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Title: The Works of Max Beerbohm
Author: Beerbohm, Henry Maximilian (1872-1956)
Bibliographer: Lane, John (1854-1925)
Illustrator [catalogue]: New, Edmund Hort (1871-1931)
Date of first publication: 1896
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: John Lane, The Bodley Head;
   New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896
   (First Edition)
Date first posted: 10 June 2008
Date last updated: 10 June 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #129

This ebook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg,
Beth A. Trapaga & the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




THE WORKS
OF
MAX BEERBOHM

_Copyrighted in the United States
All rights reserved_




THE WORKS

OF

MAX BEERBOHM




WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY

BY

JOHN LANE



London: JOHN LANE, _The Bodley Head_
New York: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1896

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press




    _'Amid all he has here already achieved, full, we may
       think of the quiet assurance of what is to come,
         his attitude is still that of the scholar; he
             seems still to be saying, before all
                things, from first to last, 'I
                     am utterly purposed
                      that I will not
                         offend!''_




CONTENTS


DANDIES AND DANDIES

A GOOD PRINCE

1880

KING GEORGE THE FOURTH

THE PERVASION OF ROUGE

POOR ROMEO!

DIMINUENDO

_Bibliography_




DANDIES AND DANDIES


How very delightful Grego's drawings are! For all their mad perspective
and crude colour, they have indeed the sentiment of style, and they
reveal, with surer delicacy than does any other record, the spirit of
Mr. Brummell's day. Grego guides me, as Virgil Dante, through all the
mysteries of that other world. He shows me those stiff-necked,
over-hatted, wasp-waisted gentlemen, drinking Burgundy in the _Caf des
Milles Colonnes_ or riding through the village of Newmarket upon their
fat cobs or gambling at Crockford's. Grego's _Green Room of the Opera
House_ always delights me. The formal way in which Mdlle. Mercandotti
is standing upon one leg for the pleasure of Lord Fife and Mr. Ball
Hughes; the grave regard directed by Lord Petersham towards that pretty
little maid-a-mischief who is risking her rouge beneath the chandelier;
the unbridled decorum of Mdlle. Hullin and the decorous debauchery of
Prince Esterhazy in the distance, make altogether a quite enchanting
picture. But, of the whole series, the most illuminative picture is
certainly the _Ball at Almack's_. In the foreground stand two little
figures, beneath whom, on the nether margin, are inscribed those
splendid words, _Beau Brummell in Deep Conversation with the Duchess of
Rutland_. The Duchess is a girl in pink, with a great wedge-comb erect
among her ringlets, the Beau _trs dgag_, his head averse, his chin
most supercilious upon his stock, one foot advanced, the gloved fingers
of one hand caught lightly in his waistcoat; in fact, the very deuce of
a pose.

In this, as in all known images of the Beau, we are struck by the utter
simplicity of his attire. The 'countless rings' affected by D'Orsay,
the many little golden chains, 'every one of them slighter than a
cob-web,' that Disraeli loved to insinuate from one pocket to another
of his vest, would have seemed vulgar to Mr. Brummell. For is it not to
his fine scorn of accessories that we may trace that first aim of
modern dandyism, the production of the supreme effect through means the
least extravagant? In certain congruities of dark cloth, in the rigid
perfection of his linen, in the symmetry of his glove with his hand,
lay the secret of Mr. Brummell's miracles. He was ever most economical,
most scrupulous of means. Treatment was everything with him. Even
foolish Grace and foolish Philip Wharton, in their book about the beaux
and wits of this period, speak of his dressing-room as 'a studio in
which he daily composed that elaborate portrait of himself which was to
be exhibited for a few hours in the clubrooms of the town.' Mr.
Brummell was, indeed, in the utmost sense of the word, an artist. No
poet nor cook nor sculptor, ever bore that title more worthily than he.

And really, outside his art, Mr. Brummell had a personality of almost
Balzacian insignificance. There have been dandies, like D'Orsay, who
were nearly painters; painters, like Mr. Whistler, who wished to be
dandies; dandies, like Disraeli, who afterwards followed some less
arduous calling. I fancy Mr. Brummell was a dandy, nothing but a dandy,
from his cradle to that fearful day when he lost his figure and had to
flee the country, even to that distant day when he died, a broken
exile, in the arms of two _religieuses_. At Eton, no boy was so
successful as he in avoiding that strict alternative of study and
athletics which we force upon our youth. He once terrified a master,
named Parker, by asserting that he thought cricket 'foolish.' Another
time, after listening to a reprimand from the head-master, he twitted
that learned man with the assymmetry of his neckcloth. Even in Oriel he
could see little charm, and was glad to leave it, at the end of his
first year, for a commission in the Tenth Hussars. Crack though the
regiment was--indeed, all the commissions were granted by the Regent
himself--young Mr. Brummell could not bear to see all his
brother-officers in clothes exactly like his own; was quite as deeply
annoyed as would be some god, suddenly entering a restaurant of many
mirrors. One day, he rode upon parade in a pale blue tunic, with silver
epaulettes. The Colonel, apologising for the narrow system which
compelled him to so painful a duty, asked him to leave the parade. The
Beau saluted, trotted back to quarters and, that afternoon, sent in his
papers. Henceforth he lived freely as a fop, in his maturity, should.

His _dbut_ in the town was brilliant and delightful. Tales of his
elegance had won for him there a precedent fame. He was reputed rich.
It was known that the Regent desired his acquaintance. And thus,
Fortune speeding the wheels of his cabriolet and Fashion running to
meet him with smiles and roses in St. James's, he might well, had he
been worldly or a weakling, have yielded his soul to the polite
follies. But he passed them by. Once he was settled in his suite, he
never really strayed from his toilet-table, save for a few brief hours.
Thrice every day of the year did he dress, and three hours were the
average of his every toilet, and other hours were spent in council with
the cutter of his coats or with the custodian of his wardrobe. A
single, devoted life! To White's, to routs, to races, he went, it is
true, not reluctantly. He was known to have played battledore and
shuttle-cock in a moonlit garden with Mr. Previt and some other
gentlemen. His elopement with a young Countess from a ball at Lady
Jersey's was quite notorious. It was even whispered that he once, in
the company of some friends, made as though he would wrench the knocker
off the door of some shop. But these things he did, not, most
certainly, for any exuberant love of life. Rather did he regard them as
healthful exercise of the body and a charm against that dreaded
corpulency which, in the end, caused his downfall. Some recreation from
his work even the most strenuous artist must have; and Mr. Brummell
naturally sought his in that exalted sphere whose modish elegance
accorded best with his temperament, the sphere of _le plus beau monde_.
General Bucknall used to growl, from the window of the Guards' Club,
that such a fellow was only fit to associate with tailors. But that was
an old soldier's fallacy. The proper associates of an artist are they
who practise his own art rather than they who--however honourably--do
but cater for its practice. For the rest, I am sure that Mr. Brummell
was no lackey, as they have suggested. He wished merely to be seen by
those who were best qualified to appreciate the splendour of his
achievements. Shall not the painter show his work in galleries, the
poet flit down Paternoster Row? Of rank, for its own sake, Mr. Brummell
had no love. He patronised all his patrons. Even to the Regent his
attitude was always that of a master in an art to one who is sincerely
willing and anxious to learn from him.

Indeed, English society is always ruled by a dandy, and the more
absolutely ruled the greater that dandy be. For dandyism, the perfect
flower of outward elegance, is the ideal it is always striving to
realise in its own rather incoherent way. But there is no reason why
dandyism should be confused, as it has been by nearly all writers, with
mere social life. Its contact with social life is, indeed, but one of
the accidents of an art. Its influence, like the scent of a flower, is
diffused unconsciously. It has its own aims and laws, and knows none
other. And the only person who ever fully acknowledged this truth in
sthetics is, of all persons most unlikely, the author of _Sartor
Resartus_. That any one who dressed so very badly as did Thomas Carlyle
should have tried to construct a philosophy of clothes has always
seemed to me one of the most pathetic things in literature. He in the
Temple of Vestments! Why sought he to intrude, another Clodius, upon
those mysteries and light his pipe from those ardent censers? What were
his hobnails that they should mar the pavement of that delicate Temple?
Yet, for that he betrayed one secret rightly heard there, will I pardon
his sacrilege. 'A dandy,' he cried through the mask of Teufelsdrck,
'is a clothes-wearing man, a man whose trade, office, and existence
consists in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit,
purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the
wearing of clothes wisely and well.' Those are true words. They are,
perhaps, the only true words in _Sartor Resartus_. And I speak with
some authority. For I found the key to that empty book, long ago, in
the lock of the author's empty wardrobe. His hat, that is still
preserved in Chelsea, formed an important clue.

But (behold!) as we repeat the true words of Teufelsdrck, there comes
Monsieur Barbey D'Aurevilly, that gentle _moqueur_, drawling, with a
wave of his hand, '_Les esprits qui ne voient pas les choses que par
leur plus petit ct, ont imagin que le Dandysme tait surtout l'art
de la mise, une heureuse et audacieuse dictature en fait de toilette et
d'lgance extrieure. Trs-certainement c'est cela aussi, mais c'est
bien davantage. Le Dandysme est toute une manire d'tre et l'on n'est
pas que par la ct matriellement visible. C'est une manire d'tre
entirement compose de nuances, comme il arrive toujours dans les
socits trs-vieilles et trs-civilises._' It is a pleasure to argue
with so suave a subtlist, and we say to him that this comprehensive
definition does not please us. We say we think he errs.

Not that Monsieur's analysis of the dandiacal mind is worthless by any
means. Nor, when he declares that George Brummell was the supreme king
of the dandies and _fut le dandysme mme_, can I but piously lay one
hand upon the brim of my hat, the other upon my heart. But it is as an
artist, and for his supremacy in the art of costume, and for all he did
to gain the recognition of costume as in itself an art, and for that
superb taste and subtle simplicity of mode whereby he was able to
expel, at length, the Byzantine spirit of exuberance which had
possessed St. James's and wherefore he is justly called the Father of
Modern Costume, that I do most deeply revere him. It is not a little
strange that Monsieur D'Aurevilly, the biographer who, in many ways,
does seem most perfectly to have understood Mr. Brummell, should
belittle to a mere phase that which was indeed the very core of his
existence. To analyse the temperament of a great artist and then to
declare that his art was but a part--a little part--of his temperament,
is a foolish proceeding. It is as though a man should say that he
finds, on analysis, that gunpowder is composed of potassium chloride
(let me say), nitrate and power of explosion. Dandyism is ever the
outcome of a carefully cultivated temperament, not part of the
temperament itself. That _manire d'tre, entirement compose de
nuances_, was not more, as the writer seems to have supposed, than
attributory to Mr. Brummell's art. Nor is it even peculiar to dandies.
All delicate spirits, to whatever art they turn, even if they turn to
no art, assume an oblique attitude towards life. Of all dandies, Mr.
Brummell did most steadfastly maintain this attitude. Like the
single-minded artist that he was, he turned full and square towards his
art and looked life straight in the face out of the corners of his
eyes.

It is not hard to see how, in the effort to give Mr. Brummell his due
place in history, Monsieur D'Aurevilly came to grief. It is but strange
that he should have fallen into a rather obvious trap. Surely he should
have perceived that, so long as Civilisation compels her children to
wear clothes, the thoughtless multitude will never acknowledge dandyism
to be an art. If considerations of modesty or hygiene compelled every
one to stain canvas or chip marble every morning, painting and
sculpture would in like manner be despised. Now, as these
considerations do compel every one to envelop himself in things made of
cloth and linen, this common duty is confounded with that fair
procedure, elaborate of many thoughts, in whose accord the fop
accomplishes his toilet, each morning afresh, Aurora speeding on to
gild his mirror. Not until nudity be popular will the art of costume be
really acknowledged. Nor even then will it be approved. Communities are
ever jealous (quite naturally) of the artist who works for his own
pleasure, not for theirs--more jealous by far of him whose energy is
spent only upon the glorification of himself alone. Carlyle speaks of
dandyism as a survival of 'the primeval superstition, self-worship.'
'_La vanit_,' are almost the first words of Monsieur D'Aurevilly,
'_c'est un sentiment contre lequel tout le monde est impitoyable_.' Few
remember that the dandy's vanity is far different from the crude
conceit of the merely handsome man. Dandyism is, after all, one of the
decorative arts. A fine ground to work upon is its first postulate. And
the dandy cares for his physical endowments only in so far as they are
susceptible of fine results. They are just so much to him as to the
decorative artist is inilluminate parchment, the form of a white vase
or the surface of a wall where frescoes shall be.

Consider the words of Count D'Orsay, spoken on the eve of some duel,
'We are not fairly matched. If I were to wound him in the face it would
not matter; but if he were to wound me, _ce serait vraiment dommage_!'
There we have a pure example of a dandy's peculiar vanity--'It would be
a real pity!' They say that D'Orsay killed his man--no matter whom--in
this duel. He never should have gone out. Beau Brummell never risked
his dandyhood in these mean encounters. But D'Orsay was a wayward,
excessive creature, too fond of life and other follies to achieve real
greatness. The power of his predecessor, the Father of Modern Costume,
is over us yet. All that is left of D'Orsay's art is a waistcoat and a
handful of rings--vain relics of no more value for us than the fiddle
of Paganini or the mask of Menischus! I think that in Carolo's painting
of him, we can see the strength, that was the weakness, of _le jeune
Cupidon_. His fingers are closed upon his cane as upon a sword. There
is mockery in the inconstant eyes. And the lips, so used to close upon
the wine-cup, in laughter so often parted, they do not seem immobile,
even now. Sad that one so prodigally endowed as he was, with the three
essentials of a dandy--physical distinction, a sense of beauty and
wealth or, if you prefer the term, credit--should not have done greater
things. Much of his costume was merely showy or eccentric, without the
rotund unity of the perfect fop's. It had been well had he lacked that
dash and spontaneous gallantry that make him cut, it may be, a more
attractive figure than Beau Brummell. The youth of St. James's gave him
a wonderful welcome. The flight of Mr. Brummell had left them as sheep
without a shepherd. They had even cried out against the inscrutable
decrees of fashion and curtailed the height of their stocks. And (lo!)
here, ambling down the Mall with tasselled cane, laughing in the window
at White's or in Fop's Alley posturing, here, with the devil in his
eyes and all the graces at his elbow, was D'Orsay, the prince paramount
who should dominate London and should guard life from monotony by the
daring of his whims. He accepted so many engagements that he often
dressed very quickly both in the morning and at nightfall. His
brilliant genius would sometimes enable him to appear faultless, but at
other times not even his fine figure could quite dispel the shadow of a
toilet too hastily conceived. Before long he took that fatal step, his
marriage with Lady Harriet Gardiner. The marriage, as we all know, was
not a happy one, though the wedding was very pretty. It ruined the life
of Lady Harriet and of her mother, the Blessington. It won the poor
Count further still further from his art and sent him spinning here,
there, and everywhere. He was continually at Cleveden, or Belvoir, or
Welbeck, laughing gaily as he brought down our English partridges, or
at Crockford's, smiling as he swept up our English guineas from the
board. Holker declares that, excepting Mr. Turner, he was the finest
equestrian in London and describes how the mob would gather every
morning round his door to see him descend, insolent from his toilet,
and mount and ride away. Indeed, he surpassed us all in all the
exercises of the body. He even essayed preminence in the arts (as if
his own art were insufficient to his vitality!) and was for ever
penning impenuous verses for circulation among his friends. There was
no great harm in this, perhaps. Even the handwriting of Mr. Brummell
was not unknown in the albums. But D'Orsay's painting of portraits is
inexcusable. The sthetic vision of a dandy should be bounded by his
own mirror. A few crayon sketches of himself--_dilectissim
imagines_--are as much as he should ever do. That D'Orsay's portraits,
even his much-approved portrait of the Duke of Wellington, are quite
amateurish, is no excuse. It is the process of painting which is
repellent; to force from little tubes of lead a glutinous flamboyance
and to defile, with the hair of a camel therein steeped, taut canvas,
is hardly the diversion for a gentleman; and to have done all this for
a man who was admittedly a field-marshal....

