TRADES, PROFESSIONS AND SCIENCES.

Trades, professions, manufactures, even the sciences, the divine sciences themselves, come in and go out of fashion with times and circumstances; and to talk of permanency, of stopping short at particular epochs and eras (always so sacred with dullness and ignorance), is to speak a language utterly inapplicable to truth, nature, and society. Many of the trades which were in vogue so recently as the time of the two first Georges, are passed and gone. Fifty years ago, London and Paris abounded with fan painters. Some of the most noted artists among the contemporaries of Sir Joshua Reynolds began life in this department of their profession; and they made more money by sprawling shepherdesses in bell-hoops, upon banks of roses, attended by squinting shepherds with bag-wigs and bouquets, than some scores of young painters can now acquire by copying the works of Titian, or catching the beauties of Raphael. Then there was the coach-pannel painter, belonging to times when the visiting chariot of a lady of fashion bore her device and cognizance on her carriage, like the knight of old on his shield and target: when the loves and the graces, with turtles, trophies, and wreaths of roses, were sported in the park and the ring, to the admiration of the pedestrian multitude, and the substantial comfort of the unambitious and unknown artist.

I remember having seen one of these antiquated teams of taste of the good old times, creeping along a cross road in Picardy, on my first visit to France. How different from a modern “drag” of dash, shaped and coloured like a mail coach, as strong and as ungainly, and decorated with pointers and race-horses! It enshrined a dowager anti-revolutionary beauty, much more freshly painted than her voiture coupée, and almost in as many colours. She bore in her hand a fan to match, that was an historical picture of the court of Louis the XVth; and her hair was dressed with a tête, surmounted by a petite cornette, qui ne laissait rien à désirer, in the eyes of the true virtuoso of highly preserved antiquities. The carriage, the fan, the coiffure, were all alike the production of arts long now gone by. Oh! how I should have liked to seize upon the whole set-out, and place it under a glass case!

I have a family on the list of my visiting book, scarcely less curious in their way, than these Picardy relics; fit for the cabinet, and worthy to be preserved as dried specimens of a phasis of society which history will never record.

The painted carriage was unknown in the time of Henry the IVth of France, who tells Sully that he cannot visit him on a certain occasion, because his wife had “mon carrosse,” the only carriage belonging to the royal establishment. The fashion of splendidly decorating coaches, began in the middle of Louis the XIVth’s reign, and it ended, in England, in the reign of George the Ist. The most gorgeous carriage on record, was that which the ingenious sycophancy of Bernini painted for Christina of Sweden, on the occasion of her visit to Pope Alexander the VIIth, when she went to Rome, to make a public abjuration of Lutheranism. “She was received,” says a curious old work I picked up on a stall in the Piazza Navona in Rome, “with unspeakable applause;” and among other “regali” presented her by the Pope, were a coach, a litter, a sedan chair, and a hackney. The description of these articles is curious, and belongs to times and trades now no more.⁠[6]⁠

Some traces of the expense and magnificence of coach decorations still remain in the state carriage of the Lord Mayor of London, which has survived many more important monuments of the taste and the judgment of our ancestors. Whether the painting of pictures on coach panels was driven out by heraldic pride, or fell merely by the caprice of fashion, I cannot say. It is most probable that the custom was itself an innovation upon armorial bearings, to which it in turn gave place. In the early period of the revolution, when the emblazoning of arms was forbidden, some of the bolder members replaced their escutcheon on their carriages, by the representation of the sun behind a cloud, with the motto—“ça reparoîtra.”

Almost in our times, great has been the downfal of wig-makers, who, for more than a century, engrossed so large a portion of the public money. In the time of Queen Anne, thirty guineas was the price of a full fledged perriwig, an enormous sum for those days. As the beaux laid down false hair, the women seem to have adopted its use. Under the names of systems and têtes, these filthy appendages maintained their ground in Ireland to a late period. The last “system, tête, and peruke-maker,” I saw, was in my childhood, in Connaught, and so I handed him over to the Miss Mac Taafs, for their city of Craiggellan, where he figures in the person of Gil-Duff O’Kirwan. The “system” was a high cushion of horse-hair. I saw it worn by an itinerant schoolmistress, brought into my father’s house, to teach me my letters, and to work a sampler, when I was about four years old. Her figure and system got such a hold of my imagination, that, “not on the book my eyes were fixed, but her.” “That fairy form,” (which was six feet high,) “I have ne’er forgot”—.

The system was a most complicated affair. Men served an apprenticeship to learn its architecture. The cushion was but a scaffolding, on which the superstructure was supported, which rose by the foot; while curls, “en canon” massy as rolling stones, were piled on each other, till they made “Ossa like a wart.”

