statement that out of respect to the wishes of M. de Beriot, the husband
of Malibran, no posthumous sketch or cast of her face of any kind was
taken. M. Edmond Cottinet, however, in a private note to Mrs. Clara
Bell, wrote: “When Madame Malibran died I was very young, but I remember
distinctly hearing my mother told that de Beriot, the husband of her
friend, had taken her mask, and that it had helped him to execute the
crowned bust of the great singer which now decorates the private cabinet
of her son. His bust, nevertheless, is not a good likeness, nor is it
agreeable. But it is a touching proof of the love of the widower. Is it
not wonderful that simply by the force of this love a musician should
have been transformed into a sculptor? This was M. de Beriot’s only work
in this line of art.” Later, M. Cottinet, having seen a photograph of
the mask, added: “It is she! The first moment I saw it I recognized it,
with feelings of profound emotion and tender pity. It is she, with her
slightly African type, containing, perhaps, a little negro blood (her
father, Garcia, being of Spanish-Moorish descent). It is she as death
found her, her face ruined by that terrible fall from her horse.... It
is undoubtedly the mask from which her husband made the bust, which did
not seem to be as charming as she was. Mr. Hutton may be perfectly
satisfied that he possesses an authentic cast.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: MARIA F. MALIBRAN]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The head of Schiller has lain as uneasily since his death as if he had
worn a crown, or, like Cromwell, had rejected one. The story of its
posthumous wanderings is very grewsome. It is told at length by Emil
Palleske in his _Life of Schiller_, and at greater length by Mr. Andrew
Hamilton. The poet left a widow and family almost friendless and almost
penniless; his brother-in-law Wolzogen was absent, and Goethe lay very
ill. A cast of Schiller’s head was taken by Klauer; and his body,
hurriedly put into a plain deal coffin of the cheapest kind, was buried
in a public vault, with nothing to designate whose body it was, and
without the utterance of a word or a note of requiem. Twenty-one years
later, as was the custom of the place, this public vault was emptied,
and the bones it contained were scattered to make room for a new
collection. Friends of Schiller, after great and unpleasant labor,
gathered together twenty-three of these dishonored skulls, from which
they selected as Schiller’s that one “which differed enormously from all
the rest in size and shape;” they compared it with Klauer’s cast, and
accepted its identity. It was then deposited, with no little ceremony,
in the hollow pedestal containing Dannecker’s colossal bust of Schiller
in the Grand Ducal Library at Weimar. Goethe, however, desiring to
recover more of the mortal part of his friend, had the head removed
again and fitted to the rest of the bones of the body. These bones were
deposited also in the Library, and the head put back in its pedestal. In
1827, at the suggestion of Louis of Bavaria, the head and the trunk were
reunited and placed in a vault which the grand duke had built for
himself and for his own family; and there, by the side of Goethe, who
joined him in 1832, Schiller still rests.
Palleske, describing Schiller’s death, says: “Suddenly an electric shock
seemed to vibrate through him, the most perfect peace lit up his
countenance, his features were those of one calmly sleeping.” And this
is the impression his death-mask gives.
Carlyle in one of his flash-light pictures thus photographed
Schiller—the negative was found in the Commonplace-book of the late Lord
Houghton—“He was a man with long red hair, aquiline nose, hollow cheeks,
and covered with snuff.”
A strange uneasiness seems to have possessed the bones of many of the
great composers. Mozart’s skull is said to be in the possession of Prof.
Hyrtl, the famous anatomist of Vienna, who proposes to bequeath it to
the Mozarteum at Salzburg. Mozart, like Schiller, was buried by an
impoverished family in a grave unmarked save by a musical grave-digger,
who secured the head—according to what seems to be very vague
tradition—ten years later, and kept it, so long as he himself lived, in
a cupboard in his humble lodgings in the precincts of the Cemetery of
St. Marx. From him it passed to a second grave-digger, also musical,
from whom it came into the possession of the Hyrtls. Those who have
examined it, however, say that it has none of the peculiarities which,
according to the existing theories of phrenology, should mark the
presence of musical genius. And these peculiarities, strangely enough,
are said to have been lacking in the skulls of Haydn, Schubert, and
Beethoven, each of which, like the skulls of Mozart and Schiller and of
Shakspere’s Yorick, had a tongue in it, and could sing once; and each
seems to have been knocked about the mazzard with a sexton’s spade, and
to have been used to point a moral, and, perhaps, even to stop a
bunghole.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: FREDERICK SCHILLER]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haydn’s skull, it may be mentioned, is believed to be in the possession
of the family of an eminent physician in Vienna. The rest of his body,
originally buried in Hundsthurn church-yard, now lies in the parish
church of Eisenstadt.
