Nay, but it is useless to protest. Artifice must queen it once more in
the town, and so, if there be any whose hearts chafe at her return, let
them not say, 'We have come into evil times,' and be all for resistance,
reformation, or angry cavilling. For did the king's sceptre send the sea
retrograde, or the wand of the sorcerer avail to turn the sun from
its old course? And what man or what number of men ever stayed that
inexorable process by which the cities of this world grow, are very
strong, fail, and grow again? Indeed, indeed, there is charm in every
period, and only fools and flutterpates do not seek reverently for what
is charming in their own day. No martyrdom, however fine, nor satire,
however splendidly bitter, has changed by a little tittle the known
tendency of things. It is the times that can perfect us, not we the
times, and so let all of us wisely acquiesce. Like the little wired
marionettes, let us acquiesce in the dance.
For behold! The Victorian era comes to its end and the day of sancta
simplicitas is quite ended. The old signs are here and the portents to
warn the seer of life that we are ripe for a new epoch of artifice. Are
not men rattling the dice-box and ladies dipping their fingers in the
rouge-pot? At Rome, in the keenest time of her degringolade, when there
was gambling even in the holy temples, great ladies (does not Lucian
tell us?) did not scruple to squander all they had upon unguents from
Arabia. Nero's mistress and unhappy wife, Poppaea, of shameful
memory, had in her travelling retinue fifteen--or, as some say,
fifty--she-asses, for the sake of their milk, that was thought an
incomparable guard against cosmetics with poison in them. Last century,
too, when life was lived by candle-light, and ethics was but etiquette,
and even art a question of punctilio, women, we know, gave the best
hours of the day to the crafty farding of their faces and the towering
of their coiffures. And men, throwing passion into the wine-bowl to sink
or swim, turned out thought to browse upon the green cloth. Cannot we
even now in our fancy see them, those silent exquisites round the long
table at Brooks's, masked, all of them, 'lest the countenance should
betray feeling,' in quinze masks, through whose eyelets they sat
peeping, peeping, while macao brought them riches or ruin! We can see
them, those silent rascals, sitting there with their cards and their
rouleaux and their wooden money-bowls, long after the dawn had crept
up St. James's and pressed its haggard face against the window of the
little club. Yes, we can raise their ghosts--and, more, we can see
many where a devotion to hazard fully as meek as theirs. In England there
has been a wonderful revival of cards. Baccarat may rival dead faro in
the tale of her devotees. We have all seen the sweet English chatelaine
at her roulette wheel, and ere long it may be that tender parents will
be writing to complain of the compulsory baccarat in our public schools.
In fact, we are all gamblers once more, but our gambling is on a finer
scale than ever it was. We fly from the card-room to the heath, and
from the heath to the City, and from the City to the coast of the
Mediterranean. And just as no one seriously encourages the clergy in its
frantic efforts to lay the spirit of chance that has thus resurged among
us, so no longer are many faces set against that other great sign of a
more complicated life, the love for cosmetics. No longer is a lady of
fashion blamed if, to escape the outrageous persecution of time, she
fly for sanctuary to the toilet-table; and if a damosel, prying in her
mirror, be sure that with brush and pigment she can trick herself into
more charm, we are not angry. Indeed, why should we ever have been?
Surely it is laudable, this wish to make fair the ugly and overtop
fairness, and no wonder that within the last five years the trade of the
makers of cosmetics has increased immoderately--twentyfold, so one of
these makers has said to me. We need but walk down any modish street
and peer into the little broughams that flit past, or (in Thackeray's
phrase) under the bonnet of any woman we meet, to see over how wide a
kingdom rouge reigns.
And now that the use of pigments is becoming general, and most women
are not so young as they are painted, it may be asked curiously how the
prejudice ever came into being. Indeed, it is hard to trace folly, for
that it is inconsequent, to its start; and perhaps it savours too
much of reason to suggest that the prejudice was due to the tristful
confusion man has made of soul and surface. Through trusting so keenly
to the detection of the one by keeping watch upon the other, and by
force of the thousand errors following, he has come to think of surface
even as the reverse of soul. He seems to suppose that every clown
beneath his paint and lip-salve is moribund and knows it (though in
verity, I am told, clowns are as cheerful a class of men as any other),
that the fairer the fruit's rind and the more delectable its bloom,
the closer are packed the ashes within it. The very jargon of the
hunting-field connects cunning with a mask. And so perhaps came man's
anger at the embellishment of women--that lovely mask of enamel with its
shadows of pink and tiny pencilled veins, what must lurk behind it?
Of what treacherous mysteries may it not be the screen? Does not the
heathen lacquer her dark face, and the harlot paint her cheeks, because
sorrow has made them pale?
After all, the old prejudice is a-dying. We need not pry into the secret
of its birth. Rather is this a time of jolliness and glad indulgence.
