An amateur in oil (of the gentler sex) having thus attempted and failed to paint the poet when he was at Rome, two or three years later (1821 or 1822) Shelley surrendered himself to a masculine dabbler in water-colours—to Williams, the companion of his voyage to death. Possibly, this sketch (which differed from Miss Curran’s effort, in being finished) would have been preserved, had it accorded with the spurious portraitures, given so profusely in later time to a credulous and undiscerning public. But it has disappeared; and at the present date no one can say how far it merited the praise given to it by Trelawny, whose favourable opinion of the ‘spirited water-colour drawing’ would deserve more consideration, had he known half as much about the fine arts as he knew about horses and yachts. The Indian-ink sketch of a boy in the academicals of an Oxford undergraduate, the unfinished daub in oil, and the ‘spirited water-colour drawing,’ are the only portraits of the poet, known to have been produced by artists of any qualification or incapacity during his life.
Possibly, the Indian-ink sketch, which De Quincey saw somewhere in London, was the best of the three performances. It cannot have been much more absurd than Miss Curran’s absurdity, though from De Quincey’s words it seems to have been a sufficiently ludicrous production. ‘The sketch,’ says the Opium-Eater, ‘tallied pretty well with a verbal description which I had heard of him in some company, viz.: that he was tall, slender, and presenting the air of an elegant flower, whose head drooped from being surcharged with rain’—a description censured by the essayist for giving the equally false and disagreeable impression that the youthful littérateur ‘was tainted, even in his external deportment, by some excess of sickly sentimentalism, from which, however, in all stages of his life, he was remarkably free.’ Though, possibly, more like the man than Miss Curran’s fanciful oil-daub and Mr. Williams’s ‘spirited’ achievement in water-colour, this performance in Indian-ink, which made a young Englishman look like a dripping lily or a rose well wetted at a pump, was certainly a libel on the scandalous undergraduate.
Perhaps it would have been well had the spirited water-colour disappeared sooner. It would have been better than well had Miss Curran’s ‘failure’ been tossed into the Tiber as soon as she despaired of making a decent picture of it. Unfortunately, the thing that was only begun by a woman, and the thing that was finished to the last touch by man, survived the poet; so that Mrs. Shelley (through Mrs. Williams) was able to put them into the hands of Mr. Clint, with a request that out of such sorry materials, her own reminiscences—the recollections of a widow who liked to speak of herself as ‘the chosen mate of a celestial spirit’—and his sense of the fitness of things, he would compose a picture, worthy of being handed down to posterity, as the veritable and unquestionably historic likeness of the greatest lyrical poet of the nineteenth century.
The fancy picture, that was ‘composed’ under these less unusual than laughable circumstances, may not be more untruthful, but certainly is not more veracious, than the majority of fancy portraits. ‘Of these materials,’ Trelawny wrote in 1858, ‘Mrs. Williams, on her return to England after the death of Shelley, got Clint to compose a portrait, which the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life thought very like him. The water-colour drawing has been lost, so that the portrait done by Clint is the only one of any value.’ What evidential value can attach to a portrait ‘composed’ and ‘done’ under such circumstances? Apart from his weakness (one might, perhaps, say his dishonesty) in consenting to the prayer of the poet’s widow and her friend (Mrs. Williams), no blame belongs to Clint. Doing as portrait-painters are wont to do, when they agree to manufacture posthumous likenesses of people they have never seen, Clint worked up a fancy picture out of the two performances by amateurs; assuming that he might rely on those performances for correct information as to the principal features and general effect of the poet’s countenance. On points where the two performances gave incongruent evidence, he relied on the widows (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) to instruct him as to which of the two performances was the more trustworthy. The portrait having been ‘composed’ and ‘done’ in this way, the final touches were added in accordance with further information from Mrs. Williams and further suggestions by ‘the chosen mate of a celestial spirit.’
