Spring Books II

Portraits of the poets

Helen Gardner

The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits David Piper (Clarendon Press, Oxford £17.50)

Whether speaking on a single great pic- ture for ten minutes on television, or giving an hour's lecture with all the ap- pearance of thinking about his subject for the first time as he goes along, or providing the National Portrait Gallery with a pam- phlet, or writing a Companion Guide, David Piper is as full of ideas as 'an egg is full of meat', and expresses them with a Precision, wit, and unforced eloquence that carries them alive into the mind. His tour Clark Lectures on The Image of the Poet are no exception, and his publishers must be commended for their presentation of his .beautiful and fascinating book, with its 225 Illustrations incorporated into its text. The theme of the book, announced at the beginning, is 'the likenesses of poets, what Poets have looked like, what poets have thought they ought to look like.., and What the poets' public or even the public at large have thought poets ought to look Like'. The fundamental problem, expressed iIt the contrast between the title and sub- title of the book, is the discrepancy between the aim of a portrait, which is (or used to be) the representation of an individual human being recognisable by those who knew him, and the generalising conception of a poet as a species of human being. In the very greatest portraits, as Sir David notes, we have the paradox that they 'trans- cend the intense particularity of thein- dividual portrayed, while all the time Preserving it, into a statement of universal alidity and relevance'. There are portraits In this book that approximate to this high Ideal and some that achieve it. More often We are faced with either a lively likeness of a 'Ilan, who happened to be a poet, or an im- age or 'icon' of what an age considers poets should be like. Alas, with the two unquest- ionably authentic representations of Shakespeare — the Droeshout engraving and the Stratford bust — we are faced with neither, and posterity, distressed by the odd- ity of the one and banality of the other, nas attempted to 'reconstitute Shakespeare Into a shape more worthy of himself'. Since the recreations of succeeding generations tend to be 'very much in their own image', Sir David finds in Shakespeare 'an ever- changing embodiment of the zeitgeist' and a. continuing theme of reference for his book. With this he has a high old time, delighting himself and us by showing

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'1.1akespeare in Staffordshire pottery

around 1850 'elevated to the aristocracy in ermine and in features and whiskers now clearly related to the Prince Consort'. He is pleased to find Shakespeare on the 120 note in the 1970s as 'witness to the stability of the pound sterling' and to know that he is still with us 'the only personal image that hovers instantly recognisable in the public awareness'. He just manages to refrain from reproducing the 'do-it-yourself cut- out cardboard bust on one side of the jum- bo pack of Kellogg's Cornflakes'.

Among the various anatomical peculiarities of the Droeshout engraving is the strange protuberance that appears on the high domed forehead, as if the sitter had recently banged his head against some hard object in the dark. I have sometimes dallied idly with the thought that this was an attempt to represent the poet as 'of im- agination all compact', since this faculty wq thought to reside in the forepart of the brain; but more probably it is the result of the engraver's incompetence in shading. I know of only one notable Shakespearean who has found this image of Shakespeare satisfying: Dr A.L. Rowse, who has written 'what a powerful impression it gives, that searching look of the eyes understanding everything, what a forehead, what a brain!' But Dr Rowse has a distinguished ally in his approval: William Blake, who, in his set of portraits of poets 'restated' the engraving, producing 'a fine humanisation and haunt- ing spiritualisation of it "grey but luminous" as he had seen the spirits of the poets' in his communion with them on the Sussex shore. (Plate 118) Like Sir David I have a fondness for the Stratford bust, 'respectable to the point of tedium' as it is: 'the portrait of a gentleman, an armigerous gentleman of standing, who from time to time, as George III noted of Gibbon, fancied scribbling'. The brow, though impressive, is less disproportionate to the face. Here we do not have the archetypal egg-head that is stamped on the popular mind. He looks very nice, but not very clever, though pro- bably rather shrewd. Looking at the bust provokes the same response as comes from reading a severely documentary, unspecu- Iative life of Shakespeare. Logan Pearsall Smith thought 'the attempt to reconcile the poetry which Shakespeare wrote with the prose of the extremely prosaic life he led is apt to addle the brains of those who under- take it'. How, he asks, can we think of this 'Apollo... this demi-god serenely running a popular show and raking in the pennies'? He noted that it had been calculated that 'after the religious maniacs' the two next

