If we compare this “quiet felicity” of the artist with the absurd travesties worn on our American stage, we can better understand the pleasure which filled Mr. James’s heart.  What, for example, would Madame Nathalie have thought of the modish gowns which Mrs. Fiske introduces into the middle-class Norwegian life of Ibsen’s dramas?  No plays can less well bear such inaccuracies, because they depend on their stage-setting to bring before our eyes their alien aspect, to make us feel an atmosphere with which we are wholly unfamiliar.  The accessories are few, but of supreme importance; and it is inconceivable that a keenly intelligent actress like Mrs. Fiske should sacrifice vraisemblance to a meaningless refinement.  In the second act of “Rosmersholm,” to take a single instance, the text calls for a morning wrapper, a thing so manifestly careless and informal that the school-master, Kroll, is scandalized at seeing Rebecca in it, and says so plainly.  But as Mrs. Fiske plays the scene in a tea-gown of elaborate elegance, in which she might with propriety have received the Archbishop of Canterbury, Kroll’s studied apologies for intruding upon her before she has had time to dress, and the whole suggestion of undue intimacy between Rebecca and Rosmer, which Ibsen meant to convey, is irrevocably lost.  And to weaken a situation for the sake of being prettily dressed would be impossible to a French actress, trained in the delicacies of her art.

If the feeling for clothes, the sense of their correspondence with time and place, with public enthusiasms and with private sensibilities, has always belonged to France, it was a no less dominant note in Italy during the two hundred years in which she eclipsed and bewildered the rest of Christendom; and it bore fruit in those great historic wardrobes which the Italian chroniclers describe with loving minuteness.  We know all about Isabella d’ Este’s gowns, as if she had worn them yesterday.  We know all about the jewels which were the assertion of her husband’s pride in times of peace, and his security with the Lombard bankers in times of war.  We know what costumes the young Beatrice d’ Este carried with her on her mission to Venice, and how favourably they impressed the grave Venetian Senate.  We can count the shifts in Lucretia Borgia’s trousseau, when that much-slandered woman became Duchess of Ferrara, and we can reckon the cost of the gold fringe which hung from her linen sleeves.  We are told which of her robes was wrought with fish scales, and which with interlacing leaves, and which with a hem of pure and flame-like gold.  Ambassadors described in state papers her green velvet cap with its golden ornaments, and the emerald she wore on her forehead, and the black ribbon which tied her beautiful fair hair.