The Devils Pool | Page 2

collection, or rather in that great book, in which Death, playing
his part on every page, is the connecting link and the dominant thought,
Holbein has marshalled sovereigns, pontiffs, lovers, gamblers,
drunkards, nuns, courtesans, brigands, paupers, soldiers, monks, Jews,
travellers, the whole world of his day and of ours; and everywhere the
spectre of Death mocks and threatens and triumphs. From a single
picture only, is it absent. It is that one in which Lazarus, the poor man,
lying on a dunghill at the rich man's door, declares that he does not fear
Death, doubtless because he has nothing to lose and his life is
premature death.
Is that stoicist idea of the half-pagan Christianity of the Renaissance
very comforting, and do devout souls find consolation therein? The
ambitious man, the rascal, the tyrant, the rake, all those haughty sinners
who abuse life, and whom Death holds by the hair, are destined to be
punished, without doubt; but are the blind man, the beggar, the

madman, the poor peasant, recompensed for their long life of misery by
the single reflection that death is not an evil for them? No! An
implacable melancholy, a ghastly fatality, overshadows the artist's work.
It resembles a bitter imprecation upon the fate of mankind.
There truly do we find the grievous satire, the truthful picture of the
society Holbein had under his eyes. Crime and misfortune, those are
what impressed him; but what shall we depict, we artists of another age?
Shall we seek in the thought of death the reward of mankind in the
present day? Shall we invoke it as the punishment of injustice and the
guerdon of suffering?
No, we have no longer to deal with Death, but with Life. We no longer
believe either in the nothingness of the tomb or in salvation purchased
by obligatory renunciation; we want life to be good because we want it
to be fruitful. Lazarus must leave his dunghill, so that the poor may no
longer rejoice at the death of the rich. All must be happy, so that the
happiness of some may not be a crime and accursed of God. The
husbandman as he sows his grain must know that he is working at the
work of life, and not rejoice because Death is walking beside him. In a
word, death must no longer be the punishment of prosperity or the
consolation of adversity. God did not destine death as a punishment or
a compensation for life; for he blessed life, and the grave should not be
a refuge to which it is permitted to send those who cannot be made
happy.
Certain artists of our time, casting a serious glance upon their
surroundings, strive to depict grief, the abjectness of poverty, Lazarus's
dunghill. That may be within the domain of art and philosophy; but, by
representing poverty as so ugly, so base, and at times so vicious and
criminal a thing, do they attain their end, and is the effect as salutary as
they could wish? We do not dare to say. We may be told that by
pointing out the abyss that yawns beneath the fragile crust of opulence,
they terrify the wicked rich man, as, in the time of the Danse Macabre,
they showed him its yawning ditch, and Death ready to wind its
unclean arms about him. To-day, they show him the thief picking his
lock, the assassin watching until he sleeps. We confess that we do not

clearly understand how they will reconcile him with the humanity he
despises, how they will move his pity for the sufferings of the poor man
whom he fears, by showing him that same poor man in the guise of the
escaped felon and the burglar. Ghastly Death, gnashing his teeth and
playing the violin in the productions of Holbein and his predecessors,
found it impossible in that guise to convert the perverse and to comfort
their victims. Is it not a fact that the literature of our day is in this
respect following to some extent in the footsteps of the artists of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance?
Holbein's drunkards fill their glasses in a sort of frenzied desire to put
aside the thought of Death, who, unseen by them, acts as their
cup-bearer. The wicked rich men of to-day demand fortifications and
cannon to put aside the thought of a rising of the Jacquerie, whom art
shows them at work in the shadow, separately awaiting the moment to
swoop down upon society. The Church of the Middle Ages answered
the terrors of the powerful ones of the earth by selling indulgences. The
government of to-day allays the anxiety of the rich by making them pay
for many gendarmes and jailers, bayonets and prisons.
Albert Dürer, Michael Angelo, Holbein, Callot, Goya, produced