have faith to believe that thousands which are now wasted in mere
political charlatanism would go to provide for the rearing of the
children of the state, male and female. My wife has spoken for the boys;
I speak for the girls also. What is provided for their physical
development and amusement? Hot, gas-lighted theatric and operatic
performances, beginning at eight, and ending at midnight; hot, crowded
parties and balls; dancing with dresses tightly laced over the laboring
lungs,--these are almost the whole story. I bless the advent of croquet
and skating. And yet the latter exercise, pursued as it generally is, is
a most terrible exposure. There is no kindly parental provision for the
poor, thoughtless, delicate young creature,--not even the shelter of a
dressing-room with a fire, at which she may warm her numb fingers and
put on her skates when she arrives on the ground, and to which she may
retreat in intervals of fatigue; so she catches cold, and perhaps sows
the seed which with air-tight stoves and other appliances of hot-house
culture may ripen into consumption.
"What provision is there for the amusement of all the shop girls,
seamstresses, factory girls, that crowd our cities? What for the
thousands of young clerks and operatives? Not long since, in a
respectable old town in New England, the body of a beautiful girl was
drawn from the river in which she had drowned herself,--a young girl
only fifteen, who came to the city, far from home and parents, and fell
a victim to the temptation which brought her to shame and desperation.
Many thus fall every year who are never counted. They fall into the
ranks of those whom the world abandons as irreclaimable.
"Let those who have homes and every appliance to make life pass
agreeably, and who yet yawn over an unoccupied evening, fancy a lively
young girl all day cooped up at sewing in a close, ill-ventilated room.
Evening comes, and she has three times the desire for amusement and
three times the need of it that her fashionable sister has. And where
can she go? To the theatre, perhaps, with some young man as thoughtless
as herself, and more depraved; then to the bar for a glass of wine, and
another; and then, with a head swimming and turning, who shall say where
else she may be led? Past midnight and no one to look after her,--and
one night ruins her utterly and for life, and she as yet only a child!
"John Newton had a very wise saying: 'Here is a man trying to fill a
bushel with chaff. Now if I fill it with wheat first, it is better than
to fight him.' This apothegm contains in it the whole of what I would
say on the subject of amusements."
IX.
DRESS, OR WHO MAKES THE FASHIONS.
The door of my study being open, I heard in the distant parlor a sort of
flutter of silken wings, and chatter of bird-like voices, which told me
that a covey of Jennie's pretty young street birds had just alighted
there. I could not forbear a peep at the rosy faces that glanced out
under pheasants' tails, doves' wings, and nodding humming-birds, and
made one or two errands in that direction only that I might gratify my
eyes with a look at them.
Your nice young girl, of good family and good breeding, is always a
pretty object, and, for my part, I regularly lose my heart (in a sort of
figurative way) to every fresh, charming creature that trips across my
path. All their mysterious rattle-traps and whirligigs,--their curls and
networks and crimples and rimples and crisping-pins,--their little
absurdities, if you will,--have to me a sort of charm, like the tricks
and stammerings of a curly-headed child. I should have made a very poor
censor if I had been put in Cato's place: the witches would have thrown
all my wisdom into some private chip-basket of their own, and walked off
with it in triumph. Never a girl bows to me that I do not see in her eye
a twinkle of confidence that she could, if she chose, make an old fool
of me. I surrender at discretion on first sight.
Jennie's friends are nice girls,--the flowers of good, staid, sensible
families,--not heathen blossoms nursed in the hot-bed heat of wild,
high-flying, fashionable society. They have been duly and truly taught
and brought up, by good mothers and painstaking aunties, to understand
in their infancy that handsome is that handsome does; that little girls
must not be vain of their pretty red shoes and nice curls, and must
remember that it is better to be good than to be handsome; with all
other wholesome truisms of the kind. They have been to school, and had
their minds improved in all modern ways,--have calculated eclipses, and
read Virgil, Schiller, and La Fontaine, and understand all about the
geological strata, and the different systems of metaphysics,--so that a
person reading the list of their acquirements might be a little appalled
at the prospect of entering into conversation with them. For all these
reasons I listened quite indulgently to the animated conversation that
was going on about--Well!
