Flirt or prude, prim or gay, foolish or wise, woman, once criticised,
cries to her sisters, and is recognised and defended as woman. All
feminine comment, all internal censure, is hushed before the foe. The
tittle-tattle of the gossips, the social intrigues of the dowager, are
adopted as frankly as the self-devotion of a Miss Nightingale. The door
of refuge is flung open as widely for the foolish virgins as for the
wise. All distinctions of age, of conduct, of intelligence, of rank are
annihilated or forgotten in the presence of the enemy. Every fault is to
be defended, every weakness to be held stoutly against his attacks. "No
surrender" is the order of the day. It is only when the criticism of the
outer world withdraws that woman's internal criticism recommences. This
is, indeed, half the offence of outer assailants, that they suspend and
injure the working of that inner discipline which woman exerts over
woman. Mrs. Proudie, it has been said, is the Church.
Women certainly present the only analogy in the present day to that
claim of internal jurisdiction for which the Church struggled so
gallantly in the middle ages. No one who sees the serried ranks with
which she encounters all investigation from without would imagine the
severity with which she administers justice within. Like the Westphalian
Vehm-gericht, the mystery of feminine courts is only equalled by their
terrible sentences. Mrs. Grundy on the seat of justice is a Rhadamanthus
to whom criticism may fairly leave an erring sister. But all this in
nowise weakens the firmness of woman's attitude before an outer foe. She
claims absolute right to all hanging, drawing, and quartering on her
domains. Like a feudal baron, she will yield to no man her stocks and
her gallows. But to judge from the prim front of her squares, the
cordial grasp of hand-in-hand with which they form to resist all
masculine charges, no one would imagine the ruthless severity with which
woman was breaking some poor drummer-boy inside.
We are bound, however, to add, that in all our remarks we have only been
nibbling at the outer rind of a great difficulty. Woman has
characteristically fallen back on a grand principle, and has asserted
her absolute immunity from all criticism whatever. It is not merely that
this critic is deaf or that critic malignant, that one censor is
ignorant and another basely envious of woman. All this special pleading
is totally flung aside, and the defence stands on a basis of the most
uncompromising sort. No man, it is asserted, can judge woman, because no
man can understand her. She is the Sphinx of modern investigation, and
man is not fated to be her OEdipus. We can conceive of few
announcements more welcome, if it be only true.
In an age when everything seems pretty well discovered, when one cannot
preserve even a shred of mystery to cloak the bareness of one's life,
when the very surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious
griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an
amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay more, that an insoluble,
mystery is standing on one's very hearth-rug. No wonder great
philosophers have spent their lives in vain in looking for the riddle of
existence, when they never dreamt of looking for it at home. Why woman
is so peculiarly mysterious, why the laws of her nature are so specially
unintelligible to a common world, we have not yet been informed. What is
asserted is simply the fact of this mystery, and before that great fact
criticism retires.
All that remains for it is to pray and to wait, to hope for a revelation
from within, since it is forbidden any exploration from without. Some
prophetess, no doubt a veiled prophetess herself, will arise to lift the
veil of her sex. Woman, let us hope, will at last unriddle woman. Smit
by the sunbeams, or rather by the moonbeams, of self-discovery, the
Sphinx of modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music the
mystery of her existence.
MISTRESS AND MAID ON DRESS AND UNDRESS.
No one with a soul to appreciate the extra-judicial utterances of Mr.
Samuel Warren can have forgotten the memorable lament over the decline
and fall of the fine old English maid-servant with which, some years
ago, he introduced some cases of petty larceny to the notice of the
grand-jurors of Hull. The alarm sounded with such touching eloquence
from the judgment-seat was taken up last autumn, if we remember, by a
venerable Countess, who, in an address to an assemblage of Cumbrian
lasses, aspirants to the kitchen and the dairy, took occasion to read
them a lecture on the duty of dressing with the simplicity befitting
their station. Both the learned Recorder and the venerable Countess were
animated by the best intentions. Their advice was excellent, and we
sincerely trust that it may have induced the neat-handed Phyllis of the
North to curb her immoderate taste for finery. These sporadic warnings
seem likely to ripen at last into action.
