The Works Of Max Beerbohm Part 3

Surely there must be among us artists as cunning in the use of brush and puff as any who lived at Versailles. Surely the splendid, impalpable advance of good taste, as shown in dress and in the decoration of houses, may justify my hope of the preeminence of Englishwomen in the cosmetic art. By their innate delicacy of touch they will accomplish much, and much, of course, by their swift feminine perception. Yet it were well that they should know something also of the theoretical side of the craft. Modern authorities upon the mysteries of the toilet are, it is true, rather few; but among the ancients many a writer would seem to have been fascinated by them. Archigenes, a man of science at the Court of Cleopatra, and Criton at the Court of the Emperor Trajan, both wrote treatises upon cosmetics--doubtless most scholarly treatises that would have given many a precious hint. It is a pity they are not extant.

From Lucian or from Juvenal, with his bitter picture of a Roman levee, much may be learnt; from the staid pages of Xenophon and Aristophanes'

dear farces. But best of all is that fine book of the Ars Amatoria that Ovid has set aside for the consideration of dyes, perfumes, and pomades. Written by an artist who knew the allurement of the toilet and understood its philosophy, it remains without rival as a treatise upon Artifice. It is more than a poem, it is a manual; and if there be left in England any lady who cannot read Latin in the original, she will do well to procure a discreet translation. In the Bodleian Library there is treasured the only known copy of a very poignant and delightful rendering of this one book of Ovid's masterpiece. It was made by a certain Wye Waltonstall, who lived in the days of Elizabeth, and, seeing that he dedicated it to 'the Vertuous Ladyes and Gentlewomen of Great Britain,' I am sure that the gallant writer, could he know of our great renaissance of cosmetics, would wish his little work to be placed once more within their reach. 'Inasmuch as to you, ladyes and gentlewomen,'

so he writes in his queer little dedication, 'my booke of pigments doth first addresse itself, that it may kisse your hands and afterward have the lines thereof in reading sweetened by the odour of your breath, while the dead letters formed into words by your divided lips may receive new life by your pa.s.sionate expression, and the words marryed in that Ruby coloured temple may thus happily united, multiply your contentment.' It is rather sad to think that, at this crisis in the history of pigments, the Vertuous Ladyes and Gentlewomen cannot read the libellus of Wye Waltonstall, who did so dearly love pigments.

But since the days when these great critics wrote their treatises, with what gifts innumerable has Artifice been loaded by Science! Many little part.i.tions must be added to the narthecium before it can comprehend all the new cosmetics that have been quietly devised since cla.s.sical days, and will make the modern toilet chalks away more splendid in its possibilities. A pity that no one has devoted himself to the compiling of a new list; but doubtless all the newest devices are known to the admirable unguentarians of Bond Street, who will impart them to their clients. Our thanks, too, should be given to Science for ridding us of the old danger that was latent in the use of cosmetics. Nowadays they cannot, being purged of any poisonous element, do harm to the skin that they make beautiful. There need be no more sowing the seeds of destruction in the furrows of time, no martyrs to the cause like Maria, Countess of Coventry, that fair dame but infelix, who died, so they relate, from the effect of a poisonous rouge upon her lips. No, we need have no fears now. Artifice will claim not another victim from among her wors.h.i.+ppers.

Loveliness shall sit at the toilet, watching her oval face in the oval mirror. Her smooth fingers shall flit among the paints and powder, to tip and mingle them, catch up a pencil, clasp a phial, and what not and what not, until the mask of vermeil tinct has been laid aptly, the enamel quite hardened. And, heavens, how she will charm us and ensorcel our eyes! Positively rouge will rob us for a time of all our reason; we shall go mad over masks. Was it not at Capua that they had a whole street where nothing was sold but dyes and unguents? We must have such a street, and, to fill our new Seplasia, our Arcade of the Unguents, all herbs and minerals and live creatures shall give of their substance.

The white cliffs of Albion shall be ground to powder for Loveliness, and perfumed by the ghost of many a little violet. The fluffy eider-ducks, that are swimming round the pond, shall lose their feathers, that the powder-puff may be moonlike as it pa.s.ses over Loveliness' lovely face.

