... “this was once Ambition’s airy hall,
The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul:
Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit
And Passion’s host, that never brook’d control.”
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,
“Who hath not loiter’d in a green churchyard,
And let his spirit, like a demon mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
To see skull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;