“large-presenced, ample-countenanced, grand-foreheaded,” and said that
“the upper part of his face was excessively fine. His eyes were large,
light gray, prominent, and of a liquid brilliancy. The lower part of his
face was somewhat dragged, indicating the presence of habitual pain; but
his forehead was prodigious, and like a smooth slab of alabaster.” Leigh
Hunt likened his brow to “a great piece of placid marble,” and added
that even in his old age “there was something invincibly young in the
look of his face.” “This boylike expression” he considered “very
becoming in one who dreamed and speculated as Coleridge did when he was
really a boy, and who passed his entire life apart from the rest of the
world with a book and his flowers.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carlyle’s portrait of Coleridge is peculiarly in the Carlylian vein.
“Figure a fat, flabby, incurvated personage, at once short, rotund, and
relaxed; with a watery mouth; a snuffy nose; a pair of strange brown,
timid, and yet earnest-looking eyes; a high tapering brow; and a great
brush of gray hair—and you have some faint idea of Coleridge.”
Coleridge himself was not more flattering to Coleridge. In 1796 he wrote
to John Thelwall: “My face, unless when animated by immediate eloquence,
expresses great sloth, and great, indeed almost idiotic, good-nature.
’Tis a mere carcass of a face, fat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of
inexpression. Yet I am told that my eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are
physiognomically good.”
Mrs. Sara Coleridge, in her _Memoir_, gave a long account of Coleridge’s
death and burial, in which she said that “his body was opened, according
to his own urgent request;” but, as usual in such cases, she did not
allude to the making of any cast of his face or head.
Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, however, the son of Derwent Coleridge, who
is preparing a _Life_ of his illustrious grandfather, writes, in a
private note: “My mother used to tell me that the bust in her possession
was by Spurzheim, and was taken from a death-mask; but with regard to
Spurzheim, she must have been in error, as he died before Coleridge.
Lord Coleridge says that the bust in _his_ possession is by Spurzheim,
and was taken from a cast of the poet’s features; but whether he falls
into the same error as my mother did, I cannot say. It is, of course,
possible that Spurzheim took a life-cast from Coleridge’s face.”
Mr. Ernest Coleridge is inclined to accept the authenticity of the mask
in my collection. It certainly bears a strong resemblance to the two
busts of which he writes, as well as to the portrait by Allston, now in
the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Carlyle said that “Wordsworth’s face bore marks of much, not always
peaceful, meditation; the look of it not bland or benevolent so much as
close, impregnable, and hard.” S. C. Hall wrote that “his eyes were mild
and up-looking; his mouth coarse rather than refined; his forehead high
rather than broad;” while Greville put it more tersely when he described
him as “hard-featured, brown, wrinkled, with prominent teeth, and a few
scattered gray hairs.” Leigh Hunt said, in his _Autobiography_:
“Certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural
[as Wordsworth’s]. They were like fires half burning, half smouldering,
with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of
two caverns. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wordsworth reminded Hazlitt “of some of Holbein’s heads—grave,
saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humor, a peculiar sweetness
in his smile.” Elsewhere Hazlitt spoke of his “intense high, narrow
forehead, Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose, and a
convulsive inclination to laughter about his mouth, which was a good
deal at variance with the solemn and stately expression of the rest of
his face.” And Sir Humphry and Lady Davy, who were at Wordsworth’s
funeral, were both struck by the likeness of his face, in the deep
repose of death, to that of Dante. The expression, they thought, was
much more feminine than it had been in life, and it suggested strongly
the face of his devoted sister, with whom so many of his years had been
spent.
Haydon, in his _Journal_, April 13, 1815, wrote: “I had a cast made
yesterday of Wordsworth’s face. He bore it like a philosopher. He sat in
my dressing-gown with his hands folded; sedate, solemn, and still.” And
then Haydon described how, through the open door, he exhibited the
unconscious poet, undergoing this unbecoming operation, to curious but
disrespectful friends of them both.
Another account of this performance shows us Wordsworth flat on his back
on the studio floor, with Charles Lamb dancing about him, and making
absurd remarks in order to force the poet to smile, and so spoil the
mask. All of which was very characteristic of that “dear delightful,”
“poor creature” who was despised by Carlyle, and who was naturally loved
by everybody else. What would we not give now for a mask of Lamb
himself, dead or alive?
