There is one respect in which the war has brought us a certain measure
of relief. It is no longer necessary to lie awake o' nights thinking
about your clothes. There are some people, of course, who like
thinking about their clothes. They seem to regard themselves as
perambulating shop window models on which to hang things, and if you
take away that subject from their conversation they are bankrupt. When
I was coming down on the bus the other afternoon I could not help
overhearing snatches of a conversation which was going on between two
women in the seat behind me. It was conducted with great volubility
and seriousness, and it came to me in scraps like this: "No, I don't
like that shade.... I saw a beautiful hat at So-and-So's at
Kensington; only 25s.; it was ... Yes, she has nice taste and always
looks ... No, brocaded..." And so on without a pause for the space of
half an hour.
I don't offer that conversation as representative. I imagine that in
the lump women are thinking less about dress to-day from the merely
ornamental point of view than they ever did. If you spend twelve hours
a day on a bus or a tram in a blue uniform and leggings, or driving a
Carter Paterson van in a mackintosh and a sou'wester, or filling shells
in a yellow overall, dress cannot occupy quite its old dominion over
your thoughts. You will think more about comfort and less about
finery. And that, according to Herbert Spencer, is an evidence of a
higher intelligence. The more barbaric you are the more you regard
dress from the point of view of ornament and the less from the point of
view of utility. It is a hard saying for the West End of life.
Spencer, to illustrate his point, mentions that the African attendants
of Captain Speke strutted about in their goatskin mantles when the
weather was fine, but when it was wet took them off, folded them up,
and went about naked and shivering in the rain.
A talk like that of the two women on the bus would not be possible
among men; but that does not mean that they have souls above finery.
It is not good form among them to talk about dress--that is all. But
that many of them think about it as seriously as women do, if less
continuously, is certain. Pepys' Diary is strewn with such
self-revelations as "This morning came home my fine Camlett cloak, with
gold buttons, and a silk suit, which cost me much money, and I pray God
to make me able to pay for it." He ought to have thought of that
earlier. No one is entitled to order fine clothes and then throw the
responsibility for paying for them on the Almighty. At least he might
have prayed to God on the subject before approaching the tailor. The
case of Goldsmith was not less conspicuous. He was as vain as a
peacock, and refused to go into the Church because he loved to wear
bright clothes. And his spirit is not dead among men. Who can look
upon the large white spats of ---- ---- as he comes down the floor of
the House without feeling that he is as dress-conscious as a milliner.
I am not speaking with disrespect of the well-dressed man (I do not
mean the over-dressed man: he is an offence). I would be well-dressed
myself if I knew how, but I have no gift that way. Like Squire
Shallow, I am always in the rearward of the fashion. I find that with
rare exceptions I dislike new fashions. They disturb my tranquillity.
They give me a nasty jolt. I suspect that the explanation is that
beneath my intellectual radicalism there lurks a temperamental
conservatism, a love of sleepy hollows and quiet havens and the old
grass-grown turnpikes of habit. It is no uncommon paradox. Spurgeon
had it like many others. He was once rebuked by a friend for his
political activity on the Liberal side. Why did he yield to this
weakness? "You ought to mortify the Old Man," said his friend. "I do
mortify him," said Spurgeon. "You see my Old Man is a Tory and I make
him vote Liberal. That mortifies him." I am conscious of the same
conflict, and in the matter of clothes the Old Man of Toryism is an
easy winner.
It was so with Carlyle. He raged like a bear with a sore head against
the existing political fashion of things, but in the matter of clothes
he was a mere antediluvian, and when he wanted a new suit he simply
wrote to the little country tailor in far-off Ecclefechan and told him
to send another "as before." And so, by taking no thought about the
matter, he achieved the distinction in appearance which the people who
worry about clothes do not achieve. The flavour of the antique world
hung about him like a fragrance, as, but yesterday, it hung about Lord
Courtney who looked like a reminiscence of the world of our
grandfathers walking our streets to the rebuke of a frivolous
generation.
I cannot claim to exhale this fine essence of the past. I am just an
ordinary camp-follower of the fashions, too perverse to march with the
main army, too timid to ignore it, but just hanging on its skirts as it
were, a forlorn relic of the year before last. My taste in ties, I am
assured, is execrable. My clothes are lacking in style, and my boots
have an unconquerable tendency to shapelessness. I put on whatever is
handiest without a thought of artistic design. My pockets bulge with
letters and books, and I am constantly reminded by well-meaning people
that the top button of my waistcoat is unbuttoned. I am perfectly
happy until I come into contact with the really well-dressed man who
has arranged himself on a conscious scheme, and looks like a sartorial
poem. I lunched with such a man a few days ago. I could not help
envying the neat perfection of everything about him, and I know, as his
eye wandered to my tie, that there was something there that made him
shudder as a harsh discord in music would make me shudder. It may have
been the wrong shade; it may have been awry; it may have been anything
that it oughtn't to have been. I shall never know.
And it is a great joy to be able not to care. The war has lightened
the cloud that hangs over those of us who simply cannot be dressy no
matter how much we try. It is no longer an offence to appear a little
secondhand. It is almost a virtue. You may wear your oldest clothes
and look the whole world in the face and defy its judgments. You may
claim that your baggy knees are a sacrifice laid on the altar of
patriotism and that the hat of yester-year is another nail in the
coffin of the Kaiser. A distinguished Parliamentarian, a man who has
sat in Cabinets, boasted to me the other day that he had not bought a
suit of clothes since the war began, and I had no difficulty in
believing the statement.
That is the sort of example that makes me happy. It gives me the
feeling that I am at last really in the fashion--the fashion of old and
unconsidered clothes. It is a very comfortable fashion. It saves you
worry and it saves you money. I hope it will continue when the war has
become a memory. And if we want a literary or historical warrant for
it we may go to old Montaigne. When he was a young fellow without
means, he says somewhere, he decked himself out in brave apparel to
show the world that he was a person of consequence; but when he came to
his fortune he went in sober attire and left his estates and his
chateaux to speak for him. That is the way of us unfashionable folk.
We leave our estates and our chateaux to speak for us.