Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (227 page)

About pictures: I have to see the ruining of so many fine pictures in the framing, by reason of the frame being out of all keeping with the picture. I don’t like to see the great, glaring, pretentious gold frames for fine pictures; use gold frames only where the picture can plainly bear it, and in all other cases picture frames should be tinted a middle tone between the picture and the wall. Oil paintings in gold frames should be richly hung with velvet bands, while water-colours and etchings should be suspended by cords.

Nothing is more saddening, nothing more melancholy, than having to look upon pictures hung in lines; you might as well set ten or twenty young girls on a platform playing one tune on pianos at the same time. Two pictures should not be hung side by side – they will either kill one another, or else commit artistic suicide; to stick them in rows makes me wonder why people like pictures at all. Your pictures may be hung with good effect upon a chocolate shade of paper, but not having geometrical figures, which distract the attention. They should be hung from a ledge under the frieze and should be hung also on the eye-line; the habit in America of hanging them up near the cornices struck me as irrational at first; it was not until I saw how bad the pictures were that I realised the advantage of the custom.

Put no photographs of paintings on your walls – they are libels on great masters; there is no way to get a worse idea of a painter than by a photograph of his work; I don’t think I ever saw a photograph that was a decoration, for the first thing you should see is its beauty of colour, and there is no colour of worth for decorative purposes in photographs. They are ridiculous pretences, and should be kept in portfolios to show to friends whose friendship is not treacherous. As a painting should be an exquisite arrangement of colours, so an engraving should be an exquisite arrangement of black and white, which the photograph never is. Most modern engravings are not good; they may be hung on walls, or framed in plain wood and placed on a shelf; woodcuts of masters like Doré may be framed in wood and hung on the walls.

Every house should have some good casts of old Greek work if possible. There can be no nobler influence in a room than a marble Venus of Milo: in the presence of an image so pure, no tongue would date to talk scandal. There should be casts of good men in the library.

And now books: an old library is one of the most beautifully coloured things imaginable; the old colours are toned down and they are so well bound, for whatever is beautiful is well made. Modern bookbinding is one of the greatest drawbacks to the beauty of many libraries — books are bound in all manner of gaudy colours. The best binding is white vellum, which in a few years looks like ivory, or calf, and with age takes on the tints of gold. You can’t have all your books rebound. The only thing left is to have curtains to hide them out of sight until a more tasteful style than the modern one of binding prevails. When I landed in Boston I found my old publisher, who had moved from London, binding my poems in all those dreadful colours which I had spent my youth trying to abolish; he might have spared me, I thought.

As regards dress: the true nobility of dress is an important part of education, but there is much in the dress of modern times to discourage us. If it were not for the lovely dressing of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the excellence of Venetian art would never have existed; but there is nothing in the styles of the present to give such models to the artists; I hardly dare suggest what must be the thought of the true sculptor when asked to work out the statue of a modern – his thought must be suicidal. There is nothing more indicative of moral decline than squalor and an indifference to dress: the money spent on modern dress is an extravagant waste.

People should not mar beautiful surroundings by gloomy dress; dress nowadays is altogether too sombre, and we should accustom ourselves to the use of more colour and brightness; there should always be a beautifully arranged composition of well-balanced light and shade. There would be more joy in life if we would accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes. The dress of the future, I think, will use drapery to a great extent and will abound with joyous colour.

One should have nothing on one’s dress that has not some meaning or that is not useful; beauty in dress consists in its simplicity – all useless and encumbering bows, flounces, knots, and other such meaningless things so fashionable today are nothing but the foolish inventions of the milliner. All the evil of modern dressing has come from the failure to recognise that the right people to construct our apparel are artists, and not modern milliners, whose chief aim is to swell their bills.

Nothing is beautiful, such as tight corsets, which is destructive of health; all dress follows out the lines of the figure – it should be free to move about in, showing the figure. Anything that disfigures the form or blots out the beauty of the natural lines is ugly, and so a knowledge of anatomy as well as art is necessary in correct dressmaking. If one could fancy the Medicean Venus taken from her pedestal in the Louvre to Mr Worth’s establishment in the Palais Royal to be dressed in modern French millinery, every single beautiful line would be destroyed, and no one would look at her a second time.

