Littell's Living Age/Volume 129/Issue 1661/The Art of Luxury
THE ART OF LUXURY.
There is a luxury of the senses and a luxury of the imagination. The ancients — that is, the Greeks, Romans, and Scriptural races — understood both perfectly; but our direct ancestors did not. The ancients began with their cities, making them by their magnificence tempting to the very strangers whom they pretended to exclude. It is enough, however, to name Babylon, Athens, and Rome; for further expatiation would give an historical tinge to that which is designed as pure philosophy. For the same reason is rejected, though not so peremptorily, that volume of anecdote which has its alpha in Cleopatra's pearl, and its omega in poor Jack eating a five-pound note in a sandwich at Wapping. Most of these stories are apocryphal, and they do not represent the true spirit of luxury. But, in order that a subject may be made interesting, it is essential to take all the traditions with it, and spill the grain of salt. Let us believe, then, in everything that Tacitus and Suetonius tell; in the barbaric indulgences of Nero, Commodus, Heliogabalus, and the un-Cæsaric Cæsars: for they are quite as easy to comprehend as the black broth of Sparta, and the boiled peas which the monks of old used to put in their shoes. How much is this world the happier for doubting whether Apicius ate the tongues of nightingales; that Lucullus sent to the Danube for a trout when he dined cum Lucullo; that Sardanapalus was fanned night and day by fifty virgins; or that the ladies of Lesbos slept on roses whose perfume had been artificially heightened? What should we do for illustrations to dress dull topics into gaiety, had the chroniclers been silent as Syrian bishops upon these decorative additions to history? It is very pleasant to think that court maidens once powdered their hair with gold, as the Merovingian kings most certainly powdered their beards; that a famous Venetian gentleman, who affected rather than felt a love of the arts, had his pictures uncovered one by one to the sound of slow music, like a murder on the stage; that Lord Berkeley's shaving-basin was of solid silver — as why should it not be, any more than of electro-plate? — that Queen Elizabeth's night-cap was wrought with gilded silk; that water was filtered through gold-dust, not a century ago, by the sybarites of Chili, as is gravely attested by Señor Techo; that men, according to Rabelais, who is fortified by the authority of Montluc, drank hippocras as a morning draught, and even went so far as to have dinner and supper on the same day. "See that the powder I use be rich in cassia," ccies the polished gentlemen in Middleton's play to the valet whom he has just kicked down stairs. Did not the confectioners celebrated in Featley's "Mystica" mix gold particles with their pastry, and were they one iota less absurd than our connoisseurs in eau d'or? Depend upon it, every generation will have its Capua, whether on the Volturno or at Trouville, and luxury after all is a mere affair of fashion. Marc Antony's daughter in our age might not make the lampreys in her fish-pond wear earrings, though the statement is doubted by the critical Bayle and even the credulous Pliny; yet she would probably change her dress five times a day at Biarritz, as do the Parisian graces, born, not of divine sea-foam, but of that other froth called agiotage. We do not wear waistcoats painted with scenes from Watteau, or warm idealizations from Brantome, as did the coxcombs of the ancienne noblesse; neither do we truss up our horses' tails with gold and silver, but we cockade the creatures until they become unendurably vain — more of their adornments than of their beauty, which is a common case; and the first necessity of an "Ulster," the tailors assure us, is that it should be "impressive." Our girls do not bathe in blood; but the trade in "balms" exhibits a considerable hankering after artificial beauty. A man now who should be seen with a mirror in his hat, or a woman with one on her breast, would be pitied as a lunatic; yet these were contemporary follies ridiculed by Ben Jonson.