A pretty questiocn this, my dear Eusebius,--and that the question comes
from you, who at no time of your life were a "Beau Nash," is rather
extraordinary. It is after the fashion of most of your movements,
however, and so far should not be thought extraordinary in you. For as
you do not walk in the track that other men's shoes have made, nor
dress your thoughts in other men's draperies; but both walk and think
as few other men do, I ought not to wonder that you turn suddenly
round upon me, eye me from head to foot, and ask me this curious
question, How I came to be a sloven. Now, I can easily imagine your
own slovenly attitude and attire when you wrote me this precious
letter, and how fantastically conceited you fancied yourself standing
before me, ωστε Ζωγραφης--like a painter, as says Hecuba,
when she bad her rags and misery be looked at,--and thought to put me
out of countenance with your own perfections. Perfections, indeed!
Why, your whole wardrobe would not be worth exporting in charity to
the land of Ne'erdo-weels--and I doubt not that the loss of a single
suit, bad as it may be, would leave you in some small respects as bare
as when you came into the world. You have been reading, you tell me,
the "Æsthetics of Dress," as you term them, those very amusing papers
in Maga--from which you mean to cull materials for the history of the
art, and to write a treatise on "The Philosophy of Tailors," wherein
you intend to set forth upon what principles of the "_Fitness_ of
things" it is that nine tailors make a man. It is a whimsical notion
of yours that the game of nine-pins was set up in honour of these nine
worthies--"Knights of the thimble"--signifying how weakly they stand
upon their _pins_, and how they go by the board at the very breath of
a ball. You affect to think that the Templars were but the imitators
of a more honourable cross-legged company--and that their antiquity is
shown prior to the invention of Heraldry, for that the very term, the
_coat_ of arms, must have come from them. You say they can show
_parchments_ with the oldest companies and families, and cut to
shivereens the longest pedigrees, and yet never go beyond their own
measure.
What would a parliament be without them? They not only make their man,
but _seat_ him. Indeed, man is no man, till he is made one by these
Novemviri, and hath been invested by them, as of old, with the _toga
virilis_; and now-a-days (we vulgarise every thing even in the
nomenclature) the first advance to manhood is to be "breeched:"--that
first step when, with the dignity of newly assumed and duly authorised
manhood, the dressed youth puts his best foot foremost, on the first
step of the ladder of life, and is not ashamed, while ascending, to
turn his back, and show what stuff he is made of.
It is said, that when a man marries he enters into a bond with society
for his future good behaviour--but of what consequence is this, in
comparison with that previous bottomry bond, to use a mercantile word
suitable to these our mercantile days, that every man has entered into
and given the surety of nine men besides, without which, whatever
bottom he may show in the fight, the greatest hero would be but a
_sans culotte_. Heroes! why, are not tailors the very models after
which men should dress themselves? They have made, in all senses, the
best regiments. And what a large slice of this globe is governed and
commanded by the Board in Threadneedle Street.
Thread and thimble do wonders to make a man--rig him out with the best
materials--no devil's dust, disdaining dishonest "thimble-riggery."
The son of Japetus admired not more his man-invention, than does the
tailor. The fleshly life which he condescends to stuff into his
manufacture, is with him but a secondary consideration; and it must be
confessed he is often not very choice in these his human materials.
Any thing that way will do to adorn the real "man of shreds and
patches." Pegs and lay figures would answer the purpose quite as well
as these, pattern-humanities, if they would but walk. Bad, however, as
they are, as specimens _per se_, they are made so much of by the
adornments, that their painted effigies and portraits, as they are
exhibited in tailors' laboratories, saloons, and establishments,
excite the envy and wonder of a gaping population. They are set forth,
to show what the worst man may be made--to portray vividly the
excellence of the art, and to "give the world assurance of a man,"
even built and fabricated out of next to nothing but his dress. It is
no longer "_Ex pede Herculem_." The boot-maker has been defeated--Hoby
dethroned--you may have a Hercules or an Apollo only according to
cloth measure. Then will the proud artificer hold the mirror up to
Nature to show her how vastly she is improved, even though it be by
the slandered hands of "Nature's journeymen." Then, so various in its
powers is the art, that the real professors will at the shortest
notice turn the shopman into the esquire, and, if need be, the thief
into an archdeacon. They will fit you with any character, fit or
unfit:--will send you most genteelly to the court or to the gallows.
