unanswerable arguments--an American girl’s eyes. They are different,
believe me, these American eyes, from any other sort. The women of no
other country can look at you that way. You must admit, and in some
degree understand this, or you cannot hope to understand Miss America
in society or anywhere else. You may say of her eyes what Darwin
hinted of eyes in general, that they are the supreme physical paradox.
They do not peer like the virgin eyes of poetical tradition. It
has been complained that they have not at all the inquiring look once
thought to be so winsome in the young. They seem to _know_, yet
they are too feminine to assert. We say hard things about the poets
nowadays, but who can blame the poets for becoming emotional over her
eyes? Are eyes ever more a mystery, a contradiction, an uncombattable
force than when Miss America turns upon us her gentle yet fearless,
her wise yet maidenly orbs? We may have planned a battle. We may have
girded ourselves for a glance toward these twin guns in that implacable
turret, but at the first encounter our bravado withers. When she uses
these weapons as she pre-eminently knows how, we declare the motion
carried--the eyes have it.
So soon as we grasp the fact that Miss America can look _and_
talk, we are in a fair way to understand some of the secrets of her
power. It is quite generally admitted that she talks well, and very
seldom, I think, with any disparaging reservation. She is a good
talker. She is more; she is a good conversationalist, for she can
listen. If speech is silver and silence is golden, I am free to admit
that Miss America does not seem to believe altogether in the gold
standard. She appears to be somewhat of a bi-metallist. I don’t blame
her; and I always admire her method of dealing with men who believe in
the free silver of continuous talk.
Her reserve here is characteristic of her agreeable poise in society
whenever and wherever she is called upon to say the right thing at the
right time. She never exhibits stage fright, though she has confessed
(afterward) to the symptoms. If, like Isabella, she is “loth to speak
so indirectly,” she doesn’t show it. She may, indeed, like the Venus
of Melos, be disarmed, but she never will be found, like the Winged
Victory, to have lost her head. Foreigners sometimes have said that
Miss America talks too loudly, but I am sure that this effect arises
from her vivacity, and one might retort that if her enunciation ever
is more than necessarily audible the chances are all in favor of your
being glad that you did not miss a word.
[Illustration]
Sometimes she has a way of talking to you at an oblique angle. She
likes to banter while she pours tea, for example, parrying and
thrusting with the agility of one of those Viennese girls who know
how to fence with a blade in each hand. When Mme. De Staël declared
that conversation, “like talent, exists only in France,” Miss America
had not grown up. It still is true, probably, as Mrs. Poyser pointed
out, that a woman “can count a stocking top while a man’s gitting his
tongue ready.” Man’s development has been distressingly slow. He never
has met but indifferently the supreme test of the _tête-à-tête_.
It may be that his habits of life dispose him to take an exaggerated,
sometimes even a morbid, view of the hazard of words. Regarding the
situation solemnly is fatal to facility. The situation is not, and
cannot be, intrinsically solemn, being devised to get away from
solemnity. The talk is no more momentous than the tea. Neither is an
end, but only a means. “It grieves my heart,” cried Addison, “to see a
couple of proud, idle flirts sipping their tea for a whole afternoon
in a room hung round with the industry of their great-grandmothers.”
Now this comment, surely, represents a most unwholesome frame of mind,
subversive of that relaxation which Delsarte and many charming women
disciples have bidden us cultivate.
[Illustration]
Alas! it would be a good thing if sipping tea for a whole afternoon in
one room were the worst sin practised by our young women. Sipping tea
in a dozen rooms on the same afternoon is surely a worse matter. In the
days when people gave up a whole afternoon to a call, conversational
stitching and tea drinking were reduced to a science, and gossip to a
fine art. In a later day, when the author of the Synthetic Philosophy
found occasion to marvel over and to lament the velocity with which
men and women were going about their affairs in this country, calling
customs had utterly changed. If our women had undertaken to perpetuate
throughout the year the New Year’s Day habits of the sociable Dutch of
Manhattan, they could not have been more successful. The potency of
pasteboard and the human imagination have not greatly diminished the
pressure, and will not so long as the intoxication of mere rapidity
continues to preserve its power. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
has colloquially expressed the distressing celerity with which certain
classes of fashionable women rush in, laugh, talk, eat and disappear,
in the tersely alliterative “giggle, gabble, gobble, git.”
