LONDON PROMENADE DRESS, 1836.
In all seriousness, however, the trouser is an absurdity even from the point of view of mere comfort. A man cannot sit down without first hitching himself up at the knee. The knee is the natural place for the garment to be drawn in, as a certain degree of looseness is necessary at that point in order to allow of the free movement of the limb. Nature herself rebels against the trouser, and does her level best to produce variety of fold, which makes for beauty. Philistine man, however, decides otherwise, and that singular invention the trouser-stretcher—true emblem of the modern spirit of incongruity—is called into play, to undo during the night Nature's doings of the previous day.
The late Lord Salisbury, in his speech at the Royal Academy Banquet on April 30, 1887, is reported as saying: "Then consider the costume of the period. Dresses seem to have been selected by the existing English generation with a special desire to flout and gibe at and repudiate all possibility of compliance with any sense of beauty. I am taxing my memory, but I cannot remember any sculptor who has been bold enough to give a life statue of any English notability in the evening dress of the period. I am quite sure that if that man exists he must be strongly tempted to commit suicide the moment his work appears."
The Tailor and Cutter—delightfully fascinating print!—has thrown out many dark hints lately of impending startling changes in men's attire. By the way, who are the Rhadamanthine spirits who sit mysteriously in judgment upon these high matters, issuing their fateful decrees, regulating the delicate and subtle curves of the brim of a pot-hat or the turn of a coat collar? Perhaps the Tailor and Cutter knows, but, upon the principle that knowledge is power, declines to say; anyway, whatever changes the immediate future may have in store for us, we may take comfort from the fact that they must necessarily be in the direction of betterment, since, having recently emerged from that bottomless pit of all that is æsthetically terrible—the Victorian era: the era of the crinoline, the antimacassar, and of wax flowers under glass—we could not possibly strike a lower depth.
[II]
THE
TUNIC
"Where were the variegated robes, works of Sidonian women, which god-like Paris himself brought from Sidon, sailing over the wide sea, along the course by which he conveyed high-born Helen?"—Iliad, vi. 289.