What shall I say of the moving, living, kaleidoscope, twinkling and coruscating in the vast enceinte? Indeed, it is very difficult to say anything a bout the outward similitude of a bal masqué that has not been said a hundred times before. You have taken for granted the very considerable admixture of plain evening costume, worn by the swells et autres, which speckles the galaxy of gay costumes with multitudinous black dots. After this, we all know what to expect, and whom to find. Paint, patches, spangles, and pearl-powder, tawdry gold and silver (more brassy and pewtery, rather, I opine), and sham point lace. Sham fox-hunters, mostly of a Hebrew cast of countenance, in tarnished scarlet coats, creased buckskins, and boots with tops guiltless of oxalic acid, brandishing whips that have oftener been laid across their own shoulders than on the flanks of the “screws” they have bestridden; and screening their mouths with palms covered by dubious white kid gloves, or with bare dirt-inlaid knuckles protuberant with big rings of mosaic jewellery, shouting “Yoicks,” and “Hark-away,” in nasal accents. Undergraduates, in trencher caps and trailing gowns, worn by jobbernols, who know far more about Oxford Street than the University of Oxford. Barristers, more likely to be pleaded for than to plead. Bartlemy-Fair Field Marshals, in costumes equally akin to his who rides on the lamentable white horse before the Lord Mayor’s gingerbread coach, and Bombastes Furioso in the farce. Charles the Seconds, with all the dissolute effrontery of that monarch, but of his wit or merriment none. Red Rovers and Conrad Corsairs, whose nautical adventures have been confined to a fracas on board a penny steamboat; Albanian, and Sciote, and Suliote Chiefs, with due fez, kilt, yataghan, and lambrochines, in orthodox “snowy camise and shaggy capote,” and who act their characters in a likelier manner than their comrades, for they are, the majority, arrant “Greeks.” A few Bedouin Arabs—a costume picturesque yet inexpensive: a pen’north of Spanish liquorice to dye the face withal; a couple of calico sheets, for caftan and burnous, with the tassel of a red worsted bell-pull or so to finish off with, and you have your Abd-el-Kader complete. Half-a-dozen Marquises, of Louis the Fifteenth’s time. Plenty of Monks: robes and cagoules of gray linen, a rope for a girdle, a pennyworth of wooden beads for a rosary, and slippers cut down into sandals—these are as cheap as effective. A Knight, in complete armour (pasteboard with tin-foil glued thereupon); a Robinson Crusoe, always getting into piteous dilemmas, with his goatskin (worsted) umbrella; a Bear, a Demon, and a Chinese Mandarin. When I have enumerated these, I find that I have noticed the travestisements most prevalent among the English male portion of the costumed mob. But there is another very appreciable element in these exhibitions: the foreign one. A century has passed since Johnson told us, in his mordant satire of “London,” that England’s metropolis was—
“The needy villain’s general home,
The common sew’r of Paris and of Rome.”
It is astonishing to find how much foreign riff-raff and alien scoundrelry will turn up at a masquerade. Leicester Square and Panton Street, the cloaques of the Haymarket and Soho, disgorge the bearded and pomatumed scum of their stale pot-au-feu-smelling purlieus on this dancing floor. They come with orders, and don’t sup; rather hover about the Daughters of Folly and Sons of Silliness, to wheedle and extort odd silver sums, with which to gamble at atrocious “nicks,” and tobacco-enveloped gambling dens in Leicesterian slums, yet unrooted out by lynx-eyed policemen. Homer not unfrequently nods in Scotland Yard. “None are so blind as those that won’t see,” whisper the wicked. These foreigners—shameless, abandoned rogues, mostly throwing undeserved discredit upon honest, harmless forestieri; fellows who are “known to the police” in Paris, and have a second home at the Depôt de la Prefecture—affect the cheap, but thoroughly masquerade costume of the Pierrot. Very easy of accomplishment, this disguise. About one and ninepence outlay would suffice, it seemeth to me. Jerkin of white calico, with immoderately long sleeves, like those of a camisole de force unfastened; galligaskins of the same snowy cheapness, and scarlet slippers; any number of tawdry calico bows of any colour down the sides, a frill round the neck, where the “jougs” of the pillory or the collar of the garotte should be; the face, that should be seared with the hangman’s brand, thickly plastered with flour, so that there would be no room for the knave to blush, even if the light hand of a transient conscience smote him on the cheek and bade him remember that he once had a mother, and was not always aide-de-camp in waiting to Beelzebub; a conical cap of pasteboard, like an extinguisher snowed upon; here you have the Pierrot. The Englishman sometimes attempts him, but generally fails in the assumption. In order to “keep-up” the character well, it is necessary to play an infinity of monkey-tricks, to bear kicking with cheerful equanimity, to dance furiously, and to utter a succession of shrill screams at the end of every dance. Else you are no true Pierrot; and these elegancies are foreign to our phlegmatic manners.