These adscititious monstrosities were beginning to disappear, when Mr. Pitt, by the hair-powder tax, gave a death blow to the trade of hair-dressing. It has been said, I know not with what truth, that the idea of this tax originated with Lewis the actor, and that he was handsomely rewarded for the invention. At this period, the Brutus head, and the close-cropped tête à la victime, were adopted as tests of republicanism in France; as the round head was made a mark of covenantism in the English revolution; and this fashion aided and abetted the destruction of the loquacious tribe of tale-bearers.

It is one of the blessed effects of the diffusion of knowledge, to render men less dependent on others; and society seems to have rejoiced in its emancipation from the tyranny of hair-dressing. Formerly the barber’s knock was as well known, and as punctual as the postman’s. His important visage, sagacious look, and his bag of apparatus, belonged as much to the objects of daily vision, as the place in which he was received. There, for one mortal hour at least, and that at the most precious and active period of the day, sat the victim of fashion with its minister, bound tightly up in a white cloth, like a baby in swaddling-clothes, sometimes pulled by the nose, sometimes scored on the cheek, and often in danger of an unlucky cut across the throat;—then again, smoked and smothered with the vapours reeking from the curling iron, which dragged up his hair by the roots; while his drawn-in breath, clenched hands, closed lips, and puffed cheeks, spoke all the torture of his voluntary suffocation. The whole sad scene terminated in a dense cloud of musty powder, discharged from the notable puffing machine into every exposed orifice, filling the ears, ascending the nostrils, and blinding the eyes of the sufferer. Yet the wisdom of our ancestors looked upon this daily martyrdom and perpetual disfiguration as indispensable to the appearance of a gentleman. Even tradesmen gave up their time and persons to this voluntary immolation; and assisted to people the good old times with monsters, and to support trades, which, making no return, diverted industry from more profitable channels.

Franklin, when ambassador to France during the American war, frequently expressed his regret that the corps de friseurs was not placed at his disposition, to fight the English; and that the money expended on hair-powder was not devoted to powder of more inflammable and explosive properties. The use of hair-powder, however, encouraged the landed interest,—a saving virtue; and if it raised the price of bread, there was, as the French king has it, the charity of the nation to supply the deficiencies of the poor—a right royal specimen of political economy.

Hair-dressing, moreover, had its indirect advantages, by encouraging literary propensities; many worthy persons took the opportunity of lining the inside of their heads, while the barber decorated its outward parts, who would never otherwise have found leisure for “improving the mind.” In those days, a play-book or a pamphlet was sure to be whitened, in every third page, by the contents of the powder-puff. Hairdressers were also serviceable to their species, by maintaining and diffusing a taste for anecdote. Even ministers of state were occasionally indebted to the coiffeur for their principal knowledge of human nature, and for the better part of their wit.

The ministerial influence of barbers has ever been considerable. The grand sultan’s barber is, to this day, the pivot of affairs, the focus of revolutions, the ladder of rising fortunes, and the Tarpeian rock of functionaries on the wane. Under Louis the Fourteenth, the coiffeurs, male and female, were important personages; and they figure largely in the memoirs of that day. Martin la Vienne, and Mademoiselle la Borde, have become historical characters, as much as the heroes and beauties they dressed; and the “coiffure à la paysanne,” and “les boucles de Montgobert,” form epochs in the history of nations. Under the regency, an “Encyclopédie Perruquière” appeared, illustrating the mysteries of the craft by one hundred and twenty engravings of different orders of perruques, which gave the idea, some years afterwards, of a work on the same plan, by Le Sieur le Gros, coiffeur to the court of Louis the Fifteenth. The solemn importance attached to this volume by its author, who announced it to the great Catherine of Russia, is an admirable satire on the frivolity of the day; the title was “Livre d’Estampes de l’Art de la Coiffure des Dames Françaises, gravés sur les dessins originaux d’après mes accommodates, avec le Traité en abrégé d’entretenir et de conserver les Cheveux naturels.”⁠[7]⁠—And yet Madame de Genlis says, “Il y a quarante-cinq ans que les femmes auroient trouver de l’indécence à se faire coiffer par des hommes.”⁠[8] M. Le Gros gave a still further dignity to the art, by opening an academy, which he divided into the same number of classes as the academy of sciences at Paris; and actually furnished it with thirty models, that were not exactly “d’après l’antique.”

Under Louis the Sixteenth, the hair-dressers are said to have been accompanied by les physiognomistes, who pronounced on the style to be adopted on each head, according to the nature of the countenance. One of these Lavaters of the toilet entering, with his employer, into the dressing-room of a new patient, fresh arrived from England, threw him into no small consternation by the earnestness of his scrutinizing regard. Full of John Bullish notions, of French tyranny, lettres de cachet, and, of course, of his own importance in the eyes of the government, the Englishman saw nothing in the penetrating looks of the artist, but espionnage and “à cul de basse fosse:”—he was actually preparing for a knock-down blow, and a run, when the solemn figure relieved him from his fright, and left the room, exclaiming, “Figure de marron, marronnez Monsieur.”

