MORALS AND FACES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19946, 13 November 1926, Page 24

MORALS AND FACES.

PORTRAITS OF CELEBRITIES

ATTRACTIVE SINNERS. In the fine old romance, “Whitefriars,” for which the sins of the court of Charles II furnished material. Miss Robinson, following a commendably moral, but correspondingly unsound principle, depicted the villians of the piece, historical and otherwise, as decidedly unattractive (writes R. B. in the Melbourne Age), Towards tho end of this romance Jeffreys puts in an appearance; and the authoress made him a very dismal personage. Of course, she was quite wrong. Like Macaulay, she was too much of a partisan to give Jeffreys his due. On the other hand, among recent romances Rafael Sabatini has offered an accurate portrait of the judge, describing the striking heauty of the face—when not distorted by the torment of disease. But then Sabatini shows a tendency in romance to deal fairly with sinners—even when depicting Caesar Borgia; and measured against the bright, young Borgia, Jeffreys at his worst, may reasonably be regarded as a comparatively humane man. Visiting the National Portrait Gallery in London the other dav, I spent quite a while before the painting of Jefferys; the representation of the young man, robed in scarlet and black, entirely boars out Sabatini, and confounds accordingly the old school of romancers, whether novelists or historians, who wore convinced that the villian of the piece must be made to look the part. Becauso. emphatically Jeffreys does not. The aspect is high, serene and commanding: the painting at least suggests the great jurist—the man of brilliant intellect; just such a man as the later school of historians tends to present in interpretation of Jeffreys these historians decline to allow the actual achievements of the young lawyer to be wholly obscured by the iniquities of the Bloody Assize. By application of the principles of M'Laurin to Jeffreys, it is quite reasonable to find an explanation of the ghastly record of the judge’s later years, not alone in devotion to the wretched Stuart James 11, and in the corrupt spirit of the age, and in mere physical torment of disease, but also in sheer sadism, delight in cruelty, as a form of mental sickness. Such perversion would be inflamed by intemperance, by the wild carousals of the judge with his boon companions, carousals which. I read the other day, made the nights hideous about Hare Court at the temple, now the most serene of old world haunts at the very heart of London. I assume that Sabatini took his description of the judge from the painting in one of the Stuart rooms at the National Portrait Gallery. There hangs the picture of the handsome sinner as he was in life, not as old-fashioned romancers have drawn him in the blackest of ink. All about him the sinners of the Restoration period and of those later tragical years of the Stuarts, during- which the colossal folly and bigotry of James brought down their house to final ruin, leer, glower, smirk, simper, or look merely delightful. ' nd thi worst of these sinners, 1 fear, give the lie direct to that comfortable platitude of peculiarly Victorian type, “handsome is as handsome does,” for they are quite superb in dignity and- beauty. Nigh to Jeffreys is the most tragic portrait in tile gallery—the painting of the dead Monmouth; the laces muffled beneath the chin, the face, ever in its dread repose, ‘ surely most clearly revealing the beauty of the Stuarts; the closed eyes long lashed, the black hair curling about the marble brows.

The Stuart portraits throughout command attention; though, frankly, I marvelled afresh at the depictions of Mary Stuart, the charm of that most_ fascinating sinner was admittedly elusive in life and decidedly it eluded her ' painters. I am sure that, except for an occasional frosty tweak in the winter, her nose wasn’t that hue of pink. lam equally convinced that she did not use walnut stain or permangante of potash for her hair. And even in the supreme moments of her tragedy—say at Rizzio’s death, though John Drinkwater has given us to understand that she really did not care for Rizzio, or ever for Bothwell, and that her tragedy was that she never met her I. tellectual or spiritual mate, I am certain that she did not look as though she had ’ en drinking vinegar. But that’s how she looks in the National Gallery portraits. T prefer to stick to Maurice Hewlett’s description of her in the “Queen’s Quair.” She was, she must have been, as cwlett 'escribes ‘ her —passionate, not painful. Even James I gets a far more generous deal than Mary. He appears quite respectable in his robes, and this wretched, degenerate Stuart certainly was not He seems of a far more striking and_ pleasing personality than his creature Buckingham—not at all an attractive sinner, this, but represented as quite fatuous, and even inclined to flabbiness There succeed, in centrast, the pictured melancholy and dignity of Charles I, and the beauty of his Queen, with at hand the force and vigour of Strafford, though even here Macaulay seems to mo erong again, for the magnifi cent prose with widen ho describes Strafford certainly does not give any idea of the real portrait of the man. Strafford looks more commonplace. Then there is the painting of Charles 11, royally robed, sneering, elusive, as this most gifted of the Stuart men in life, but somehow looking superlatively miserable, quite as the average man looks when he is sitting for his portrait. Sjill, these Stuarts, one and all. are free trom the smugness of the orange portraits or the dreadful dullness of the Hanoverians; even James 11, with all the bitterness and morbid melancholy of his expression, has a dignity no Hanoverian monarch possesses in his portrait. And. in more striking contrast, down the years appear those thoroughly Victorian horrors of Victoria herself, and more lamentable yet, the beloved Albert. I sped away from thn portrait of" Albert the Good, though even Albert could hardly have looked anythink like that, surely ! I fled back to the Stuarts. And, ignoring history, I felt less pity somehow even for the Young Protender, exquisitely depicted as a boy, than I did for Albert.