What _do_ girls generally talk about, when a knot of them get together?
Not, I believe, about the sources of the Nile, or the precession of the
equinoxes, or the nature of the human understanding, or Dante, or
Shakespeare, or Milton, although they have learned all about them in
school; but upon a theme much nearer and dearer,--the one all-pervading
feminine topic ever since Eve started the first toilet of fig-leaves;
and as I caught now and then a phrase of their chatter, I jotted it down
in pure amusement, giving to each charming speaker the name of the bird
under whose colors she was sailing.
"For my part," said little Humming-Bird, "I'm quite worn out with
sewing; the fashions are all _so_ different from what they were last
year, that everything has to be made over."
"Isn't it dreadful!" said Pheasant. "There's my new mauve silk dress! it
was a very expensive silk, and I haven't worn it more than three or four
times, and it really looks quite dowdy; and I can't get Patterson to do
it over for me for this party. Well, really, I shall have to give up
company because I have nothing to wear."
"Who _does_ set the fashions, I wonder," said Humming-Bird; "they seem
nowadays to whirl faster and faster, till really they don't leave one
time for anything."
"Yes," said Dove, "I haven't a moment for reading, or drawing, or
keeping up my music. The fact is, nowadays, to keep one's self properly
dressed is all one can do. If I were _grande dame_ now, and had only to
send an order to my milliner and dressmaker, I might be beautifully
dressed all the time without giving much thought to it myself; and that
is what I should like. But this constant planning about one's toilet,
changing your buttons and your fringes and your bonnet-trimmings and
your hats every other day, and then being behindhand! It is really too
fatiguing."
"Well," said Jennie, "I never pretend to keep up. I never expect to be
in the front rank of fashion, but no girl wants to be behind every one;
nobody wants to have people say, 'Do see what an old-times, rubbishy
looking creature _that_ is.' And now, with my small means and my
conscience, (for I have a conscience in this matter, and don't wish to
spend any more time and money than is needed to keep one's self fresh
and tasteful,) I find my dress quite a fatiguing care."
"Well, now, girls," said Humming-Bird, "do you really know, I have
sometimes thought I should like to be a nun, just to get rid of all this
labor. If I once gave up dress altogether, and knew I was to have
nothing but one plain robe tied round my waist with a cord, it does
seem to me as if it would be a perfect repose,--only one is a
Protestant, you know."
Now, as Humming-Bird was the most notoriously dressy individual in the
little circle, this suggestion was received with quite a laugh. But Dove
took it up.
"Well, really," she said, "when dear Mr. S---- preaches those saintly
sermons to us about our baptismal vows, and the nobleness of an
unworldly life, and calls on us to live for something purer and higher
than we are living for, I confess that sometimes all my life seems to me
a mere sham,--that I am going to church, and saying solemn words, and
being wrought up by solemn music, and uttering most solemn vows and
prayers, all to no purpose; and then I come away and look at my life,
all resolving itself into a fritter about dress, and sewing-silk, cord,
braid, and buttons,--the next fashion of bonnets,--how to make my old
dresses answer instead of new,--how to keep the air of the world, while
in my heart I am cherishing something higher and better. If there's
anything I detest it is hypocrisy; and sometimes the life I lead looks
like it. But how to get out of it? what to do?"
"I'm sure," said Humming-Bird, "that taking care of my clothes and going
into company is, frankly, _all_ I do. If I go to parties, as other girls
do, and make calls, and keep dressed,--you know papa is not rich, and
one must do these things economically,--it really does take all the time
I have. When I was confirmed the Bishop talked to us so sweetly, and I
really meant sincerely to be a good girl,--to be as good as I knew how;
but now, when they talk about fighting the good fight and running the
Christian race, I feel very mean and little, for I am quite sure this
isn't doing it. But what is,--and who is?"
"Aunt Betsey Titcomb is doing it, I suppose," said Pheasant.
"Aunt Betsey!" said Humming-Bird, "well, she is. She spends _all_ her
money in doing good. She goes round visiting the poor all the time. She
is a perfect saint;--but O girls, how she looks! Well, now, I confess,
when I think I must look like Aunt Betsey, my courage gives out. _Is_ it
necessary to go without hoops, and look like a dipped candle, in order
to be unworldly? Must one wear such a fright of a bonnet?"
