Under The Crinoline II

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

Mr. Lewisohn's observation on the crinoline springs, explains the Professor, from the recent advance in scientific analysis of the moral temperature. The crinoline has been sufficiently damned on other counts. The standard condemnation is that summed up with especial terseness and vigor by a writer who terms it "the ugliest, most meaningless, and most fantastic dress ever donned by woman in Europe." The familiar grounds for hostility have been aesthetic.

How account for the miraculous vitality of the costume which arose from the dead again and yet again? It must have seemed heavenly to ladies in numbers untold. Utterances in defense of it are curiously hard to find, though a few instances are discoverable. It is curious that these are all taken from great artists of one kind or another.

Thackeray's predilection for the crinoline, indeed, betrayed him into a curious deflection from artistic integrity. Becky Sharp, of course, is forever real in her psychology; the Victorian master did not balk at that. But when he came to make his delectable little pen drawings of her, he was false to Becky's underwear!

In Vanity Fair are heard the guns of Waterloo. Becky, with her blonde ringlets, her eyes "very large, odd and attractive," and her indomitable chin, and the other feminine "puppets" should have been delineated in the scant fashions of 1815. Instead, the plates portray the ample styles of 1848—the period of the swelling approach of the crinoline. In a naive confession of his sentimental misdoing the author states, in a footnote to the novel, that it was his intention, "faithful to history, to depict all the characters of this tale in their proper costumes, as they wore them at the commencement of the century." But he continues, "When I remember the appearance of people in those days, and that an officer and lady were actually habited like this [accompanying small drawing], I have not the heart to disfigure my heroes by costumes so hideous; and have, on the contrary, engaged a model of rank dressed according to the present fashion."

This extraordinary case of an anachronism at the source naturally has resulted in considerably confusing our visualizing Becky. For instance, Mr. Frederic Dorr Steele, who a few years ago took occasion to call attention to Thackeray's discrepancy, at the same time made a charming drawing of Becky—in a dress far more Victorian than Empire in style. And another delightful drawing, ostensibly a representation of Becky, by Mr. Albert Sterner, presents a figure in the most fullblown sort of crinoline. Becky as seen on the stage is permanently associated with Minnie Maddern Fiske who, in Becky Sharp by Langdon Mitchell, first presented at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1899 and frequently revived during the next dozen years, is indelibly fixed in the memory as a vivid figure 0f the Waterloo period.

The point is this. Thackeray felt that the fashion which was just out of fashion was "hideous," though history much esteems the costume. But for the styles amid which he wrote, so much reviled as ridiculous and hideous (and, according to Mr. Lewisohn, even worse), he entertained a sentimental regard.

From the quaint but amateurish dalliance of Thackeray with fashion drawing let us proceed to a nineteenth century draughtsman who knew how to draw magnificently—a pictorial connoisseur of fashion who caught the rustle of frou-frou as hardly any other has ever caught it. The dean of American art critics, speaking 0f Gavarni and his ability to render the "animated elegance" of a Parisienne's toilet, says: "Crinoline has gone down the wind as, among other things, cumberous and thereby awkward, but for the artist there was an element as of quicksilver in its flowing lines."

And a span of years after its passing, we may find at least one instance of a wistful aesthetic memory of the crinoline. "Sitting in my chair with half-closed eyes," writes Mr. George Moore in a justly celebrated chapter, "it seemed to me that I saw crinolines faintly gliding over the floor." He is reminded of Chelsea or Dresden figures. "Good God," he represents himself as exclaiming to his lady friend, "if you were to wear a crinoline I should love you beyond hope of repentance... . We might have searched the town for a crinoline. . . . We could hardly speak for excitement." The lady thought of how she would look in a crinoline, and Mr. Moore remembered the illustrations in an early edition of Balzac of which he was the happy possessor.

In these nostalgic pages Mr. Moore reveals that the remembrance of the crinoline, accompanied by the white stockings of his reverie, filled him with "a tenderness and melancholy" he "could not subdue." Mr. Moore does not remember stockings of any other kind in his youth. As a rule, indeed, the stockings worn with the crinoline were white.

The shoes of the preceding era had generally been discarded for high laced "boots." As the boots were black, this combination has been thought by some to have given "the finishing touch of ugliness" to the costume. However, both Manet and Whistler felt a note of beauty in white stockings with black boots.

The fact should be added to the record here that in the midst of the crinoline era, in 1859, Punch mentioned "the fashionable red stockings now so much worn." And in this same year a correspondent of this historic mirror of manners spoke of the "martial red petticoat," then apparently much in favor.

As the last quarter of the century approached, Marjorie's "foundation" changed, and the returning bustle displaced the hoop. Her feet quite disappeared, her skirts began to trail, and the train came in. The standard idea of womankind became that expressed in Christopher Morley's philosophical lines :

That women also were bisected
Was not admitted, though suspected.

When John Leech died in 1864, he was succeeded on Punch by that artists' artist, Charles Keene, and by George du Maurier. To Du Maurier was alloted the social scene, the little dramas of the dining- and drawing-rooms and the croquet-lawns of those of more or less Fashion. And so perhaps the best-known presentations of feminine styles from the middle sixties on to the nineties are those by the hand of the author of Trilby.

He found Marjorie greatly changed since Leech's time. Yes, she had changed like anything! She was no longer a human kitten or a Chelsea china doll, but an Olympian goddess—even when playing lawn-tennis. With the change in fashions had, of course, come a change in type. Marjorie had grown a head taller. Some people think that Du Maurier simply drew her that way, without considering that it was a fact. Well, practically. For the skirt rising comparatively straight from the floor at the sides, its length accentuated by a train trailing behind, could not but produce that effect.

Tall, serious, stately, dignified, she was no longer pretty as her grandmother had been—she was beautiful! Du Maurier in his reminiscences observes of the girls of this period: "They are so cultivated, and know such a lot—of books, of art, of science, of politics, and theology—of the world, the flesh, and the devil. They actually think for themselves; they have broken loose and jumped over the ring fence . . . to the dismay of their grandparents!" Adding that his love of them is "tinged with awe," Du Maurier compares them not to kittens but to a very different animal —"that mighty, beautiful, but most uncertain quadruped, the thoroughbred horse."

The bustle, the proudest bustle of all, was in full popularity around 1880. It may seem somewhat odd to us that the woman of the bustle had leaped over the fence, and all that. She had, at any rate, leaped out of her pantalettes. They were discarded in the early sixties.

Du Maurier was not unsuccessful in drawing a plausible Olympian goddess. His drawings of course represent only the externals of her apparel. At this period, when swelling skirts retained thir preeminence, it was Marjorie's practice to wear as many as eight petticoats. Beneath her corset she wore a chemise long as a nightgown. Over her corset, an "under-body," high-necked, and long-sleeved. Then, tied about her waist by drawstrings were straight, stiffly starched drawers, extending below the knee, and finished at the bottom with tucks and embroidery.