Jezebel’s painting her face and tiring her head, is so immediately
followed, in the narrative of her death and non-burial, by there being
found no more of her left than the skull, besides the feet and the palms
of the hands, that the connection is grimly suggestive of certain stanzas
in the “Vision of Sin:”
“You are bones, and what of that?
Every face, however full,
Padded round with flesh and fat,
Is but modell’d on a skull.
“Death is king, and Vivat Rex!
Tread a measure on the stones,
Madam—if I know your sex
From the fashion of your bones.”
Byron muses on a skull[10] from among scattered heaps, as now a shattered
cell which even the worm disdains; he ponders on its broken arch, its
ruined wall, its chambers desolate, and portals foul; yet,
... “this was once Ambition’s airy hall,
The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul:
Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit
And Passion’s host, that never brook’d control.”
It is Yorick’s skull that Hamlet is apostrophizing when he says, “Now
get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick,
to _this_ favour she must come.” _Tôt ou tard_, as _le bon réligieux_
in “Atala” reminds his fair young listener, _quelle qu’eût été votre
felicité, ce beau visage se fút changé en cette figure uniforme que le
sépulcre donne à la famille d’Adam_. The good king Réné had painted on
the walls of one of the rooms in the Celestine monastery at Avignon, a
skeleton—it was that of a once surpassing beauty who had won his heart.
How would the moral have lost its point had the head of the skeleton
been replaced, like that in the painter’s room in the Strada Vecchia
of Rome, so graphically described in “Dutch Pictures,” by a mask, or
cardboard “dummy” of a superlatively inane cast of beauty—the blue eyes
and symmetrical lips (curved into an unmeaning and eternal simper),
the pink cheeks, and silken doll’s tresses, “contrasting strangely
with the terribly matter-of-fact bones and ligaments beneath—the moral
to my lady’s looking-glass.” Gwillim, the Pursuivant, as quoted, not
approvingly, in Southey’s “Doctor,” counsels all gentlewomen that are
proud of their beauty to consider that they “carry on their shoulders
nothing but a skull wrapt in skin, which one day will be loathsome to be
looked on.” The old French poet Villon, _aux charniers des Innocents_,
speculates in a manner that to one critic recalls the graveyard scene in
“Hamlet,” on the destiny of _corps féminin, qui tant est tendre, poli,
suave, gracieux_—for how can he help his thoughts running thitherward
“quand il considère ces têtes entassées en ces charniers”? Who, indeed,
as Keats once asked,
“Who hath not loiter’d in a green churchyard,
And let his spirit, like a demon mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
To see skull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
Pitying each form that hungry Death has marr’d,
And filling it once more with human soul?”
In such a spot Blair lingers, to apostrophize beauty, as a pretty
plaything, a dear deceit, which the grave discredits. The charms
expunged, the roses faded, and the lilies soiled, what has beauty more
to boast of? Will the lovers of it flock round it now, to gaze and do it
homage?
“Methinks I see thee with thy head low laid,
While, surfeited upon thy damask cheek,
The high-fed worm, in lazy volumes roll’d,
Riots unscared. For this was all thy caution?
For this thy painful labours at the glass,
T’ improve those charms, and keep them in repair,
For which the spoiler thanks thee not?”
So that much less known, but much more powerful, writer, Thomas Lovell
Beddoes, muses in Death’s cabinet, the Campo Santo of Ferrara, on the
“unfashionable worm,” respectless of, alike, the crown-illumined brow
and the cheek’s bewitchment, as he creeps to his repast—on what? “No
matter how clad or nicknamed it might strut above, what age or sex,—it
is his dinner-time.” The final residuum of such repasts becomes an
unrecognisable skull, about which some chance possessor of it shall, in
after days, perhaps, indulge in cynical conjectures and speculations in a
tone and to a tune like this:
“Did she live yesterday, or ages back?
What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?
And were your ringlets fair, or brown, or black,
Poor little head! that long has done with aching?”
Mercury, in Lucian’s dialogue, shows Menippus the skulls of several
world-famous beauties; and the philosopher falls to moralizing upon that
of Helen. “Was it for this,”[11] he exclaims, “that a thousand ships
sailed from Greece, so many brave men died, and so many cities were
destroyed?” Menippus was so far of the Ralph Nickleby type, “not a man to
be moved by a pretty face,” with a grinning skull beneath it: men like
him profess to look and work below the surface, and so to see the skull,
and not its delicate covering.
Where, asks the author of “Esmond,” are those jewels now that beamed
under Cleopatra’s forehead, or shone in the sockets of Helen? With Mr.
Thackeray in another place, again, we take the skull up, and think of
the glances that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that
shone in those vacant sockets, and cheeks dimpling with smiles that once
covered that ghastly yellow framework. “They used to call those teeth
pearls once. See! there’s the cup she drank from, the gold chain she
wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her cheeks, her
looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a feast we
find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones.” And has not
Macaulay his “Sermon in a Churchyard”? wherein one practical improvement
of the subject, as conventional pulpiteers phrase it, runs thus:—
“Dost thou beneath the smile or frown
Of some vain woman bend thy knee?
Here take thy stand, and trample down
Things that were once as fair as she.
Here rave of her ten thousand graces,
Bosom, and lip, and eye, and chin,
While, as in scorn, the fleshless faces
Of Hamiltons and Waldegraves grin.”
_THE CARCASE OF JEZEBEL ON THE FACE OF THE FIELD._