These habits are, of course, utterly destructive of good talk. Modern
society talk under the pressure of numbers and a consent to oscillate
violently, is like the scattered fragments of a word game. A man--I
cannot speak for a woman--emerges from a “crush” with fresh emotions
toward the grotesquely ironical definition of words as the vehicle of
thought.
[Illustration: Gossip]
However, I am glad to think that Miss America does not seek to revive
the spectacular talking such as women did in the days of the old
French salons. A woman talking to a dozen men at the same time may
have been a charming affair. Mme. Récamier is credited with having
done it very well. But no sane and truthful man ever will admit his
contentment with the microscopic fragment of a woman’s attention.
Exclusive interest in a woman is undoubtedly a primitive instinct, yet
the great deference paid to success in the _tête-à-tête_ well
may justify this instinctive preference, and those hostesses surely
will be most successful who devise some liberty for this instinct. The
tendency of our social life is doubtless against centralization. There
can be no more monologists, it seems. “The worst of hearing Carlyle,”
said Margaret Fuller, “is that you cannot interrupt him.” The modern
social gathering, whatever its aims or variations, is quite sure at
least of this quality,--that it will interrupt. We cannot deny that
even “One-Minute Conversations with Nice Girls” is an experience having
its compensations as well as its drawbacks, for while a few eloquent
seconds with many women may not be so desirable in some ways as many
eloquent seconds with one woman, it always must be difficult to know
beforehand just when this will be the case. Mr. Warner has shrewdly
pointed out that some women are interesting for five minutes, some
for ten, some for an hour; “some,” he adds, “are not exhausted in a
whole day; and some (and this shows the signal leniency of Providence)
are perennially entertaining, even in the presence of masculine
stupidity.” The trouble is (as you might guess) that the interruption
always cuts you off at the end of three minutes with the girl who
would be interesting for a whole day. For aught I know, society may
have averaged this thing, and have discovered that the low limit is
safest, that it leaves both parties most completely in possession of
the benefit of the doubt. But how few men can start a new conversation
every ninety seconds with anything like the success that attends a
woman’s efforts to do the same thing?
No, woman, who created Society with its capital letter, has succeeded,
whether by design or accident, in producing a situation in which she is
placed at a very definite advantage. She can riddle a man with deadly
small shot before he can roll up his heavy guns. Yet she never will
like the man who either refuses the close order or surrenders. She will
like him best if he “puts up a good fight.” If he stammers, she knows
just how to deal with his broken English and keep him going. _Quot
linguae, tot homines._ But you cannot multiply a woman that way.
One language is all that she needs. Small talk is a large question.
As the loose change of vocal currency, it is an indispensable
commodity. The larger denominations are not available. As for cashing
an intellectual check, good as your credit may be, it is out of the
question altogether; and a wise man recognizes the fact that in the
matter of this commodity woman is a banker who must always pocket a
margin.
[Illustration]
One day in a far Southwestern city the belle of the place drove me in
a dogcart for a memorable half hour. She was no taller than I, but she
wore a magnificent hat, one of those hats which even the girl could not
make you forget, and as she sat on the “dinky,” she arose beside me
in a quelling contrast. The horse was a smart stepper (at least that
is my confused impression), the road demanded a discriminating rein;
but though we drove past the leading hotel in the crisis of the event,
and drew the fire of a hundred eyes, that girl’s delightful wit never
faltered nor forsook her, that is to say, never forsook _me_; for,
of course, I needed a helping hand. No man not specifically trained
to it could gracefully maintain himself at such an altitude with any
credit to his power of speech. When I recall that dashing day, the
roll of the cart, the flutter of those lofty feathers, the firm grace
of those little gloved hands, the healthy glow of the face I looked
up to, I feel an accentuated humility, a deep conviction of my oral
inferiority.
