You will say:
‘Life may be marvellous, but these revelations about human motives are
terrible, and they depress us.’
They ought not to depress you. The saving quality about human motives
is that they are so human, and therefore so forgivable. And, be it
remembered, I have not asserted that the demonstration of wealth and
leisure is the sole explanation of fashionableness. I have already
referred to the desire to be attractive; and to this must be added the
sense of beauty, which is nearly allied to it. The woman who bedecks
herself is actuated by all three motives--the motive of ostentation (to
satisfy primarily the man), the motive to attract, and the motive to
satisfy the sense of beauty.
As regards the last, it may be said that the sense of beauty does not
regularly improve in mankind, like, for instance, the sense of justice.
No feminine raiment has ever equalled the classic Greek, which was
not costly. But then the Greeks were not worried by too much wealth.
And the Greek dress would be highly inconvenient without the Greek
daily life, and especially without the Greek climate. And I doubt if
nowadays we should care greatly for the Greek life. Still, the sense
of beauty does emphatically exist among us, and the desire of women to
be attractive is quite as powerful as it was in the time of Aspasia.
These two motives are constantly, and often victoriously, fighting
against the motive of ostentation, and it is probably the interplay of
the three motives that produces the continual confusing and expensive
changes of fashion, as has been well argued by Professor Franklin Henry
Giddings, one of the most brilliant social philosophers in the United
States.
‘But all this must be altered!’ the ardent among you will cry out.
‘In future women must dress solely to be attractive and to satisfy the
sense of beauty.’
Well, they just won’t. Men will never allow it, and women themselves
would never agree to it. Costume will always be more than costume;
costume is so handy and effective as a symbol of something else; and
that something else will always be--success. When wealth ceases to be
the standard of success, then costume will cease to be employed as a
proof of wealth, and not before. Meanwhile, we must admit that, if the
possession of wealth has to be proved to the world, it could not be
proved in a more charming and less offensive way than in the costumes
of women. The spectacle of a stylish dress stylishly worn is extremely
agreeable. The spectacle of a room full of stylish dresses stylishly
worn is thrilling. He among you who has never been to a ball should go
to one and try the experience for himself.
Leisure, the ability to be idle and useless, is still to a certain
extent a standard of success in life, but not anything like so much
as in the past. People are gradually perceiving that to be idle and
useless is vicious. Hence the unpracticalness of women’s costumes will
gradually decrease. Beyond question high heels, for example, will
vanish from our pavements and from our drawing-rooms. I even have hope
that women will one day wear dresses which they can put on and fasten
unaided without the help of one, two, or three assistants. But such
changes will arrive slowly. You cannot hurry nature. It is a great
truth that the present is firmly rooted in the past. It refuses to be
pulled up by the roots. Futile to announce that you will in future be
guided by nothing but common sense! Whose common sense? Common sense
is a purely relative thing. The common sense of the past often seems
silly to us, and the common sense of the present will often seem silly
to the future. The progress of mankind is an extraordinarily complex
business. It cannot be settled in a phrase. Nothing in it is simple;
nothing in it is unrelated to the rest. Everything in it has a reason
which will appeal to true intelligence. And men should bear this in
mind when they talk lightly and scornfully (and foolishly) about
women’s fashions.
To conclude, let me utter one word about the secret fear that lies
always at the back of most men’s minds--the fear that such-and-such a
change in the habits of women will destroy their femininity. This fear
is groundless. Femininity--thank heaven!--is entirely indestructible.
It will survive all progress and all revolutions of taste. And when the
end comes on this cooling planet the last vestige of it will be there,
fronting the last vestige of masculinity.
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press.
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced
quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
otherwise left unbalanced.
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not
changed.
Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.