A TREATISE ON HEAD-GEAR.* IT is quite agreeable at the
present time to come across a book of so frankly reactionary a nature as this. "Thanks, doubtless, to atavism or mysteriously innate Oriental preju- dices,"—the author writes at his treatise's close,— " The writer of these vain pages takes no interest in the programmes and results of universities for women. Vassar laureates and Girton graduates are indifferent to him, His con- viction is that for a woman gifted with beauty, the ideal is to wear beautiful clothes and ornaments, and look charming. He would fain see women loaded with jewelry like idols, with • diadems and ear-plates on their heads, long droppers in their ears, their bosoms glittering with necklaces, their waists encircled -with girdles of glory, their arms stiff with bracelets, and their ankles bedecked with rings that would jingle as they walked. Evidently this ideal cannot be realised in the actual conditions - --- * Wimpies and Crieping-Pine: being Studies in the Coiffure and Ornaments of Wonten. By Theodore Child, Illustrated. London: Osgood, Kenyan° and Co. of Occidental life, with its lack of privacy and modesty, its brusqueness of movement and gesture, its haste and unquietness in all things."
The writer of such lines as these must have been a visitor to the reproduction at Olympia of the interior of an Oriental harem, where Punch represented a coster-visitor as exclaim- ing that the life of a jewelled and recumbent lady, smoking a narghile upon her sofa-cushions, would "suit him down to the ground." But its antagonism to the modern idea of bicycles and golfing for women, by the side of classics and mathematics, is too marked for feasibility, even in idea. And after all, extremes meet in this as in other matters. We plead guilty to thinking a lady in man's bicycling costume and a lady with "rings on her ankles and bells on her toes," as equally sinning against woman's proper dress. But the mysterious equation of women's rights, with the two very oppo.. site missions claimed for the sex by its two opposing classes of advocates, is one which can only be solved by time, if even by that. It seems safe to conclude that the present transi- tional and wearisome state of things will produce a reaction of some kind before long, but in what direction it is perfectly idle to speculate.
As is often the case with books of the kind before us, it is in its pictures that for the many its main attraction will lie. They are well selected and well reproduced, though they cannot emulate in attraction the quaint and picturesque volume upon feminine costume which was reviewed in our columns some months ago. Head-dresses are limited in their scope after all, and it requires an enthusiast so poetical upon his especial subject as Mr. Child to write about it like this No painter has rendered more delicately than Watteau the charm of the movements of a woman's head and neck ; the fascination of blond flesh, white and silky like the petal of a camellia; the delight of flavescent hair, ruddy like the golden tints of sunset, and forming a luminous nimbus around the head ; the transition from the warm tones of the hair to the neat sheenless white of the neck formed by the short, downy hair; the chews= fonds that curl over the nape, and seem spangled by the light ; the rare beauty of the short hair that curls naturally behind the ears."
