"Seeing thy face, with all thy fluctuant hair
Falling in dull gold opulence from thy brow,
Watching thy light blue eyes, now fired, or now
Laughterful, or now dim as with despair,
I wonder, friend, that it should be God's care
To have made at all (what matter when or how?)
A being so sadly, desolately rare,
So beautifully incomplete as thou!
"O rank, black pool, with one star's imaged form!
O deep, rich-hearted rose, with rot at core!
O summer heaven, half-purpled with stern storm!
O lily, with one white leaf dipt in gore!
O angel shape, whom over curves and clings
The awful imminence of a devil's wings!"
Greek genius understood of course that when Pandora was endowed with
gifts, Aphrodite took a double handful of the golden foam off Cyprus,
whence her own blondness rose, and gilded Pandora's clay. What a pity
that the mischievous Hermes put a thieving flattery into that gracious
form! It ran into the fingers with an instinct to baffle man's
profoundest forethought. In one of her Greek aspects she was called
Ἁνησἱδωδοϛ, bestower of presents, like those of Ceres, colored like the
golden-bearded rye and corn.
Lydgate married Miss Rosamond, that piece of unexceptionable blondness,
whose temper during matrimonial crises was so cool and even as
to amount to the highest provocation. A perfectly well-regulated
bit of Nature's chasteness was this wife, who went about the town
prevaricating and misrepresenting when her husband's affairs had
become involved, telling fresh fibs to cover the flanks of her first
ones; thus building a track that shunted him off into ever new
embarrassments. Infantile bloominess of flesh and even-tempered eyes
were nothing but the skim of tortuous pride; and a lie dropped from her
lips the prettiest product in the world.
Shakspeare fancied that Caliban's mother, Sycorax, was a "blue-eyed
hag." Bianca Capello, a woman of solid and whole-souled powers of
mischief, was the "golden-haired" sorceress of Venice.
The women of the Huzules, a Sclavonic tribe that has settled in the
Carpathian range, are vastly superior to the men. The blonde type
predominates. They ride horses astride, and in morals are perfect
Messalinas, filling the villages with intrigues which frequently have
most tragic terminations.
So was Helen Jegado a pure blonde. She lived in the time of Louis
Philippe; and a great many persons fell victims to her genius for
murder. No less than twenty-five are positively known to have been
taken off by her. She managed wonderfully to use two innocent women to
cover these crimes and to be suspected instead of herself. At the place
of execution she exonerated them.
Charlotte Corday's hair "seemed black when fastened in a large mass
around her head: it seemed gold-colored at the points of the tresses,
like the ear of corn,--deeper and more lustrous than the wheat-stalk in
the sunlight." Her variable eyes were "blue when she reflected, almost
black when called into animated play." Her skin had the wholesome and
marbled whiteness of perfect health.
Rebecca Sharp had "a knack of adopting a demure _ingénue_ air, under
which she was most dangerous. She said the wickedest things with the
most simple, unaffected air when in this mood, and would take care
artlessly to apologize for her blunders, so that all the world should
know that she had made them."
Ninon de l'Enclos, and Madame de Chevreuse, the famous conspirator who
baffled two cardinals with an admirable mixture of pluck and cunning,
were pure blondes. Such women court their objects and pursue their
schemes in a manifold and sprightly fashion: their magnetic power flits
to and fro, many-colored, subtle, silent, swift as an aurora. They have
complicated the policy of courts and sown dissension in cabinets. They
misrepresent a statesman's secrets, set one clique against another,
stir about in society till it becomes one stupendous snarl; and perhaps
you cannot point to a spot upon their reputation. They give slander
itself no opportunity to lie as they can do, while they immaculately
defy truth to brand as counterfeit the phrases of their charming
insincerity. Look at the smooth brow that sheds your scrutiny: there's
not a crease nor wrinkle on it where suspicion may lodge to fester. The
eyes embrace you with the frankness of Joab, who took Abner aside to
speak with him, quietly, asking, "Art thou in health, my brother?" and
smote him there under the fifth rib, and left him far from well.
