"Costly your habit as your purse can buy."
You should, however, remember to whom that advice was given,--to the
courtier Laertes, that "man about town" in Denmark.
Your quotation will not, be assured, fit me, and, I suspect, not
yourself either, with a new suit. We must play our parts, and dress
accordingly. For, as the old courtier adds--
"The apparel oft proclaims the man."
I would have your courtier, who is but a sort of palace furniture,
dress to suit, and make perfect the millinery and upholstery about
him. You say that the being a good dresser made the fortune of Sir
Walter Raleigh, when he threw his costly paletot before the feet of
Queen Elizabeth. True; but that trick is not to be played twice. You
are more likely to enter the palace like the boy Jones, than through
any such Eusebian gallantry. And what should you or I do there? You
would make but a sorry Aristippus, wearing your court suit, indeed,
"with a difference;" for there is not a tailor that would not
mismeasure you in your unsteady postures; and you would make them
worse by your uncontrolled laugh at your new position.
I am no greater sloven than yourself. You have, in fact, therein the
advantage of me by a greater laxity. You could not make a Mantalini.
But--not to think of that extravagance--let me remind you of a kind of
"well-dressed man" whom I have often heard you say you should like to
trip up and lodge in a gutter. It is one who is always well-dressed,
always the same, whatever the temperature--one whom rain never wets,
suns never make to fade, whom dirt will not splash. In summer he never
looks hot. Dust will not attach to his boots or to his coat. He walks
about, and always alone. He is quite out of the pale and contact of
friendship, as if the invisible creatures so admirably described in
the "Rape of the Lock" were with invisible brushes ever busying
themselves about his male attire. You never see him accost or be
accosted by man or woman. His shadow, if he has one, must smooth the
dust upon which it falls. There is no wear and tear in him, nor in any
thing about him. His voice, if utterance he hath, must be of a poor
monotony, of a preservative tone, and without growth. Whence he comes
or whither he goes, is an undivulged secret. Does he undress? He is so
unchangeable, so ever the same neat, well-dressed, unsoiled, and
unsoilable man. He never was in a chrysalis state. He must have been
beat out of some tailor's brains with a goose, and come into the world
ready dressed, and unborn of woman. However fashion changes, it is all
the same, he is never out of it. Like dissolving views, he slides
unnoticeably from costume to costume, without one article about him
being ever newer or older, and you never can tell where the difference
is. Changes must take place, yet in some charmed invisible manner. He
is like a man made by the magical words of Pancrates the Memphian out
of a broomstick, and set walking about, and as if the Encrates tailor
had forgotten the charm to reduce him again; and so he had walked
about ever since.
While I thus laugh in the glory of slovenliness, I must refrain from
entering upon a wider field,--woman's influences in the full dressed
world.--Let them enjoy their prerogative undisturbed. As we shall not
undergo a feminine metamorphosis, we are not likely to suffer, from
their amiable dress vagaries, unless they should return to some of
their older fashions, in which case, we must alter our very houses to
please them; as was done for Isabel of Bavaria, the luxurious consort
of Charles VI. of France, who, when he kept court at Vincennes, was
compelled to call in the architect, and have all the doors of the
palace made higher, to admit the head-dresses of the Queen and her
ladies. Yet we need not laugh, for, Eusebius, if the trunk hose should
come into vogue again, our doorways must be widened. That would not be
so bad as a return on our side of the question to a tight fit, on
which condition every limb was in misery, that, to think of, will
reconcile you to our loose indifference. What a monstrous contrast of
extremes has been exhibited, from the tight pantaloon, such as we see
it in some old pictures, to the great breeches worn in the beginning
of the reign of Elizabeth! In the "Pedigree of the English gallant,"
an account is given of a man, whom the Judges accused of wearing
breeches contrary to law, (a law was made against them.) His defence
of himself is curious. "He drawed out of his sloops the contents,"
viz., a pair of sheets, two table-cloths, ten napkins, four shirts, a
brush, a glass, and a comb, with night-caps, and other things, saying,
"Your worships may understand, that because I have no safer a
store-house, these pockets do serve me for a room to lay up my goods
in, and though it be a straight prison, yet it is big enough for them,
for I have many things of value yet within it." He was discharged, as
he should have been, with his merchandise, and allowed to trade freely
on his own bottom. Hudibras carried some such a cupboard. Small must
have been the population, when these inexpressibles, great
inexpressibles, gallanted with the ladies' large hoop farthingales. A
few pairs must have occupied no small space. A courtship in those days
must have resembled a siege, where the principal defence lay in the
outworks, and the difficulty of approach was not a little enhanced by
the encumbrances of the advancing party.
