In several surprising and enigmatic statements, T. S. Eliot's friends commented on his addiction to cosmetics. On September 27, 1922, Virginia Woolf, always a caustic observer and keen gossip, recorded, "I am not sure that he does not paint his lips." (1) That same year Clive Bell told Woolf's sister, Vanessa, that Eliot had gone further in exterior decoration and "taken to powdering his face green--he looks interesting and cadaverous." (2) Five years later Osbert Sitwell could scarcely believe that the self-effacing Eliot had actually tinted himself: "I was amazed to notice on his cheeks a dusting of green powder--pale but distinctly green, the colour of a forced lily-of-the-valley. I was all the more amazed at this discovery, because any deliberate dramatization of his appearance was so plainly out of keeping with his character, and with his desire never to call attention to himself."

A few days afterward Osbert said that Virginia Woolf, still puzzled, "was anxious for someone to confirm or rebut what she thought she had seen-whether I had observed the green powder on his face.... She had been equally astounded and... neither of us could find any way of explaining this extraordinary and fantastical pretence; except on the one basis that the great poet wished to stress his look of strain and that this must express a craving for sympathy in his [marital and financial] unhappiness." (3) Eliot's biographer Peter Ackroyd ventured a possible explanation: "His sensitivity to atmosphere was such that he may have wanted to live up to it--wearing, face powder made him look more modem, more interesting, a poet rather than a bank official." (4)

Eliot's "fantastical pretence" was not merely a plea for sympathy or egoistic provocation, but a daring and defiant attempt to place himself within a literary tradition that provided both poetic license and aesthetic justification. In his influential essay "In Praise of Make-Up," section XI of The Painter of Modern Life (1863), Charles Baudelaire extolled the reformation of nature, the majesty of artificial forms, the need to approximate the ideal, and the duty to appear magical and supernatural:

The use of face powder, so foolishly anathematized by candid philosophers, has the purpose ... of creating an abstract unity in the texture and color of the skin.... Black lines give depth and strangeness to the expression, and to the eyes they give a more specific appearance of a window opening unto the infinite.... There is no need for make-up to be hidden, or to avoid showing itself; on the contrary, it should stand out clearly, if not with affectation, at least with some degree of candor. (5)

Baudelaire followed his own artistic credo. Edouard Manet's friend and biographer, Antonin Proust, recalled that "at one time when the poet wore makeup in an outrageous manner, Manet said, 'he had a layer of it, but there was so much genius under that layer.'" (6)

In his study of Max Beerbohm (1972), John Felstiner observed that cosmetics had been condemned by satirists, from Juvenal to Pope, as a frivolous artifice suitable for the demimonde of actresses and whores, dandies and sexual deviants. …