Go through a book of costumes, and you will find that when dress was most simple, it was most beautiful: one of the earliest forms is the ancient Greek drapery, which is most simple and so exquisite for your girls, but I must warn you that it is most difficult to design. And then I think we may be pardoned a little enthusiasm over the dress of the time of Charles II, so beautiful, indeed, that in spite of its invention being with the Cavaliers, it was copied by the Puritans. And the dress for the children at that time must not be passed over: it was a very golden age for the little ones; I don’t think that they have ever looked so lovely as they do in the pictures of that time. And the ladies might study the costumes of the old Venetian ladies and pattern after them. If something more modern is desired, the dress of the last century in England was also particularly generous and graceful: it can be found in the style of dress painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and by Gainsborough; there is nothing bizarre about it, and it is full of harmony and beauty. There should be nothing
outre
in dress; a man or woman of taste can so conform their dress that it will not merit disapproval but receive the praise of those who have an artistic eye.

Of all ugly things, nothing can exceed in ugliness artificial flowers, which, I am sure, none of you wear; and it is better not to wear any modern jewellery, since none of the designs are good. It is difficult to speak of the modern bonnet – there are no limits to indignation, but there are limits to language – for the modern bonnet is an irrational monstrosity not affording the wearer the slightest use: it does not keep the sun off in summer nor the rain off in winter. The large hat of the last century was more sensible and useful, and nothing is more graceful in the world than a broad-brimmed hat. We have lost the art of draping the human form and have even discarded the graceful cloak with its deep folds for the unnatural and ungraceful jacket; the cloak, on the other hand, is always graceful, and is the simplest and most beautiful drapery ever devised.

The uncomfortable character of our present dress is shown by our willingness to adopt a new fashion every three months. All really beautiful dress is durable too, and if the beautiful is obtained, economy would be secured also. In these days, when we have suffered so dreadfully from the incursions of the modern milliners, we hear ladies boast that they do not wear a dress more than once; in the old days, when the dresses were decorated with beautiful designs and worked with exquisite embroidery, ladies rather took a pride in bringing out the garment and wearing it many times, and handing it down to their daughters, as something precious and beautiful for them to wear – a process which I think would be quite appreciated by modern husbands and fathers when called upon to settle the bills.

And how shall men dress? Men say they don’t particularly care how they dress, and that it is little matter. I am bound to reply that I don’t believe them and don’t think that you do either. They dress in black and sober greys and browns because that is the custom, and their dress is not beautiful, either, in design, being careless and without harmony of style. In all my journeys through the country, the only well-dressed men I have seen in America were the miners of the Rocky Mountains; they wore a wide-brimmed hat which shaded their faces from the sun and protected them from the rain, and their flowing cloak, which is by far the most beautiful piece of drapery ever invented, may well be dwelt upon with admiration. Their high boots too were sensible and practical. These miners dressed for comfort and of course attained the beautiful. As I looked at them, I could not help thinking with regret of the time when these picturesque miners should have made their fortunes and would go West to assume again all the abomination of modern fashionable attire. Indeed, I made some of them promise that when they again appeared in the more crowded scenes of Eastern civilisation, they would still continue to wear their lovely costume, but I don’t believe they will.

The dress of the men of the last century was graceful; the gentlemen might study for their pattern the noble and beautiful attire of George Washington; that brave and great man dressed with taste, as did other American gentlemen of his day. Men should dress more in velvet – grey or brown or black – as it catches the light and shade, while broadcloth is ugly as it does not absorb the light. Trousers become dirty in the street; knee-breeches are more comfortable and convenient – prettier to look at, too, and easier to keep out of the mud; high boots in the streets keep the mud off, but low shoes and silk stockings should be used in the drawing room. Finally, cloaks should be worn instead of coats.