Another favourite costume with the bal masqué is that of the “Postillon de Longjumeau.” He is as well-nigh extinct in France, by this chiming, as our own old English post-boys. Railways shunted him off on to oblivion’s sidings with terrible rapidity. Only, his Imperial Highness Prince Jerome Napoleon—whom the Parisians persist in calling “l’Oncle Tom,” because, say they, Napoleon I., his brother, was “le grand homme” Napoleon III., his nephew, “le petit homme” so this must be necessarily “l’oncle-t-homme”—or Tom—this mediocre old gentleman, who throughout his long life has always been fortunate enough to be lodged, and boarded, and pensioned at other peoples’ expense (they positively carved out a kingdom for him once), still keeps up a staff of postillons de Longjumeau, who, with much bell-ringing, whip-cracking, and “ha! heu hooping!” guide his fat, white, hollow-backed Norman post-horses, when his Imperial Highness goes down to St. Cloud or Chantilly in his travelling carriage. It is a quaint, not unbecoming costume: glazed hat, the brim built at an angle, broad gold band, cockade as big as a pancake, and multicoloured streamers of attenuated ribbon; short wig, with club well powdered; jacket with red facings and turn-up two-inch tails; saucepan-lid buttons, and metal badge on the left arm; scarlet vest, double breasted; buckskins, saffron-dyed; high boots with bucket tops, and greased, mind, not blacked; long spurs, and whip insignificant as to stock and tremendous as to lash. This is his Imperial Highness’s postilion, and this, minus the spurs, is the postilion of the bal masqué.
And the ladies? I am reticent. I am nervous. I draw back. “I don’t like,” as the children say. Hie you to the National Gallery, and look at Turner’s picture of “Phryne going to the bath as Venus.” Among the wild crew of bacchantes and psoropaphæ who surround that young person, you will find costumes as extravagant of hues, as variegated, as strike the senses here. Only, among the masqueraders you must not look for harmony of colour or symmetry of line. All is jarring, discordant, tawdry, and harlequinadish. You are in error if you suppose I am about to descant at length on the glittering semi-nudities gyrating here. Go to, you naughty queans! you must find some other inventory-maker. Go and mend your ways, buy horsehair corsets, “disciplines” and skulls if you will, and repair to the desert, there to mortify yourselves. Alas! the hussies laugh at me, and tell me that the only manner in which they choose to tolerate horsehair is en crinoline. Go to, and remember the fate of a certain Janet Somebody—I forget her surname—condemned by some Scotch elders, in the early days of the Reformation, to stripes and the stocks, for assuming a “pair of breeks.” Alack! the débardeurs only mock me, and tell me that I am a fogey.