All this happened when Wordsworth was forty-two years of age, and
thirty-five years before he died. Sir Henry Taylor in his
_Autobiography_, spoke, shortly after the poet’s death, of “a cast taken
of a mask of Wordsworth.” He considered it admirable as a likeness, and
added that it was so regarded by Mrs. Wordsworth. He saw “a rough
grandeur in it, with which, if it was to be converted into marble,
posterity might be contented.” But he does not say whether it was a
life-mask or a death-mask, and he does not refer to the Haydon mask as
such. In no other work, in no biography of Wordsworth, and in no account
of his last hours, is any allusion to the mask to be found. The face
here reproduced is, without question, that of Wordsworth. It suggests
the Wordsworth of middle age; it strongly resembles the portraits
painted by Haydon; it is much too young in form and expression for the
senile Wordsworth of the well-known Fraser Gallery; and there is little
doubt of its being the work of Haydon alluded to above. Haydon is known
to have painted several portraits of Wordsworth, one of which exhibits
him in a Byron collar and another shows him with eyes rolling in fine
frenzy over the composition of a sonnet on one of Haydon’s own pictures.
Haydon also introduced Wordsworth as a devout disciple in his large work
called “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” painted in 1818.
Mr. John Gilmer Speed, in his _Memoirs of Keats_, presents an engraving
of “John Keats from the Life-Mask of Haydon in 1818,” and pronounces it
the most satisfactory of the likenesses of Keats that he has seen. In no
other of the _Lives_ of Keats is any allusion made to this mask; it is
not mentioned in any of the published letters to or from Keats, or in
_The Correspondence and Table-Talk of Haydon_. Joseph Severn, shortly
before he died, told Mr. Richard Watson Gilder that he _believed_ the
cast to have been the work of Haydon, and that he prized it as the most
interesting, as it is the most real and accurate, portrait of his friend
in existence; and through him were procured the few copies of it in this
country, one of which is here reproduced. Mr. Gilder considers it much
more agreeable than the death-mask must have been, for it not only
escapes the haggardness of death, but there is even, so it seems to him,
a suggestion of humorous patience in the expression of the mouth. “In
this mask,” he adds, “one has the authentic form and shape—the very
stamp of the poet’s visage.” And he calls attention to the fact of its
remarkable resemblance to more than one of the members of the Keats
family whom he has met.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: JOHN KEATS]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Cowden Clarke, who does not seem to have been aware of the
existence of the mask, said that the best portrait of Keats is the first
done by Severn himself, that which is engraved in Hunt’s _Lord Byron and
his Contemporaries_. Lord Houghton, in his _Life of Keats_, quoted the
description given him by a lady (probably Mrs. B. W. Procter), who
watched Keats in the Surrey Institute in London, listening to Hazlitt’s
course of Lectures on the British Poets, in the winter of 1817-18. “His
countenance,” she said, “lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and
brightness; it had an expression as if it had been looking at some
glorious sight. His mouth was full and less intellectual than his other
features.” Leigh Hunt drew his portrait more carefully. “Every feature
was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. If there was any faulty
expression, it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a
character of pugnacity. The face was rather long than otherwise; the
upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the
cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive;
his hair, of a brown color, was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. His
head was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the
skull, a singularity which he had in common with Byron and Shelley,
whose hats I could not get on.”
Mr. William Sharp quotes a letter of Joseph Severn, written a day or two
after the death of Keats, in which he said to Charles Armitage Brown,
“Yesterday a gentleman came to cast the face, hand, and foot” of Keats.
And on the 3d of April, 1821, John Taylor wrote to Severn from London
for “the mask, hand, and foot.” The later history of these interesting
casts I have never been able to learn.
The original cast of the life-mask of Keats, made in Haydon’s studio,
and very much finer than any of the replicas of it, is in the possession
of the National Portrait Gallery in London. It was given by Keats
himself to his intimate friend John Hamilton Reynolds, just before Keats
went abroad to die. Reynolds bequeathed it to his sister, Miss Charlotte
Reynolds, by whom it was presented, with a clear pedigree, to the
trustees of the National Portrait Gallery. This cast, with the mask of
Cromwell, and a copy of the mask of Dr. Johnson, are, curiously enough,
the only life-masks or death-masks in the institution in question.
The printed portraits of Johnson are very many. He himself said, once,
of the painting by Trotter, “Well, thou art an ugly fellow; but still, I
believe thou art like the original.” George Kearsley wrote that “his
face was capable of great expression, both in respect to intelligence
and mildness, as all those can witness who have seen him in the flow of
conversation, or under the influence of grateful feelings;” and Bishop
Percy wrote, “Johnson’s countenance, when in good humor, was not
disagreeable. His face clear, his complexion good, and his features not
ill-formed; many ladies have thought he might not have been unattractive
when young.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: SAMUEL JOHNSON]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The original of the mask of Johnson belongs to the Royal Literary Fund,
the secretary of which, Mr. A. Llewellyn Roberts, in giving his consent
to the reproduction of it here, writes as follows concerning it: “It was
taken from a cast after death, under the direction of Dr. Johnson’s
medical attendant, Mr. Cruikshanks, who informed his daughter, into
whose possession it came, that it was a remarkably correct likeness.