Vain is the conceit of the scoffing world of fashion that affect to
scorn the craft that makes them what they are;--nay, a great deal
better, and to look what they are not. Let them try to set up for
themselves, what sorry figures they would be--perfectly ridiculous, to
be kicked out of Fop's Alley, and whipped by the beadle!! worse clad
than Prince Vortigern in that despicable and invisible slip of a
vestment,
"Which from a naked Pict his grandsire
won."
But that can never be to any extent. What man in his senses would
enter upon this stage of the world, rushing in like a wild man of the
woods, a general wonder, and without the introductory aid of his
proper master of the ceremonies; when, too, at a trifling cost, he can
take his ticket of admission, and go boldly certificated by the
sign-manual of a Doudney or a Moses? No man dares to walk entirely out
of rules sartorial, nor utterly to despise the images which it
pleaseth the tailors to set up. Not that their laws are like those of
the Medes and Persians, which alter not--their very principle is
change--and every change is _suitable_. The seasons change not fast
enough for them. Is a man to be married?--even then he is in the
tailor's hands--he must have a new suit--nay, he must wait for it, he
dare not appear without it. Is he to be hanged?--he must have a new
suit; nay, before condemnation he is tried in his best, as if he were
to be judged as much by appearance as evidence. The public, the real
thinking public, take more notice of his appearance than of his
crimes. Every journal is full of accurate detail, not of his doings,
but of his looks and of his dress. The Pictorials present the very cut
of his coat, and pattern on his waistcoat; and what the graver cannot,
they supply in words, so that you may see not only the shape but the
colour. Blue is the favourite colour at the altar of Hymen,--a suit of
black on the platform of the hangman--but that is a compliment to the
clergy--or a malice, that folk may think most who go out of the world
that way are of the cloth--and that is what they call giving the
culprit "the benefit of clergy."
Really man should be defined "a dressing animal."--Were all the powers
of the earth to meet together to consult upon their everlasting
interests, the previous question would be, in what are they to appear;
and the first announcement of the great congress of the gentlemen of
the press would be what they wore,--what they said, would be slurred
over as of less importance. Thus, for example, the Roman historian is
particular when he describes the great ambassador before the senate of
the Carthagenains, making a fold of his robe, as if it alone were
worthy to contain the fate and fortunes of empires, asking them which
they would have, Peace or War--and so letting it fall loose out of his
hand,--just as a modern senator on the opposition side might put his
hands into his breeches pockets, make a show of searching, and taking
them out with nothing in them, might, with all the dignity of
senatorial energy, declare that he could not surmise where the
minister would get his supplies.
It is extraordinary man is ashamed of nothing so much as of his own
natural figure. It is a mean and low thing to appear to have flesh and
blood, excepting in the face and hands,--this remark must, however,
apply only to the male sex. The female is allowed a greater latitude.
Even a Count D'Orsay would be hooted through the streets, should he
dare to appear, on foot or on horseback, without a coat, and with his
shirtsleeves tucked up,--such is the obeisance we make to the
tailoring craft. And if it be a folly, it is one of an old growth, and
is rife among our antipodes as ourselves. Savage and cultivated, civil
and uncivil, all have the propensity. The Chinese exquisites felt the
skirts of the coats of the members of our embassy, and burst out into
immoderate laughter. They quizzed the cut and colour, proud of their
own envelopes; and, to their cost, judged us by our clothes. They have
since felt our arms. Your tailor is an important personage all the
world over, but alas! he is too restricted in his commerce. He is
confined to spots and spaces, that is, individually speaking,--universal
is the race. It is quite curious to consider what free trade may do
for him. The export and the import may quite change the appearances of
all, men, women, and children. When navigation laws shall be done away
with, and "free bottoms shall carry free goods," then, indeed, may it
come to pass that "motley is your only wear." The picturesque will
triumph; wondrous will be the variety; in apparel, China and
Kamschatka shall meet and shuffle together in every public way. Then
"all the world will be a stage," and all the men and women at least
look like players. The drab world will be extinct--it is nearly so
now. Quakers have been long since ashamed of their Sartorian
antipathies, and from growing to be coxcombs in their own particular
line, have pretty generally thrown off the dull garb, and plunged with
eagerness into the emporium of fashion, and come out so as that their
mothers would not know them. The snake throws off his old skin, and
when he comes out shining in his new, looks with a sly leer from under
the hedge, and seemeth to say, "Thanks, friend, thee hast complimented
me by following my example, I am verily proud of thy similitude." Too
many of us have a spice in our veins of the snake's venom,--shift
skins, and turn coats,--but no more of that, Eusebius, it leads to
fearful questioning, and we both eschew politics; and do not let us
call up the evil one, whoever may be among the tailors. Yet let me
remind you of a whimsical accident that happened the other day to a
certain M.P., who, having bought a ready-made paletot, walked boldly
into the streets, forgetting that he was thus ticketed on the back,
"This neat article to be sold cheap." I dare to say, it was warranted
to keep its gloss, and turn as good as new--and that the wearer
_peeled_ well in the house.
