTEN BYLOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

BOSTONPrinted forCopeland and Day69 Cornhill1897

Apatrin, according toRomano Lavo-Lil, is "a Gypsy trail: handfuls of leaves or grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to denote, to those behind, the way which they have taken." Well, these wild dry whims arepatrinsdropped now in the open for our tribe; but particularly for you. They will greet you as you lazily come up, and mean: Fare on, and good luck love you to the end! On each have I put the date of its writing, as one might make memoranda of little leisurely adventures in prolonged fair weather; and you will read, in between and all along, a record of pleasant lonely paths never very far from your own, biggest of Romanys! in the thought-country of our common youth.

Ingraham Hill, South Thomaston, Maine,October 19, 1896.

leaf

APHILOSOPHER now living, and too deserving for any fate but choice private oblivion, was in Paris, for the first time, a dozen years ago; and having seen and heard there, in the shops, parks, and omnibus stations, much more baby than he found pleasing, he remarked, upon his return, that it was a great pity the French, who are so in love with system, had never seen their way to shutting up everything under ten years of age! Now, that was the remark of an artist in human affairs, and may provoke a number of analogies. What is in the making is not a public spectacle. It ought to be considered very outrageous, on the death of a painter or a poet, to exhibit those rough first drafts, which he, living, had the acumen to conceal. And if, to animpartial eye, in a foreign city, native innocents seem too aggressively to the fore, why should not the seclusion desired for them be visited a thousandfold upon the heads, let us say, of students, who are also in a crude transitional state, and undergoing a growth much more distressing to a sensitive observer than the physical? Youth is the most inspiring thing on earth, but not the best to let loose, especially while it carries swaggeringly that most dangerous of all blunderbusses, knowledge at half-cock. There is, indeed, no more melancholy condition than that of healthy boys scowling over books, in an eternal protest against their father Adam's fall from a state of relative omniscience. Sir Philip Sidney thought it was "a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse that a man should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue!" The throes of education are as degrading and demoralizing as a hanging, and, when the millennium sets in, will be as carefully screened from the laity. Around the master and the pupil will be reared a portly and decorous Chinese wall, which shall pen within their proper precincts the din ofhic, hæc, hoc,and the steam of suppers sacrificed to Pallas.

The more noxious variety of student, however, is not young. He is "in the midway of this our mortal life"; he is fearfully foraging, with intent to found and govern an academy; he runs in squads after Anglo-Saxon or that blatant beast, Comparative Mythology; he stops you on 'change to ask if one has not good grounds for believing that there was such a person as Pope Joan. He can never let well enough alone. Heine must be translated and Junius must be identified. The abodes of hereditary scholars are depopulated by the red flag of thenouveau instruit. He infests every civilized country; the army-worm is nothing to him. He has either lacked early discipline altogether, or gets tainted, late in life, with the notion that he has never shown sufficiently how intellectual he really is. In every contemplative-looking person he sees a worthy victim, and his kindling eye, as he bears down upon you, precludes escape: he can achieve no peace unless he is driving you mad with all which you fondly dreamed you had left behind in oldS.'s accursed lecture-room. You may commend to him in vain the reminder which Erasmus left for the big-wigs, that it is the quality of what you know which tells, and never its quantity. It is inconceivable to him that you should shut your impious teeth against First Principles, and fear greatly to displace in yourself the illiteracies you have painfully acquired.

Judge, then, if the learner of this type (and in a bitterer degree, the learneress) could but be safely cloistered, how much simpler would become the whole problem of living! How profoundly would it benefit both society and himself could the formationary mind, destined, as like as not, to no ultimate development, be sequestered by legal statute in one imperative limbo, along with babes, lovers, and training athletes!Quicquid ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi.

For the true scholar's sign-manual is not the midnight lamp on a folio. He knows; he is baked through; all superfluous effort and energy are over for him. To converse consumedly upon the weather, and compare notes as to "whether it is likely to hold up for to-morrow,"—this,says Hazlitt, "is the end and privilege of a life of study." Secretly, decently, pleasantly, has he acquired his mental stock; insensibly he diffuses, not always knowledge, but sometimes the more needful scorn of knowledge. Among folk who break their worthy heads indoors over Mr. Browning and Madame Blavatsky, he moves cheerful, incurious, and free, on glorious good terms with arts and crafts for which he has no use, with extraneous languages which he will never pursue, with vague Muses impossible to invite to dinner. He is strictly non-educational:

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!No hungry generations tread thee down."

