Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 355, May 1845

We come, therefore, to our last remaining class of coats, and here we halt with a hum of approbation: it would be hard indeed were we to pull the modern dandy to pieces, and leave him no protection against the wintry blast. Yes! the frock or surtout is good! we have little or nothing to say against it, – much in its favour. Utility and elegance are at once seen combined in this garment; it is warm, easy to wear, and comfortable it is of graceful and dignified appearance, and it is becoming, to man at all periods of his life. The frock-coat is nothing more than the ancient tunic opened in front, and made to sit tight upon the upper part of the body: the superior half of it shows the form of the wearer to advantage, and imparts to it a due degree of manly rigidity, while the inferior half partakes of the flowing folds of drapery, and gives warmth and covering down to the very knees. Of all garments that are to have any degree of freedom and looseness about them, the frock-coat is the best: it is good for a man in almost any avocation, and may be made suitable for the common business of life, as well as for the refinements of society. But then it should not be worn open: it should be buttoned upon the breast. Place an officer in his plain closely-buttoned undress coat by the side of a civilian, with his loose and open frock, and the contrast is so decidedly in favour of the former, that the point, as a matter of taste and effect, will not admit of a dispute. The one is a regular sloven compared with the other. If any thing can be said against this buttoning, it is on the score of inconvenience in civil life: – is a man at his library-table or his office-desk always to be fastened up in buckram? where are we to stow away our watches, our knives, our toothpicks, our loose cash (when we have any —par parenthèse)? There is some weight in these objections; for these little articles of comfort cannot be dispensed with; and we have no better answer than to propose small external pockets with lapels, which would not spoil the symmetry of the figure; or else, if you are obstinate, good reader, and are determined on throwing away your money upon waistcoats – then keep your frock-coat open; but have a waistcoat either of the same colour, or of some respectable hue, and have it made jacket-fashion, as good behind as before. For ourselves, however, we confess we shall prefer

"That you, my friend, whatever wind should blow,Might traverse England safely to and fro,An honest man, close-button'd to the chin, —Broad-cloth without, and a warm heart within."

Any quantity of ornament that might be deemed requisite, could easily be applied to this kind of coat – so as to make it a fit habiliment for occasions of ceremony: in its present state, it retains the stiffness of its military origin, (for it may be called an invention of the Great Duke's, of him who wore it on the glorious fields of Salamanca and Waterloo, and it came into fashion at the close of the Peninsular war:) but it may be embroidered as much as you please, or its stuff may be varied ad infinitum, from Manchester fustian to the finest Genoa velvet. Not that embroidery is always consonant with good taste, when applied to male attire. A plain, dark, close-buttoned coat, whether of cloth or velvet, fastened with a single row of diamond or steel buttons in front, would be far more effective, as an object of good taste, than if its seams were all covered with gold lace.

As for the colour of coats, we do not intend to speak of this till we come to the subject of military costume. We leave it awhile to the taste of the nation, – colours have always served as marks of national differences. We beg leave to subjoin a few words in behalf of a poor little garment that has hardly any grown-up friends to say any thing for it; and which, when it left school, either went into a manufactory, or was sent to sea – we mean the jacket. In warm weather, for a country walk, for a ride, for a game at billiards or cricket, even for shooting, (experto crede) – a jacket is a capital contrivance; while for a sail, whether down the Thames or up the Mediterranean, it is indispensable. We do not appreciate the jacket as we ought, or rather we do not remember the good service it did us at Eton and Harrow – when the limbs were free and supple, and when their full activity was called into constant play, who would have thought of a coat? It was only when we began to fancy ourselves men, and to think that our claims to virility lay in the skirts of our coats, that we discarded the jacket. 'Twas an ungrateful proceeding: – school friendships ought not to be broken – and we recommend you, courteous reader, some day or other to lay your dignity aside for a while, and indulge in the innocent freedom of a jacket: you will get through any work you have on hand twice as quickly. The beaux of Queen Elizabeth's and King Jamie's courts wore nothing else but jackets, you know, with their short mantles hanging in the most dégagé manner from the shoulders: – and truly we do not see why a man in a well-cut jacket, properly decorated, should not be entitled to as much admiration in his civil capacity, as when he has the honour to hold her Majesty's commission in the Tenth, and avails himself of that privilege to disturb the equanimity of the beauty and fashion of England. Much may be said upon all sides in this matter: the jacket would now be deemed too familiar without a sword and sabretache; the frock might be considered as slovenly; about the habit-de-cour there can be no dispute; as for the dress-coat, it ought to be sent to Monmouth Street; waistcoats should be given to your valet. Speedily judge for yourself, tasty reader; but let us have a garment calculated for real use, and real ornament; no pretence, no sham; a fine manly figure, and a covering worthy of it, voilà la chose essentielle!

