Chapter III: The Mission of Beauty (2)

In the great old-world houses, the last of these evolutions was superintended by the master of the robes in person. Saluting with a low bow, he announced the costume for the day. The serving maids, aided by the squires, busied themselves about the lady, and packed her into a doughty accoutrement of crimson and cloth of gold, a sort of clumsy casing, a veritable strait-jacket, treacherously supported since the close of the fifteenth century by busks or whale-bones, the furtive origin of the corset. Around her neck was thrown a necklace of gold, rubies, emeralds or diamonds, and on her head was set a sort of tiara.

Not one of these details is unimportant, since the whole performance had a lofty aim. And this is just the opportunity we have been waiting for to judge the women; or rather, their dress passes judgment upon them. Will they, we ask, have the courage to make their clothing expressive of their own individuality, to render their garments in some sort living and personal, or will they, with mere vulgar coquetry, copy and wear the costume that may be seen trailing in any street? The courage to indulge an individual taste in dress seemed a thing of no consequence; it is, really, a great and a rare virtue; it stamps a woman at once, shows if she has a soul above her tailor, if she has self-knowledge, if she reflects, if she has a feeling for art, if she is determined to show the world her own intelligence, her own beauty. Hands all round for liberty and truth! Anne of France and many others rebelled against the craze for a slim figure, stifling in summer, freezing in winter, regardless of the claims of physical health, and even seeking to conceal the signs of motherhood. How they wished that aestheticism would lead them back to the Greek art, that is to say, to wide flowing garments, dignified, comfortable, healthy, elegant! Or, as Louise Labé[190] poetically besought, that women, instead of fastening themselves in a strait-jacket, would condescend to resemble a leaf-cone, which opens spontaneously to bear its fruit! But no; the only approach they made to Greek art was that they sought to indicate the lines of the figure through close-fitting casings, but the casings were whalebone and artificial. Health, even life itself, was of no account; to graces which, however imperfect, had all the attractions of naturalness they preferred a stuffed and padded ideal. For alas! with the majority of women, a dialogue of Plato could not hold a candle to a conversation with a dressmaker. Fashion was omnipotent; under Louis XII. there was nothing but high-starched neck-ruffs; under Francis I. nothing but low-necked dresses cut square in front, and boldly gored to a point behind.

The philosophic spirit, untrammelled by physical barriers, manifested itself in the internationalisation of fashions.

It was known throughout western Europe that a fashion adopted by Isabella of Mantua was one to be followed, and that the ladies of Paris were adepts in matching bright colours, and ridiculously concealed their faces under thick veils. It was the acme of good style to dress one day like a Frenchwoman, the next like a German, Italian or Greek.

The platonists somewhat resented this vulgar application of their ideas; that was not their conception of cosmopolitanism. To weld the minds of men, to introduce into men’s hearts far and wide the truly refining leaven of affection, fraternal concord and tenderness, by means of the common love of the beautiful—that they could applaud. But masquerades like these—what a mockery! In this matter, however, their authority was ineffectual; a stronger was required. Francis I. knit his brows when Spanish mantillas made their appearance at his court; he had his own reasons for not being fond of them. He said that he believed himself among a rout of devils. This one saying accomplished what no arguments would ever have succeeded in doing: the Spanish frippery was packed away in the wardrobes until the political sky changed.

Nevertheless, the intellectual preoccupation made its way, and people were willing to pay regard, up to a certain point, to Plato’s principle that the soul rather than the body is to be clothed: in other words they proclaimed a correlation between the colour of the petticoats and the state of the soul. Everybody knew that there are physical harmonies which hold absolutely; that sober tints suit the pale, dull colours people of bilious complexion, and bright tones faces inclined to ruddiness. But people rarely thought—they did not trouble to think—that there might be for souls a similar harmony, much loftier, of much greater importance, and much more necessary to observe; for the complexion may be improved by a touch of the paint-brush, while the soul must be kept as it is. M. Jules Lemaître, whose genius is thoroughly French and whose opinion it is always a pleasure to quote in matters of good sense, has in our own time this quaint idea: “Our fathers, who wore lace and feathers, coats red, blue, dove-coloured, apple-green, and soft-hued lilac, could not but feel more disposed to joy, seeing each other blooming like flower-beds. If fashion should some day make us walk the streets in purple silks, we should forthwith be rescued from doubt and despair.”

