I
The mindless male of our species is commonly engaged in committing
an indelicate assault upon woman’s taste in dress. He is graciously
pleased to dislike the bright colors that she wears. Her dazzling
headgear, her blinding parasol, her gorgeous frock with its burning
bows and sunset streamers, the iridescence of her neckwear, the radiant
glories of her scarves and the flaming splendor of her hose—these
various and varied brilliances pain the eyes of this weakling, making
him sad. He seems so miserable that it is charity to wish that he had
died when he was little—when he was himself in hue (and cry) a blazing
scarlet.
Every man to his taste; doubtless mine is barbaric. Anyhow, I like the
rich, bright bravery that the ladies wear. It is not a healthy eye that
is offended by intensity of color. It is not an honest taste that
admires it in a butterfly, a humming bird or a sunset, and derides it
in a woman. Nature is opulent of color; one has to look more than twice
to see what a wealth of brilliant hues are about him, so used to them
have our eyes become. They are everywhere—on the hills, in the air,
the water, the cloud. They float like banners in the sunlight and lurk
in shadows. No artist can paint them; none dares to if he could. The
critics would say he had gone mad and the public would believe them.
And it is wicked to believe a critic.
Nature has no taste; she makes odious and hideous combinations of tints
that swear at one another like quarreling cats—hues that mutually rend
and slay. She has the unparalleled stupidity to spread a blue sky above
a green plain and draw it down to the horizon, where the two colors
exhaust themselves in debating their differences. To be quite plain
about it, Nature is a dowdy old vulgarian. She has no more taste than
Shakspeare.
Just as Shakspeare poured out the unassorted jewels of his
inexhaustible understanding—cut, uncut, precious, bogus, crude,
contemptible and superb, all together, so Nature prodigally lavishes
her largess of color. I am not sure that Shakspeare did not teach her
the trick. Let the ladies, profiting by her bounty, emulate her virtues
and avoid her vice, each having due regard to her own kind of beauty,
and taking thought for its fitting embellishment and display. Let them
not permit the neutral-tinted minds of the “subdued-color” fiends to
fray them with utterance of feeble platitude.
An intolerable deal of nonsense has been uttered, too, about the
heartlessness of fashionable women in wearing the plumage of
song-birds—and all women are fashionable, and therefore “heartless,”
whom fortune has favored with means to that end. It is conceded by
those who utter the nonsense that it does no good; and that fact alone
would make it nonsense if the lack of wisdom did not inhere in its
every proposition. No doubt the offending female is herself somewhat
punctured in the conscience of her as she goes beautifuling herself
with the “starry plumes” which “expanded shine with azure, green and
gold,” and remembers the unchristian censure entailed by her passion
for this manner of headgear. If so, let her take comfort in this
present assurance that she is only obeying an imperious mandate of her
nature, which is also a universal law. To be comely in the eyes of the
male—that is the end and justification of her being, and she knows it.
Moreover, to the task of its accomplishment she brings an intelligence
distinctly superior to that with which we judge the result. We may
say that we don’t like her to have a fledged head; and that may be
true enough: our error consists in thinking that this is the same
proposition as that we don’t like her with her head fledged. Clearly,
we do: we like her better with her feathers than without, and shall
continue to prefer her that way as long as she is likely to hold the
feathers in service; then we shall again like her better without them,
even as we liked her better with them. The lesson whereof is that what
are called the “caprices” of fashion have an underlying law as constant
as that of gravitation.
In this one thing the woman is wise in her day and generation. She
may be unable to formulate her wisdom; it must, indeed be confessed
that she commonly makes a pretty bad attempt at explanation of
anything; but she knows a deal more than she knows that she knows.
One of the things that she perfectly apprehends is the evanescence of
æsthetic gratification, entailing the necessity of infinite variety
in the method of its production; and the knowledge of this is power.
In countries where the women of one generation adorn themselves as
the women of another did, they are slaves, and their bondage, I am
constrained to say, is just. Efface the caprices of fashion—let our
women look always the same, even their loveliest, and in a few years we
should be driving them in harness. If the fowls of the air can serve
her in averting the catastrophe, woman is right in employing their
artful aid. Moreover—a point hitherto overlooked—it is mostly men who
kill the fowls.
Urged to its logical conclusion, the argument of the Audubon Society
(named in honor of the most eminent avicide of his time) against the
killing of song-birds to decorate their betters withal would forbid
the killing of the sheep, an amiable quadruped; the fur-seal—extremely
graceful in the water; the domestic cow—distinguished for matronly
virtues; and the donkey, which, although it has no voice, is gifted
with a fine ear and works up well into a superior foreign sausage.
In short, we should emancipate ourselves from Nature’s universal law
of mutual destruction, and, lest we efface something which has the
accidental property of pleasing some of our senses, go naked, feed upon
the viewless wind and sauce our privation with the incessant spectacle
of song-birds pitching into one another with tigerish ferocity and
committing monstrous excesses on bees and butterflies.
We need not concern ourselves about “extermination”; the fashion is not
going to last long enough for that, and if it threatened to do so the
true remedy is not abstention, but breeding. Probably there was a time
when appeals were made for preservation of what is now the domestic
“rooster”—a truly gorgeous bird to look at. If he had not been good to
eat (in his youth) and his wife a patient layer their race would have
been long extinct. All that preserves the ostrich is the demand for its
plumage. If dead pigs were not erroneously considered palatable there
would not be a living pig within reach of man’s avenging arm. Who but
for the value of their scalps would be at the trouble and expense of
breeding coyotes? Thus we see how it is in the economy of nature that
out of the nettle danger the lower animals pluck the flower safety; and
it may easily be that the hatbird will owe its life to the profit that
we have in its death, and in the flare of the plume-hunter’s gun will
“hail the dawn of a new era.”