_From a paper on the Fine Arts of old in England, in Blackwood's
Magazine._
The sex and character of Elizabeth herself was no weak ingredient in the
poetic spirit of the time. Loyalty and gallantry blended in the
adoration paid her; and the supremacy which she claimed and exercised
over the church, invested her regality with a sacred unction that
pertained not to feudal sovereigns. It is scarce too much to say, that
the virgin-queen appropriated the Catholic honours of the Virgin Mary.
She was as great as Diana of the Ephesians. The moon shone but to
furnish a type of her bright and stainless maidenhood. To magnify her
greatness, the humility of courtly adulation merged in the ecstasies of
Platonic love. She was charming by indefeasible right;--a _jure
divino_ beauty. Her fascinations multiplied with her wrinkles, and
her admirers might have anticipated the conceit of Cowley,
"The antipevistoisis of age
More inflamed their amorous rage."
It is easy for a Whig, or a Puritan, or any other unimaginative
blockhead, to cry out against all this as nauseous flattery, and assert
that after all she was rather an unpoetical personage than otherwise--a
coarse-minded old maid, half prude, half coquette, whose better part was
mannish, and all that belonged to her sex a ludicrous exaggeration of
its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the
woman Elizabeth, but the Virgin-queen, the royal heroine, is the theme
of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the
cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon,
degrading royalty, while they palaver its possessor, but Britannia's
sacred majesty, enshrined in chaste and lofty womanhood. Our ancestors
paid their compliments to sex or rank--ours are addressed to the person.
There is no flattery where there is no falsehood--no falsehood where
there is no deception. Loyalty of old was a passion, and passion has a
truth of its own--and as language does not always furnish expressions
exactly adapted, or native to the feeling, what can the loyal poet do,
but take the most precious portion of the currency, and impress it with
the mint-mark of his own devoted fancy? Perhaps there never was a more
panegyrical rhymer than Spenser, and yet, so fine and ethereal is his
incense, that the breath of morning is not more cool and salutary:--
"It falls me here to write of Chastity
That fayrest virtue, far above the rest.
For which what needs me fetch from Faery,
Forreine ensamples it to have exprest,
Sith it is shrined in my soveraine's brest,
And form'd so lively on each perfect part,
That to all ladies, who have it protest,
Needs but behold the pourtraict of her part,
If pourtray'd it might be by any living art;
But living art may not least part expresse,
Nor life-resembling pencil it can paint,
All it were Zeuxis or Praxiteles--
His dædale hand would faile and greatly faynt,
And her perfections with his error taynt;
Ne poet's wit that passeth painter farre--
In picturing the parts of beauty daynt," &c.
But neither Zeuxis nor Praxiteles was called from the dead to mar her
perfections, nor record her negative charms. Poetry was the only art
that flourished in the Virgin reign. The pure Gothic, after attaining
its full efflorescence under Henry VII., departed, never to return. The
Grecian orders were not only absurdly jumbled together, but yet more
outrageously conglomerated with the Gothic and Arabesque. "To gild
refined gold--to paint the lily," was all the humour of it. A similar
inconsistency infected literature. The classic and the romantic (to use
those terms, which, though popular, are not logically exact) were
interwoven. The Arcadia and the Fairy Queen are glorious offences, which
"make defect perfection." Perhaps, Shakspeare's "small Latin and less
Greek," preserved him from worse anachronisms than any that he has
committed. Queen Bess's patronage was of the national breed: she loved
no pictures so well as portraits of herself. As, however, her painters
have not flattered her, it may not uncharitably be concluded that they
were no great deacons in their craft. It is a much easier thing to
assure a homely female, in prose or rhyme, that she is beautiful, than
to represent her so upon canvass. Her effigies are, I believe, pretty
numerous, varying in ugliness, but none that I have seen even
handsome--prettiness, of course, is out of the question. She was fond of
finery, but had no taste in dress. Her ruff is downright odious; and the
liberal exposure of her neck and bosom anything but alluring. With all
her pearls about her, she looks like a pawnbroker's lady bedizened for
an Easter ball, with all the unredeemed pledges from her husband's shop.
She seems to have patronized that chimera in the ideal or allegorical
portrait, at which Reubens and Sir Joshua were so often doomed to toil.