For the era of rouge is upon us, and as only in an elaborate era can
man, by the tangled accrescency of his own pleasures and emotions, reach
that refinement which is his highest excellence, and by making himself,
so to say, independent of Nature, come nearest to God, so only in an
elaborate era is woman perfect. Artifice is the strength of the world,
and in that same mask of paint and powder, shadowed with vermeil tinct
and most trimly pencilled, is woman's strength.
For see! We need not look so far back to see woman under the direct
influence of Nature. Early in this century, our grandmothers, sickening
of the odour of faded exotics and spilt wine, came out into the daylight
once more and let the breezes blow around their faces and enter, sharp
and welcome, into their lungs. Artifice they drove forth and they set
Martin Tupper upon a throne of mahogany to rule over them. A very reign
of terror set in. All things were sacrificed to the fetish Nature. Old
ladies may still be heard to tell how, when they were girls, affectation
was not; and, if we verify their assertion in the light of such literary
authorities as Dickens, we find that it is absolutely true. Women appear
to have been in those days utterly natural in their conduct--flighty,
fainting, blushing, gushing, giggling, and shaking their curls. They
knew no reserve in the first days of the Victorian era. No thought was
held too trivial, no emotion too silly, to express. To Nature everything
was sacrificed. Great heavens! And in those barren days what influence
did women exert! By men they seem not to have been feared nor loved, but
regarded rather as 'dear little creatures' or 'wonderful little
beings,' and in their relation to life as foolish and ineffectual as the
landscapes they did in water-colour. Yet, if the women of those years
were of no great account, they had a certain charm, and they at least
had not begun to trespass upon men's ground; if they touched not
thought, which is theirs by right, at any rate they refrained from
action, which is ours. Far more serious was it when, in the natural
trend of time, they became enamoured of rinking and archery and
galloping along the Brighton Parade. Swiftly they have sped on since
then from horror to horror. The invasion of the tennis-courts and of the
golf-links, the seizure of the bicycle and of the typewriter, were
but steps preliminary in that campaign which is to end with the final
victorious occupation of St. Stephen's. But stay! The horrific pioneers
of womanhood who gad hither and thither and, confounding wisdom with the
device on her shield, shriek for the unbecoming, are doomed. Though they
spin their bicycle-treadles so amazingly fast, they are too late. Though
they scream victory, none follow them. Artifice, that fair exile, has
returned.
Yes, though the pioneers know it not, they are doomed already. For of
the curiosities of history not the least strange is the manner in which
two social movements may be seen to overlap, long after the second has,
in truth, given its death-blow to the first. And, in like manner, as one
has seen the limbs of a murdered thing in lively movement, so we need
not doubt that, though the voices of those who cry out for reform be
very terribly shrill, they will soon be hushed. Dear Artifice is with
us. It needed but that we should wait.
Surely, without any of my pleading, women will welcome their great and
amiable protectrix, as by instinct. For (have I not said?) it is upon
her that all their strength, their life almost, depends. Artifices first
command to them is that they should repose. With bodily activity their
powder will fly, their enamel crack. They are butterflies who must not
flit, if they love their bloom. Now, setting aside the point of view of
passion, from which very many obvious things might be said (and probably
have been by the minor poets), it is, from the intellectual point of
view, quite necessary that a woman should repose. Hers is the resupinate
sex. On her couch she is a goddess, but so soon as ever she put her foot
to the ground--ho, she is the veriest little sillypop, and quite done
for. She cannot rival us in action, but she is our mistress in the
things of the mind. Let her not by second-rate athletics, nor indeed
by any exercise soever of the limbs, spoil the pretty procedure of her
reason. Let her be content to remain the guide, the subtle suggester
of what we must do, the strategist whose soldiers we are, the little
architect whose workmen.
'After all,' as a pretty girl once said to me, 'women are a sex by
themselves, so to speak,' and the sharper the line between their worldly
functions and ours, the better. This greater swiftness and less erring
subtlety of mind, their forte and privilege, justifies the painted mask
that Artifice bids them wear. Behind it their minds can play without
let. They gain the strength of reserve. They become important, as in
the days of the Roman Empire were the Emperor's mistresses, as was the
Pompadour at Versailles, as was our Elizabeth. Yet do not their faces
become lined with thought; beautiful and without meaning are their
faces.
And, truly, of all the good things that will happen with the full
revival of cosmetics, one of the best is that surface will finally
be severed from soul. That damnable confusion will be solved by the
extinguishing of a prejudice which, as I suggest, itself created. Too
long has the face been degraded from its rank as a thing of beauty to
a mere vulgar index of character or emotion. We had come to troubling
ourselves, not with its charm of colour and line, but with such
questions as whether the lips were sensuous, the eyes full of
sadness, the nose indicative of determination. I have no quarrel with
physiognomy. For my own part I believe in it. But it has tended to
degrade the face aesthetically, in such wise as the study of cheirosophy
has tended to degrade the hand. And the use of cosmetics, the masking of
the face, will change this. We shall gaze at a woman merely because she
is beautiful, not stare into her face anxiously, as into the face of a
barometer.
