always such an exacting and absorbing tendency, that it seems to have
furnished work for religionists and economists, in all ages, to keep it
within bounds. Various religious bodies, at the outset, adopted severe
rules in protest against it. The Quakers and the Methodists prescribed
certain fixed modes of costume as a barrier against its frivolities and
follies. In the Romish Church an entrance on any religious order
prescribed entire and total renunciation of all thought and care for the
beautiful in person or apparel, as the first step towards saintship.
The costume of the _religieuse_ seemed to be purposely intended to
imitate the shroudings and swathings of a corpse and the lugubrious
color of a pall, so as forever to remind the wearer that she was dead to
the world of ornament and physical beauty. All great Christian preachers
and reformers have levelled their artillery against the toilet, from the
time of St. Jerome downward; and Tom Moore has put into beautiful and
graceful verse St. Jerome's admonitions to the fair church-goers of his
time.
'WHO IS THE MAID?
'ST. JEROME'S LOVE.
'Who is the maid my spirit seeks,
Through cold reproof and slander's blight?
Has _she_ Love's roses on her cheeks?
Is _hers_ an eye of this world's light?
No: wan and sunk with midnight prayer
Are the pale looks of her I love;
Or if, at times, a light be there,
Its beam is kindled from above.
'I chose not her, my heart's elect,
From those who seek their Maker's shrine
In gems and garlands proudly decked,
As if themselves were things divine.
No: Heaven but faintly warms the breast
That beats beneath a broidered veil;
And she who comes in glittering vest
To mourn her frailty still is frail.
'Not so the faded form I prize
And love, because its bloom is gone;
The glory in those sainted eyes
Is all the grace _her_ brow puts on.
And ne'er was Beauty's dawn so bright,
So touching, as that form's decay,
Which, like the altar's trembling light,
In holy lustre wastes away.'
"But the defect of all these modes of warfare on the elegances and
refinements of the toilet was that they were too indiscriminate. They
were in reality founded on a false principle. They took for granted that
there was something radically corrupt and wicked in the body and in the
physical system. According to this mode of viewing things, the body was
a loathsome and pestilent prison, in which the soul was locked up and
enslaved, and the eyes, the ears, the taste, the smell, were all so many
corrupt traitors in conspiracy to poison her. Physical beauty of every
sort was a snare, a Circean enchantment, to be valiantly contended with
and straitly eschewed. Hence they preached, not moderation, but total
abstinence from all pursuit of physical grace and beauty.
"Now, a resistance founded on an over-statement is constantly tending
to reaction. People always have a tendency to begin thinking for
themselves; and when they so think, they perceive that a good and wise
God would not have framed our bodies with such exquisite care only to
corrupt our souls,--that physical beauty, being created in such profuse
abundance around us, and we being possessed with such a longing for it,
must have its uses, its legitimate sphere of exercise. Even the poor,
shrouded nun, as she walks the convent garden, cannot help asking
herself why, if the crimson velvet of the rose was made by God, all
colors except black and white are sinful for her; and the modest Quaker,
after hanging all her house and dressing all her children in drab,
cannot but marvel at the sudden outstreaking of blue and yellow and
crimson in the tulip-beds under her window, and reflect how very
differently the great All-Father arrays the world's housekeeping. The
consequence of all this has been, that the reforms based upon these
severe and exclusive views have gradually gone backward. The Quaker
dress is imperceptibly and gracefully melting away into a refined
simplicity of modern costume, which in many cases seems to be the
perfection of taste. The obvious reflection, that one color of the
rainbow is quite as much of God as another, has led the children of
gentle dove-colored mothers to appear in shades of rose-color, blue,
and lilac; and wise elders have said, it is not so much the color or
the shape that we object to, as giving too much time and too much
money,--if the heart be right with God and man, the bonnet ribbon may be
of any shade you please."
"But don't you think," said Pheasant, "that a certain fixed dress,
marking the unworldly character of a religious order, is desirable? Now,
I have said before that I am very fond of dress. I have a passion for
beauty and completeness in it; and as long as I am in the world and
obliged to dress as the world does, it constantly haunts me, and tempts
me to give more time, more thought, more money, to these things than I
really think they are worth. But I can conceive of giving up this thing
altogether as being much easier than regulating it to the precise point.