largest classes in insane asylums of Great Britain 'consist of those who rave about the Royal Family, or those who, by thinking about Shakespeare, have unhinged their minds'. Sir David's mind is very clearly not unhinged, but his concentration on Shakespeare in his first lecture has made him perfunctory and uncharacteristically careless in his treatment of Donne and Milton.

But perhaps this is because they are not presented as poets in their portraits. Apart from the ludicrous frontispiece that Mosely provided for the Poems of 1645, we have only the Faithorne engraving of Milton at 62, which quite rightly 'gives no indication of his blindness', since both in prose and verse Milton himself poignantly insisted that his sightless eyes were

clear To outward view of blemish or of spot — a boast he could hardly have dared to make if he had not been assured by friends that it was true. It also gives no indication that Milton is a poet. Donne was a connoisseur — a Titian, now in the Louvre, was once in his study. He was keenly alive to different styles and conventions and had himself painted in different poses and different styles but not as a poet or, indeed, as a member of any profession. His 'portrait in shadows' shows him in 'love-melancholy', not the melancholy of a poet. Isaac Oliver's miniature, signed and dated 1616, must be at least a year after Donne took orders in January 1615. He appears as a layman. The portrait in St Paul's Deanery, dated 1620, that is after his return from Doncaster's continental embassy, does not show him as chaplain to the ambassador, wearing the gold medal with which the Synod of Dort honoured him; it shows him in classical garb. His final memorial shows him not as Dean of Paul's but simply as a man in a shroud.

Pope was, like Donne, a connoisseur of painting and even practised the art; but, unlike Donne, he had a supreme sense of ' his vocation as a poet and imposed his con- ' ception of the dignity of his profession on those who painted him. Pope appears to have been painted some 66 times, and • always so as to exclude a view of his defor- mity. This, Sir David rightly sees as a 'self- awareness, or vanity' that was 'far more than merely defensive, or pathetic'. Pope's vanity, he writes was magisterially intense, yet swelled, and not least in his actual portraits, the scope of his own image to embrace the poetic vocation itself, its classic dignity and its independence.

He finds this most successfully achieved in sculpture, in the busts made by Rysbrack and Roubiliac, for, as he says elsewhere, in sculpted busts compared with painted por- traits the pulse and flush of life is stilled, and the image is drained of the accidental ephemera of mortality.

Although I assent to this and find in the busts the most satisfying 'images' of poets — far superior to statues — I am more deeply moved when I glimpse a soul and in- tellect informing its tenement of clay: by Kneller's last portrait of Pope, all sensibili- ty, intellect and courage in a face worn by endurance of the 'long disease' of his life, even more, perhaps, by the final portrait of him ascribed to Richardson. In both of these there is something of what Sir David calls 'that mysterious compromise kindling between painter and sitter' that makes a great portrait.

In the third lecture on 'Byron and the Romantic Image' a new medium, the 'life mask' makes a brief appearance. Although Sir David calls the life mask of Blake, which appears both in profile and full face, 'one of the most satisfactory of poets' portraits', the life mask seems to me neither 'image' nor 'portrait'. Blake's visionary head of himself, abstracted from the flesh, is a true 'image'. The life mask has in common with the portrait only the enforced immobility of the victim; although here the keeping of a pose must have been far more agonising, with the face (or in Blake's case the whole head) encased in wet plaster 'with lifelines provided by two straws up the nostrils'. The agony is not apparent with Blake and Keats but dominates the life mask of Wordsworth taken in 1815. With a few exceptions — Scott in 1808 as the poet of 'Caledonia stern and wild', painted 'in a concentration of contemplation that is both internal and ex- ternalised in the wild majesty of the set- ting'; Wordsworth 'seen brooding on Helvellyn in 1842'; and perhaps Byron at 19 about to set out on a sea voyage — portraits of the romantic poets are disappointing. With Byron himself the 'image' disastrously takes over. None of the portraits capture 'the unique amalgam of Hero and Anti- Hero that was Byron'. Sir David thinks on- ly Delacroix might have given us a great portrait, and, among English painters, Lawrence might have caught something of the demonic in Byron. There is more pleasure to be got from the sketches: an en- chanting series of sketches of Blake, Haydon's of Keats and D'Orsay's of Byron. I only wish Sir David had found room for the heads of Wordsworth and Keats from Haydon's 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem'.

