in question as searchingly as you can; find every fault in my work, and
in that of the other Nostradamic commentators, that you can; expose all
that is weak or illusive, wherever you find it to be so. Let us see,
then, how far all the learning and acuteness you can bring to bear,
coupled with whatever established prejudice, and its rancour at being
disturbed in comfortable somnolency, can suggest, to overthrow what other
men heretofore, and I now, have taken so much pains to bring together and
give shape to. Consciously I have not set down a single word with any
other desire than that the truth should prevail; and if your criticism
can establish the opposite, I shall still repeat, “Let truth prevail.”
But I do not think you can do this: and if not, there is only one other
thing, open to the learned and the wise that can be done,—that is, to
rewrite their philosophies, so as to make room for the reception of this
rather awkward piece of truth that has here got in the way of our old
theories, and cannot be got out of the way again. To the really competent
and candid reader I have nothing whatever to add beyond begging him to
refer back to the closing words of my preface, as to him they will be
found to contain my whole and entire message.
APPENDIX.
_Referred to at p. 178._
The genuine and spurious portraits of Cromwell are numerous to such a
degree, that they may almost be called innumerable; for they can never be
counted, as no one man can get at them all to reckon them up. Their main
authority is said to depend upon the works of four artists, Lely, Cooper,
Walker, Faithorne. Samuel Butler, the author of the ever-marvellous
“Hudibras,” is thought to have painted a likeness, but it counts for
nothing, as it is not now to be identified as existing in any collection.
The first-named three are painters, the fourth is a great engraver.
In all these, Mr. Frederic Harrison professes to discover “singular
resemblance” [“Cromwell,” p. 32,] but considers that Cooper’s is the
most successful of them all. I find the first to be a most misleading
statement, and one that may be disproved by anybody who will compare
Cooper’s likeness, as given in Carlyle’s “Cromwell Letters” with the
picture by Walker in the National Portrait Gallery. They differ in
every particular,—in character, feature, temperament, and conformation.
Scarcely do they agree even in the wart. There is nothing to identify
them as representing the same individual. Either Lely copied Cooper, or
Cooper copied Lely, and they accordingly, of course, correspond with each
other; but truth is too much sacrificed to flattery by both these courtly
painters, for us to suppose that their work corresponds very accurately
with the sitter. Such examples of Faithorne as are readily accessible in
the Print Room at the Museum convey no adequate idea of the man. Neither
do they resemble Cooper, Lely, nor Walker’s work. There is a profile
print by Houbraken, an excellent performance, which is interesting as
showing that both the chin and forehead receded greatly. There is also a
very peculiar engraving of Thomas Simon’s medal, which is very beautiful
as a work of art. But here again the facial angle is simply villainous,
with very mean diminutive eyes, and the dress almost clerical. The
engraving from the Cooper at Sidney College gives the wart on the left
brow instead of the right.
From such discrepant things it seems to me next to impossible to derive
any correct notion regarding the face of Cromwell, except that the facial
angle of the side face must have been unusually bad. Yet Mr. Harrison is
able to express himself as follows:—
“No human countenance recorded is more familiar to us than that broad,
solid face with the thick and prominent red nose; the heavy gnarled brow,
with its historic wart; eyes firm, penetrating, sad; square jaw, and
close-set mouth; scanty tufts of hair on lip and chin; long loose brown
locks flowing down in waves on to the shoulder. His whole air breathing
energy, firmness, passion, pity, and sorrow.” Carlyle’s fancy version is
given below.[454]
This being derived from a falsity, must itself be false. But is it not
somewhat curious that friends and foes of Cromwell should alike sit down
contentedly before this admirably executed miniature of Cooper’s without
devoting a second thought to its representative value as a portrait of
the man in question? Its artistic felicity should be as nothing to
the historical inquirer. Taken as a mere portrait, this Cooper is as
valueless as Veronese’s presentment of Alexander the Great; or as any
fancy portrait of Oliver would be, if sent in by some skilled modern hand
to the next May show at Burlington House.
Our sense of surprise increases, when we come to remember that we possess
an authentic original to go by, in the shape of a mask still extant that
was taken at death. Historians draw up rigmarole pen-and-ink portraits
of their own, but are all silent about this, or make only casual mention
of it as “the mask at the Statuaries,” just as though it corresponded
in every particular with Samuel Cooper’s exquisite pigment-figment.
Romancists delight in coloured detail gathered from history; and
historians revel in romance when it saves them from searching into
dry detail. In this case historical gossip slips in to illustrate the
stringent veracity of Cromwell. When Lely was to take his portrait, he
is said to have ordered him to be faithful in representing every blemish
and defect, to paint warts and all, or he would not be paid. Lely knew
what this meant, and acted accordingly. All portrait-painters flatter,
they must to secure a practice; but, they ought to select the best aspect
possible, for so far it is what it professes to be, a likeness. Now the
strong point with your court painter is, to throw in skillfully what is
not there. In this Lely and Cooper have succeeded to admiration.