He loathes information and the givers and takers thereof. Like Mr. Lang, he laments bitterly that Oxford is now a place where many things are being learned and taught with great vigor. The main business to him is to live gracefully, without mental passion, and to get off alone into a corner for an affectionate view of creation. A mystery serves his turn better than a history. It is to be remembered that had the Rev. Laurence Sterne gone to gazeupon the spandrils of Rouen Cathedral, we should all have lost thefille de chambre, the dead ass, and Maria by the brookside. Any one of these is worth more than hieroglyphics; but who is to attain that insight that these are so, except the man of culture, who has the courage to forget at times even his sole science, and fall back with delight upon a choice assortment of ignorances?

The scholar's own research, from his cradle, clothes him in privacy; nor will he ever invade the privacy of others. It is not with a light heart that he contemplates the kindergarten system. He himself, holding his tongue, and fleeing from Junius and Pope Joan, from cubic roots and the boundaries of Hindostan, from the delicate difference between the idiom of Maeterlinck and that of Ollendorff, must be an evil sight to Chautauquans, albeit approved of the angels. He has little to utter which will sound wise, the full-grown, finished soul! If he had, he would of his own volition seek a cell in that asylum for protoplasms, which we have made bold to recommend.

The truth is, very few can be trustedwith an education. In the old days, while this was a faith, boredom and nervous prostration were not common, and social conditions were undeniably picturesque. Then, as now, quiet was the zenith of power: the mellow mind was unexcursive and shy. Then, as now, though young clerical Masters of Arts went staggering abroad with heads lolling like Sisyphus' stone, the ideal worth and weight grew "lightly as a flower." Sweetly wrote the good Sprat of his famous friend Cowley: "His learning sat exceedingly close and handsomely upon him: it was not embossed on his mind, but enamelled." The best to be said of any knowing one among us, is that he does not readily show what deeps are in him; that he is unformidable, and reminds whomever he meets of a distant or deceased uncle. Initiation into noble facts has not ruined him for this world nor the other. It was a beautiful brag which James Howell, on his first going beyond sea, March the first, in the year sixteen hundred and eighteen, made to his father. He gives thanks for "that most indulgent and costly Care you havebeen pleased, in so extraordinary a manner, to have had of my Breeding, (tho' but one child of Fifteen) by placing me in a choice Methodical School so far distant from your dwelling, under a Learned (tho' Lashing) Master; and by transplanting me thence to Oxford to be graduated; and so holding me still up by the chin, until I could swim without Bladders. This patrimony of liberal Education you have been pleased to endow me withal, I now carry along with me abroad as a sure inseparable Treasure; nor do I feel it any burden or incumbrance unto me at all!"

There, in the closing phrase, spoke the post-Elizabethan pluck. Marry, any man does well since, who can describe the aggregated agonies of his brain asno incumbrance, as less, indeed, than a wife and posterity! To have come to this is to have earned the freedom of cities, and to sink the schoolmaster as if he had never been.

1889.

leaf

IT has seemed to many thoughtful readers, within the last fifty or sixty years, that Wordsworth'sOde on the Intimationsis altogether mistaken in its assumption that the open-air world is dearer to the child than to the man: or that the Heaven which so easily fuses with it in our idea lies nearer to the former than to the latter. Some abnormally perceptive child (like the infant W.W. himself) may have a clear sense of "glory in the grass, of splendor in the flower." But the appreciation of natural objects is infinitely stronger, let us say, in the babe of thirty; and so is even the appreciation of the diversions which they provide. Were it not for the prospects of unforeseen and adventurous company abroad, the child prefers to play in the shed. But the post-meridian child,who is not a "grown-up," but only a giant, desires "the house not made with hands": he has a delicate madness in his blood, the moment he breathes wild air.

