PORTRAIT OF REMBRANDT Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn By Elbert Francis Baldwin Rembrandt: fic 1633: In all Holland there is no more typically Dutch town than Leyden. When we hear its name, we think instinctively of its celebrated university, of its Elzevirs, of its situation on the lower reaches of the Rhine, of its picturesque town-hall and churches and asylums, of its markets and fairs, of Spinoza and Lucas van Leyden. The town could not have looked very differently nearly three centuries ago, when to a miller and his wife was born a son. That son became the greatest of Northern painters, and his name is one of the supreme names in all painting. The name was Rembrandt Harmenszoon (shortened later; zoon meant the son of Harmen) van Rijn (because he lived on the banks of the Rhine). He was not destined by his parents to follow his father's trade. Instead they enrolled him among the students of Latin literature at the University, and intended him for the law. Nature intended otherwise. Unlike the traditional parents of artists, these parents saw their mistake, removed him from the University, and placed him under the instruction of one Swanenburch, where. he remained three years. Rembrandt then went to Amsterdam, where he placed himself under a more famous teacher, Pieter Lastman. In six months the young painter returned to Leyden to work independently, so sure of himself had he become. Here he made such progress that, when only twenty-five, he decided to locate definitely in the larger city, and returned to Amsterdam for good. Most artists live lives in which are striking, not to say dramatic, effects; but a quieter artist's life than Rembrandt's is rare. He was a genuine Dutchman in this; but in another equally important respect he did not at all correspond to the Dutch character, which is above everything economical, unprodigal, thrifty. Rembrandt realized the phrase we hear nowadays," You would not expect an artist to be a practical man, would you?" Now, Rembrandt did not mean to be extravagant in his own living, and in personal and household expenses was actually frugal, but he had one habit which brought him to bankruptcy. It was not drinking, nor gambling, nor dissipation in any fiercer form than extravagant expenditure for works of art. His studio must have been something worth seeing, for anything to decorate it or his beloved models, his Saskia and his Hendrickje, was hard to refuse. If he had no money to buy hangings and furniture, jewels and robes, he would borrow it. That studio must now be appropriately housed, and what house was there quite so expressive of good Dutch architecture, and so adapted to Rembrandt's use, as the one in the Breestraat, which cost 13,000 florins, and was never but half paid for? The accumulated interest on the remaining half was one reason for the artist's financial ruin. The house was built in 1606, from the date inscribed on the modillion in the second story. Rembrandt loved this home more than anything in the world: it was his world. It sheltered his wife and his children, and the children of his art. What a picture must have been seen there every evening: Rembrandt quietly drawing or engraving, and his beautiful wife engaged at her needlework; for it was to that house that he brought his Saskia, the Frisian girl whose face in maturer beauty looks out of the frame on the opposite page. We may gain a wrong idea of their married life, and think it a rollicking one, from the familiar picture in the Dresden Gallery showing Rembrandt laughing and holding his wife on his knee, while with one hand he raises a wine-glass. The couple are arrayed in richest attire, and seemed only too well disposed to make holiday. Their real life was singularly sedate and serene. It is pitiful that it should have been only eight years long, cut short by Saskia's premature death. During those years Rembrandt seemed for the most part to forget other subjects than his beloved Saskia. We have portrait after portrait of her in pencil, etching, and paint. It was always a labor of love to produce those portraits. He never tired of painting his wife's long, golden, silky hair, her peachlike complexion, her beautiful dark eyes, and her lovely mouth. After the manner of his time, he loved to deck her in gold-broidered garments and in rare jewels. He sought for characters whom he could thus adorn, as, for instance, Delilah in "Samson's Marriage," or The Wife of the Burgomaster of Pancras." No works of Rembrandt are more painstaking than these portraits in their various disguises. There is an impulsiveness and yet a perfect finish about them which fascinates every art-lover. From the time of Saskia's death, however, obscurity began to fall on Rembrandt's life, if THE BEGGARS not upon his work. That life had REMBRANDT'S HOUSE About this time, too, the