In society, as elsewhere, woman often reminds us of her superiority
to the algebraic axiom that things which are equal to the same thing
are equal to each other. There are qualified ways in which a man may
be equal to society. But to say that he is equal to a woman--that is
another matter.
You will remind me that society is not wholly a matter of talk, large
or small. This is very true. Among other things, it is a matter of
clothes.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VI
LACE AND DESTINY
[Illustration]
Victor Hugo thought that “a book might be written with regard to the
influence of gold lace on the destiny of nations.” Carlyle wrote the
book, extending his discussion to the influence of lace that is not
golden on the destiny of society; and one may scarcely venture a few
tentative words upon the subject of clothes without the feeling that he
should, properly, apologize to “Sartor Resartus.” And yet, as we have
many reasons for remembering, there are new clothes, and if there is no
new philosophy, it is not impossible that the old philosophy may have
some new bearings, and that the new conditions, as sometimes happens,
modify the application of the eternal verities.
Naturally one cannot throw out even a casual suggestion in such a
matter without realizing that we have gone very far from the primitive
standpoint. When Adam told Eve that she looked lovely in green, the
situation was strikingly different from any that we now can fancy,
not only with regard to the lady, but with regard to the situation
in general, for, as there could be no relativity in the sincerity
of the compliment, there could have been no diffidence in receiving
it. It is clear that either paying or receiving a compliment under
such circumstances must of necessity have had an inferior excitement;
yet we can have no difficulty in grasping the fact that between the
primitive dress reform situation presented in the wilds of Paradise,
and the highly evolved subtleties of modern dress, lie infinite ethical
complexities, a pyramid of riddles, a Mammoth Cave of doubt. It having
been established by centuries of habit that civilized men and women
shall always wear some clothes, and most of the time a great deal of
them, the question has not the simplicity which it might have had at
an earlier time. Clothes principles are now as intricate as apparel
itself. They are associated with ages of prejudice, libraries of
history, acres of painted art, mountains of dry goods. On the other
hand, certain notions now are entirely accepted, and the field for
debate, after all, is much narrower than might at first appear.
It may not be amiss to remember the fact, flatly expressed by Carlyle,
that “the first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration,
as, indeed, we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized
countries.” In women, dress is this “spiritual want” touched by
artistic sentiment, I had almost said religion; and whatever we may
say of the essential barbarism of the sentiment, it seems quite likely
to prove one of those barbarisms that are fundamental and permanent.
If we might remember that it is fundamental much of modern discussion
would be simplified. I find Mr. Finck giving the following elements as
explaining the Fashion Fetish: the vulgar display of wealth, milliners’
cunning, the tyranny of the ugly majority, cowardice and sheepishness.
These are all good explanations, but the list seems sadly deficient
without an allusion to this instinctive and ineradicable desire for
decoration. Mr. Theodore Child seems to have in mind the instinctive
and final phase of the situation when he bids us “enjoy in imagination
what the meanness of the age refuses to the desire of the eyes.”
Woman herself seems to have adopted the view of Epictetus that “we
ought not, even by the aspect of the body to scare away the multitude
from philosophy.” Socrates meant the same thing when he said to one of
his too-ragged followers, “I see thy vanity shining through the holes
in thy coat.” Clothes, then, are not merely to warm or to conceal, but
also to decorate. Wherein they warm or conceal, they are a science.