Even the camels shall become ministers of delight, giving many tufts of their hair to be stained in her splendid colour-box, and across her cheek the swift hares foot shall fly as of old. The sea shall offer her the phucus, its scarlet weed. We shall spill the blood of mulberries at her bidding. And, as in another period of great ecstasy, a dancing wanton, la belle Aubrey, was crowned upon a church's lighted altar, so a.r.s.enic, that 'greentress'd G.o.ddess,' ashamed at length of skulking between the soup of the unpopular and the test-tubes of the Queen's a.n.a.lyst, shall be exalted to a place of consummate honour upon the toilet-table of Loveliness.

All these things shall come to pa.s.s. Times of jolliness and glad indulgence! For Artifice, whom we drove forth, has returned among us, and, though her eyes are red with crying, she is smiling forgiveness.

She is kind. Let us dance and be glad, and trip the c.o.c.kawhoop!

Artifice, sweetest exile, is come into her kingdom. Let us dance her a welcome!

Oxford, 1894.

Poor Romeo!

Even now Bath glories in his legend, not idly, for he was the most fantastic animal that ever stepped upon her pavement. Were ever a statue given him (and indeed he is worthy of a grotesque in marble), it would be put in Pulteney Street or the Circus. I know that the palm trees of Antigua overshadowed his cradle, that there must be even now in Boulogne many who set eyes on him in the time of his less fatuous declension, that he died in London. But Mr. Coates (for of that Romeo I write) must be claimed by none of these places. Bath saw the laughable disaster of his debut, and so, in a manner, his whole life seems to belong to her, and the story of it to be a part of her annals.

The Antiguan was already on the brink of middle-age when he first trod the English sh.o.r.e. But, for all his thirty-seven years, he had the heart of a youth, and his purse being yet as heavy as his heart was light, the English sun seemed to s.h.i.+ne gloriously about his path and gild the letters of introduction that he scattered everywhere. Also, he was a gentleman of amiable, nearly elegant mien, and something of a scholar.

His father had been the most respectable resident Antigua could show, so that little Robert, the future Romeo, had often sat at dessert with distinguished travellers through the Indies. But in the year 1807 old Mr. Coates had died. As we may read in vol. lxxviii. of The Gentleman's Magazine, 'the Almighty, whom he alone feared, was pleased to take him from this life, after having sustained an untarnished reputation for seventy-three years,' a pa.s.sage which, though objectionable in its theology, gives the true story of Romeo's antecedents and disposes of the later calumnies that declared him the son of a tailor. Realising that he was now an orphan, an orphan with not a few grey hairs, our hero had set sail in quest of amusing adventure.

For three months he took the waters of Bath, un.o.btrusively, like other well-bred visitors. His attendance was solicited for all the most fas.h.i.+onable routs, and at a.s.semblies he sat always in the shade of some t.i.tled turban. In fact, Mr. Coates was a great success. There was an air of most romantic mystery that endeared his presence to all the damsels fluttering fans in the Pump Room. It set them vying for his conduct through the mazes of the Quadrille or of the Triumph, and blus.h.i.+ng at the sound of his name. Alas! their tremulous rivalry lasted not long.

Soon they saw that Emma, sole daughter of Sir James Tylney Long, that wealthy baronet, had cast a magic net about the warm Antiguan heart. In the wake of her chair, by night and day, Mr. Coates was obsequious. When she cried that she would not drink the water without some delicacy to banish the iron taste, it was he who stood by with a box of vanilla-rusks. When he shaved his great moustachio, it was at her caprice. And his devotion to Miss Emma was the more noted for that his own considerable riches were proof that it was true and single. He himself warned her, in some verses written for him by Euphemia Boswell, against the crew of penniless admirers who surrounded her:

'Lady, ah! too bewitching lady! now beware Of artful men that fain would thee ensnare Not for thy merit, but thy fortunes sake. Give me your hand--your cash let venals take.'

