THE PORTRAITS OF JOHN KNOX.
THE article on the above subject in this month's Fraser, which may be safely ascribed to the pen of Mr. Carlyle, will, we believe, be most justly apprehended if regarded as a piece of special pleading, disguised or concealed to some extent by asso- ciation with a variety of more or less eloquent, entertaining, and interesting matter, and often not a little wayward, loose, and inaccurate, in support of the opinion to which he committed him- self last year, when he wrote under an engraving of Lord Somer- ville's so-called portrait of Knox, "The one picture I ever could believe to be a likeness of Knox—February, 1874;" had it photo- graphed, and sent copies to various persons in Scotland and also in England ; and which, we understand, Mr. David Laing, of Edinburgh, and other authorities there, entirely repudiated, asserting it to be the likeness of some unknown individual a hundred years after Knox's time.
The writer seeks to prove, first, that Beza's somewhat wooden portrait of Knox is quite untrustworthy, for which purpose it is necessary to discredit Beza's knowledge of Knox ; next, that the Soraerville portrait is a copy of an older picture, which would make it more probable that it may be a portrait of Knox,
though it would not tend to show that it is. In the first place, the treatment accorded to Beza and his Icon of Knox is, to use a mild expression, rather ungracious, Beza being even repre- sented as a man whom Knox might have deemed unworthy of his acquaintance. Now, it is true that Beza, when a young man, did publish, in a small thin volume dedicated to his distinguished preceptor, Melchior Wolmar, amongst a number of other things, and all in Latin, some rather free verses (as had also been done by his friend George Buchanan, who is in this respect compared with Beza by his erudite biographer, Dr. Irving) ; but years before Knox went to the Continent, Beza had repented of that proceeding, and had become a zealous and valued ally of the Geneva Reformers. While he was Professor of Greek at Lau- sanne he gave lectures to the people on the New Testament, and in 1556 published his great work, the translation of it into Latin, with copious notes ; and this afterwards went through almost innu- merable editions, the second and fifth of which were dedicated by Beza, in special epistles, to our Queen Elizabeth. In 1559, the year in which Knox finally quitted Geneva, Beza moved from Lausanne to reside there permanently ; and was the confidential friend of Calvin, and also his colleague in the church and in the college (being Professor of Theology in the latter), till the death of Calvin, just five years later, when he succeeded to all the offices . which had been held by him, and to a great amount of his influ- ence in the Protestant world. So much for the insinuation that Beza was not a person whom Knox would be likely to care to know. MiCrie, the painstaking and conscientious biographer of Knox, distinctly states that Beza and Knox were personally ac- quainted while the latter resided at Geneva ; his three, not two, several residences there (the first in 1554; the second in 1555, after his somewhat unpleasant experiences as minister at Frank- furt for about four months each ; the third with his wife and her mother from September, 1556, till January, 1559), having ex- tended altogether over a period of about three years. And all writers about Knox who make any allusion to Beza appear to have gone on the same belief. However, the writer in Fraser aims to discredit this belief, with a view to discredit the likeness of Knox given by Ben in his "Icones," ; and although he introduces, at full length, the translation of a letter from Beza to his friend Buchanan, he makes no allusion whatever to the two long and affectionate letters from Beza to his friend Knox, of which Mr. Laing has given translations in the sixth volume of his "Works of John Knox."