I have often thought that this selfish concentration, which is a part
of dandyism, is also a symbol of that _Einsamkeit_ felt in greater or
less degree by the practitioners of every art. But, curiously enough,
the very unity of his mind with the ground he works on exposes the
dandy to the influence of the world. In one way dandyism is the least
selfish of all the arts. Musicians are seen and, except for a price,
not heard. Only for a price may you read what poets have written. All
painters are not so generous as Mr. Watts. But the dandy presents
himself to the nation whenever he sallies from his front door. Princes
and peasants alike may gaze upon his masterpieces. Now, any art which
is pursued directly under the eye of the public is always far more
amenable to fashion than is an art with which the public is but
vicariously concerned. Those standards to which artists have gradually
accustomed it the public will not see lightly set at naught. Very
rigid, for example, are the traditions of the theatre. If my brother
were to declaim his lines at the Haymarket in the florotund manner of
Macready, what a row there would be in the gallery! It is only by the
impalpable process of evolution that change comes to the theatre.
Likewise in the sphere of costume no swift rebellion can succeed, as
was exemplified by the Prince's effort to revive knee-breeches. Had his
Royal Highness elected, in his wisdom, to wear tight trousers strapped
under his boots, 'smalls' might, in their turn, have reappeared, and at
length--who knows?--knee-breeches. It is only by the trifling addition
or elimination, modification or extension, made by this or that dandy
and copied by the rest, that the mode proceeds. The young dandy will
find certain laws to which he must conform. If he outrage them he will
be hooted by the urchins of the street, not unjustly, for he will have
outraged the slowly constructed laws of artists who have preceded him.
Let him reflect that fashion is no bondage imposed by alien hands, but
the last wisdom of his own kind, and that true dandyism is the result
of an artistic temperament working upon a fine body within the wide
limits of fashion. Through this habit of conformity, which it
inculcates, the army has given us nearly all our finest dandies, from
Alcibiades to Colonel Br*b*z*n _de nos jours_. Even Mr. Brummell,
though he defied his Colonel, must have owed some of his success to the
military spirit. Any parent intending his son to be a dandy will do
well to send him first into the army, there to learn humility, as did
his archetype, Apollo, in the house of Admetus. A sojourn at one of the
Public Schools is also to be commended. The University it were well to
avoid.

Of course, the dandy, like any other artist, has moments when his own
period, palling, inclines him to antique modes. A fellow-student once
told me that, after a long vacation spent in touch with modern life, he
had hammered at the little gate of Merton and felt of a sudden his hat
assume plumes and an expansive curl, the impress of a ruff about his
neck, the dangle of a cloak and a sword. I, too, have my Elizabethan,
my Caroline moments. I have gone to bed Georgian and awoken Early
Victorian. Even savagery has charmed me. And at such times I have often
wished I could find in my wardrobe suitable costumes. But these modish
regrets are sterile, after all, and comprimend. What boots it to defy
the conventions of our time? The dandy is the 'child of his age,' and
his best work must be produced in accord with the age's natural
influence. The true dandy must always love contemporary costume. In
this age, as in all precedent ages, it is only the tasteless who cavil,
being impotent to win from it fair results. How futile their voices
are! The costume of the nineteenth century, as shadowed for us first by
Mr. Brummell, so quiet, so reasonable, and, I say emphatically, so
beautiful; free from folly or affectation, yet susceptible to exquisite
ordering; plastic, austere, economical, may not be ignored. I spoke of
the doom of swift rebellions, but I doubt even if any soever gradual
evolution will lead us astray from the general precepts of Mr.
Brummell's code. At every step in the progress of democracy those
precepts will be strengthened. Every day their fashion is more secure,
corroborate. They are acknowledged by the world. The barbarous costumes
that in bygone days were designed by class-hatred, or hatred of race,
are dying, very surely dying. The costermonger with his
pearl-emblazoned coat has been driven even from that Variety Stage,
whereon he sought a desperate sanctuary. The clinquant corslet of the
Swiss girl just survives at _bals costums_. I am told that the kilt is
now confined entirely to certain of the soldiery and to a small cult of
Scotch Archacists. I have seen men flock from the boulevards of one
capital and from the avenues of another to be clad in Conduit Street.
Even into Oxford, that curious little city, where nothing is ever born
nor anything ever quite dies, the force of the movement has penetrated,
insomuch that tasselled cap and gown of degree are rarely seen in the
streets or colleges. In a place which was until recent times scarcely
less remote, Japan, the white and scarlet gardens are trod by men who
are shod in boots like our own, who walk--rather strangely still--in
close-cut cloth of little colour, and stop each other from time to
time, laughing to show how that they too can furl an umbrella after the
manner of real Europeans.

It is very nice, this universal acquiescence in the dress we have
designed, but, if we reflect, not wonderful. There are three apparent
reasons, and one of them is sthetic. So to clothe the body that its
fineness be revealed and its meanness veiled has been the sthetic aim
of all costume, but before our time the mean had never been struck. The
ancient Romans went too far. Muffled in the ponderous folds of a toga,
Adonis might pass for Punchinello, Punchinello for Adonis. The ancient
Britons, on the other hand, did not go far enough. And so it had been
in all ages down to that bright morning when Mr. Brummell, at his
mirror, conceived the notion of trousers and simple coats. Clad
according to his convention, the limbs of the weakling escape contempt,
and the athlete is unobtrusive, and all is well. But there is also a
social reason for the triumph of our costume--the reason of economy.
That austerity, which has rejected from its toilet silk and velvet and
all but a few jewels, has made more ample the wardrobes of Dives, and
sent forth Irus nicely dressed among his fellows. And lastly there is a
reason of psychology, most potent of all, perhaps. Is not the costume
of to-day, with its subtlety and sombre restraint, its quiet
congruities of black and white and grey, supremely apt a medium for the
expression of modern emotion and modern thought? That aptness, even
alone, would explain its triumph. Let us be glad that we have so easy,
yet so delicate, a mode of expression.

Yes! costume, dandiacal or not, is in the highest degree expressive,
nor is there any type it may not express. It enables us to classify any
'professional man' at a glance, be he lawyer, leech or what not. Still
more swift and obvious is its revelation of the work and the soul of
those who dress, whether naturally or for effect, without reference to
convention. The bowler of Mr. Jerome K. Jerome is a perfect preface to
all his works. The silk hat of Mr. Whistler is a real _nocturne_, his
linen a symphony _en blanc majeur_. To have seen Mr. Hall Caine is to
have read his soul. His flowing, formless cloak is as one of his own
novels, twenty-five editions latent in the folds of it. Melodrama
crouches upon the brim of his _sombrero_. His tie is a Publisher's
Announcement. His boots are Copyright. In his hand he holds the staff
of _The Family Herald_.

But the dandy, innowise violating the laws of fashion, can make more
subtle symbols of his personality. More subtle these symbols are for
the very reason that they are effected within the restrictions which
are essential to an art. Chastened of all flamboyance, they are from
most men occult, obvious, it may be, only to other artists or even only
to him they symbolise. Nor will the dandy express merely a crude idea
of his personality, as does, for example, Mr. Hall Caine, dressing
himself always and exactly after one pattern. Every day as his mood has
changed since his last toilet, he will vary the colour, texture, form
of his costume. Fashion does not rob him of free will. It leaves him
liberty of all expression. Every day there is not one accessory, from
the butterfly that alights above his shirt front to the jewels planted
in his linen, that will not symbolise the mood that is in him or the
occasion of the coming day.

On this, the psychological side of foppery, I know not one so expert as
him whom, not greatly caring for contemporary names, I will call Mr. Le
V. No hero-worshipper am I, but I cannot write without enthusiasm of
his simple life. He has not spurred his mind to the quest of shadows
nor vexed his soul in the worship of any gods. No woman has wounded his
heart, though he has gazed gallantly into the eyes of many women,
intent, I fancy, upon his own miniature there. Nor is the incomparable
set of his trousers spoilt by the perching of any dear little child
upon his knee. And so, now that he is stricken with seventy years, he
knows none of the bitterness of eld, for his toilet-table is an
imperishable altar, his wardrobe a quiet nursery and very constant
harem. Mr. Le V. has many disciples, young men who look to him for
guidance in all that concerns costume, and each morning come,
themselves tentatively clad, to watch the perfect procedure of his
toilet and learn invaluable lessons. I myself, a lie-a-bed, often steal
out, foregoing the best hours of the day abed, that I may attend that
_leve_. The rooms of the Master are in St. James's Street, and perhaps
it were well that I should give some little record of them and of the
manner of their use. In the first room the Master sleeps. He is called
by one of his valets, at seven o'clock, to the second room, where he
bathes, is shampooed, is manicured and, at length, is enveloped in a
dressing-gown of white wool. In the third room is his breakfast upon a
little table and his letters and some newspapers. Leisurely he sips his
chocolate, leisurely learns all that need be known. With a cigarette he
allows his temper, as informed by the news and the weather and what
not, to develop itself for the day. At length, his mood suggests,
imperceptibly, what colour, what form of clothes he shall wear. He
rings for his valet--'I will wear such and such a coat, such and such a
tie; my trousers shall be of this or that tone; this or that jewel
shall be radiant in the folds of my tie.' It is generally near noon
that he reaches the fourth room, the dressing-room. The uninitiate can
hardly realise how impressive is the ceremonial there enacted. As I
write, I can see, in memory, the whole scene--the room, severely
simple, with its lemon walls and deep wardrobes of white wood, the
young fops, [Greek: philomathestatoi ton neaniskon], ranged upon a long
bench, rapt in wonder, and, in the middle, now sitting, now standing,
negligently, before a long mirror, with a valet at either elbow, Mr. Le
V., our cynosure. There is no haste, no faltering, when once the scheme
of the day's toilet has been set. It is a calm toilet. A flower does
not grow more calmly.

Any of us, any day, may see the gracious figure of Mr. Le V., as he
saunters down the slope of St. James's. Long may the sun irradiate the
surface of his tilted hat! It is comfortable to know that, though he
die to-morrow, the world will not lack a most elaborate record of his
foppery. All his life he has kept or, rather, the current valets have
kept for him, a _Journal de Toilette_. Of this there are now fifty
volumes, each covering the space of a year. Yes, fifty springs have
filled his buttonhole with their violets; the snow of fifty winters has
been less white than his linen; his boots have outshone fifty sequences
of summer suns and the colours of all those autumns have faded in the
dry light of his apparel. The first page of each volume of the _Journal
de Toilette_ bears the signature of Mr. Le V. and of his two valets. Of
the other pages each is given up, as in other diaries, to one day of
the year. In ruled spaces are recorded there the cut and texture of the
suit, the colour of the tie, the form of jewellery that was worn on the
day the page records. No detail is omitted and a separate space is set
aside for 'Remarks.' I remember that I once asked Mr. Le V., half in
jest, what he should wear on the Judgment Day. Seriously, and (I
fancied) with a note of pathos in his voice, he said to me, 'Young man,
you ask me to lay bare my soul to you. If I had been a saint I should
certainly wear a light suit, with a white waistcoat and a flower, but I
am no saint, sir, no saint.... I shall probably wear black trousers or
trousers of some very dark blue, and a frock-coat, tightly buttoned.'
Poor old Mr. Le V.! I think he need not fear. If there be a heaven for
the soul, there must be other heavens also, where the intellect and the
body shall be consummate. In both these heavens Mr. Le V. will have his
hierarchy. Of a life like his there can be no conclusion, really. Did
not even Matthew Arnold admit that conduct of a cane is three-fourths
of life?

Certainly Mr. Le V. is a great artist, and his supremacy is in the tact
with which he suits his toilet to his temperament. But the marvellous
affinity of a dandy's mood to his daily toilet is not merely that it
finds therein its perfect echo nor that it may even be, in reflex,
thereby accentuated or made less poignant. For some years I had felt
convinced that in a perfect dandy this affinity must reach a point,
when the costume itself, planned with the finest sensibility, would
change with the emotional changes of its wearer, automatically. But I
felt that here was one of those boundaries, where the fields of art
align with the fields of science, and I hardly dared to venture
further. Moreover, the theory was not easy to verify. I knew that,
except in some great emotional crisis, the costume could not palpably
change its aspect. Here was an _impasse_; for the perfect dandy--the
Brummell, the Mr. Le V.--cannot afford to indulge in any great emotion
outside his art; like Balzac, he has not time. The gods were good to
me, however. One morning near the end of last July, they decreed that I
should pass through Half Moon Street and meet there a friend who should
ask me to go with him to his club and watch for the results of the
racing at Goodwood. This club includes hardly any member who is not a
devotee of the Turf, so that, when we entered it, the cloak-room
displayed long rows of unburdened pegs--save where one hat shone. None
but that illustrious dandy, Lord X., wears quite so broad a brim as
this hat had. I said that Lord X. must be in the club.

'I conceive he is too nervous to be on the course,' my friend replied.
'They say he has plunged up to the hilt on to-day's running.'

His lordship was indeed there, fingering feverishly the sinuous ribands
of the tape-machine. I sat at a little distance, watching him. Two
results straggled forth within an hour, and, at the second of these, I
saw with wonder Lord X.'s linen actually flush for a moment and then
turn deadly pale, I looked again and saw that his boots had lost their
lustre. Drawing nearer, I found that grey hairs had begun to show
themselves in his raven coat. It was very painful and yet, to me, very
gratifying. In the cloak-room, when I went for my own hat and cane,
there was the hat with the broad brim, and (lo!) over its iron-blue
surface little furrows had been ploughed by Despair.

_Rouen, 1896._




A GOOD PRINCE


I first saw him one morning of last summer, in the Green Park. Though
short, even insignificant, in stature and with an obvious tendency to
be obese, he had that unruffled, Olympian air, which is so sure a sign
of the Blood Royal. In a suit of white linen he looked serenely cool,
despite the heat. Perhaps I should have thought him, had I not been
versed in the _Almanach de Gotha_, a trifle older than he is. He did
not raise his hat in answer to my salute, but smiled most graciously
and made as though he would extend his hand to me, mistaking me, I
doubt not, for one of his friends. Forthwith, a member of his suite
said something to him in an undertone, whereat he smiled again and took
no further notice of me.

I do not wonder the people idolise him. His almost blameless life has
been passed among them, nothing in it hidden from their knowledge. When
they look upon his dear presentment in the photographer's window--the
shrewd, kindly eyes under the high forehead, the sparse locks so
carefully distributed--words of loyalty only and of admiration rise to
their lips. For of all princes in modern days he seems to fulfil most
perfectly the obligation of princely rank. [Greek: Nepios] he might
have been called in the heroic age, when princes were judged according
to their mastery of the sword or of the bow, or have seemed, to those
medival eyes that loved to see a scholar's pate under the crown, an
ignoramus. We are less exigent now. We do but ask of our princes that
they should live among us, be often manifest to our eyes, set a
perpetual example of a right life. We bid them be the ornaments of our
State. Too often they do not attain to our ideal. They give, it may be,
a half-hearted devotion to soldiering, or pursue pleasure merely--tales
of their frivolity raising now and again the anger of a public swift to
envy them their temptations. But against this admirable Prince no such
charges can be made. Never (as yet, at least) has he cared to 'play at
soldiers.' By no means has he shocked the Puritans. Though it is no
secret that he prefers the society of ladies, not one breath of scandal
has ever tinged his name. Of how many English princes could this be
said, in days when Figaro, quill in hand, inclines his ear to every
keyhole?