Miss Emma was his first love. To understand his subsequent behaviour, let us remember that Cupid's shaft pierces most poignantly the breast of middle-age. Not that Mr. Coates was laughed at in Bath for a love-a-lack-a-daisy. On the contrary, his mien, his manner, were as yet so studiously correct, his speech so reticent, that laughter had been unusually inept. The only strange taste evinced by him was his devotion to theatricals. He would hold forth, by the hour, upon the fine conception of such parts as Macbeth, Oth.e.l.lo and, especially, Romeo.

Many ladies and gentlemen were privileged to hear him recite, in this or that drawing-room, after supper. All testified to the real fire with which he inflamed the lines of love or hatred. His voice, his gesture, his scholars.h.i.+p, were all approved. A fine symphony of praise a.s.sured Mr. Coates that no suitor worthier than he had ever courted Thespis.

The l.u.s.t for the footlights' glare grew lurid in his mothish eye. What, after all, were these poor triumphs of the parlour? It might be that contemptuous Emma, hearing the loud salvos of the gallery and boxes, would call him at length her lord.

At this time there arrived at the York House Mr. Pryse Gordon, whose memoirs we know. Mr. Coates himself was staying at number ** Gay Street, but was in the habit of breakfasting daily at the York House, where he attracted Mr. Gordon's attention by 'rehearsing pa.s.sages from Shakespeare, with a tone and gesture extremely striking both to the eye and the ear.' Mr. Gordon warmly complimented him and suggested that he should give a public exposition of his art. The cheeks of the amateur flushed with pleasure. 'I am ready and willing,' he replied, 'to play Romeo to a Bath audience, if the manager will get up the play and give me a good "Juliet"; my costume is superb and adorned with diamonds, but I have not the advantage of knowing the manager, Dimonds.' Pleased by the stranger's ready wit, Mr. Gordon scribbled a note of introduction to Dimonds there and then. So soon as he had 'discussed a brace of m.u.f.fins and so many eggs,' the new Romeo started for the playhouse, and that very day bills were posted to the effect that 'a Gentleman of Fas.h.i.+on would make his first appearance on February 9 in a role of Shakespeare.'

All the lower boxes were immediately secured by Lady Belmore and other lights of Bath. 'Butlers and Abigails,' it is said, 'were commanded by their mistresses to take their stand in the centre of the pit and give Mr. Coates a capital, hearty clapping.' Indeed, throughout the week that elapsed before the premiere, no pains were spared in a.s.suring a great success. Miss Tylney Long showed some interest in the arrangements.

Gossip spoke of her as a likely bride.

The night came. Fas.h.i.+on, Virtue, and Intellect thronged the house.

Nothing could have been more cordial than the temper of the gallery.

All were eager to applaud the new Romeo. Presently, when the varlets of Verona had brawled, there stepped into the square--what!--a mountebank, a monstrosity. Hurrah died upon every lip. The house was thunderstruck.

Whose legs were in those scarlet pantaloons? Whose face grinned over that bolster-cravat, and under that Charles II. wig and opera-hat? From whose shoulders hung that spangled sky-blue cloak? Was this bedizened scarecrow the Amateur of Fas.h.i.+on, for sight of whom they had paid their s.h.i.+llings? At length a voice from the gallery cried, 'Good evening, Mr.

Coates,' and, as the Antiguan--for he it was--bowed low, the theatre was filled with yells of merriment. Only the people in the boxes were still silent, staring coldly at the protege who had played them so odious a prank. Lady Belmore rose and called for her chariot. Her example was followed by several ladies of rank. The rest sat spellbound, and of their number was Miss Tylney Long, at whose rigid face many gla.s.ses were, of course, directed. Meanwhile the play proceeded. Those lines that were not drowned in laughter Mr. Coates spoke in the most foolish and extravagant manner. He cut little capers at odd moments. He laid his hand on his heart and bowed, now to this, now to that part of the house, always with a grin. In the balcony-scene he produced a snuff-box, and, after taking a pinch, offered it to the bewildered Juliet. Coming down to the footlights, he laid it on the cus.h.i.+on of the stage-box and begged the inmates to refresh themselves, and to 'pa.s.s the golden trifle on.'