Beethoven’s bones seem to have been disturbed but twice. His grave, in
the Währing Cemetery at Vienna, having become almost uninhabitable from
long neglect, he was reburied in the same spot in 1863; and in 1888 he
was removed to the Central Cemetery of Vienna.
Beethoven’s head is described, by those who knew him in life, as having
been uncommonly large. His forehead was high and expanded. His eyes,
when he laughed, seemed to sink into his head, although they were
distended to an unusual degree when one of his musical ideas took
possession of his mind. His mouth was well-formed; his under-lip
protruded a little; his nose was rather broad. According to one
authority “his skull [at the time of the exhumation in 1863] was
discovered to be very compact throughout, and about an inch thick;”
according to another authority it was “a small skull, and might have
been supposed to belong to a man of restricted intellect, rather than to
a genius like the great master.”
Mr. Philip Hale, in _Famous Composers and their Works_, says: “The
dimensions of the forehead were extraordinary; in height the forehead
came next to that of Napoleon, and in breadth it surpassed it. His face
was strong and sombre, and while it was not without ugliness it was
expressive. The head was built stoutly throughout. The nose was thick,
the jaw was broad, the mouth was firm and with protruding lips; the
teeth were white, well-shaped, and sound, and when he laughed he showed
them freely; the square chin rested on a white cravat. The greater
number of pictures of Beethoven are idealized.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: LUDWIG VON BEETHOVEN—From Life]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: LUDWIG VON BEETHOVEN—From Death]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beethoven’s left ear-shell, it is said, is preserved in the cabinet of
curiosities of a musical family in England. The mask of his face is one
of the few casts of notable men to be found in the Museum of the British
Phrenological Association in Ludgate Circus, London. It reposes, in
plaster, in that institution, by the side of the cast of the head of
Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Two masks of Beethoven are in existence. The first was taken from life
by Franz Klein in 1812, when the subject was in his forty-second year.
Mr. Hale considers this “and the bust made after it by the same artist
as of the first importance in forming a correct judgment of the value of
all the portraits of Beethoven.” The second mask was made by Dannhauser,
on March 28, 1827, two days after Beethoven died. Both casts are here
reproduced.
Beethoven was fond of telling the following story about himself. It will
give a very fair idea of what he considered to be the size of his own
cranium. Meeting the entire Imperial Family of Austria, on one occasion,
at Töplitz, in the summer of 1812, “I pressed my hat down on my head,”
he said, “buttoned up my great-coat, and walked with folded arms through
the thickest of the throng; princes and pages formed a line—the Archduke
Rudolph took off his hat, and the Emperor made the first salutation.
Those gentry know me!”
It is hardly to be wondered at that Goethe, who was his companion,
should have been made very uncomfortable by the display of what looks
like a piece of impertinence, even to republican eyes, and even at the
end of three-quarters of a century of enlightenment. It is pleasant to
read that royalty itself was highly amused by the whole performance.
Perhaps the best pen-picture of Mendelssohn in existence is that taken
by Bayard Taylor, who wrote that “his eyes were dark, lustrous, and
unfathomable. They were black, but without the usual opaqueness of black
eyes; shining, not with a surface light, but with a pure serene
planetary flame. His brow, white and unwrinkled, was high and nobly
arched, with great breadth at the temples, and strongly resembling that
of Poe. His nose had the Jewish prominence, without its usual
coarseness; I remember particularly that the nostrils were as finely cut
and as flexible as an Arab’s. The lips were thin and rather long, but
with an expression of undescribable sweetness in their delicate curves.
