is an especial characteristic of radicals, or even “provincials,” as a
class. Some of the fine ladies who would be most horrified at the
“girlsterousness” of this young maiden would themselves smoke their
cigarettes in much worse company, morally speaking, than she ever
tolerated. And, so far as manners are concerned, I am bound to say that
the worst cases of rudeness and ill-breeding that have ever come to my
knowledge have not occurred in the “rural districts,” or among the lower
ten thousand, but in those circles of America where the whole aim in
life might seem to be the cultivation of its elegances.
And what confirms me in the fear that the most profound and serious
types of this disease are not to be found in the wildcat regions is the
fact that so much of is transplanted to Europe, among those who have the
money to travel. It is there described broadly as “Americanism;” and, so
surely as any peculiarly shrill group is heard coming through a European
picture-gallery, it is straightway classed by all observers as belonging
to the great Republic. If the observers are enamoured at sight with the
beauty of the young ladies of the party, they excuse the voices;
“Strange or wild, or madly gay,
They call it only pretty Fanny’s way.”
But other observers are more apt to call it only Columbia’s way; and if
they had ever heard the word “girlsterousness,” they would use that too.
Emerson says, “A gentleman makes no noise; a lady is serene.” If we
Americans often violate this perfect maxim of good manners, it is
something that America has, at least, furnished the maxim. And, between
Emerson and “girlsterousness,” our courteous philosopher will yet carry
the day.
XLVI.
ARE WOMEN NATURAL ARISTOCRATS?
A clergyman’s wife in England has lately set on foot a reform movement
in respect to dress; and, like many English reformers, she aims chiefly
to elevate the morals and manners of the lower classes, without much
reference to her own social equals. She proposes that “no servant, under
pain of dismissal, shall wear flowers, feathers, brooches, buckles or
clasps, ear-rings, lockets, neck-ribbons, velvets, kid gloves, parasols,
sashes, jackets, or trimming of any kind on dresses, and, above all, no
crinoline; no pads to be worn, or frisettes, or _chignons_, or
hair-ribbons. The dress is to be gored and made just to touch the
ground, and the hair to be drawn closely to the head, under a round
white cap, without trimming of any kind. The same system of dress is
recommended for Sunday-school girls, school-mistresses, church-singers,
and the lower orders generally.”
The remark is obvious, that in this country such a course of discipline
would involve the mistress, not the maid, in the “pain of dismissal.”
The American clergyman and clergyman’s wife who should even “recommend”
such a costume to a school-mistress, church-singer, or Sunday-school
girl,—to say nothing of the rest of the “lower orders,”—would soon find
themselves without teachers, without pupils, without a choir, and
probably without a parish. It is a comfort to think that even in older
countries there is less and less of this impertinent interference: the
costume of different ranks is being more and more assimilated; and the
incidental episode of a few liveries in our cities is not enough to
interfere with the general current. Never yet, to my knowledge, have I
seen even a livery worn by a white native American; and to restrain the
Sunday bonnets of her handmaidens, what lady has attempted?
This is as it should be. The Sunday bonnet of the Irish damsel is only
the symbol of a very proper effort to obtain her share of all social
advantages. Long may those ribbons wave! Meanwhile I think the fact that
it is easier for the gentleman of the house to control the dress of his
groom than for the lady to dictate that of her waiting-maid,—this must
count against the theory that it is women who are the natural
aristocrats.
Women are no doubt more sensitive than men upon matters of taste and
breeding. This is partly from a greater average fineness of natural
perception, and partly because their more secluded lives give them less
of miscellaneous contact with the world. If Maud Müller and her husband
had gone to board at the same boarding-house with the Judge and his
wife, that lady might have held aloof from the rustic bride, simply from
inexperience in life, and not knowing just how to approach her. But the
Judge, who might have been talking politics or real estate with the
young farmer on the doorsteps that morning, would certainly find it
easier to deal with him as a man and a brother at the dinner-table. From
these different causes women get the credit or discredit of being more
aristocratic than men are; so that in England the Tory supporters of
female suffrage base it on the ground that these new voters at least
will be conservative.
But, on the other hand, it is women, even more than men, who are
attracted by those strong qualities of personal character which are
always the antidote to aristocracy. No bold revolutionist ever defied
the established conventionalisms of his times without drawing his
strongest support from women. Poet and novelist love to depict the
princess as won by the outlaw, the gypsy, the peasant. Women have a way
of turning from the insipidities and proprieties of life to the wooer
who has the stronger hand; from the silken Darnley to the rude Bothwell.
This impulse is the natural corrective to the aristocratic instincts of
womanhood; and though men feel it less, it is still, even among them,
one of the supports of republican institutions. We need to keep always
balanced between the two influences of refined culture and of native
force. The patrician class, wherever there is one, is pretty sure to be
the more refined; the plebeian class, the more energetic. That woman is
able to appreciate both elements, is proof that she is quite capable of
doing her share in social and political life. This English clergyman’s
wife, who devotes her soul to the trimmings and gored skirts of the
lower orders, is no more entitled to represent her sex than are those
ladies who give their whole attention to the “novel and intricate
bonnets” advertised this season on Broadway.
