Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/317

Rh Oscar, threw their mahogany into the streets. A few smart women even dressed themselves in suave draperies and unheard-of greens. Into whatever ballroom you went, you would surely find, among the women in tiaras and the fops and the distinguished foreigners, half a score of comely ragamuffins in velveteen, murmuring sonnets, posturing, waving their hands. "Nincompoopiana" the craze was called at first, and later "Æstheticism."

It was in 1880 that Private Views became necessary functions of fashion. I should like to have been at a Private View of the Old Grosvenor Gallery. There was Robert Browning, the poet, button-holing a hundred friends and doffing his hat with a courtly sweep to more than one duchess. There, too, was Theo Marzials, poet and eccentric, and Walter Sickert, the impressionist, 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. What interesting folk! What a wonderful scene! A chronicler of the time thus writes of it:

"There were quaint, beautiful, extraordinary costumes walking about ultra-aesthetics, artistic-aesthetics, aesthetics 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 glowing garment that Albert Dürer might have designed for a mantle. There were fashion able 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