You would, I see, implicate me in fopperies. If it is not my humour to
patronise by personal wear, I at least panegyrise all fraternities of
tailors. You may make yourself look ridiculous if you please, and the
change may not ill become your vagary-loving mind; but I do not mean
to doff my old habit, not having faith in novelties, that I should
trust the present easy motion of my limbs to unused ties and
compressions. Dress, with such old ones as we are, Eusebius, should
have the blessings Sancho bestows upon sleep, and "should wrap us warm
like a blanket;" and what reason is there that we should think the
worse of ourselves for showing the dates of our thoughts and ways, and
bearing upon our coats the figures of a somewhat backward age. We may
yet brighten up our countenances, and say out of the book of that
dramatist who knew life so well, and may thus depict ours--even for
some few years to come, my dear good Eusebius,--
"Though time hath worn us into slovenry,
But, by the mass, our hearts are in the trim."
They that have taken off and put on their clothes as often as you and
I have done, may well look upon them as old friends, with their
familiar looks, and see in their wear and tear a certain kinship with
ourselves, and all our own elbow rubs that the world hath given us,
and the thread-bare arguments that we have put upon ourselves, from
which we imagined we could raise fine flattering maxims, and
substantial truths, which have more deceived us in the wear than in
the affection with which they retain us and are still retained.
"When this old cloak was new,"
says the old song,--and how much does it imply--what a world of memory
is involved in its every fold. At the shaking of the skirts out fly
visions of the past,--familiar faces, endearing converse round the
pleasant hearth,--cares that we have wrapped round with them, buried
in them, and now come up but as effigies of thoughts that no longer
trouble, dreams of life's anxieties, from which the mind takes
wholesome food, indulging in the repose of the old envelopment. Would
you exchange this, Eusebius, for any new untried thing, forcing its
intimacy upon you without claim to your friendship, jerking you and
twitting you with impertinent and ill-fitting pressure, with no other
association but of the congregational squattings of the nine
journeymen who made its existence, redolent of misshapen and
snuff-stained thumbs?
I would no more willingly part with the habit that gives me personal
ease, and is familiar with all my movements, than I would with that
metaphorical habit of mind, of thoughts and feeling, that makes the
continuing identity of my being. I say identity, for a man of any
character must identify himself with his clothes: by wear they acquire
somewhat more than a likeness. No man can ride the same horse daily
for five years, but the two animals will in some strange way give out
to each other something of their natures--there is sure to be a
resemblance. So is it with our clothes. There is an old caricature of
Bunbury's,--"The Country Club"--in which this truth is shown. You know
you could put every man's hat upon his head, though they are all hung
on pegs. And this is surely a most characteristic kind of portraiture.