His face was a long oval in form, and the complexion pale, but not
pallid. As I looked upon him I said to myself—‘The Prophet David!’”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: FELIX MENDELSSOHN]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lampadius, in his _Life of Mendelssohn_, said of the composer’s death:
“His features soon assumed an almost glorified expression. So much he
looked like one in sleep that some of his friends thought that it could
not be death, an illusion which is often given to the eye of love. His
friends Bendemann and Hübner took a cast of his features as he lay.”
A clever Frenchman said not long since, in the Paris _Gaulois_, that the
Pantheon is nothing but a Grand Hotel, in which the distinguished guests
find a temporary lodging-place, and then, like other transients, give up
their rooms to somebody else. Mirabeau, Marat, Rousseau, and Voltaire
boarded there for a time, and then surrendered their apartments, which
are now occupied by Victor Hugo and a few men of no literary, artistic,
or political importance; all of whom will, no doubt, in their turn, and
before many years, be forced to find some second-class _pension_, where
the rates are lower and the service is bad.
It was discovered lately that Mirabeau had again changed his quarters,
and that his present address cannot be ascertained. He was carried in
great pomp, and with many porters and in many ’busses, to the Pantheon,
in 1791; but with Marat he was “de-Pantheonized by order of the National
Convention” a year or two later. Marat’s body was thrown into a common
sewer in the Rue Montmartre; that of Mirabeau was placed, with no pomp
whatever, in the cemetery of Saint-Marcel, the criminals’
burying-ground, where, now that it is wanted once more—this time for
honorable disposal—it cannot be found. Mirabeau’s is the face of a man
perfectly satisfied with his own achievements and with his own personal
appearance. He believed, and he was courageous enough to say, that pure
physical beauty in man could only exist in a face which was pitted with
small-pox, his own being so marked! And he looks here as if his last
thought in life had been one of profound admiration for himself. An
eye-witness of his funeral said to one of his biographers that, “except
a single trace of physical suffering, one perceived with emotion the
most noble calm and the sweetest smile upon that face, which seemed
enwrapped in a living sleep, and occupied with an agreeable dream.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: G. R. MIRABEAU]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marat and Robespierre are among the most enigmatical productions of a
very enigmatical movement. During their lives they were not very
beautiful in conduct nor very amiable in character; but the casts taken
of their faces after their uncomfortable deaths are quiet and peaceful,
and the effect they produce is one of loving rather than loathing. In
the mask of each the cerebral development is small, especially in the
region of the frontal bone; and phrenological experts who have examined
them say that their development, or lack of development, taken with
their facial traits, indicates ill-balanced minds.
Marat’s face, as David painted him, is that of a North-American Indian
with a white skin. The contemporary portraits of Robespierre, on the
other hand, represent a mild-mannered man of severe and pensive
expression. According to Lamartine, “his forehead was good, but small,
and projecting over the temples, as if enlarged by the mass and
embarrassed movements of his thoughts. His eyes, much veiled by their
lids, and very sharp at the extremities, were deeply buried in the
cavities of their orbits; they were of a soft blue color. His nose,
straight and small, was very wide at the nostrils, which were high and
too expanded. His mouth was large, his lips thin and disagreeably
contracted at each corner, his chin small and pointed. His complexion
was yellow and livid. The habitual expression of his face was the
superficial serenity of a grave mind, and a smile wavering betwixt
sarcasm and sweetness. There was _softness_, but of a sinister
character. The dominant characteristic of his countenance was the
prodigious and continued tension of brow, eyes, mouth, and all the
facial muscles.”
The masks of Mirabeau, Marat, and Robespierre are known to have been
taken, in each case, after death, “by order of the National Assembly.”