Who was the first coxcomb? Was dress, in its origin, a modest or
immodest appendage to the person; or rather when did it first cease to
be merely a protection or concealment? Is love of ornament a natural
virtue, or a superinduced vice? These are curious speculations. There
is an old play I have somewhere read of, which represents our first
parents in Paradise perfectly nude, and so were they exhibited, and in
public, without shame. The subsequent acts introduced them dressed;
and the last act, I believe, in the fashion of the day in which the
play was acted. As all plays were then serious, was this
representation a satire on coxcombry, and intended to exhibit the
progress of personal degradation?
What does a man propose to himself when he goes to his tailor's? Is it
to be clothed or adorned? Is it to hide a defect, that he may not
appear worse than he is, or that he may appear better than he is? To
attract observation or to escape it. Is the pride in dress, or in
undress? Ingenious in self-deceit was the reply of the man reproved
for the badness of his dress, "Oh every body knows me here;" and his
reply when seen in the same suit far from his home, "Oh nobody knows
me here." This was a true amateur; he loved slovenliness for its own
sake. Few believe themselves so ill-made, as that the "dogs will bark
at them." Even Richard III., who owned to his deformity, gets a little
in love with himself, and thinks of adorning his person. "I do mistake
my person all this while." He determines to act the exquisite.
"I'll be at charges for a looking-glass;
And entertain a score or two of tailors,
To study fashions to adorn my body.
Since I have crept in favour with myself,
I will maintain it with some little cost."
Or does the satirical and successful Richard merely laugh at your
fop-wooers, and, proud of his own superiority, contemn them, by
imagining their dress on his own person? One would really think, from
the figures one sees, that there are people who dress purposely to
spite the tailors, as there are those who are paid to be walking
placards of recommendation.
The butcher who ran after the fat man, and stopped him crying, "Be so
good, sir, as to say you buy your meat of me," was not more aware of
the benefit of such a personal recommendation, than is our fashionable
tailor. A well-made man, if he is in tolerable fashion, may be
supplied with clothes, as I am credibly informed, for nothing but the
merely notifying the makers. They are the decoy-ducks, excepting that,
though they have fine feathers, they have no bills.
I am told that a fashionable tailor would be quite shy of an ill-made
and vulgar looking customer; and generally charges his dislike in his
bill, that he may lose him. I knew a portrait painter, that professed
to decline, painting ugly people, upon that principle, and
consequently his success was quite astonishing; every one he did paint
was in better humour with himself, and was proud of his certificate of
beauty when he named the artist. Were you and I, Eusebius, to presume
to enter the saloon of a fashionable cutter, and order suits, they
would be purposely so ill-made, that no one should suspect from whence
they came. And we should ever wear them with a hitch of discomfort in
some part or other. So that, were we to try our best at foppery, we
could not now succeed. I have tried it upon various occasions, and
convinced myself that I was not born to it, and certainly neither of
us has acquired a second nature that any tailor would recognise. A
tailor's man, like the poet, must be born with nature's fit, or
nothing else will fit him,--"nascitur non fit." Some wear their limbs
so loosely, that they move them as do those German toys, whose legs
you see children jerk with a string. The best Sartorial artist can
make nothing of them; they are a mockery even upon the manufacture of
"journeymen," they "imitate nature so abominably."
How I came to be a sloven! Well, if I am a sloven, which I hardly know
how to admit, and if I am a little in love with a kind of genteel
slovenry, how came I by it? I did not take to it naturally, as you
did, Eusebius; I caught it. And once caught, however we may upon
occasions throw it off, it returns like an influenza, and becomes a
continual habit. Few, indeed, are there who are not born with a
contrary propensity, inheriting it from their mothers, whose
preparations for the coming offspring were of the finest, the _ventum
textilem_, as Apuleius calls it,--woven wind. Early, indeed, in his
day of existence, is the little infant taught to show off, both his
nude and his finery, and to hear the beauty of both commended. Thus is
vanity engendered in the bud. You were a born genius, and exempt from
the cradle from this visible mark of frailty. It was not so with me; I
was an incipient fop before I could walk. And now I remember,
Eusebius, that I sent you a letter some years ago, that should have
answered, though perhaps imperfectly, your question. It was a "passage
of autobiography," giving you an account of my first entrance at a
public school, and how I was "breeched." How one Mr. Flight, after
much tugging and pulling, by himself and foreman, did contrive to fit
me into a pair of mouse-colour leather inexpressibles,--a good name
for them, too, for I was hardly _pressible_ in or out of them. Do you
not remember my narration of the second time of putting them on, on my
first morning at Winchester College, while the chapel bell was going,
and I not yet fitted in; and how at last I did contrive to get some
portion of me into them, and to fasten one button, and how I ran (but
that word won't express the movement I made) breathless into the
chapel, and on kneeling down, the button gave way to my shame,
discomfort, and disgrace, exposure, ridicule. I might parody what the
cock said to the fox,
"The master my defeat, and all the school-boys, see."
