But the Mary Stuart of history and the Lady Macbeth of Shakspeare
belong to a different type. We know that the former had a delicate
exterior, auburn hair, and beaming blue eyes: her tone of speaking was
gentle and sweet, excellently soft and low. Mrs. Siddons, whose style
and color were altogether different, became so saturated with Lady
Macbeth as to be convinced she must have been a blonde. We think that
Shakspeare implies and justifies this delicate perception, and turns
it into history. Both the queens of Scotland represented the kind of
blonde women who are fired by sunlight: it crisps the golden or the
chestnut hair, becomes quicksilver in the veins, hits every brain-cell
with its actinic ray, and chases over the yielding hair in ripples like
a blown wheat-field. The voice is low, but ever clear and even,--a
fabric closely woven throughout, capable of sustaining the strongest
moments of the soul, and of vibrating with them: the whole gamut of
passion may be swept by it, from the enticing whisper to the peal of
defiance. It is a trumpet, made of silver, and not one note of it is
brassy; but it pierces the distance none the less directly, and summons
Macbeth by sonorous phrases out of the mist and pointlessness of dreams.
But Nature drew the character of Mary Stuart from elements less simple
than were used by Shakspeare in constructing Lady Macbeth. Mary, to
all the culture of her times, added various tastes and a delicate
susceptibility for art: she loved music, plays, minstrels, games, and
was passionately devoted to the chase. Her great pace in hunting, her
fiery dash through the underbrush, was observed and has been long
remembered. Once, having been thrown from her horse, the attendants
found her on the ground, gayly laughing as she put up the dishevelled
hair.
In the cold autumn of 1562, she went in person upon an expedition
to punish a Highland clan. She jested with fatigues and hardships,
"and was as much at her ease," says Froude, "galloping a half-broken
stallion over the heather as when languishing in her boudoir over a
love-sonnet." She said "she wished she was a man, to know what life
it was to lie all night in the field, or to walk on the causey with a
Glasgow buckler and a broadsword."
She reminds us of Bathsheba in the novel which has been already quoted.
Talking with her maid Liddy, she said, "I hope I am not a bold sort
of maid,--mannish?" she continued, with some anxiety. To which Liddy
replied, "Oh, no, not mannish; but so almighty womanish that 'tis
getting on that way sometimes."
At the age of nineteen, the delicately nurtured woman set sail from
France for Scotland, to begin that long, indomitable struggle to
succeed Elizabeth, and to break the Reformation in England. The wiliest
and most inflexible of Queen Elizabeth's counsellors shivered their
weapons against the guard of her swift tact, until imprisonment, which
was twice escaped from, and death,--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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