As a remedy for this short-sightedness, the result of their isolated position, the aristocracy of power is always prompt to borrow from the aristocracy of talent that assistance in the practical working of its government which it requires; they are glad to find safe men among the people to whom they can delegate the cares of office, the annoyances of patronage, and the odium of power; and, the better to secure these men, they are always ready to lift them among themselves, to identify them with their exclusive interests, and to give them a permanent establishment among the nobles of the land.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF DRESS.
Perhaps we may be expected to say something of the dress of men of fashion, as it is peculiar, and not less characteristic than their manner. Their clothes, like their lives, are usually of a neutral tint; staring colours they studiously eschew, and are never seen with elaborate gradations of under waistcoats. They would as soon appear out of doors in cuerpo, as in blue coats with gilt buttons, or braided military frocks, or any dress smacking of the professional. When they indulge in fancy colours and patterns, you will not fail to remark that these are not worn, although imitated by others. The moment a dressy man of fashion finds that any thing he has patronized gets abroad, he drops the neckcloth or vest, or whatever it may be, and condemns the tailor as an "unsafe" fellow. But it is not often that even the most dressy of our men of fashion originate any thing outré, or likely to attract attention; of late years their style has been plain, almost to scrupulosity.
Notwithstanding that the man of fashion is plainly dressed, no more than ordinary penetration is required to see that he is excellently well dressed. His coat is plain, to be sure, much plainer than the coat of a Jew-clothesman, having neither silk linings, nor embroidered pocket-holes, nor cut velvet buttons, nor fur collar; but see how it fits him—not like cast iron, nor like a wet sack, but as if he had been born in it.
There is a harmony, a propriety in the coat of a man of fashion, an unstudied ease, a graceful symmetry, a delicacy of expression, that has always filled us with the profoundest admiration of the genius of the artist; indeed, no ready money could purchase coats that we have seen—coats that a real love of the subject, and working upon long credit, for a high connexion, could alone have given to the world—coats, not the dull conceptions of a geometric cutter, spiritlessly outlined upon the shop-board by the crayon of a mercenary foreman, but the fortunate creation of superior intelligence, boldly executed in the happy moments of a generous enthusiasm!
Vain, very vain is it for the pretender to fashion to go swelling into the atelier of a first-rate coat architect, with his ready money in his hand, to order such a coat! Order such a coat, forsooth! order a Raphael, a Michael Angelo, an epic poem. Such a coat—we say it with the generous indignation of a free Briton—is one of the exclusive privileges reserved, by unjust laws, to a selfish aristocracy!
The aristocratic trouser-cutter, too, deserves our unlimited approbation. Nothing more distinguishes the nineteenth century, in which those who can manage it have the happiness to live, than the precision we have attained in trouser-cutting. While yet the barbarism of the age, or poverty of customers, vested the office of trouser-cutter and coat architect in the same functionary, coats were without soul, and "inexpressibles" inexpressibly bad, or, as Coleridge would have said, "ridiculous exceedingly." In our day, on the contrary, we have attained to such a pitch of excellence, that the trouser-cutter who fails to give expression to his works, is hunted into the provinces, and condemned for life to manufacture nether garments for clergymen and country gentlemen.
The results of the minute division of labour, to which so much of the excellence of all that is excellent in London is mainly owing, is in nothing more apparent than in that department of the fine arts which people devoid of taste call fashionable tailoring. We have at the West End fashionable artistes in riding coats, in dress coats, in cut-aways; one is superlative in a Taglioni, another devotes the powers of his mind exclusively to the construction of a Chesterfield, a third gives the best years of his life to the symmetrical beauty of a barrel-trouser; from the united exertions of these, and a thousand other men of taste and genius, is your indisputably-dressed man of fashion turned out upon the town. Then there are constructors of Horse Guards' and of Foot Guards' jacket, full and undress; the man who contrives these would expire if desired to turn his attention to the coat of a marching regiment; a hussar-pelisse-maker despises the hard, heavy style of the cutters for the Royal Artillery, and so on. Volumes would not shut if we were to fill them with the infinite variety of these disguisers of that nakedness which formerly was our shame, but which latterly, it would seem, has become our pride. With the exception of one gentleman citywards, who has achieved an immortality in the article of box-coats, every contriver of men of fashion, we mean in the tailoring, which is the principal department, reside in the parish of St James's, within easy reach of their distinguished patrons. These gentlemen have a high and self-respecting idea of the nobleness and utility of their vocation. A friend of ours, of whom we know no harm save that he pays his tailors' bills, being one day afflicted with this unusual form of insanity, desired the artist to deduct some odd shillings from his bill; in a word, to make it pounds—"Excuse me, sir," said Snip, "but pray, let us not talk of pounds—pounds for tradesmen, if you please; but artists, sir, artists are always remunerated with guineas!"
To return to the outward and visible man of fashion, from whose peculiarities our dissertation upon the sublime and beautiful in tailoring has too long detained us. The same subdued expression of elegance and ease that pervades the leading articles of his attire, extends, without exception, to all the accessories; or if he is deficient in aught, the accessorial toggery, such as hats, boots, choker, gloves, are always carefully attended to; for it is in this department that so distinguished a member of the detective police as ourselves is always enabled to arrest disguised snobbery. You will never see a man of fashion affect a Paget hat, for example, or a D'Orsayan beaver: the former has a ridiculous exuberance of crown, the latter a by no means allowable latitude of brim—besides, borrowing the fashion of a hat, is with him what plagiarizing the interior furniture of the head is with others. He considers stealing the idea of a hat low and vulgar, and leaves the unworthy theft to be perpetrated by pretenders to fashion: content with a hat that becomes him, he is careful never to be before or behind the prevailing hat-intelligence of the time. Three hats your man of fashion sedulously escheweth—a new hat, a shocking bad hat, and a gossamer. As the song says, "when into a shop he goes" he never "buys a four-and-nine," neither buyeth he a Paris hat, a ventilator, or any of the hats indebted for their glossy texture to the entrails of the silk worm; he sporteth nothing below a two-and-thirty shilling beaver, and putteth it not on his head until his valet, exposing it to a shower of rain, has "taken the shine out of it."