Those of Marat and Robespierre in my collection are identical with the
wax effigies in the “Chamber of Horrors” in Madame Tussaud’s gallery in
London, her catalogue asserting that they are “authentic;” and very fine
casts of Mirabeau and Marat are in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, the
latter hanging under David’s portrait of Marat, painted from nature
immediately after the assassination.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: JEAN PAUL MARAT]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: MAXIMILIAN ROBESPIERRE]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The contemporaries of Sir Isaac Newton, like those of Kean, were all so
much impressed by what he knew and by what he did, that they seldom
thought of posterity as caring to know how he looked, either in life or
in death. From many different sources, however, we learn, in a
fragmentary way, that he was “short but well-set, and inclined to be
corpulent;” that “he had a very lively and piercing eye;” that “his hair
was abundant and white as silver, without any baldness, and when his
peruke was off was a venerable sight;” that “he was a man of no very
prominent aspect;” that “his face was almost square, and that his chin
had unusual width;” that “although he reached the great age of
eighty-four, he retained until the last almost all of his teeth;” and
that “his countenance was mild, pleasant, and comely.” Bishop Atterbury
said, “in the whole air of his face and make there was nothing of that
penetrating sagacity which appears in his compositions. He had something
rather languid in his look and manner, which did not raise any very
great expectation in those who did not know him;” and Dr. Humphrey
Newton, who was his assistant and amanuensis, said that during the many
years of their intimate association he never knew him to laugh but once!
His death was not without pain, and his mask will not be recognized
readily by those who are familiar with his face as pictured and
sculptured with his peruke on.
If Sir David Brewster’s account of Newton’s life be the true one, he was
as good as he was great, and nothing can be added to that. His portraits
by Lely, Kneller, and other famous painters still exist in different
parts of Great Britain.
The terra-cotta bust of Newton, from the hand of Roubilliac, is in the
British Museum. His bust and full-length statue in marble, by the same
artist, belong to Trinity College, Cambridge. They were both, as is well
known, based upon this mask of his face, taken after death, the original
of which, made by Roubilliac, is now in the rooms of the Royal Society,
at Burlington House in London. It was presented to that institution in
1829 by Samuel Hunter Christie, and the officers of the society have no
doubt of its authenticity. Mr. Christie found it by accident in the shop
of a dealer in statuary, whose father had purchased it at the sale of
Roubilliac’s effects more than half a century before. The dealer parted
with it for a few shillings, although he was satisfied that it was the
mask of Newton, and by Roubilliac. Charles Richard Weld, in his _History
of the Royal Society_, gave a steel engraving of it, and declared that
“it presents all the characteristic features of the Society’s former
illustrious president.” Only a few copies of it are known to exist, and
it is one of the most valuable and important masks in my collection.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: SIR ISAAC NEWTON]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roubilliac’s mask of Alexander Pope was one of the cherished possessions
of Samuel Rogers, but its present whereabouts I have not been able to
discover.
The contrasts between the profoundest of England’s philosophers and the
bravest of her bruisers are as marked in an intellectual as in a
physical way. Ben Caunt, the pugilist, died in London in 1861,
universally respected. He was, during the later years of his life,
proprietor of the Coach and Horses, a public-house in St. Martin’s Lane,
much frequented by his old pupils, and by all the prominent patrons of
the prize-ring. He came to America in the early Forties, giving a series
of exhibitions throughout the country, but never engaging in any serious
encounter here. He was a leader in his own profession, and at one time,
perhaps, the best-known man in all England. His portrait, which once
adorned the walls of cottage and palace, is still to be found in Miles’s
_Pugilistica_, taken at the period of his famous fight with “Bendigo” in
1842. His head is certainly a strong one, and, in a phrenological way,
he was better than many of the men among his contemporaries who did
better things.
Thackeray, like most Anglo-Indian infants, was sent, when he was about
five years of age, to the mother-country for mental and physical
nourishment. An aunt, with whom he lived, discovered the child one
morning parading about in his uncle’s hat, which exactly fitted him.