I should as much think of setting up the painted likeness of a
deceased friend or dearer relative as a sign to a pot-house for the
Saracen's head, as I would give his suit of clothes, at least in the
shape in which he left them, to a mumper that should go begging in
them. Would it not be an offence, that the noble air of freedom and of
sentient responsibility they have acquired, should be doomed to
contract in damp and unwholesome decay, the look of degradation and
drooping melancholy of a vicious meanness, retaining, at the same
time, that something of the departed, which, by its presence, seems to
connect him with an abominable deterioration? Let the clothes be
buried with the man, lest your friend's very effigies be seen in low
haunts and vile places. For you can steep them in no dye of a Lethe
that will wash away the remembrances, the likenesses they have
acquired. Would you have the apron of sanctity transferred, by
ill-advised gift, from a defunct archbishop to the boddice of an
indecent figurante? Detestable notions these--that nothing should be
lost, and all turned to use! What use of any thing is better than that
one which keeps feelings, affections, respect, entire! Were I a modern
iconoclast, I would rather burn the petticoats of "our Lady of
Loretto," than transfer them to a still lower puppet-show. I had
rather say for ever with the Mayor of Garratt, "Stand back, you
gentleman without a shirt," than present him with one of my
grandfather's wearing. When a boy, I always used to think it a painful
sight to see cast clothes hung out on poles or lines, and extending
half across a street, blown to and fro with the winds, like ghosts
affecting the show and motion of vitality, undergoing their
purification in an upper aerial purgatory, preparatory to their
metempsychosis, uncertain if they should adopt unto themselves a
bodily being of a higher or a lower order. To hang the coat seemed
very like hanging the man.
Pythagoras was the first man, says history, that wore breeches. When
he hung up the shield of Euphorbus in the temple of Juno, to show that
he had been Euphorbus, did he suspend his breeches also? He probably
did, disliking any meaner transmigration for them; for we are told his
fashion was not followed until some generations had passed. The modern
Pythagorean would send them to the pawnbrokers.
The fine idea of Lucian, that our shadows will be our accusers, might
very properly be transferred to coats and inexpressibles; for, besides
that they might witness of our whereabouts and of our doings, they
might witness of our ingratitude in casting them off,--wearing our old
friends thread-bare, and then throwing them off when they have most
singularly accommodated themselves to all our strange ways,--of
sending them, as the unfeeling do the high-mettled racer to the cart,
to other service to which they are but ill-fitted. The wearer of
another man's coat is guilty of a kind of larceny; he does more than
steal from the person, he in one sense steals the person itself! At
least, he should be held responsible for all that has been done in the
coat, and that on the principle of taxation, as the law comes not on
the tenant gone off, but upon the land. Better that a man should make
a museum of his apparel, than part with it out of the family of which
it so properly forms a part.
A gallery of suspended braces might represent one's ancestors, equally
with the be-wigged portraits that seem to lay their hands upon their
hearts, and say from their frames, "Posterity, I begot you." A
breeches-gallery might with much less expense serve the same purpose;
for if these articles have not fittingly belonged to posterity, it is
notorious that they have most fittingly belonged to something very
like it. Do you not think, Eusebius, that these suspension breeches,
the idea of which is worthy the Shandean philosophy, would be very
expressive of family character, and nicely distinguish unseemly
interpolation; and that a genealogical wardrobe-gallery would become
an object of pride, and most proper appendage to the family seat? It
could no more be doubted to what race and blood apparel would justly
belong, than to what shoulders certain heads must belong--which
illustration reminds me of that saying of Bishop Bonner's to Henry
VIII. who threatened to cut off the head of every Frenchman in his
power, should Francis I. take the life of the bishop? "True, sire,"
said he with a smile, "but I question, if any of their heads would fit
my shoulders as well as that I have on." So would the family-fit be no
bad test of the true character and vitality in the genealogical tree.
I suppose that, by your question--How I came to be a sloven--you would
have me throw off my old habits, and put on new--and perhaps, in your
satirical innuendo, attack more than apparel, which we abuse by
metaphor, when we term ill manners "bad habits!" Did I tell you how
ingeniously our gay and jocund friend and poetical satirist defended
himself in encounter of wit with a bantering opponent? "How do we
know," said he, "but that our vices may be our persecuted virtues."