How fatal it has been, in how many ways, this confusion of soul and
service! Wise were the Greeks in making plain masks for their mummers to
play in, and dunces we not to have done the same! Only the other day, an
actress was saying that what she was most proud of in her art--next, of
course, to having appeared in some provincial pantomime at the age of
three--was the deftness with which she contrived, in parts demanding a
rapid succession of emotions, to dab her cheeks quite quickly with rouge
from the palm of her right hand or powder from the palm of her left.
Gracious goodness! why do not we have masks upon the stage? Drama is the
presentment of the soul in action. The mirror of the soul is the voice.
Let the young critics, who seek a cheap reputation for austerity, by
cavilling at 'incidental music,' set their faces rather against the
attempt to justify inferior dramatic art by the subvention of a quite
alien art like painting, of any art, indeed, whose sphere is only
surface. Let those, again, who sneer, so rightly, at the 'painted
anecdotes of the Academy,' censure equally the writers who trespass on
painters' ground. It is a proclaimed sin that a painter should concern
himself with a good little girl's affection for a Scotch greyhound,
or the keen enjoyment of their port by elderly gentlemen of the early
'forties. Yet, for a painter to prod the soul with his paint-brush is
no worse than for a novelist to refuse to dip under the surface, and the
fashion of avoiding a psychological study of grief by stating that the
owner's hair turned white in a single night, or of shame by mentioning
a sudden rush of scarlet to the cheeks, is as lamentable as may be. But!
But with the universal use of cosmetics and the consequent secernment of
soul and surface, upon which, at the risk of irritating a reader, I
must again insist, all those old properties that went to bolster up the
ordinary novel--the trembling lips, the flashing eyes, the determined
curve of the chin, the nervous trick of biting the moustache, aye, and
the hectic spot of red on either cheek--will be made spiflicate, as the
puppets were spiflicated by Don Quixote. Yes, even now Demos begins to
discern. The same spirit that has revived rouge, smote his mouth as it
grinned at the wondrous painter of mist and river, and now sends him
sprawling for the pearls that Meredith dived for in the deep waters of
romance.
Indeed the revival of cosmetics must needs be so splendid an influence,
conjuring boons innumerable, that one inclines almost to mutter against
that inexorable law by which Artifice must perish from time to
time. That such branches of painting as the staining of glass or
the illuminating of manuscripts should fall into disuse seems, in
comparison, so likely; these were esoteric arts; they died with the
monastic spirit. But personal appearance is art's very basis. The
painting of the face is the first kind of painting men can have known.
To make beautiful things--is it not an impulse laid upon few? But
to make oneself beautiful is an universal instinct. Strange that the
resultant art could ever perish! So fascinating an art too! So various
in its materials from stimmis, psimythium, and fuligo to bismuth and
arsenic, so simple in that its ground and its subject-matter are one, so
marvellous in that its very subject-matter becomes lovely when an artist
has selected it! For surely this is no idle nor fantastic saying. To
deny that 'making up' is an art, on the pretext that the finished work
of its exponents depends for beauty and excellence upon the ground
chosen for the work, is absurd. At the touch of a true artist, the
plainest face turns comely. As subject-matter the face is no more than
suggestive, as ground, merely a loom round which the beatus artifex may
spin the threads of any golden fabric:
'Quae nunc nomen habent operosi signa Maronis Pondus iners quondam
duraque massa fuit. Multa viros nescire decet; pars maxima rerum
Offendat, si non interiora tegas,'
and, as Ovid would seem to suggest, by pigments any tone may be set
aglow on a woman's cheek, from enamel the features take any form.
Insomuch that surely the advocates of soup-kitchens and free-libraries
and other devices for giving people what Providence did not mean them to
receive should send out pamphlets in the praise of self-embellishment.
For it will place Beauty within easy reach of many who could not
otherwise hope to attain to it.
But of course Artifice is rather exacting. In return for the repose she
forces--so wisely!--upon her followers when the sun is high or the moon
is blown across heaven, she demands that they should pay her long
homage at the sun's rising. The initiate may not enter lightly upon her
mysteries. For, if a bad complexion be inexcusable, to be ill-painted is
unforgivable; and, when the toilet is laden once more with the fulness
of its elaboration, we shall hear no more of the proper occupation for
women. And think, how sweet an energy, to sit at the mirror of coquetry!
See the dear merits of the toilet as shown upon old vases, or upon
the walls of Roman ruins, or, rather still, read Böttiger's alluring,
scholarly description of 'Morgenscenen im Puttzimmer Einer Reichen
Römerin.' Read of Sabina's face as she comes through the curtain of her
bed-chamber to the chamber of her toilet. The slavegirls have long been
chafing their white feet upon the marble floor. They stand, those timid
Greek girls, marshalled in little battalions. Each has her appointed
task, and all kneel in welcome as Sabina stalks, ugly and frowning, to
the toilet chair. Scaphion steps forth from among them, and, dipping a
tiny sponge in a bowl of hot milk, passes it lightly, ever so lightly,
over her mistress' face. The Poppaean pastes melt beneath it like snow.