From a letter lately inserted in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, we learn that
a "Clergyman's Wife" has long been brooding in silent indignation over
"the present disgraceful style of dress among female servants." Her
disgust finds vent in a manifesto to the mistresses of Great Britain,
in which, after painting the evil in the darkest possible colors, she
ends by suggesting a remedy for it. Dress, we are told, among "the lower
orders of females," has arrived at a pitch which has wholly changed the
aspect and character of our towns and country villages. Neither
preachers nor good books can avail to stop it. Bad women are fearfully
increased in number, good wives and mothers are getting rare. In
consequence of the reckless expenditure of women upon their dress,
husbands become drunkards, and murder too commonly follows. The remedy
for this terrible state of things is to be found in the following
"proposition:"--The ladies of England are to form an association,
pledging themselves to adopt, each family for themselves, a uniform for
their female servants, and to admit none into their service who refuse
to wear it.
The uniform is not to be old-fashioned or disfiguring, but merely neat,
simple, and consequently becoming. The following ornaments are to be
absolutely prohibited--"feathers, flowers, brooches, buckles or clasps,
earrings, lockets, neck-ribbons and velvets, kid-gloves, parasols,
sashes, jackets, Garibaldis, all trimming on dresses, crinoline, or
steel of any kind." No dress to touch the ground. No pads, frisettes, no
chignons, no hair-ribbons. Having swept away by a stroke of the pen all
this mass of finery, a "Clergyman's Wife" goes on to make some
"suggestions," which we quote for the edification of our lady readers:--
"Morning dress: Lilac print, calico apron, linen collar. Afternoon
dress: Some lighter print, muslin apron, linen collar and cuffs.
Sundays: a neat alpaca dress, linen collar and cuffs, or frill tacked
into the neck of the dress, a black apron, a black shawl, a medium straw
bonnet with ribbons and strings of the same color, a bow of the same
inside, and a slight cap across the forehead, thread or cotton gloves, a
small cotton or alpaca umbrella to keep off sun and rain. The winter
Sunday dress: Linsey dress, shepherd's plaid shawl, black straw bonnet.
A plain brown or black turndown straw hat with a rosette of the same
color, and fastened on with elastic, should be possessed by all servants
for common use, and is indispensable for nursemaids walking out with
children. Should servants be in mourning, the same neat style must be
observed--no bugles, or beads, or crape flowers allowed."
The first thing that strikes us in connection with this glib project is
the enormous difficulty of carrying it into execution. It is easy, we
all know, to call spirits from the vasty deep, but exceedingly difficult
to induce them to obey the summons. It is easy, and to feminine
ingenuity rather pleasant than otherwise, to devise sumptuary laws for
the kitchen. But it is quite another thing to try to enforce them. By
what coercive machinery is Betsy Jane to be forced into the detested
uniform? We know how deeply the Anglo-Saxon mind resents any social
"ticketing." Does a "Clergyman's Wife" suppose that the British
housemaid is exempt from this little weakness common to her race? At any
rate, we are convinced that she would never subside into a "lilac
print" or a "neat alpaca" without a tremendous struggle. Her first
weapon of defence would infallibly be a strike. It is absurd to suppose
that she would cling to her flowers and parasol with less tenacity than
cabby to his right of running over people in the dark.
Now, is a "Clergyman's Wife" prepared to face the consequences of such a
strike? Is she ready for an indefinite time to cook her own dinner, mend
her own dresses, dust her own rooms, manage her own nursery? What if the
vengeance of the housemaid menaced by the imposition of a "calico apron"
or a "medium straw bonnet" should assume a darker form, and a system of
domestic "rattening" should spread terror through the tranquil
parsonages of England? Is she prepared to brave the system of
intimidation by which a union of vindictive cooks and nursery-maids
might assert their inherent rights to lockets and earrings? Has she the
nerve to crush the secret plots of kitchen Fenianism? Ultimately, no
doubt, her efforts might be crowned with success. When that happy time
arrived, when "her suggestions were generally adopted," and the
"requirements of ladies, especially those of fortune, were generally
known" to comprise a uniform for the maid-servant, she might succeed in
closing the market of domestic service to the flaunting abigail whose
audacious finery renders her to the outward eye indistinguishable from
her own daughters.