Scipio and Laelius cannot keep, to save them, from stone-skipping on the strand, though they have come abroad for purposes of political conversation. Poets and bookmen are famous escapers of this sort. Surrey shooting his toy arrows at lighted windows; Shelley sailing his leaves and bank-notes on the Hampstead ponds; Dr. Johnson, of all persons, rolling down the fragrant Lincolnshire hills; Elizabeth Inchbald ("a beauty and a virtue," as her epitaph at Kensington prettily says) lifting knockers on April evenings and running away, for the innocent deviltry of it;—these have discovered the fun and the solace of out-of-doors at a stroke, and with a conscious rapture impossible to their juniors. Master Robin Hood, Earl of Huntingdon, probably kept to his perfectly exemplary brigandage because he liked the "shaws shene," and objected to going home at nightfall. No child ever tastes certain romantic joys which come of intimacies with creation. That he maywrite a letter upon birchbark, that he may eat a mushroom from the broken elm-trunk and drink the blood of the maple, that he may woo a squirrel from the oak, a frog from the marsh, or even a twelve-tined buck from his fastness, to be caressed and fed, strikes him as an experiment, not as an honor. It will not do to say that the worship of the natural world is an adult passion: it is quite the contrary; but only certain adults exemplify it. Coleridge, in theBiographia Litteraria, has a very beautiful theory, and a profoundly true one. "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day, for perhaps forty years, have made familiar:

"'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,And man and woman,—'

this is the character and privilege of genius." The genuine faun-heart is the child conscious and retrieved, the child by law established in happy natures. I knew one boy of six who met an ugly gypsy in a lane, and who, on being askedwhether he would like to go and live with her, replied in Americanese, with slow-breathed transports: "Oh-ee, yup!" In his mind was an instant vision of a bed suspended among leaves; and the clatter and glitter of the sacred leaves had nearly stolen his soul away. But he was not a common boy. His nurse being close behind, he was providentially saved, that time, to be abducted later by much more prosaic influences. Nor has the love of Nature, of late so laboriously instilled into the young, thanks to Froebel's impetus, made much progress among its small supposed votaries. The examination-papers, which, in a lustier age, began with—"Who dragged Which around the walls of What?" now stoop to other essentials:

"The wood-spurge has a cup of three."

Yet unless misled by the tender cant of their elders, even the modern Master and Missy would rather find and examine the gas-metre than the wood-spurge.

In his best estate, the out-of-doorling hunts not, neither fishes: he simply moves or sits, in eternal amalgamationwith the eternal: an enchanted toper of life and death, one with all that has ever been, or shall ever be, convinced that "there is a piece of divinity in us which is older than the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun." He is generally silent, because his sincere speech cannot be what we call sane. No one, however, who is truly content in the sought presence of Nature, can be sure that it is she who gives him all, or even most, of his comfort. It is only the poetic fashion to say so. It is at least doubtful if Nature be not, in her last exquisiteness, for the man already independent of her. There are those who may accost her, not as a petitioner, but as one sovereign to another in a congress of the Powers. Moral poise is the true passport to her favor, not a fine eye for "the leopard-colored trees" in late autumn, nor an ear for the bold diapasons of the surge. The man of vanities and ambitions and agitated fears may as well go to the football game: for the woods are cold to him. The lover, indeed, is notoriously rural while his fit lasts; he has been known to float into a mosquito-marsh, obliviously readingTristram of Lyonnesse. But so oblique a cult as his can count for nothing with the Mother. Her favorite spite is to deepen melancholy, as her prayer and purpose are to enhance joy. Not primary in her functions, she waits upon man's anterior dispositions, and gives her delights, as Fortuna is said to do, to the indifferent. But he shall not be indifferent after: her praise drips, honey-bright, from his lip. If any question him, remembering Vaughan's

"O tell me whence that joy doth springWhose diet is divine and fair,Which wears Heaven like a bridal ring?"

he may say that it is the possessing love of Nature which makes his day so rich. She meanwhile, could put a gloss upon that plausible text. The order and peace in him had first subjugated her terrible heart.