"No," said Jennie, "I think not. I think Miss Betsey Titcomb, good as
she is, injures the cause of goodness by making it outwardly repulsive.
I really think, if she would take some pains with her dress, and spend
upon her own wardrobe a little of the money she gives away, that she
might have influence in leading others to higher aims; now all her
influence is against it. Her _outré_ and repulsive exterior arrays our
natural and innocent feelings against goodness; for surely it is natural
and innocent to wish to look well, and I am really afraid a great many
of us are more afraid of being thought ridiculous than of being wicked."
"And after all," said Pheasant, "you know Mr. St. Clair says, 'Dress is
one of the fine arts,' and if it is, why of course we ought to cultivate
it. Certainly, well-dressed men and women are more agreeable objects
than rude and unkempt ones. There must be somebody whose mission it is
to preside over the agreeable arts of life; and I suppose it falls to
'us girls.' That's the way I comfort myself, at all events. Then I must
confess that I do like dress; I'm not cultivated enough to be a painter
or a poet, and I have all my artistic nature, such as it is, in dress. I
love harmonies of color, exact shades and matches; I love to see a
uniform idea carried all through a woman's toilet,--her dress, her
bonnet, her gloves, her shoes, her pocket-handkerchief and cuffs, her
very parasol, all in correspondence."
"But my dear," said Jennie, "anything of this kind must take a fortune!"
"And if I had a fortune, I'm pretty sure I should spend a good deal of
it in this way," said Pheasant. "I can imagine such completeness of
toilet as I have never seen. How I would like the means to show what I
could do! My life, now, is perpetual disquiet. I always feel shabby. My
things must all be bought at hap-hazard, as they can be got out of my
poor little allowance,--and things are getting so horridly dear! Only
think of it, girls! gloves at two and a quarter! and boots at seven,
eight, and ten dollars! and then, as you say, the fashions changing so!
Why, I bought a sack last fall and gave forty dollars for it, and this
winter I'm wearing it, to be sure, but it has no style at all,--looks
quite antiquated!"
"Now I say," said Jennie, "that you are really morbid on the subject of
dress; you are fastidious and particular and exacting in your ideas in a
way that really ought to be put down. There is not a girl of our set
that dresses as nicely as you do, except Emma Seyton, and her father,
you know, has no end of income."
"Nonsense, Jennie," said Pheasant. "I think I really look like a beggar;
but then, I bear it as well as I can, because, you see, I know papa does
all for us he can, and I won't be extravagant. But I do think, as
Humming-Bird says, that it would be a great relief to give it up
altogether and retire from the world; or, as Cousin John says, climb a
tree and pull it up after you, and so be in peace."
"Well," said Jennie, "all this seems to have come on since the war. It
seems to me that not only has everything doubled in price, but all the
habits of the world seem to require that you shall have double the
quantity of everything. Two or three years ago a good balmoral skirt was
a fixed fact; it was a convenient thing for sloppy, unpleasant weather.
But now, dear me! there is no end to them. They cost fifteen and twenty
dollars; and girls that I know have one or two every season, besides all
sorts of quilled and embroidered and ruffled and tucked and flounced
ones. Then, in dressing one's hair, what a perfect overflow there is of
all manner of waterfalls, and braids, and rats and mice, and curls, and
combs; when three or four years ago we combed our own hair innocently
behind our ears, and put flowers in it, and thought we looked nicely at
our evening parties! I don't believe we look any better now, when we are
dressed, than we did then,--so what's the use?"
"Well, did you ever see such a tyranny as this of fashion?" said
Humming-Bird. "We know it's silly, but we all bow down before it; we are
afraid of our lives before it; and who makes all this and sets it going?
The Paris milliners, the Empress, or who?"
"The question where fashions come from is like the question where pins
go to," said Pheasant. "Think of the thousands and millions of pins that
are being used every year, and not one of them worn out. Where do they
all go to? One would expect to find a pin mine somewhere."