A cooling lotion is poured over her brow, and is fanned with feathers.
Phiale comes after, a clever girl, captured in some sea-skirmish on the
Aegean. In her left hand she holds the ivory box wherein are the phucus
and that white powder, psimythium; in her right a sheaf of slim brushes.
With how sure a touch does she mingle the colours, and in what sweet
proportion blushes and blanches her lady's upturned face. Phiale is the
cleverest of all the slaves. Now Calamis dips her quill in a certain
powder that floats, liquid and sable, in the hollow of her palm.
Standing upon tip-toe and with lips parted, she traces the arch of the
eyebrows. The slaves whisper loudly of their lady's beauty, and two of
them hold up a mirror to her. Yes, the eyebrows are rightly arched. But
why does Psecas abase herself? She is craving leave to powder Sabina's
hair with a fine new powder. It is made of the grated rind of the
cedar-tree, and a Gallic perfumer, whose stall is near the Circus, gave
it to her for a kiss. No lady in Rome knows of it. And so, when four
special slaves have piled up the headdress, out of a perforated box
this glistening powder is showered. Into every little brown ringlet it
enters, till Sabina's hair seems like a pile of gold coins. Lest the
breezes send it flying, the girls lay the powder with sprinkled attar.
Soon Sabina will start for the Temple of Cybele.
Ah! Such are the lures of the toilet that none will for long hold aloof
from them. Cosmetics are not going to be a mere prosaic remedy for age
or plainness, but all ladies and all young girls will come to love them.
Does not a certain blithe Marquise, whose lettres intimes from the Court
of Louis Seize are less read than their wit deserves, tell us how she
was scandalised to see 'même les toutes jeunes demoiselles émaillées
comme ma tabatièré? So it shall be with us. Surely the common prejudice
against painting the lily can but be based on mere ground of economy.
That which is already fair is complete, it may be urged--urged
implausibly, for there are not so many lovely things in this world that
we can afford not to know each one of them by heart. There is only one
white lily, and who that has ever seen--as I have--a lily really well
painted could grudge the artist so fair a ground for his skill? Scarcely
do you believe through how many nice metamorphoses a lily may be passed
by him. In like manner, we all know the young girl, with her simpleness,
her goodness, her wayward ignorance. And a very charming ideal for
England must she have been, and a very natural one, when a young girl
sat even on the throne. But no nation can keep its ideal for ever, and
it needed none of Mr. Gilbert's delicate satire in 'Utopia' to remind us
that she had passed out of our ken with the rest of the early Victorian
era. What writer of plays, as lately asked some pressman, who had been
told off to attend many first nights and knew what he was talking about,
ever dreams of making the young girl the centre of his theme? Rather he
seeks inspiration from the tried and tired woman of the world, in all
her intricate maturity, whilst, by way of comic relief, he sends the
young girl flitting in and out with a tennis-racket, the poor eidôlon
amauron of her former self. The season of the unsophisticated is gone
by, and the young girl's final extinction beneath the rising tides of
cosmetics will leave no gap in life and will rob art of nothing.
'Tush,' I can hear some damned flutterpate exclaim, 'girlishness and
innocence are as strong and as permanent as womanhood itself! Why, a few
months past, the whole town went mad over Miss Cissie Loftus! Was not
hers a success of girlish innocence and the absence of rouge? If such
things as these be outmoded, why was she so wildly popular?' Indeed,
the triumph of that clever girl, whose début made London nice even in
August, is but another witness to the truth of my contention. In a very
sophisticated time, simplicity has a new dulcedo. Hers was a success of
contrast. Accustomed to clever malaperts like Miss Lloyd or Miss Reeve,
whose experienced pouts and smiles under the sun-bonnet are a standing
burlesque of innocence and girlishness, Demos was really delighted,
for once and away, to see the real presentment of these things upon his
stage. Coming after all those sly serios, coming so young and mere with
her pink frock and straightly combed hair, Miss Cissie Loftus had the
charm which things of another period often do possess. Besides, just
as we adored her for the abrupt nod with which she was wont at first to
acknowledge the applause, so we were glad for her to come upon the stage
with nothing to tinge the ivory of her cheeks. It seemed so strange,
that neglect of convention. To be behind footlights and not rouged! Yes,
hers was a success of contrast. She was like a daisy in the window at
Solomons'. She was delightful. And yet, such is the force of convention,
that when last I saw her, playing in some burlesque at the Gaiety, her
fringe was curled and her pretty face rouged with the best of them.
And, if further need be to show the absurdity of having called
her performance 'a triumph of naturalness over the jaded spirit
of modernity,' let us reflect that the little mimic was not a real
old-fashioned girl after all. She had none of that restless naturalness
that would seem to have characterised the girl of the early Victorian
days. She had no pretty ways--no smiles nor blushes nor tremors.
Possibly Demos could not have stood a presentment of girlishness
unrestrained.
