VEILED COMPLIMENTS

For the first time in a long and illustrious journalistic career, the editor has asked me to write about a particular subject, namely veils. This filled me with some trepidation as I am not very well up in many particular subjects. One did go to school, of course, but one had a fagette to attend the actual lessons for one. Still, we commuters are nothing if not professional, so I said an immediate "Yes!" After all, we have excellent research facilities in our library at the castle—Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, an old Pears’ Cyclopaedia and any number of copies of the Illustrated London News.

Besides, I though of Lord Fermor’s statement in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.” I am sure the same must hold true for ladies.

The mourning-veil really should be de rigueur. I am not an advocate of long, Victorian periods of mourning, but a few days in black with a charming veil is extremely chic and sets one apart from the polloi who have forgotten what mourning is. They think it is something emotional rather than something you wear.
One remembers Lesley Sarony’s immortal words in Ain’t it Grand to be Bloomin’ Well Dead (frightfully amusing, but not one to pop on the gramophone at a funeral party):

Look at me Sister, bloomin' new 'at on
Ain't it grand, to be bloomin' well dead!
And look at me Brother, bloomin' cigar on
Ain't it grand, to be bloomin' well dead!

Well, that is the lower orders for you. There should not be a festive air at a funeral. It is simply not elegant. There should be a sort of mournful chic about one’s presentation, and nothing expresses that so charmingly as a nicely tailored black suit with black gloves and a black, veiled hat. The hat may be quite as new as Mr. Sarony’s sister’s—and just as useful for other occasions—but it has a reserved, wistful sort of panache which not only saves it from the sort of vulgarity implied in the song, but constitutes a particular nuance of dress that cannot often be appropriately deployed and for which, therefore, opportunities should not be neglected.

Needless to say, the more financially advantageous the death has been, the deeper should be the delicate tristesse one evinces.
But let us move on to happier, and less businesslike occasions. The veil certainly does not have to be funereal. The other moods it expresses perfectly are those of mystery and forbiddenness—you know how a glass-fronted bookcase always makes the books seem both more valuable and more unattainable. Well, a veil has the same effect in relation to a lady: but in this case it is also more romantic. One would say that it lends her a Gothic air, if the word had not been waylaid by dreadful people who wear black lip-rouge. What it certainly does is to lend a modern outfit an air of dark, Victorian mediaevalism but without sacrificing the least part of the pin-neat modernity of current Art-Deco fashion. It is, in its way, a minor miracle of stylistic synthesis—reconciling what might seem almost to be opposites into a perfectly delightful whole.

Veils can take many forms, from the simple eye-veil, which offers the veil-effect in an understated way, and with a minimum of encumbrance, to the full veil fastening under the chin, perhaps with a subtle lace-pattern.
Of the delightful nuances of smoking through a veil (the choice of cigarette holder is crucial) and of kissing through a veil—an experience of subtle delicacy if done correctly—I shall say nothing at this time, yet the aesthetic imagination of all but the dullest must surely be fired by such images, as it must also by the hunting-veil which presents to the eye the very embodiment of a modern Veiled Artemis. Surely in a world that cannot appreciate these things the soul must be in a coma.