Unfortunately there is no record of the artist’s name, but it is alleged
that each member of Dr. Johnson’s family had a copy.” This particular
copy was given to the Royal Literary Fund by William Hutchins, who lived
in Hanover Square. There is no reference to the taking of the mask of
Johnson to be found in any of the editions of Boswell’s _Life_ of the
great lexicographer.
Keats and Haydon first met in the house of Leigh Hunt in November, 1816,
and to their mutual delight. They became very intimate upon very short
acquaintance, and the poet was constantly to be found in the studio of
the painter; they vowed that they were dearer to each other than
brothers, and they prayed that their hearts might be buried together.
Naturally a friendship so enthusiastic in its beginning did not last
very long, and Haydon seems to have been most unjust in his reflections
upon Keats, written some time after Keats’s heart had been buried in
Rome—and alone! Haydon wrote in the first flush of his intimacy with
Keats: “Never have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of
future greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his
arm-pits and ether in his soul; while I was painting, walking, or
thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me—they came
over me, and shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and
thanked God.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is Haydon upon himself. Macaulay looked at him in a different
light. “Haydon,”—he wrote in his _Diary_ in 1853—“Haydon was exactly
the vulgar idea of a man of genius. He had all of the morbid
peculiarities which are supposed by fools to belong to intellectual
superiority—eccentricity, jealousy, caprice, indefinite disdain for
other men; and yet he was as poor, commonplace a creature as any in
the world. He painted signs, and gave himself more airs than if he had
painted the Cartoons. Whether you struck him or stroked him, starved
him or fed him, he snapped at your hand in just the same way!”
In the _Memoir_ of Haydon by his son is a fine engraving of the
death-mask of Haydon, a replica of which is in my collection. This mask,
with that of Jeremy Bentham, was broken, as you here see them, by
careless Custom-house officers on their arrival in New York a few years
ago.
James Parton quoted Burr as saying of Jeremy Bentham, “It is impossible
to conceive a physiognomy more strongly marked with ingenuousness and
philanthropy.” John Stuart Mill said of him that “he was a boy till the
last.” And at the age of eighty-two he himself wrote to an old friend:
“I am alive, though turned of eighty; still in good health and spirits;
codifying like a dragon.” “Candor in the countenance, mildness in the
looks, serenity upon the brow, calmness in the language, coolness in the
movements, imperturbability united with the keenest feeling:” such,
according to Brissot de Warville, were the characteristics of Bentham.
Since St. Denis of France used to walk about with his head under his
arm, or used to sit about with his head in his lap, in the third century
of our Christian era, no _post-mortem_ performance is more grotesque
than that of Jeremy Bentham, who left his body by will to Dr. Southwood
Smith. The legatee was instructed to dissect it, and to deliver lectures
upon it to his medical students and to the public generally. After these
anatomical demonstrations a skeleton was to be made, and was made, of
the bones. Dr. Smith “endeavored to preserve the head untouched”—the
words are his own—“merely drawing away the fluids by placing it under an
air-pump over sulphuric acid. By this means the head was rendered as
hard as the skulls of the New-Zealanders, but all expression, of course,
was gone. Seeing this would not do for exhibition, I had a mould made in
wax by a distinguished French artist, taken from David’s bust,
Pickersgill’s picture, and my own ring. The artist succeeded in
producing one of the most admirable likenesses ever seen. I then had the
skeleton stuffed out to fit Bentham’s own clothes, and this was likewise
fitted to the trunk. The figure was placed seated on the chair in which
he usually sat, one hand holding the walking-stick which was his
constant companion when he went out, called by him ‘Dapple.’ The whole
was enclosed in a mahogany case with glass doors.” Bentham was wont to
amuse himself in his boyish old age with the vision of his presiding, as
it were, in proper person at meetings of his disciples, and he even used
to anticipate his being wheeled to the top of the table on festive
occasions!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: JEREMY BENTHAM]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
His figure as here described is still to be seen in the rooms of
University College, Gower Street, London. It is curious that Dr. Smith
did not go to the mask for a representation of Bentham’s actual face.
That such a mask was made, George Combe testified in the columns of the
London _Phrenological Journal_ a few years after Bentham’s death. He
said that it was in his own possession, and showed that “the knowing
organ was large and the reflective organs only full.” The mask, he said,
was very like the portrait of Bentham reproduced in Tait’s edition of
Bentham’s works. But he does not say whether it was a death-mask or the
life-mask known to have been made by Turnerelli, an Italian sculptor
living in London, in the early part of this century, and when Bentham
was not more than fifty years of age. He was eighty-five when he died.