XLVII.
MRS. BLANK’S DAUGHTERS.
Mrs. Blank, of Far West—let us not draw her from the “sacred privacy of
woman” by giving the name or place too precisely—has an insurmountable
objection to woman’s voting. So the newspapers say; and this objection
is, that she does not wish her daughters to encounter disreputable
characters at the polls.
It is a laudable desire, to keep one’s daughters from the slightest
contact with such persons. But how does Mrs. Blank precisely mean to
accomplish this? Will she shut up the maidens in a harem? When they go
out, will she send messengers through the streets to bid people hide
their faces, as when an Oriental queen is passing? Will she send them
travelling on camels, veiled by _yashmaks_? Will she prohibit them from
being so much as seen by a man, except when a physician must be called
for their ailments, and Miss Blank puts her arm through a curtain, in
order that he may feel her pulse and know no more?
Who is Mrs. Blank, and how does she bring up her daughters? Does she
send them to the post-office? If so, they may wait a half-hour at a time
for the mail to open, and be elbowed by the most disreputable
characters, waiting at their side. If it does the young ladies no harm
to encounter this for the sake of getting their letters out, will it
harm them to do it in order to get their ballots in? If they go to hear
Gough lecture, they may be kept half an hour at the door, elbowed by
saint and sinner indiscriminately. If it is worth going through this to
hear about temperance, why not to vote about it? If they go to
Washington to the President’s inauguration, they may stand two hours
with Mary Magdalen on one side of them and Judas Iscariot on the other.
If this contact is rendered harmless by the fact that they are receiving
political information, will it hurt them to stay five minutes longer in
order to act upon the knowledge they have received?
This is on the supposition that the household of Blank are plain,
practical women, unversed in the vanities of the world. If they belong
to fashionable circles, how much harder to keep them wholly clear of
disreputable contact! Should they, for instance, visit Newport, they may
possibly be seen at the Casino, looking very happy as they revolve
rapidly in the arms of some very disreputable characters; they will be
seen in the surf, attired in the most scanty and clinging drapery, and
kindly aided to preserve their balance by the devoted attentions of the
same companions. Mrs. Blank, meanwhile, will look complacently on, with
the other matrons: they are not supposed to know the current reputation
of those whom their daughters meet “in society;” and, so long as there
is no actual harm done, why should they care? Very well; but why, then,
should they care if they encounter those same disreputable characters
when they go to drop a ballot in the ballot-box? It will be a more
guarded and distant meeting. It is not usual to dance round-dances at
the ward-room, so far as I know, or to bathe in clinging drapery at that
rather dry and dusty resort. If such very close intimacies are all right
under the gas-light or at the beach, why should there be poison in
merely passing a disreputable character at the City Hall?
On the whole, the prospects of Mrs. Blank are not encouraging. Should
she consult a physician for her daughters, he may be secretly or openly
disreputable; should she call in a clergyman, he may, though a bishop,
have carnal rather than spiritual eyes. If Miss Blank be caught in a
shower, she may take refuge under the umbrella of an undesirable
acquaintance; should she fall on the ice, the woman who helps to raise
her may have sinned. There is not a spot in any known land where a woman
can live in absolute seclusion from all contact with evil. Should the
Misses Blank even turn Roman Catholics, and take to a convent, their
very confessor may be secretly a scoundrel; and they may be glad to flee
for refuge to the busy, buying, selling, dancing, voting world outside.
No: Mrs. Blank’s prayers for absolute protection will never be answered,
in respect to her daughters. Why not, then, find a better model for
prayer in that made by Jesus for his disciples: “I pray Thee, not that
Thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldst keep
them from the evil.” A woman was made for something nobler in the world,
Mrs. Blank, than to be a fragile toy, to be put behind a glass case, and
protected from contact. It is not her mission to be hidden away from all
life’s evil, but bravely to work that the world may be reformed.
XLVIII.
THE EUROPEAN PLAN.
Every mishap among American women brings out renewed suggestions of what
maybe called the “European plan” in the training of young girls,—the
plan, that is, of extreme seclusion and helplessness. It is usually
forgotten, in these suggestions, that not much protection is really
given anywhere to this particular class as a whole. Everywhere in
Europe, the restrictions are of caste, not of sex. Even in Turkey,
travellers tell us, women of the humbler vocations are not much
secluded. It is not the object of the “European plan,” in any form, to
protect the virtue of young women, as such, but only of young ladies;
and the protection is pretty effectually limited to that order. Among
the Portuguese, in the island of Fayal, I found it to be the ambition of
each humble family to bring up one daughter in a sort of ladylike
seclusion: she never went into the street alone, or without a hood which
was equivalent to a veil; she was taught indoor industries only; she was
constantly under the eye of her mother. But, in order that one daughter
might be thus protected, all the other daughters were allowed to go
alone, day or evening, bare-headed or bare-footed, by the loneliest
mountain-paths, to bring oranges or firewood or whatever their work may
be—heedless of protection. The safeguard was for a class: the average
exposure of young womanhood was far greater than with us. So in London,
while you rarely see a young lady alone in the streets, the housemaid is
sent on errands at any hour of the evening with a freedom at which our
city domestics would quite rebel; and one has to stay but a short time
in Paris to see how entirely limited to a class is the alleged restraint
under which young French girls are said to be kept.