To paint the movements of the neck was certainly an achieve- ment on Watteau's part which deserves to be recorded, and we are not surprised to learn after this that the type of femi- nine beauty which he saw and materialised—we quote the words of our Truefittian bard—was one of the truly great and precious inventions of art, as great and original and fascinating as the types of beauty which we owe to Botticelli, Leonardo, Luini, and Raphael. We cannot quite agree with the writer that Art, in all her power and variety, could at any time succeed in creating beauty, though she may produce a good imitation here and there. And the true moral of Mr. Child's volume is that the great coiffeur is, in his line, as great an artist, and certainly as much concerned in the creation of beauty, as Botticelli or Watteau themselves. The first appear- ance in modern Europe of the male hairdresser was not until the eighteenth century, when Legros, Frederic, and Leonard made their calling as famous as Vattel or Boyer did theirs. Legros, indeed, began life as a cook, and opened an academy for hairdressers, in which he based his teaching upon the proportion of the head and the style of the face, till in 1765 he published his great work on L'Art de la Coiffure des Dames Fraapaises which specified as many ways of dressing the hair as the artist of the other line discovered for the cooking of eggs. The three hundred fashions of the wife of Marcus Aurelius were outdone, and before the end of the century the triumph of vaccination was celebrated by the colure a l'inoculation, composed of a serpent, a club, a rising sun, and an olive tree : and a frigate in full sail was set forth in the coiffure d a Belle Poole. The au pare Anglais made of the hair a foundation for figured landscapes adorned with meadows, trees, and sheep. One wonders at the patience alike of artist and of subject. But if Herder, the German philosopher, compared hair to "a sacred forest covering the mysteries of thought," Mr. Child's enthusiasm has its excuse in respected precedent. As for the love of the women themselves for adorning their tresses in every form of gracefulness, we have the story of Tertullian, the Christian introduced by Apicius, the jeweller of the Emperor Nero, into a gallery containing representations of all the cunning of Faustina and her cotemporaries, and of his sense of weakness in the presence of such demonstrations of feminine charm, in spite of the grave warnings to his a/righter Priscilla that followed it Curious and pretty enough is the manner in which Mr. Child follows out the devotion of the sex through all time
to the fascination of golden hair. In itself uncommon, it attracted them so constantly from the first, as to make dyeing and bleaching the resource of ages. The Italian poets were first in the raze of admiration. Fazio degli Uberti sang of his lady's "golden-threaded hair," and Guido Cavaleanti follows in his track fifteen years before Dante took up the tale. Boccaccio described how,-
" Round her red garland and her golden hair I saw a fire about Fiammetta's head,"
And Petrarch would hear of no other shade at all. "'In the golden hair of Laura, Love has hidden the bonds with which he grasps me," The gold that Love has spun and woven with his hands," The crimped hair, shining like pure gold,' are a handful of his phrases." From Homer to Apnleins, says Mr. Child, the worship of fair hair persists. Aphrodite was a blonde, and so in later days was Milton's Eve, who--
"Her unadorned golden tresses wore Dishevelled."
A later Firenzuola requires the ideal beauty of the Renaissance in Italy to have blonde hair. When the poets were all of this
mind, what Could poor woman do but dye ? So she took to correcting nature; and so it was that, though natural fair
hair has always been the exception in Italy. Titian and Palma and Botticelli revel in golden hair. Dyes and bleaching lotions were the resource of Laura, as they had been of Nero's wife Poppma, at the Emperor's request. Our author opines that the means even were the same, the main process being to bleach the hair and dry it in the sun, as the young Venetian beauties did openly on their balconies. "I was sitting," says Polia, in a work of Francesco Colonna, the Venetian monk, "according to the custom of beautiful young girls, at the window, or rather on the balcony, of my palace. My blond hair, the delight of young girls, was floating loosely over my snowy shoulders. Bathed with an ambrosia destined to render it as brilliant as threads of gold, it was drying in the rays of ardent Phcebus. Proud to serve me, a maid was combing my hair with infinite care."
And Poliphilo beheld and loved,—and small blame to him. Without going quite so far as Mr. Child, we cannot help a feeling that this antidote to Girton is a little nice. And the " arte biondeggiante," for this shameless mendacity even got itself a name, goes on still even in this modern world of ours :— " Leurs tresses blondoyantes Voletoient ondoyantes Sur leur col blanchissant.
Leurs yeux comma planetes, Sur lours faces brunettes Alloient resplendissant."
In short, this is a pretty kind of anachronistic book to turn over in an idle mood. As for the pictured faces from the repertories of Titian and Palma and Botticelli, of Watteau and Mi guard, and Gerard, they are a gallery of delight, in which, to our thinking, the sweet face of Marie Mancini, the niece of Mazarin and the passion of Louis XIV., carries off the palm, in spite of the obviously black little curly head which sur- mounts the smiling features. It is surely a little unfair on Mr. Child's part, with such a face before him, to write on the opposite page that the women of the Great Monarch's day were "bovine, Junonian, fleshly, and material," to be succeeded by refinement under Louis XV., and touching sentimentality towards the end of the eighteenth century. After all, and in spite of everything, we are inclined to believe that pretty women are articles which do not change much.
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