Upon the one action that were well obliterated from his record I need
not long insist. It seems that the wife of an aged ex-Premier came to
have an audience and pay her respects. Hardly had she spoken when the
Prince, in a fit of unreasoning displeasure, struck her a violent blow
with his clenched fist. Had His Royal Highness not always stood so far
aloof from political contention, it had been easier to find a motive
for this unmannerly blow. The incident is deplorable, but it belongs,
after all, to an earlier period of his life; and, were it not that no
appreciation must rest upon the suppression of any scandal, I should
not have referred to it. For the rest, I find no stain, soever faint,
upon his life. The simplicity of his tastes is the more admirable for
that he is known to care not at all for what may be reported in the
newspapers. He has never touched a card, never entered a play-house. In
no stud of racers has he indulged, preferring to the finest blood-horse
ever bred a certain white and woolly lamb with a blue riband to its
neck. This he is never tired of fondling. It is with him, like the
roebuck of Henri Quatre, wherever he goes.

Suave and simple his life is! Narrow in range, it may be, but with
every royal appurtenance of delight, for to him Love's happy favours
are given and the tribute of glad homage, always, here and there and
every other where. Round the flower-garden at Sandringham runs an old
wall of red brick, streaked with ivy and topped infrequently with balls
of stone. By its iron gates, that open to a vista of flowers, stand two
kind policemen, guarding the Prince's procedure along that bright
vista. As his perambulator rolls out of the gate of St. James's Palace,
he stretches out his tiny hands to the scarlet sentinels. An obsequious
retinue follows him over the lawns of the White Lodge, cooing and
laughing, blowing kisses and praising him. Yet do not imagine his life
has been all gaiety! The afflictions that befall royal personages
always touch very poignantly the heart of the people, and it is not too
much to say that all England watched by the cradle-side of Prince
Edward in that dolorous hour, when first the little battlements rose
about the rose-red roof of his mouth. I am glad to think that not one
querulous word did His Royal Highness, in his great agony, utter. They
only say that his loud, incessant cries bore testimony to the perfect
lungs for which the House of Hanover is most justly famed. Irreiterate
be the horror of that epoch!

As yet, when we know not even what his first words will be, it is too
early to predict what verdict posterity will pass upon him. Already he
has won the hearts of the people; but, in the years which, it is to be
hoped, still await him, he may accomplish more. _Attendons!_ He stands
alone among European princes--but, as yet, only with the aid of a
chair.

_London, 1895._




1880

    _Say, shall these things be forgotten
    In the Row that men call Rotten,
          Beauty Clare?_--Hamilton Ad.


'History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians
repeat one another.' Now, there are still some periods with which no
historian has grappled, and, strangely enough, the period that most
greatly fascinates me is one of them. The labour I set myself is
therefore rather Herculean. But it is also, for me, so far a labour of
love that I can quite forget or even revel in its great difficulty. I
would love to have lived in those bygone days, when first society was
inducted into the mysteries of art and, not losing yet its old and
elegant tenue, babbled of blue china and white lilies, of the painter
Rossetti and the poet Swinburne. It would be a splendid thing to have
seen the _tableaux_ at Cromwell House[1] or to have made my way through
the Fancy Fair[2] and bartered all for a cigarette from a shepherdess;
to have walked in the Park, straining my eyes for a glimpse of the
Jersey Lily[3]; danced the livelong afternoon to the strains of the
Manola Valse[4]; clapped holes in my gloves for Connie Gilchrist.

      [1] 'Cromwell House.' _The residence of Lady Freake, a famous
      hostess of the day and founder of a brilliant salon, where even
      Royalty was sure of a welcome. The writer of a recent monograph
      declares that 'many a modern hostess would do well to emulate
      Lady Freake, not only in her taste for the Beautiful in Art but
      also for the Intellectual in Conversation._'

      [2] 'Fancy Fair.' _For a full account of this function, see pp.
      102-124 of the 'Annals of the Albert Hall._'

      [3] 'Jersey Lily.' _A fanciful title bestowed, at this time, upon
      the beautiful Mrs. Langtry, who was a native of Jersey Island.
      See also p. 51._

      [4] 'Manola Valse.' _Supposed to have been introduced by Albert
      Edward, Prince of Wales, who, having heard it in Vienna, was
      pleased, for a while, by its novelty, but soon reverted to the
      more sprightly_ deux-temps.

It is a pity that the historians have held back so long. For this
period is now so remote from us that much in it is nearly impossible to
understand, more than a little must be left in the mists of antiquity
that involve it. The memoirs of the day are, indeed, many, but not
exactly illuminative. From such writers as _Frith, Montague Williams_
or the _Bancrofts_, you may gain but little peculiar knowledge. That
quaint old chronicler, _Lucy_, dilates amusingly enough upon the frown
of Sir Richard (afterwards Lord) Cross or the tea-rose in the Prime
Minister's button-hole. But what can he tell us of the negotiations
that led Gladstone back to public life or of the secret councils of
the Fourth Party, whereby Sir Stafford was gradually eclipsed? Good
memoirs must ever be the cumulation of gossip. Gossip (alas!) has been
killed by the Press. In the tavern or the barber's-shop, all secrets
passed into every ear. From newspapers how little can be culled!
Manifestations are there made manifest to us and we are taught, with
tedious iteration, the things we knew, and need not have known, before.
In my research, I have had only such poor guides as _Punch, or the
London Charivari_ and _The Queen, the Lady's Newspaper_. Excavation,
which in the East has been productive of rich material for the
archologist, was indeed suggested to me. I was told that, just before
Cleopatra's Needle was set upon the Embankment, an iron box, containing
a photograph of Mrs. Langtry, some current coins and other trifles of
the time, was dropped into the foundation. I am sure much might be done
with a spade, here and there, in the neighbourhood of old Cromwell
House. Accursed be the obduracy of vestries! Be not I, but they, blamed
for any error, obscurity or omission in my brief excursus.

The period of 1880 and of the two successive years should ever be
memorable, for it marks a great change in the constitution of English
society. It would seem that, under the quiet _rgime_ of the Tory
Cabinet, the upper ten thousand, (as they were quaintly called in those
days,) had taken a somewhat more frigid tone. The Prince of Wales had
inclined to be restful after the revels of his youth. The prolonged
seclusion of Queen Victoria, who was then engaged upon that superb work
of introspection and self-analysis, _More Leaves from the Highlands_,
had begun to tell upon the social system. Balls and other festivities,
both at Court and in the houses of the nobles, were notably fewer. The
vogue of the Opera was passing. Even in the top of the season, Rotten
Row, I read, was not impenetrably crowded. But in 1880 came the tragic
fall of Disraeli and the triumph of the Whigs. How great a change came
then upon Westminster must be known to any one who has studied the
annals of Gladstone's incomparable Parliament. Gladstone himself, with
a monstrous majority behind him, revelling in the old splendour of
speech that not seventy summers nor six years' sulking had made less;
Parnell, deadly, mysterious, with his crew of wordy peasants that were
to set all Saxon things at naught--the activity of these two men alone
would have made this Parliament supremely stimulating throughout the
land. What of young Randolph Churchill, who, despite his halting
speech, foppish mien and rather coarse fibre of mind, was yet the
greatest Parliamentarian of his day? What of Justin Huntly McCarthy,
under his puerile mask a most dark, most dangerous conspirator, who,
lightly swinging the sacred lamp of burlesque, irradiated with fearful
clarity the wrath and sorrow of Ireland? What of Blocker Warton? What
of the eloquent atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, pleading at the Bar,
striding past the furious Tories to the very Mace, hustled down the
stone steps with the broadcloth torn in ribands from his back? Surely
such scenes will never more be witnessed at St. Stephen's. Imagine the
existence of God being made a party question! No wonder that at a time
of such turbulence fine society also should have shown the primordia of
a great change. It was felt that the aristocracy could not live by
good-breeding alone. The old delights seemed vapid, waxen. Something
vivid was desired. And so the sphere of fashion converged with the
sphere of art, and revolution was the result.

Be it remembered that long before this time there had been in the heart
of Chelsea a kind of cult for Beauty. Certain artists had settled
there, deliberately refusing to work in the ordinary official way, and
'wrought,' as they were wont to asseverate, 'for the pleasure and sake
of all that is fair.' Little commerce had they with the brazen world.
Nothing but the light of the sun would they share with men. Quietly and
unbeknown, callous of all but their craft, they wrought their poems or
their pictures, gave them one to another, and wrought on. Meredith,
Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Holman Hunt were in this band of shy
artificers. In fact, Beauty had existed long before 1880. It was Mr.
Oscar Wilde who managed her _dbut_. To study the period is to admit
that to him was due no small part of the social vogue that Beauty began
to enjoy. Fired by his fervid words, men and women hurled their
mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio-shops for the
furniture of Annish days. Dados arose upon every wall, sunflowers and
the feathers of peacocks curved in every corner, tea grew quite cold
while the guests were praising the Willow Pattern of its cup. A few
fashionable women even dressed themselves in sinuous draperies and
unheard-of greens. Into whatsoever ball-room you went, you would surely
find, among the women in tiaras and the fops and the distinguished
foreigners, half a score of comely ragamuffins in velveteen, murmuring
sonnets, posturing, waving their hands. Beauty was sought in the most
unlikely places. Young painters found her mobled in the fogs, and
bank-clerks, versed in the writings of Mr. Hamerton, were heard to
declare, as they sped home from the City, that the Underground Railway
was beautiful from London Bridge to Westminster, but not from Sloane
Square to Notting Hill Gate.

stheticism, (for so they named the movement,) did indeed permeate, in
a manner, all classes. But it was to the _haut monae_ that its primary
appeal was made. The sacred emblems of Chelsea were sold in the
fashionable toy-shops, its reverently chanted creeds became the patter
of the _boudoirs_. The old Grosvenor Gallery that stronghold of the
few, was verily invaded. Never was such a fusion of delightful folk as
at its Private Views.[5] There was Robert Browning, the philosopher,
doffing his hat with a courtly sweep to more than one Duchess. There,
too, was Theo Marzials, poet and eccentric, and Charles Colnaghi, the
hero of a hundred tea-fights, and young Brookfield, the comedian, and
many another good fellow. My Lord of Dudley, the _virtuoso_, came
there, leaning for support upon the arm of his fair young wife.
Disraeli, with his lustreless eyes and face like some seamed Hebraic
parchment, came also, and whispered behind his hand to the faithful
Corry. And Walter Sickert spread the latest _mot_ of 'the Master,'[6]
who, with monocle, cane and tilted hat, flashed through the gay mob
anon.

      [5] 'Private Views.' _This passage, which I found in a
      contemporary chronicle, is so quaint and so instinct with the
      spirit of its time that I am fain to quote it:_

          _'There were quaint, beautiful, extraordinary costumes
          walking about--ultra-sthetics, artistic-sthetics, sthetics
          that made up their minds to be daring, and suddenly gave way
          in some important point--put a frivolous bonnet on the top of
          a grave and flowing garment that Albert Durer might have
          designed for a mantle. There were fashionable costumes that
          Mrs. Mason or Madame Elise might have turned out that
          morning. The motley crowd mingled, forming into groups,
          sometimes dazzling you by the array of colours that you never
          thought to see in full daylight.... Canary-coloured garments
          flitted cheerily by garments of the saddest green. A hat in
          an agony of pokes and angles was seen in company with a
          bonnet that was a gay garland of flowers. A vast cape that
          might have enshrouded the form of a Mater Dolorosa hung by
          the side of a jauntily-striped Langtry-hood._'

      [6] The 'Master.' _By this title his disciples used to address
      James Whistler, the author-artist. Without echoing the obloquy
      that was lavished at first nor the praise that was lavished later
      upon his pictures, we must admit that he was, at least, a great
      master of English prose and a controversialist of no mean
      power._

_Autrement_, there was Coombe Wood, in whose shade the Lady Archibald
Campbell suffered more than one of Shakespeare's plays to be enacted.
Hither, from the garish, indelicate theatre that held her languishing,
Thalia was bidden, if haply, under the open sky, she might resume her
old charm. All Fashion came to marvel and so did all the sthetes, in
the heart of one of whose leaders, Godwin, that superb architect, the
idea was first conceived. Real Pastoral Plays! Lest the invited guests
should get any noxious scent of the footlights across the grass, only
amateurs were accorded parts. They roved through a real wood, these
jerkined amateurs, with the poet's music upon their lips. Never under
such dark and griddled elms had the outlaws feasted upon their venison.
Never had any Rosalind traced with such shy wonder the writing of her
lover upon the bark, nor any Orlando won such laughter for his not
really sportive dalliance. Fairer than the mummers, it may be, were the
ladies who sat and watched them from the lawn. All of them wore jerseys
and tied-back skirts. Zulu hats shaded their eyes from the sun. Bangles
shimmered upon their wrists. And the gentlemen wore light frock-coats
and light top-hats with black bands. And the sthetes were in
velveteen, carrying lilies.

Not that Art and Fashion shunned the theatre. They began in 1880 to
affect it as never before. The one invaded Irving's _premires_ at the
Lyceum. The other sang pans in praise of the Bancrofts. The French
plays, too, were the feigned delight of all the modish world. Not to
have seen Chaumont in _Totot chez Tata_ was held a solecism. The homely
mesdames and messieurs from the Parisian boards were 'lionised' (how
strangely that phrase rings to modern ears!) in ducal drawing-rooms. In
fact, all the old prejudice of rank was being swept away. Even more
significant than the reception of players was a certain effort, made at
this time, to raise the average of aristocratic loveliness--an effort
that, but a few years before, would have been surely scouted as quite
undignified and outrageous. What the term 'Professional Beauty'
signified, how any lady gained a right to it, we do not and may never
know. It is certain, however, that there were many ladies of tone, upon
whom it was bestowed. They received special attention from the Prince
of Wales and hostesses would move heaven and earth to have them in
their rooms. Their photographs were on sale in the window of every
shop. Crowds assembled every morning, to see them start for Rotten Row.
Preminent among Professional Beauties were Lady Lonsdale (afterwards
Lady de Grey), Mrs. Wheeler, who always 'appeared in black,' and Mrs.
Cornwallis West, who was Amy Robsart in the _tableaux_ at Cromwell
House, when Mrs. Langtry, cette _Clopatre de son sicle_ appeared
also, stepping across an artificial brook, in the pink kirtle of Effie
Deans. We may doubt whether the movement, represented by these ladies,
was quite in accord with the dignity and elegance that always should
mark the best society. Any effort to make Beauty compulsory robs Beauty
of its chief charm. But, at the same time, I do believe that this
movement, so far as it was informed by a real wish to raise a practical
standard of feminine charm for all classes, does not deserve the
strictures that have been passed upon it by posterity. One of its
immediate sequels was the incursion of American ladies into London.
Then it was that these pretty creatures, 'clad in Worth's most elegant
confections,' drawled their way through our greater portals. Fanned, as
they were, by the feathers of the Prince of Wales, they had a great
success, and they were so strange that their voices and their dresses
were mimicked _partout_. The English beauties were rather angry,
especially with the Prince, whom alone they blamed for the vogue of
their rivals. History credits His Royal Highness with many notable
achievements. Not the least of these is that he discovered the
inhabitants of America.