This was my first disgust at my own personal appearance. I hated my
leathers; but they _stuck_ to me, nevertheless,--my wardrobe contained
nothing but leathers. I was like the dog that had killed his first
lamb, forced to wear the skin, that became more odious every day. Here
was a first distaste to dress. The fit was uncomfortable enough; but,
besides, I was a subject of ridicule.
Time, with its wear and tear, took off the pride of my nether garment,
and affected at length a kind of reconciliation between us. We fitted
each other better, and both entered into a compact of mutual slovenry.
Things won't last for ever, although, in those days, the trade did
affect to manufacture a material they called "everlasting." As the
quotation from an old song will show:
"And this my old coat, which is threadbare to-day,
May become _everlasting_ to-morrow."
With new breeches come new manners, new ideas. Foppery takes growth
again, though it is somewhat tender; struggles for life, but somehow
or other acquires strength in the struggle. You contend against it,
you wrestle with it, and, by a kind of enchantment, it becomes the
tailor Antæus, and rises from every defeat a bigger man than ever.
Behold me, let me stand for my picture, _Ætatis 18, Scholæ
Wintoniensis alumnus_. The date is at present unmentionable,--it will
be found one of these days at the back of the canvass; behold me at
the college gates, turning my back, for about my last holidays, upon
those statuesque antique worthies, Sophocles, Euripides, Æschylus. We
have shaken hands finally with the sublime Longinus, preferring for
the time a "sublime and beautiful" of our own, a butterfly of the
first down. On second thoughts, I am not quite fit to stand there yet;
I must describe my preliminary state. My boots, I rather think, my
first boots, had come home the night before; boots then were no more
like boots now, than are loose trousers to Mr. Flight's mouse-coloured
tights. There was nearly the same process of pulling and tugging to
get them on, and when once on, the _revocare gradum_ was next to an
impossibility. The leather, too, was of a more soaky oily kind, I
suppose, and stuck like adhesive plaster, and drew like that medicated
material. My boots were on, over-night, but no tug of war, no steam
power of man or men--for we all tugged, and all steamed--could get
them off. So it was determined I should sleep in them. It was very
well so to determine, but sleep, as the negro said, "hab no massa,"
and would not obey. The bootmaker had advised and disappeared. It was
soon found a just observation, _Ne sutor ultra crepidam_. Sleep would
not be bed ridden, for I was booted, possibly spurred; not even a
classical charm would do,
"Heus, al quis long â sub nocte, puellæ,
Brachia nexa tenens ultro te somne repellit,
Inde veni."
Sleep was only the more obstinate, and preferred better society, or
worse. Sleep has been too much petted by panegyrists, till he has
learnt ill manners, lies down with the clown and the drunkard, for
whom he leaves the presence and courting arms of suffering
beauty,--such were my thoughts in those youthful classical and
romantic days, and the above passage was most likely Latinised,--
"shown up." _Probatum est._
I must hasten on, for I am, though booted, not dressed yet. With a
sickening sensation, at the earliest gray light of a midsummer dawn,
did I put on my clothes--my bran-new, in which I was to go out into
the sunshine of life. First, there was a pair of bright orange-colour
plush breeches; a light buff waistcoat with a sham-red under; a
coat--no--nor jacket nor coat, but a beautiful tailor-creation, a
coatee; colour, green; buttons, shining metal. My boots were of the
kind called tops.
Now I am ready to stand at the college gates for my picture, whip in
hand, though a chaise is waiting for me and two more. My "copartners
in exile" temporary, are waiting for me. They vociferate impatience.
