1892.
[SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION]
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 "the cognoscenti and 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 itself to 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's succoring 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.