Fearing some abnormal and dangerous development of the brain, she
carried him at once to a famous physician of the day, who is reported to
have said, “Don’t be afraid, madam; he has a large head, but there’s a
good deal in it!” How much was in it subsequent events have certainly
proved. His brain, when he died, fifty-three years later, weighed
fifty-eight and a half ounces. In 1849 or 1850, Charlotte Brontë wrote
of Thackeray: “To me the broad brow seems to express intellect. Certain
lines about the nose and cheek betray the satirist and cynic; the mouth
indicates a childlike simplicity—perhaps even a degree of irresoluteness
in consistency—weakness in short, but a weakness not unamiable.” And
Motley, writing to his wife in 1858, said: “I believe you have never
seen Thackeray; he has the appearance of a colossal infant, smooth,
white, shining ringlety hair, flaxen, alas! with advancing years; a
roundish face, with a little dab of a nose, upon which it is a perpetual
wonder how he keeps his spectacles.” This broken nose was always a
source of amusement to Thackeray himself; he caricatured it in his
drawings, he frequently alluded to it in his speech and in his letters,
and he was fond of repeating Douglas Jerrold’s remark to him when he was
to stand as godfather to a friend’s son—“Lord, Thackeray, I hope you
won’t present the child with your own mug!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: BEN. CAUNT]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is not pleasant to look upon the face of Thackeray—the face of which
we love to think so pleasantly—as distorted by death. He was found dead
in his bed on the morning of December 24, 1863:—“So young a man,” as
Dickens wrote, “that the mother who blessed him in his first sleep
blessed him in his last. The final words he corrected in print,”
continued Dickens, “were—‘And my heart throbbed with an exquisite
bliss.’ God grant that on that Christmas eve when he laid his head back
on his pillow, and threw up his arms as he had been wont to do when very
weary, some consciousness of duty done, and Christian hope throughout
life humbly cherished, may have caused his heart so to throb when he
passed away to his Redeemer’s rest!” “And, lo,” said Thackeray himself
once, of the most beautiful character in all fiction, his own Thomas
Newcome—“And, lo, he whose heart was as that of a little child had
answered to his name, and stood in the presence of The Master!”
“We think of Thackeray,” wrote Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh, “as of our
Chalmers, found dead in like manner: the same childlike, unspoiled, open
face, the same gentle mouth, the same spaciousness and softness of
nature, the same look of power. What a thing to think of—his lying there
alone in the dark, in the midst of his own mighty London; his mother and
his daughters asleep, and, it may be, dreaming of his goodness. Long
years of sorrow, labor, and pain had killed him before his time. It was
found after death how little life he had to live. He looked always fresh
with that abounding silver hair, and his loving, almost infantile face;
but he was worn to a shadow, and his hands wasted as if by eighty
years.”
The cast of Thackeray’s face was made by Brucciani on that sad Christmas
morning, at the request of Dr., now Sir, Henry Thompson; and a cast of
his right hand was made at the same time—that honest, faithful,
beautiful, wasted right hand, which
“never writ a flattery,
Nor signed the page that registered a lie.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: THOMAS CHALMERS]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Chalmers was another man of great heart and of great head. He
died, as we have seen, as Thackeray died, without warning, but without
pain or conflict. He was discovered sitting half erect in his bed, his
head reclining quietly on his pillow, the expression of his countenance
that of fixed and majestic repose. He had responded cheerfully when his
name was called. Thackeray heard the summons evidently in a moment of
physical distress; but his “_Adsum_” was just as ready, and no doubt it
was quite as willingly uttered.
“In height and breadth and in general configuration,” wrote Julian
Charles Young, “Dr. Chalmers was not unlike Coleridge. I have, since I
knew Coleridge, sometimes thought that if Chalmers’s head had been
buried from sight, I could easily have mistaken him for that remarkable
man. His face was pallid and pasty, and, I rather think, showed slight
traces of small-pox. His features were ordinary; his hair was scanty,
and generally roughed, as if his fingers had often passed through it;
his brow was not high, but very broad, and well developed. His skull,
phrenologically speaking, argued great mathematical power, but showed
deficiency in the very qualities for which he was conspicuous, namely,
benevolence and veneration.”
Concerning Coleridge, Young wrote: “His general appearance would have
led me to suppose him a dissenting minister. His hair was long, white,
and neglected; his complexion was florid; his features were square; his
eyes watery and hazy; his brow broad and massive; his build uncouth; his
deportment grave and abstracted.”