But, with her grave insouciance, Miss Cissie Loftus had much of the
reserve that is one of the factors of feminine perfection, and to most
comes only, as I have said, with artifice. Her features played very,
very slightly. And in truth, this may have been one of the reasons of
her great success. For expression is but too often the ruin of a face;
and, since we cannot, as yet, so order the circumstances of life that
women shall never be betrayed into 'an unbecoming emotion,' when the
brunette shall never have cause to blush nor La Gioconda to frown,
the safest way by far is to create, by brush and pigments, artificial
expression for every face.
And this--say you?--will make monotony? You are mistaken, tots caelo
mistaken. When your mistress has wearied you with one expression, then
it will need but a few touches of that pencil, a backward sweep of that
brush, and ho, you will be revelling in another. For though, of course,
the painting of the face is, in manner, most like the painting of
canvas, in outcome it is rather akin to the art of music--lasting, like
music's echo, not for very long. So that, no doubt, of the many little
appurtenances of the Reformed Toilet Table, not the least vital will
be a list of the emotions that become its owner, with recipes for
simulating them. According to the colour she wills her hair to be for
the time--black or yellow or, peradventure, burnished red--she will
blush for you, sneer for you, laugh or languish for you. The good
combinations of line and colour are nearly numberless, and by their
means poor restless woman will be able to realise her moods in all their
shades and lights and dappledoms, to live many lives and masquerade
through many moments of joy. No monotony will be. And for us men
matrimony will have lost its sting.
But that in the world of women they will not neglect this art, so
ripping in itself, in its result so wonderfully beneficent, I am sure
indeed. Much, I have said, is already done for its full revival. The
spirit of the age has made straight the path of its professors. Fashion
has made Jezebel surrender her monopoly of the rouge-pot. As yet, the
great art of self-embellishment is for us but in its infancy. But if
Englishwomen can bring it to the flower of an excellence so supreme as
never yet has it known, then, though Old England lose her martial and
commercial supremacy, we patriots will have the satisfaction of knowing
that she has been advanced at one bound to a place in the councils
of aesthetic Europe. And, in sooth, is this hoping too high of my
countrywomen? True that, as the art seems always to have appealed to the
ladies of Athens, and it was not until the waning time of the Republic
that Roman ladies learned to love the practice of it, so Paris, Athenian
in this as in all other things, has been noted hitherto as a far more
vivid centre of the art than London. But it was in Rome, under the
Emperors, that unguentaria reached its zenith, and shall it not be in
London, soon, that unguentaria shall outstrip its Roman perfection!
Surely there must be among us artists as cunning in the use of brush
and puff as any who lived at Versailles. Surely the splendid, impalpable
advance of good taste, as shown in dress and in the decoration of
houses, may justify my hope of the preëminence of Englishwomen in the
cosmetic art. By their innate delicacy of touch they will accomplish
much, and much, of course, by their swift feminine perception. Yet it
were well that they should know something also of the theoretical side
of the craft. Modern authorities upon the mysteries of the toilet are,
it is true, rather few; but among the ancients many a writer would seem
to have been fascinated by them. Archigenes, a man of science at the
Court of Cleopatra, and Criton at the Court of the Emperor Trajan, both
wrote treatises upon cosmetics--doubtless most scholarly treatises that
would have given many a precious hint. It is a pity they are not extant.
From Lucian or from Juvenal, with his bitter picture of a Roman levée,
much may be learnt; from the staid pages of Xenophon and Aristophanes'
dear farces. But best of all is that fine book of the Ars Amatoria that
Ovid has set aside for the consideration of dyes, perfumes, and
pomades. Written by an artist who knew the allurement of the toilet and
understood its philosophy, it remains without rival as a treatise upon
Artifice. It is more than a poem, it is a manual; and if there be left
in England any lady who cannot read Latin in the original, she will do
well to procure a discreet translation. In the Bodleian Library there
is treasured the only known copy of a very poignant and delightful
rendering of this one book of Ovid's masterpiece. It was made by a
certain Wye Waltonstall, who lived in the days of Elizabeth, and, seeing
that he dedicated it to 'the Vertuous Ladyes and Gentlewomen of Great
Britain,' I am sure that the gallant writer, could he know of our great
renaissance of cosmetics, would wish his little work to be placed once
more within their reach. 'Inasmuch as to you, ladyes and gentlewomen,'
so he writes in his queer little dedication, 'my booke of pigments doth
first addresse itself, that it may kisse your hands and afterward have
the lines thereof in reading sweetened by the odour of your breath,
while the dead letters formed into words by your divided lips may
receive new life by your passionate expression, and the words marryed
in that Ruby coloured temple may thus happily united, multiply your
contentment.' It is rather sad to think that, at this crisis in the
history of pigments, the Vertuous Ladyes and Gentlewomen cannot read the
libellus of Wye Waltonstall, who did so dearly love pigments.
