Max Beerbohm

Be it remembered that long before this time there had been in the heart of Chelsea a kind of cult for Beauty. Certain artists had settled there, deliberately refusing to work in the ordinary official way, and “wrought," as they were wont to asseverate, “for the pleasure and sake of all that is fair.” Little commerce had they with the brazen world. Nothing but the light of the sun would they share with men. Quietly and unbeknown, callous of all but their craft, they wrought their poems or their pictures, gave them one to another, and wrought on. Meredith, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Holman Hunt were in this band of shy artificers. In fact, Beauty had existed long before 1880. It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who managed her debut. To study the period is to admit that to him was due no small part of the social vogue that Beauty began to enjoy. Fired by his fervid words, men and women hurled their mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio-shops for the furniture of Annish days. Dados arose upon every wall, sunflowers and the feathers of peacocks curved in every corner, tea grew quite cold while the guests were praising the Willow Pattern of its cup. A few fashionable women even dressed them selves in sinuous draperies and unheard-of greens. Into whatsoever ballroom you went, you would surely find, among the women in tiaras and the fops and the distinguished foreigners, half a score of comely ragamufhns in velveteen, murmuring sonnets, posturing, Waving their hands. Beauty was sought in the most unlikely places. Young painters found her mobled in the fogs, and bank-clerks, versed in the writings of Mr. Hamerton, were heard to declare, as they sped home from the City, that the Underground Railway was beautiful from London Bridge to Westminster, but not from Sloane Square to Notting Hill Gate.

Estheticism (for so they named the movement) did indeed permeate, in a manner, all classes. But it was to the haut monde that its primary appeal was made. The sacred emblems of Chelsea were sold in the fashionable toy-shops, its reverently chanted creeds became the patter of the boudoirs. The old Grosvenor Gallery, that stronghold of the few, was verily invaded. Never was such a fusion of de’ lightful folk as at its Private Views.* There was Robert Browning the philosopher, dofiing his hat with a courtly sweep to more than one Duchess. There, too, was Theo Marzials, poet and eccentric, and Charles Colnaghi, the hero of a hundred tea-fights, and young Brookfield, the comedian, and many another good fellow. My Lord of Dudley, the virtuoso, came there, leaning for support upon the arm of his fair young wife. Disraeli, with his lustreless eyes and face like some seamed Hebraic parchment, came also, and whispered behind his hand to the faithful Corry. And Walter Sickert spread the latest mat of “the Master? who, with monocle, cane and tilted hat, flashed through the gay mob anon.

Autrement, there was Coombe Wood, in whose shade the Lady Archibald Campbell suffered more than one of Shakespeare’s plays to be enacted. Hither, from the garish, indelicate theatre that held her languishing, Thalia was hidden, if haply, under the open sky, she might resume her old charm. All Fashion came to marvel and so did all the aesthetes, in the heart of one of whose leaders, Godwin, that superb architect, the idea was first conceived. Real Pastoral Plays!

This passage, which I found in a contemporary chronicle, is so
quaint and so instinct with the spirit of its time that I am fain to quote it: “There were quaint, beautiful, extraordinary costumes walking about-ultra aesthetics, artistic-aesthetics, zsthetics that made up their minds to be daring, and suddenly gave way in some important point-put a frivolous bonnet on the top of a grave and flowing garment that Albert Diirer might have designed for a mantle. There were fashionable costumes that Mrs. Mason or Madame Elise might have turned out that morning. The motley crowd mingled, forming into groups, sometimes dazzling you by the array of colours that you never thought to see in full daylight. . . .Canary-coloured garments flitted cheerily by garments of the saddest green. A hat in an agony of pokes and angles was seen in
company with a bonnet that was a gay garland of flowers. A vast cape that might
have enshrouded the form of a Mater Dolorosa hung by the side of a jauntily striped Langtry-hood.”

and

My collection, like most collections, began imperceptibly. A man does not say to himself “I am going to collect’ this thing or that. True, the schoolboy says so; but his are not, in the true sense of the word. collections. He seeks no set autobiographic symbols, for boys never look back-~there is too little to look back on, too much in front. Nor have the objects of his collection any intrinsic charm for him. He starts a collection merely that he may have a plausible excuse for doing something he ought not to do. He goes in for birds' eggs merely that he may be allowed to risk his bones and tear his clothes in climbing; for butterflies, that he may be encouraged to poison and impale; for stamps . . . really, I do not know why he, why ant sane creature, goes in for Stamps. It follows that he has no real love
of his collection and soon abandons it for something else. The art oollector, how different! His hobby has a solid basis of pet~ preference. Some one gives him (say) a piece of jade. He admires it. He sees another piece in a shop, and buys it; later, he buys another. He does not regard these pieces of jade as distinct from [ha rest of his possessions; he has no idea of collecting jade. It is not till he has acquired several other pieces that he ceases to regard them a, mere items in the decoration of his room, and gives them a little table or a tray of a cabinet, all to themselves. How well they look there! How they intensify one another! He really must get some One to give him that little pedestalled Cupid which he saw yesterday in Wardour Street. Thus awakes in him, quite gradually, the spirit of the collector. Or take the case of one whose collection is not of beautiful things, but of autobiographic symbols: take the case of the glut ton. He will have pocketed many menus before it occurs to him to arrange them in an album. Even so, it was not until a fair number of labels had been pasted on my hat-box that I saw them as souvenirs, and determined that in future my hat-box should always travel with me and so commemorate my every darling escape.

In the path of every collector are strewn obstacles of one kind or another; and the overleaping of them is part of the fun. As a collector of labels I had my pleasant difficulties. On any much-belabelled piece of baggage the porter always pastes the new label over that which looks most recent; else the thing might miss its destination. Now, paste dries before the end of the briefest journey; and one of my canons was that, though two labels might overlap, none must efface the inscription of another. On the other hand, I did not wish to lose my hat-box, for this would have entailed inquiries, and dcscriptions, and telegraphing up the line, and all manner of agitation. What, then, was I to do? I might have taken my hat-box with me in the carriage? That, indeed, is what I always did. But unless a thing is to go in the van it receives no label at all. So I had to use a mild stratagem. “Yes,” I would say, “everything in the van!” The labels would be duly affixed. “Oh,” I would cry seizing the hat-box quickly. “I forgot. I want this with me in the carriage.” (I learned to seiieii quickly, because some porters are such martinets that they will whisk the label off and confiscate it.) Then, when the man was not looking, I would remove the label from the place he had chosen for it and press it on some unoccupied part of the surface.