Walker, in his several portraits, gives us another set of varieties. His
picture in the Portrait Gallery [Granger, “Biog. Hist.,” iii. p. 290.]
with Cromwell’s son Richard as page tying on the father’s scarf, has been
finely engraved by Pierre Lombart. In this picture, which is a little
wooden, we get an average-looking gentleman going to battle. A man we
should have to look at three or four times before we should individualize
him at all in the memory. Mr. Nobody riding to nowhere particular is
the impression derived. Of the engraving, however, Evelyn says, and he
knew Cromwell perfectly well, “that it gives the strongest resemblance
of him.” He therein physiognomically discovers “characters of the
greatest dissimulation, boldness, cruelty, and ambition, in every stroke
and touch.” I can say nothing of this, for I have not seen the Lombart
engraving. The picture does not convey the idea.
How pliantly subservient art was in those days, is well illustrated in
another Cromwell engraving by the same Lombart. This artist had done,
after Vandyke, a “Charles on horseback,” from which he erased the face,
and substituted that of Cromwell. The slender figure of the king had to
do duty for the heavy-built brewer of Huntingdon. But times change, and
we with them. So Peter reinstated the king. There must be impressions of
this turn-face print in its three states; for no doubt copies were sold
at every stage. The King is dead. God save the Protector! The Protector
is dead. God save the King! The dead lion is never so good for the crowd
as the live ass; irrespective of the latter creature being far more
representative. A quality much sought after in modern governors.
There is a portrait of Cromwell affixed to Isaac Kimber’s “Life of Oliver
Cromwell,” which he published anonymously [Granger, iii. 297]. This is
pronounced in the “Letters of Mr. Hughes” to be most like the authentic
family pictures of Cromwell. Vertue engraved it in 1724 for Rapin’s
“History of England,” and when Granger wrote the picture was in the
possession of Sir Thomas Frankland of Old Bond Street. I suppose this to
be still in the hands of the Frankland-Russells of Chequers Court, who
also possess a plaster cast of Cromwell’s face. By the courtesy of the
family I have been permitted to examine this; but it seems to me of no
value, and it has no history.
We come now to the terra-cotta bust by Edward Pierce, which is in the
National Portrait Gallery, said to be taken from life. Pierce was an
artist in the second generation. His father, of the same christian name,
was a painter, and assistant of Vandyke. Our Edward was trained for a
statuary, and became the pupil of Edward Bird: he also acted as assistant
to Sir Christopher Wren, and is said to have built St. Clement Danes
under him. He did a bust of Wren, for the theatre at Oxford, and also one
of Newton. He died at Surrey street in the Strand, and was buried at the
old Savoy. This bust of Cromwell was, to all appearance, modelled by him
from a cast taken from life, and must therefore, as to measurement and
bulk, be of life size.
I was kindly permitted by Mr. George Scharf, of the National Portrait
Gallery, to take the dimensions of this bust by measurement, but
practically they are not very useful, inasmuch as the head has a great
abundance of short curly hair, which of course in terra-cotta becomes
perfectly solid, and thereby increases the circumference of the head by
many inches.
The circumference, hair and all, at his brow is 28²⁄₈ inches.
Nape of neck to frontal bone, where it unites
with nose 15⁴⁄₈ ”
Breadth from ear to ear at level of the central
hole of each ear as near as can be approximated 6²⁄₈ ”
This last measurement is, I believe, correct, but it is a dimension
that only a large forceps could take with perfect certainty. It is so
small, however, that I feel sure that the other two dimensions must be
very far from giving the true osseous formation, so that several inches
will have to be allowed off them for the hair. Again, the measurement
between the tip of nose and back of head (9⅝ inches) would also require
that deductions be made for a wad of hair at the back. This measurement
when reduced, and coupled with the third measurement given, indicates an
undersized skull for a broad-built man of five feet eleven in stature.
As for the physiognomy, the nose, though far from fine, is somewhat
aquiline, and the best of all the features of the face. The forehead is
low, ill-formed, and mean. The mouth firm, cruel, deceitful. The jowl
and chin sensual and gross almost to brutality. It is the face of a
man of low passions, possibly ambitious, but of great duplicity, of a
low-bred type, the type as of one sprung from a lower stratum of society
than his history indicates him to have sprung from; and you may readily
suppose that in exchanges of course buffoonery with the roughest trooper
of his corps, he would have been quite within his own province and at
home. His mother’s portrait shows her also to have been a very masculine
coarse-featured woman.