In conclusion, what is the relation of art to morals? It is sometimes said that our art is opposed to good morals; but on the contrary, it fosters morality. Wars and the clash of arms and the meeting of men in battle must be always, but I think that art, by creating a common intellectual atmosphere between all countries might, if it could not overshadow the world with the silvery wings of peace, at least make men such brothers that they would not go out to slay one another for the whim or folly of some king or minister as they do in Europe; for national hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest. And hence the enormous importance given to all the decorative arts in our English renaissance; we want children to grow up in England in the simple atmosphere of all fair things; the refining influence of art, begun in childhood, will be of the highest value to all of us in teaching our children to love what is beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and ugly. Then when a child grows up he learns that industrious we must be, but industry without art is simply barbarism.

For there never was an age that so much needed the spiritual ministry of art as the present. Today more than ever the artist and a love of the beautiful are needed to temper and counteract the sordid materialism of the age. In an age when science has undertaken to declaim against the soul and spiritual nature of man, and when commerce is ruining beautiful rivers and magnificent woodlands and the glorious skies in its greed for gain, the artist comes forward as a priest and prophet of nature to protest, and even to work against the prostitution or the perversion of what is lofty and noble in humanity and beautiful in the physical world, and his religion in its benefits to mankind is as broad and shining as the sun. There are grand truths and beauty in the Catholic pictorial art, and in the Protestant religious music, which no sectarian prejudices and no narrow-minded bigotry can keep the world from acknowledging and admiring. I urge you all not to become discouraged because ridicule is thrown upon those who have the boldness to run counter to popular prejudice; in time the true aesthetic principles will prevail. Throughout the world, in all times and in all ages, there have been those who have had the courage to advocate opinions that were for the time abhorred by the public. But if those who hold those opinions have the courage to maintain and defend them, it is absolutely certain that in the end the truth will prevail.

And so let it be for you to create an art that is made with the hands of the people, for the joy of the people too, an art that will be a democratic art, entering into the houses of the people, making beautiful the simplest vessels they contain, for there is nothing in common life too mean, in common things too trivial, to be ennobled by your touch, nothing in life that art cannot raise and sanctify.

A NOTE ON ILLUSION

In many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been made on that splendour of mounting which now characterises our Shakespearian revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the costumes of his actors, and that, could he see Mrs. Langtry’s production of
Antony and Cleopatra
, he would probably say that the play, and the play only, is the thing, and that everything else is leather and prunella. While as regards any historical accuracy in dress, Lord Lytton, in an article in the
Nineteenth Century
, has laid it down as a dogma of art that archaeology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any of Shakespeare’s plays, and the attempt to introduce it one of the stupidest pedantries of an age of prigs.

Lord Lytton’s position I shall examine later on; but as regards the theory that Shakespeare did not busy himself much about the costume-wardrobe of his theatre, anybody who cares to study Shakespeare’s method will see that there is absolutely no dramatist of the French, English, or Athenian stage who relies so much for his illusionist effects on the dress of his actors as Shakespeare does himself.

Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beauty of costume, he constantly introduces into his plays masques and dances, purely for the sake of the pleasure which they give the eye; and we have still his stage-directions for the three great processions in
Henry the Eighth
, directions which are characterised by the most extraordinary elaborateness of detail down to the collars of S.S. and the pearls in Anne Boleyn’s hair. Indeed it would be quite easy for a modern manager to reproduce these pageants absolutely as Shakespeare had them designed; and so accurate were they that one of the court officials of the time, writing an account of the last performance of the play at the Globe Theatre to a friend, actually complains of their realistic character, notably of the production on the stage of the Knights of the Garter in the robes and insignia of the order as being calculated to bring ridicule on the real ceremonies; much in the same spirit in which the French Government, some time ago, prohibited that delightful actor, M. Christian, from appearing in uniform, on the plea that it was prejudicial to the glory of the army that a colonel should be caricatured. And elsewhere the gorgeousness of apparel which distinguished the English stage under Shakespeare’s influence was attacked by the contemporary critics, not as a rule, however, on the grounds of the democratic tendencies of realism, but usually on those moral grounds which are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.

