But, as they ran, those sands had measured more than "a great portrait-painter." They had measured Greatness; greatness which is not to be delimited by the wanton outrages of man or the accidents of time. Both have had their share in the judgments of generations that have lost all his greatest and nearly all his imaginative creations. And what the Spoiler has spared, the self-styled Restorer has too often ruined. Self-love, on the other hand, and family pride have been engaged to preserve those portraits by which it is now the fashion to mulct him of his far larger dues.
Of his mysticism, of the symbolism in which his "Journal Intime" is written in his own firm cipher, this little book is not the place to speak; though for those who have once come to know the true Holbein these have a spell, a stern, inexhaustible enchantment all their own.
But study the few fortunate survivals of his imaginative works, study even more the wrecks and skeletons of his loftier conceptions, and ask yourself if it could be by only a quick eye and a clever hand (and he had both, assuredly) that Holbein caught up the dying ember of the Van Eycks' torch and fanned it by his originality, his fancy, his winged realism, until its light lit up the dim ways of Man with a clairvoyance far beyond theirs. This eye, this mind, flung its gleaming penetration into every covert of the soul and deep, deep, deep into the most shrouded, the most shuddering secrets of Mortality.
Was it by virtue of a mere portrait-painter's powers that the son of the Augsburg Bohemian came to lay his finger upon the very core and composition of perhaps the haughtiest, the subtlest, the most dread despot since the Cæsars? Henry VIII. and Fisher; the Laïs Corinthiaca, the Duchess of Milan, his brooding wife; dancing children, and dancing Death; Christ on the Cross, Christ in the Grave, Christ Arisen; lambs in the fields, woods and hills, gaping peasants, wild battle;—put them side by side, the poor ghosts of them left to us, and compute the range of art—"the majestic range" that framed them all.
Let us be just. Let us forget for a moment the chirp of the family housekeeper over her gods. Let us gather up the broken fragments that are more than the meal, and humbly own the Miracle that created them. It is idle to argue with the intelligence that can see "a want of imagination" in Holbein. But we can find proof and to spare that it is not so; that his so-called "limitations"—apart from method, which is a matter of Epoch—are due to a creed we may or may not agree with, but surely must respect. The creed that Beauty is the framework, the ornament, rather than the substance of things; the pleasure, not the purpose of "this mortal"; and that the sweetest flower that blows is but an exquisite moment of transfigured clay.
He smells the mould above the rose; yet how he draws the rose! The brazen arrogance of pomp, the pearl on a woman's neck, the shimmer of a breaking bubble, the wrinkles in a baby's foot, the beauty of life, the pathos of life, the irony and the lust of life,—he has painted them all, as he saw them all, in the phantasmagoric Procession of Being betwixt garret and throne.
He has painted each, too, with that genius for seizing the essential quality which is the thing, that never forsook him from Augsburg to Saint Andrew's Undershaft; that singular, vivid, original genius which can well afford to let his grave be forgotten, whose works build for him, as Hans Holbein—
One of the few, the immortal names
That were not born to die.