That is philosophically true. It must be remembered that we cannot isolate ourselves; we are dependent in a high degree on the world around us. The inward joy we seek to create needs an external joy for its support; the sun, the blue sky, the luxuriance of flowers, the clearness of the air, the boundless gaiety and infinite cordiality of Nature quicken and penetrate us; a grey sky and a dull horizon will never kindle glowing reflections in our soul.

It is needful and right that men, and above all women, should display an infectious joy and vitality also, that we should not have to puzzle out the real person under the tasteless guise of a vulgar fashion-plate, cut from a price list and flung over the shoulders. Everyone should make his dress a palpable expression of his life and joy, like the flowers and birds and fruits. The Catholic religion intuitively seized on this profound truth; it retained and developed, with the pageantry of its ceremonies, the gold-embroidered copes flashing with sombre brilliance, and all this red and white and blue the purpose of which is to make us forget that these celebrants singing as they move are men, and to represent them to us as the very flower of our ideas, as the essence of our tenderest prayers and affections. Of this admirable demand for the embellishment of life we have preserved only one melancholy symbol, mourning. Men, with their customary suits of solemn black, may be said to carry everywhere with them the idea of disenchantment, of the awful paltriness and the perpetual mournfulness of the soul: there is nothing of a man about them; they go about the streets like the scattered parts of one huge machine.

And this self-abnegation has nothing to do with material questions of comfort or economy; there is no woman so poor that she cannot, if she wishes, rise above her wretchedness by means of these external symbols. Such at least was the opinion of the sixteenth-century women. To them every colour spoke of the soul and to the soul; it was the ensign of one’s spiritual fatherland, or, to use a modern metaphor, a railway signal-light; white, the line is clear! it signifies a heart free as air, a soul unappropriated or at any rate overflowing with youthfulness; green, it is springtime with the soul, in the full vigour of sweet acknowledged hopes; red, an utter despair! The cloth of gold, the golden jewels then so much in vogue, represented the rich glow of sunlight, the spacious joy of life! Whoever wished might approach and find warmth and gladness. Celestial blue meant to the Italians soft ethereal happiness; to the French, a tender and fortunate love. Black was regarded as melancholy: yet this colour, incapable of fading, symbolised constancy, firmness, and had its friends in consequence. Why restrict it to mourning, as though our feelings for our dead are alone eternal? Margaret, who loved and encouraged the use of black, protests:

Le noir, souvent, se porte pour plaisir,
Et plus souvent que pour peine et tourment.[191]

However, people generally preferred not to take their pleasure in black. Rabelais allowed in the Abbey of Thelema none but brilliant costumes: he wished to have one colour a day, and that the days should be told off as white, pink, yellow, red, green—never black.

Thus the sartorial art, in spite of little encouragement, itself came at last to exhale a perfume of life and the ideal. Unhappily it had a cruel, powerful foe, which was incessantly to check its aspirations and keep it in perpetual bondage to materialism. This foe was the vulgar passion for sumptuous display, the terrible taste that substituted a mere ostentation of wealth for a garb expressive of art and sentiment.

The French never recovered from that fever.

When Charles VIII. found himself face to face with the court of Ludovico Il Moro,[192] sinking under the weight of golden shoulder-knots and jewellery, a thrill shot through the French army.

From that time it was vain for the preachers to join hands with the philosophers and demonstrate the infinite vulgarity of luxuriousness and its deplorable moral effects; it was vain for the legislators to enact laws; the die was cast.

People were dazzled, fascinated by wealth: they knew not nor wished to know what wretchedness it cloaked, how many women, and some of the noblest of them, ruined themselves in their vanity, how many others lived by expedients that would not bear the light.[193]

Assuredly, magnificence had a glory of its own: there was no lack of gazetteers to applaud to the echo the marvels seen on great occasions: “Signorina Bulcano, in white cloth with gold trimmings and a golden girdle; her Excellency the Countess Maddaloni in red velvet; her Excellency the Countess du Rugo, in red cloth with large gold necklace.” There is this to be said, indeed, that these chroniclers, superior in this respect to some of ours, were destined to come down to posterity.

