Dance of Death? Alas! she took the first step of that dance in Paradise, and the artists of the olden time did not deprive her of her due precedence. She leads the Dance, but with this difference from those who follow her:—they, cowering and muffled, go off the scene with Death; she, upright in her naked innocence and beauty, brings him on. Poor Eve! she had her punishment and made her atonement to man for leading him to death, in becoming the source and the joy and solace of his life; but it was not for the artists of the Dance of Death to embody this phase of her existence. So essential a part of the Dance is the temptation of Eve, that the whole subject was concentrated into the representation of that event by a German engraver, in this singular manner:—Adam and Eve stand by the Tree of Knowledge, around which twines the serpent, from whom Eve is receiving the apple; but the trunk of the tree is formed by the twisted legs and the ribs of a skeleton, from the head and the outstretched arms of which spring the branches and the foliage. It is worthy of remark, that many painters, the greatest of them (Raphael) at their head, have represented the tempter of Eden as a beautiful woman, whose body terminates in a serpent. It was a mistake on their part to do so. They knew how much of the Devil a woman might have in her, and how irresistible a temptress she is; but they forgot, that, on this occasion, woman, not man, was tempted.
There was a Dance of Death in Old St. Paul's Church, in London,—the one burned down in the Great Fire; and another in the beautiful little parish church of Stratford-on-Avon,—but this, too, has disappeared. It is interesting to know that they were there, and that Shakspeare saw them; for he has woven some of the thoughts that they awakened in his mind into a noble passage in one of his historical plays. We shall recur to it in examining Holbein's Dance.
The Dance was represented, and still exists, in one very singular place. At Lucerne, in Switzerland, it appears upon a covered bridge, in the triangles formed by the beams which support the roof. The groups, of which there are thirty-six, are double, looking away from each other, and are so arranged, that the passenger, on entering the bridge, has before him a long array of these grotesque and gloomy pictures. The motive for placing the Dance in such a place is unknown, and it is difficult to conjecture what it was. It could hardly have been to enforce the old adage,—Speak well of the bridge that carries you over.
While we have been thus endeavoring to discover the origin of the Dance of Death, what it was, and what it meant, Holbein has been waiting more patiently than he was wont, for us to see who he was, and why the Dance, which was known three hundred years at least before he was born, is now universally spoken of as his.
Hans Holbein, the greatest painter of the German school, came honestly by his talent and his name. He was the son of Hans Holbein, a painter, who was the son of another Hans Holbein, also a painter. The first Hans was a poor painter; the second a good one; and the third so great, that the world, when it speaks their common name, means only him. The father and grandfather were born at Augsburg, in Bavaria, and of late years it has been asserted by mousing antiquaries that the grandson was born there too; but this, perhaps, is not quite certain; and it is much pleasanter to adhere to the ancient faith, and believe that he was born at that strange old Bâle, in sight of that great Dance, the reproduction, or rather recreation, of which was to make so great a part of his fame,—especially as he was quite surely an inhabitant of the town at such tender years, that the veriest Know-Nothing in the place would not have deprived him of his citizenship.
Of Holbein's life we unfortunately know very little. He showed his talent early, as all the great painters have done. Conscious of his abilities, he devoted himself eagerly to the study of the profession to which his genius urged him. He learned not only painting, but engraving, the sculpture of metals, and architecture; and of all these, it will be remembered, Bâle offered him facilities for study, in examples which must have stimulated both his imagination and his ambition. He did not lack encouragement; for the nobles and burghers of Bâle had begun to acquire a taste for the arts, which their ruder fathers contemned; and they had, at this time, a university in their city, which made them acquainted with Cicero and the orators, of whom Aeneas Sylvius found them so ignorant.
But Holbein, although eminent and well employed, did not thrive. He had some Bâlois failings, and, as Aeneas Sylvius would have said, worshipped Father Bacchus and Dame Venus with too much devotion;—not that he was a drunkard or a debauchee; but he sought in conviviality with men of talent, and in the company of beautiful women, too happy in the caresses of the great painter, who was generous with his florins, that happiness which he could not find at home. For poor Hans was afflicted with what has been the moral and social ruin of many a better, if not greater man than he—a froward, shrill-tongued wife. Luckily, however, the great scholar and philosopher, Erasmus, went into retirement at Bâle, in 1521; and he soon recognized the genius of Holbein, and became his admirer and friend. By his advice, and at the solicitation of an English nobleman, and, poor fellow, seeking refuge from the temper of his wife, whom even the sweet cares of maternity could not mollify, Holbein determined to leave Bâle for England. What was the great cause of Frau Holbein's tantrums,—whether Hans's ears were pierced with conjugal clamors, as poor Albert Dürer's, the other great German painter's, were, because he could not supply all his wife's demands for money, to enable her, perhaps, to exhibit herself at church on holy days in one of those precious pulpits, splendid in velvet and jewels, to the discomfiture of the other painters' wives,—we do not know; but whatever was the cause of her oft-recurring outbreaks, they made him not unwilling to put France and the English Channel between himself and her, his children, and the home of his childhood.
He gave out, at first, that his absence from Bâle would be temporary,—only for the purpose of raising the value of his works, by making them more difficult to obtain. Before he went, he finished and sent home a portrait on which he was engaged. It was one of his best pictures; and the person for whom it was painted, lost for a while in admiration of its beauty, noticed at last that a fly, which had settled upon the forehead, remained there motionless. He stepped up to brush the insect away, and found that it was a part of the picture. This story has, since Holbein's time, been told of many painters,—among others, of Benjamin West. Such a piece of mere imitation should have added nothing to the reputation of a painter of Holbein's powers; but the story was soon told all over Bâle, and orders were given to prevent the loss to the city of so great an artist. But Holbein had quietly gone off, furnished with letters of introduction from Erasmus, who wrote in one of them that in Bâle the arts were chilled; which might well be true of a place where so much ado was made about the painting of a fly.
In England, Holbein found a friend and patron in Sir Thomas More,—Henry the Eighth's great Lord Chancellor; and a sight of some of his works won him, ere long, the favor of the King himself. He was appointed Court Painter, with apartments at the palace, and a yearly salary of two hundred florins, (or thirty pounds, equal to about two hundred pounds now,) which he received in addition to the price of his pictures. After about three years of prosperity he went home to his wife and children; but as he soon returned to England, we may safely conclude that his visit was to provide for the latter, and with no hope of living with the former. Some years after, in 1538, when his fame was still increasing, the city of Bâle, proud of its son, offered him a handsome annuity, in the hope that that might induce him to return to his country, his children, and his wife. But he could not be tempted. Though not the wisest of men, he was Solomon enough to know that "it is better to dwell in a corner of the house-top than with a brawling woman and in a wide house"; and as he was successful and held in honor in England as well as Bâle, he contented himself with a corner of King Henry's palace.
But although he fled from his wife, he painted her portrait; and we need no testimony to warrant the likeness. She is the very type of one of those meek shrews, alternately a martyr and a fury, that drive a man to madness when they speak and to despair when they are silent. We might reasonably wonder that he would paint so vivid a representation of that which he so sedulously shunned. But poor Hans, who probably had some lingering remains of his early love, knew, that, although he should make a speaking likeness, it would be a silent one, and that this Frau Holbein must keep the look which he chose to summon to her face. That, indeed, was knowledge that was power! How he must have chuckled as he saw his wife looking at him more natural than