It will be seen that in this renaissance the keenest students of the
exquisite were women. Nevertheless, men were not idle, neither. Since
the day of Mr. Brummell and King George, the noble art of self-adornment
had fallen partially desuete. Great fops like Bulwer and _le jeune
Cupidon_ had come upon the town, but never had they formed a school.
Dress, therefore had become simpler, wardrobes smaller, fashions apt to
linger. In 1880 arose the sect that was soon to win for itself the
title of 'The Mashers.'[7] What this title exactly signified I suppose
no two etymologists will ever agree. But we can learn clearly enough,
from the fashion-plates of the day, what the Mashers were in outward
semblance; from the lampoons, their mode of life. Unlike the dandies of
the Georgian era, they pretended to no classic taste and, wholly
contemptuous of the sthetes, recognised no art save the art of dress.
Much might be written about the Mashers. The restaurant--destined to
be, in after years, so salient a delight of London--was not known to
them, but they were often admirable upon the steps of clubs. The Lyceum
held them never, but nightly they gathered at the Gaiety Theatre.
Nightly the stalls were agog with small, sleek heads surmounting
collars of interminable height. Nightly, in the _foyer_, were lisped
the praises of Kate Vaughan, her graceful dancing, or of Nellie Farren,
her matchless fooling. Never a night passed but the dreary stage-door
was cinct with a circlet of fools bearing bright bouquets, of
flaxen-headed fools who had feet like black needles, and graceful fools
incumbent upon canes. A strange cult! I once knew a lady whose father
was actually present at the first night of 'The Forty Thieves,' and
fell enamoured of one of the _coryphes_. By such links is one age
joined to another.

      [7] 'Masher.' _One authority derives the title, rather
      ingeniously, from 'Ma Chre,' the mode of address used by the
      gilded youth to the barmaids of the period--whence the corruption
      'Masher.' Another traces it to the chorus of a song, which, at
      that time, had a great vogue in the music-halls:_

          _'I'm the slashing, dashing, mashing Montmorency of the day.'
          This, in my opinion, is the safer suggestion, and may be
          adopted._

There is always something rather absurd about the past. For us, who
have fared on, the silhouette of Error is sharp upon the past horizon.
As we look back upon any period, its fashions seem grotesque, its
ideals shallow, for we know how soon those ideals and those fashions
were to perish, and how rightly; nor can we feel a little of the
fervour they did inspire. It is easy to laugh at these Mashers, with
their fantastic raiment and languid lives, or at the strife of the
Professional Beauties. It is easy to laugh at all that ensued when
first the mummers and the stainers of canvas strayed into Mayfair. Yet
shall I laugh? For me the most romantic moment of a pantomime is always
when the winged and wired fairies begin to fade away, and, as they
fade, clown and pantaloon tumble on joppling and grimacing, seen very
faintly in that indecisive twilight. The social condition of 1880
fascinates me in the same way. Its contrasts fascinate me.

Perhaps, in my study of the period, I may have fallen so deeply beneath
its spell that I have tended, now and again, to overrate its real
import. I lay no claim to the true historical spirit. I fancy it was a
chalk drawing of a girl in a mob-cap, signed 'Frank Miles, 1880,' that
first impelled me to research. To give an accurate and exhaustive
account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.
But I hope that, by dealing, even so briefly as I have dealt, with its
more strictly sentimental aspects, I may have lightened the task of the
scientific historian. And I look to Professor Gardiner and to the
Bishop of Oxford.

_London, 1894._




KING GEORGE THE FOURTH


They say that when King George was dying, a special form of prayer for
his recovery, composed by one of the Archbishops, was read aloud to him
and that His Majesty, after saying Amen 'thrice, with great fervour,'
begged that his thanks might be conveyed to its author. To the student
of royalty in modern times there is something rather suggestive in this
incident. I like to think of the drug-scented room at Windsor and of
the King, livid and immobile among his pillows, waiting, in
superstitious awe, for the near moment when he must stand, a spirit, in
the presence of a perpetual King. I like to think of him following the
futile prayer with eyes and lips, and then, custom resurgent in him and
a touch of pride that, so long as the blood moved ever so little in his
veins, he was still a king, expressing a desire that the dutiful
feeling and admirable taste of the Prelate should receive a suitable
acknowledgment. It would have been impossible for a real monarch like
George, even after the gout had turned his thoughts heavenward, really
to abase himself before his Maker. But he could, so to say, treat with
Him, as he might have treated with a fellow-sovereign, in a formal way,
long after diplomacy was quite useless. How strange it must be to be a
king! How delicate and difficult a task it is to judge him! So far as I
know, no attempt has been made to judge King George the Fourth fairly.
The hundred and one eulogies and lampoons, irresponsibly published
during and immediately after his reign, are not worth a wooden hoop in
Hades. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has published a history of George's reign,
in which he has so artistically subordinated his own personality to his
subject, that I can scarcely find, from beginning to end of the two
bulky volumes, a single opinion expressed, a single idea, a single
deduction from the admirably-ordered facts. All that most of us know of
George is from Thackeray's brilliant denunciation. Now, I yield to few
in my admiration of Thackeray's powers. He had a charming style. We
never find him searching for the _mot juste_ as for a needle in a
bottle of hay. Could he have looked through a certain window by the
river at Croisset or in the quadrangle at Brasenose, how he would have
laughed! He blew on his pipe, and words came tripping round him, like
children, like pretty little children who are perfectly drilled for the
dance, or came, did he will it, treading in their precedence, like
kings, gloomily. And I think it is to the credit of the reading mob
that, by reason of his beautiful style, all that he said was taken for
the truth, without questioning. But truth after all is eternal, and
style transient, and now that Thackeray's style is becoming, if I may
say so, a trifle 1860, it may not be amiss that we should inquire
whether his estimate of George is in substance and fact worth anything
at all. It seems to me that, as in his novels, so in his history of the
four Georges, Thackeray made no attempt at psychology. He dealt simply
with types. One George he insisted upon regarding as a buffoon, another
as a yokel. The Fourth George he chose to hold up for reprobation as a
drunken, vapid cad. Every action, every phase of his life that went to
disprove this view, he either suppressed or distorted utterly.
'History,' he would seem to have chuckled, 'has nothing to do with the
First Gentleman. But I will give him a niche in Natural History. He
shall be King of the Beasts.' He made no allowance for the
extraordinary conditions under which all monarchs live, none for the
unfortunate circumstances by which George, especially, was from the
first hampered. He judged him as he judged Barnes Newcome and all the
scoundrels he created. Moreover, he judged him by the moral standard of
the Victorian Age. In fact, he applied to his subject the wrong method,
in the wrong manner, and at the wrong time. And yet every one has taken
him at his word. I feel that my essay may be scouted as a paradox; but
I hope that many may recognise that I am not, out of mere boredom,
endeavouring to stop my ears against popular platitude, but rather, in
a spirit of real earnestness, to point out to the mob how it has been
cruel to George. I do not despair of success. I think I shall make
converts. The mob is really very fickle and sometimes cheers the truth.

None, at all events, will deny that England stands to-day otherwise
than she stood a hundred and thirty-two years ago, when George was
born. To-day we are living a decadent life. All the while that we are
prating of progress, we are really so deteriorate! There is nothing but
feebleness in us. Our youths, who spend their days in trying to build
up their constitutions by sport or athletics and their evenings in
undermining them with poisonous and dyed drinks; our daughters, who are
ever searching for some new quack remedy for new imaginary megrim, what
strength is there in them? We have our societies for the prevention of
this and the promotion of that and the propagation of the other,
because there are no individuals among us. Our sexes are already nearly
assimilate. Women are becoming nearly as rare as ladies, and it is only
at the music-halls that we are privileged to see strong men. We are
born into a poor, weak age. We are not strong enough to be wicked, and
the Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

But this was not so in the days when George was walking by his tutor's
side in the gardens of Kew or of Windsor. London must have been a
splendid place in those days--full of life and colour and wrong and
revelry. There was no absurd press nor vestry to protect the poor at
the expense of the rich and see that everything should be neatly
adjusted. Every man had to shift for himself and, consequently, men
were, as Mr. Clement Scott would say, manly, and women, as Mr. Clement
Scott would say, womanly. In those days, a young man of wealth and
family found open to him a vista of such licence as had been unknown to
any since the barbatuli of the Roman Empire. To spend the early morning
with his valet, gradually assuming the rich apparel that was not then
tabooed by a hard sumptuary standard; to saunter round to White's for
ale and tittle-tattle and the making of wagers; to attend a 'drunken
_djener_' in honour of _'la trs belle Rosaline_' or the Strappini;
to drive some fellow-fool far out into the country in his pretty
curricle, 'followed by two well-dressed and well-mounted grooms, of
singular elegance certainly,' and stop at every tavern on the road to
curse the host for not keeping better ale and a wench of more charm; to
reach St. James' in time for a random toilet and so off to dinner.
Which of _our_ dandies could survive a day of pleasure such as this?
Which would be ready, dinner done, to scamper off again to Ranelagh and
dance and skip and sup in the rotunda there? Yet the youth of that
period would not dream of going to bed or ever he had looked in at
Crockford's--_tanta lubido rerum_--for a few hours' faro.

This was the kind of life that young George found opened to him, when,
at length, in his nineteenth year, they gave him an establishment in
Buckingham House. How his young eyes must have sparkled, and with what
glad gasps must he have taken the air of freedom into his lungs! Rumour
had long been busy with the damned surveillance under which his
childhood had been passed. A paper of the time says significantly that
'the Prince of Wales, with a spirit which does him honour, has three
times requested a change in that system.' King George had long
postponed permission for his son to appear at any balls, and the year
before had only given it, lest he should offend the Spanish Minister,
who begged it as a personal favour. I know few pictures more pathetic
than that of George, then an overgrown boy of fourteen, tearing the
childish frill from around his neck and crying to one of the royal
servants, 'See how they treat me!' Childhood has always seemed to me
the tragic period of life. To be subject to the most odious espionage
at the one age when you never dream of doing wrong, to be deceived by
your parents, thwarted of your smallest wish, oppressed by the terrors
of manhood and of the world to come, and to believe, as you are told,
that childhood is the only happiness known; all this is quite terrible.
And all Royal children, of whom I have read, particularly George, seem
to have passed through greater trials in childhood than do the children
of any other class. Mr. Fitzgerald, hazarding for once an opinion,
thinks that 'the stupid, odious, German, sergeant-system of discipline
that had been so rigorously applied was, in fact, responsible for the
blemishes of the young Prince's character.' Even Thackeray, in his
essay upon George III., asks what wonder that the son, finding himself
free at last, should have plunged, without looking, into the vortex of
dissipation. In Torrens' _Life of Lord Melbourne_ we learn that Lord
Essex, riding one day with the King, met the young prince wearing a
wig, and that the culprit, being sternly reprimanded by his father,
replied that he had 'been ordered by his doctor to wear a wig, for he
was subject to cold.' Whereupon the King, to vent the aversion he
already felt for his son, or, it may have been, glorying in the
satisfactory result of his discipline, turned to Lord Essex and
remarked, 'A lie is ever ready when it is wanted.' George never lost
this early-ingrained habit of lies. It is to George's childish fear of
his guardians that we must trace that extraordinary power of
bamboozling his courtiers, his ministry, and his mistresses that
distinguished him through his long life. It is characteristic of the
man that he should himself have bitterly deplored his own
untruthfulness. When, in after years, he was consulting Lady Spencer
upon the choice of a governess for his child, he made this remarkable
speech, 'Above all, she must be taught the truth. You know that I don't
speak the truth and my brothers don't, and I find it a great defect,
from which I would have my daughter free. _We have been brought up
badly, the Queen having taught us to equivocate._' You may laugh at the
picture of the little chubby, curly-headed fellows learning to
equivocate at their mother's knee, but pray remember that the wisest
master of ethics himself, in his theory of [Greek: hexeis apodeikitai],
similarly raised virtues, such as telling the truth, to the level of
regular accomplishments, and, before you judge poor George harshly in
his entanglements of lying, think of the cruelly unwise education he
had undergone.

However much we may deplore this exaggerated tyranny, by reason of its
evil effect upon his moral nature, we cannot but feel glad that it
existed, to afford a piquant contrast to the life awaiting him. Had he
passed through the callow dissipations of Eton and Oxford, like other
young men of his age, he would assuredly have lacked much of that
splendid, pent vigour with which he rushed headlong into London life.
He was so young and so handsome and so strong, that can we wonder if
all the women fell at his feet? 'The graces of his person,' says one
whom he honoured by an intrigue, 'the irresistible sweetness of his
smile, the tenderness of his melodious, yet manly voice, will be
remembered by me till every vision of this changing scene are
forgotten. The polished and fascinating ingenuousness of his manners
contributed not a little to enliven our promenade. He sang with
exquisite taste, and the tones of his voice, breaking on the silence of
the night, have often appeared to my entranced senses like more than
mortal melody.' But besides his graces of person, he had a most
delightful wit, he was a scholar who could bandy quotations with Fox or
Sheridan, and, like the young men of to-day, he knew all about Art. He
spoke French, Italian, and German perfectly. Crossdill had taught him
the violoncello. At first, as was right for one of his age, he cared
more for the pleasures of the table and of the ring, for cards and
love. He was wont to go down to Ranelagh surrounded by a retinue of
bruisers--rapscallions, such as used to follow Clodius through the
streets of Rome--and he loved to join in the scuffles like any
commoner. Pugilism he learnt from Angelo and he was considered by some
to be a fine performer. On one occasion, too, at an _exposition
d'escrime_, when he handled the foils against the _matre_, he 'was
highly complimented upon his graceful postures.' In fact, despite all
his accomplishments, he seems to have been a thoroughly manly young
fellow. He was just the kind of figure-head Society had long been in
need of. A certain lack of tone had crept into the amusements of the
_haut monde_, due, doubtless, to the lack of an acknowledged leader.
The King was not yet mad, but he was always bucolic, and socially out
of the question. So at the coming of his son Society broke into a
gallop. Balls and masquerades were given in his honour night after
night. Good Samaritans must have approved when they found that at these
entertainments great ladies and courtesans brushed beautiful shoulders
in utmost familiarity, but those who delighted in the high charm of
society probably shook their heads. We need not, however, find it a
flaw in George's social bearing that he did not check this kind of
freedom. At the first, as a young man full of life, of course he took
everything as it came, joyfully. No one knew better than he did, in
later life, that there is a time for laughing with great ladies and a
time for laughing with courtesans. But as yet it was not possible for
him to exert influence. How great that influence became I will suggest
hereafter.

I like to think of him as he was at this period, charging about, in
pursuit of pleasure, like a young bull. The splendid taste for building
had not yet come to him. His father would not hear of him patronising
the turf. But already he was implected with a passion for dress and
seems to have erred somewhat on the side of dressing up, as is the way
of young men. It is fearful to think of him, as Cyrus Redding saw him,
'arrayed in deep-brown velvet, silver embroidered, with cut-steel
buttons, and a gold net thrown over all.' Before that 'gold net thrown
over all,' all the mistakes of his after-life seem to me to grow almost
insignificant. Time, however, toned his too florid sense of costume,
and we should at any rate be thankful that his imagination never
deserted him. All the delightful munditi that we find in the
contemporary 'fashion-plates for gentlemen' can be traced to George
himself. His were the much-approved 'quadruple stock of great
dimension,' the 'cocked grey-beaver,' 'the pantaloons of mauve silk
negligently crinkled' and any number of other little pomps and foibles
of the kind. As he grew older and was obliged to abandon many of his
more vigorous pastimes, he grew more and more enamoured of the
pleasures of the wardrobe. He would spend hours, it is said, in
designing coats for his friends, liveries for his servants, and even
uniforms. Nor did he ever make the mistake of giving away outmoded
clothes to his valets, but kept them to form what must have been the
finest collection of clothes that has been seen in modern times. With a
sentimentality that is characteristic of him, he would often, as he
sat, crippled by gout, in his room at Windsor, direct his servant to
bring him this or that coat, which he had worn ten or twenty or thirty
years before, and, when it was brought to him, spend much time in
laughing or sobbing over the memories that lay in its folds. It is
pleasant to know that George, during his long and various life, never
forgot a coat, however long ago worn, however seldom.

