VI
In conclusion, Dürer appears as a draughtsman of unrivalled powers. And when one looks on his drawings as what they most truly were, his preparation for the tasks set him by the conditions of his life, there is room for nothing but unmixed admiration. It is only when one asks whether those tasks might not have been more worthy of such high gifts that one is conscious of deficiency or misfortune. And can one help asking whether the Emperor Max might not have given Dürer his Bible or his Virgil to illustrate, instead of demanding to have the borders of his "Book of Hours" rendered amusing with fantastic and curious arabesques; whether Dürer's learned friends, instead of requiring from him recondite or ceremonious allegories, might not have demanded title-pages of classic propriety; or whether the imperial bent of his own imagination might not have rendered their demands malleable, and bid them call for a series of woodcuts, engravings or drawings, which could rival Rembrandt's etchings in significance of subject-matter and imaginative treatment, as they rival them in executive power? In his portraits--the large majority of which have come down to us only as drawings, the majority of which were never anything else--the demand made upon him was worthy; but even here Holbein, a man of lesser gift and power, has perhaps succeeded in leaving a more dignified, a more satisfying series; one containing, if not so many masterpieces, fewer on which an accidental or trivial subject or mood has left its impress. Yet, in spite of this, it is Dürer's, not Rembrandt's, not Holbein's character, that impresses us as most serious, most worthy to be held as a model. It is before his portrait of himself that Mr. Ricketts "forgets all other portraits whatsoever, in the sense that this perfect realisation of one of the world's greatest men is worthy of the occasion." So that we feel bound to attribute our dissatisfaction to something in his circumstances having hindered and hampered the flow of what was finest in his nature into his work. From Venice he wrote: "I am a gentleman here, but only a hanger-on at home." Germany was a better home for a great character, a great personality, than for a great artist: Dürer the artist was never quite at home there, never a gentleman among his peers. The good and solid burghers rated him as a good and solid burgher, worth so much per annum; never as endowed with the rank of his unique gift. It was only at Venice and Antwerp that he was welcomed as the Albert Dürer whom we to-day know, love, and honour.
FOOTNOTES:
See the exquisite landscape in the collection of Mr. C. S. Ricketts and Mr. C. H. Shannon, reproduced in the sixth folio of the Dürer Society, 1903. Mr. Campbell Dodgson describes the drawing as in a measure spoilt by retouching, but what convinces him that these retouches are not by Dürer? The pen-work seems to be at once too clever and too careless to have been added by another hand to preserve a fading drawing.
XII. Discourse.