The performance, so obviously grotesque, was just the kind of thing to please the G.o.ds. The limp of Hephaestus could not have called laughter so unquenchable from their lips. It is no trifle to set Englishmen laughing, but once you have done it, you can hardly stop them. Act after act of the beautiful love-play was performed without one sign of satiety from the seers of it. The laughter rather swelled in volume. Romeo died in so ludicrous a way that a cry of 'encore arose and the death was actually twice repeated. At the fall of the curtain there was prolonged applause. Mr. Coates came forward, and the good-humoured public pelted him with fragments of the benches. One splinter struck his right temple, inflicting a scar, of which Mr. Coates was, in his old age, not a little proud. Such is the traditional account of this curious debut. Mr. Pryse Gordon, however, in his memoirs tells another tale. He professes to have seen nothing peculiar in Romeo's dress, save its display of fine diamonds, and to have admired the whole interpretation. The att.i.tude of the audience he attributes to a hostile cabal. John R. and Hunter H.

Robinson, in their memoir of Romeo Coates, echo Mr. Pryse Gordon's tale.

They would have done well to weigh their authorities more accurately.

I had often wondered at this discrepancy between doc.u.ment and tradition.

Last spring, when I was in Bath for a few days, my mind brooded especially on the question. Indeed, Bath, with her faded memories, her tristesse, drives one to reverie. Fas.h.i.+on no longer smiles from her windows nor dances in her suns.h.i.+ne, and in her deserted parks the invalids build up their const.i.tutions. Now and again, as one of the frequent chairs glided past me, I wondered if its shadowy freight were the ghost of poor Romeo. I felt sure that the traditional account of his debut was mainly correct. How could it, indeed, be false? Tradition is always a safer guide to truth than is the tale of one man. I might amuse myself here, in Bath, by verifying my notion of the debut or proving it false.

One morning I was walking through a narrow street in the western quarter of Bath, and came to the window of a very little shop, which was full of dusty books, prints and engravings. I spied in one corner of it the discoloured print of a queer, lean figure, posturing in a garden. In one hand this figure held a snuff-box, in the other an opera-hat. Its sharp features and wide grin, flanked by luxuriant whiskers, looked strange under a Caroline wig. Above it was a balcony and a lady in an att.i.tude of surprise. Beneath it were these words, faintly lettered: Bombastes Coates wooing the Peerless Capulet, that's 'nough (that snuff) 1809. I coveted the print. I went into the shop.

A very old man peered at me and asked my errand. I pointed to the print of Mr. Coates, which he gave me for a few s.h.i.+llings, chuckling at the pun upon the margin.

'Ah,' he said, 'they're forgetting him now, but he was a fine figure, a fine sort of figure.'

'You saw him?'

'No, no. I'm only seventy. But I've known those who saw him. My father had a pile of such prints.'

'Did your father see him?' I asked, as the old man furled my treasure and tied it with a piece of tape.

'My father, sir, was a friend of Mr. Coates,' he said. 'He entertained him in Gay Street. Mr. Coates was my father's lodger all the months he was in Bath. A good tenant, too. Never eccentric under my father's roof--never eccentric.'

I begged the old bookseller to tell me more of this matter. It seemed that his father had been a citizen of some consequence, and had owned a house in modish Gay Street, where he let lodgings. Thither, by the advice of a friend, Mr. Coates had gone so soon as he arrived in the town, and had stayed there down to the day after his debut, when he left for London.

'My father often told me that Mr. Coates was crying bitterly when he settled the bill and got into his travelling-chaise. He'd come back from the playhouse the night before as cheerful as could be. He'd said he didn't mind what the public thought of his acting. But in the morning a letter was brought for him, and when he read it he seemed to go quite mad.'

'I wonder what was in the letter!' I asked. 'Did your father never know who sent it?'

'Ah,' my greybeard rejoined, 'that's the most curious thing. And it's a secret. I can't tell you.'