Wherein they decorate, they are an art. The science is exact; the art
is rich in variety and change, making every other art its handmaiden,
every season its holiday, every sentiment its theme. It is an art
redolent of the years, tingling with the daring of youth. Above all,
it is an art in which woman chooses to express herself in a language
free from the inhibitions placed upon other arts, in which, ignoring
when she chooses, the primary excuses and incentives, she takes an
art-for-art’s-sake justification for showing us the separate and
independent fascination, in themselves, of sublimated clothes. No
one who cannot perceive the inherent interest, if not the inherent
justification, of clothes as clothes, ever can see deeply into the
philosophy of dress, or ever can see deeply into the philosophy of
women.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
The wide contrast, and one growing continually wider, in the
characteristics of masculine and feminine dress, on those occasions
when it most definitely expresses itself as dress, might suggest that
some variation in the governing philosophy of each had taken place,
perhaps at some definite time; for there was no such contrast in an
earlier day. It may be that at the time--and we may set this early
in the present century, easily within the period of our own national
history--when man began to simplify his attire, to put aside all
but the rudest decorative elements, woman definitely formulated her
justifications for perpetuating the idea of clothes for clothes’ sake.
We are bound to remember what she has had to live down. She has had to
live down Queen Elizabeth, and all the hyperbole of Continental fashion
when Continental fashion was in its most imaginative mood. Political
traditions were not the only burdens of our ambitious young republic.
Think of the gorgeous head-dresses, half as tall as the women who wore
them, and which afforded such delight to the caricaturist! Have you
ever stopped to think how few opportunities woman gives the cartoonist
nowadays, how severe a strain she places upon his ingenuity? There may
be an occasional note of excess. A recent foreign investigator found
the clothes of our women too much so, too perfect for repose. This
note of excess is the characteristic of genius. I myself have seen
American women who, to a merely masculine prejudice, seem to be wearing
too many rings. But we must make reasonable allowance for the natural
accumulations of time. It has occurred to me that I might do as we may
with a tree,--tell a woman’s age by her rings.
[Illustration]
So that in looking about and finding the whole of human society
“hooked, and buttoned up and held together by clothes,” we cannot hope
in any successful way to investigate the matter, if we forget for a
moment that the dress of women is to be looked at as a subjective
element. Going a little way with logical analysis, and agreeing,
for example, that “if the cut betoken intellect and talent, so
does color betoken temper and heart,” we soon meet with a mountain
height of contradictions introduced by the purely personal effect of
woman herself, and we find, long before attaining any symmetry of
information, that woman has invested certain material elements
of life, as she has invested so many elements of life that are not
material, with the interest she herself has for us. A little lace, a
ribbon she has worn in her hair, a glove, a satin slipper, a fan, a
shred of trimming, have an eloquence in their revelation of her, a
fragrance in their transmission of her touch, which eludes logic and
confounds investigation. By a faculty and privilege of making things
seem reasonable that are not at all reasonable, by a witchcraft, a
sophistry of fashion, a trick of illusion, in the presence of which
we forget every rule of art, every principle of proportion, every
prejudice of habit, she can utterly bewilder us in a master stroke
of invincible instinct. She takes, deliberately and with exquisite
selective tact, certain entirely simple, inoffensive elements,--things
which in themselves you must acknowledge to be harmless and almost
rational; she takes these simple elements and she puts them together
by a method, and in a manner, of which no man, if he lived to be one
hundred and eighty-six, ever would discover the secret, and, waving her
wizard wand over the entire mess, she calls it a hat!
Nothing could be more preposterous, of course. When we study the thing
as an object separated from her, it might, even though we knew that she
had created it, excite our derision. But when we see this masterpiece
of absurdity upon her head, that which had seemed at once an offence to
nature and to art, the acme of decorative nonsense, immediately becomes
forgivable--immediately becomes right. It is not that we excuse it for
her sake. It is not that the apposition dismays our reason. We bow to
it, accept it, and end by perceiving that, whether it be taken as an
old fact of nature or a new fact of genius, it is unanswerable.
[Illustration]
No woman could be more completely, undebatably sane than the Professor.