I never read of a nun's taking the veil, without a certain thrill of
sympathy. To cut off one's hair, to take off and cast from her, one by
one, all one's trinkets and jewels, to lie down and have the pall thrown
over one, and feel one's self, once for all, dead to the world,--I
cannot help feeling as if this were real, thorough, noble renunciation,
and as if one might rise up from it with a grand, calm consciousness of
having risen to a higher and purer atmosphere, and got above all the
littlenesses and distractions that beset us here. So I have heard
charming young Quaker girls, who, in more thoughtless days, indulged in
what for them was a slight shading of worldly conformity, say that it
was to them a blessed rest when they put on the strict, plain dress, and
felt that they really had taken up the cross and turned their backs on
the world. I can conceive of doing this, much more easily than I can of
striking the exact line between worldly conformity and noble aspiration,
in the life I live now."
"My dear child," said I, "we all overlook one great leading principle of
our nature, and that is, that we are made to find a higher pleasure in
self-sacrifice than in any form of self-indulgence. There is something
grand and pathetic in the idea of an entire self-surrender, to which
every human soul leaps up, as we do to the sound of martial music.
"How many boys of Boston and New York, who had lived effeminate and idle
lives, felt this new power uprising in them in our war! How they
embraced the dirt and discomfort and fatigue and watchings and toils of
camp-life with an eagerness of zest which they had never felt in the
pursuit of mere pleasure, and wrote home burning letters that they never
were so happy in their lives! It was not that dirt and fatigue and
discomfort and watchings and weariness were in themselves agreeable, but
it was a joy to feel themselves able to bear all and surrender all for
something higher than self. Many a poor Battery bully of New York, many
a street rowdy, felt uplifted by the discovery that he too had hid away
under the dirt and dust of his former life this divine and precious
jewel. He leaped for joy to find that he too could be a hero. Think of
the hundreds of thousands of plain, ordinary workingmen, and of
seemingly ordinary boys, who, but for such a crisis, might have passed
through life never knowing this to be in them, and who courageously
endured hunger and thirst and cold, and separation from dearest friends,
for days and weeks and months, when they might, at any day, have bought
a respite by deserting their country's flag! Starving boys, sick at
heart, dizzy in head, pining for home and mother, still found warmth and
comfort in the one thought that they could suffer, die, for their
country; and the graves at Salisbury and Andersonville show in how many
souls this noble power of self-sacrifice to the higher good was
lodged,--how many there were, even in the humblest walks of life, who
preferred death by torture to life in dishonor.
"It is this heroic element in man and woman that makes self-sacrifice an
ennobling and purifying ordeal in any religious profession. The man
really is taken into a higher region of his own nature, and finds a
pleasure in the exercise of higher faculties which he did not suppose
himself to possess. Whatever sacrifice is supposed to be duty, whether
the supposition be really correct or not, has in it an ennobling and
purifying power; and thus the eras of conversion from one form of the
Christian religion to another are often marked with a real and permanent
exaltation of the whole character. But it does not follow that certain
religious beliefs and ordinances are in themselves just, because they
thus touch the great heroic master-chord of the human soul. To wear
sackcloth and sleep on a plank may have been of use to many souls, as
symbolizing the awakening of this higher nature; but, still, the
religion of the New Testament is plainly one which calls to no such
outward and evident sacrifices.
"It was John the Baptist, and not the Messiah, who dwelt in the
wilderness and wore garments of camel's hair; and Jesus was commented
on, not for his asceticism, but for his cheerful, social acceptance of
the average innocent wants and enjoyments of humanity. 'The Son of man
came eating and drinking.' The great, and never-ceasing, and utter
self-sacrifice of his life was not signified by any peculiarity of
costume, or language, or manner; it showed itself only as it
unconsciously welled up in all his words and actions, in his estimates
of life, in all that marked him out as a being of a higher and holier
sphere."
"Then you do not believe in influencing this subject of dress by
religious persons' adopting any particular laws of costume?" said
Pheasant.
"I do not see it to be possible," said I, "considering how society is
made up. There are such differences of taste and character,--people move
in such different spheres, are influenced by such different
circumstances,--that all we can do is to lay down certain great
principles, and leave it to every one to apply them according to
individual needs."
"But what are these principles? There is the grand inquiry."