But in the early days of which I speak he had not yet touched that
self-conscious note which, in manner and mode of life, as well as in
costume, he was to touch later. He was too violently enamoured of all
around him, to think very deeply of himself. But he had already
realised the tragedy of the voluptuary, which is, after a little time,
not that he must go on living, but that he cannot live in two places at
once. We have, at this end of the century, tempered this tragedy by the
perfection of railways, and it is possible for our good Prince, whom
Heaven bless, to waken to the sound of the Braemar bagpipes, while the
music of Mdlle. Guilbert's latest song, cooed over the footlights of
the Concerts Parisiens, still rings in his ears. But in the time of our
Prince's illustrious great-uncle there were not railways; and we find
George perpetually driving, for wagers, to Brighton and back (he had
already acquired that taste for Brighton which was one of his most
loveable qualities) in incredibly short periods of time. The rustics
who lived along the road were well accustomed to the sight of a high,
tremulous phaeton flashing past them, and the crimson face of the young
prince bending over the horses. There is something absurd in
representing George as, even before he came of age, a hardened and
cynical profligate, an Elagabalus in trousers. His blood flowed fast
enough through his veins. All his escapades were those of a healthful
young man of the time. Need we blame him if he sought, every day, to
live faster and more fully?

In a brief essay like this, I cannot attempt to write, as I hope one
day to do, in any detail a history of George's career, during the time
when he was successively Prince of Wales and Regent and King. Merely is
it my wish at present to examine some of the principal accusations that
have been brought against him, and to point out in what ways he has
been harshly and hastily judged. Perhaps the greatest indignation
against him was, and is to this day, felt by reason of his treatment of
his two wives, Mrs. Fitzherbert and Queen Caroline. There are some
scandals that never grow old, and I think the story of George's married
life is one of them. It was a real scandal. I can feel it. It has
vitality. Often have I wondered whether the blood with which the young
Prince's shirt was saturate when Mrs. Fitzherbert was first induced to
visit him at Carlton House, was merely red paint, or if, in a frenzy of
love, he had truly gashed himself with a razor. Certain it is that his
passion for the virtuous and obdurate lady was a very real one. Lord
Holland describes how the Prince used to visit Mrs. Fox, and there
indulge in 'the most extravagant expressions and actions--rolling on
the floor, striking his forehead, tearing his hair, falling into
hysterics, and swearing that he would abandon the country, forego the
crown, &c.' He was indeed still a child, for Royalties, not being ever
brought into contact with the realities of life, remain young far
longer than other people. Cursed with a truly royal lack of
self-control, he was unable to bear the idea of being thwarted in any
wish. Every day he sent off couriers to Holland, whither Mrs.
Fitzherbert had retreated, imploring her to return to him, offering her
formal marriage. At length, as we know, she yielded to his importunity
and returned. It is difficult indeed to realise exactly what was Mrs.
Fitzherbert's feeling in the matter. The marriage must be, as she knew,
illegal, and would lead, as Charles James Fox pointed out in his
powerful letter to the Prince, to endless and intricate difficulties.
For the present she could only live with him as his mistress. If, when
he reached the legal age of twenty-five, he were to apply to Parliament
for permission to marry her, how could permission be given, when she
had been living with him irregularly? Doubtless, she was flattered by
the attentions of the Heir to the Throne, but, had she really returned
his passion, she would surely have preferred 'any other species of
connection with His Royal Highness to one leading to so much misery and
mischief.' Really to understand her marriage, one must look at the
portraits of her that are extant. That beautiful and silly face
explains much. One can well fancy such a lady being pleased to live
after the performance of a mock-ceremony with a Prince for whom she
felt no passion. Her view of the matter can only have been social, for,
in the eyes of the Church, she could only live with the Prince as his
mistress. Society, however, once satisfied that a ceremony of some kind
had been enacted, never regarded her as anything but his wife. The day
after Fox, inspired by the Prince, had formally denied that any
ceremony had taken place, 'the knocker of her door,' to quote her own
complacent phrase, 'was never still.' The Duchesses of Portland,
Devonshire and Cumberland were among her visitors.

How much pop-limbo has been talked about the Prince's denial of the
marriage! I grant that it was highly improper to marry Mrs. Fitzherbert
at all. But George was always weak and wayward, and he did, in his
great passion, marry her. That he should afterwards deny it officially
seems to me to have been utterly inevitable. His denial did her not the
faintest damage, as I have pointed out. It was, so to speak, an
official quibble, rendered necessary by the circumstances of the case.
Not to have denied the marriage in the House of Commons would have
meant ruin to both of them. As months passed, more serious difficulties
awaited the unhappily wedded pair. What boots it to repeat the story of
the Prince's great debts and desperation? It was clear that there was
but one way of getting his head above water, and that was to yield to
his father's wishes and contract a real marriage with a foreign
princess. Fate was dogging his footsteps relentlessly. Placed as he
was, George could not but offer to marry as his father willed. It is
well, also, to remember that George was not ruthlessly and suddenly
turning his shoulder upon Mrs. Fitzherbert. For some time before the
British plenipotentiary went to fetch him a bride from over the waters,
his name had been associated with that of the beautiful and
unscrupulous Countess of Jersey.

Poor George! Half-married to a woman whom he no longer worshipped,
compelled to marry a woman whom he was to hate at first sight! Surely
we should not judge a prince harshly. 'Princess Caroline very _gauche_
at cards,' 'Princess Caroline very _missish_ at supper,' are among the
entries made in his diary by Lord Malmesbury, while he was at the
little German Court. I can conceive no scene more tragic than that of
her presentation to the Prince, as related by the same nobleman. 'I,
accordingly to the established etiquette,' so he writes, 'introduced
the Princess Caroline to him. She, very properly, in consequence of my
saying it was the right mode of proceeding, attempted to kneel to him.
He raised her gracefully enough, and embraced her, said barely one
word, turned round, retired to a distant part of the apartment, and
calling to me, said: 'Harris, I am not well: pray get me a glass of
brandy.' At dinner that evening, in the presence of her betrothed, the
Princess was 'flippant, rattling, affecting wit.' Poor George, I say
again! Deportment was his ruling passion, and his bride did not know
how to behave. Vulgarity--hard, implacable, German vulgarity--was in
everything she did to the very day of her death. The marriage was
solemnised on Wednesday, April 8th, 1795, and the royal bridegroom was
drunk.

So soon as they were separated, George became implected with a morbid
hatred for his wife, which was hardly in accord with his light and
variant nature and shows how bitterly he had been mortified by his
marriage of necessity. It is sad that so much of his life should have
been wasted in futile strainings after divorce. Yet we can scarcely
blame him for seizing upon every scrap of scandal that was whispered of
his wife. Besides his not unnatural wish to be free, it was derogatory
to the dignity of a Prince and a Regent that his wife should be living
an eccentric life at Blackheath with a family of singers named Sapio.
Indeed, Caroline's conduct during this time was as indiscreet as ever.
Wherever she went she made ribald jokes about her husband, 'in such a
voice that all, by-standing, might hear.' 'After dinner,' writes one of
her servants, 'Her Royal Highness made a wax figure as usual, and gave
it an amiable pair of large horns; then took three pins out of her
garment and stuck them through and through, and put the figure to roast
and melt at the fire. What a silly piece of spite! Yet it is impossible
not to laugh when one sees it done.' Imagine the feelings of the First
Gentleman in Europe when the unseemly story of these pranks was
whispered to him!

For my own part, I fancy Caroline was innocent of any infidelity to her
unhappy husband. But that is neither here nor there. Her behaviour was
certainly not above suspicion. It fully justified George in trying to
establish a case for her divorce. When, at length, she went abroad, her
vagaries were such that the whole of her English suite left her, and we
hear of her travelling about the Holy Land attended by another family,
named Bergami. When her husband succeeded to the throne, and her name
was struck out of the liturgy, she despatched expostulations in absurd
English to Lord Liverpool. Receiving no answer, she decided to return
and claim her right to be crowned Queen of England. Whatever the
unhappy lady did, she always was ridiculous. One cannot but smile as
one reads of her posting along the French roads in a yellow
travelling-chariot drawn by cart-horses, with a retinue that included
an alderman, a reclaimed lady-in-waiting, an Italian Count, the eldest
son of the alderman, and 'a fine little female child, about three years
old, whom Her Majesty, in conformity with her benevolent practices on
former occasions, had adopted.' The breakdown of her impeachment, and
her acceptance of an income formed a fitting anti-climax to the
terrible absurdities of her position. She died from the effects of a
chill caught when she was trying vainly to force a way to her husband's
coronation. Unhappy woman! Our sympathy for her is not misgiven. Fate
wrote her a most tremendous tragedy, and she played it in tights. Let
us pity her, but not forget to pity her husband, the King, also.

It is another common accusation against George that he was an undutiful
and unfeeling son. If this was so, it is certain that not all the blame
is to be laid upon him alone. There is more than one anecdote which
shows that King George disliked his eldest son, and took no trouble to
conceal his dislike, long before the boy had been freed from his
tutors. It was the coldness of his father and the petty restrictions he
loved to enforce that first drove George to seek the companionship of
such men as Egalit and the Duke of Cumberland, both of whom were quick
to inflame his impressionable mind to angry resentment. Yet, when
Margaret Nicholson attempted the life of the King, the Prince
immediately posted off from Brighton that he might wait upon his father
at Windsor--a graceful act of piety that was rewarded by his father's
refusal to see him. Hated by the Queen, who at this time did all she
could to keep her husband and his son apart, surrounded by intriguers,
who did all they could to set him against his father, George seems to
have behaved with great discretion. In the years that follow, I can
conceive no position more difficult than that in which he found himself
every time his father relapsed into lunacy. That he should have by
every means opposed those who through jealousy stood between him and
the regency was only natural. It cannot be said that at any time did he
show anxiety to rule, so long as there was any immediate chance of the
King's recovery. On the contrary, all impartial seers of that chaotic
Court agreed that the Prince bore himself throughout the intrigues,
wherein he himself was bound to be, in a notably filial way.

There are many things that I regret in the career of George IV., and
what I most of all regret is the part that he played in the politics of
the period. Englishmen to-day have at length decided that royalty shall
not set foot in the political arena. I do not despair that some day we
shall place politics upon a sound commercial basis, as they have
already done in America and France, or leave them entirely in the hands
of the police, as they do in Russia. It is horrible to think that,
under our existing _rgime_, all the men of noblest blood and highest
intellect should waste their time in the sordid atmosphere of the House
of Commons, listening for hours to nonentities talking nonsense, or
searching enormous volumes to prove that somebody said something some
years ago that does not quite tally with something he said the other
day, or standing tremulous before the whips in the lobbies and the
scorpions in the constituencies. In the political machine are crushed
and lost all our best men. That Mr. Gladstone did not choose to be a
cardinal is a blow under which the Roman Catholic Church still
staggers. In Mr. Chamberlain Scotland Yard missed its smartest
detective. What a fine voluptuary might Lord Rosebery have been! It is
a platitude that the country is ruled best by the permanent officials,
and I look forward to the time when Mr. Keir Hardie shall hang his cap
in the hall of No. 10 Downing Street, and a Conservative working man
shall lead Her Majesty's Opposition. In the lifetime of George,
politics were not a whit finer than they are to-day. I feel a genuine
indignation that he should have wasted so much of tissue in mean
intrigues about ministries and bills. That he should have been
fascinated by that splendid fellow, Fox, is quite right. That he should
have thrown himself with all his heart into the storm of the
Westminster election is most natural. But it is awful inverideed to
find him, long after he had reached man's estate, indulging in
back-stair intrigues with Whigs and Tories. It is, of course, absurd to
charge him with deserting his first friends, the Whigs. His love and
fidelity were given, not to the Whigs, but to the men who led them.
Even after the death of Fox, he did, in misplaced piety, do all he
could for Fox's party. What wonder that, when he found he was ignored
by the Ministry that owed its existence to him, he turned his back upon
that sombre couple, the 'Lords G. and G.,' whom he had always hated,
and went over to the Tories? Among the Tories he hoped to find men who
would faithfully perform their duties and leave him leisure to live his
own beautiful life. I regret immensely that his part in politics did
not cease here. The state of the country and of his own finances, and
also, I fear, a certain love that he had imbibed for political
manipulation, prevented him from standing aside. How useless was all
the finesse he displayed in the long-drawn question of Catholic
Emancipation! How lamentable his terror of Lord Wellesley's rude
dragooning! And is there not something pitiable in the thought of the
Regent at a time of ministerial complications lying prone on his bed
with a sprained ankle, and taking, as was whispered, in one day as many
as seven hundred drops of laudanum? Some said he took these doses to
deaden the pain. But others, and among them his brother Cumberland,
declared that the sprain was all a sham. I hope it was. The thought of
a voluptuary in pain is very terrible. In any case, I cannot but feel
angry, for George's own sake and that of his kingdom, that he found it
impossible to keep further aloof from the wearisome troubles of
political life. His wretched indecision of character made him an easy
prey to unscrupulous ministers, while his extraordinary diplomatic
powers and almost extravagant tact made them, in their turn, an easy
prey to him. In these two processes much of his genius was spent
untimely. I must confess that he did not quite realise where his duties
ended. He wished always to do too much. If you read his repeated
appeals to his father that he might be permitted to serve actively in
the British army against the French, you will acknowledge that it was
through no fault of his own that he did not fight. It touches me to
think that in his declining years he actually thought that he had led
one of the charges at Waterloo. He would often describe the whole scene
as it appeared to him at that supreme moment, and refer to the Duke of
Wellington, saying, 'Was it not so, Duke?' 'I have often heard you say
so, your Majesty,' the old soldier would reply, grimly. I am not sure
that the old soldier was at Waterloo himself. In a room full of people
he once referred to the battle as having been won upon the
playing-fields of Eton. This was certainly a most unfortunate slip,
seeing that all historians are agreed that it was fought on a certain
field situate a few miles from Brussels.

In one of his letters to the King, craving for a military appointment,
George urges that, whilst his next brother, the Duke of York, commanded
the army, and the younger branches of the family were either generals
or lieutenant-generals, he, who was Prince of Wales, remained colonel
of dragoons. And herein, could he have known it, lay the right
limitation of his life. As royalty was and is constituted, it is for
the younger sons to take an active part in the services, whilst the
eldest son is left as the ruler of Society. Thousands and thousands of
guineas were given by the nation that the Prince of Wales, the Regent,
the King, might be, in the best sense of the word, ornamental. It is
not for us, at this moment, to consider whether Royalty, as a wholly
Pagan institution, is not out of place in a community of Christians. It
is enough that we should inquire whether the god, whom our grandfathers
set up and worshipped and crowned with offerings, gave grace to his
worshippers.

That George was a moral man, in our modern sense, I do not for one
moment pretend. It were idle to deny that he was profligate. When he
died there were found in one of his cabinets more than a hundred locks
of women's hair. Some of these were still plastered with powder and
pomatum, some were mere little golden curls, such as grow low down upon
a girl's neck, others were streaked with grey. The whole of this
collection subsequently passed into the hands of Adam, the famous
Scotch henchman of the Regent. In his family, now resident in Glasgow,
it is treasured as an heirloom. I myself have been privileged to look
at all these locks of hair, and I have seen a _clairvoyante_ take them
one by one, and, pinching them between her lithe fingers, tell of the
love that each symbolised. I have heard her tell of long rides by
night, of a boudoir hung with grass-green satin, and of a tryst at
Windsor; of one, the wife of a hussar at York, whose little lap-dog
used to bark angrily whenever the Regent came near his mistress; of a
milkmaid who, in her great simpleness, thought her child would one day
be king of England; of an arch-duchess with blue eyes, and a silly
little flautist from Portugal; of women that were wantons and fought
for his favour, great ladies that he loved dearly, girls that gave
themselves to him humbly. If we lay all pleasures at the feet of our
prince, we can scarcely hope he will remain virtuous. Indeed, we do not
wish our prince to be an examplar of godliness, but a perfect type of
happiness. It may be foolish of us to insist upon apolaustic happiness,
but that is the kind of happiness that we can ourselves, most of us,
best understand, and so we offer it to our ideal. In Royalty we find
our Bacchus, our Venus.