Nevertheless, this was inevitably the death of platonism, the ruin of all it loved and all it desired. A fine thing to characterise a lady by the cloth or velvet with which she garbed her bust or limbs! In this profound decadence of taste people came to see some good in the general worship of close-fitting garments, for, now that women were nothing but dolls, it was certainly better that they should appear jointed. And what seriousness could be expected of, what noble idea or worthy aim could be suggested to, a woman who was a slave to her gloves, her hats, her jewels, who spent part of her day in close confabulation with her dressmaker or jeweller?

Cest anneau est du temps passé,
Ce ruby est mal enchassé,
Ce saintureau n’est pas fort gent.
Ma troussoire n’est que d’argent,
J’en veuil une batue en or....[194]

and so on indefinitely: that was how she talked; she was no longer her own, she was a slave. Satan in the pit of hell was bewailing, it seems, the fact that he no longer saw rustling about, as formerly, dresses “open down to the waist”; and he cursed platonism! He might make himself easy, there were still most melting sights for him! And his colleague Lucifer sets himself to cheer him, showing him the league of vanity mounting to the assault of the Beautiful, the almost invincible might of money, combated and proscribed above, triumphing and swarming on all sides under the most pitiful forms of jealousy and coquetry: among good housewives, who have neither grasped nor retained anything of the new ideas but an instinct for rigging themselves out to play the countess or the duchess—among kitchen wenches who deck themselves in fallals and furbelows in apish imitation of their mistresses.

Unhappily, the king went over to the side of vanity; official France allied itself with the most dangerous adversaries of Roman philosophism and intellectual splendour: with the Milanese, whose tinsel and fripperies amused all Italy; and the Venetians, a people of large expense. The struggle was thus fought out between sensuous gratification and aestheticism. It did not alarm the platonists: they were prepared for it; as Castiglione says: “There are fools everywhere.”

But this was of all battles the most arduous, because the dividing line between coquetry and a woman’s duty to be pleasant was not always very clearly marked. A few exceptional persons had the gift of admirably combining the two tendencies; these as a rule were Italian women. At a celebrated ball given by the court of France in 1518, two ladies, Italian both, were queens—queens of beauty and of charm; the one, Clara Visconti Pusterla, devoted to white, made a brilliant figure with her silver embroideries and ropes of pearls; the other, a sister of Count Borromeo of Milan, was a dazzling apparition in cloth of gold and diamonds. Yet it was felt how secondary and precarious were successes of this external kind, and how wrong it would be for women to regard them as the real basis of their influence. They were only one means.

The fashion in regard to dwelling-house and furniture followed almost the same rules as that of costume; for in a well-ordered house everything harmonised with the people inhabiting it. The house is, so to speak, a magnificent garment, the garment defending our existence against the weather, the night, the intrusions of external life. Here, too, symmetry of arrangement and studied designs are of little moment: the house should exercise a charm, and there are ugly houses which are infinitely pleasing.

A house is pleasing when its appearance is original and homogeneous; when its inhabitant has lovingly put into it something of his own individuality, when it is not merely a classical and regular arrangement of stones erected on some vacant spot, or a gimcrack toy with pretentious and purposeless decorations; it pleases if serious thought has gone to the arrangement of its parts, if it has projections, angles, recesses judiciously contrived, and making it, so to speak, a living, breathing thing. This is the first rule: a masculine purposefulness.

The second and the feminine rule is that the house should present a great aspect of pleasantness, an appearance of amiability. It is of vast importance that it should not clash with the landscape; it should fuse with it, espouse in some sort circumambient nature, so as to radiate an influence far beyond its actual site. This harmony results as a rule from mutual accommodations; a gloomy house, for instance, will not be planted in a smiling landscape; in a wooded or rugged but spacious locality a man will set an extensive abode, without fantastic decorations, a house which dominates outbuildings and approaches; no gildings, no polychrome effects will be thrown up against a leaden sky: a church will not be constructed in the style of a hammam, nor a stock-exchange in the form of a Greek temple. The house, whatever it be, must smile, with a frank and loyal smile, speaking through its façade and its approaches to the good folk who pass, and beaming on them a look of friendliness.

