The Weekly Machen
The term “hack work” has often been used to describe Arthur Machen’s journalistic career. One could be forgiven for dismissing banal titles such as “Marvels of To-day’s Flower Show,” but long-time readers of this space will undoubtedly disagree with the assumption. True, Machen worked as a journalist—he received assignments, hit the beat, found the story and wrote it under a deadline. Yet, he was no mere reporter of the facts. Rather, he imbued each assignment with an interior wonder, despite the outwardly commonplace titles and subjects. The following article is a fine example of this craft. One may imagine a scribbling Machen in his shabby greatcoat, well past its season, as he divined the inner meaning of dress for man.
Growing Comfort of Dress
by
Arthur Machen
June 29, 1912
Some little time ago a well-known writer suggested that working men should dress for dinner. Now, I regard this proposal as one of the silliest pieces of advice that has ever been offered. My opinions on the subject of comfort are well known; I don’t believe in it as a panacea for human woes; I don’t believe that material goods in themselves will make any man happy; I do believe that the divine discomfort of adventure is a sovran medicine for all who can prescribe it to themselves.
But note the phrase, “the divine discomfort of adventure.” The divinity that resides in desperate enterprises and explorations of the unknown is altogether wanting to the process of dressing for dinner.
Subtleties of the Dress Shirt
Discomfort is plentiful in all the details of this monstrous action. The boiled shirt is not so torturous as that fabled inner vestment of Nessus; but it is chilly, it is hard, it is crackly, and every one of the three studs which “Mayfair,” in The Daily Mail, says must adorn it is a problem for fumbling fingers.
And the laundry has pinned it subtly and strongly in its back parts; pinned it so that when you insert your head into its shiny and icy depths you are caught suddenly and held fast, a struggling and helpless, yet raging, victim.
Practically that villainous pin has made the shirt into a strait-waistcoat, and the man inside it is retained in a position, deplorable, bare, and altogether ridiculous.
Then the collar, which is high and hard, and forces unmartial men into an erect and military carriage quite foreign to their real natures; then the bow of the white tie, the perfect tying of which is an inborn gift, bestowed on few; then the shiny patent leather boots, which are elegant, but tight; all these join together to rasp the body and the spirit of the natural man; here is achieved when the work is done a sum total of extreme discomfort, without any point of divinity or adventure residing in it.
I do not see the average British working man submitting himself to this slavery of the shirt; I hope he has not so far lost his senses, but that he will continue to take his evening meal according to his comfortable and sensible habit—that is, in his shirt-sleeves.
Future of the Top Hat and Frock Coat
For the fact is that, in spite of “Mayfair,” ease in dress has increased, is increasing, and will continue to increase. It is now some years since Mr. Dion Clayton Calthrop, a curious and singular authority on costume, pointed out to me that stiffness in dress of all sorts was on the down grade. In his opinion a great change in the whole scheme of men’s dress had begun; and from my observations in Bond-street, Piccadilly, and the Park this year I am inclined to think that Mr. Calthrop was right.
The silk hat and the frock coat are not gone; but they are going; they are becoming habits of ceremony and occasion; and in another twenty years it is likely enough that they will occupy a place in the scheme of costume analogous to that held to-day by the late Georgian dress.
On certain occasions it is necessary for a man to put on levee dress; and a similar habit, differentiated largely by its colouring, is the proper habit of the valetaille in stately houses.
And so in the future the silk hat and the frock-coat will be indispensable at weddings, funerals, and official receptions, and will be worn, with variations, by the butlers and the valets of the great. Probably the silk hats of the servants will be made with a peculiar curve, and their frock coats will be braided.
For there can be no doubt that the reign of these vestments over the “smart” is passing. There are as many well-dressed men walking up and down Bond-street in 1912 as there were in 1892, but the fashion of them has changed strangely. Sixty per cent. of them are in beautifully cut lounge suite of grey and dark tweeds, and they wear black or grey Homburg hats; their collars are soft, and they all look neat, but comfortable.