"Slovenry," Eusebius, is a persecuted virtue. It is a tone and virtue
that unbends, loosens the stiffness of the social body, liberates it
from the strict tie of an awkward formality, and is to the whole of
society what variety is in the dress in an individual--a happy relief,
without which there would be too much monotony. The philosopher who
made his bow to the jewelled and richly dressed man, and thanked him
for the sight, and the trouble he took in putting on and bearing such
a costly suit, should have been thanked, in his turn, for acting the
foil, the contrast, which made the finery so conspicuous. If we were
all dressed up kings and queens--were all the world to wear a lord
mayor's livery, there would be no show to see. It is the intermixture,
the great variety, that makes the exhibition, which is only then
complete when it has a little dash of slovenry. What a sorry picture
it would be that should have all bright colours! the finest carnation
is best set off with a little adjacent umber. You would no more wish
to see people in the streets all dressed alike, than you would wish to
see the streets all alike, and every house like another. Nature
dresses not after this one millinery. In the richest corn field, it is
not every blade, and ear, and stalk, that is equally broad, full, and
straight. Some have a kind of slovenly lying off from others, a grace,
the very purposed gift of Nature, to entice the eye to a more curious
and nice selection, whereby to discover the infinite degrees of
beauty, that all united make the whole perfection. The precision of
the tall and upright stalk is the more strongly marked in its
strength, by the decoration of its neighbour--and how beautifully do a
few clustered together plume off their individual irregularity into a
graceful shape! Has not the tangled hedge its own beauty even when it
"putteth forth disordered twigs?" You would not bear all pruned to one
smooth fashion. The _finery_ of Nature's robes makes but a small part
of her wardrobe; she hath her ordinary wear, and even when she putteth
on her mantle of the richest green, she trims it sparingly--and that
for the most part with a loose lacery of unobtrusive jasmine and
vine-weed. And the nature that bids all the garniture of earth thus
grow variously in richness, in moderation, and in a sweet and humble
disorder, putteth it into man's mind; for he is doomed to dress
himself, so as to follow her law;--and thus it is, that in any given
number of persons you shall see some few endowed with this natural
gift and grace of slovenry. And that careless, modest, unassuming part
in the arabesque ornament of life, you and I, Eusebius, are intended
to perform. One character for the harlequin, another for the clown,
and we must have the lean and slippered pantaloon--and there must be
some one besides, my good friend, to play the fool too, or the stage
will not be well filled, nor the comedy of life well performed, nor
the spectators well pleased.
Take, Eusebius, which part you please,--you will ultimately fall into
your natural character, and however you may shift a little with age,
you will ever have a hankering after "one more last appearance" in
motley. I doubt if the daily moving scene would be perfect without the
beggar's rags. Their loose uncared for freedom, the independence of an
escape beyond the limits of poverty, which, says the satirist, makes
men ridiculous, floating in the wind or drooping in the rain, alike
defying and disregarding the better or the worse of fortune, have
their moral as well as pictorial use and dignity too in the panorama.
The beggar's negligence is the running commentary on the rich man's
anxieties. All is right in its place; you have only to look and admire
the show. The grandest cathedrals, with their ornamented towers or
spires seeking heaven as their own, are not always the worse for a
contiguous poverty of humble dwellings, which they do but seem to take
under their sacred protection; and thus the low elevates still more
the great. You and I may be well content, by the lowness of our
apparel, to magnify the magnificent; only, I confess that when I find
myself standing as a foil to one of our rough-haired, be-whiskered and
bearded fops, I do sometimes feel inclined to throw a nut in his way
to see if he be a monkey or a man. One would not wish to be showman to
the brute. The contempt of the fop is of little moment; and here I
cannot but think Anacharsis was wrong, when he proposed to himself to
leave Greece on account of the derision cast upon him for his dress.
I admire your offering the example of Aristippus, as an inducement to
quit the character of the sloven. You say he accepted a rich robe; but
you must remember that the wiser Plato refused it. Besides, it was in
the philosophy of Aristippus to take either part, and to appear fop or
sloven as his humour pleased him, or convenience led him. "Omnis
Aristippum decuit color," says Horace; and let me suggest that _color_
must have meant, not _color vitæ_, (or if it so be, it is a metaphor
from the thing,) but the colour of his cloth--black, perhaps, turned
brown--seedy. He was certainly one to "cut his coat according to his
cloth." Diogenes in his rags and his tub was a coxcomb--one would not
be like him; he tricked up his poverty, to be observed, and looked at,
and admired, quite as much as any other coxcomb would trick out his
fashion for the eye. When he desired Alexander to step aside, not to
interpose his person between him and the sun, it was but a
self-magnifying vanity, that his filthy rags might be the more
conspicuous and set off in the splendour of a new light, as conceited
religionist sects have done, calling aloud for the finger of scorn to
point at the filthy rags of their own flesh and blood; vilifying their
bodily man, that their unfleshed and spiritual selves might be seen by
that glass through which they bid you look, to rise above and shine in
the new light of their own glorification--an idea which they have
borrowed from those picture-cherubs, who, only heads and wings, seem
altogether to have dropped their bodies and enveloped themselves in a
smoky and cloudy vapour peculiarly their own. And truly, Eusebius, I
am apt to agree with you, when we see these congregated saints of the
New Calendar, and to join in their personal vilification, and to think
that merely heads and wings might offer a more salutary odour of
sanctity than that which you say you have ever found too pungent in
the "Rag Fair" of their New-Paradise Row.
