GENERAL REMARKS ON THE MANNERS AND FASHIONS OF THE PAST AND PRESENT TIMES.
“Manners with fortunes, humors turn with climes,
Tenets with books, and principles with times.”
POPE.
When Innocence left the world, astonished man blushed at his own and his partner’s nakedness, and coverings were soon invented. For many an age, the twisted foliage of trees, and the skins of beasts, were the only garments which clothed our ancestors. Decoration was unknown, excepting the wild flower, plucked from the luxuriant shrub, the shell from the beach, or the berry off the tree. Nature was then unsophisticated; and the lover looked for no other attraction in his bride, than the peach-bloom on her cheek—the downcast softness of her consenting eye.
In after times, when Avarice ploughed the earth, and Ambition bestrode it, the gem and the silken fleece, the various product of the loom, and the Tyrian mystery of dyes, all united to give embellishments to beauty, and splendor to majesty of mien. But even at that period, when the east and south laid their decorating riches at the feet of woman, we see, by the sculpture yet remaining to us, that the dames of Greece (the then exemplars of the world) were true to the simple laws of just taste. The amply-folding robe, cast round the harmonious form; the modest clasp and zone on the bosom; the braided hair, or the veiled head; these were the fashions alike of the wife of a Phocion, and the mistress of an Alcibiades. A chastened taste ruled at their toilets; and from that hour to this, the forms and modes of Greece have been those of the poet, the sculptor, and the painter.
Rome, queen of the world! the proud dictatress to Athenian and Spartan dames, disdained not to array herself in their dignified attire; and the statues of her virgins, her matrons, and her empresses, show, in every portico of her ancient streets, the graceful fashions of her Grecian province.
The irruption of the Goths and Vandals made it needful for women to assume a more repulsive garb. The flowing robe, the easy shape, the soft, unfettered hair, gave place to skirts, shortened for flight or contest—to the hardened vest, and head buckled in gold or silver.
Thence, by a natural descent, have we the iron boddice, stiff farthingale, and spiral coiffure, of the middle ages. The courts of Charlemagne, of our Edwards, Henries, and Elizabeth, all exhibit the figures of women as if in a state of siege. Such lines of circumvallation and outworks; such impregnable bulwarks of whale-bone, wood, and steel; such impassable mazes of gold, silver, silk, and furbelows, met a man’s view, that, before he had time to guess it was a woman that he saw, she had passed from his sight; and he only formed a vague wish on the subject, by hearing, from an interested father or brother, that the moving castle was one of the softer sex.
These preposterous fashions disappeared, in England, a short time after the Restoration; they had been a little on the wane during the more classic, though distressful reign of Charles I.; and what the beautiful pencil of Vandyke shows us, in the graceful dress of Lady Carlisle and Sacharissa, was rendered yet more correspondent to the soft undulations of nature, in the garments of the lovely, but frail beauties of the Second Charles’s court. But as change too often is carried to extremes, in this case the unzoned tastes of the English ladies thought no freedom too free; their vestments were gradually unloosened of the brace, until another touch would have exposed the wearer to no thicker covering than the ambient air.
The matron reign of Anne, in some measure, corrected this indecency. But it was not till the accession of the House of Brunswick, that it was finally exploded, and gave way by degrees to the ancient mode of female fortification, by introducing the hideous Parisian fashion of hoops, buckram stays, waists to the hips, screwed to the circumference of a wasp, brocaded silks stiff with gold, shoes with heels so high as to set the wearer on her toes; and heads, for quantity of false hair, either horse or human, and height to outweigh, and perhaps outreach, the Tower of Babel! These were the figures which our grandmothers exhibited; nay, such was the appearance I myself made in my early youth; and something like it may yet be seen at a drawing-room, on court-days.
When the arts of Sculpture and Painting, in their fine specimens from the chisels of Greece and the pencils of Italy, were brought into this country, taste began to mould the dress of our female youth after their more graceful fashion. The health-destroying boddice was laid aside; brocades and whale-bone disappeared; and the easy shape and flowing drapery again resumed the rights of nature and of grace. The bright hues of auburn, raven, or golden tresses, adorned the head in its native simplicity, putting to shame the few powdered toupees, which yet lingered on the brow of prejudice and deformity.
Thus, for a short time, did the Graces indeed preside at the toilet of the British beauty; but a strange caprice seems now to have dislodged these gentle handmaids. Here stands affectation distorting the form into a thousand unnatural shapes; and there, ill-taste, loading it with grotesque ornaments, gathered (and mingled confusedly) from Grecian and Roman models, from Egypt, China, Turkey, and Hindostan. All nations are ransacked to equip a modern fine lady; and, after all, she may perhaps strike a contemporary beau as a fine lady, but no son of nature could, at a glance, possibly find out that she meant to represent an elegant woman.
To impress upon your minds, my fair friends, that symmetry of figure ought ever to be accompanied by harmony of dress, and that there is a certain propriety in habiliment adapted to form, age, and degree, shall be the purport of my next observations.