Coming Phase of Comfort
I am willing to acknowledge that there is a certain loss. The West End has certainly parted with the look of shiny and irreproachable smartness that it once wore. The silk hats glittered like black cylindrical mirrors, the high white collar were as polished as fine porcelain, the Y-shaped portion of shirt-front set off the colour of the tie, the hang of the long frock coat had something of solemn and heavy grace about it. Shiny prosperity, was the total effect of it all; it was not beautiful by any means, but it was imposing in its way.
Now this is gone or going fast; and the next relaxation will be in the matter of evening dress. The shirt with the three studs, the high collar, the dress suit, the shiny boots will still be necessary for dinners of any degree of state, and will still be the uniform of waiters, but men dining together en petit comité will tend more and more to the comfort of dark lounge suits and soft shirts and collars.
And I frankly think that the change will be for the better. I am all for ceremonial—for the use of significant and splendid habits—when a ceremony is to be performed, when some high office is to be symbolised, or some function of solemn significance is to be celebrated.
In such instances, I say, I would not abate one gilt button, one shred of scarlet, one line of gold.
A Plea for Gorgeous Robes
May the day be distant, may it never dawn, when the justices of the High Courts of England, Scotland, and Ireland sit in judgment clothed like the man in the street: let us not even imagine a coronation in black cloth, much less in tweeds.
And when it is a question of crowned anointed kings, of judges on the bench, of priests at the altar, the plea for comfort in apparel should be altogether non-suited. The chasuble—the principal vestment of the celebrating priest—was in the middle ages a voluminous, flowing, splendid, and somewhat inconvenient habit. The Roman Catholic Church suffered considerations of comfort and convenience to be heard, and the result has been the evolution of the modern chasuble; a slight, graceless, and almost unrecognizable descendant of the ancient vestment.
No; when men are on splendid business, or awful business or business of any solemn and ceremonial significance, let them by all means wear splendid and solemn robes; let that which is without be as that which is within.
But when half a dozen men dine together at home or at a restaurant, proposing to go to a musical comedy or a music-hall afterwards: is the occasion one that demands ceremony or state of any kind?
Surely not; but even if we grant the solemnity of such an affair, the mystic significance of the menu and the music, let us attire ourselves in robes more lovely than the magpie costume which is now customary.
Let us drape our bodies in solemn togas of white and scarlet, be our locks garlanded with a charming array of flowers.
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This is excellent! And he seems very accurate in predicting the long continuation of “the silk hat and the frock-coat” being “indispensable at weddings, funerals, and official receptions” and in expressing a perception of weight and endurance in saying “when it is a question of crowned anointed kings, of judges on the bench, of priests at the altar, the plea for comfort in apparel should be altogether non-suited” (with a cheeky wordplay at the close to boot). I wonder where his discussion in the rest of the paragraph following my last quotation comes in the history of the ‘chasuble wars’ (which continue to the present day)? Wikipedia’s “Chasuble” article is general in its expression: “In the 20th century, there began to be a return to an earlier, more ample, form of the chasuble, sometimes called ‘Gothic’, as distinguished from the ‘Roman’ scapular form.” How early? Herbert Thurston’s 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia article, linked there, speaks only of “two principal types”, “which may for convenience be called the Roman and the French” – where the “French type, also common in Germany and in a more debased form in Spain, is less ample”!
His next paragraph – “when men are on splendid business, or awful business or business of any solemn and ceremonial significance, let them by all means wear splendid and solemn robes” – makes me think of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, and indeed, her detective stories are full of attention to details of formality and informality in dress. She also has fancy dress parties – something which had been around since mid-Victorian times, and which Machen does not explicitly mention – though I wonder if there is some subtle play with the idea in his final paragraph. In the context, this dress seems suggested not only for the privacy of dining “together at home” but very publicly “at a restaurant, proposing to go to a musical comedy or a music-hall afterwards”! I am not sure how far clerical cassocks have made a broad comeback for public dress, but I saw someone chatting outside a department store in a pretty showy urban mall in something like a caftan earlier this evening.
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I wonder just what he was thinking of in his reference to the “place in the scheme of costume […] held to-day by the late Georgian dress”? A quick but enjoyable browse through the final, “George the Fourth”, chapter of Dion Clayton Calthrop’s English Costume (1907) – thanks to your link! – did not make me the wiser, though its closing paragraphs reward comparison and contrast with this article! Might his description include the wigs characteristic of law-court dress?
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