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 worshiped 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 more
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 passe 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."
"Oh 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