The writer has further desired to prove that the change made in the portrait of Knox in Goulart's contemporary translation of Beza's book, was made on the ground that Goulart knew that a wrong portrait of Knox had been given by Beza,—and this, though the one substituted for it is notoriously not a portrait of Knox, but one of Tyndale. To ordinary critics it would appear that here was simply a blunder made by lack of editorial care, either in Goulart, or more probably in some different person who may have superintended the insertion of the portraits. The writer in Fraser desires us to believe that Goulart intended to correct Beza's mistake in giving a wrong portrait of Knox, but by some miscarriage corrected it wrongly. And for this purpose he is anxious to establish Goulart's fidelity as a translator of Beza. Goulart, in his French translation of Beza's book, is, in the few lines addressed by him to the reader ("S. G. S." —i.e., Simon Goulart, Seulisien—" au Lecteur"), most respectful to the original author ; and his translation is, on the whole, careful and good, yet far from being, as the Fraser writer asserts, "correct to a comma." In the dedication alone at least four considerable variations occur,—for one thing, the following interesting sentence about emblems, "Stint ante [by mistake for astern], opinor, sic appellata, quod imagines eiusmodi sententiosm opere tessellato parietibus ant vasis in seri consueuerint," is entirely omitted and un- represented; Goulart, therefore, is by no means irreproachable. But to go on to a more important matter, an eloquent friend of ours has often said that his mother was a very remarkable woman,—she had an astonishing power of imagining a thing and then believing it ; we wonder what ground there is, ex- cept an entirely imaginary one, for the statements at p. 415 in Fraser that the mistake in changing and giving a wrong portrait of Melchior Wolmar was "an evident misfortune which had be- fallen him [Goulart] in the person of his printer," but that the change in the Knox portrait was by "clear intention on the part Goulart," who has "of his own head silently altogether with- drawn" the Knox of Beza and put another in its place,—which, it is admitted, is still more certainly not Knox than the omitted one. By far the most probable conjecture is that Goulart had nothing whatever to do with the portraits ; that the reissue of the book, with French translation of the letter-press, and the addition of the eleven new portraits which had been obtained, was an enter- prise of Laon's, the publisher, and that he arranged with Goulart simply for the translation, a kind of work in which we know that Goulart was at that very time a most experienced and inde- fatigable labourer, as he was also in the production of compila- tions and original compositions. In the same year, 1581, in which this little achievement of his appeared (to which he did not give his name, but only the already quoted initials, "S. G. S."), there was published, also at Geneva, a much more arduous work by him, namely, a "History of Portugal," in twenty books, trans- lated partly from Latin, partly from Portuguese ; and an original essay along with it, on the edification and advantages likely to accrue from the study of such a subject ! And this conjecture of ours acaounts very simply for the circumstance which the writer in Fraser seems rather to wonder at,—that Goulart, in his brief "preface, or rather postscript" (which, by the way, is placed at the very end of the book, and not "at the end of the Icons, and before his translation of the Emblems," as is so circum- stantially stated), makes no allusion to the eleven woodcuts now added. Mr. David Laing, in the preliminary remarks to the first volume of his "Works of John Knox," published in 1846, gives some space to a consideration of the portraits of the Reformer, and calls attention to the remarkable circumstance of the substi- tution in the French translation of 1581 of a totally different portrait (which he was the first to characterise as a likeness of Tyndale), instead of the one given by Beza in his "Icones " of the previous year,—which last he (Mr. Laing) fully believes to be a veritable likeness of Knox. And in his quiet, reasonable way, he thinks this may be explained by supposing that the original woodcut had been injured, or lost, or mislaid, and that through mistake or carelessness (such as we already know was possible in the business) another which happened to be at hand was put in. Yet however sensible and probably true this simple supposition may be, how common-place, prosaic, and dull it is, when compared - with the masterly, luxuriant fiction of the writer in Fraser in dealing with the same point!
The Somerville portrait of Knox, which Mr. Carlyle stands by, and which is, at least in Holl's engraving of it, a very fine, re- markable, and impressive head, appears to have been entirely unknown in Scotland, entirely unknown to M'Crie and Mr. Laing, the most able and thorough of all the writers about Knox. At least, if these gentlemen did know of it—and we should wonder if the engraving of it had never come under Mr. Laing's searching eye, since it was first published in Knight's "Gallery of Portraits," in 1836—they must have thought it entirely unworthy of notice in connection with Knox, for neither of them makes the least allusion to it, although 31,Crie as well as Mr. Laing devoted some time and attention to the subject of the portraits of their hero.