This plaster mask of Bentham has been compared carefully with the wax
effigy in University College. The mouth, the cranial arch, the entire
upper part of the face, and the general shape of the head are very like,
although in the wax mask the chin is shorter and rounder, and the eyes,
of course, are open.
The mask of Rossetti was made by Brucciani, after death. Only three or
four copies were cast, and the mould is in the possession of Mr. William
M. Rossetti, through whose courtesy I am able to reproduce it here, and
who writes: “I should say that my family and myself do not at all like
the version of my brother’s face presented by the mould and cast. In
especial, singular though it may sound, the dimensions of the forehead
seem wofully narrowed and belied. But of course, from a certain point of
view, the cast tells truth of its own kind.”
Mr. Hall Caine, writing of his own copy of the mask, says: “I ought
perhaps to add that it does not give a good impression of Dante
Rossetti. The upper part of the head is very noble, but the lower part
is somewhat repellant.”
A fourth copy belongs to Mr. George F. Watts, the painter, whose
portrait of Rossetti is so well known.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
An anonymous writer in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ for January, 1893, who
seems to have known Rossetti intimately, thus describes the head and
front of the poet: “He was short, squat, bull-doggish; he belonged to
the Cavour type, but the sallow face was massive and powerful. The
impression of solidity is somewhat toned down in Watts’s portrait, and
the face is thinner and more worn than when I knew him. Sleepless nights
and protracted pain may have changed him in later years and made the
ideal Rossetti more manifest. Except for the meditative, tranquil eye
(one thought of the ox-eyed Janus), there was nothing ideal about him.
He was intensely Italian, indeed, but it was the sleek and well-fed
citizen of Milan or Genoa that he recalled, not the slim and romantic
hero of Verdi or Donizetti.”
Cavour, according to George Eliot, who once got a glimpse of him in an
Italian railway station, was a man pleasant to look upon, with a smile
half kind and half caustic. He gave her the impression that “he thought
of many matters, but thanked Heaven and made no boast of them.”
Elsewhere she said: “The pleasantest sight was Count Cavour in plainest
dress, with a head full of power, mingled with _bonhomie_.”
Mr. O. M. Spencer, in _Harper’s Magazine_ for August, 1871, devotes much
space to the personal appearance of Cavour, who was, according to this
authority, “of medium stature, with a tendency to corpulency; quick and
energetic in his movements, with a forehead broad, high, and spacious;
his eyes were partially closed by weakness and still further concealed
by spectacles; his mouth not well formed and somewhat voluptuous, over
which played an ironical smile, the joint offspring of mirth and
disdain. Nevertheless, the _tout ensemble_ of his countenance was
expressive of benignity. Simple in his manners, though dignified in his
bearing, he would have been recognized anywhere as a sub-alpine country
gentleman, familiar with the usages of the court. Though of an
irascible, phosphoric temperament, he rarely or never lost his
self-control. Generous in his enmities and liberal in his friendships,
he was chary of his confidence and exclusive in his intimacies. It may
be that he was devoid of faith and affection, but he certainly loved
Italy, and believed in his own mission.”
The death-mask of Cavour, and that of Pius IX., I found lying peacefully
side by side in a little plaster-shop in Rome in the autumn of 1893. The
Pope was assuredly not devoid of faith and affection; and if he loved
Italy less, it was only because he loved the Church of Rome more.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: COUNT CAVOUR]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: PIUS IX.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pius IX., we were told, at the time of his death in 1878, was a hale and
vigorous septuagenarian, with a fine presence, a rich and melodious
voice, a facile utterance, which rose at times to eloquence, and a
benign countenance. For three days the body of the Pope lay in state in
the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament in St. Peter’s, and an eye-witness of
the ceremonies wrote: “The face, perfectly visible, seemed unchanged
from what it had been in life, and the expression was one of absolute
peace; the calmness, indeed, was almost like that of sleep. A slight
flush, even, was on the cheek, and a smile seemed to hover about the
lips. The white hair peeped from under the mitre, and in the crossed
hands, covered with red gloves, lay a crucifix suspended from a chain
about his neck.”
Signor A. Gallenza, in a volume entitled _The Pope and the King_, spoke
of the pontiff’s face in death as “handsome and dignified, with
something like sternness in the lofty brow, strangely contrasting with
that set smile so winning in the living man himself, but which was
merely the result of a muscular contraction, a dimple which even death
could not smooth.”
Henry Crabb Robinson wrote from Italy in 1831: “I occasionally saw
Leopardi, the poet, a man of acknowledged genius and of unimpeachable
character. He was a man of good family and a scholar, but he had a
feeble frame, was sickly and deformed.”