The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not that Shakespeare appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to poetry, but that he saw how important costume is as a means of producing certain dramatic effects. Many of his plays, such as
Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, All’s Well that Ends Well, Cymbeline
, and others, depend for their illusion on the character of the various dresses worn by the hero or the heroine; the delightful scene in
Henry the Sixth
, on the modern miracles of healing by faith, loses all its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet; and the denouement of the
Merry Wives of Windsor
hinges on the colour of Anne Page’s gown. As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises the instances are almost numberless. Posthumous hides his passion under a peasant’s garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot’s rags; Portia wears the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired in ‘all points as a man;’ the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen to the youth Fidele; Jessica flees from her father’s house in boy’s dress, and Julia ties up her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots, and dons hose and doublet; Henry the Eighth woos his lady as a shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim; Prince Hal and Poins appear first as footpads in buckram suits, and then in white aprons and leather jerkins as the waiters in a tavern: and as for Falstaff, does he not come on as a highwayman, as an old woman, as Heme the Hunter, and as the clothes going to the laundry?

Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode of intensifying dramatic situation less numerous. After slaughter of Duncan, Macbeth appears in his night-gown as if aroused from sleep; Timon ends in rags the play he had begun in splendour; Richard flatters the London citizens in a suit of mean and shabby armour, and as soon as he has stepped in blood to the throne, marches through the streets in crown and George and Garter; the climax of
The Tempest
is reached when Prospero, throwing off his enchanter’s robes, sends Ariel for his hat and rapier, and reveals himself as the great Italian Duke; the very Ghost in
Hamlet
changes his mystical apparel to produce different effects; and as for Juliet, a modern playwright would probably have laid her out in shroud, and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but Shakespeare arrays her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness makes the vault ‘a feasting presence full of light,’ turns the tomb into a bridal chamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo’s speech of the triumph of Beauty over Death.

Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a major-domo’s stockings, the pattern on a wife’s handkerchief, the sleeve of a young soldier, and a fashionable woman’s bonnets, become in Shakespeare’s hands points of actual dramatic importance, and by some of them the action of the play in question is conditioned absolutely. Many other dramatists have availed themselves of costume as a method of expressing directly to the audience the character of a person on his entrance, though hardly so brilliantly as Shakespeare has done in the case of the dandy Parolles, whose dress, by the way, only an archaeologist can understand; the fun of a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of fine clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in his cups, may be regarded as part of that great career which costume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes down to Mr. Gilbert; but nobody from the mere details of apparel and adornment has ever drawn such irony of contrast, such immediate and tragic effect, such pity and such pathos, as Shakespeare himself. Armed cap-a-pie, the dead King stalks on the battlements of Elsinore because all is not right with Denmark; Shylock’s Jewish gaberdine is part of the stigma under which that wounded and embittered nature writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of no better plea than the handkerchief he had given Hubert –

Have you the heart! when your head did but ache,

I knit my handkerchief about your brows,

(The best I had, a princess wrought it me)

And I did never ask it you again;

and Orlando’s bloodstained napkin strikes the first sombre note in that exquisite woodland idyll, and shows us the depth of feeling that underlies Rosalind’s fanciful wit and wilful jesting.

Last night ’twas on my arm; I kissed it;

I hope it be not gone to tell my lord

That I kiss aught but he,

says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already on its way to Rome to rob her of her husband’s faith; the little Prince passing to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle’s girdle; Duncan sends a ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own murder, and the ring of Portia turns the tragedy of the merchant into a wife’s comedy. The great rebel York dies with a paper crown on his head; Hamlet’s black suit is a kind of colourmotive in the piece, like the mourning of the Chimene in the
Cid:
and the climax of Antony’s speech is the production of Caesar’s cloak: –

I remember

The first time ever Caesar put it on.

’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent,

The day he overcame the Nervii: –

Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:

See what a rent the envious Casca made:

Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed…

Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold

Our Caesar’s vesture wounded?