"Well," said I, "let us feel our way. In the first place, then, we are
all agreed in one starting-point,--that beauty is not to be considered
as a bad thing,--that the love of ornament in our outward and physical
life is not a sinful or a dangerous feeling, and only leads to evil, as
all other innocent things do, by being used in wrong ways. So far we are
all agreed, are we not?"
"Certainly," said all the voices.
"It is, therefore, neither wicked nor silly nor weak-minded to like
beautiful dress, and all that goes to make it up. Jewelry, diamonds,
pearls, emeralds, rubies, and all sorts of pretty things that are made
of them, are as lawful and innocent objects of admiration and desire, as
flowers or birds or butterflies, or the tints of evening skies. Gems, in
fact, are a species of mineral flower; they are the blossoms of the
dark, hard mine; and what they want in perfume they make up in
durability. The best Christian in the world may, without the least
inconsistency, admire them, and say, as a charming, benevolent old
Quaker lady once said to me, 'I do so love to look at beautiful
jewelry!' The love of beautiful dress, in itself, therefore, so far from
being in a bad sense worldly, may be the same indication of a refined
and poetical nature that is given by the love of flowers and of natural
objects.
"In the third place, there is nothing in itself wrong, or unworthy a
rational being, in a certain degree of attention to the fashion of
society in our costume. It is not wrong to be annoyed at unnecessary
departures from the commonly received practices of good society in the
matter of the arrangement of our toilet; and it would indicate rather an
unamiable want of sympathy with our fellow-beings, if we were not
willing, for the most part, to follow what they indicate to be agreeable
in the disposition of our outward affairs."
"Well, I must say, Mr. Crowfield, you are allowing us all a very
generous margin," said Humming-Bird.
"But, now," said I, "I am coming to the restrictions. When is love of
dress excessive and wrong? To this I answer by stating my faith in one
of old Plato's ideas, in which he speaks of beauty and its uses. He says
there were two impersonations of beauty worshipped under the name of
Venus in the ancient times,--the one celestial, born of the highest
gods, the other earthly. To the earthly Venus the sacrifices were such
as were more trivial; to the celestial, such as were more holy. 'The
worship of the earthly Venus,' he says, 'sends us oftentimes on unworthy
and trivial errands, but the worship of the celestial to high and
honorable friendships, to noble aspirations and heroic actions.'
"Now it seems to me that, if we bear in mind this truth in regard to
beauty, we shall have a test with which to try ourselves in the matter
of physical adornment. We are always excessive when we sacrifice the
higher beauty to attain the lower one. A woman who will sacrifice
domestic affection, conscience, self-respect, honor, to love of dress,
we all agree, loves dress too much. She loses the true and higher beauty
of womanhood for the lower beauty of gems and flowers and colors. A girl
who sacrifices to dress all her time, all her strength, all her money,
to the neglect of the cultivation of her mind and heart, and to the
neglect of the claims of others on her helpfulness, is sacrificing the
higher to the lower beauty. Her fault is not the love of beauty, but
loving the wrong and inferior kind.
"It is remarkable that the directions of Holy Writ, in regard to the
female dress, should distinctly take note of this difference between
the higher and the lower beauty which we find in the works of Plato. The
Apostle gives no rule, no specific costume, which should mark the
Christian woman from the Pagan; but says, 'whose adorning, let it not be
that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or
of putting on of apparel; but let it be the hidden man of the heart, in
that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet
spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.' The gold and gems
and apparel are not forbidden; but we are told not to depend on them for
beauty, to the neglect of those imperishable, immortal graces that
belong to the soul. The makers of fashion among whom Christian women
lived when the Apostle wrote were the same class of brilliant and
worthless Aspasias who make the fashions of modern Paris; and all
womankind was sunk into slavish adoration of mere physical adornment
when the Gospel sent forth among them this call to the culture of a
higher and immortal beauty.
"In fine, girls," said I, "you may try yourselves by this standard. You
love dress too much when you care more for your outward adornings than
for your inward dispositions,--when it afflicts you more to have torn
your dress than to have lost your temper,--when you are more troubled by
an ill-fitting gown than by a neglected duty,--when you are less
concerned at having made an unjust comment, or spread a scandalous
report, than at having worn a _passée_ bonnet,--when you are less
troubled at the thought of being found at the last great feast without
the wedding garment, than at being found at the party to-night in the
fashion of last year. No Christian woman, as I view it, ought to give
such attention to her dress as to allow it to take up _all_ of three
very important things, viz.:--
_All_ her time.
