“We see no ensigns of a wedding here,
No character of a bridal!
Where be our skarves and gloves?”
In Italy and Spain the glove was cherished with the most romantic feeling ever accorded it throughout all its long and impressive history. No king of olden days exercised more despotic rule over his feudal dependents than the Spanish and Italian ladies over their “cavaliers,” to whom even to be allowed to touch the fair one’s glove was a favor which sent the aspiring lover into ecstacies. Many a yearning Romeo of that chivalric age must have exclaimed:
“Would that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!”
Coquetry by the glove seems to have persisted down to a fairly recent period. The Spectator observes that “Ned Courtly presenting Flavia with her glove (which she had dropped on purpose), she received it, and took away his life with a courtesy.” Charles IV. of Spain appears to have been in Ned Courtly’s class, for His Majesty was so extremely susceptible, we are told, to any lady who wore white kid gloves, that the use of them at court was strictly prohibited. A charming picture is called to mind also by the recollection of a novel by William Black, in which the guileless heroine all unconsciously captivates the hero the first time he sets eyes on her, by the graceful, ladylike manner in which she draws on and fastens her gloves.
But if the symbolism of gloves and their old, romantic usages largely have fallen away, leaving us an article of familiar, practical, everyday concern, the language of gloves for us is not dead. When we take pains to be fittingly costumed for an important occasion, there is no detail of our dress which we are more anxious should be in perfect keeping, than our gloves. To them still clings a halo of sentiment, part and parcel of our own dignity. In view of their history we are justified in our feeling. “Gloves,” says Beck, “outweigh all other articles of apparel which have been the outward and visible signs of hidden things.”
Chapter IV.
HOW GLOVES CAME TO GRENOBLE
“A French town ... in which the product of successive ages, not without lively touches of the present, are blended together harmoniously, with a beauty specific—a beauty cisalpine and northern—and of which Turner has found the ideal in certain of his studies of the rivers of France, a perfectly happy conjunction of river and town being of the essence of its physiognomy.”—Deny L’ Auxerrois: Walter Pater.