Art. 2.—MODES AND MANNERS.

Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century as represented in the Pictures and Engravings of the Time. Translated from the German of Dr Oskar Fischel and Max von Boehn. Four vols. Dent, 1927.

IN estimating the value of a great man's career, his social usefulness, the quality of his personality, the quality of his works, his influence and abiding position in politics, art or science, a century makes a sufficient and convenient period of time. But in the world of fashion and manners a century is not so helpful; for the ways of dress and of general behaviour follow no such definite course even as is the case with a wayward genius. Birth, marriage, and death are definite milestones in a man's life; but with fashion there seems to be no rule but only fancy; its milestones are haphazard; and many of its reactions have proved mere freakishness.

The authors of the interesting, amusing and very well illustrated work now under review have been wise enough to interpret the 19th century widely. Their study of modes and manners begins at the outbreak of the French Revolution with the Fall of the Bastille, and ends with the opening crash of the Great War; so that while they recognise the impossibility of limiting arbitrarily any movement in the ever-uncertain commonwealth of fashions and social behaviour, they have seen that one definite epoch of magnificent artificiality ended in 1798; and that another epoch, full of occasional artifice yet not so consciously splendid and containing plenty of reality, came to its close in August 1914.

Yet even the one hundred and sixteen years which, for convenience' sake, Dr Fischel and Herr von Boehn have taken as their 19th century, mark no orderly progress or inevitable ebb of retrogression so far as popular fashions and manners are concerned; for within that period we had, almost as rapidly and elaborately changeable as the designs of a vast kaleidoscope, such amazing varieties of feminine costumes-and women are ever the first victims, as well as the queens of fashion-as the 'hobble skirt' and the enormous crinoline, the waspwaist, the very hideous 'bustle' of forty years ago,

which appropriately was accompanied by leg-of-mutton sleeves and the pork-pie hat (the Shade of Mantalini might well cry Howwid'!), the long train which swept the dust and filth of the pavements, in those days less resolutely cleaned than now, and the leg atrocities of Mrs Amelia Bloomer, of Seneca Falls, Ohio, who through the militant propagation of her views aroused a furore, until a London brewer innocently killed the craze by making his barmaids wear 'bloomers.'

Extremes were flaunted brazenly within that hundred years. The Merveilleuses,' who after the Terror wore next to nothing and did it very well, represented the nearest possible approach to Nature-another small triumph for the teachings of J. J. Rousseau; one leader of the period, a lady of society, wearing 'rings on her bare feet, while silk tights and a transparent chemise open to the knee composed the remainder of her costume.' Including shoes and ornaments, the complete clothing of a lady of fashion in 1800, it is alleged, was not allowed to weigh more than eight ounces. Of course, there was reaction from those daring insufficiencies. The exaggerations of the hoops, the multiplicity of petticoats of flannel, and later of silk, high necks and pompous sleeves, were called for with all the mute insistent voices of propriety and the dress-designers, who had come to regard light-wear as naked and unprofitable. So absolute did the opposite extreme then become that it is easy to believe the assertion that in 1859, when woman's dress had reached its largest circumference, a tulle costume consisting of four skirts, each trimmed with ruches, required 1100 yards of material.

It is needless to linger over so enticing a subjectbliss and a godsend to the humorists and caricaturistsas extravagance in feminine costume; especially as the absurdities of men in their sartorial display have not been very far behind those of their wives and sisters. A glance through the pages of Mr Punch, beyond all others the best of social historians, brings to mind, and possibly to mirth, truly dreadful visions of pegtop trousers, chimney-pot hats, weeping whiskers, curled wigs, dyed and unbalanced mustachios, embroidered waistcoats, ostentatious jewellery, showing an infinite display of tailor-made foppishness; the folly, generally

ugly, of a season, soon to be succeeded by another sort of corresponding extravagance equally bold and bad. It was an opportunity for the thrusting philosophy of Thomas Carlyle and was fully used by him in his 'Sartor Resartus,' with its ironic vision of the members of the House of Commons, at a time when that assembly was unfailingly well dressed and dignified, meeting unclad and, therefore, with all their influence gone.