Three quasi-feminine costumes there are, however, that shall be pilloried here. There is the young lady in a riding-habit, who is so palpably unaccustomed to wearing such a garment, who is so piteously ill-at-ease in it, not knowing how to raise its folds with Amazonian grace, and tripping herself up at every fourth step or so, that she is more ridiculous than offensive. There is the “Middy:” a pair of white trousers, a turn-down collar, a round jacket, and a cap with a gold-lace band, being understood to fulfil all the requirements of that costume. The “middy” sneaks about in a most woeful state of sheep-leggedness, or, at most, essays to burst into delirious gymnastics, which end in confusion and contumely. And last, and most abhorrent to me, there is the “Romp.” Romps in their natural state—in a parlour, on a lawn, in a swing, at a game of blind-man’s-buff, or hunt-the-slipper—no honest man need cavil at. I like romps myself, when they don’t pull your hair too hard, have some mercy on your toes, and refrain from calling you a “cross, grumpy, old thing,” when you mildly suggest that it is very near bed-time. But a romp of some twenty-five years of age, with a cadaverous face, rouged, with a coral necklace, flaxen tails, a pinafore, a blue sash, Vandyked trousers, bare arms, and a skipping-rope: take away that romp, I say, quickly, somebody, and bring me a Gorgon or a Fury, the Hottentot Venus or the Pig-faced Lady! Anything for a change. Away with that romp, and cart her speedily to the nearest boarding-school where a lineal descendant of Mother Brownrigge yet wields her birchen sceptre.
It is on record that Thomas Carlyle, chiefest among British prose writing men, once in his life was present, in this very theatre, at a performance of the Italian Opera. He stayed the ballet, even, and went away full of strange cogitations. I would give one of my two ears (for be it known to you I am stone-deaf on the left side, like most men who have led evil lives in their youth, and could, wearing my hair long, well spare the superfluous flap of flesh and gristle) if I could persuade Thomas to visit a masquerade. There would be a new chapter in the next edition of “Sartor Resartus” to a certainty. For all these varied fopperies and fineries, dominoes, battered masks with ragged lace, sham orris, draggle-tailed feathers, tin-bladed rapiers, rabbit-skin and rat’s-tail ermine, cotton velvet, “pinked” stockings, frayed epaulettes, mended skirts—all suggest pregnant thoughts of the Bag. Tout cela sent son marchand d’habits. Not to be driven away is the pervading notion of Old Clothes of Vinegar Yard and the ladies’ wardrobe shop, of the ultimate relegation of these sallow fripperies to Petticoat Lane and Rag Fair. Nor without histories—some grave, some gay, some absurd, some terrible—must be these mended shreds of gaudy finery. They have been worn by aristocratic striplings at Eton Montem—defunct saturnalia of patrician “cadging.” Those dim brocades and Swiss shepherdess corsages, have graced the forms of the fair-haired daughters of nobles at fancy balls. Great actresses, or cantatrici, have declaimed or sung in those satins, before they were disdainfully cast by, abandoned to the dresser, sold to the Jew costumier, cut down into tunics or pages’ shoulder cloaks, furbished up with new tags and trimmings. Real barristers and gay young college lads have worn those wigs and gowns and trencher caps; real captains have flaunted at reviews in those embroidered tunics and epaulettes; swift horses have borne those scarlet coats and buckskins across country, but with real fox-hunters inside. Where are the original possessors? Drowned, or shot to death, or peacefully mouldering, insolvent, or abroad, gone up to the Lords, or hanged. Who knows? Perhaps they are lounging here as Swells, not recognising their old uniforms and academics, now worn by sham Abraham men and franc-mitous. Who can tell? Where is the pinafore of our youth, and the first shooting jacket of adolescence? “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” Where are the last winter’s snows?
But Thomas Carlyle wouldn’t come to this place, at his age and at this time in the morning; and, between you and me, I think it high time that we too should depart. In truth, the place is growing anything but orderly. Champagne and incessant exercise on the “light fantastic toe” have done their work. Dances of a wild and incoherent character, reminding one of the “Chaloupe” the “Tulipe Orageuse,” and the much-by-municipal-authorities-abhorred “Cancan” are attempted. The masters of the ceremonies seem laudably desirous of clearing the salle. Let us procure our great-coats, and flee from Babylon before the masquers grew unroarious.
A stream of masquerading humanity, male and female, begins to pour through the corridors and so out beneath the portico. It is time. Cabs and broughams—the “swells” came in the broughams—sly, wicked little inventions; policemen hoarsely shout and linkmen dart about.