Page:Costume, fanciful, historical, and theatrical (1906).djvu/243

XVI in the habit, when indoors, of wearing masks delicately perfumed and treated with cosmetics. This fashion was revived by Henry III. of France and his courtiers for the preservation of the complexion.

The fall of the Roman Empire marked the disappearance of the mask from the stage. From then onward it appeared only in pantomime, where the mask of Punchinello is familiar to this day. The nutcracker countenance, with its highly-coloured cheeks and tinkling bells, is a survival of extreme antiquity. I pause to wonder who the old Greek may have been whom the maker of masks thus immortalised? There is a world of cynicism, pathos, and philosophy in his face. I feel that he sorrowed, and that it was not because he knew too little, but because he knew too much.

The practice of wearing masks, by private individuals in everyday life, started, as did the fashion for dominoes, in Venice. There the black satin and velvet masks, still worn at fancy-dress balls and during Carnival time, first obtained, to be enthusiastically adopted in France and England a little later on. In the latter country, however, the use of the mask never degenerated into an abuse as in France, although masks became so fashionable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that society ladies deemed them an essential accessory to the toilette. They were not always worn: some-times they were carried in the hand and held up to the face only when necessary. The exclusive elected to appear masked at the theatre and other public places.

But the universal wearing of masks became such a public menace and incentive to crime that