Is the portrait finished? Then complete it at your leisure, _secundum
artem_. I am off. But while I have been standing for this portrait,
the sun has risen; it is intensely hot. Heat of weather, tight boots,
and swelling legs and limbs, are doing their work in and out of me. I
am in a sad perspiration; and so off we go. We had reached the first
mile-stone; then I discover I had left my purse behind me. Out I leap,
run all the way back to "chamber," and away again to the chaise. I
have at this moment a painful remembrance of that short pedestrian
excursion--the heat intense, the orange-yellow plush flushing up into
my face, the glare of buttons, the now-agony of my booted legs and
feet, the difficulty of making the needful speed, and fear of the
practical joke of leaving me behind--altogether these pains and
discomforts put me into a kind of bilious fever, so that, if I did not
loathe myself, I did most thoroughly my clothes. From that day I took
a disgust to yellows, any thing glaring--abhorred my orange-plush:
and I do not believe I had any symptom of foppery about me for three
years after that memorable time. There is, indeed, a miniature
portrait of me extant, taken about that period: it has a dash of
powder in the hair, a rather smirking look; and there is a blue coat,
metal buttons, the yellow waistcoat and red under; but I suspect these
are not out of my wardrobe. They are from Mr Carmine's recipe-book of
portrait costume, and may be found in page 6, lettered, "For very
young gentlemen." I am pretty sure the dress, at least as it looks
there, was not mine; for I remember well a remonstrance from my parent
about that time, thus--"My son, you are too great a sloven."
I never quite recovered this; but there did come days of philandering,
when I mended a little, and occasionally appeared thus. Behold me
entering the ball-room--coat, blue, metal buttons; waistcoat, white
dimity; nethers, black tights; pinkish silk stockings, highly-polished
shoes, with small silver buckles; hair slightly powdered, and a slip
of a tail that could flirt with either shoulder. You will see that
there is a little of the sentimental cast in this: it was a doubtful
dress, capable, by a very small change, of making the wearer a Hamlet
or a Romeo for the night, as he might determine beforehand. I
continued thus for a while respectable, and might have remained so to
this day, but for an unfortunate taste which I acquired, and which
threw me into irredeemable slovenry, in which I have remained ever
since. In my idleness, which soon became, as Shakespeare so aptly
calls it, "shapeless," I dabbled with paints, oils, and colours; and
as with growing improvement I enlarged the dimensions of my operations
from inch to the foot, and from foot to the yard, I was soon above my
elbows in the unclean "materièl." There were no tube colours in those
days; we had bladders. They were always bursting; and thus they
bedaubed the hands, and the hands bedaubed the clothes; and amateurs
were then Picts, up to their very eyes. Young as I was, I of course
fancied myself a genius, and painted so large, and so largely, that a
common-sized palette impeded my work. I enlarged that, and increased
the quantity of my colours. I now mention a frequent disaster, that,
being frequent, was quite enough to make a sloven of any one. Take the
following scene:--A room such as could be spared me, not too large, in
tolerable confusion; daubs in all states of disorder on the walls,
against the walls, loose and strained, in all directions; large slabs
for grinding colours--oils, turpentine, varnishes, &c. &c., all in
that proper disorganisation to enable any youth of a tolerably
slovenly person to set up for a genius. Now--it has taken me an hour
to set my palette--look at it--here is a goodly row of colours mixed
and intermixed after the recipe of Lionardo da Vinci, who would have
added more, if paper, as he said, had not failed him. Here, however,
are quite enough--and more than enough--_satis superque_--I look at
the palette with extreme satisfaction--my canvass is on the
easel--imagination begins to work--alas! too soon--I am not quite
ready; I must put in a cup, that diluent oil--in another, turpentine;
it is done. I am a little weary, and sit, down for a moment to rest,
looking full on my canvass, and giving loose to my fancy--I rise,
where is my palette--alas! I have sat upon it. I have had misfortunes
in etching with aqua fortis--have been the "biter bit"--but here I was
the painter painted. I do not know why the arts should be called
Fine--"The Fine Arts"--unless it be in derision of the slovenliness
which they occasion. Many a time have I sat upon my colours: a
poetical friend once wrote me an ode upon it, and begged me to learn
it by rote, as a kind of _memoria technica_, or charm of preservation.
This I declined, not being good-humoured enough to admire any poetry
not my own. But I remember upon one such occasion working off my
vexation in a sonnet. And I recommend the recipe; you may successfully
salve over many a sore distraction by soothing verse. There is a great
charm in rhyme, or at least in searching for it, and versifying either
altogether saves swearing, or enables you to throw it off very
genteelly, and with a grace. I addressed the Fine Arts, whose epithet
_Fine_ I take to be given with a superstition of dread, as the old
poets did the Furies, calling them Eumenides, thinking they should not
fare the worse for giving them a good name; and as later times called
the Fairies "the good people," lest they should punish poor innocents,
and pinch o'nights. Read, Eusebius, my remonstrance to these
personified, deified, and worshipped Fine Arts.