Certainly George was, in the practical sense of the word, a fine king.
His wonderful physique, his wealth, his brilliant talents, he gave them
all without stint to Society. From the time when, at Madame Cornelys',
he gallivanted with rips and demireps, to the time when he sat, a stout
and solitary old king, fishing in the artificial pond at Windsor, his
life was beautifully ordered. He indulged to the full in all the
delights that England could offer him. That he should have, in his old
age, suddenly abandoned his career of vigorous enjoyment is, I confess,
rather surprising. The royal voluptuary generally remains young to the
last. No one ever tires of pleasure. It is the pursuit of pleasure, the
trouble to grasp it, that makes us old. Only the soldiers who enter
Capua with wounded feet leave it demoralised. And yet George, who never
had to wait or fight for a pleasure, fell enervate long before his
death. I can but attribute this to the constant persecution to which he
was subjected by duns and ministers, parents and wives.

Not that I regret the manner in which he spent his last years. On the
contrary, I think it was exceedingly cosy. I like to think of the King,
at Windsor, lying a-bed all the morning in his darkened room, with all
the sporting papers scattered over his quilt and a little decanter of
the favourite cherry-brandy within easy reach. I like to think of him
sitting by his fire in the afternoon and hearing his ministers ask for
him at the door and piling another log upon the fire, as he heard them
sent away by his servant. It was not, I acknowledge, a life to kindle
popular enthusiasm. But most people knew little of its mode. For all
they knew, His Majesty might have been making his soul or writing his
memoirs. In reality, George was now 'too fat by far' to brook the
observation of casual eyes. Especially he hated to be seen by those
whose memories might bear them back to the time when he had yet a
waist. Among his elaborate precautious of privacy was a pair of
_avant-couriers_, who always preceded his pony-chaise in its daily
progress through Windsor Great Park and had strict commands to drive
back any intruder. In _The Veiled Majestic Man_, _Where is the Graceful
Despot of England_? and other lampoons not extant, the scribblers
mocked his loneliness. At White's, one evening, four gentlemen of high
fashion vowed, over their wine, they would see the invisible monarch.
So they rode down next day to Windsor, and secreted themselves in the
branches of a holm-oak. Here they waited _perdus_, beguiling the hours
and the frost with their flasks. When dusk was falling, they heard at
last the chime of hoofs on the hard road, and saw presently a splash of
the Royal livery, as two grooms trotted by, peering warily from side to
side, and disappeared in the gloom. The conspirators in the tree held
their breath, till they caught the distant sound of wheels. Nearer and
louder came the sound, and soon they saw a white, postillioned pony, a
chaise and, yes, girth immensurate among the cushions, a weary monarch,
whose face, crimson above the dark accumulation of his stock, was like
some ominous sunset.... He had passed them and they had seen him,
monstrous and moribund among the cushions. He had been borne past them
like a wounded Bacchanal. The King! The Regent!... They shuddered in
the frosty branches. The night was gathering and they climbed silently
to the ground, with an awful, indispellible image before their eyes.

You see, these gentlemen were not philosophers. Remember, also, that
the strangeness of their escapade, the cramped attitude they had been
compelled to maintain in the branches of the holm-oak, the intense cold
and their frequent resort to the flask must have all conspired to
exaggerate their emotions and prevent them from looking at things in a
rational way. After all, George had lived his life. He had lived more
fully than any other man. And it was better really that his death
should be preceded by decline. For every one, obviously, the most
_desirable_ kind of death is that which strikes men down, suddenly, in
their prime. Had they not been so dangerous, railways would never have
ousted the old coaches from popular favour. But, however keenly we may
court such a death for ourselves or for those who are near and dear to
us, we must always be offended whenever it befall one in whom our
interest is sthetic merely. Had his father permitted George to fight
at Waterloo, and had some fatal bullet pierced the padding of that
splendid breast, I should have been really annoyed, and this essay
would never have been written. Sudden death mars the unity of an
admirable life. Natural decline, tapering to tranquility, is its proper
end. As a man's life begins, faintly, and gives no token of childhood's
intensity and the expansion of youth and the perfection of manhood, so
it should also end, faintly. The King died a death that was like the
calm conclusion of a great, lurid poem. _Quievit._

Yes, his life was a poem, a poem in the praise of Pleasure. And it is
right that we should think of him always as the great voluptuary. Only
let us note that his nature never became, as do the natures of most
voluptuaries, corroded by a cruel indifference to the happiness of
others. When all the town was agog for the _fte_ to be given by the
Regent in honour of the French King, Sheridan sent a forged card of
invitation to Romeo Coates, the half-witted dandy, who used at this
time to walk about in absurd ribbons and buckles, and was the butt of
all the streetsters. The poor fellow arrived at the entrance of Carlton
House, proud as a peacock, and he was greeted with a tremendous cheer
from the bystanding mob, but when he came to the lacqueys he was told
that his card was a hoax and sent about his business. The tears were
rolling down his cheeks as he shambled back into the street. The Regent
heard later in the evening of this sorry joke, and next day despatched
a kindly-worded message, in which he prayed that Mr. Coates would not
refuse to come and 'view the decorations, nevertheless.' Though he does
not appear to have treated his inferiors with the extreme servility
that is now in vogue, George was beloved by the whole of his household,
and many are the little tales that are told to illustrate the
kindliness and consideration he showed to his valets and his jockeys
and his stable-boys. That from time to time he dropped certain of his
favourites is no cause for blaming him. Remember that a Great
Personage, like a great genius, is dangerous to his fellow-creatures.
The favourites of Royalty live in an intoxicant atmosphere. They become
unaccountable for their behaviour. Either they get beyond themselves,
and, like Brummell, forget that the King, their friend, is also their
master, or they outrun the constable and go bankrupt, or cheat at cards
in order to keep up their position, or do some other foolish thing that
makes it impossible for the King to favour them more. Old friends are
generally the refuge of unsociable persons. Remembering this also,
gauge the temptation that besets the very leader of society to form
fresh friendships, when all the cleverest and most charming persons in
the land are standing ready, like supers at the wings, to come on and
please him! At Carlton House there was a constant succession of wits.
Minds were preserved for the Prince of Wales, as coverts are preserved
for him to-day. For him Sheridan would flash his best bon-mot, and
Theodore Hook play his most practical joke, his swiftest chansonette.
And Fox would talk, as only he could, of Liberty and of Patriotism, and
Byron would look more than ever like Isidore de Lara as he recited his
own bad verses, and Sir Walter Scott would 'pour out with an endless
generosity his store of old-world learning, kindness, and humour.' Of
such men George was a splendid patron. He did not merely sit in his
chair, gaping princely at their wit and their wisdom, but quoted with
the scholars and argued with the statesmen and jested with the wits.
Doctor Burney, an impartial observer, says that he was amazed by the
knowledge of music that the Regent displayed in a half-hour's
discussion over the wine. Croker says that 'the Prince and Scott were
the two most brilliant story-tellers, in their several ways, he had
ever happened to meet. Both exerted themselves, and it was hard to say
which shone the most.' Indeed His Royal Highness appears to have been a
fine conversationalist, with a wide range of knowledge and great
humour. We, who have come at length to look upon stupidity as one of
the most sacred prerogatives of Royalty, can scarcely realise that, if
George's birth had been never so humble, he would have been known to us
as a most admirable scholar and wit, or as a connoisseur of the arts.
It is pleasing to think of his love for the Flemish school of painting,
for Wilkie and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The splendid portraits of foreign
potentates that hang in the Banqueting Room at Windsor bear witness to
his sense of the canvas. In his later years he exerted himself
strenuously in raising the tone of the drama. His love of the classics
never left him. We know he was fond of quoting those incomparable
poets, Homer, at great length, and that he was prominent in the
'papyrus-craze.' Indeed, he inspired Society with a love of something
more than mere pleasure, a love of the 'humaner delights.' He was a
giver of tone. At his coming, the bluff, disgusting ways of the Tom and
Jerry period gave way to those florid graces that are still called
Georgian.

A pity that George's predecessor was not a man, like the Prince
Consort, of strong chastening influence! Then might the bright
flamboyance which he gave to Society have made his reign more beautiful
than any other--a real renaissance. But he found London a wild city of
taverns and cock-pits, and the grace which in the course of years he
gave to his subjects never really entered into them. The cock-pits were
gilded and the taverns painted with colour, but the heart of the city
was vulgar, even as before. The simulation of higher things did indeed
give the note of a very interesting period, but how shallow that
simulation was and how merely it was due to George's own influence, we
may see in the light of what happened after his death. The good that he
had done died with him. The refinement he had laid upon vulgarity fell
away, like enamel from withered cheeks. It was only George himself who
had made the sham endure. The Victorian Era came soon, and the angels
rushed in and drove the nymphs away and hung the land with reps.

I have often wondered whether it was with a feeling that his influence
would be no more than life-long, that George allowed Carlton House,
that dear structure, the very work of his life and symbol of his being,
to be rased. I wish that Carlton House were still standing. I wish we
could still walk through those corridors, whose walls were 'crusted
with ormolu,' and parquet-floors were 'so glossy that, were Narcissus
to come down from heaven, he would, I maintain, need no other mirror
for his _beaut_.' I wish that we could see the pier-glasses and the
girandoles and the twisted sofas, the fauns foisted upon the ceiling
and the rident goddesses along the wall. These things would make
George's memory dearer to us, help us to a fuller knowledge of him. I
am glad that the Pavilion still stands here in Brighton. Its trite
lawns and wanton cupol have taught me much. As I write this essay, I
can see them from my window. Last night, in a crowd of trippers and
townspeople, I roamed the lawns of that dishonoured palace, whilst a
band played us tunes. Once I fancied I saw the shade of a swaying
figure and of a wine-red face.

_Brighton, 1894._




THE PERVASION OF ROUGE


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, Poppa, of shameful memory,
had in her traveling 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', 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' and pressed its haggard face against the window of the
little club. Yes, we can raise their ghosts--and, more, we can see
manywhere 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 deathblow 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. Artifice's
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--lo, 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 sthetically, 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
Bttiger's alluring, scholarly description of 'Morgenscenen im
Puttzimmer Einer Reichen Rmerin.' Read of Sabina's face as she comes
through the curtain of her bed-chamber to the chamber of her toilet.
The slave-girls 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
Poppan 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 gean. 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 '_mme les toutes jeunes demoiselles
mailles comme ma tabatire_?' 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 [Greek: eidolon 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 _dbut_ 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
expressions for every face.

And this--say you?--will make monotony? You are mistaken, _toto coelo_
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 lo, 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
sthetic 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 preminence 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 _leve_, 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 hare's 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 _dbut_, 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 fortune's 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
'Romeo' 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 _rle_ 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
_premire_, 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 _proteg_ 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 stagebox 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 'encore' 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 _dbut_.
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 _dbut_ 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 _dbut_ 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 _dbut_, 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
Tilney 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
archologist 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:

    MR. COATES, SIR,

    They say Revenge is sweet. I am fortunate to find it is so. I have
    compelled you to be far more a Fool than you made me at the
    _fte-champtre_ of Lady B. & I, having accomplished my aim, am
    ready to forgive you now, as you implored me on the occasion of the
    _fte_. But pray build no Hope that I, forgiving you, will once
    more regard you as my Suitor. For that cannot ever be. I decided
    you should show yourself a Fool before many people. But such Folly
    does not commend your hand to mine. Therefore desist your irksome
    attention &, if need be, begone from Bath. I have punished you, &
    would save my eyes the _trouble_ to turn away from your person. I
    pray that you regard this epistle as privileged and private.

    E. T. L.        10 of February.

The letter lies before me as I write. It is written throughout in a
firm and very delicate Italian hand. Under the neat initials is drawn,
instead of the ordinary flourish, an arrow, and the absence of any
erasure in a letter of such moment suggests a calm, deliberate
character and, probably, rough copies. I did not, at the time, suffer
my fancy to linger over the tesselated document. I set to elucidating
the reference to the _fte-champtre_. As I retraced my footsteps to
the little book-shop, I wondered if I should find any excuse for the
cruel faithlessness of Emma Tilney Long.

The bookseller was greatly excited when I told him I had recreated the
letter. He was very eager to see it. I did not pander to his curiosity.
He even offered to buy the article back at cost price. I asked him if
he had ever heard, in his youth, of any scene that had passed between
Miss Tilney Long and Mr. Coates at some _fte-champtre_. The old man
thought for some time, but he could not help me. Where then, I asked
him, could I search old files of local newspapers? He told me that
there were supposed to be many such files mouldering in the archives of
the Town Hall.

I secured access, without difficulty, to these files. A whole day I
spent in searching the copies issued by this and that journal during
the months that Romeo was in Bath. In the yellow pages of these
forgotten prints I came upon many complimentary allusions to Mr.
Coates: 'The visitor welcomed (by all our aristocracy) from distant
Ind,' 'the ubiquitous,' 'the charitable _riche_.' Of his 'forthcoming
impersonation of Romeo and Juliet' there were constant puffs, quite in
the modern manner. The accounts of his _dbut_ all showed that Mr.
Pryse Gordon's account of it was fabulous. In one paper there was a
bitter attack on 'Mr. Gordon, who was responsible for this insult to
Thespian art, the gentry, and the people, for he first arranged the
_whole production'_--an extract which makes it clear that this
gentleman had a good motive for his version of the affair.

But I began to despair of ever learning what happened at the
_fte-champtre_. There were accounts of 'a grand garden-party, whereto
Lady Belper, on March the twenty-eighth, invited a host of fashionable
persons.' The names of Mr. Coates and of 'Sir James Tilney Long and his
daughter' were duly recorded in the lists. But that was all. I turned
at length to a tiny file, consisting of five copies only, _Bladud's
Courier_. Therein I found this paragraph, followed by some scurrilities
which I will not quote:

    'Mr. C**t*s, who will act Romeo (_Wherefore art thou Romeo?_) this
    coming week for the pleasure of _his fashionable circle_, incurred
    the contemptuous wrath of his Lady Fair at the Fte. It was a sad
    pity she entrusted him to hold her purse while she fed the
    gold-fishes. He was very proud of the honour till the gold fell
    from his hand among the gold-fishes. How appropriate was the
    misadventure! But Miss Black Eyes, angry at her loss and her
    swain's clumsiness, cried: 'Jump into the pond, sir, and find my
    purse _instanter_!' Several wags encouraged her, and the ladies
    were of the opinion that her adorer should certainly dive for the
    treasure. 'Alas,' the fellow said, 'I cannot swim, Miss. But tell
    me how many guineas you carried and I will make them good to
    yourself.' There was a great deal of laughter at this encounter,
    and _the haughty damsel turned on her heel_, nor did she vouchsafe
    another word to her _elderly_ lover.

        'When recreant man
        Meets lady's wrath, &c. &c.'