But as that time would be long in coming, and probably would never
arrive in her lifetime, she would have to face the discomforts of a
long period of transition, during which she would have to rely on
herself and her daughters for the discharge of the various operations of
the household. Meantime we beg to suggest another way of effecting her
purpose quite as easy, and much more effectual. Why not go in for an Act
of Parliament, having for its object the total suppression of the
instinct of vanity in the female bosom? Let it be enacted that, on and
after the 1st of next April (the date would be appropriate), feathers,
flowers, and the other abominations which she seeks to proscribe, shall
be for ever abjured and disused by the fair sex. As the prelude to that
full entry on her social and political rights which is nowadays claimed
for woman, a proposal of this magnitude would commend itself, no doubt,
to the philosophic section of the House of Commons.
There is another feature in the manifesto of a "Clergyman's Wife" which
calls for observation. She lays particular stress on securing the
adhesion to her plan of "families of wealth and distinction," "ladies of
position and fortune"--of the leaders of fashion, in short, wherever
those mysterious but potent decoy-ducks are to be found. Its success
depends on "making it fashionable to adopt the uniform," on making
simplicity of dress among maid-servants the sole avenue to the "best
situations." Now, as it is conceded that the "present disgraceful style
of dress among servant girls" is the result of their ambition to imitate
their superiors, it is worth while, in order to estimate both the amount
of their responsibility for the said disgrace and the chances of
success of the proposed reform, to glance from the style of dress in
vogue in the kitchen to the style of dress in vogue in the drawing-room.
Oddly enough, on the very day on which a "Clergyman's Wife" was
permitted to ventilate her project in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the
public was favored with the latest intelligence on this point, in the
columns of a fashionable contemporary. Paris, we all know, is the
sovereign arbiter of dress to all "ladies of position and fortune" in
this country, the center of an authority on all matters relating to the
toilette, which radiates, through "families of distinction and wealth,"
to those calm retreats where clergymen's wives, in chastely severe
attire, exchange hospitalities with their neighbors. What is the
fashionable style of dress in Paris at the present moment? The
correspondent of our contemporary shall speak for himself. "We are
living," he says, "in an age which seems to be reviving the classical
period in the history of drapery. You see pretty nearly as much of the
female _torso_ now as the Athenians did when the bas-reliefs of the
Parthenon copied the modes of the Greeks so many hundred years ago, and
when the multitude did not worship the drapery of the goddess only."
After some piquant remarks on the style of dress in the theatres, he
goes on to inform us how "in the more refined and virtuous society" the
ladies are dressing this winter. "At a _fete_ graced by all that is
elegant, refined, and aristocratic in Paris," he observed the duchess,
the countess, and the baroness imitating the costly toilettes of the
_demi-monde_, arrayed like one of them precisely, in the very height of
fashion. We are favored with a minute account of one representative
toilette in the room:--
"The lady is of a noble Hungarian family, fair, with that dark brown
reddish hair which is just going to begin to be golden, but never shines
out. Pale oval face, heavy eyebrows, bright bronze eyes. Small festoons
of hair over the brow, imprisoned by a golden metal band. Behind a
Bismarck chignon. A mass of twisted hair, in a sort of Laocoon agony,
was decorated with small insects (of course I don't mean anything
impossible), glittering gem-like beetles from the Brazils. Three long
curls hang from the imposing mass, and could be worn before or behind,
and be made to perform--as I witnessed--all sorts of coquettish
tricks. . . . Now for the dress. Well, there is nothing to describe till
you get very nearly down to the waist. A pretty bit of lace on a band
wanders over the shoulder; the back is bare very low down, and more of
the bust is seen than even last year's fashions permitted. . . . You
may, as far as I could observe, dress or half-dress just as you like;
caprice has taken the place of uniform fashion. As the panorama of
_grandes dames_ floats before my mind's eye, I come to the conclusion
that I have seen more of those ladies than one could have hoped or
expected in so brief a space of time."