_All_ her strength.
_All_ her money.
Whoever does this lives not the Christian, but the Pagan life,--worships
not at the Christian's altar of our Lord Jesus, but at the shrine of the
lower Venus of Corinth and Rome."
"O now, Mr. Crowfield, you frighten me," said Humming-Bird. "I'm so
afraid, do you know, that I am doing exactly that."
"And so am I," said Pheasant; "and yet, certainly, it is not what I mean
or intend to do."
"But how to help it," said Dove.
"My dears," said I, "where there is a will there is a way. Only resolve
that you will put the true beauty first,--that, even if you do have to
seem unfashionable, you will follow the highest beauty of
womanhood,--and the battle is half gained. Only resolve that your time,
your strength, your money, such as you have, shall not all--nor more
than half--be given to mere outward adornment, and you will go right. It
requires only an army of girls animated with this noble purpose to
declare independence in America, and emancipate us from the decrees and
tyrannies of French actresses and ballet-dancers. _En avant_, girls! You
yet can, if you will, save the republic."
X.
WHAT ARE THE SOURCES OF BEAUTY IN DRESS.
The conversation on dress which I had held with Jennie and her little
covey of Birds of Paradise appeared to have worked in the minds of the
fair council, for it was not long before they invaded my study again in
a body. They were going out to a party, but called for Jennie, and of
course gave me and Mrs. Crowfield the privilege of seeing them equipped
for conquest.
Latterly, I must confess, the mysteries of the toilet rites have
impressed me with a kind of superstitious awe. Only a year ago my
daughter Jennie had smooth dark hair, which she wreathed in various
soft, flowing lines about her face, and confined in a classical knot on
the back of her head. Jennie had rather a talent for _coiffure_, and the
arrangement of her hair was one of my little artistic delights. She
always had something there,--a leaf, a spray, a bud or blossom, that
looked fresh, and had a sort of poetical grace of its own.
But in a gradual way all this has been changing. Jennie's him first
became slightly wavy, then curly, finally frizzly, presenting a tumbled
and twisted appearance, which gave me great inward concern; but when I
spoke upon the subject I was always laughingly silenced with the
definitive settling remark: "O, it's the fashion, papa! Everybody wears
it so."
I particularly objected to the change on my own small account, because
the smooth, breakfast-table _coiffure_, which I had always so much
enjoyed, was now often exchanged for a peculiarly bristling appearance;
the hair being variously twisted, tortured, woven, and wound, without
the least view to immediate beauty or grace. But all this, I was
informed, was the necessary means towards crimping for some evening
display of a more elaborate nature than usual.
Mrs. Crowfield and myself are not party-goers by profession, but Jennie
insists on our going out at least once or twice in a season, just, as
she says, to keep up with the progress of society; and at these times I
have been struck with frequent surprise by the general untidiness which
appeared to have come over the heads of all my female friends. I know,
of course, that I am only a poor, ignorant, bewildered man-creature; but
to my uninitiated eyes they looked as if they had all, after a very
restless and perturbed sleep, come out of bed without smoothing their
tumbled and disordered locks. Then, every young lady, without exception,
seemed to have one kind of hair, and that the kind which was rather
suggestive of the term _woolly_. Every sort of wild _abandon_ of frowzy
locks seemed to be in vogue; in some cases the hair appearing to my
vision nothing but a confused snarl, in which glittered tinklers,
spangles, and bits of tinsel, and from which waved long pennants and
streamers of different-colored ribbons.
I was in fact very greatly embarrassed by my first meeting with some
very charming girls, whom I thought I knew as familiarly as my own
daughter Jennie, and whose soft, pretty hair had often formed the object
of my admiration. Now, however, they revealed themselves to me in
_coiffures_ which forcibly reminded me of the electrical experiments
which used to entertain us in college, when the subject stood on the
insulated stool, and each particular hair of his head bristled and rose,
and set up, as it were, on its own account. This high-flying condition
of the tresses, and the singularity of the ornaments which appeared to
be thrown at hap-hazard into them, suggested so oddly the idea of a
bewitched person, that I could scarcely converse with any presence of
mind, or realize that these really were the nice, well-informed,
sensible little girls of my own neighborhood,--the good daughters, good
sisters, Sunday-school teachers, and other familiar members of our best
educated circles; and I came away from the party in a sort of blue maze,
and hardly in a state to conduct myself with credit in the examination
through which I knew Jennie would put me as to the appearance of her
different friends.