The pursuit of fashion in costume through its manifold changes is fascinating; but the truth must not be lost sight of that it is the excess, the extreme, the extravagance, which catches the eye and keeps the attention, and not the normal style which, after all, is required, as clothing is necessitated, by the conditions of climate and the health and comfort of the body. The fripperies change but not the foundations. The truth of the uses of extravagance was recognised and exploited by Oscar Wilde, in his violent and, happily, brief régime. To be notorious one must be almost outrageous. One's pose and wit must be as loud as an advertisement, and in his case it was an advertisement. It is easy to laugh at Reginald Bunthorne and his gushing tribe, the angular, flower-adoring, long-haired, velveteen-clad poseurs; and, indeed, that floppy fraternity and sisterhood strove frankly and earnestly to win the laughter, and even the ridicule, which brought the small fame that was the only fame available to them. Yet, looked at with critical eyes, is this, our age, free from a similar blatancy, a more or less corresponding though less sophisticated loudness of appearance and costume? It is unnecessary to turn moralist yet in these meditations; but while we may think complacently of the spreading crinoline-which yet caused women to move gracefully, as Trelawney of the Wells' has shown-and the greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery' inanities of Wilde and his forgotten companions, it may be remembered that our grandmothers in their youth, though possibly they might now be sometimes regarded as dowdy, at least avoided the fidgety brevity of the ultra-modern skirt, the silly bondage of the cigarette, the open parade of the vanity glass and the bag of cosmetics and, worst of all, the nasty vulgarity of the lipstick.

It is, however, needless as yet to estimate the value

and tendencies of present fashions, especially as it is important to judge from the normal and not from the abnormal. After all, the real ruler in these things is the woman or man of taste, and not the 'flapper' of either sex; and it is very interesting in making this broken survey of a century of change to see what our forebears did habitually, and how we have, or have not, improved on their practices; how they dressed and comported themselves; walked, danced, flirted, rode and played their games; how they behaved at and after Church, at the opera, and in Parliament-what a fallingoff seems to be there!-for it well may be that in this social inquest we shall discover remediable faults in our modern manners; and assuredly, watching the rushing and the racing, the restlessness of the silly social day, we should be better for a dose or two of Turveydrop, even if we do not wish to recover the full bloom and flavour of that ripely artificial flower, Beau Brummel.

Self-respect is the safeguard of modes and manners; and it is curious to recognise how often that quality seems to have been wanting in the years that are gone-a real self-respect, I mean; and not a mistaken convention. This, anyhow, is a cleaner day. Soap boilers make easy fortunes now; and men sing with gusto in their baths. It is well known that many a good house, built even in the later Victorian days, has had to be adapted and sometimes reconstructed because it lacked that first necessity of home-life, a bath-room. The Saturday evening hip-bath was often the nearest approach to cleanliness practised by those who knew it to be the virtue put next to godliness; yet our fathers then were godly enough with their conscientious church-going and their family prayers:

'The slight value attached to cleanliness during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries is well known; in Spain, the bath was forbidden as a heathen abomination. The renowned Queen Margaret of Navarre, of courtly life, washed herself at the oftenest once a week, and then only her hands. The roi soleil never washed himself; and the single bathing-tub to be found at his time at Versailles-the bath-room being considered a superfluity, and therefore devoted to other pur poses than washing-was not discovered, and then quite accidentally, before the days of the Pompadour, and was then

placed in the garden for a fountain. Such being the habits of the time, it will be understood with what disapprobation it was said of Napoleon that he washed too much!' (Vol. I, p. 80.)

That this is no exaggeration is corroborated by some private testimony that came from a lady who was in waiting in the days of the Second Empire. It is a fact that even then not only were there no baths in the Palace of the Tuileries but no water was laid on and every drop of it used for any purpose had to be carried upstairs. The passage quoted takes us back to an earlier day than these volumes illustrate; but it is so apt in pointing an argument, and so amusing in itself, that it was impossible to ignore it, especially as the reference to the Emperor Napoleon marks the clear change, the positive uplift, to better things in regard to soap and water; though his reputation in that respect really was not too beautiful.

Nowadays we recognise the salutary effects of water, outwardly applied; and never have the English been so careless over washing and bathing themselves as, at any rate, some of their European neighbours; partly because as a nation we led in out-door sports and healthy recreations, and must wash for comfort afterwards; but also because we early got rid of the ugly theory, cultivated by the medieval Church, that it was necessary to mortify the body by suffering filth and lice and eczema, and, therefore, to wash was to pamper the weak flesh; a vanity and an open invitation to Satan. The extraordinarily unpleasant condition of the body of Archbishop Thomas Becket, as discovered at his martyrdom, has been told for all to read by Dean Stanley; and Gibbon's amusing footnote about the old nun who at the celebration of her seventy years' incarceration in a convent boasted that during the whole of that time she had not once washed her body but only the tips of her fingers on the days when she was to receive the Communion, is significant.

Let it be recognised that such a dirty idea of what is virtuous and proper has been for very long past; though only the other day insanitary conditions prevailed which now would not be tolerated (though the slums are still with us); and for this the sanity of sanitation, the wise