To criticize a gown is always a more pleasing task than to waste one's patience upon a coat; and, independently of this, the æsthetician has to lay aside nearly all terms of reprobation, in alluding to the habiliments of ladies of the present day. Women have never wandered into so many absurdities of form with regard to this main article of dress, as men have; they have been volatile enough in the material, and colour, and ornament of their gowns; but in shape and cut they have kept much nearer to the golden rule of comfort and utility than the lords of the creation. The period of greatest aberration in this matter may be taken as extending from the latter quarter of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. During those long years, absurdity and inconvenience seemed to hold paramount sway in the wardrobes of the fair; and to apply the word "taste," in its good sense, to any portion of the female dress, at least in England, is hardly allowable within the limits mentioned. Look at your grandmothers' pictures, or turn over the leaves of any edition of Hogarth's works, and the broadness of the caricature cannot fail to strike you. That women should ever have consented so greatly to travestie the beautiful proportions of their fair frames; that they should ever have so completely lost sight of the main principles of decoration and comeliness, is inconceivable. The mischief all originated in France; and it must have come, in the first instance, from the deformity, either of body or mind, of some crabbed old dowager at Versailles; no young unsophisticated girl would ever of herself have invented the hoop or the négligé. But those times have happily gone by; and after passing through a transition state of minor absurdity – (look to the prints of the Belle Assemblée from 1800 to 1815) – we have thrown away all unnatural short waists; we have discarded scanty skirts; stomachers have been sent nearly to the right about; and with the exception of a single opisthodomic folly – to which we do not care to allude more particularly – our better halves, and our fair friends, seem to have entered upon an age of good taste and good sense. The happy change has been brought about partly by some women of good sense consulting their own ideas of utility and simplicity – partly by a return of public taste to the dresses of the middle ages, and also of the times of Charles the First. Ladies have at length become aware, that novelty of form is not essential to beauty of effect – and they have opened their eyes to the truth, that the less they disfigure the proportions of their persons, the more becomingly and the more comfortably will they be clad.

