being (says the biographer) "coarse in quality, little tended or dressed by its owner, and floating down over a large ungainly person, excited some ridicule ;" or like Coleridge's, as Hazlitt describes it, in his younger days, black and glossy as the raven's, and falling in smooth masses over his forehead. This long pendulous hair is alleged to be peculiar to enthusiasts.* Sir Thomas Browne devotes a chapter to "the picture of our Saviour with long hair," wherein indeed, judges the expositor of vulgar errors, "the hand of the painter is not accusable, but the judgment of the common spectator; conceiving He observed this fashion of His hair, because He was a Nazarite ; and confounding a Nazarite by vow, with those by birth or education." John Wesley's answer to remonstrants against his overgrowth of unshorn hair, was, that to adopt the prevailing fashion would curtail his means of almsgiving to the poor; and "I am much more sure," he protested, "that what this enables me to do is according to the Scripture, than I am that the length of my hair is contrary to it." The royal fashion of long hair, says Gibbon, in his account of the Merovingian dynasty, was the ensign of their birth and dignity; their flaxen locks, which they combed and dressed with singular care, hung down in flowing ringlets on their back and shoulders, while the rest of the nation were obliged, either by law or custom, to shave the hinder part of their head, and comb their hair over their forehead. Mr. Thackeray, in his Legend of the Rhine, just reminds his readers of the great estimation in which the hair was held in the North; how nobles only were permitted to wear it long; how, when a man disgraced himself, a shaving was sure to follow; and what penalties were inflicted upon villains or varlets who ventured on ringlets.† In Absalom's case it would seem that, let every man in the realm wear his 66 *Hazlitt speaks of it as 'traditionally inseparable (though of a different colour) from the pictures of Christ ;" and adds: "It ought to belong, as a character, to all who preach Christ crucified;' and Coleridge was at that time one of those."-Winterslow Essays, p. 7. See the works, with dry gravity he gives the reference, of Aurelius Tonsor; Hirsutus de Nobilitate Capillari; Rolandus de Oleo Macassari ; Schnurrbart Frisirische Alterthumskunde, etc. ABSALOM'S TANGLED TRESSES. 139 hair at full length, the prince's would still be a phenomenon, unique, sui generis, beyond parallel. The old dramatist George Peele makes King David fondly expatiate on the matchless beauty of that hair,—as when he gives his captains charge to respect the young man's life in battle: 66 Touch no hair of him,— Not that fair hair with which the wanton winds To sing their lover every night asleep. Oh, spoil not, Joab, Jove's [Jehovah's] fair ornaments, Joab himself describes Absalom elsewhere in the play in notes of almost the same pitch: "A beautiful and fair young man is he; In all his body is no blemish seen; His hair is like the wire of David's harp, That twines about his bright and ivory neck; In Israel is not such a goodly man.' But for proper extravagance, a judicious mixture of the Oriental and of the Elizabethan drama, commend us to what Absalom is made to affirm of himself, as one that -in his face Carries the final purpose of his God, His thunder is entangled in my hair, And with my beauty is His lightning quench'd."* So mouths it the rebel son, in King Cambyses' vein. The style is in salient contrast with the Old Testament narrative, of which Dr. Rowland Williams has said that it makes us seem to know all the people; the natural manners and vivid outbursts of feeling make the scene stand out with a kind of homely poetry. "We see the stripling Absalom with his youthful grace, priding himself on the beauty of his long hair. * The Tragedy of Absalon : as It hath been divers Times played on the Stage. Written by George Peele. London, 1599. We sympathise with his anger at the double outrage on his favourite sister, and hardly stay to blame the bloody fierceness of the revenge with which he blotted out her wrong. We are more inclined to blame the intrigue which he carries on against his indulgent father; but even this interests us against our will." Then again, the sitting in the gate, and inquiring each suitor's business, the air of friendly interest in the story, and the wish that each might obtain redress, all sealed by a familiar kiss, are characterized as touches true to life; nor are we surprised when the plot comes to head in rebellion—the people of Israel, or the prominent persons who claimed to represent them, changing their allegiance in the first hour of revolution, in a way to remind us of "the falling of England throughout court and