This, then, is, or shortly will be, in a tasteless and exaggerated form,
the style of dress among those "ladies of distinction" whose
co-operation a "Clergyman's Wife" fondly hopes to enlist in her scheme
for purging the kitchen of its "disgraceful" finery. It is just possible
that she has not heard of these things. Perhaps in the retirement of the
parsonage, with her eyes intently fixed on the moral havoc which dress
is causing among "the lower orders of females," she has assumed that the
dress of the higher orders of females is irreproachably modest and
correct. If so, we are sorry to have to dispel an illusion which would
go far to justify the self-complacent tone of her lecture. But unless
she is blissfully ignorant of contemporary fashions in any sphere more
elevated than the kitchen, we are struck with astonishment at the
hardihood of an appeal at the present moment to ladies of fashion.
Is a being whose avowed object is to imitate as exactly as possible the
cosmetic tricks of the _demi-monde_ likely to prove an influential ally
in a crusade against cheap finery? Is a mistress whose head-gear
resembles the art-trophy of an eccentric hair-dresser, and whose
clothing is described as nothing to speak of "until you get very nearly
down to the waist," the person to be especially selected to preach
propriety of dress to her maid? Or is it that a "Clergyman's Wife"
objects to overdress only, and not to underdress; and that, while she
would repress with severity any attempt on the part of "females of the
lower order" to adorn their persons, she looks with a tolerant eye,
among "ladies of position and fortune," upon the nude? We are curious to
know at what point in the social scale she would draw the line above
which an unblushing exhibition of the female _torso_ is decent, and
below which earrings and a parasol are immoral.
As a matter of fact, so far from discouraging the passion for dress
among their female dependents, ladies of position and fortune are apt to
insist on their dressing smartly. They like to see some of their own
lustre reflected on their attendants. A dowdy in sad-colored print or
linsey is by no means to their taste. This has been well pointed out in
a letter in which a "Maid-servant" replied, through the _Pall Mall
Gazette_, to the project of reform proposed by a "Clergyman's Wife."
Looking at the question from her own point of view, she described in
plain words how, when she first went into service, she had wished to
dress simply, but was quickly made to understand that she must either
spend more of her wages on dress, or seek another situation. We believe
that her experience would be endorsed by the great majority of her
class. If a "Clergyman's Wife" would take the pains to inquire into the
facts of the case, she would not be long in ascertaining from what
quarter the signal for unbecoming finery among "females of the lower
orders" really comes.
The plain truth of the matter is, that a reform in the dress of "lower
class females," and maid-servants in particular, can only be brought
about in one way. The reaction in favor of a neat and simple style must
come from above, and not from below; in the way of example, not of
precept. When "ladies of position and fortune" cease to lavish their
thousands on millinery, their copyists in the nursery and kitchen will
cease to spend their wages on a similar object. When every one above the
rank of a governess dresses in a manner suitable to her station,
complaints will be no longer heard about "unbecoming" finery below
stairs. The chief incentive to showy dress among the "lower orders of
females" is unquestionably a desire to ape the extravagance of their
betters. Remove that incentive, and the evil which a "Clergyman's Wife"
so forcibly deplores will soon cure itself.
We hope that she may be induced to turn her reforming zeal into another
direction. Instead of indulging in childish projects for putting the
Sunday-school, and the church singers, and maid-servants, and the lower
orders of females generally into uniforms, let her attack the mischief
at its root, and persuade the fine ladies of the earth to curtail their
monstrous prodigality and immodest vagaries in dress. Let her add her
warning voice to that of the Head of Latin Christianity, who has
recently denounced this scandal of the age with the same perennial vigor
that characterizes his anathemas on the Subalpine Government.
AESTHETIC WOMAN.
It is the peculiar triumph of woman in this nineteenth century that she
has made the conquest of Art. Our grandmothers lived in the kitchen, and
debased their finer faculties to the creation of puddings and pies. They
spun, they knitted, they mended, they darned, they kept the accounts of
the household, and scolded the maids. From this underground existence of
barbaric ages woman has at last come forth into the full sunshine of
artistic day; she has mounted from the kitchen to the studio, the
sketching-desk has superseded the pudding-board, sonatas have banished
the knitting-needle, poetry has exterminated weekly accounts. Woman, in
a word, has realized her mission; it is her characteristic, she tells us
through a chorus of musical voices, to represent the artistic element of
the world, to be pre-eminently the aesthetic creature.