The final lecture, 'The End of Fame', deals with the disappearance of the image of the poet. Sir David ascribes this primari- ly to the invention of photography, which 'destroyed the monopoly of the artist's im- age', and could multiply images indefinite- ly, and to the decay of the art of portraiture in the first half of this century, when almost all artists of originality pursued formal values in painting. He perhaps does not suf- ficiently recognise how strongly Eliot's 'Impersonal Theory of Poetry', which declared that 'poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from per- sonality', put forward as early as 1919, dominated the attitudes of modern poets. Of the Victorian poets, only Tennyson pro- vides a powerful public image of a poet, the artist, Watts, and Tennyson agreeing in the purpose of a portrait to paint a face that is 'the shape and colour of a mind and life... at its best and fullest', the painter and the poet having in common 'at least the inten- tion of the grandly sublime, of simple and innocent goodness'. More to our taste to- day than the 'austere and severe' image of Watts's 1863 portrait are the early portrait of the young Tennyson, the entrancing sketch of Tennyson by Spedding 'still perhaps almost an undergraduate, and the spit image of an undergraduate as he is now, has been and ever shall be, angled, en- tangled, in the concentration of reading, feet perhaps on the mantelpiece', and Rossetti's sketch of Tennyson reading Maud at Browning's house in 1855, 'the subject again contorted, clutching a limb as if in fear it might spontaneously get awaY from him'. Neither the early portrait or the two sketches suggest that the poet's brow was exceptionally lofty, but this is a con- spicuous feature of the 1863 portrait and even more of the photograph by Julia Cameron, with which Sir David makes in- teresting comparisons, and the last portrait. Its predominance links Tennyson with the Shakespeare of the Droeshout engraving, which has bequeathed to posterity the onlY 'personal image' of a poet, as Sir David asserts, 'instantly recognisable'.

In 1930 Stephen Spender had a conversa- tion he has reported with T.S. Eliot, and he also reports a comment that Eliot made afterwards to Allen Tate: 'I noticed that Spender spoke of wanting to be a poet, not of writing poems.' Since 1930 the process of the disappearance of the image of 'the poet has progressed further under the impact of television, and 'the retina of civilised man is bombarded by fabricated images remorselessly'. Indeed, as Sir David com- ments the images can almost take over and real life seem at times but a shadow of realitY rather than the other way round. If one finds oneself sitting opposite a television celebrity in the train, he or she may well appear — not larger than life — but smaller than television, and the saMe phenomenon can occur for that matter in the case of the Poet Laureate if he happens to be Sir John Betjeman.

By a happy accident I had just finished reading this last chapter when I saw on television a collection of poets calling on the Laureate on the occasion of his 75th birthday to present him with a volume of poems they had written in his honour. It was supposed to be a surprise. The poets as they shuffled in, if I had not known most of them by sight, seemed indistinguishable from persons who appear regularlY On discussion programmes, games, or quizzes. It seemed very extraordinary that a person as dedicated as Sir John is to ritual and ceremony should be 'honoured' by this modish informality and subjected to the treatment given to those who appear on ThrIs is Your Life. Of course, excellent per- former on television as he is, he played up. The only one among the poets who faintly suggested images of the poet of the past was

Philip Larkin, who, by chance, presents that high domed forehead always associated with Shakespeare, and I wondered how

illanY who watched the programme thought When he came forward `Ah! there's a real Poet.'