How attractive all these Stuart sinners, then; how marked in contrast with their supplantors and successors! As marked in contrast ns great and glorious Chatham, eagle eyed, with the poor fool, George 111, in cloth of gold and royal robe; Or as the Marlborough, who found opportunity for the expression of his military genius through infamy and betrayal, ancl as his handsome, termagant duchess, with the good and fat Queen Anne, in whom, emphatically, the Stuart graces failed to survive.

Sinners again allure in the earlier portraiture. The little painting of Richard 111 Seemed to me as fascinating a piece of work as tho painting of the dead Monmouth. The face of Richard has the charm of the Borgia; tho slim fingers play with the jewelled rings, the horror brood ing over the room in the Tower in which tho murdpr of the princes was done—a horror which it needs no lively imagination to conjure up, for assuredly it rests there to this day—seemed to pass from the mind Looking at the face—the strange fascina tion of Richard’s face—l fell to conjectur ing the destiny of England, had the state craft of the man, the genius of the man, found time and opportunity for its expres sion.

But in the Tudor room the charm of the sinners decidedly is not. To me the most appalling portrait on the walls is that of Thomas Cromwell, the black-capped black-gowned Thomas Cromwell; the face, for all its power, is wholly evil, and of ali the Tudor Ministers—one might go further and say of all the English Ministers down the years—the Minister of Henry VIII excelled in iniquity. The evil of Richard 111 is masked by the weird beauty of the portrait; the evil of Thomas Cromwell is recorded In his portrait for the ages. Elizabeth glows with a splendour of gems, plunder of Spain, not a few of them, presumably. _ Henry _ VIII, bloated, manychinned, pig-eyed is a gross absurdity. If he really were like that, and I assume that he must have been, I have an. additional suggestion to offer to M’Laun'n’s diagnosis of nis case and its effect upon Henry’s wives—the deplorable brevity of their careers. When Henry grew like that—so pouchy and pendulous-cheeked, not one of his wives could surely have refrained from laughing at him, and levity simply meant brevity, of course. It wasn’t safe then to laugh at Henry. I. laughed, because it is safe nowadays. But I didn't laugh at Anne Boleyn. Here again was a similar experience to Marv Stuart’s—the difficulty of finding an ade quate artist. The loveliness of Anne Boleyn certainly isn’t in her portrait. Still, the picture does hold the attention: the face does suggest the superlative cunning, if not the fascination of the most mysterious of English queens—the strategist who matched her wits against the splendour and the might of Rome, of Spain, and the greatest English houses, and by it won, and through her victory changed the history of the world. Mental and bodily

sickness destroyed her; a mad-woman shattered her own fortune —a mad-woman, not a fair, voluptuous fool. The true solution of the mystery is surely offered in “PostMortem.” A few months hack I tramped through scenes of Henry’s love making with Anne Boleyn—tramped by green Kentish lanes to Hever —to the road, the hills, the valley, whither came Henry seeking his sweetheart at her father’s house. In the Norman church at the crown of the hill Boleyn himself lies buried; a little inn bears a signboard picturing the King; in the_ castle —now splendidly restored—the girl matched her wit and will against Henry; refused to become his mistress in succession to her sister, and fought successfully _ for royalty. In this narrow space of fairest England the fate of the English people was determined, and from the intrigue the Christian world was split asunder. Wandering about those green lanes at twilight, I conjured up the figures of the royal romance. I conjured up in contrast with the beauty of this serene setting the grim record engraved upon a plate within the tower walls —marking the last scene of Anne’s bid for fortune, the falling of the axe. I could conjure up, I say, in all this rural loveliness the royal romance, but somehow I couldn’t make Henry fit into the picture. Magnificent young Henry as ho came to the throne would have fitted into the picture, but not the tallow-tub Henry of the later years.

I spent before the Tudors and the Stuarts at the gallery so much of my time that I sped through the room where hang the portraits of the writers who made resplendent the nineteenth century. But I found time to study two excruciating daubs —attributed to the young degenerate Branwell’s Bronte —the portrait of Emily Bronte, and the group of the Bronte sisters. They are so badly painted that Branwell must have painted them. But if the greatest of English women novelists—Emily and Charlotte—are so horribly depicted, a piteous interest attaches to their paintings. How must the sisters have admired the handiwork' of their young brother—that brother in whom they alone found genius, that brother whose degeneracy and death formed the greatest tragedy of their tragic lives! Branwell, whose sole claims to remembrance are that he was their brother, and that his opium-haunted brain, and ravings, through the nights while Emily listened, furnished for her the attributes and speech of Heathcliff of “Wuthering Heights ”!