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 Jenny'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 rattletraps 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.
Jenny'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 Jenny, "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 oh 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 Jenny, "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 _outre_ 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 Jenny, "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 haphazard, 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 Jenny, "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, Jenny," 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 Jenny, "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 Jenny.
"And the fashions come from a source about as pure," said I, from the
next room.
"Bless me, Jenny, 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 armchair.
"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 womankind is marching under the command
of those 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 women'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."
"The fact is," said I, "that the love of dress and outside show has
been 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 leveled 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 churchgoers of his time.