So the story of the _dbut_ was complete! Was ever a lady more
inexorable, more ingenious, in her revenge? One can fancy the poor
Antiguan going to the Baronet's house next day with a bouquet of
flowers and passionately abasing himself, craving her forgiveness. One
can fancy the wounded vanity of the girl, her shame that people had
mocked her for the disobedience of her suitor. Revenge, as her letter
shows, became her one thought. She would strike him through his other
love, the love of Thespis. 'I have compelled you,' she wrote
afterwards, in her bitter triumph, 'to be a greater Fool than you made
me.' She, then, it was that drove him to his public absurdity, she who
insisted that he should never win her unless he sacrificed his dear
longing for stage-laurels and actually pilloried himself upon the
stage. The wig, the pantaloons, the snuff-box, the grin, were all
conceived, I fancy, in her pitiless spite. It is possible that she did
but say: 'The more ridiculous you make yourself, the more hope for
you.' But I do not believe that Mr. Coates, a man of no humour,
conceived the means himself. _They_ were surely hers.

It is terrible to think of the ambitious amateur in his bedroom,
secretly practising hideous antics or gazing at his absurd apparel
before a mirror. How loath must he have been to desecrate the lines he
loved so dearly and had longed to declaim in all their beauty and their
resonance! And then, what irony at the daily rehearsal! With how sad a
smile must he have received the compliments of Mr. Dimonds on his fine
performance, knowing how different it would all be 'on the night!'
Nothing could have steeled him to the ordeal but his great love. He
must have wavered, had not the exaltation of his love protected him.
But the jeers of the mob were music in his hearing, his wounds
love-symbols. Then came the girl's cruel contempt of his martyrdom.

Aphrodite, who has care of lovers, did not spare Miss Tylney Long. She
made her love, a few months after, one who married her for her fortune
and broke her heart. In years of misery the wayward girl worked out the
penance of her unpardonable sin, dying, at length, in poverty and
despair. Into the wounds of him who had so truly loved her was poured,
after a space of fourteen years, the balsam of another love. On the 6th
September 1823, at St. George's, Hanover Square, Mr. Coates was married
to Miss Anne Robinson, who was a faithful and devoted wife to him till
he died.

Meanwhile, the rejected Romeo did not long repine. Two months after the
tragedy at Bath, he was at Brighton, mingling with all the fashionable
folk, and giving admirable recitations at routs. He was seen every day
on the Parade, attired in an extravagant manner, very different to that
he had adopted in Bath. A pale-blue _surtout_, tasselled Hessians, and
a cocked hat were the most obvious items of his costume. He also
affected a very curious tumbril, shaped like a shell and richly gilded.
In this he used to drive around, every afternoon, amid the gapes of the
populace. It is evident that, once having tasted the fruit of
notoriety, he was loath to fall back on simpler fare. He had become a
prey to the love of absurd ostentation. A lively example of dandyism
unrestrained by taste, he parodied in his person the foibles of Mr.
Brummell and the King. His diamonds and his equipage and other follies
became the gossip of every newspaper in England. Nor did a day pass
without the publication of some little rigmarole from his pen. Wherever
there was a vacant theatre--were it in Cheltenham, Birmingham, or any
other town--he would engage it for his productions. One night he would
play his favourite part, Romeo, with reverence and ability. The next,
he would repeat his first travesty in all its hideous harlequinade.
Indeed, there can be little doubt that Mr. Coates, with his vile
performances, must be held responsible for the decline of dramatic art
in England and the invasion of the amateur. The sight of such folly,
strutting unabashed, spoilt the prestige of the theatre. To-day our
stage is filled with tailors'-dummy heroes, with heroines who have real
curls and can open and shut their eyes and, at a pinch, say 'mamma' and
'papa.' We must blame the Antiguan, I fear, for their existence. It was
he--the rascal--who first spread that _scen sacra fames_. Some say
that he was a schemer and impostor, feigning eccentricity for his
private ends. They are quite wrong; Mr. Coates was a very good man. He
never made a penny out of his performances; he even lost many hundred
pounds. Moreover, as his speeches before the curtain and his letters to
the papers show, he took himself quite seriously. Only the insane take
themselves quite seriously.

It was the unkindness of his love that maddened him. But he lived to be
the lightest-hearted of lunatics and caused great amusement for many
years. Whether we think of him in his relation to history or
psychology, dandiacal or dramatic art, he is a salient, pathetic
figure. That he is memorable for his defects, not for his qualities, I
know. But Romeo, in the tragedy of his wild love and frail intellect,
in the folly that stretched the corners of his 'peculiar grin' and
shone in his diamonds and was emblazoned upon his tumbril, is more
suggestive than some sages. He was so fantastic an animal that Oblivion
were indeed amiss. If no more, he was a great Fool. In any case, it
would be fun to have seen him.

_London, 1896._




DIMINUENDO


In the year of grace 1890, and in the beautiful autumn of that year, I
was a freshman at Oxford. I remember how my tutor asked me what
lectures I wished to attend, and how he laughed when I said that I
wished to attend the lectures of Mr. Walter Pater. Also I remember how,
one morning soon after, I went into Ryman's to order some foolish
engraving for my room, and there saw, peering into a portfolio, a
small, thick, rock-faced man, whose top-hat and gloves of _bright_
dog-skin struck one of the many discords in that little city of
learning or laughter. The serried bristles of his moustachio made for
him a false-military air. I think I nearly went down when they told me
that this was Pater.

Not that even in those more decadent days of my childhood did I admire
the man as a stylist. Even then I was angry that he should treat
English as a dead language, bored by that sedulous ritual wherewith he
laid out every sentence as in a shroud--hanging, like a widower, long
over its marmoreal beauty or ever he could lay it at length in his
book, its sepulchre. From that laden air, the so cadaverous murmur of
that sanctuary, I would hook it at the beck of any jade. The writing of
Pater had never, indeed, appealed to me, [Greek: all aiei], having
regard to the couth solemnity of his mind, to his philosophy, his rare
erudition, [Greek: tina phota megan kai kalon edegmen]. And I suppose
it was when at length I saw him that I first knew him to be fallible.

At school I had read _Marius the Epicurean_ in bed and with a dark
lantern. Indeed, I regarded it mainly as a tale of adventure, quite as
fascinating as _Midshipman Easy_, and far less hard to understand,
because there were no nautical terms in it. Marryat, moreover, never
made me wish to run away to sea, whilst certainly Pater did make me
wish for more 'colour' in the curriculum, for a renaissance of the
Farrar period, when there was always 'a sullen spirit of revolt against
the authorities'; when lockers were always being broken into and marks
falsified, and small boys prevented from saying their prayers, insomuch
that they vowed they would no longer buy brandy for their seniors. In
some schools, I am told, the pretty old custom of roasting a
fourth-form boy, whole, upon Founder's Day still survives. But in my
school there was less sentiment. I ended by acquiescing in the slow
revolution of its wheel of work and play. I felt that at Oxford, when I
should be of age to matriculate, a 'variegated dramatic life' was
waiting for me. I was not a little too sanguine, alas!

How sad was my coming to the university! Where were those sweet
conditions I had pictured in my boyhood? Those antique contrasts? Did I
ride, one sunset, through fens on a palfrey, watching the gold
reflections on Magdalen Tower? Did I ride over Magdalen Bridge and hear
the consonance of evening-bells and cries from the river below? Did I
rein in to wonder at the raised gates of Queen's, the twisted pillars
of St. Mary's, the little shops, lighted with tapers? Did bull-pups
snarl at me, or dons, with bent backs, acknowledge my salute? Any one
who knows the place as it is, must see that such questions are purely
rhetorical. To him I need not explain the disappointment that beset me
when, after being whirled in a cab from the station to a big hotel, I
wandered out into the streets. _On aurait dit_ a bit of Manchester
through which Apollo had once passed; for here, among the hideous trams
and the brand-new bricks--here, glared at by the electric-lights that
hung from poles, screamed at by boys with the _Echo_ and the
_Star_--here, in a riot of vulgarity, were remnants of beauty, as I
discerned. There were only remnants.

Soon also I found that the life of the place, like the place, had lost
its charm and its tradition. Gone were the contrasts that made it
wonderful. That feud between undergraduates and dons--latent, in the
old days, only at times when it behoved the two academic grades to
unite against the townspeople--was one of the absurdities of the past.
The townspeople now looked just like undergraduates and the dons just
like townspeople. So splendid was the train-service between Oxford and
London that, with hundreds of passengers daily, the one had become
little better than a suburb of the other. What more could extensionists
demand? As for me, I was disheartened. Bitter were the comparisons I
drew between my coming to Oxford and the coming of Marius to Rome.
Could it be that there was at length no beautiful environment wherein a
man might sound the harmonies of his soul? Had civilisation made
beauty, besides adventure, so rare? I wondered what counsel Pater,
insistent always upon contact with comely things, would offer to one
who could nowhere find them. I had been wondering that very day when I
went into Ryman's and saw him there.

When the tumult of my disillusioning was past, my mind grew clearer. I
discerned that the scope of my quest for emotion must be narrowed. That
abandonment of one's self to life, that merging of one's soul in bright
waters, so often suggested in Pater's writing, were a counsel
impossible for to-day. The quest of emotions must be no less keen,
certainly, but the manner of it must be changed forthwith. To unswitch
myself from my surroundings, to guard my soul from contact with the
unlovely things that compassed it about, therein lay my hope. I must
approach the Benign Mother with great caution. And so, while most of
the freshmen were doing her honour with wine and song and wreaths of
smoke, I stood aside, pondered. In such seclusion I passed my first
term--ah, how often did I wonder whether I was not wasting my days,
and, wondering, abandon my meditations upon the right ordering of the
future! Thanks be to Athene, who threw her shadow over me in those
moments of weak folly!

At the end of term I came to London. Around me seethed swirls, eddies,
torrents, violent cross-currents of human activity. What uproar! Surely
I could have no part in modern life. Yet, yet for a while it was
fascinating to watch the ways of its children. The prodigious life of
the Prince of Wales fascinated me above all; indeed, it still
fascinates me. What experience has been withheld from His Royal
Highness? Was ever so supernal a type, as he, of mere Pleasure? How
often he has watched, at Newmarket, the scud-a-run of quivering
homuncules over the vert on horses, or, from some night-boat, the
holocaust of great wharves by the side of the Thames; raced through the
blue Solent; threaded _les coulisses_! He has danced in every palace of
every capital, played in every club. He has hunted elephants through
the jungles of India, boar through the forests of Austria, pigs over
the plains of Massachusetts. From the Castle of Abergeldie he has led
his Princess into the frosty night, Highlanders lighting with torches
the path to the deer-larder, where lay the wild things that had fallen
to him on the crags. He has marched the Grenadiers to chapel through
the white streets of Windsor. He has ridden through Moscow, in strange
apparel, to kiss the catafalque of more than one Tzar. For him the
Rajahs of India have spoiled their temples, and Blondin has crossed
Niagara along the tight-rope, and the Giant Guard done drill beneath
the chandeliers of the Neue Schloss. Incline he to scandal, lawyers are
proud to whisper their secrets in his ear. Be he gallant, the ladies
are at his feet. _Ennuy_, all the wits from Bernal Osborne to Arthur
Roberts have jested for him. He has been 'present always at the focus
where the greatest number of forces unite in their purest energy,' for
it is his presence that makes those forces unite.

'_Ennuy?_' I asked. Indeed he never is. How could he be when Pleasure
hangs constantly upon his arm! It is those others, overtaking her only
after arduous chase, breathless and footsore, who quickly sicken of her
company, and fall fainting at her feet. And for me, shod neither with
rank nor riches, what folly to join the chase! I began to see how small
a thing it were to sacrifice those external 'experiences,' so dear to
the heart of Pater, by a rigid, complex civilisation made so hard to
gain. They gave nothing but lassitude to those who had gained them
through suffering. Even to the kings and princes, who so easily gained
them, what did they yield besides themselves? I do not suppose that, if
we were invited to give authenticated instances of intelligence on the
part of our royal pets, we could fill half a column of the _Spectator_.
In fact, their lives are so full they have no time for thought, the
highest energy of man. Now, it was to thought that _my_ life should be
dedicated. Action, apart from its absorption of time, would war
otherwise against the pleasures of intellect, which, for me, meant
mainly the pleasures of imagination. It is only (this is a platitude)
the things one has not done, the faces or places one has not seen, or
seen but darkly, that have charm. It is only mystery--such mystery as
besets the eyes of children--that makes things superb. I thought of the
voluptuaries I had known--they seemed so sad, so ascetic almost, like
poor pilgrims, raising their eyes never or ever gazing at the moon of
tarnished endeavour. I thought of the round, insouciant faces of the
monks at whose monastery I once broke bread, and how their eyes
sparkled when they asked me of the France that lay around their walls.
I thought, _pardie_, of the lurid verses written by young men who, in
real life, know no haunt more lurid than a literary public-house. It
was, for me, merely a problem how I could best avoid 'sensations,'
'pulsations,' and 'exquisite moments' that were not purely
intellectual. I would not attempt to combine both kinds, as Pater
seemed to fancy a man might. I would make myself master of some small
area of physical life, a life of quiet, monotonous simplicity, exempt
from all outer disturbance. I would shield my body from the world that
my mind might range over it, not hurt nor fettered. As yet, however, I
was in my first year at Oxford. There were many reasons that I should
stay there and take my degree, reasons that I did not combat. Indeed, I
was content to wait for my life.

And now that I have made my adieux to the Benign Mother, I need wait no
longer. I have been casting my eye over the suburbs of London. I have
taken a most pleasant little villa in ----ham, and here I shall make my
home. Here there is no traffic, no harvest. Those of the inhabitants
who do anything go away each morning and do it elsewhere. Here no vital
forces unite. Nothing happens here. The days and the months will pass
by me, bringing their sure recurrence of quiet events. In the
spring-time I shall look out from my window and see the laburnum
flowering in the little front garden. In summer cool syrups will come
for me from the grocer's shop. Autumn will make the boughs of my
mountain-ash scarlet, and, later, the asbestos in my grate will put
forth its blossoms of flame. The infrequent cart of Buszard or Mudie
will pass my window at all seasons. Nor will this be all. I shall have
friends. Next door, there is a retired military man who has offered, in
a most neighbourly way, to lend me his copy of the _Times_. On the
other side of my house lives a charming family, who perhaps will call
on me, now and again. I have seen them sally forth, at sundown, to
catch the theatre-train; among them walked a young lady, the charm of
whose figure was ill concealed by the neat waterproof that overspread
her evening dress. Some day it may be ... but I anticipate. These
things will be but the cosy accompaniment of my days. For I shall
contemplate the world.

I shall look forth from my window, the laburnum and the mountain-ash
becoming mere silhouettes in the foreground of my vision. I shall look
forth and, in my remoteness, appreciate the distant pageant of the
world. Humanity will range itself in the columns of my morning paper.
No pulse of life will escape me. The strife of politics, the intriguing
of courts, the wreck of great vessels, wars, dramas, earthquakes,
national griefs or joys; the strange sequels to divorces, even, and the
mysterious suicides of land-agents at Ipswich--in all such phenomena I
shall steep my exhaurient mind. _Delicias quoque bibliothecae
experiar._ Tragedy, comedy, chivalry, philosophy will be mine. I shall
listen to their music perpetually and their colours will dance before
my eyes. I shall soar from terraces of stone upon dragons with shining
wings and make war upon Olympus. From the peaks of hills I shall swoop
into recondite valleys and drive the pigmies, shrieking little curses,
to their caverns. It may be my whim to wander through infinite parks
where the deer lie under the clustering shadow of their antlers and
flee lightly over the grass; to whisper with white prophets under the
elms or bind a child with a daisy-chain or, with a lady, thread my way
through the acacias. I shall swim down rivers into the sea and outstrip
all ships. Unhindered I shall penetrate all sanctuaries and snatch the
secrets of every dim confessional.