No babe, indeed, is born other than wild: he springs up on the farther border of civilization. Happy for him, if he can find his way back, with waking choice, even once a year, in his maturity, to recapture the perfect condition, and subject to ithis own developed faculties. How many have suffered the pure epic homesickness, the longing for decivilization, which has drawn them "to discover islands far away," or to roam without purpose at all, like Alastor and the Scholar Gypsy! Observe, that in all tradition the courtesies of the countryside are showered on the race of the deliberately glad. Magdalen of Pazzi, alone in the cloister-garden, rapturously catching up the roses to her face, and extolling Him who made them fair, signifies much: not only that she was dowered with the keen perception of beauty,—hardly that at all; but that she was at the apex of moral sanity, which has as much right to be passionate with beauty as the sun itself. It is inconceivable that barbarians should admire the sunset: though it is not inconceivable that barbarians in good society should say that they do so. For one of the earmarks of our latter-day culture is this patronal relish of the works of the Most High. Literature is over-ballasted with "descriptive passages," which the reader skips, but which no self-respecting author can afford to do without. We talk incessantly of the hills and the sea, and the flora and fauna thereof; and insolently take it for granted that we alone have arrived at the proper inwardness of these subjects. In naught have we more wronged the feudal ages than in denying to them an intimate knowledge and love of scenic detail. One glance at their cathedral capitals, at leaves, rose-haws, antlers, cobwebs, and shells, in stone carven since the tenth century, should have been corrective of that foolish depreciation of a people far nearer to the heart of things than we. The common dislike of gypsies is another revelation of jealousy: for we are not the Mother's favored children. Us she consigns to starched linen, and roofs, retorts of carbonic acid gas: would we sleep again on her naked breast, we come home to endure gibes, and the sniffles.

Well may the "sylvan" (a dear Elizabethan word gone into the dust-heap) feel that he is manumitted and exempt. He has no occasion to grow up. He looks with affectionate strangeness on his life past, as on his life to come, thinking it a solecism to anticipate decay wherehitherto no decay has been, or where indeed, if it have been, he "has had the wit never to know it." The Heaven which lies around us in our infancy is always there afterwards, waiting in vain, for the most part, for reciprocations. Symbolisms, sacraments, abound in the natural world, and to avail oneself of them is to regain and retain fleeting good, and to defy the time-dragon's tooth with a smile as of immortality. Devotion to a blackberry pasture and a swimming-pool confers youth on the devotee, provided he has not to pick fruit nor rescue ribald little boys for a living. A travelled man, a man of the world, has a ripe expert look: one says of him, admiring his talk and his manners, that he bears his age with grace. But nothing is so ageless as a sailor: he can bear his age neither well nor ill, for the obvious reason. In his hard cheek and blue eye are innocence, readiness, zest, taciturnity, daring, shyness, truth: all the fine wild qualities which "they that sit in parlors never dream of." It is not a physiological fact alone, that for health's sake you must be in league with the open. Whoever clingsto it for love, is known by his superior simplicity and balance. Many a coast-guardsman, or scout in the Canadian forest, has achieved the complete power which is mistakenly supposed to come, like an imposition of hands, upon the educated; and he gets this inestimable accolade, mark you, merely by smelling sea-kelp and sassafras, and welcoming a rainstorm as a pleasant sort of fellow: by the exercise of sheer natural piety, whose processes turn about and hit back by keeping him young. Would you perpetrate an elfin joke on such a one, present him with a calendar: the urban and domestic accuser. To register time, and consult its phases scientifically, is to give it a deplorable advantage over you. A brook scoffs at birthdays: and many a violet errs in chronology, and sidles forth at Martinmas. It is the shepherd-boy in theArcadiawho "pipes as if he should never grow old": marry, it is not anybody in a theatre orchestra! Which, think you, died with her girlhood yet unconsumed within her, Madame Récamier or the Nut-brown Maid? The victory is not with cosmetics. To the soirées ofthe hermit thrush, tan is your only wear. The "sylvan" is anti-chronological. He who comes close to the heart-beat of progress and dissolution in the wilderness, the vicissitudes of the vegetable world, must feel that, save in an allegory, these things are not for him: they go under him as a swimmer's wave. "Change upon change: yet one change cries out to another, like the alternate seraphim, in praise and glory of their Maker." The human atom gets into the mood of the according leaf, caring not how long it has hung there, how soon it may fall. God's will, in short, is nowhere so plain and acceptable as on a lonely stretch of moor or water. Who can feel it so keenly in the town? The town has never allowed man to guess his superiority to it: creature of his own exaggerations, it cows him, and compels him to remember, in his unrest, that he is no longer a spirit, no longer a child.

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 figureof 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? Butan 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.

leaf

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 theTolle, 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 arestrangely 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 wayBound 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 uponit 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 greatnoble, 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 setMy Lodging is on the Cold Groundin full song, on his genealogical tree? James the First and Charles theFirst 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.

leaf

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 "thecognoscentiand 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 itselfto 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'ssuccoring 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-lengthof 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 theTudor 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 theFidei 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, atfirst, 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 standsà 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 momentaryglooms, 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 truestliegemen 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.

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