She would not allow a shadow in her picture, arguing, like a Chinese, or
a chop-logic, that shade is only an accident, and no true property of
body. Like Alexander, who forbade all sculptors but Lysippus to carve
his image, she prohibited all but special cunning limners from drawing
her effigy. This was in 1563, anno regni 5, while, though no chicken,
she still was not clean past her youth. This order was probably intended
to prevent caricatures. At last she quarrelled with her looking-glass as
well as her painters, and her maids of honour removed all mirrors from
her apartments, as carefully as Ministers exclude opposition papers (we
hope not Maga) from the presence of our most gracious sovereign. It is
even said, that those fair nettles of India took advantage of her
weakness, to dress her head awry, and to apply the rouge to her nose,
instead of her cheeks. So may the superannuated eagle be pecked at by
daws. But the tale is not probable. After all, it is but the captious
inference of witlings and scoffers, that attributes to mere sexual
vanity that superstitious horror of encroaching age, from which the
wisest are not always free. It may be, that they shrink from the
reflection of their wrinkles, not as from the despoilers of beauty, but
as from the vaunt-couriers of dissolution. In rosy youth, while yet the
brow is alabaster-veined with Heaven's own tint, and the dark tresses
turn golden in the sun, the lapse of time is imperceptible as the
throbbing of a heart at ease. "So like, so very like, is day to
day,"--one primrose scarce more like another. Whoever saw their first
grey hairs, or marked the crow-feet at the angle of their eyes, without
a sigh or a tear, a momentous self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the
soul, a thought that youth is flown for ever? None but the blessed few
that, having dedicated their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the
shedding of their vernal blossoms, a promise that the season of immortal
fruit is near. It is a frailty, almost an instance of humanity, to aim
at concealing that from others, of which ourselves are painfully
conscious. The herculean Johnson keenly resented the least allusion to
the shortness of his sight. So entirely is man a social animal, so
dependent are all his feelings for their very existence upon
communication and sympathy, that the "fee griefs," which none but
ourselves are privy to, are forgotten as soon as they are removed from
the senses. The artifices to which so many have recourse to conceal
their declining years, are often intended more to soothe themselves,
than to impose on others. This aversion to growing old is specially
natural and excusable in the celibate and the childless. The borrowed
curls, the pencilled eyebrows,
"The steely-prison'd shape,
So oft made taper, by constraint of tape,"
the various cosmetic secrets, well-known to the middle ages, not only of
the softer sex, are not unseemly in a spinster, so long as they succeed
in making her look young. They are intolerable in a mother of any age.
But we, my dear Christopher, resigned and benevolent old bachelors as we
are, can well appreciate the vanity of the aged heart, that sees not its
youth renewed in any growing dearer self. Nothing denotes the advances
of life, at once so surely and so pleasantly as children springing up
around a good man's table. Perhaps our famous Queen, in her latter days,
though full of honours as of years, would gladly have changed places
with the wife of any yeoman that had a child to receive her last
blessing, whose few acres were not to pass away to the hungry expecting
son of a hated rival. Her virginity was not like that of Jephthah's
daughter, a free-will offering to the Lord. Pride, and policy, and
disappointment, and, it may be, hopeless, self-condemned affection,
conspired to perpetuate it. Probably it was well for England that no
offspring of hers inherited her throne. By some strange ordinance of
nature, it generally happens that these wonderful clever women produce
idiots or madmen.--Witness Semiramis, Agrippina, Catherine de Medicis,
Mary de Medicis, Catherine of Russia, and Lady Wortley Montague. One
miniature of Elizabeth I have seen, which, though not beautiful, is
profoundly interesting: it presents her as she was in the days of her
danger and captivity, when the same wily policy, keeping its path, even
while it seemed to swerve, was needful to preserve her life, that
afterwards kept her firm on a throne. Who was the artist that produced
it? I know not; but it bears the strongest marks of authenticity, if to
be exactly what a learned spirit would fancy Elizabeth--young, a
prisoner, and in peril--be evidence of true portraiture. There is pride,
not aping humility, but wearing it as a well-beseeming habit;--there is
passion, strongly controlled by the will, but not extinct, neither dead
nor sleeping, but watchful and silent; brows sternly sustaining a weight
of care, after which a crown could be but light; a manly intellect,
allied with female craft;--but nonsense! it will be said; no colours
whatever could represent all this, and that, too, in little, for the
picture was among Bone's enamels. Well, then, it suggested it all.
Perhaps the finest Madonna ever painted would be no more than a meek,
pious, pretty woman, and an innocent child, if we knew not whom it was
meant for.
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