MY NOBLE FRIEND:--Here are the featherses sent my soul, my noble
friend, are there no other featherses leaved in the shop besides
these featherses? and these featherses remains, and these featherses
are ukly. They are very dear, who buyses dheses? And my noble
friend, we want a noat from yourself; those you brought last tim,
those you sees were very beautiful; we had searched; my soul, I want
featherses again, of those featherses. In Kalada there is plenty of
feather. Whatever bees, I only want beautiful featherses; I want
featherses of every desolation to-morrow.
(Signed) YOU KNOW WHO.
The first steps in culture do not, then, it seems, remove from the feminine
soul the love of pretty things. Nor do the later steps wholly extinguish
it; for did not Grace Greenwood hear the learned Mary Somerville conferring
with the wise Harriet Martineau as to whether a certain dress should be
dyed to match a certain shawl? Well! why not? Because women learn the use
of the quill, are they to ignore "featherses "? Because they learn science,
must they unlearn the arts, and, above all, the art of being beautiful? If
men have lost it, they have reason to regret the loss. Let women hold to
it, while yet within their reach.
Mrs. Rachel Rowland of New Bedford, much prized and trusted as a public
speaker among Friends, and a model of taste and quiet beauty in costume,
delighted the young girls at a Newport Yearly Meeting, a few years since,
by boldly declaring that she thought God meant women to make the world
beautiful, as much as flowers and butterflies, and that there was no sin in
tasteful dress, but only in devoting to it too much money or too much time.
It is a blessed doctrine. The utmost extremes of dress, the love of colors,
of fabrics, of jewels, of "featherses," are, after all, but an effort after
the beautiful. The reason why the beautiful is not always the result is
because so many women are ignorant or merely imitative. They have no sense
of fitness: the short wear what belongs to the tall, and brunettes
sacrifice their natural beauty to look like blondes. Or they have no
adaptation; and even an emancipated woman may show a disregard for
appropriateness, as where a fine lady sweeps the streets, or a fair orator
the platform, with a silken or velvet train which accords only with a
carpet as luxurious as itself. What is inappropriate is never beautiful.
What is merely in the fashion is never beautiful. But who does not know
some woman whose taste and training are so perfect that fashion becomes to
her a means of grace instead of a despot, and the worst excrescence that
can be prescribed--a _chignon_, a hoop, a panier--is softened into
something so becoming that even the Parisian bondage seems but a chain of
roses?
In such hands, even "featherses" become a fine art, not a matter of vanity.
Are women so much more vain than men? No doubt they talk more about their
dress, for there is much more to talk about; yet did you never hear the men
of fashion discuss boots and hats and the liveries of grooms? A good friend
of mine, a shoemaker, who supplies very high heels for a great many pretty
feet on Fifth Avenue in New York, declares that women are not so vain in
that direction as men. "A man who thinks he has a handsome foot," quoth our
fashionable Crispin, "is apt to give us more trouble than any lady among
our customers. I have noticed this for twenty years." The testimony is
consoling--to women.
And this naturally suggests the question, What is to be the future of
masculine costume? Is the present formlessness and gracelessness and
monotony of hue to last forever, as suited to the rough needs of a workaday
world? It is to be remembered that the difference in this respect between
the dress of the sexes is a very recent thing. Till within a century or so,
men dressed as picturesquely as women, and paid as minute attention to
their costume. Even the fashions in armor varied as extensively as the
fashions in gowns. One of Henry III.'s courtiers, Sir J. Arundel, had
fifty-two complete suits of cloth of gold. No satin, no velvet, was too
elegant for those who sat to Copley for their pictures. In Puritan days the
laws could hardly be made severe enough to prevent men from wearing
silver-lace and "broad bone-lace," and shoulder-bands of undue width, and
double ruffs and "immoderate great breeches." What seemed to the Cavaliers
the extreme of stupid sobriety in dress would pass now for the most
fantastic array. Fancy Samuel Pepys going to a wedding of to-day in his
"new colored silk suit and coat trimmed with gold buttons, and gold broad
lace round his hands, very rich and fine." It would give to the ceremony
the aspect of a fancy ball; yet how much prettier a sight is a fancy ball
than the ordinary entertainment of the period!
At intervals the rigor of masculine costume is a little relaxed; velvets
resume their picturesque sway: and, instead of the customary suit of solemn
black, gentlemen even appear in blue and gold editions at evening parties.
Let us hope that good sense and taste may yet meet each other, for both
sexes; that men may borrow for their dress some womanly taste, women some
masculine sense; and society may again witness a graceful and appropriate
costume, without being too much absorbed in "featherses."