At page 436 in Fraser it is stated that the Somerville picture has been inspected, since it was brought from Ireland last year, by the most distinguished artists and judges of art that could be found in London, but very few of them appear to have given any producible evidence in support of the idea that it might be a portrait of Knox. Mr. Tait's remarks about the head (we shall say nothing now about the dress) may be, and we think are, very just ; but he stops short of expressing any belief that the picture is a very old one, or.a copy of an older one, or that it had any- thing to de with Knox. As to the statements of Mr. Boehm
of copious, continuous gin such as be men- tions, but only indications of some five or six marginal notes i But Dr. Milner spoke with an authority which Dr. Bathes had n the whole length of the margin, which is separated from the text not, and his words were testimony against us with every l'ro- by a rather broad, dark line or border, as may be clearly a seen in any good impression of the engraving. And it is somewhat untoward circumstance that no similar dark line or border is to be found in any of the English Bibles printed at entitled to the excuse that partisans of peculiar opinions are often I Oorteva. very credulous as to the extent to which their opinions obtain There are, of course, few persons who have the knowledge general acceptance. On the very eve of the Council of the Vatican eedknowledge necessary for the formation of a judgment on such a subject as
the one we have been dealing with, or who will take the trouble in the Pope's Infallibility, and longed and strove for its definition, of acquiring it ; and out of the millions in our country—" mostly with an artful and copious variety .of scornful and uncomely epithets. The Church spoke, and those then of its fold, who is fools," according to Mr. Carlyle's celebrated estimate of them—a
-great majority of readers will probably be quite content to take this country the matter on his showing. Or to take an illustration from an event of still later date, but of
about" circular cracking" (whatever the cause and import of such cracking maybe), and about the head being represented a little over the size of nature, on which he seems to found a great deal, it must be remarked, in the first place, that the statements cannot be ad- mitted as accurate. The present writer has just been to the Kensing- ton Museum to examine the picture, and he at least would never have thought of describing the cracking as "circular," for it is not circular, nor like the circular cracking we have often seen in pic- tures; nor is the head painted on a scale larger than life ; from the bottom of the chin to the crown of the skull-cap—and the cap, of course, adds a little—it measures barely 9i inches, and we know many living heads whose measurements exceed that. The head of one of our most distinguished living naturalists, which we have carefully measured, is, in perpendicular height, 91 inches,—if measured merely with callipers is about 1 of an inch more ; and another living head which we have measured is 9 it- inches in perpendicular height. But even if the head had been somewhat over the size of nature, it would have been no trustworthy indica- tion that the picture was probably a copy, for portrait-painters frequently, even intentionally, make the head a little larger than life. Then as to the painter of the supposed original, we happen to know the opinions of most of the distinguished artists who examined the picture, and they regard it as simply ridiculous that any one should find on the face of it any suggestion or justification of the idea that it was probably copied from a picture by Francis Pourbus the elder ; it would be quite as sensible, and as sure a sign of knowledge of the "styles and epochs" of painting, to say it bears evidence on its face that it was probably a copy from a picture by Titian, who was alive and diligently at work through- out the whole period of Knox's sojourn in this world. It is scarcely necessary to add that we have not heard of a single artist whose opinion coincides with that of the eminent sculptor .on this point. Mr. Merritt, in his note, does not "conjecture" that the picture is a copy from one by Pourbus (we should be much surprised, if he is acquainted with any pictures by Pourbus, did he think it to be so), but only from one of the time of Pourbus, whit& is, indeed, nothing more than the label he found on the picture virtually, and boldly (!) says,—" Portrait of John Knox ; probably a copy from an old original ;" in other words, probably a copy from a picture of the time of Francis l'ourbu.s, for if such original was ever done, it must have been in his time, seeing that he was living and painting for some twenty years before Knox died. We shall probably be near the truth, if we suppose that Mr. Merritt was led to think of Pourbus, as some before him had been, by remembering or possessing a copy of the engraving of Pourbus's picture of Buchanan, which Knight also gave in his "Gallery of Portraits" and his "Pictorial History of England." We infer that Mr. Merritt did not know the Buchanan picture itself, for he only says he believes it is "in the possession of the Royal Society," as is stated on the engraved plate. In the second paragraph of his note he has not been fortunate, for of records and tradition, in which, we think very properly, he has considerable confidence, there are none at all in favour of the Somerville portrait, and they all cumulate in another direction. It would appear from the remarks preceding Mr. Merritt's note that his opinion had been invited, and no information given him as to the history of the picture or the existence of rival por- traits, no hint even that the picture had been lined ! We -rather question the fairness of this, and are very doubtful whether any valuable opinion ought to be expected in such circumstances.
We may just add that the faithful inspector's report about the book in the picture—which the critics supposed to be a Geneva Bible of the year 1562—does not seem to have been quite so faith- ful as it might have been. We could discover no narrow stripe
Previous page