Among blonde women we can easily observe two kinds, which may be
called, for brevity, the lunar and the solar. The one kind seems as
if blanched by sunlight that has been reflected: it wilts from defect
rather than excess of warming power. The passions are low-toned, like
the body: a sort of scrofulous habit seems indicated by a too delicate
and thin complexion; it lurks in the lifeless yellow or chestnut
of the hair, in the unsound teeth and the languid speech. There is
little valor for mischief in them, as there is little ambition for
achievement. Their virtue seems only a temper that is kept faint as if
by constant exudation of the blood.
But the Mary Stuart of history and the Lady Macbeth of Shakspeare
belong to a different type. We know that the former had a delicate
exterior, auburn hair, and beaming blue eyes: her tone of speaking was
gentle and sweet, excellently soft and low. Mrs. Siddons, whose style
and color were altogether different, became so saturated with Lady
Macbeth as to be convinced she must have been a blonde. We think that
Shakspeare implies and justifies this delicate perception, and turns
it into history. Both the queens of Scotland represented the kind of
blonde women who are fired by sunlight: it crisps the golden or the
chestnut hair, becomes quicksilver in the veins, hits every brain-cell
with its actinic ray, and chases over the yielding hair in ripples like
a blown wheat-field. The voice is low, but ever clear and even,--a
fabric closely woven throughout, capable of sustaining the strongest
moments of the soul, and of vibrating with them: the whole gamut of
passion may be swept by it, from the enticing whisper to the peal of
defiance. It is a trumpet, made of silver, and not one note of it is
brassy; but it pierces the distance none the less directly, and summons
Macbeth by sonorous phrases out of the mist and pointlessness of dreams.
But Nature drew the character of Mary Stuart from elements less simple
than were used by Shakspeare in constructing Lady Macbeth. Mary, to
all the culture of her times, added various tastes and a delicate
susceptibility for art: she loved music, plays, minstrels, games, and
was passionately devoted to the chase. Her great pace in hunting, her
fiery dash through the underbrush, was observed and has been long
remembered. Once, having been thrown from her horse, the attendants
found her on the ground, gayly laughing as she put up the dishevelled
hair.
In the cold autumn of 1562, she went in person upon an expedition
to punish a Highland clan. She jested with fatigues and hardships,
"and was as much at her ease," says Froude, "galloping a half-broken
stallion over the heather as when languishing in her boudoir over a
love-sonnet." She said "she wished she was a man, to know what life
it was to lie all night in the field, or to walk on the causey with a
Glasgow buckler and a broadsword."
She reminds us of Bathsheba in the novel which has been already quoted.
Talking with her maid Liddy, she said, "I hope I am not a bold sort
of maid,--mannish?" she continued, with some anxiety. To which Liddy
replied, "Oh, no, not mannish; but so almighty womanish that 'tis
getting on that way sometimes."
At the age of nineteen, the delicately nurtured woman set sail from
France for Scotland, to begin that long, indomitable struggle to
succeed Elizabeth, and to break the Reformation in England. The wiliest
and most inflexible of Queen Elizabeth's counsellors shivered their
weapons against the guard of her swift tact, until imprisonment, which
was twice escaped from, and death,--
"That fell arrest,
Without all bail,"--
became England's last resource against this dangerous, lovable,
bewildering, fateful woman. Her bronze effigy in St. Mary's Church
at Warwick lifts features whose clearly cut delicacy implies her
resolution, and the magnetic power of all her loves and plots.
Her attachments were sometimes inspired by politics, sometimes by
sentiment. All her mental and emotional ability was pledged to honor
drafts which came in the interest of the Pope, of France, of hatred
of Protestantism, of desire to govern England. She was in a frame
of constant pique at the influence and reputation of Elizabeth. The
Scottish reformers kept her skirmishing talent well employed. Defending
her amusements or her mass against John Knox, she braved him till his
bitter speech gathered into brine in her eyes. But, as it flowed, the
lines of resolution upon her face were etched more clearly. She could
lend her person to Bothwell with the hope of consolidating a party.
With power and beauty at command, she lavished every wile to control
the transitional epoch into which she was born. Her life was a series
of shifts and dramatic surprises. But no dark recollections ever
disturbed her sleep; nor did she carry a candle through the midnight of
a shattered mind, to throw light upon suspected murders.
In love she was less constant than Macbeth's wife, who felt but one
great passion, and had no art nor culture to lavish in retaining its
object. She might have said,--
"I am as true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth."
We shall find this sun-lighted heart less capable of endurance than the
other blondes of history.