city, at almost a moment's notice, from James II. to William III." Joab is described by the Broadchalke Sermon-essayist as a tower of strength, amidst this formidable nucleus of resistance, and little trusting the revolution which "a capricious stripling (like the Stuart Monmouth) was to lead." Small need to say that in Dryden's great poem the Stuart Monmouth is Absalom : “The song of Asaph shall for ever last. With wonder late posterity shall dwell Of David and his rebel son was the Emperor Frederick II. thinking, if not of them only, when he wrote to the States of Sicily, after the death of his son Henry, unreconciled: “I am not the first who has suffered injury from disobedient sons, and yet wept over their graves." That equally renowned Kaiser, Henry IV., was at least equally afflicted; and there is something of the impulsive fondness of David in that gush of feeling on the father's part, when the two Henrys met in arms on the banks of the Moselle, and the elder threw himself at the feet of the younger, and adjured him by the welfare of his soul to desist from his unnatural strife. He knew, he said, that his sins deserved the chastisement of God: "But do not thou sully thy honour and thy name. No law of God obliges a son to be the instrument of divine vengeance against his father." ABSALOM IN SERMON AND PLAY. J41 No difficult task was it for such unscrupulous intriguers as the disaffected Scottish nobles of the fifteenth century, to work upon the youthful ambition of James, Duke of Rothesay, not yet midway in his teens, to join their party and favour their designs against his father, James III.; who, in his anxiety, as Tytler says, to avoid a mortal contest, permitted the son who had usurped his kingly style, and the subjects who were in rebellion, to negotiate on a footing of equality with himself. Violent, eventually, was that son's remorse. "What," exclaims South, in his hearty downright way, "made that ungrateful wretch Absalom kick at all the kindnesses of his indulgent father, but because his ambition would needs be fingering the sceptre, and hoisting him into his father's throne?" In another sermon, the next in printed order, the same outspoken preacher has his fling at Absalom, for inviting his dear brother to a feast, hugging and embracing, courting and caressing him, till he had well dosed his weak head with wine, and his foolish heart with confiding credulity; " and then in he brings him an old reckoning, and makes him pay it off with his blood." To say that Dr. South has his fling at the rebel prince and fratricide, is but to give him the credit of doing metaphorically what is done literally in the valley of Jehoshaphat to this day; for Eastern travellers tell us of the very conspicuous tomb by tradition allotted to Absalom, that Jewish fathers, as they walk past it with their children, bid their boys each cast a stone there, to mark their displeasure at the son who rebelled against his sire; and some years ago it was reported as nearly full of such stones. The old Elizabethan dramatist already quoted, in due course of the tragedy hangs Absalom by the hair, and extorts from him in that position this soliloquy: "What angry angel, sitting in these shades, And holds my body thus 'twixt heaven and earth? *So George Peele consistently spells the name. Dryden so spells it inconsistently, just when and only when the exigencies of rhyme constrain him, or might seem to do so; and not always then. Within the first score That may untwine me this unpleasant curl, To loose my body from this bond of death, Oh, let my beauty fill these senseless plants With sense and power to loose me from this plague, And work some wonder to prevent his death The young man's pride in his beauty is made prominent enough; a sort of ruling passion strong in death. His appeal to Joab for help is summarily dismissed by that rough and ready (yet in Peele's version rather too rhetorical) soldier: * "Rebel to nature, hate to heaven and earth! And which thou thought'st His grace did glory in? Of goodly personage, when the virtuous soul Is stuff'd with nought but pride and stubbornness ?" One hardly recognises the Joab of the Book of Samuel in of lines in the Absalom and Achitophel we come, for instance, upon this couplet : "Of all the numerous progeny was none So beautiful, so brave, as Absalon." But midway in it we have, unless the variation be due to the printers,— Achitophel still wants a chief, and none 66 Was found so fit as warlike Absalom." Towards the close of the second part the n for m recurs: "Sure ruin waits unhappy Absalon, Alike by conquest or defeat undone." * In Henslowe's Diary, under the date October 1602, this entry occurs: "Pd. for poleyes and workmanship for to hange Absalome, xiiijd." |