It is well perhaps to mention here a bust that Grose in a letter to
Granger in 1774, calls “a masterly and spirited bust of Oliver Cromwell
by one Bannier.” It was then in Mr. Gostling’s collection. He says it is
like that engraving given in Rapin’s “History.” I imagine it therefore to
be a fancy rendering, and of very small historic value.
The expert historians, and of course the general public together with
them, are perfectly satisfied with the Cromwell presented to them by
Samuel Cooper. I confess that I think it a most laughable presentment,
and of quite impossible credence. I do not think Pierce’s bust to be
satisfactory, but I most certainly consider that it is the only likeness
I have had the opportunity of examining that conveys even a hint of
what can be supposed to be the real appearance of the man. There is
but one way now remaining to settle this question. It is very much to
be regretted that, with so much pretence of a desire for historical
accuracy, we should have allowed two hundred and fifty years to elapse
without making the least attempt to settle this question.
We learn from Breval’s “Travels” that at the Old Palace at Florence there
is a cast preserved of Oliver Cromwell. The mould was obtained from
Cromwell’s face _a few minutes after his decease_, “through the dexterous
management of the Tuscan resident in London.” This, or a cast from it,
ought immediately to be secured for our National Portrait Gallery. A copy
of it would cost very little in either time, money, or trouble to secure;
and when secured three or four should be cast in bronze, and placed in
different museums so that one fire could not destroy all of them at once.
I feel almost sure that it will be found to confirm the bust of Pierce,
as being more like Cromwell than anything else that we possess. And
further, as Pierce’s work is by no means a grand achievement in the
sculptor’s art, I should hope to find in the Florence cast characteristic
indications that are absent from Pierce’s work. Grandeur of soul is
incompatible with such a face as Pierce gives us. But I confess that I
see no grandeur whatever that could be expressed by a man whose history
is that of Oliver. His base success the world may worship if it will. I
despise success if it must be obtained by Cromwell’s methods. I observe
that the great in history are always mean in fact; and I well know that
you must say to all the men who have been triumphant, let no probing
moralist come near you. Pitiable and contemptible is the man who can envy
the great in the greatness of their crimes. I do not expect that the
cast, if procured, will make the reading any better for Cromwell; but,
if it should, I am quite ready to give him all the advantage of it. At
present I hold that the face is villainous, like the man.
“... ducitur unco,
Spectandus: gaudent omnes. Quæ labra? Quis illi
Vultus erat? Nunquam, si quid mihi credis, amavi
Hunc hominem.”
JUVENAL, x. 66.
Still, love or no love, we have reached the end; and if we should confirm
Pierce, the flesh and bones of the man thus revived will also confirm
the epithets of Nostradamus, which first induced me to enter upon this
investigation.
“Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet.”—_John_ iv. 19.
“Quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat: cœli scrutantur
plagas.”—CIC., _Divin._, ii. 13.
This granted, a pig is nearest wisdom.
Μάντις ἄριστος, ὄστις εἰκάζει καλῶς.—WITSIUS, _Miscel._, p. 14.
The best analogist is the best prophet.
“L’observation des analogies universelles a été negligée, et
c’est pour cela qu’on ne croit plus à la divination.”—LEVI,
_Clef des Mystères_, p. 216.
Μαντεῖον, ἐπὶ χείλεσι βασιλέως, ἐν δὲ κρίσει οὐ μὴ πλανηθῇ τὸ
στόμα αὐτοῦ.—_Prov._ xvi. 10, LXX.
There is divination on a king’s lips, and judgment fails not in
his mouth.
FOOTNOTES
[1] This noble and enlarged thought is worthy of Coleridge, who is
the greatest thinker of our century, whether you take him as poet or
philosopher. Nobody has yet claimed for him the pre-eminence which, I
believe, to be his. The peculiar, nay, unique frailties of the man have
blinded the men of his own time to the super-eminent, intellectual,
_practical_, and imaginative endowments with which he was so affluently
furnished. By the middle of next century, some hundred or so years from
his death, the fact will have dawned upon the world, if not before. It
will then be recognized that such a personality as his, was “a great
birth of time,” and to be registered as such in the deathless calendar of
genius. Saint, seer, and sage was that man. Not “spoilt in the making,”
as the witty Lamb put it, with all the lambent malice of a friend jocose.
