Product DescriptionAn Excerpt from the book-_A la sueur de ton visaige, Tu gagnerais ta pauvre vie. Après long travail et usaige, Voicy la mort qui te convie. _ *THIS quaint old French verse, written under one of Holbein’s pictures,is profoundly melancholy. The engraving represents a laborer driving hisplow through the middle of a field. Beyond him stretches a vast horizon,dotted with wretched huts; the sun is sinking behind the hill. It is theend of a hard day’s work. The peasant is old, bent, and clothed in rags. He is urging onward a team of four thin and exhausted horses; theplowshare sinks into a stony and ungrateful soil. One being only isactive and alert in this scene of toil and sorrow. It is a fantasticcreature. A skeleton armed with a whip, who acts as plowboy to the oldlaborer, and running along through the furrow beside the terrifiedhorses, goads them on. This is the specter Death, whom Holbein hasintroduced allegorically into that series of religious and philosophicsubjects, at once melancholy and grotesque, entitled “The Dance ofDeath. ” * In toil and sorrow thou shalt eat The bitter bread of poverty. After the burden and the heat, Lo! it is Death who calls for thee. In this collection, or rather this mighty composition, where Death, whoplays his part on every page, is the connecting link and predominatingthought, Holbein has called up kings, popes, lovers, gamesters,drunkards, nuns, courtesans, thieves, warriors, monks, Jews, andtravelers,–all the people of his time and our own; and everywhere thespecter Death is among them, taunting, threatening, and triumphing. Heis absent from one picture only, where Lazarus, lying on a dunghill atthe rich man’s door, declares that the specter has no terrors for him;probably because he has nothing to lose, and his existence is already alife in death. Is there comfort in this stoical thought of the half-pagan Christianityof the Renaissance, and does it satisfy religious souls? The upstart,the rogue, the tyrant, the rake, and all those haughty sinners who makean ill use of life, and whose steps are dogged by Death, will be surelypunished; but can the reflection that death is no evil make amends forthe long hardships of the blind man, the beggar, the madman, and thepoor peasant? No! An inexorable sadness, an appalling fatality broodover the artist’s work. It is like a bitter curse, hurled against thefate of humanity. Holbein’s faithful delineation of the society in which he lived is,indeed, painful satire. His attention was engrossed by crime andcalamity; but what shall we, who are artists of a later date, portray?Shall we look to find the reward of the human beings of to-day inthe contemplation of death, and shall we invoke it as the penalty ofunrighteousness and the compensation of suffering?No, henceforth, our business is not with death, but with life. Webelieve no longer in the nothingness of the grave, nor in safety boughtwith the price of a forced renunciation; life must be enjoyed in orderto be fruitful. Lazarus must leave his dunghill, so that the poor needno longer exult in the death of the rich. All must be made happy, thatthe good fortune of a few may not be a crime and a curse. As the laborersows his wheat, he must know that he is helping forward the work oflife, instead of rejoicing that Death walks at his side. We mayno longer consider death as the chastisement of prosperity or theconsolation of distress, for God has decreed it neither as thepunishment nor the compensation of life. Life has been blessed by Him,and it is no longer permissible for us to leave the grave as the onlyrefuge for those whom we are unwilling to make happy.

George W. Sands- The Devil’s Pool

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