And your Aristippus was not quite to my mind; for though there was a
show of wisdom in his carelessness, it was the very show that was
displeasing, and the easy putting on of other men's tastes and
opinions, as if he himself was as changeable as they. Does not the
confirmed sloven appear to be actuated by a nobler kind of philosophy,
who, with a soul bent, as man's should be, on durability, resisting to
the utmost a common, degrading, and visible mutability, and seeing how
changeable a thing fashion of any kind is, and how unworthy a thing it
is to become to-morrow utterly unlike what he is to-day, and to be
to-day what he was not yesterday, despises these shiftings and
changes,--these fittings on and takings off,--these ever-varying
metamorphoses that so unman him, and rests with a firm disregard of
appearance, which, if unsteady, must be false to the character that is
or should be within him; and if it be not false, is but the greater
shame, and fixes the instability upon his mind? Is it not a kind of
blot upon the fair profession of respect and reverence, to stoop and
put on the livery of a fashion which leads you up to the portraits of
your ancestors, and bids you turn to ridicule their attire, and
perhaps makes you laugh at the father who begat you?--or subject
yourself to a like disgrace, by imagining them to be looking down from
the walls in contempt upon yourself, and that the fading colours blush
for you? I have heard a neighbour tell of a friend of his, who had
done great things, in a worldly sense, for his family, and who,
wishing to stand well in the eyes of his posterity, with an
affectionate reminiscence had his portrait taken in his wedding-suit.
But after this, going to a play, and seeing the counterpart upon the
stage, he bethought him that such might be the case with his
suit,--that it might be sold, and go to the theatrical wardrobe: so,
as he said, to save his posterity the disgrace of casting contempt or
ridicule upon one who had done so much for them, he had the dress
painted out, and left it in his will, that the real wedding-suit
should be buried with him. Indeed, it is recorded of a gentleman about
a century ago, who, having a very goodly show of ancestors, was so
shocked at the unfashionable appearances of his Vandykes, that he had
the fashionable bob-wigs of the day put upon them all.
And this, Eusebius, reminds me to speak of painters, who in nothing
are more at a loss than in what manner to dress their sitters. They
have almost all come to the conviction at last, that a kind of
slovenly undress is the best, and are sure to adopt it, unless by
particular desire, and to commemorate official consequence, the robes
and chain of a lord mayor are required, at an extra charge, or the
solemn look of one who is nobody must be removed from asinine
insignificance by a great quantity of fur, or a red curtain suspended
from a marble column in the open air. Sculptors take a bolder step,
and, with a taste that does credit to their sagacity, give the bust,
without hesitation, a slovenly dignity,--simply throw an old huckaback
towel round the chest and over the shoulder, and trust to the features
of the man and the material of the marble to add weight and
consequence. The historical painter would be worse off still, had he
not by common consent a kind of sovereignty over dress. His greatest
desire is, upon all occasions, entirely to discard it, as much as may
be to paint the nude, as if there were no truth but naked truth. The
trim suit is his aversion; the wardrobe for his lay figures offers but
a curious assemblage of rags.
It would be difficult to learn how to grapple with this Proteus of
dress--mutable fashion. I am told that our dresses, male and female,
were extremely ridiculous in the eyes of the French, when we visited
the continent after the Peace. The Persian visitors were astonished
that we wore our hair in the wrong place--on the head instead of the
chin. There is almost a slovenly simplicity which alone properly
imitates the natural ease and grace of unconfined nature. The farther
we depart from it, we go but back again to the rude, uncultured
barbarian. Sir Joshua somewhere says, that if a tattooed Indian and a
powdered and buttoned man of fashion should meet in the street, he
that laughed first would be the real savage.