But since the days when these great critics wrote their treatises, with
what gifts innumerable has Artifice been loaded by Science! Many little
partitions must be added to the narthecium before it can comprehend all
the new cosmetics that have been quietly devised since classical
days, and will make the modern toilet chalks away more splendid in its
possibilities. A pity that no one has devoted himself to the compiling
of a new list; but doubtless all the newest devices are known to the
admirable unguentarians of Bond Street, who will impart them to their
clients. Our thanks, too, should be given to Science for ridding us of
the old danger that was latent in the use of cosmetics. Nowadays they
cannot, being purged of any poisonous element, do harm to the skin
that they make beautiful. There need be no more sowing the seeds of
destruction in the furrows of time, no martyrs to the cause like Maria,
Countess of Coventry, that fair dame but infelix, who died, so they
relate, from the effect of a poisonous rouge upon her lips. No, we need
have no fears now. Artifice will claim not another victim from among her
worshippers.
Loveliness shall sit at the toilet, watching her oval face in the oval
mirror. Her smooth fingers shall flit among the paints and powder, to
tip and mingle them, catch up a pencil, clasp a phial, and what not
and what not, until the mask of vermeil tinct has been laid aptly, the
enamel quite hardened. And, heavens, how she will charm us and ensorcel
our eyes! Positively rouge will rob us for a time of all our reason;
we shall go mad over masks. Was it not at Capua that they had a whole
street where nothing was sold but dyes and unguents? We must have such
a street, and, to fill our new Seplasia, our Arcade of the Unguents, all
herbs and minerals and live creatures shall give of their substance.
The white cliffs of Albion shall be ground to powder for Loveliness, and
perfumed by the ghost of many a little violet. The fluffy eider-ducks,
that are swimming round the pond, shall lose their feathers, that the
powder-puff may be moonlike as it passes over Loveliness' lovely face.
Even the camels shall become ministers of delight, giving many tufts
of their hair to be stained in her splendid colour-box, and across her
cheek the swift hares foot shall fly as of old. The sea shall offer her
the phucus, its scarlet weed. We shall spill the blood of mulberries
at her bidding. And, as in another period of great ecstasy, a dancing
wanton, la belle Aubrey, was crowned upon a church's lighted altar,
so Arsenic, that 'greentress'd goddess,' ashamed at length of skulking
between the soup of the unpopular and the test-tubes of the Queen's
analyst, shall be exalted to a place of consummate honour upon the
toilet-table of Loveliness.
All these things shall come to pass. Times of jolliness and glad
indulgence! For Artifice, whom we drove forth, has returned among us,
and, though her eyes are red with crying, she is smiling forgiveness.
She is kind. Let us dance and be glad, and trip the cockawhoop!
Artifice, sweetest exile, is come into her kingdom. Let us dance her a
welcome!
Oxford, 1894.
Poor Romeo!
Even now Bath glories in his legend, not idly, for he was the most
fantastic animal that ever stepped upon her pavement. Were ever a statue
given him (and indeed he is worthy of a grotesque in marble), it would
be put in Pulteney Street or the Circus. I know that the palm trees of
Antigua overshadowed his cradle, that there must be even now in Boulogne
many who set eyes on him in the time of his less fatuous declension,
that he died in London. But Mr. Coates (for of that Romeo I write) must
be claimed by none of these places. Bath saw the laughable disaster of
his début, and so, in a manner, his whole life seems to belong to her,
and the story of it to be a part of her annals.
The Antiguan was already on the brink of middle-age when he first trod
the English shore. But, for all his thirty-seven years, he had the heart
of a youth, and his purse being yet as heavy as his heart was light,
the English sun seemed to shine gloriously about his path and gild the
letters of introduction that he scattered everywhere. Also, he was a
gentleman of amiable, nearly elegant mien, and something of a scholar.
His father had been the most respectable resident Antigua could show,
so that little Robert, the future Romeo, had often sat at dessert with
distinguished travellers through the Indies. But in the year 1807 old
Mr. Coates had died. As we may read in vol. lxxviii. of The Gentleman's
Magazine, 'the Almighty, whom he alone feared, was pleased to take him
from this life, after having sustained an untarnished reputation for
seventy-three years,' a passage which, though objectionable in its
theology, gives the true story of Romeo's antecedents and disposes of
the later calumnies that declared him the son of a tailor. Realising
that he was now an orphan, an orphan with not a few grey hairs, our hero
had set sail in quest of amusing adventure.
For three months he took the waters of Bath, unobtrusively, like other
well-bred visitors. His attendance was solicited for all the most
fashionable routs, and at assemblies he sat always in the shade of some
titled turban. In fact, Mr. Coates was a great success. There was an air
of most romantic mystery that endeared his presence to all the damsels
fluttering fans in the Pump Room. It set them vying for his conduct
through the mazes of the Quadrille or of the Triumph, and blushing at
the sound of his name. Alas! their tremulous rivalry lasted not long.