The main divisions of lady's gown – every milliner understands what we mean – are the corsage or body, and the jupe or skirt. They are as independent of each other as the upper and lower divisions of a wasp – (indeed, some giddy girls have carried the similitude too far, and have been seen to approximate in their lacing contractions to that wonderfully small animal passage) – and these two divisions of the garment are to be formed and ornamented on totally different principles. By the common practice and consent of all womankind, it appears that the lower portion should be loose and flowing; and that the upper should be so conformable to the contour of the body, as to show that contour to the best advantage; these must be taken as the fundamental definitions upon which all laws of female dress are to be tried. And, first of all, of the skirt; if its form is to be loose and flowing, it should be made to derive its beauty from the curves and breaks and folds which drapery, partly suspended, partly at rest on the ground, will afford. It must be ample and symmetrically proportioned; and its material must have sufficient stiffness as well as pliability – drapery always requires a certain volume of material to be effective. The extreme limit of a scanty skirt, and its poor effect, as well as its great inconvenience, may be judged of from the figures and pictures of the old Egyptian priestesses – they look very statuesque, and make capital caryatides for temples – but they will not bear a comparison with those lovely Athenian virgins, winding round the Parthenon, in their sacred pilgrimage to the shrine of their tutelar goddess. Drapery, then, must be ample, if it is to fall in graceful folds. But drapery, only suspended, will not produce the entire effect desired; it will hang in merely longitudinal lines, whereas one of the most pleasing effects produced by it is caused by those abrupt breaks in a fold, those sudden cuttings off of volutes, which are only to be seen when part of the drapery is in horizontal repose, or rests partially on the ground. Hence short gowns are not so graceful as long ones; they are beautiful at any time, it is true, and when the wearer is seated, produce somewhat of the effect alluded to; but for a woman to be robed with all the combined influences of grace and dignity, she must allow her dress to trail partially around her. Think upon the short garments of many classes of peasantry, and think of the train of a lady when dressed for court – we speak of their form, not of their substance – it will easily be seen how much dignity is conferred by length. The utility of long skirts is not so easy to be proved as their beauty; but this is only on the score of the difficulty in keeping them clean; as for warmth and comfort, the advantage is quite on their side. Our fair contemporaries, however, seem to have arrived at a reasonable and happy medium upon that point; they never wore better-formed skirts than at the present day. A gown, if properly made, and without any stinting of stuff, and if that stuff have any thing like substance, needs no adventitious aids to give it sufficient amplitude of contour; let our gentle readers take the hint; they will otherwise militate against one of the main laws of good taste. Let them only look at the portraits of their ancestors in the middle of the last century but one – let them look at Hollar's prints, and if they are open to conviction they will agree in what we say.

If the skirt is to be ample, the body should be confined to the natural shape of the human frame; and the more nearly it is so, the more graceful and effective will it become. Do what we will, distort the sleeves and waist as much as we may, we shall never come up to the symmetry of Dame Nature; she is a better milliner than any in Regent Street; and if the ladies would have their corsages made after her pattern in all cases, they would find their clothes fitting better, pinching less, and keeping them much warmer. Women assert – and we are not competent to dispute the point with them – that they need an enveloping support for the body; in fact, that they must have corsets: be it so: there is no harm in the article itself, provided the utility of it can be clearly proved; but there is much harm in it, if, by an abuse of its powers, this same thing is made to distort the body, and to injure the internal organization of the human frame. As far as beauty of form is concerned, whatever intrenches on the proportion of natural shape is intrinsically contradictory to it: let no woman imagine that she has a fine figure, if she can lace herself into a diameter of nine or ten inches; for by so doing, she disturbs the harmony of all the curves – all the lines of beauty, as Hogarth calls them – with which she has been so richly endowed; she fails of her effect, and, instead of beauty, produces only absurdity. Still the corsage of her dress should fit close; and for this to be possible, there must be a well-fitting corset beneath; but it need not pinch or squeeze the least in the world; let it fit close; that is enough. It is no doubt uncommonly convenient for a lusty alderman's wife of forty to reduce herself to the proportions of "fair seventeen;" but she ought to be able to reduce the whole frame in the same ratio; otherwise to pull in at the waist till the idea of suffocation is painfully evident to the most careless beholder, and yet to leave the bust with the symmetry of Minerva Victrix, is a gross and palpable absurdity. Far from being the το χαλον, this is the το χαχον of all female decoration.

And, if the waist should not be metamorphosed into unnatural smallness, so the sleeves should not be puffed out into preternatural enlargement. Those abominable gigot-sleeves, so well named from our old familiar family-joint – they were utter abominations; and those bishop's sleeves – they were foolish caricatures. Ladies are doing much better now: either, in the evening, they trust to nature herself to set off their arms as she pleases, or else, in the morning, they envelope them in a covering that hardly destroys the beauty of their form. This is as it should be: one of the principal characteristics of female grace consists, as any sculptor can tell you, in the narrowness of the shoulders – just as of male dignity, in their breadth. What, then, could ever have made ladies suppose that they were ornamenting themselves by extending the upper portions of their sleeves until they measured full three feet in a direct transversal line? We are now witnesses of better ideas; the neck, the shoulders, and the arms are allowed to make a continuous series of curves. The corsage is simple in its form, and the only attempt at enrichment is the pendant border of lace, or other material, that gives due relief, without destroying the harmony of the outline.

