Godwin,one of the most artistic spirits of this century inEngland,created the marvellous loveliness of the first act ofCLAUDIAN,and showed us the life of Byzantium in the fourthcentury,not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts,not by anovel which requires a glossary to explain it,but by the visiblepresentation before us of all the glory of that great town.Andwhile the costumes were true to the smallest points of colour anddesign,yet the details were not assigned that abnormal importancewhich they must necessarily be given in a piecemeal lecture,butwere subordinated to the rules of lofty composition and the unityof artistic effect.Mr.Symonds,speaking of that great picture ofMantegna's,now in Hampton Court,says that the artist hasconverted an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of line.
The same could have been said with equal justice of Mr.Godwin'sscene.Only the foolish called it pedantry,only those who wouldneither look nor listen spoke of the passion of the play beingkilled by its paint.It was in reality a scene not merely perfectin its picturesqueness,but absolutely dramatic also,getting ridof any necessity for tedious descriptions,and showing us,by thecolour and character of Claudian's dress,and the dress of hisattendants,the whole nature and life of the man,from what schoolof philosophy he affected,down to what horses he backed on theturf.
And indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfusedinto some form of art.I have no desire to underrate the servicesof laborious scholars,but I feel that the use Keats made ofLempriere's Dictionary is of far more value to us than ProfessorMax Muller's treatment of the same mythology as a disease oflanguage.Better ENDYMION than any theory,however sound,or,asin the present instance,unsound,of an epidemic among adjectives!
And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi's book onVases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his 'Ode on aGrecian Urn'?Art,and art only,can make archaeology beautiful;and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly,forit can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actuallife with the wonder of the unreal world.But the sixteenthcentury was not merely the age of Vitruvius;it was the age ofVecellio also.Every nation seems suddenly to have becomeinterested in the dress of its neighbours.Europe began toinvestigate its own clothes,and the amount of books published onnational costumes is quite extraordinary.At the beginning of thecentury the NUREMBERG CHRONICLE,with its two thousandillustrations,reached its fifth edition,and before the centurywas over seventeen editions were published of Munster'sCOSMOGRAPHY.Besides these two books there were also the works ofMichael Colyns,of Hans Weigel,of Amman,and of Vecellio himself,all of them well illustrated,some of the drawings in Vecelliobeing probably from the hand of Titian.
Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired theirknowledge.The development of the habit of foreign travel,theincreased commercial intercourse between countries,and thefrequency of diplomatic missions,gave every nation manyopportunities of studying the various forms of contemporary dress.
After the departure from England,for instance,of the ambassadorsfrom the Czar,the Sultan and the Prince of Morocco,Henry theEighth and his friends gave several masques in the strange attireof their visitors.Later on London saw,perhaps too often,thesombre splendour of the Spanish Court,and to Elizabeth came envoysfrom all lands,whose dress,Shakespeare tells us,had an importantinfluence on English costume.
And the interest was not confined merely to classical dress,or thedress of foreign nations;there was also a good deal of research,amongst theatrical people especially,into the ancient costume ofEngland itself:and when Shakespeare,in the prologue to one ofhis plays,expresses his regret at being unable to produce helmetsof the period,he is speaking as an Elizabethan manager and notmerely as an Elizabethan poet.At Cambridge,for instance,duringhis day,a play of RICHARD THE THIRD was performed,in which theactors were attired in real dresses of the time,procured from thegreat collection of historical costume in the Tower,which wasalways open to the inspection of managers,and sometimes placed attheir disposal.And I cannot help thinking that this performancemust have been far more artistic,as regards costume,thanGarrick's mounting of Shakespeare's own play on the subject,inwhich he himself appeared in a nondescript fancy dress,andeverybody else in the costume of the time of George the Third,Richmond especially being much admired in the uniform of a youngguardsman.
