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 Caesars? Henry VIII. and Fisher; the Lais 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
purpos