I know not how it is, but the glamour of fashion in the eyes of girlhood
is so complete, that the oddest, wildest, most uncouth devices find
grace and favor in the eyes of even well-bred girls, when once that
invisible, ineffable _aura_ has breathed over them which declares them
to be fashionable. They may defy them for a time,--they may pronounce
them horrid; but it is with a secretly melting heart, and with a mental
reservation to look as nearly like the abhorred spectacle as they
possibly can on the first favorable opportunity.
On the occasion of the visit referred to, Jennie ushered her three
friends in triumph into my study; and, in truth, the little room seemed
to be perfectly transformed by their brightness. My honest, nice,
lovable little Yankee-fireside girls were, to be sure, got up in a style
that would have done credit to Madame Pompadour, or any of the most
questionable characters of the time of Louis XIV. or XV. They were
frizzled and powdered, and built up in elaborate devices; they wore on
their hair flowers, gems, streamers, tinklers, humming-birds,
butterflies, South American beetles, beads, bugles, and all imaginable
rattle-traps, which jingled and clinked with every motion; and yet, as
they were three or four fresh, handsome, intelligent, bright-eyed girls,
there was no denying the fact that they _did look extremely pretty_; and
as they sailed hither and thither before me, and gazed down upon me in
the saucy might of their rosy girlhood, there was a gay defiance in
Jennie's demand, "Now, papa, how do you like us?"
"Very charming," answered I, surrendering at discretion.
"I told you, girls, that you could convert him to the fashions, if he
should once see you in party trim."
"I beg pardon, my dear; I am not converted to the fashion, but to you,
and that is a point on which I didn't need conversion; but the present
fashions, even so fairly represented as I see them, I humbly confess I
dislike."
"O Mr. Crowfield!"
"Yes, my dears, I do. But then, I protest, I'm not fairly treated. I
think, for a young American girl, who looks as most of my fair friends
do look, to come down with her bright eyes and all her little panoply of
graces upon an old fellow like me, and expect him to like a fashion
merely because _she_ looks well in it, is all sheer nonsense. Why,
girls, if you wore rings in your noses, and bangles on your arms up to
your elbows, if you tied your hair in a war-knot on the top of your
heads like the Sioux Indians, you would look pretty still. The question
isn't, as I view it, whether you look pretty,--for that you do, and that
you will, do what you please and dress how you will. The question is
whether you might not look prettier, whether another style of dress, and
another mode of getting up, would not be far more becoming. I am one who
thinks that it would."
"Now, Mr. Crowfield, you positively are too bad," said Humming-Bird,
whose delicate head was encircled by a sort of crapy cloud of bright
hair, sparkling with gold-dust and spangles, in the midst of which, just
over her forehead, a gorgeous blue butterfly was perched, while a
confused mixture of hairs, gold-powder, spangles, stars, and tinkling
ornaments fell in a sort of cataract down her pretty neck. "You see, we
girls think everything of you; and now we don't like it that you don't
like our fashions."
"Why, my little princess, so long as I like you better than your
fashions, and merely think they are not worthy of you, what's the harm?"
"O yes, to be sure. You sweeten the dose to us babies with that
sugar-plum. But really, Mr. Crowfield, why don't you like the fashions?"
"Because, to my view, they are in great part in false taste, and injure
the beauty of the girls," said I. "They are inappropriate to their
characters, and make them look like a kind and class of women whom they
do not, and I trust never will, resemble internally, and whose mark
therefore they ought not to bear externally. But there you are,
beguiling me into a sermon which you will only hate me in your hearts
for preaching. Go along, children! You certainly look as well as anybody
can in that style of getting up; so go to your party, and to-morrow
night, when you are tired and sleepy, if you'll come with your crochet,
and sit in my study, I will read you Christopher Crowfield's
dissertation on dress."
"That will be amusing, to say the least," said Humming-Bird; "and, be
sure, we will all be here. And mind, you have to show good reasons for
disliking the present fashion."