The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as pathetic as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of Lear’s wandering on the heath is intensified beyond words by his fantastic attire; and when Cloten, stung by the taunt of that simile which his sister draws from her husband’s raiment, arrays himself in that husband’s very garb to work upon her the deed of shame, we feel that there is nothing in the whole of modern French realism, nothing even in
Thérèse Raquin
, that masterpiece of horror, which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with this strange scene in
Cymbeline.

In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages are those suggested by costume. Rosalind’s

Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I

have a doublet and hose in my disposition?

Constance’s

Grief fills the place of my absent child,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth –

Ah! cut my lace asunder! –

are only a few of the many examples one might quote. One of the finest effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini, in the last act of
Lear
, tearing the plume from Kent’s cap and applying it to Cordelia’s lips when he came to the line,

This feather stirs; she lives!

Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion, plucked, I remember, some fur from his archaeologically-incorrect ermine for the same business; but Salvini’s was the finer effect of the two, as well as the truer. And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last act of
Richard the Third
have not, I am sure, forgotten how much the agony and terror of his dream was intensified, by contrast, through the calm and quiet that preceded it, and the delivery of such lines as

What, is my beaver easier than it was?

And all my armour laid into my tent?

Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy –

lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering the last words which Richard’s mother called after him as he was marching to Bosworth: –

Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse,

Which in the day of battle tire thee more

Than all the complete armour that thou wear’st.

As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal, it is to be remarked that, while he more than once complains of the smallness of the stage on which he has to produce big historical plays and of the want of scenery which obliges him to cut out many effective open-air incidents, he always writes as a dramatist who had at his disposal a most elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who could rely on the actors taking pains about their make-up. Even now it is difficult to produce such a play as the
Comedy of Errors;
and to the picturesque accident of Miss Ellen Terry’s brother resembling herself we owe the opportunity of seeing
Twelfth Night
adequately performed. Indeed, to put any play of Shakespeare’s on the stage, absolutely as he himself wished it to be done, requires the services of a good property-man, a clever wig-maker, a costumier with a sense of colour and a knowledge of textures, a master of the methods of making-up, a fencing-master, a dancing-master, and an artist to direct personally the whole production. For he is most careful to tell us the dress and appearance of each character. ‘Racine abhorre la réalité,’ says Auguste Vacquerie somewhere; ‘il ne daigne pas s’occuper de son costume. Si l’on s’en rapportait aux indications du poète, Agamemnon serait vêtu d’un sceptre et Achille d’une épée.
¹
’ But with Shakespeare it is very different. He gives us directions about the costumes of Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in
Macbeth
, and the apothecary in
Romeo and Juliet
, several elaborate descriptions of his fat knight, and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb in which Petruchio is to be married. Rosaline, he tells us, is tall, and is to carry a spear and a little dagger; Celia is smaller, and is to paint her face brown so as to look sunburnt. The children who play at fairies in Windsor Forest are to be dressed in white and green – a compliment, by the way, to Queen Elizabeth, whose favourite colours they were – and in white, with green garlands and gilded vizors, the angels are to come to Katherine in Kimbolton. Bottom is in home-spun, Lysander is distinguished from Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his boots. The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her husband in mourning beside her. The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of the Cardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English coats, are all made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue. We know the patterns on the Dauphin’s armour and the Pucelle’s sword, the crest on Warwick’s helmet and the colour of Bardolph’s nose. Portia has golden hair, Phoebe is black-haired, Orlando has chestnut curls, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s hair hangs like flax on a distaff, and won’t curl at all. Some of the characters are stout, some lean, some straight, some hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some are to blacken their faces. Lear has a white beard, Hamlet’s father a grizzled, and Benedick is to shave his in the course of the play. Indeed, on the subject of stage beards Shakespeare is quite elaborate; tells us of the many different colours in use, and gives a hint to actors always to see that their own are properly tied on. There is a dance of reapers in rye-straw hats, and of rustics in hairy coats like satyrs; a masque of Amazons, a masque of Russians, and a classical masque; several immortal scenes over a weaver in an ass’s head, a riot over the colour of a coat which it takes the Lord Mayor of London to quell, and a scene between an infuriated husband and his wife’s milliner about the slashing of a sleeve.