I know what I am talking about. And yet the Professor wears a hat. I
had occasion, one day, when she had left it for a moment on a table,
to study it analytically as a creation. It was a fearful and wonderful
thing. No man ever can forget the moment when first, with mature
deliberation, and in a consciousness of the vast significance of life,
he takes up a woman’s hat, timorously, as if it were a ten-inch shell
or Minerva’s helmet, and gazes into its fragile fastness. When I
mentally grasped, as a man may in the absence of the wearer, the many
and extraordinary elements of the Professor’s hat; when I sought to
associate its multi-colored grotesqueness with the classic simplicity
of the Professor’s profile; when I figured its heterogeneous elements
as an object of decoration for the Professor’s outward and visible
effect; when I fancied the Professor’s brain flashing and glowing under
this riotous symbolism, I was filled with a new sense of the futility
of reason, a new awe for the wonder of woman.
[Illustration]
Dr. Holmes has spoken of the hat as “the vulnerable point of the
artificial integument”; but plainly he was speaking of the masculine
hat, for woman’s hat is no vulnerable point with her. It is her strong
point, her point of vantage, the citadel of her sophistries. You can
reason with her about other things, but you cannot reason with her
about her hats; not, mind you, because she will not listen, but because
she, or the hat, makes you not want to. This is not to say that it
makes no difference who wears the hat. It does make a difference. Take
a device like the calash, such as our great-grandmothers wore. There
were faces that did not look well in it, faces which quite naturally
might have made us think less well of the calash for the moment. Under
certain other circumstances--that is to say, over a certain other head,
its quaintness begins to have a meaning, and it seems as natural and
acceptable as anything else which the right face and the right person
choose to display for us. Thackeray contended that sauer-kraut tastes
good in Germany, and it is notorious that the bagpipes sound quite
reasonable in Scotland. In the same way, there is no form of hat yet
devised by human ingenuity that will not tempt forgiveness when it is
on the right woman.
And woman herself quite clearly perceives the force of association,
the importance, if the significance of the hat is to be preserved
and understood, of keeping it on her head. If this were not so why
should we be confronted with the monumental paradox that our womankind
are keeping their hats on in church and taking them off in places of
amusement? At the theatre woman consents to be separated from her hat,
and to have her hat separated from her. At her devotions she is not
yet willing to commit this discord, and in the dim religious light it
twinkles and shimmers its owner’s insistent dictum: The hat is the
woman. In a thousand ways the hat declares the existence of occult
meanings. A woman who would cut a man who wore a made tie, who would
not buy a reproduced antique or pirated print, who knows Sèvres at
a hundred yards and a real Bokhara in the dark, will cover her head
with linen lilies and cotton-bloated roses. A woman who would hesitate
to put a jewel in her hair, will heap upon the dyed straw of her hat
festoons of glass and steel and wax, with the fretted carcass of a bird.
After all, there is no occasion to take hats seriously, unless you
happen to sit behind one, which, of course, cannot always be happening.
They are a wonderful study; there are so many different kinds; they
have been talked about so much, and have filled so large a place in
our lives, especially in public audiences. They have been discussed as
widely and as fervidly as the Federal Constitution. Because of them,
men have passed laws and sleepless nights. Because of them men fought
duels in the last century and lawsuits in this. To make it possible
to have them more refulgent and fetching, husbands and fathers have
worked on Sundays and stopped smoking. Though it has been assailed
with fanatical bitterness, buffeted by satire, stripped by statute,
stoned by envy, disciplined by reform, the hat serenely survives, a
defiant catalogue of every trait for which it ever has been either
praised or condemned. From out the din of conflict and discussion it
rises unscathed and unashamed the proud emblem of woman’s pictorial
supremacy, which all nature has said must and shall be preserved.
And you know what she can do with a veil; she can make you forget that
a veil is barbarous; she can make you forget that you shouldn’t like
veils,--she can make you like her in one. She can make it increase her
effect of preciousness, if that effect is in her line; or make it
increase her sphinx-like effect, if that happens to be in her line.
She no longer is extravagant in contriving them. Sarah’s was to cost a
thousand pieces of silver. She now is content to make it a direct and
specific instrument of illusion.
[Illustration]