Jezebel’s painting her face and tiring her head, is so immediately followed, in the narrative of her death and non-burial, by there being found no more of her left than the skull, besides the feet and the palms of the hands, that the connection is grimly suggestive of certain stanzas in the “Vision of Sin:”
Byron muses on a skull[10] from among scattered heaps, as now a shattered cell which even the worm disdains; he ponders on its broken arch, its ruined wall, its chambers desolate, and portals foul; yet,
It is Yorick’s skull that Hamlet is apostrophizing when he says, “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.” Tôt ou tard, as le bon réligieux in “Atala” reminds his fair young listener, quelle qu’eût été votre felicité, ce beau visage se fút changé en cette figure uniforme que le sépulcre donne à la famille d’Adam. The good king Réné had painted on the walls of one of the rooms in the Celestine monastery at Avignon, a skeleton—it was that of a once surpassing beauty who had won his heart. How would the moral have lost its point had the head of the skeleton been replaced, like that in the painter’s room in the Strada Vecchia of Rome, so graphically described in “Dutch Pictures,” by a mask, or cardboard “dummy” of a superlatively inane cast of beauty—the blue eyes and symmetrical lips (curved into an unmeaning and eternal simper), the pink cheeks, and silken doll’s tresses, “contrasting strangely with the terribly matter-of-fact bones and ligaments beneath—the moral to my lady’s looking-glass.” Gwillim, the Pursuivant, as quoted, not approvingly, in Southey’s “Doctor,” counsels all gentlewomen that are proud of their beauty to consider that they “carry on their shoulders nothing but a skull wrapt in skin, which one day will be loathsome to be looked on.” The old French poet Villon, aux charniers des Innocents, speculates in a manner that to one critic recalls the graveyard scene in “Hamlet,” on the destiny of corps féminin, qui tant est tendre, poli, suave, gracieux—for how can he help his thoughts running thitherward “quand il considère ces têtes entassées en ces charniers”? Who, indeed, as Keats once asked,
In such a spot Blair lingers, to apostrophize beauty, as a pretty plaything, a dear deceit, which the grave discredits. The charms expunged, the roses faded, and the lilies soiled, what has beauty more to boast of? Will the lovers of it flock round it now, to gaze and do it homage?
So that much less known, but much more powerful, writer, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, muses in Death’s cabinet, the Campo Santo of Ferrara, on the “unfashionable worm,” respectless of, alike, the crown-illumined brow and the cheek’s bewitchment, as he creeps to his repast—on what? “No matter how clad or nicknamed it might strut above, what age or sex,—it is his dinner-time.” The final residuum of such repasts becomes an unrecognisable skull, about which some chance possessor of it shall, in after days, perhaps, indulge in cynical conjectures and speculations in a tone and to a tune like this:
Mercury, in Lucian’s dialogue, shows Menippus the skulls of several world-famous beauties; and the philosopher falls to moralizing upon that of Helen. “Was it for this,”[11] he exclaims, “that a thousand ships sailed from Greece, so many brave men died, and so many cities were destroyed?” Menippus was so far of the Ralph Nickleby type, “not a man to be moved by a pretty face,” with a grinning skull beneath it: men like him profess to look and work below the surface, and so to see the skull, and not its delicate covering.
Where, asks the author of “Esmond,” are those jewels now that beamed under Cleopatra’s forehead, or shone in the sockets of Helen? With Mr. Thackeray in another place, again, we take the skull up, and think of the glances that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that shone in those vacant sockets, and cheeks dimpling with smiles that once covered that ghastly yellow framework. “They used to call those teeth pearls once. See! there’s the cup she drank from, the gold chain she wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her cheeks, her looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a feast we find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones.” And has not Macaulay his “Sermon in a Churchyard”? wherein one practical improvement of the subject, as conventional pulpiteers phrase it, runs thus:—