In the interior, to furnish it, that is to say, to render it habitable, all smiles and happy memories,—this again is to enlarge oneself, to complete oneself: and it is here that woman’s art is absolutely indispensable. A human dwelling in the nature of the case can make no claim to a proud immortality. Every passing season attacks and tends to destroy it; whilst the objects of nature renew themselves unceasingly by the automatic movement of their latent vitality, it is needful for us at every moment more or less to reconstruct our shelter, under pain of seeing it crumble and fall before our eyes. It is like one of the fruits of our life. Thus, while it should be as solid as possible, while reminding us of the persons with whom it has successively lived, it must show itself supple and give expression to our present life, if only by fleeting suggestions, corresponding to the various impressions of our existence, and dying when we die.

It was in this direction that the fine taste of prelates and ladies gave itself free and glorious scope. A lover of the beautiful is so keenly conscious that everything about him ought to be the manifestation of some flash of thought! A chair, a couch, a piece of tapestry, all must speak to us and exhort us to live the life of the heart, without allowing ourselves to be crushed or numbed. At Rome, the home of this dominant spirit, and even at Naples, the rays of its influence extended almost inimitably; and it so well attained its object that a people wonderfully sensitive, amiable, enthusiastic, ignorant of physical wants, became enamoured of these glories of high culture of which, however, it barely caught the reflection, and attuned itself to them. Men hoped the time was at hand when all mankind would delight in beauty, they fancied that they were born to live under glorious ceilings, among palm-trees, gushing fountains and marvels of art. To this day the humblest of flymen dilates with pride in the artistic treasures of his city. And how diplomatically Isabella of Mantua went to work to surround herself with splendid objects! What care Vittoria Colonna took in the mere ordering of a casket! They appreciated equally the charm of collecting antiques, diamonds, pictures, pottery, plate; the sole desideratum was that the object of their quest should be beautiful or rare, the expression of an artistic idea or an evocation of the past, that it should add to the Attic charm of life, play its part in the cultivation of taste; in a word, that it should be loved. Life thus, in its superb radiance, assumed a grandeur and delightfulness of which we too caught the secret, in those days when the palaces at Rome still had their galleries, the villas their delightful rows of oleanders, the ruins their majesty. It was a genuine and glorious sumptuousness, well calculated to elevate men’s minds! No wonder that the desire of sharing in it spread through the world, and that, unchecked by natural divisions, men’s hearts were simultaneously possessed by one grand impulse towards beauty. This embroidery of life contributed in large measure to the sentiment of the brotherhood of man which then declared itself, and which appeared so singular; to-day we do not truly realise its importance, because, thanks to the mechanical lessening of distances, all men have become neighbours (and unpleasant neighbours at that): a varnish of uniformity has spread itself over everything; milkmaids and princesses often read the same books, wear almost the same hats, marry at the same age and with the same ideas. But in those days it was an absolutely new thing, when national diversities and individual liberties were so strongly accentuated, to create a harmony of ideas and a fellowship in love, of which the women were the natural harbingers.

Enter the palace of Margaret of Austria at Brussels, and, if you do not find yourself back in Rome or Florence, yet you will at once perceive that the remarkable mind of a princess has there gathered together all that gives charm to life: a vast library, well supplied with romances, history and poetry; furniture of priceless value, stately busts, brilliant mirrors, portraits of all the princes and princesses of the time, and by their side the portraits of notorious fools: a medley of life and ideas; various pedigrees of the house of Austria, a trophy of Indian feathers of brilliant colours, fierce shaggy heads of wolves, broad fans, glistening armour, crystals, priceless caskets, medallions, majestic chandeliers, articles in jasper and adamant; on the walls, admirable Flemish tapestries spangled with gold or silver; on the floor, warm, thick-piled carpets; here and there valuable pictures in profusion. The visitor’s curiosity, solicited on all sides, knows not at first where to stop to admire. And these various objects, individual as they are, become animate and dwell together in a sort of high, grand, collective existence: the one mind which discovered their affinities seems to permeate them, sets them vibrating in unison, and thus penetrates the soul of the visitor.

Through this great science of intellectually adorning the material conditions of life a first result was obtained: men loved life. Sadness concealed itself, joy kept the whole world dancing to its merry pipe. It was impossible to be anything but gay and amiable. If it chanced that someone was to be buried, it was with full orchestral accompaniment, amid the twinklings of a thousand tapers, and with a ceremony quite lyrical. If perchance a man desired a melancholy funeral, he would do well to say so in his will and prescribe the number of candles; but most often men set their hearts on dying gallantly, and did not dream of depriving their friends of an honourable entertainment or of economising on behalf of their heirs.