346 ARIADNE FLORENTINA. 



of death, and fear all evil, for Thou art not with us, and Thy 

 rod and Thy staff comfort us not." He does not choose this 

 task. It is thrust upon him, just as fatally as the burial of 

 the dead is in a plague-struck city. These are the things he 

 sees, and must speak. He will not become a better artist 

 thereby ; no drawing of supreme beauty, or beautiful things, 

 will be possible to him. Yet we cannot say he ought to have 

 done anything else, nor can we praise him specially in doing 

 this. It is his fate ; the fate of all the bravest in that clay. 



175. For instance, there is no scene about which a shallow 

 and feeble painter would have been more sure to adopt the 

 commonplaces of the creed of his time than the death of a 

 child, chiefly, -and most of all, the death of a country child, 

 a little thing fresh from the cottage and the field. Surely 

 for such an one, angels will wait by its sick bed, and rejoice as 

 they bear its soul away ; and over its shroud flowers will be 

 strewn, and the birds will sing by its grave. So your common 

 sentimentalist would think, and paint. Holbein sees the facts, 

 as they verily are, up to the point when vision ceases. He 

 speaks, then no more. 



The country labourer's cottage the rain coming through 

 its roof, the clay crumbling from its partitions, the fire lighted 

 with a few chips and sticks on a raised piece of the mud floor, 

 such dais as can be contrived, for use, not for honour. The 

 damp wood sputters ; the smoke, stopped by the roof, though 

 the rain is not, coils round again, and down. But the mother 

 can warm the child's supper of bread and milk so holding 

 the pan by the long handle ; and on mud floor though it be, 

 they are happy, she, and her child, and its brother, if only 

 they could be left so. They shall not be left so : the young 

 thing must leave them will never need milk warmed for it any 

 more. It would fain stay, sees no angels feels only an icy 

 grip on its hand, and that it cannot stay. Those who loved 

 it shriek and tear their hair in vain, amazed in grief. ' Oh, 

 little one, you must lie out in the fields then, not even undei 

 this poor torn roof of thy mother's to-night ? ' 



176. Again : there was not in the old creed any subject 

 more definitely and constantly insisted on than the death of a 