"Victor Hugo says they go into the sewers in Paris," said Jennie.
"And the fashions come from a source about as pure," said I, from the
next room.
"Bless me, Jennie, do tell us if your father has been listening to us
all this time!" was the next exclamation; and forthwith there was a whir
and rustle of the silken wings, as the whole troop fluttered into my
study.
"Now, Mr. Crowfield, you are too bad!" said Humming-Bird, as she perched
upon a corner of my study-table, and put her little feet upon an old
"Froissart" which filled the arm-chair.
"To be listening to our nonsense!" said Pheasant.
"Lying in wait for us!" said Dove.
"Well, now, you have brought us all down on you," said Humming-Bird,
"and you won't find it so easy to be rid of us. You will have to answer
all our questions."
"My dears, I am at your service, as far as mortal man may be," said I.
"Well, then," said Humming-Bird, "tell us all about everything,--how
things come to be as they are. Who makes the fashions?"
"I believe it is universally admitted that, in the matter of feminine
toilet, France rules the world," said I.
"But who rules France?" said Pheasant. "Who decides what the fashions
shall be there?"
"It is the great misfortune of the civilized world, at the present
hour," said I, "that the state of morals in France is apparently at the
very lowest ebb, and consequently the leadership of fashion is entirely
in the hands of a class of women who could not be admitted into good
society, in any country. Women who can never have the name of wife,--who
know none of the ties of family,--these are the dictators whose dress
and equipage and appointments give the law, first to France, and through
France to the civilized world. Such was the confession of Monsieur
Dupin, made in a late speech before the French Senate, and acknowledged,
with murmurs of assent on all sides, to be the truth. This is the reason
why the fashions have such an utter disregard of all those laws of
prudence and economy which regulate the expenditures of families. They
are made by women whose sole and only hold on life is personal
attractiveness, and with whom to keep this up, at any cost, is a
desperate necessity. No moral quality, no association of purity, truth,
modesty, self-denial, or family love, comes in to hallow the atmosphere
about them, and create a sphere of loveliness which brightens as mere
physical beauty fades. The ravages of time and dissipation must be made
up by an unceasing study of the arts of the toilet. Artists of all
sorts, moving in their train, rack all the stores of ancient and modern
art for the picturesque, the dazzling, the grotesque; and so, lest these
Circes of society should carry all before them, and enchant every
husband, brother, and lover, the staid and lawful Penelopes leave the
hearth and home to follow in their triumphal march and imitate their
arts. Thus it goes in France; and in England, virtuous and domestic
princesses and peeresses must take obediently what has been decreed by
their rulers in the _demi-monde_ of France; and we in America have
leaders of fashion, who make it their pride and glory to turn New York
into Paris, and to keep even step with everything that is going on
there. So the whole world of woman-kind is marching under the command of
these leaders. The love of dress and glitter and fashion is getting to
be a morbid, unhealthy epidemic, which really eats away the nobleness
and purity of women.
"In France, as Monsieur Dupin, Edmond About, and Michelet tell us, the
extravagant demands of love for dress lead women to contract debts
unknown to their husbands, and sign obligations which are paid by the
sacrifice of honor, and thus the purity of the family is continually
undermined. In England there is a voice of complaint, sounding from the
leading periodicals, that the extravagant demands of female fashion are
bringing distress into families, and making marriages impossible; and
something of the same sort seems to have begun here. We are across the
Atlantic, to be sure; but we feel the swirl and drift of the great
whirlpool; only, fortunately, we are far enough off to be able to see
whither things are tending, and to stop ourselves if we will.
"We have just come through a great struggle, in which our women have
borne an heroic part,--have shown themselves capable of any kind of
endurance and self-sacrifice; and now we are in that reconstructive
state which makes it of the greatest consequence to ourselves and the
world that we understand our own institutions and position, and learn
that, instead of following the corrupt and worn-out ways of the Old
World, we are called on to set the example of a new state of
society,--noble, simple, pure, and religious; and women can do more
towards this even than men, for women are the real architects of
society.