Soon they saw that Emma, sole daughter of Sir James Tylney Long, that
wealthy baronet, had cast a magic net about the warm Antiguan heart. In
the wake of her chair, by night and day, Mr. Coates was obsequious. When
she cried that she would not drink the water without some delicacy
to banish the iron taste, it was he who stood by with a box of
vanilla-rusks. When he shaved his great moustachio, it was at her
caprice. And his devotion to Miss Emma was the more noted for that
his own considerable riches were proof that it was true and single. He
himself warned her, in some verses written for him by Euphemia Boswell,
against the crew of penniless admirers who surrounded her:
'Lady, ah! too bewitching lady! now beware Of artful men that fain would
thee ensnare Not for thy merit, but thy fortunes sake. Give me your
hand--your cash let venals take.'
Miss Emma was his first love. To understand his subsequent behaviour,
let us remember that Cupid's shaft pierces most poignantly the breast
of middle-age. Not that Mr. Coates was laughed at in Bath for a
love-a-lack-a-daisy. On the contrary, his mien, his manner, were as yet
so studiously correct, his speech so reticent, that laughter had been
unusually inept. The only strange taste evinced by him was his devotion
to theatricals. He would hold forth, by the hour, upon the fine
conception of such parts as Macbeth, Othello and, especially, Romeo.
Many ladies and gentlemen were privileged to hear him recite, in this
or that drawing-room, after supper. All testified to the real fire with
which he inflamed the lines of love or hatred. His voice, his gesture,
his scholarship, were all approved. A fine symphony of praise assured
Mr. Coates that no suitor worthier than he had ever courted Thespis.
The lust for the footlights' glare grew lurid in his mothish eye. What,
after all, were these poor triumphs of the parlour? It might be that
contemptuous Emma, hearing the loud salvos of the gallery and boxes,
would call him at length her lord.
At this time there arrived at the York House Mr. Pryse Gordon, whose
memoirs we know. Mr. Coates himself was staying at number ** Gay Street,
but was in the habit of breakfasting daily at the York House, where
he attracted Mr. Gordon's attention by 'rehearsing passages from
Shakespeare, with a tone and gesture extremely striking both to the eye
and the ear.' Mr. Gordon warmly complimented him and suggested that he
should give a public exposition of his art. The cheeks of the amateur
flushed with pleasure. 'I am ready and willing,' he replied, 'to play
Romeö to a Bath audience, if the manager will get up the play and give
me a good "Juliet"; my costume is superb and adorned with diamonds, but
I have not the advantage of knowing the manager, Dimonds.' Pleased by
the stranger's ready wit, Mr. Gordon scribbled a note of introduction to
Dimonds there and then. So soon as he had 'discussed a brace of muffins
and so many eggs,' the new Romeo started for the playhouse, and that
very day bills were posted to the effect that 'a Gentleman of Fashion
would make his first appearance on February 9 in a rôle of Shakespeare.'
All the lower boxes were immediately secured by Lady Belmore and other
lights of Bath. 'Butlers and Abigails,' it is said, 'were commanded by
their mistresses to take their stand in the centre of the pit and give
Mr. Coates a capital, hearty clapping.' Indeed, throughout the week that
elapsed before the première, no pains were spared in assuring a great
success. Miss Tylney Long showed some interest in the arrangements.
Gossip spoke of her as a likely bride.
The night came. Fashion, Virtue, and Intellect thronged the house.
Nothing could have been more cordial than the temper of the gallery.
All were eager to applaud the new Romeo. Presently, when the varlets of
Verona had brawled, there stepped into the square--what!--a mountebank,
a monstrosity. Hurrah died upon every lip. The house was thunderstruck.
Whose legs were in those scarlet pantaloons? Whose face grinned over
that bolster-cravat, and under that Charles II. wig and opera-hat? From
whose shoulders hung that spangled sky-blue cloak? Was this bedizened
scarecrow the Amateur of Fashion, for sight of whom they had paid their
shillings? At length a voice from the gallery cried, 'Good evening, Mr.
Coates,' and, as the Antiguan--for he it was--bowed low, the theatre was
filled with yells of merriment. Only the people in the boxes were still
silent, staring coldly at the protégé who had played them so odious a
prank. Lady Belmore rose and called for her chariot. Her example was
followed by several ladies of rank. The rest sat spellbound, and of
their number was Miss Tylney Long, at whose rigid face many glasses
were, of course, directed. Meanwhile the play proceeded. Those lines
that were not drowned in laughter Mr. Coates spoke in the most foolish
and extravagant manner. He cut little capers at odd moments. He laid his
hand on his heart and bowed, now to this, now to that part of the house,
always with a grin. In the balcony-scene he produced a snuff-box, and,
after taking a pinch, offered it to the bewildered Juliet. Coming down
to the footlights, he laid it on the cushion of the stage-box and begged
the inmates to refresh themselves, and to 'pass the golden trifle on.'