The falseness and absurdity of the composition are mainly referable to the romantic view Miss Curran took of the poet’s appearance, and to her romantic desire to give him the beauty which she deemed appropriate to the author of incomparably beautiful poems. Rating him with the angels, the lady was determined he should look like an angel—on her canvas. Beginning with this ambition, it is no matter for surprise that she made only ‘a beginning.’ If he was instructed to rely on the daub in oil, rather than on the spirited water-colour, it is not wonderful Clint went wrong. In her resolve to make Shelley look like an angel, Miss Curran decided to make the principal feature of his portrait altogether unlike the most prominent feature of his face. In the face, this feature wanted the size and contour needful for the romantic beauty, with which the lady would fain have endowed her bard. In the picture, this particular feature has every quality required in a feature of its kind by connoisseurs of romantic beauty—connoisseurs, that is to say, of the conventional school to which the lady and her friends (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) belonged.
The artist was not more interested than either of the other ladies in misrepresenting the poet in this particular feature. Mrs. Williams was animated with sentimental tenderness for the poet, who wrote her so much beautiful poetry. It was natural for this romantic mourner to wish that in his historic portrait, her Platonic lover should be relieved of a facial defect, that in her opinion amounted to disfigurement. Whilst mourning sincerely for her husband, Mrs. Williams mourned romantically for the poet who had perished with her husband in the same wild storm. In like manner, Mrs. Shelley (whose notions of the beautiful were purely conventional) was desirous that this particular feature should be dealt with tenderly, delicately, lovingly, in the portrait that would represent her husband’s facial show to future ages. Hence it was, that whilst he was composing the great historic portrait chiefly out of Miss Curran’s artistic falsehood, neither of the ladies, on whose guidance he relied, was in a mood to tell Mr. Clint in what respect the oil-daub was especially misleading, or even to hint it was likely to mislead him in any way. Sixty years since, a little turn-up nose was universally regarded as a nose wholly unbefitting a poet. In their measures for rendering their poet altogether admirable and lovely to unborn ages, both ladies were especially desirous that on the historic canvas he should be endowed with a nose wholly unlike the one that had been, in their eyes, the great blemish of his earthly tabernacle.
If Trelawny’s evidence may be accepted, Clint did his work to the satisfaction of ‘the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life.’ As Trelawny was one of those few, the ‘composition’ may be assumed to have had his approval. But Trelawny knew nothing of pictures, and little of the poet with whose story he will be associated to the end of time. The whole term of their friendly intercourse exceeded six months by no more than two or three days. And throughout that term the Cornish gentleman, with his simple reverence for literature and men of letters, regarded the poet through the glamour that makes things seem other than they are. On being shown the portrait for the first time, with an assurance that people approved it, Trelawny was not the man to discover anything wrong in it. When he saw it for the first time, a considerable number of long years had elapsed since the death of his acquaintance for six short months. Under these circumstances, Trelawny’s good word goes for nothing in the estimate of the spurious performance. That Hogg resembled Peacock in rating the picture at its proper worthlessness is matter of certainty; for though an engraving of the artistic imposture faces the title-page of his first volume, the biographer shows himself fully alive to the fictitious nature of the composition, by his vivid and minute verbal portraitures of the poet at Oxford and in later stages of his career.
Since Trelawny published Vinter’s lithograph of the picture as a frontispiece to the Recollections (1858), numerous engravings have appeared on wood, stone, or metal, of the posthumous ‘composition’ which the Cornish gentleman, at the time of his book’s appearance, regarded as the only reliable painting of the poet. ‘The water-colour drawing has been lost,’ Trelawny wrote in 1858, ‘so the portrait done by Clint is the only one of any value.’ At that time he was far from imagining that the oil-sketch, which Miss Curran ‘never finished, and left in an altogether flat and inanimate state,’ would ever compete in public confidence with the posthumous ‘composition.’ To the present writer it has not seemed worth the while to inquire what (if anything) was done to Miss Curran’s ‘failure,’ to bring it out of the ‘altogether flat and inanimate state,’ and put it into a condition to be regarded (on the authority of words spoken by Sir Percy Shelley, on the authority of his mother) as the ‘best portrait extant’ of the poet. It is enough for the present writer and his readers to know that Miss Curran’s beginning of a portrait has risen to this place in Sir Percy’s esteem—to know that it rose eventually to an equally high place in Mary Godwin Shelley’s esteem—to know from Lady Shelley’s assurance that the frontispiece of the third edition of her Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources, is an engraving from (to use her ladyship’s words) ‘the original picture by Miss Curran, painted at Rome in 1818, now in Sir Percy Shelley’s possession’—to know, from Mr. Buxton Forman’s authoritative assurance, that the frontispiece to the first volume of his edition of The Poetical Works is an engraving from the same ‘best portrait extant,’ and not an engraving of Clint’s posthumous ‘composition’—to know that engravings from this ‘best portrait extant’ have, like the engravings at first hand of the ‘composition,’ been repeatedly re-engraved (with or without variations to suit the requirements of editorial taste),—and, lastly, to know that all the engravings and re-engravings of the two delusive originals are flagrant and altogether-to-be-repudiated misrepresentations of the poet’s actual appearance.
After what has been said of Miss Curran’s unfinished oil-sketch, and Clint’s posthumous ‘composition,’ which was mainly made up from the lady’s derelict absurdity, it is needless to say that all the engravings and re-engravings of the abandoned fib and the elaborate falsehood bear a close resemblance to one another. Resembling one another in the contour of the features, the arrangement of the hair (even to the tips of the curls), the items of costume (even to the shape of the rumpled Byronic collars), these engravings and re-engravings might be mistaken for reproductions of the same original picture—allowance being made for the taste and whims of engravers, the fancies and requirements of editors. The only difference between the avowed engravings from Miss Curran’s daub and the engravings of Mr. Clint’s composition is that the former are something more unnatural and unsatisfactory than the latter. The poet of the former lot of engravings is a somnambulant girl—a sleepwalker from dyspepsia, who, on leaving her bed somehow or other, contrived to put on her brother’s walking-coat instead of her own bodice. The poet of the latter set of engravings is a very pretty girl, exhibiting no sign of disease, apart from the indications of a desire to look something wiser and prettier than she really is. Like the somnambulant girl of the more disagreeable picture, the young lady of these less disagreeable engravings has put on her brother’s coat, wears Byronic shirt-collars, has a quill pen in her lily-white hand, and is so posed that her right fore-arm is resting on an open manuscript. Of the dozen or more engravings of this young lady now lying open before the present writer’s desk, the one to which he would direct his readers’ attention—in consideration of its being the most agreeable, typical, and artistic of them all—is the engraving by that fine engraver, Francis Holl, which does duty as frontispiece to the first volume of Hogg’s (unfinished) Life.
What is offered to the eye by this frontispiece? It is the picture of a man, to judge of it from the coat, the folds of the Byronic shirt-collar, and the absence of the developments of the breast that are such powerful elements of feminine loveliness. It is the picture of a beautiful girl, to judge of it by the girlish face and hair, the girlishness of the long, slender neck. The first thing to strike the beholder of this girl’s face is the symmetrical character of its delicate beauty. The symmetry is perfect—too perfect, even for a girl of seventeen. The fine pencillings of the eye-brows, the curves immediately beneath the eyes, the superior contours of the cheeks, the line and shadow-line of the long, straight nose, the outlines of the lower parts of the countenance, the curlings of the small kissable lips and dainty chin, are all finely, unsurpassably symmetrical. If the word may be applied to things so lovely and delicate, symmetry is carried even to caricature in the details of this girlish face. Of course the face, so delicately girlish, is deficient in the strength, the indications of force, active or latent, always to be looked for and, in some degree, invariably discernible in the countenance of a man of mark.