"Viewed in this light, even the small, frittering cares of woman's
life--the attention to buttons, trimmings, thread, and sewing-silk--may
be an expression of their patriotism and their religion. A noble-hearted
woman puts a noble meaning into even the commonplace details of life.
The women of America can, if they choose, hold back their country from
following in the wake of old, corrupt, worn-out, effeminate European
society, and make America the leader of the world in all that is good."
"I'm sure," said Humming-Bird, "we all would like to be noble and
heroic. During the war, I did so long to be a man! I felt so poor and
insignificant because I was nothing but a girl!"
"Ah, well," said Pheasant, "but then one wants to do something worth
doing, if one is going to do anything. One would like to be grand and
heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be _very_
something, _very_ great, _very_ heroic; or if not that, then at least
very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity
that bores me."
"Then, I suppose, you agree with the man we read of, who buried his one
talent in the earth, as hardly worth caring for."
"To say the truth, I always had something of a sympathy for that man,"
said Pheasant. "I can't enjoy goodness and heroism in homoeopathic
doses. I want something appreciable. What I can do, being a woman, is a
very different thing from what I should try to do if I were a man, and
had a man's chances: it is so much less--so poor--that it is scarcely
worth trying for."
"You remember," said I, "the apothegm of one of the old divines, that if
two angels were sent down from heaven, the one to govern a kingdom, and
the other to sweep a street, they would not feel any disposition to
change works."
"Well, that just shows that they are angels, and not mortals," said
Pheasant; "but we poor human beings see things differently."
"Yet, my child, what could Grant or Sherman have done, if it had not
been for the thousands of brave privates who were content to do each
their imperceptible little,--if it had not been for the poor, unnoticed,
faithful, never-failing common soldiers, who did the work and bore the
suffering? No _one_ man saved our country, or could save it; nor could
the men have saved it without the women. Every mother that said to her
son, Go; every wife that strengthened the hands of her husband; every
girl who sent courageous letters to her betrothed; every woman who
worked for a fair; every grandam whose trembling hands knit stockings
and scraped lint; every little maiden who hemmed shirts and made
comfort-bags for soldiers,--each and all have been the joint doers of a
great heroic work, the doing of which has been the regeneration of our
era. A whole generation has learned the luxury of thinking heroic
thoughts and being conversant with heroic deeds, and I have faith to
believe that all this is not to go out in a mere crush of fashionable
luxury and folly and frivolous emptiness,--but that our girls are going
to merit the high praise given us by De Tocqueville, when he placed
first among the causes of our prosperity the _noble character of
American women_. Because foolish female persons in New York are striving
to outdo the _demi-monde_ of Paris in extravagance, it must not follow
that every sensible and patriotic matron, and every nice, modest young
girl, must forthwith, and without inquiry, rush as far after them as
they possibly can. Because Mrs. Shoddy opens a ball in a
two-thousand-dollar lace dress, every girl in the land need not look
with shame on her modest white muslin. Somewhere between the fast women
of Paris and the daughters of Christian American families there should
be established a _cordon sanitaire_, to keep out the contagion of
manners, customs, and habits with which a noble-minded, religious
democratic people ought to have nothing to do."
"Well now, Mr. Crowfield," said the Dove, "since you speak us so fair,
and expect so much of us, we must of course try not to fall below your
compliments; but, after all, tell us what is the right standard about
dress. Now we have daily lectures about this at home. Aunt Maria says
that she never saw such times as these, when mothers and daughters,
church-members and worldly people, all seem to be going one way, and sit
down together and talk, as they will, on dress and fashion,--how to have
this made and that altered. We used to be taught, she said, that
church-members had higher things to think of,--that their thoughts ought
to be fixed on something better, and that they ought to restrain the
vanity and worldliness of children and young people; but now, she says,
even before a girl is born, dress is the one thing needful,--the great
thing to be thought of; and so, in every step of the way upward, her
little shoes, and her little bonnets, and her little dresses, and her
corals and her ribbons, are constantly being discussed in her presence,
as the one all-important object of life. Aunt Maria thinks mamma is
dreadful, because she has maternal yearnings over our toilet successes
and fortunes; and we secretly think Aunt Maria is rather soured by old
age, and has forgotten how a girl feels."