As for form, then, we congratulate the ladies on having attained and preserved so much excellence in their habiliments. We have only to recommend, that they do not rashly try to innovate upon what they now delight in; or rather, if new ideas are to be introduced, that they control them by a perpetual reference to the form and framework of nature, as their best, indeed their only, guide to what is true and beautiful. Thanks to the manufacturing skill of European nations in general, and of our own more particularly, there is no lack of material for women to choose their dresses from. The loom teems with all kinds of substances; and every requirement of climate, every caprice of fancy, can now be gratified at a reasonable rate. One of the best symptoms of taste amongst Englishwomen is the increasing use of the finer woollen fabrics. They are well suited to the climate, and they are calculated to make graceful habiliments in whatever manner they are employed. But cotton is an immense boon for the mass of the population; and, by contributing to the cleanliness of the lower orders, has been of great value to the health of the community. The fact is, that it is of little consequence what an elegant woman wears, as far as her appearance is concerned. All clothes require, as the French say, to be bien portés. An awkward woman will never look well in any thing, however fine. Let ladies consult their own comfort, their own purposes, and the material they hit upon will certainly become them. We have now, too, ample means of decoration: furs, and lace, and ribands, and embroidery, are gradually coming within the grasp of large classes of society; we have to fear rather a deluge of ornament than the opposite; and, if caution is to be used in any direction, it is in this. The true secret of female ornament is, that it should be genuine: no sham flowers; no make-believe lapels; no collars only stitched on to the edge of the gown; no bows that do not untie; no ribands without some positive use; all false ornament should be avoided as the direct contrary to what is tasteful and becoming. If lace is worn, let it be of thread or silk – not of cotton; if fur, let it be from the real animal – not dyed or imitated; if jewels, let them be few but good, and set in real gold – no abominable sham decoration.

And what are we to say about cloaks, and pelisses, and shawls, and the other preservers of gowns, that correspond to the outward comforters of man? They flutter about in shop windows, thick as gnats in a summer sunbeam: many of them are elegant; not a few useful; some are quite loves! – witness the polka-pelisse – others are frumpy and old-fashioned; such as the cloak with a deep cape of ever-to-be-respected maternal memory. But there are two which we single out as simple and unspoiled, and indeed unspoilable, items of dress, which ought to be in fashion as long as women love pretty things. One is the Spanish mantilla; that plain black scarf which forms the sweetest disguisement a woman can put on: by its simplicity, and its obvious utility, it claims our approbation at the first glance. The other is the Indian shawl; that marvellous product of the mountain loom, fit for any climate, for any temperature, for any complexion, and for any purpose; women may rack their inventions for ever, but they never will invent a garment more generally useful, more constantly becoming, than this.

