Morning after morning, and year upon year, Holbein turned his back upon St. Johannthor, and walked eastward along the Rheinhalde;—the river racing toward him on his left hand, the University rising in front of him beyond the bridge, and the delicate Cathedral towers beyond the University. For the Basel Minster was still the Cathedral of the great See of Basel. Passing the wall of the Dominican Cemetery, on which was painted the ancient Dance of Death with which his own after-creations were so often to be confused, Holbein must many a time have studied the famous old copy. For though the Dominican painting was then nearly a century old, it was a copy of a still older original in the Klein-Basel nunnery of Klingenthal, a community under Dominican direction.
But he would pass another spot—one day to be of far more living importance to him. In 1520 it was a corn warehouse, known by the name of ze Crüz, which belonged to Adam Petri, the printer, who had inherited it from his uncle, the famous printer Johann Petri, by whose ingenious improvements the art of printing was so greatly facilitated. Two years later, in 1522, Froben bought this granary, ze Crüz, and converted it into the book-magazine which was known all over Europe as "Froben's Book-house." And in this latter year Adam Petri, greatly to Luther's disgust, pirated Luther's translation of the New Testament, which had appeared three months before.
Holbein drew a superb title-page, ante-dated 1523, for this "enterprise" of Petri—the New Testament "now right faithfully rendered into German,"—with the symbols of the Evangelists at the four corners, the arms of Basel at the top, the device of the printer at the foot, and the noble figures of St. Paul and St. Peter on either side; figures which will bear comparison with Dürer's "Four Temperaments" of a later date. Later still he designed another striking title-page for Thomas Wolff's translation; and his beautiful title-pages and ornaments for Froben, with whom his connection was not a temporary matter such as these others, would need a volume to themselves.
Holbein's only rival, if he could be called such, in work of this sort was the talented goldsmith, Urs Graf, who, as an exceedingly loose fish, lived most appropriately in the Fischmarkt in his own house near the old Birsig Bridge, when he was not in the lock-up for one or another of his constant brawls and scandals. But to compare the best work of both is to recognise a difference in kind as well as degree: the essential difference between even negligent genius and the most elaborate talent. High talent Urs Graf had unquestionably; though stamped,—I think,—with the lawless caprices of his own character. Holbein's every design has not only what Urs Graf lacked—that ordered imagination which is Style—but over and above all, the subtle expression of Power.
Many a time, too, just where he would turn away from the Rhine for the business centre of Gross-Basel, the artist would make some little pause at the old "Flower" Inn (zur Blume), which gave its name to the Blumenplatz, and is still commemorated in the greatly extended Blumenrain of to-day. All the world now knows the famous hotel of "The Three Kings"; and where it reaches nearest to the Old Bridge stood the "Blume" of Holbein's time, even then the oldest of the Basel inns. This Blume, not to be confused with later inns of the same name, shared with its no less famous contemporary,—"The Stork," in the Fischmarkt,—the special patronage of the chief printers. Basilius Amerbach, for instance, the brother of Holbein's friend Bonifacius, lived at the Blume; and often the painter must have turned in for a friendly glass with him and a chat about Bonifacius, away at his law studies in Avignon.
As for the Stork, its very rooms were named in remembrance of the envoys and merchant traders who flocked to it on all great occasions. There was a "Cologne Room," for instance, and a "Venetian Room," among many others. The men of Venice, indeed, had a particular affection for it. Here Holbein met with all nationalities, and learned much of the great centres of other countries. Here came all the Basel magnates and printers. And here, a few years later on, came that bizarre personage who was for a very brief time Basel's "town physician," the Paracelsus Theophrastus Bombastus to whom we owe our word bombastic. Holbein was on a visit to England during the latter's short tenure of office, when the combined scholarship and poverty of Oporinus made him the hack of Paracelsus and the victim of many a petty tyranny. At that time Oporinus,—the son of that Hans Herbster, painter, whose portrait is now attributed to Ambrose Holbein,—was glad to place his remarkable knowledge of Greek at Froben's service. He was not yet a printer, as later when Holbein drew a clever device for him. And neither he nor the painter could know that one day the daughter of Bonifacius Amerbach should marry him out of sheer pity for his unhappy old age,—somewhat as he himself, when but a lad of twenty, married an aged Xantippe from gratitude.
But in 1520, when Holbein was just married, Oporinus was still a student and Bonifacius unmarried. Erasmus, too, did not permanently take up his home with Froben until the following year, and was now at Louvain. Yet what a true university was that little house zum Sessel (now 3, Todtengässlein, the little lane where the old post-office stood) to an intelligence such as Holbein's! And what a circle was that of Froben's staff! From Froben himself, above whom Erasmus alone could tower in scholarship, down through every member to the youngest, and from such men as Gerard Lystrius on the one hand and the literally "Beatus" Rhenanus on the other, what things were not to be learned!
And what discussions those were that drew each man to give of his best in the common talk! Venice sent news of the "unspeakable" Turk, whom she had such good cause to watch and dread. For fifty years his name had ceased to blanch the cheek of other nations; but now it was said, and said truly, that the dying Selim, "the Grim," had forged a thunderbolt which Suleyman II. would not be slow to hurl. No man could know the worst or dared predict the end, as to that Yellow Terror of Holbein's time. And closer still, to keen eyes, were the threats of the coming Peasant Terror. Wurtemberg had battened down the flames, it is true; but the deck of Europe was hot under foot with the passions that were soon to make the Turks' atrocities seem gentle in comparison.
The death of Maximilian and the election of Charles V. were a year old now. But none knew better than the Basel printers how much the League of Swabia and the Swiss Confederation had weighed in the close contest of claims between those three strangely youthful competitors for the Emperor's crown;—Charles, but nineteen; Francis I., one-and-twenty; and Henry VIII., not twenty-five. Basel also knew that Charles had only bought his triumph by swearing to summon the Diet of Worms. All the more, therefore, was she intensely alive to the possible issues of the Arabian-Nights-Entertainment which had but just concluded on the dreary Calais flats when Holbein became one of Basel's citizens. Erasmus had come back full of it. Marco Polo's best wonders made but a dingy show beside the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," where in this June the two defeated candidates for imperial honours had kissed each other midway between the ruined moat of Guisnes and the rased battlements of Arde.
Then, on top of this, came the rumours of the English King's undertaking to answer Luther's most formidable attack on Rome. It was in 1520, the year after his great disputation with Eck at Leipzig, that Luther published his cataclysmic addresses: "To the Christian Nobles of Germany" and "On the Babylonian Captivity,"—the latter of which itself contains the whole Protestant Reformation in embryo. "Would to God," exclaimed Erasmus of it, "that he had followed my counsel and abstained from odious and seditious proceedings!" Bishop Tunstall, then in Worms, had also written of it:—"I pray God keep that book out of England!" But before the year was out "that book" had reached England, and Henry VIII. had sworn to annihilate its arguments and to triumphantly defend the dogmas of Rome. The eagerly-awaited "Defence" did not get printed, and would remain in Pope Leo's hands for a year yet. But Basel knew, through More and Erasmus,—whose canny smile probably discounted its critical quality,—pretty much its line of defence. Nor was Froben's circle one whit more surprised than its royal author when its immediate reward was that formal style and title—Defender of the Faith,—to which a few years more were to lend so different a significance.