The revolution came, and kings and coiffeurs fell together.—Nature vindicated her rights—hair-dressers lost theirs—and beauty and purity resumed their privileges under the name of Greek costume.

The enameller was also, in former times, a profession of much profit and occupation: not such enamellers as the Bones and Bates of the present day, nor as the Petitots of the past; but good tradesman-like artists, who kept shops well stored with enamelled snuff, patch, and rouge boxes, and every article of domestic usage, to which they could apply their art. Who, that ever rummaged her mother’s drawers, and found the watch-chains of her grandmother, ponderous as jack-chains, and fastened with hooks massy as flesh-forks, does not remember the enamelled trinkets suspended from it—eggs, anchors, bird-cages, and watch-boxes, with bottles for bergamotte, and beetles filled with thieves’ vinegar, (the eau de cypre, and the mille-fleurs of the belles of the last century, who always smelled like a pot of pomatum, or a pickled cucumber)?—the least prized of the senses has its march of intellect, tout comme un autre, and the strength of perfumes is no bad indication of the state of society.

But, alas, for the sciences! that they too should “bear but the perfume and suppliance of a moment;” and be brought in and out of fashion, like a beret of Herbault, or a robe of Victorine. Yet so it is, and was, and ever will be, as the wants and exigencies of society have occasion for the aid of different pursuits.

Towards the end of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, and the beginning of that of Louis the Fifteenth, (including the regency,) astronomy, taking the place of polemics, raged like an epidemic. Men, women, and children, leaving this world to take care of itself, got into “other and better worlds;” and wits, lost on earth, were all to be found, like Orlando’s, in the moon. Women’s eyes were no longer the only lights that helped poets to similes. Celestial bodies succeeded to terrestrial; Love, no longer blind, never appeared without a telescope; rendezvous were given in bosquets and on terraces, to gaze on the “chaste cold moon;” hearts and planets disappeared together; and ladies were so intently engaged in studying the principles of Newton, that they forgot their own; and gave practical demonstration that, in going astray, women’s “stars are more in fault than they.”

But when Newton had ceased to act upon the imagination, by fresh discoveries of striking and impressive import, the astronomers became mauvais ton; and the Parisian women of fashion took to pet geometers, as the pendants for their pet monkeys. D’Alembert became the Coryphæus of the French boudoirs; and the Tencins, and the Du Deffands fought for the possession of the least gallant man and the first geometrician of his age; who, in his turn, made way for chemistry and Lavoisier.

The English, who have been called a nation of shopkeepers, and who mingle trade even with their love of science, took to chemistry with an enthusiasm proportioned to its utility in the arts; much in the same way as the kings and nobles of a former age had brought alchemy into vogue, as an instrument of their avarice. Although natural history entered the lists with its experimental rival, and canvassed for vogue in the library of Sir Joseph Bankes, oxygen and hydrogen carried the field; and Sir Humphry Davy, with his class of aristocratic beauties in the west, was as much revered as the “premier baron de la Judée” is in the east.

Chemistry, however, has had its day; and the Ricardos and Malthuses have succeeded, to turn the heads of those, whom nature intended only to turn the heads of others—to be succeeded in the next generation by—God knows what. In France, the once popular electricity of Franklin, and the cognate study of the magnet, have given birth to the reigning folly of Mesmerism; and in England, the popular labours of the Hunters have terminated in the current vogue of craniology. Who can answer for it, that the necessities of no-popery may not revive the witchcraft of King James, and call to its aid the penal dicta of some new Matthew Hale, for the better putting down of dangerous papists?

Even the divine arts, which are of all ages, have experienced the full versatility of human affairs. Protestantism made war upon the successors of the Raphaels; and great pictures went out, with great cathedrals and great palaces. Pitt dealt a severe back-handed blow to engraving; while wealth, snugness, and personal vanity, combined to give currency to portraits of gentlemen and ladies. Now, we have lithography opening a new career to genius and industry; and every day teems with fresh discoveries, all, more or less, influencing the destiny of the imitative arts.

Neither are the learned professions built upon a more solid foundation. Theology, notwithstanding the fashionable sanctity, is obsolete; law is at a considerable discount, and physicians are set on one side, to give place for the triumphal car of surgery. The fact is, that society, like nature, bent on its own great purposes, steadily pursues the course of its interests; and it sustains, for the moment, those pursuits, and those only, for which it has an immediate and pressing occasion. It is in vain that we look for the architectural skill which raised the ponderous temples of Egypt, or the more graceful, but less substantial, edifices of Greece. Mortar and Roman cement have substituted the Nashes and the Wyatvilles, for the protégés of the Ptolemys and Pericles; and the reign of George the Fourth cannot, in physical possibility, become the age of Augustus. The house of brick, will never become the house of marble.