It is a demon-driven soul if ever there was one. He is in the very act of springing to his feet and rushing away anywhere, anywhere out of this Presence;—no more concerned about his money-bag than about the food he loathes. Thirty pieces of silver! If the priests have lied, if this is in very truth the Messiah his heart still half believes Him, will thirty pieces of silver buy his soul from the Avenger? Is there time still to escape? What if he break the promise given when he was over-persuaded in the market-place the other day? But did not the High Priest himself declare that this is Beelzebub in person,—this fair, false, dear,—oh! still too dear Illusion? Up! Let him be gone out of this!—from the sound of that Voice, from the sight of that Face, get the thing over and done, done—done one way or another! If God's work, as the priests swear, well and good. He will have earned the pity of God Himself. If the devil's, as his heart whispers, well, too! Let him take his price and buy himself a rope long enough to house his soul in any Hell, rather than sit on in this one! It is all painted, or was once; all written on that sunken cheek, that matted hair and clammy brow; in that cavernous socket, that eye of lurid despair; on the whole anatomy of a lost soul. The hand that did it was very young, very immature; but it had the youth and the immaturity of a Master.
There is another and a very different work, an oil painting, in the Royal Collection at Lisbon, signed IOANNES HOLBEIN FECIT 1519, which, if by the younger Hans, would almost put the question as to whether the painter knew the landscapes of Italy, beyond doubt; so southern is the type of its background. The work, however, has been rejected by Woltmann, on the strength of an old photograph not quite perfect. He held the signature to be spurious, and attributed the picture to the school of Gerard David. And he gave to the work the name by which it is now generally styled in English works: "The Fountain of Life" (Der Brunnen des Lebens).[3] He did so from the inscription within the rim of the well immediately in the foreground; but a literal translation of this inscription, PVTEVS AQUARUM VIVENCIUM, is, I think, to be preferred: The Well of Living Waters.
The majority of those competent to form a judgment in such matters are inclined to attribute the work to Hans Holbein the Elder, who did not die until some years later, and who made use of a very similar form of signature. And for myself I find it hard to see how anyone familiar with Hans the Younger could accept it as his work at any period of his career; least of all at the date given in the signature. So that equally whether Woltmann is right in believing the signature itself spurious, or those are right who hold it to be the genuine signature of Hans the Elder,—a more detailed description of the composition does not fall within the scope of this little volume. But the whole matter is most clearly set forth, and a very beautiful reproduction in colours given of the painting itself, in Herr Seeman's article upon it, which will be found in the appended List of References.
Considerably before 1519, as has been said, Holbein had begun to develop his special genius for Design, and to apply it to glass or window-paintings, as well as to metal and wood-engravings. The beautiful drawings, whether washed, or etched with the point, in chalks or Indian ink, of which examples may be seen in almost every great collection, private as well as public, that year after year were created by that fertile brain and ever more masterly hand, constitute an Art in themselves. And since so many (perhaps the greater number as well as the greater in subject) of his paintings have perished, it is chiefly in his drawings that the progression of his powers can be followed, or the plane and scope of his imagination recognised at all. There is seldom a date on them; but they will be found to date themselves pretty accurately by certain features. In his earliest, for instance, that defect of which mention has been made,—the short thick figures due to the energy of his rebound from Gothic attenuation is a grave fault. There is a Virgin and Child among his washed drawings for glass-paintings in the Basel Museum, for example, which, when you cut it off at the knees, is one of the most charming pictures of Mother and Child to be found in any painter's treatment of this subject. And behind them is a gem of landscape. Yet the whole, as it stands, is utterly marred by the Virgin's dwarfed limbs. But although Holbein never entirely overcame this fault, he did very greatly do so, as the years passed.
His architectural settings, too, tended to greater simplicity in his later years. Yet this is not a safe guide. Some early designs have simple forms; some comparatively late ones, a very ornate architecture. For the truth is that these architectural backgrounds and settings remained, so long as his fancy had any free field for disporting itself, an integral part of his conception. But only as inseparable from the Symbolism, the under-tow, of his imagination. To my thinking, at any rate, they make a gravid mistake who look for "realism" in these things.
His stately pillars and arches, his fluid forms of ornament, are not his idea of the actual surroundings of the characters he portrays, any more than they are your idea, or mine, of those surroundings. Is it to be supposed that he thought the dwellings of our Lord were palaces? Or that he could not paint a stable? Those who maintain that Holbein was a Realist in the modern sense of the word must reconcile as best they can the theory with the facts. But when we see the stage set with every stately circumstance,—the Babe amid the fading splendours of earthly palaces, our Lord mocked by matter as well as man,—I dare to think that we shall do well to cease from insisting on an adobe wall, and to study those "incongruous" circumstances to which the will and not the poverty of Holbein consents. We shall, at least, no longer be dull to "the tears of things" as he saw them.
But it would be no less a mistake to think of Holbein as one without a sense of laughter as well. His drawings of open-mouthed peasants gossiping in a summer's nooning, or dancing in some uncouth frolic,—and still more his romping children, dancing children, and the chase of the fox running off with the goose,—all of these are full of boyish fun. Would that they could be given here without usurping the place of more important works! But that is impossible. And so, too, with the costume-figures of Basel, among which is the charming back view of a citizen's wife, with all the women bent far backward in the odd carriage that was then "the latest fashion" among them.
He was particularly happy, also, in his drawings of the Landsknechte, those famous Mercenaries of "Blut und Eisen"; always ready to drink a good glass, and a-many; to love a good lass after the same liberal fashion; to troll a good song or fight a good fight; and all with equal zest. He had not mixed with these masterful gentry for nothing; nor they with him to wholly die. There are a number of drawings where they are engaged in combat, too, which show that Holbein's heart leapt to the music of sword and spear as blithely as does Scott's or Dumas's—as blithely as did the hearts of the Reisläufer themselves. Look at the mad rush, the hand-to-hand grapple, in a drawing of the Basel Collection, for instance ([Plate 7]). The blood-lust, the heroism, the savagery, the thrust, the oath, the dust-choked prayer, the forgotten breathing clay under the bloodstained foot; the very clash and din of the fray;—all is told with the brush. And yet not one unnecessary detail squandered. It is as if one watched it from some palpitating refuge, just near enough to see the forefront figures distinctly and to make out the interlocked hubbub and fury where the ranks have been broken through. It would be a great day for Art could we but chance upon some lost painting for which such a study had served its completed purpose.