The performance, so obviously grotesque, was just the kind of thing to
please the gods. The limp of Hephaestus could not have called laughter
so unquenchable from their lips. It is no trifle to set Englishmen
laughing, but once you have done it, you can hardly stop them. Act after
act of the beautiful love-play was performed without one sign of satiety
from the seers of it. The laughter rather swelled in volume. Romeo died
in so ludicrous a way that a cry of 'encoré arose and the death was
actually twice repeated. At the fall of the curtain there was prolonged
applause. Mr. Coates came forward, and the good-humoured public pelted
him with fragments of the benches. One splinter struck his right temple,
inflicting a scar, of which Mr. Coates was, in his old age, not a little
proud. Such is the traditional account of this curious début. Mr. Pryse
Gordon, however, in his memoirs tells another tale. He professes to
have seen nothing peculiar in Romeo's dress, save its display of fine
diamonds, and to have admired the whole interpretation. The attitude
of the audience he attributes to a hostile cabal. John R. and Hunter H.
Robinson, in their memoir of Romeo Coates, echo Mr. Pryse Gordon's tale.
They would have done well to weigh their authorities more accurately.
I had often wondered at this discrepancy between document and tradition.
Last spring, when I was in Bath for a few days, my mind brooded
especially on the question. Indeed, Bath, with her faded memories, her
tristesse, drives one to reverie. Fashion no longer smiles from her
windows nor dances in her sunshine, and in her deserted parks the
invalids build up their constitutions. Now and again, as one of the
frequent chairs glided past me, I wondered if its shadowy freight were
the ghost of poor Romeo. I felt sure that the traditional account of his
début was mainly correct. How could it, indeed, be false? Tradition is
always a safer guide to truth than is the tale of one man. I might amuse
myself here, in Bath, by verifying my notion of the début or proving it
false.
One morning I was walking through a narrow street in the western quarter
of Bath, and came to the window of a very little shop, which was full
of dusty books, prints and engravings. I spied in one corner of it the
discoloured print of a queer, lean figure, posturing in a garden. In one
hand this figure held a snuff-box, in the other an opera-hat. Its sharp
features and wide grin, flanked by luxuriant whiskers, looked strange
under a Caroline wig. Above it was a balcony and a lady in an attitude
of surprise. Beneath it were these words, faintly lettered: Bombastes
Coates wooing the Peerless Capulet, that's 'nough (that snuff) 1809. I
coveted the print. I went into the shop.
A very old man peered at me and asked my errand. I pointed to the print
of Mr. Coates, which he gave me for a few shillings, chuckling at the
pun upon the margin.
'Ah,' he said, 'they're forgetting him now, but he was a fine figure, a
fine sort of figure.'
'You saw him?'
'No, no. I'm only seventy. But I've known those who saw him. My father
had a pile of such prints.'
'Did your father see him?' I asked, as the old man furled my treasure
and tied it with a piece of tape.
'My father, sir, was a friend of Mr. Coates,' he said. 'He entertained
him in Gay Street. Mr. Coates was my father's lodger all the months
he was in Bath. A good tenant, too. Never eccentric under my father's
roof--never eccentric.'
I begged the old bookseller to tell me more of this matter. It seemed
that his father had been a citizen of some consequence, and had owned
a house in modish Gay Street, where he let lodgings. Thither, by the
advice of a friend, Mr. Coates had gone so soon as he arrived in the
town, and had stayed there down to the day after his début, when he left
for London.
'My father often told me that Mr. Coates was crying bitterly when he
settled the bill and got into his travelling-chaise. He'd come back from
the playhouse the night before as cheerful as could be. He'd said he
didn't mind what the public thought of his acting. But in the morning
a letter was brought for him, and when he read it he seemed to go quite
mad.'
'I wonder what was in the letter!' I asked. 'Did your father never know
who sent it?'
'Ah,' my greybeard rejoined, 'that's the most curious thing. And it's a
secret. I can't tell you.'
He was not as good as his word. I bribed him delicately with the
purchase of more than one old book. Also, I think, he was flattered by
my eager curiosity to learn his long-pent secret. He told me that the
letter was brought to the house by one of the footmen of Sir James
Tylney Long, and that his father himself delivered it into the hands of
Mr. Coates.
'When he had read it through, the poor gentleman tore it into many
fragments, and stood staring before him, pale as a ghost. "I must not
stay another hour in Bath," he said. When he was gone, my father (God
forgive him!) gathered up all the scraps of the letter, and for a long
time he tried to piece them together. But there were a great many of
them, and my father was not a scholar, though he was affluent.'
'What became of the scraps?' I asked. 'Did your father keep them?'
'Yes, he did. And I used to try, when I was younger, to make out
something from them. But even I never seemed to get near it. I've never
thrown them away, though. They're in a box.'
I got them for a piece of gold that I could ill spare--some score or
so of shreds of yellow paper, traversed with pale ink. The joy of the
archaeologist with an unknown papyrus, of the detective with a clue,
surged in me. Indeed, I was not sure whether I was engaged in private
inquiry or in research; so recent, so remote was the mystery. After two
days' labour, I marshalled the elusive words. This is the text of them: