From Paris comes the terrible news that M. Verneuil, a chemist, has
succeeded in making rubies at no considerable cost. This will doubtless
prove a sharp affliction to many persons addicted to display of rubies
on their surfaces, as well as to some who have them under lock and key
for sale to the others; for of course the value of the natural stones
must eventually fall to that of the artificial, if the two kinds are
identical in composition, hardness and color. Rubies will perhaps go
out of use altogether, for gems accessible to the poor are worthless to
the rich, and gems worthless to the rich are not wanted by the poor.
The beauty of the ruby will remain, but so will human nature.
Having few rubies and, I trust, not much human nature, I am disposed
to regard M. Verneuil’s crime as a public benefaction. If he will
pursue his experimentation to its “logical conclusion,” giving us cheap
diamonds, pearls, emeralds, turquoises and the rest, many of us will
rise up (from our seats away back) and call him blest.
Victims of the habit of wearing pretty pebbles have always accounted
for their affliction by affirming the beauty of the pebbles. If that
is why they wear them they will continue to wear them when they are
common and cheap—when M. Verneuil and his anarchist co-workers in
the laboratory have put them “within the reach of all.” Does any one
believe that they will? Why do they not now wear (and confess it) the
paste jewels that are every bit as beautiful as the genuine? Why would
the “society woman” consider herself dishonored if caught red-handed in
a necklace of wax beads distinguishable from pearls by the microscope
only?
The “preciousness” of these things is their cost. A woman “ablaze with
diamonds” is a woman silently shouting: “I am rich!” If her jewels did
not say this, and say it plainly, she would throw them into the nearest
gutter—nay, her contempt of them might receive such avowal as giving
them to the poor.
Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored taste persuades him to personal
adornment with porcupine quills, eagle feathers, bear-claws and the
tail of a wildcat! They are lovely—no doubt of that—but if porcupines,
eagles, bears and wildcats were abundant, accessible and amiable he
would make himself a thing of glory and consequence with something less
easily acquired. Please to consider the peculiar significance lurking
in the good old word “bravery” applied to the fine attire and ornaments
of the lowly. Does it not distinctly point to a primitive state when
personal adornment was the prize of courage in the chase? “Bravery” is
the finery of persons not far removed from a state of nature; our own
finery we do not call so, not even in poetry. A fairly good name for it
is “pursery.”
In the progress of the race away from primitive conditions and barbaric
modes of thought and feeling, the female contingent does not walk at
the head of the procession. Women are more “conservative” than men:
they are last to renounce the habits and customs of the ancestral
savage. Witness their addiction to powder and paint. We have all
inherited the tendency to daub our faces, a once useful custom, for
by differing designs tribes and families were distinguished from one
another at a glance. Attentive to other matters, mostly nonsense and
mischief, men have suffered the practice to fall into disuse, but
women—whom God bless!—continue it as when frighthood was in flower,
accounting for it by hardily affirming its service to the complexion.
Let it go at that; that is a better reason than can be urged for
defacing the female periphery with pebbles, candidly inutile and in
open apostasy to the gospel of Beauty Unadorned. Wherefore, that we may
have surcease of the pretty-pebble habit in the otherwise supportable
female of our species as she has been handed down to us from her noisy
sessions in primeval tree-tops, let us pray for success of M. Verneuil
and his accomplices in their hardy effort to discredit and vulgarize
the product of gem farm and pearl pool.
1902.