Records have survived of those Pantagruelic feasts with which the great ones of the mediæval world delighted to celebrate the auspicious events of their lives, and the chronicler never fails to sum up the almost interminable list of the spices and essences with which the cook, on the advice of learned physicians, seasoned the viands, in order that, whilst the grosser meats satisfied the animal cravings of the stomach, those ethereal aromatics might stimulate the finer fluids, whose ebb and flow controls the soul, and the well-flavoured dishes might not only be hot on men's tongues but eke "prick them in their courages." They pricked to some purpose, it seems. And, if the spice-sated Netherlands-Indian is a comparatively law-abiding man, it must be because battening rice counteracts maddening curry. But for this providential arrangement, I fully believe he would think no more of battle, murder, and sudden death than of an indigestion, and consider a good dinner as an ample explanation of both.
Now, as to what they clothe themselves withal. Taine's opinion concerning tight fitting clothes has been mentioned--viz: that they are an invention of the North. A fortnight in Batavia will explain and prove the theory better than many books by many philosophers; and, moreover, cause the most sartorially-minded individual to consign the "invention" to a place hotter than even Java. Like the habitations, the habits of European civilization are irksome in the tropics; and, for indoor-wear at least, they have suffered a sun-change into something cool and strange--into native costume modified in fact. Now, the outward apparel of the Javanese consists of a long straight narrow skirt "the sarong" with a loose fitting kind of jacket over it,--short for the men, who call it "badjoo," and longer for the women who wear it as "kabaya": which garments have been adopted by the Hollanders, with the one modification of the sarong into a "divided skirt" for the men, and the substitution of white batiste and embroidery for the coloured stuffs of which native women make their kabayas, in the case of the ladies. On the Javanese, a small, spare, slightly-made race, the garb sits not ungracefully; narrow and straight as it is, it goes well with contours so attenuated. But on the sturdier Hollander the effect is something appalling. An adequate description of the men's appearance in it would read like a caricature; and though, with the help of harmonious colours and jewellery, the women look better when thus attired, the dress is not becoming to them either, at least in non-colonial eyes. The æsthetic sense shies and kicks out at the sight of those straight, hard, unnatural lines. Modern male costume has been held up to ridicule as a "system of cylinders". The sarong and kabaya combine to form one single cylinder, which obliterates all the natural lines and curves of the feminine form divine, and changes a woman into a parti-coloured pillar, for an analogy to which one's thoughts revert to Lot's wife. But, though utterly condemned from an artistic point of view, from a practical one it must be acquitted, and even commended. In a country where the temperature ranges between 85° and 95° Fahrenheit in the shade, cool clothes which can be changed several times a day, are a condition not merely of comfort, but of absolute cleanliness and decency, not to mention hygiene. For it is a noteworthy fact that the women, who wear colonial dress up to six in the evening, stand the climate better than the men, who, in the course of things, wear it during an hour or an hour and a half at most, in the day. And it must be admitted that both men and women enjoy better health in Java, under this colonial regime of dressing than in the British possessions, where they cling to the fashions of Europe.