Yes! among books that charm, and give wings to the mind, will my days
be spent. I shall be ever absorbing the things great men have written;
with such experience I will charge my mind to the full. Nor will I try
to give anything in return. Once, in the delusion that Art, loving the
recluse, would make his life happy, I wrote a little for a yellow
quarterly and had that _succs de fiasco_ which is always given to a
young writer of talent. But the stress of creation soon overwhelmed me.
Only Art with a capital H gives any consolations to her henchmen. And
I, who crave no knighthood, shall write no more. I shall write no more.
Already I feel myself to be a trifle outmoded. I belong to the
Beardsley period. Younger men, with months of activity before them,
with fresher schemes and notions, with newer enthusiasm, have pressed
forward since then. _Cedo junioribus._ Indeed, I stand aside with no
regret. For to be outmoded is to be a classic, if one has written well.
I have acceded to the hierarchy of good scribes and rather like my
niche.

_Chicago, 1895._




THE WORKS OF MAX BEERBOHM

A BIBLIOGRAPHY

BY JOHN LANE





PREFACE


After some considerable experience in the field of bibliography I
cannot plead as palliation for any imperfections that may be discovered
in this, that it is the work of a 'prentice hand. Difficult as I found
my self-imposed task in the case of the Meredith and Hardy
bibliographies, here my labour has been still more herculean.

It is impossible for one to compile a bibliography of a great man's
works without making it in some sense a biography--and indeed, in the
minds of not a few people, I have found a delusion that the one is
identical with the other.

Mr. Beerbohm, as will be seen from the page headed _Personalia_, was
born in London, August 24, 1872. In searching the files of the _Times_
I naturally looked for other remarkable occurrences on that date. There
was only one worth recording. On the day upon which Mr. Beerbohm was
born, there appeared in the first column of the _Times_, this
announcement:

    "On [Wednesday], the 21st August, at Brighton, the wife of V. P.
    Beardsley, Esq., of a son."

That the same week should have seen the advent in this world of two
such notable reformers as Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm is a
coincidence to which no antiquary has previously drawn attention. Is it
possible to over-estimate the influence of these two men in the art and
literature of the century!

Like two other great essayists, Addison and Steele, Mr. Beerbohm was
educated at Charterhouse, and, like the latter, at Merton College,
Oxford. At Charterhouse he is still remembered for his Latin verses,
and for the superb gallery of portraits of the masters that he
completed during his five years' sojourn there. There are still extant
a few copies of his satire, in Latin elegiacs, called _Beccerius_,
privately printed at the suggestion of Mr. A. H. Tod, his form-master.
The writer has said "Let it lie," however, and in such a matter the
author's wish should surely be regarded. I have myself been unable to
obtain a sight of a copy, but a more fortunate friend has furnished me
with a careful description of the opusculum, which I print in its place
in the bibliography.

He matriculated at Merton in 1890, and immediately applied himself to
the task he had set before him, namely, a gallery of portraits of the
Dons.

I am aware that he contributed to _The Clown_ and other undergraduate
journals: also that he was a member of the Myrmidons' Club. It was
during his residence at Oxford that his famous treatise on Cosmetics
appeared in the pages of an important London Quarterly, sets of which
are still occasionally to be found in booksellers' catalogues at a high
price, though the American millionaire collector has made it one of the
rarest of finds. These were the days of his youth, the golden age of
"decadence." For is not decadence merely a _fin de sicle_ literary
term synonymous with the "sowing his wild oats" of our grandfathers? a
phrase still surviving in agricultural districts, according to Mr.
Andrew Lang, Mr. Edward Clodd, and other Folk-Lorists.

Mr. Beerbohm, of course, was not the only writer of his period who
appeared as the champion of artifice. A contemporary, one Richard Le
Gallienne, an eminent Pose Fancier, has committed himself somewhere to
the statement that "The bravest men that ever trod this planet have
worn corsets."

But what is so far away as yester-year? In 1894, Mr. Beerbohm, in
virtue of his "Defence of Cosmetics" was but a pamphleteer. In 1895 he
was the famous historian, for in that year appeared the two earliest of
his profound historical studies, The History of the Year 1880, and his
work on King George the Fourth. During the growth of these
masterpieces, his was a familiar figure in the British Museum and the
Record Office, and tradition asserts that the enlargement of the latter
building, which took place some time shortly afterwards, was mainly
owing to his exertions.

Attended by his half-brother Mr. Tree, Mrs. Tree and a numerous
theatrical suite, he sailed on the 16th of January 1895, for America,
with a view, it is said, to establishing a monarchy in that land. Mr.
Beerbohm does not appear to have succeeded in this project, though he
was interviewed in many of the newspapers of the States. He returned,
_re infecta_, to the land of his birth, three months later.

After that he devoted himself to the completion of his life-work, here
set forth.

The materials for this collection were drawn, with the courteous
acquiescence of various publishers, from _The Pageant_, _The Savoy_,
_The Chap Book_, and _The Yellow Book_. Internal evidence shows that
Mr. Beerbohm took fragments of his writings from _Vanity_ (of New York)
and _The Unicorn_, that he might inlay them in the First Essay, of
whose scheme they are really a part. The Third Essay he re-wrote. The
rest he carefully revised, and to some he gave new names.

Although it was my privilege on one occasion to meet Mr. Beerbohm--at
five o'clock tea--when advancing years, powerless to rob him of one
shade of his wonderful urbanity, had nevertheless imprinted evidence of
their flight in the pathetic stoop, and the low melancholy voice of one
who, though resigned, yet yearns for the happier past, I feel that too
precise a description of his personal appearance would savour of
impertinence. The curious, on this point, I must refer to Mr. Sickert's
and Mr. Rothenstein's portraits, which I hear that Mr. Lionel Cust is
desirous of acquiring for the National Portrait Gallery.

It is needless to say that this bibliography has been a labour of love,
and that any further information readers may care to send me will be
gladly incorporated in future editions.

I must here express my indebtedness to Dr. Garnett, C.B., Mr. Bernard
Quaritch, Mr. Clement K. Shorter, Mr. L. F. Austin, Mr. J. M. Bullock,
Mr. Lewis Hind, Mr. and Mrs. H. Beerbohm Tree, Mrs. Leverson, and Miss
Grace Conover, without whose assistance my work would have been far
more arduous.

J. L.

THE ALBANY, _May 1896._




THE BIBLIOGRAPHY
OF THE
WORKS OF MAX BEERBOHM


1886.

A Letter to the Editor. _The Carthusian_, Dec. 1886, signed Diogenes.

A bitter cry of complaint against the dulness of the school paper.
                                                 [Not reprinted.


[ 1890. ]

Beccerius  |  a Latin fragment  |  with explanatory notes by M.B.
                                                 [N.D.

About twelve couplets printed on rough yellow paper, pp. 1 to 4, cr.
8vo, notes in double columns at foot of page.

No publisher's or printer's name.


1894.

A Defence of Cosmetics. _The Yellow Book_, Vol. I., April 1894, pp.
65-82.

Reprinted in "The Works" under the title of "The Pervasion of Rouge."

Lines suggested by Miss Cissy Loftus. _The Sketch_, May 9, 1894, p. 71.
A Caricature.                                    [Not reprinted.

Mr. Phil May and Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. _The Pall Mall Budget_, June 7,
1894. Two Caricatures.                           [Not reprinted.

Two Eminent Statesmen (the Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour and the Rt. Hon. Sir
Wm. Harcourt). _Pall Mall Budget_, July 5, 1894. Two Caricatures.
                                                 [Not reprinted.

Two Eminent Actors (Mr. Beerbohm Tree and Mr. Edward Terry). _Pall Mall
Budget_, July 26, 1894. Two Caricatures          [Not reprinted.

A Letter to the Editor. _The Yellow Book_, Vol. II., July, 1894, pp.
281-284.                                         [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Gus Elen (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Sept. 15, 1894.
                                                 [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Oscar Wilde (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Sept. 22,
1894.                                            [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: R. G. Knowles, _"There's a picture for you!"_
(Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Sept. 29, 1894.      [Not reprinted.

M. Henri Rochefort and Mr. Arthur Roberts. _Pall Mall Budget_, Oct. 4,
1894. Two Caricatures.                           [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Henry Arthur Jones (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Oct.
6, 1894.                                         [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks : Harry Furniss (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Oct. 13,
1894.                                            [Not reprinted.

A Caricature of George the Fourth. _The Yellow Book_, Vol. III., Oct.
1894.                                            [Not reprinted.

A Note on George the Fourth. _The Yellow Book_, Vol. III., Oct. 1894,
pp. 247-269.

Reprinted in "The Works" under the title of "King George the Fourth."

A parody of this appeared, under the title of "A Phalse Note on George
the Fourth," in _Punch_, October 27, 1894, p. 204.

Personal Remarks: Lord Lonsdale (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Oct. 20,
1894.                                             [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: W. S. Gilbert (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Oct. 27,
1894.                                            [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: L. Raven Hill (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Nov. 3,
1894.                                            [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: The Marquis of Queensberry (Caricature).
_Pick-Me-Up_, Nov. 17, 1894.                     [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Ada Reeve (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Nov. 24, 1894.
                                                 [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Seymour Hicks (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Dec. 1,
1894.                                            [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Corney Grain (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Dec. 8,
1894.                                            [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Lord Randolph Churchill (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_,
Dec. 22, 1894.                                   [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Dutch Daly (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Dec. 29, 1894.
                                                 [Not reprinted.


1895.

Character Sketches of "The Chieftain" at the Savoy.

  I. Mr. Courtice Pounds.
 II. Mr. Scott Fishe.
III. Mr. Walter Passmore.
_Pick-Me-Up_, Jan. 5, 1895.                      [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Henry Irving (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Jan. 5,
1895.

"1880." _The Yellow Book_, Vol IV., Jan. 1895, pp. 275-283. Reprinted
in "The Works."

A parody of this appeared, under the title of "1894," by Max Mereboom,
in _Punch_, February 2, 1895, p. 58.

Character Sketches of "An Ideal Husband" at the Haymarket.

  I. Mr. Bishop
 II. Mr. Charles Hawtrey.
III. Miss Julia Neilson.
_Pick-Me-Up_, Jan. 19, 1895.                     [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Harry Marks (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Jan. 19,
1895.                                            [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: F. C. Burnand (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Jan. 26,
1895.                                            [Not reprinted.

Dandies and Dandies. Vanity (New York). Feb. 7, 1895.

The above has been reprinted with additions and alterations in "The
Works."

Personal Remarks: Arthur Pinero (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Feb. 9,
1895.                                            [Not reprinted.

Dandies and Dandies. _Vanity_ (New York). Feb. 14, 1895.

Dandies and Dandies. _Vanity_ (New York). Feb. 21, 1895.

The above have been reprinted with additions and alterations in "The
Works."

Personal Remarks: The Rt. Hon. Sir William Vernon Harcourt
(Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, Feb. 23, 1895.       [Not reprinted.

Dandies and Dandies. _Vanity_ (New York). Feb. 28, 1895.

The above has been reprinted with additions and alterations in "The
Works."

Personal Remarks: Earl Spencer (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, March 9,
1895.                                            [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Arthur Balfour (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, March 16,
1895.                                            [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: S. B. Bancroft (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, March 23,
1895.                                             [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Paderewski (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, March 30,
1895.                                            [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Colonel North (Caricature). _Pick-Me-Up_, April 6,
1895.                                            [Not reprinted.

Personal Remarks: Alfred de Rothschild. _Pick-Me-Up_, April 20, 1895.
                                                 [Not reprinted.

Merton. (The Warden of Merton.) _The Octopus_, May 25, 1895. A
Caricature.                                      [Not reprinted.

Seen on the Towpath. _The Octopus_, May 29, 1895. A Caricature.
                                                 [Not reprinted.

An Evening of Peculiar Delirium. _The Sketch_, July 24, 1895.
                                                 [Not reprinted.

Notes in Foppery. _The Unicorn_, Sept. 18, 1895.

Notes in Foppery. _The Unicorn_, Sept. 25, 1895.

The above have been reprinted with additions and alterations in "The
Works," under the title of "Dandies and Dandies."

Press Notices on "Punch and Judy," selected by Max Beerbohm. _The
Sketch_, Oct. 16, 1895 (p. 644).                 [Not reprinted.

Be it Cosiness. _The Pageant_, Christmas, 1895, pp. 230-235.

Reprinted in "The Works" under the title of "Diminuendo."

A parody of this appeared, under the title of "Be it Cosiness," by Max
Mereboom, in _Punch_, Dec. 21, 1895, p. 297.


1896.

A Caricature of Mr. Beerbohm Tree, a wood engraving after the drawing
by Max Beerbohm. _The Savoy_, No. 1, Jan. 1896, p. 125.
                                                 [Not reprinted.

A Good Prince. _The Savoy_, No. I, Jan. 1896, pp. 45-7.
                                           [Reprinted in "The Works."

De Natura Barbatulorum. _The Chap-Book_, Feb. 15, 1896, pp. 305-312.

The above has been reprinted with additions and alterations in "The
Works," under the title of "Dandies and Dandies."

Poor Romeo! _The Yellow Book_, Vol. IX., April '96, pp. 169-181.
                                           [Reprinted in "The Works."

A Caricature of Aubrey Beardsley. A wood engraving after the drawing by
Max Beerbohm. _The Savoy_, No. 2, April, 1896, p. 161.


PERSONALIA.

On the 24th instant, at 57 Palace Gardens Terrace, Kensington, the wife
of J. E. Beerbohm, Esq., of a son. _The Times_, Aug. 26, 1872.

A few words with Mr. Max Beerbohm. (An interview by Ada Leverson.) _The
Sketch_, Jan. 2, 1895, p. 439.

Max Beerbohm: an interview by Isabel Brooke Alder. _Woman_, April 29,
1896, pp. 8 & 9.

On Mr. Beerbohm leaving Oxford in July 1895, he took up his residence
at 19 Hyde Park Place, formerly the residence of another well-known
historian--W. C. Kinglake. _Woman_, April 29, 1896, p. 8.


PORTRAITS OF MR. MAX BEERBOHM.

Max Beerbohm in "Boyhood." _The Sketch_, Jan. 2, 1895, pp. 439.

Max Beerbohm. _Oxford Characters_. Lithographs by Will Rothenstein.
Part 6. _It is believed this artist did several pastels of Mr.
Beerbohm._

Portrait of Mr. Beerbohm standing before a picture of George the
Fourth, by Walter Sickert.

Mr. Max Beerbohm. _Woman_, April 29, 1896, p. 8.


Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
London & Edinburgh




[Illustration: John Lane--Catalog of Publications in Belles Lettres]

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_ROBERTSON_ (_JOHN M._).

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_THIMM_ (_CARL A._).

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Poems. With frontispiece, title-page, and cover design by Laurence
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_WATSON_ (_WILLIAM_).

Excursions in Criticism; being some Prose Recreations of A Rhymer. Cr.
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Sappho. Memoir, text, selected renderings, and a literal translation by
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                                                 [Third Edition.


The Yellow Book

_An Illustrated Quarterly. Pott 4to, 5s. net._

Volume    I. April 1894, 272 pp., 15 Illustrations. [_Out of print_.

Volume   II. July 1894, 364 pp., 23 Illustrations.

Volume  III. October 1894, 280 pp., 15 Illustrations.

Volume   IV. January 1895, 285 pp., 16 Illustrations.

Volume    V. April 1895, 317 pp., 14 Illustrations.

Volume   VI. July 1895, 335 pp., 16 Illustrations.

Volume  VII. October 1895, 320 pp., 20 Illustrations.

Volume VIII. January 1896, 406 pp., 26 Illustrations.




[End of _The Works of Max Beerbohm_ by Max Beerbohm]