He was not as good as his word. I bribed him delicately with the purchase of more than one old book. Also, I think, he was flattered by my eager curiosity to learn his long-pent secret. He told me that the letter was brought to the house by one of the footmen of Sir James Tylney Long, and that his father himself delivered it into the hands of Mr. Coates.

'When he had read it through, the poor gentleman tore it into many fragments, and stood staring before him, pale as a ghost. "I must not stay another hour in Bath," he said. When he was gone, my father (G.o.d forgive him!) gathered up all the sc.r.a.ps of the letter, and for a long time he tried to piece them together. But there were a great many of them, and my father was not a scholar, though he was affluent.'

'What became of the sc.r.a.ps?' I asked. 'Did your father keep them?'

'Yes, he did. And I used to try, when I was younger, to make out something from them. But even I never seemed to get near it. I've never thrown them away, though. They're in a box.'

I got them for a piece of gold that I could ill spare--some score or so of shreds of yellow paper, traversed with pale ink. The joy of the archaeologist with an unknown papyrus, of the detective with a clue, surged in me. Indeed, I was not sure whether I was engaged in private inquiry or in research; so recent, so remote was the mystery. After two days' labour, I marshalled the elusive words. This is the text of them:

MR. COATES, SIR,

They say Revenge is sweet. I am fortunate to find it is so. I have compelled you to be far more a Fool than you made me at the fete-champetre of Lady B. & I, having accomplished my aim, am ready to forgive you now, as you implored me on the occasion of the fete. But pray build no Hope that I, forgiving you, will once more regard you as my Suitor. For that cannot ever be. I decided you should show yourself a Fool before many people. But such Folly does not commend your hand to mine. Therefore desist your irksome attention &, if need be, begone from Bath. I have punished you, & would save my eyes the trouble to turn away from your person. I pray that you regard this epistle as privileged and private.

E. T. L. 10 of February.

The letter lies before me as I write. It is written throughout in a firm and very delicate Italian hand. Under the neat initials is drawn, instead of the ordinary flourish, an arrow, and the absence of any erasure in a letter of such moment suggests a calm, deliberate character and, probably, rough copies. I did not, at the time, suffer my fancy to linger over the tessellated doc.u.ment. I set to elucidating the reference to the fete-champetre. As I retraced my footsteps to the little bookshop, I wondered if I should find any excuse for the cruel faithlessness of Emma Tylney Long.

The bookseller was greatly excited when I told him I had re-created the letter. He was very eager to see it. I did not pander to his curiosity.

He even offered to buy the article back at cost price. I asked him if he had ever heard, in his youth, of any scene that had pa.s.sed between Miss Tylney Long and Mr. Coates at some fete-champetre. The old man thought for some time, but he could not help me. Where then, I asked him, could I search old files of local news-papers? He told me that there were supposed to be many such files mouldering in the archives of the Town Hall.

I secured access, without difficulty, to these files. A whole day I spent in searching the copies issued by this and that journal during the months that Romeo was in Bath. In the yellow pages of these forgotten prints I came upon many complimentary allusions to Mr. Coates: 'The visitor welcomed (by all our aristocracy) from distant Ind,' 'the ubiquitous,' 'the charitable riche.' Of his 'forthcoming impersonation of Romeo and Juliet' there were constant puffs, quite in the modern manner. The accounts of his debut all showed that Mr. Pryse Gordon's account of it was fabulous. In one paper there was a bitter attack on 'Mr. Gordon, who was responsible for this insult to Thespian art, the gentry, and the people, for he first arranged the whole production'--an extract which makes it clear that this gentleman had a good motive for his version of the affair.

But I began to despair of ever learning what happened at the fete-champetre. There were accounts of 'a grand garden-party, whereto Lady Belper, on March the twenty-eighth, invited a host of fas.h.i.+onable persons.' The names of Mr. Coates and of 'Sir James Tylney Long and his daughter' were duly recorded in the lists. But that was all. I turned at length to a tiny file, consisting of five copies only, Bladud's Courier.