MISCELLANEOUS-HISTORICAL.
Happier is our Professor, and more purely scientific and historic, when he
reaches the Middle Ages in Europe, and down to the end of the Seventeenth
Century; the true era of extravagance in Costume. It is here that the
Antiquary and Student of Modes comes upon his richest harvest. Fantastic
garbs, beggaring all fancy of a Teniers or a Callot, succeed each other,
like monster devouring monster in a Dream. The whole too in brief
authentic strokes, and touched not seldom with that breath of genius which
makes even old raiment live. Indeed, so learned, precise, graphical, and
every way interesting have we found these Chapters, that it may be thrown
out as a pertinent question for parties concerned, Whether or not a good
English Translation thereof might henceforth be profitably incorporated
with Mr. Merrick's valuable Work _On Ancient Armor_? Take, by way of
example, the following sketch; as authority for which Paulinus's
_Zeitkurzende Lust_ (ii. 678) is, with seeming confidence, referred to:
"Did we behold the German fashionable dress of the Fifteenth Century, we
might smile; as perhaps those bygone Germans, were they to rise again, and
see our haberdashery, would cross themselves, and invoke the Virgin. But
happily no bygone German, or man, rises again; thus the Present is not
needlessly trammelled with the Past; and only grows out of it, like a Tree,
whose roots are not intertangled with its branches, but lie peaceably
underground. Nay it is very mournful, yet not useless, to see and know,
how the Greatest and Dearest, in a short while, would find his place quite
filled up here, and no room for him; the very Napoleon, the very Byron, in
some seven years, has become obsolete, and were now a foreigner to his
Europe. Thus is the Law of Progress secured; and in Clothes, as in all
other external things whatsoever, no fashion will continue.
"Of the military classes in those old times, whose buff-belts, complicated
chains and gorgets, huge churn-boots, and other riding and fighting gear
have been bepainted in modern Romance, till the whole has acquired somewhat
of a sign-post character,--I shall here say nothing: the civil and pacific
classes, less touched upon, are wonderful enough for us.
"Rich men, I find, have _Teusinke_ [a perhaps untranslatable article]; also
a silver girdle, whereat hang little bells; so that when a man walks, it is
with continual jingling. Some few, of musical turn, have a whole chime of
bells (_Glockenspiel_) fastened there; which, especially in sudden whirls,
and the other accidents of walking, has a grateful effect. Observe too how
fond they are of peaks, and Gothic-arch intersections. The male world
wears peaked caps, an ell long, which hang bobbing over the side
(_schief_): their shoes are peaked in front, also to the length of an ell,
and laced on the side with tags; even the wooden shoes have their ell-long
noses: some also clap bells on the peak. Further, according to my
authority, the men have breeches without seat (_ohne Gesass_): these they
fasten peakwise to their shirts; and the long round doublet must overlap
them.
"Rich maidens, again, flit abroad in gowns scolloped out behind and before,
so that back and breast are almost bare. Wives of quality, on the other
hand, have train-gowns four or five ells in length; which trains there are
boys to carry. Brave Cleopatras, sailing in their silk-cloth Galley, with
a Cupid for steersman! Consider their welts, a handbreadth thick, which
waver round them by way of hem; the long flood of silver buttons, or rather
silver shells, from throat to shoe, wherewith these same welt-gowns are
buttoned. The maidens have bound silver snoods about their hair, with gold
spangles, and pendent flames (_Flammen_), that is, sparkling hair-drops:
but of their mother's head-gear who shall speak? Neither in love of grace
is comfort forgotten. In winter weather you behold the whole fair creation
(that can afford it) in long mantles, with skirts wide below, and, for hem,
not one but two sufficient hand-broad welts; all ending atop in a thick
well-starched Ruff, some twenty inches broad: these are their Ruff-mantles
(_Kragenmantel_).
"As yet among the womankind hoop-petticoats are not; but the men have
doublets of fustian, under which lie multiple ruffs of cloth, pasted
together with batter (_mit Teig zusammengekleistert_), which create
protuberance enough. Thus do the two sexes vie with each other in the art
of Decoration; and as usual the stronger carries it."
Our Professor, whether he have humor himself or not, manifests a certain
feeling of the Ludicrous, a sly observance of it which, could emotion of
any kind be confidently predicated of so still a man, we might call a real
love. None of those bell-girdles, bushel-breeches, counted shoes, or other
the like phenomena, of which the History of Dress offers so many, escape
him: more especially the mischances, or striking adventures, incident to
the wearers of such, are noticed with due fidelity. Sir Walter Raleigh's
fine mantle, which he spread in the mud under Queen Elizabeth's feet,
appears to provoke little enthusiasm in him; he merely asks, Whether at
that period the Maiden Queen "was red-painted on the nose, and
white-painted on the cheeks, as her tire-women, when from spleen and
wrinkles she would no longer look in any glass, were wont to serve her"?
We can answer that Sir Walter knew well what he was doing, and had the
Maiden Queen been stuffed parchment dyed in verdigris, would have done the
same.
Thus too, treating of those enormous habiliments, that were not only
slashed and gallooned, but artificially swollen out on the broader parts of
the body, by introduction of Bran,--our Professor fails not to comment on
that luckless Courtier, who having seated himself on a chair with some
projecting nail on it, and therefrom rising, to pay his _devoir_ on the
entrance of Majesty, instantaneously emitted several pecks of dry
wheat-dust: and stood there diminished to a spindle, his galloons and
slashes dangling sorrowful and flabby round him. Whereupon the Professor
publishes this reflection:--
"By what strange chances do we live in History? Erostratus by a torch;
Milo by a bullock; Henry Darnley, an unfledged booby and bustard, by his
limbs; most Kings and Queens by being born under such and such a
bed-tester; Boileau Despreaux (according to Helvetius) by the peck of a
turkey; and this ill-starred individual by a rent in his breeches,--for no
Memoirist of Kaiser Otto's Court omits him. Vain was the prayer of
Themistocles for a talent of Forgetting: my Friends, yield cheerfully to
Destiny, and read since it is written."--Has Teufelsdrockh, to be put in
mind that, nearly related to the impossible talent of Forgetting, stands
that talent of Silence, which even travelling Englishmen manifest?
"The simplest costume," observes our Professor, "which I anywhere find
alluded to in History, is that used as regimental, by Bolivar's Cavalry, in
the late Colombian wars. A square Blanket, twelve feet in diagonal, is
provided (some were wont to cut off the corners, and make it circular): in
the centre a slit is effected eighteen inches long; through this the
mother-naked Trooper introduces his head and neck; and so rides shielded
from all weather, and in battle from many strokes (for he rolls it about
his left arm); and not only dressed, but harnessed and draperied."
With which picture of a State of Nature, affecting by its singularity, and
Old-Roman contempt of the superfluous, we shall quit this part of our
subject.