We must admit, of course, some damage that hindered general currency, as
also the attainment of such now worthless cash-results as fell to beings
distinctly inferior to himself, such as Byron, Southey, Wordsworth,
Moore, great as some estimate them to be; and this failure shut Coleridge
out from social success,—that success which most of us so ignorantly
and greedily covet here, because it makes the present comfortable. But
the chief reason, of any shortcoming hurtful to success, that may be
observable in Coleridge, no doubt arose from his being far too great to
be adequately measured by any of his fellow-men. Many of them were, it is
true, highly capable men as the world goes. Even Carlyle, however, who
has disparaged him, when placed beside him, dwarfs to a man of Lilliput.
We have to bear in mind always that excellent remark of La Bruyère,
“Celui qui ne prévoit rien, est souvent dupe; celui qui prévoit trop, est
toujours malheureux.” This is true of all prophets, and especially true
of Coleridge.
But, another thing there is that helps to diminish Coleridge in the
general estimation. He has not completed work enough, in well set and
fixed form, for posterity to be quite able to render him adequate, that
is to say, resplendent justice. His unexampled conversational gifts have
somewhat barred the way to a due appreciation of his equally unexampled
literary potentialities. His conversational aptitudes have perished in
the moment of their triumphant display. Being without record in this
respect, he suffers precisely as the greatest actor does. Triumphs of
the table and the salon are like the triumphs of the stage, we can only
revive them in spirit, on the basis of some felicitously appreciative
sentence, chance embalmed in print, that some competent contemporary
has ejaculated. I, for instance, know the overwhelming power of Kean
only through my mother, and the burning phrases left behind by Byron and
Coleridge. But the next generation can have no cognizance of him beyond
those phrases. It is for this precise reason I indite so long a note as
this on Coleridge, out of the pure respect I bear him for his stupendous
intelligence and incommensurable soul. I have, indeed, tried to put on
record elsewhere my impression of his poetry; but, I have not yet been
able to get it printed. Should it ever be so, it would at least acquire
some value from the fact of its representing, in a limited and qualified
degree, Coleridge’s vivid influence upon one who may partially stand on
the footing of a contemporary. Coleridge is a spirituality in the world,
and his modes of revealing himself are such as lead the run of mankind to
esteem him visionary; but it will be found that it is they, not he, that
must be reckoned “such stuff as dreams are made of.”
[2] Touching this curse to fall on Napoleon, a somewhat singular analogy
arises in comparing with it the axiom laid down by Thomasius, quoted in
Bruncker’s “Hist. Crit. Philos.,” v. 488. He says that the spirit is, as
it were, resident in the centre of all bodies, and thence emits rays, so
extending matter. But where it draws back the rays from the circumference
of the material to the centre, it soon dissolves and corrupts the body.
_Si vero radios ex circumferentia materiæ spiritus attrahat ad centrum,
resolvitur corpus et corrumpitur._ If we suppose this to have taken
place at the epileptic seizure of Napoleon, the mental attack becomes an
image or antitype of the battle of Leipsic, when the swarm of birds beat
back the eagle. An interpreter, such as Joseph, could have told him the
meaning of the dream or swoon. The defeat was first of all rehearsed in
the soldier’s own brain.
[3]
Οἱ δὲ τὰ ἄτομα καὶ αἰσθητὰ δημιουργοῦσι
Καὶ σωματοειδῆ καὶ κατατεταγμένα εἰς ὕλην.
STANLEY’S “Hist. Chald. Phil.,” p. 43.
[4] To get one thing, one must always forego some other. Jupiter did not
give prescience to Tiresias till Juno had struck him blind. And for our
own great Milton it was necessary he should have wisdom at one entrance
quite shut out, before, in “Paradise Lost,” he could make men’s memory a
prisoner to his name for ever, in a willing though perpetual serfdom.
[5] The facts for this life are taken, where no other reference is given,
from a scarce work, entitled, “La première face du Janus François, par
Jean Aimes de Chavigny Beaunois, 1594.” It is found in the Library at
Paris; but not in the British Museum. Fortunately M. le Pelletier gives
an almost literal transcript of this “Brief discours sur la vie de M.
Michel de Nostredame.”
[6] “Archives du Magnetisme Animal,” vol. viii. “Tous deux” (_i.e._
father and mother) “appartenaient à une famille Juive,” converted in
the sixteenth century, and of the tribe of Issachar (“Nouvelle Biog.
Générale” [Le Pelletier, i. 16 n.]).
[7] His grandfather, Moreri tells us.
[8] Moreri assigns this to the year 1525.
[9] He calls Scaliger in the heyday of friendship “a Virgil in poetry,
a Cicero in eloquence, a Galen in medicine,” and declares that to him
he is indebted for his scientific attainments (“Penny Cyclopædia,” s.v.
_Nostradamus_).
[10] “That the great bulk of French society of his day was impressed by
his effusions there can be no doubt” (Chambers’ “Book of Days,” vol. ii.,
p. 13).
[11] Moreri says that nobody knows what his report was.