Nature educates her, as Wordsworth sang long ago, into a being of her
own, sensitive above all to beauty of thought and color, and sound and
form. Delicate perceptions of evanescent shades and tones, lost to the
coarser eye and ear of man, exquisite refinements of spiritual
appreciation, subtle powers of detecting latent harmonics between the
outer and the inner world of nature and the soul, blend themselves like
the colors of the prism in the pure white light of woman's organization.
And so the host of Woman, as it marches to the conquest of this world,
flaunts over its legions the banner of art.
In one of the occasional passages of real poetic power with which Walt
Whitman now and then condescends to break the full tide of rhapsody over
the eternities and the last patent drill, he describes himself as seeing
two armies in succession go forth to the civil war. First passed the
legions of Grant and M'Clellan, flushed with patriotic enthusiasm and
hope of victory, and cheered onward by the shouts of adoring multitudes.
Behind, silent and innumerable, march the army of the dead. Something,
we must own, of the same contrast strikes us as we stand humbly aside to
watch the aesthetic progress of woman.
It is impossible not to feel a certain glow of enthusiastic sympathy as
the vanguard passes by--women earnest in aim and effort, artists,
nursing-sisters, poetesses, doctors, wives, musicians, novelists,
mathematicians, political economists, in somewhat motley uniform and
ill-dressed ranks, but full of resolve, independence, and
self-sacrifice. If we were fighting folk we confess we should be half
inclined to shout for the rights of woman, and to fall manfully into the
rank. As it is, we wait patiently for the army behind, for the main
body--woman herself. Woman fronts us as noisy, demonstrative, exacting
in her aesthetic claims. Nothing can surpass the adroitness with which
she uses her bluer sisters on ahead to clear the way for her gayer
legions; nothing, at any rate, but the contempt with which she dismisses
them when their work is done. Their office is to level the stubborn
incredulity, to set straight the crooked criticisms, of sceptical man,
and then to disappear. Woman herself takes their place. Art is
everywhere throughout her host--for music, the highest of arts, is the
art of all.
The singers go before, the minstrels follow after, in the midst are the
damsels playing on the timbrels. The sister Arts have their own
representatives within the mass. Sketching boasts its thousands, and
poetry its tens of thousands. A demure band of maidens blend piety with
art around the standard of Church decoration. Perhaps it is his very
regard for the first host--for its earnestness, for its real
womanhood--that makes the critic so cynical over the second; perhaps it
is his very love for art that turns to quiet bitterness as he sees art
dragged at the heels of foolish virgins. For art _is_ dragged at their
heels. Woman will have man love her for her own sake; but she loves art
for the sake of man. Very truly, if with an almost sublime effrontery,
she re-christens for her own special purposes the great studies that
fired Raffaelle or Beethoven. She pursues them, she pays for them, not
as arts, but as accomplishments. Their cultivation is the last touch
added at her finishing school ere she makes her bow to the world. She
orders her new duet as she orders her new bonnet, and the two purchases
have precisely the same significance. She drops her piano and her
paint-brush as she drops her coquetries and flirtations, when the fish
is landed and she can throw the bait away. Or, what is worse, she keeps
them alive as little social enjoyments, as reliefs to the tedium of
domestic life, as something which fills up the weary hours when she is
fated to the boredom of rural existence.
A woman of business is counted a strange and remarkable being, we hardly
know why. Looking coolly at the matter, it seems to us that all women
are women of business; that their life is spent over the counter; that
there is nothing in earth or heaven too sacred for their traffic and
their barter. Love, youth, beauty, a British mother reckons them up on
her fingers, and tells you to a fraction their value in the market. And
the pale sentimental being at her side, after flooring one big fellow
with a bit of Chopin, and another with a highly unintelligible verse of
Robert Browning, poses herself shyly and asks through appealing eyes,
"Am I not an aesthetic creature?"