whims of picture-buyers began to change. Instead of virile Rembrandtesque work, the minute and enamel-like prettinesses and insipidities of some fashionable painters were preferred. We now come to that disputed point, the relations of Rembrandt and Hendrickje, the latter the model for the exquisite "Portrait of a Woman in the Louvre. Whatever might have been true at first, Rembrandt recognized Hendrickje ere long as his wife, as, at birth, he acknowledged the Rembrand child, Cornelia, as his own. Nor could there be more striking proof of complete respect and accord than in the tender treatment always given to 1 Alfred Austin: The New Poet Laureate By Hamilton W. Mabie T is forty-five years since Tennyson was made Poet Laureate, a stretch of time so long that, to the great majority of readers of English poetry, it seems as if the great poet and the great place were indivisible. Nothing shows more clearly the national and representative character of Tennyson's poetry than the splendid tradition which he has created about the Laureateship. He has so exalted the place that men have forgotten that it is merely an official position; they have come to regard it as formal recog-. nition of primacy among contemporary singers. As the crowning of Petrarch was simply a public recognition of a genius which had already thrown its spell over Italy, so we have come to think of the Laureate as a child of the Muses rather than an appointee of the English Prime Minister. The vacant place confirmed the general impression; the golden crown was above the grasp of any living singer. Lord Salisbury has rudely dispelled the illusion by a selection which compels us to remember that of the fourteen men who have been Laureates only four have been singers of high rank; four 'others have been men of respectable gifts and achievements; six have been minor poets of such slender talent that they have been forgotten. Ben Jonson, Dryden, Wordsworth, and Tennyson seem, in the long historical perspective, to have happened among the Laureates rather than to have been of them; the lines of Olympian descent and of official recognition have four times run parallel, but for the greater part they have had widely different directions. the official singers have usually been taken. And yet unable to cross the invisible line which separates the man at work from the man at play, the craftsman from the artist. Carefully educated, not in the historic English schools, but in Catholic institutions, taking his degree at the London University, called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, forsaking the law at an early age for the more congenial work of the pen, a writer of verse since his eighteenth year, a journalist of skill and intelligence, Mr. Austin has come to the full maturity of his sixtieth year with a very honorable record of work, which is widely respected but which has never set the pulse beating or the imagination aflame. A stout Conservative of the Tory type, he has felt the charm of English scenery, history, and life in their imposing and impressive attitudes. He is well equipped to write an ode on the death of a Prime Minister or the birth of an heir to the throne, but he has never touched the heart of the English people. He has, it is true, written a number of short lyrics which have some singing quality in them, touches of ease and abandon such as a poet by the grace of God always has at command. It ought to be added that he has also feeling; indeed,. feeling is his truest gift. But it is significant that even his smoothest and sweetest verse has never found lodgment in the memory of his readers, and the men are probably few who can recall a line of his writing. His love of nature is sincere and intelligent, but the magic of English skies and woods never steeps his lines in the enchantment which lies on Wordsworth's "Daffodils." In the expression of this love he is. always self-contained and conventional. He has never. felt the throb of passion which Wordsworth knew. He is always rational and sophisticated; his contact. with nature is always through the medium of thought, as the first line of the verses. Mr. Austin is an English gentleman of culture, dignity, and ability; a man of scholarly tastes and attainment, of high character, and of unquestioned ability. He does not lack talent, but he lacks the kind of talent which the world has come to associate with the position to which he has been called. He is essentially a prose writer, and it has been his ill fortune to be thrust into a place which two great poets have held in succession. His clear-cut face expresses virility, decision, energy; but there is no imagination in it. It is the face of a strenuous rather than of a spontaneous man; of a poet who has formed himself by deliberate and laborious effort rather than one who has had the help