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| "The Winter Habit of an English Gentlewoman" |
Francis Bacon somewhere remarks that politeness veils vice just as dress masks wrinkles. Perhaps this saying of his was founded on the circumstance, that Queen Elizabeth not only wore dresses of increasing splendour with increasing age, but that she also used occasionally to appear masked on great gala occasions. The mode thus royally given, was not however very speedily or generally followed. The introduction of masks as a fashion appears to have "obtained," as old authors call it, only about the year 1660. Pepys, in 1663, says that he went to the Royal Theatre, and there saw Howard's comedy of ' The Committee' (known to us in it's new form and changed name of ' The Honest Thieves'). He designates it as "a merry but indifferent play, only Lacy's part, an Irish footman, is beyond imagination." Among the company were Viscount Falkenberg, or Falconbridge, with his wife, the third daughter of Cromwell. " My Lady Mary Cromwell," he goes on to say, " looks as well as I have known her, and well clad; but when the house began to fill, she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play; which of late is become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face. So" he adds,—and it shows, does that sighed-forth " So " the melancholy consequence of leading wives into temptation,—"So to the Exchange, to buy things, with my wife ; among others a vizard for herself."
Certainly that pretty precisian, Mary Cromwell, in a vizard at the play, sounds oddly; one would as soon expect to hear of Mrs. Chisholm at a Casino! No wonder Mrs. Pepys admired her !
But Mrs. Pepys was not very long content with her English vizard; for six months after we find the little man, her husband, recording—" To Covent Garden, to buy a maske at the French house, Madame Charett's, for my wife." The taste of Mrs. Pepys was doubtless influenced by the example of the court, " where six women, my Lady Castlemaine and Duchess of Monmouth being two of them, and six men, the Duke of Monmouth, and Lord Arran, and Monsieur Blanfort (Lord Feversham) being three of them, in vizards, but most rich and antique dresses, did dance admirably and most gloriously." What Pepys thought of the fashion and the time is seen again by a sighing comment—"God give us cause to continue the mirth!"
The fashion was still in full force in 1667; and to what purpose it was used, and to what purpose it might be abused, may be seen in the following extract:
" To the King's House to ' The Maid's Tragedy,' but vexed all the while with two talking ladies and Sir Charles Sedley; yet pleased to have their discourse, he being a stranger. And one of the ladies would and did sit with her mask on through all the play; and, being as exceeding witty as ever I heard woman, did talk most pleasantly with him; but was, I believe, a virtuous woman, and of quality. He would fain know who she was, but she would not tell; yet did give him many pleasant hints of her knowledge of him, by that means setting his brains at work to find out who she was, and did give him leave to use all means to find out who she was, but pulling off her- mask. He was mighty witty and she also making sport with him very inoffensively, that a more pleasant rencontre I never heard;" and then once more a groaning commentary—"but by that means lost the pleasure of the play wholly."
In the following year Pepys makes record of his having been at Bartholomew Fair with his wife and a party. We " took a link," he says, " the women resolving to be dirty, and walked up and down to get a coach; and my wife being a little before me, had like to have been taken up by one whom we saw to be Sam Hartlib. My wife had her vizard on; yet we cannot say that he meant any hurt; for it was just as she was by a coach side, which he had, or had a mind to take up: and he asked her, ' Madam, do you go in this coach but as soon as he saw a man come to her (I know not whether he knows me) he departed away apace." By all which we may see that a vizard at a fair was evidently an outward and visible sign," recognized by the rakes and gallants of the locality.
A vizard in the Park, at dusk, was equally intelligible; and though the men were not masked at that or any other hour, they were at that time and place more than sufficiently disguised.
" And now" says Vincent, in Sir George Etherege's comedy of ' Love in a Wood, or St. James's Park'—now a man may carry a bottle under his arm, instead of his hat, and no observing, spruce fop will miss the cravat that lies on one's shoulder, or count the pimples on one's face." As at park and fair, so fell the convenient covering into evil application at the play itself. The matter is alluded to by the Widow Blackacre in the epilogue to the
' Plain Dealer':
" For as in Hall of Westminster
Sleek sempstress vends amid the Courts her ware ;
So while we bawl, and you in judgment sit,
The visor-mask sells linen too i: the pit."
By the end of the seventeenth century the fashion of masks was being tarnished by vulgarity; and the practice of concluding comedies with a ' Marriage in a Mask,' a ceremony which may not have been unusual, was already considered as a stale device. Congrevc winds up two of his comedies, ' The Old Bachelor,' and ' Love for Love,' with this jovial sort of bouquet.
The mode however still held on at the theatre. The latter was never more licentious than now, and the ladies never so much loved to resort thither. Our great grandmothers however, when young, were extremely modest: many of them were afraid of venturing to a new play till their lovers assured them they might do so without offence to their exquisite delicacy. The bolder spirits, still modest but impatient, went in masks,—not unwilling to listen to savoury uncleanness, but so modest that they could not bear any one to see that they did not blush at it. " Such incidents as these," says the ' Spectator,' " make some ladies wholly absent themselves from the playhouse; and others never miss the first night of a new play, lest it should prove too luscious to admit of their going with any countenance to the second;"—a most exquisite reason. It was good enough however to authorize vizards; and the theatre became something like what Nat Lee in his ' Nero' describes Mount Ida to have been,—
" Where the gods meet and dance in masquerade "
But Mount Ida had something divine about it, which our stage in the days of vizards certainly had not. As Joe Haines said to his masked audience, in the concluding lines of the prologue to the very play just named—
" All tragedies, egad! to me sound oddly;
I can no more be serious than you godly."
The fashion, after it had been indifferently well worn by the ladies, of course fell to their maids, and Abigail wore the vizard which Lady Betty dropped. In Malcolm's ' London' (eighteenth century) a writer is quoted, whose communication shows whither the masks had fallen in 1731. It is in a letter on " Boxing Day," and in it occurs the following passage :
—" My friend next carried me to the upper end of Piccadilly, where, one pair of stairs over a stable, we found near a hundred people of both sexes (some masked, others not), a great part of which were dancing to the music of two sorry fiddles. It is impossible to describe this medley of mortals fully; however, I will do it as well as I can. There were footmen, servant-maids, butchers, apprentices, oyster and orange women, and sharpers, which appeared to be the best of the company. This horrid place seemed to be a complete nursery for the gallows. My friend informed me it was called ' a threepenny hop;' and while we were talking, to my great satisfaction, by order of the Westminster justices, to their immortal honour, entered the constables and their assistants, who carried off all the company that was left; and had not our friend been known to them, we might have paid dear for our curiosity."
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| "The Vanity of Women: Masks and Bustles", attributed to Maarten de Vos |
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