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS

No. IVDryden on Chaucer

Nothing is gained by attempting to deny or to disguise a known and plain fact, simply because it happens to be a distasteful one – Time has estranged us from Chaucer. Dryden and Pope we read with easy, unearned pleasure. Their speech, their manner of mind, and their facile verse, are of our age, almost of our own day. The two excellent, graceful, and masterly poets belong, both of them, to THIS NEW WORLD. Go back a little, step over an imperceptible line, to the contemporary of Dryden, Milton, and you seem to have overleaped some great chronological boundary; you have transported yourself into THAT OLD WORLD. Whether the historical date, or the gigantic soul, or the learned art, make the separation, the fact is clear, that the poet of the "Paradise Lost" stands decidedly further off; and, more or less, you must acquire the taste and intelligence of the poem. Why, up to this hour, probably, there are three-fifths of the poem that you have not read; or, if you have read all, and go along with all, you have yourself had experience of the progress, and have felt your capacity of Milton grow and dilate. So has it been with your capacity for Shakspeare, or you are a truant and an idler. To comprehend with delight Milton and Shakspeare as poets, you need, from the beginning, a soul otherwise touched, and gifted for poesy, than Pope claims of you, or Dryden. The great elder masters, being original, require of you springs of poesy welling in your own spirit; while the two latter, imitative artists of luxury, exact from you nothing more, in the way of poetical endowment, than the gusto of ease and luxurious enchantment. To prefer, for some intellectual journey, the smooth wafture of an air-gliding ear – to look with pleasure upon a dance of bright-hued images – to hear more sweetness in Philomela's descant than in a Turkish concert – to be ever so little sensible to the bliss of dreams – ever so little sick of reality, and ever so little glad to be rid of it for an hour – is qualification enough to make you a willing and able reader of verse in the latter school. But if you are to prefer the style of the antecessors, other conditions must come in. It is, then, not a question merely whether you see and love in Imogen the ideal of a wife in love with her husband, or take to the surpassing and inimitable portraiture of the "lost archangel" in Satan; but whether you feel the sweetness of Imogen's soul in the music of her expressions – whether you hear the tones of the Will that not the thunder has quelled, in that voice to which all "the hollow deep of hell resounded." If you do, assuredly you will perceive in yourself that these are discernments of a higher cast, and that place you upon a higher degree when critics on poetry come to be ranked, than when you had nothing better to say for yourself than that your bosom bled at the Elegy on an Unfortunate Young Lady, or that you varied with Alexander to the varying current of the Ode of St Cecilia's Day.

We call Chaucer the Father of our Poetry, or its Morning Star. The poetical memory of the country stretches up to him, and not beyond. The commanding impression which he has made upon the minds of his people dates from his own day. The old poets of England and Scotland constantly and unanimously acknowledge him for their master. Greatest names, Dunbar, Douglas, Spenser, Milton, carry on the tradition of his renown and his reign.

In part he belongs to, and in part he lifts himself out of, his age. The vernacular poetry of reviving Europe took a strong stamp from one principal feature in the manners of the times. The wonderful political institution of Chivalry – turned into a romance in the minds of those in whose persons the thing itself subsisted – raised up a fanciful adoration of women into a law of courtly life; or, at the least, of courtly verse, to which there was nothing answerable in the annals of the old world. For though the chief and most potent of human passions has never lacked its place at the side of war in the song that spoke of heroes – though two beautiful captives, and a runaway wife bestowed by the Goddess of Beauty, and herself the paragon of beauty to all tongues and ages, have grounded the Iliad– though the Scæan gate, from which Hector began to flee his inevitable foe, and where that goddess-born foe himself stooped to destiny, be also remembered for the last parting of a husband and a wife – though Circe and Calypso have hindered homebound Ulysses from the longing arms of Penelope – and Jason, leading the flower of a prior and yet more heroic generation, must first win the heart of Medea before he may attain the Golden Fleece – though the veritable nature of the human being have ever thus, through its strongest passion, imaged itself in its most exquisite mirror, Poetry – yet there did, in reawaking Europe, a new love-poetry arise, distinctively characterised by the omnipotence which it ascribed to the Love-god, legitimating in him an usurped supremacy, and exhibiting, in artificial and wilful excess, that passion which the older poets drew in its powerful but unexaggerated and natural proportions.

Thenceforwards the verse of the South and of the North, and alike the forgotten and the imperishable, all attest the predominancy of the same star. Diamond eyes and ruby lips stir into sound the lute of the Troubadours and the Minnesingers. Famous bearers of either name were knights distinguished in the lists and in the field. And who is it that stole from heaven the immortal fire of genius for Petrarch? Laura. Who is the guide of Dante through Paradise? Beatrice. In our own language, the spirit of love breathes, more than in any other poet, in Spenser. His great poem is one Lay of Love, embodying and associating that idealized, chivalrous, and romantic union of "fierce warres and faithful loves." It hovers above the earth in some region exempt from mortal footing – wars such as never were, loves such as never were – and all – Allegory! One ethereal extravagance! A motto may be taken from him to describe that ascendancy of the love-planet in the poetical sky of renewed Europe. It alludes to the love-freaks of the old Pagan deities upon earth, in which the King of the Gods excelled, as might be supposed, all the others.