of heaven in following the lines of his own inclination. All that high aims, hard work, a wholesome life, and an honorable ambition can accomplish in a man to whom the higher gifts have been denied has been wrought in Mr. Austin; but the ease, the spontaneity, the freshness, and the magical charm of the poet he has never compassed. They are beyond him; in spite of all his striving and his painstaking effort he remains an artisan, entitled "A Birthday" shows: I love to think, when first I woke The leaves were fresh on elm and oak, The earliest sound that greeted me Was the ousel's ringing tone; The gray-green elder whitened slow When held up to the window-pane, It is Mr. Austin's misfortune that, while he can write about the glory and the newness of the world, he cannot make us see and feel them. Mr. Watson has said of him that he "may, in a special sense, be styled the Laureate of the English seasons," and it certainly is true that, in picturing the changes of the year and expressing the spirit of the seasons, Mr. Austin is at his best. The following lines have been widely quoted, and come very near the felicity and freshness of poetry: VILLAGE CHURCH NEAR ALFRED AUSTIN'S HOME from his tireless hand, and of these four are devoted to long and elaborate poems. Such titles as "The Human Tragedy," "Savonarola: A Tragedy," "The Tower of Babel: A Celestial Love Drama," "Fortunatus, the Pessimist," "Prince Lucifer," suggest the gravity of the themes with which Mr. Austin has dealt and the seriousness with which he has taken himself and his work.1 Seriousness is the note of great poetry, but it is also the note of a great deal of mechanical verse. Both Wordsworth and Tennyson took themselves, as we say, very seriously; but so also did Mr. Tupper and Mr. Bailey. Mr. Austin is a careful, conscientious, and often skillful workman ; be understands the technical side of his craft; but he has neither the intellectual force which gives long poems their architectural strength and beauty, nor the freshness and variety of touch which lends continuous charm to massive structure. Like Keats's friend, the ambitious painter Hayden, Mr. Austin has epic hopes and desires with only a lyric gift of very slender substance. He is best in his shorter and less pretentious pieces. Love of nature and love of country are familiar notes in these lyrics. He shares with his greater brethren that national feeling which is rarely lacking in poets of force and originality. The England of which Shakespeare sang with such majesty of epithet and adjective-"this sceptered isle," "this teeming womb of royal kings," "this seat of Mars;" which evoked from Tennyson so many noble lines illustrative of civic progress and of the continuity of national growth and power, appeals also to Mr. Austin. But it is not the heroic England of Shakespeare nor the progressive England of Tennyson of which he sings; it is imperial England of world-wide trade and sea-wide supremacy: BEN JONSON Poet Laureate 1619-1637 By permission of D. G. Francis I see the deep-plowed furrows of the main Bristling with harvest; funnel, and keel, and shroud, Heaving and hurrying hither through gale and cloud, Winged by their burdens; argosies of grain, Flocks of strange breed, and herds of Southern strain, Antarctic fleece and equatorial spice, Cargoes of cotton, and flax, and silk, and rice, Food for the hearth, and staples for the loom; Mr. Austin's work as a journalist has been varied and ardent. JOHN DRYDEN Huge vats of sugar, casks of wine and oil, Summoned from every sea to one sole shore sing. He reported the Franco-German War and the last great Vatican Council for the "Standard," and he has long contributed editorially to this Conservative organ. He has written three novels, which, in this country at least, have attracted no attention. It was as a critic of trenchant style that he first became known in England. The essays on "The Poetry of the Period" had an audacity and dash which stimulated curiosity. They were keen and epigrammatic, and they dealt frankly with great reputations. Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Morris were sharply called to account by a writer who sounded a clarion note in behalf of virility, passion, stir, and power. It is singular that when this voice crying in the wilderness of conventionality began to chaunt the burden of its own prophecy it was devoid of every tone which it had demanded from other voices; of all the voices of the time which have tried to sing, it has been most tame, unimpassioned, and mechanical. In two books of prose, "The Garden That I Love" and "In Monica's Garden," Mr. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 'Poet Laureate 1843-1850 Austin makes his nearest approach to litera- 1 Mr. Austin's books are published in this country by ALFRED TENNYSON Poet Laureate 1850-1892 |