Again, it is to be remembered that the whole “European plan,” so far as
it is applied on the Continent of Europe, is a plan based upon utter
distrust and suspicion, not only as to chastity, but as to all other
virtues. It is applied among the higher classes almost as consistently
to boys as to girls. In every school under church auspices, it is the
French theory that boys are never to be left unwatched for a moment; and
it is as steadily assumed that girls will be untruthful if left to
themselves, as that they will do every other wrong. This to the
Anglo-Saxon race seems very demoralizing. “Suspicion,” said Sir Philip
Sidney, “is the way to lose that which we fear to lose.” Readers of the
Brontë novels will remember the disgust of the English pupils and
teachers in French schools at the constant espionage around them; and I
have more than once heard young girls who had been trained at such
institutions say that it was a wonder if they had any truthfulness left,
so invariable was the assumption that it was the nature of young girls
to lie. I cannot imagine any thing less likely to create upright and
noble character, in man or woman, than the systematic application of the
“European plan.”
And that it produces just the results that might be feared, the whole
tone of European literature proves. Foreigners, no doubt, do habitual
injustice to the morality of French households; but it is impossible
that fiction can utterly misrepresent the community which produces and
reads it. When one thinks of the utter lightness of tone with which
breaches, both of truth and chastity, are treated even, in the better
class of French novels and plays, it seems absurd to deny the
correctness of the picture. Besides, it is not merely a question of
plays and novels. Consider, for instance, the contempt with which Taine
treats Thackeray for representing the mother of Pendennis as suffering
agonies when she thinks that her son has seduced a young girl, his
social inferior. Thackeray is not really considered a model of elevated
tone, as to such matters, among English writers; but the Frenchman is
simply amazed that the Englishman should describe even the saintliest of
mothers as attaching so much weight to such a small affair.
An able newspaper writer, quoted with apparent approval by the Boston
Daily Advertiser, praises the supposed foreign method for the “habit of
dependence and deference” that it produces; and because it gives to a
young man a wife whose “habit of deference is established.” But it must
be remembered, that, where this theory is established, the habit of
deference is logically carried much farther than mere conjugal
convenience would take it. Its natural outcome is the authority of the
priest, not of the husband. That domination of the women of France by
the priesthood which forms to-day the chief peril of the republic,—which
is the strength of legitimism and imperialism and all other conspiracies
against the liberty of the French people,—is only the visible and
inevitable result of this dangerous docility.
One thing is certain, that the best preparation for freedom is freedom;
and that no young girls are so poorly prepared for American life as
those whose early years are passed in Europe. The worst imprudences, the
most unmaidenly and offensive actions, that I have ever heard of in
decent society, have been on the part of young women educated in Europe,
who have been launched into American life without its early
training,—have been treated as children until they suddenly awakened to
the freedom of women. On the other hand, I remember with pleasure, that
a cultivated French mother, whose daughter’s fine qualities were the
best seal of her motherhood, once told me that the models she had chosen
in her daughter’s training were certain families of American young
ladies, of whom she had, through peculiar circumstances, seen much in
Paris.
XLIX.
“FEATHERSES.”
One of the most amusing letters ever quoted in any book is that given in
Curzon’s “Monasteries of the Levant,” as the production of a Turkish
sultana who had just learned English. It is as follows:—
NOTE FROM ADILE SULTANA, THE BETROTHED OF ABBAS PASHA, TO HER
ARMENIAN COMMISSIONER.
CONSTANTINOPLE, 1844.
_My Noble Friend_:—Here are the featherses sent my soul, my noble
friend, are there no other featherses leaved in the shop beside
these featherses? and these featherses remains, and these featherses
are ukly. They are very dear, who buyses dheses? And my noble
friend, we want a noat from yorself; those you brought last tim,
those you sees were very beautiful; we had searched; my soul, I want
featherses again, of those featherses. In Kalada there is plenty of
feather. Whatever bees, I only want beautiful featherses; I want
featherses of every desolation to-morrow.
(Signed)
YOU KNOW WHO.
The first steps in culture do not, then, it seems, remove from the
feminine soul the love of finery. Nor do the later steps wholly
extinguish it; for did not Grace Greenwood hear the learned Mary
Somerville conferring with the wise Harriet Martineau as to whether a
certain dress should be dyed to match a certain shawl? Well! why not?
Because women learn the use of the quill, are they to ignore
“featherses”? Because they learn science, must they unlearn the arts,
and above all the art of being beautiful? If men have lost it, they have
reason to regret the loss. Let women hold to it, while yet within their
reach.
Mrs. Rachel Howland of New Bedford, much prized and trusted as a public
speaker among Friends, and a model of taste and quiet beauty in costume,
delighted the young girls at a Newport Yearly Meeting, a few years
since, by boldly declaring that she thought God meant women to make the
world beautiful, as much as flowers and butterflies, and that there was
no sin in tasteful dress, but only in devoting to it too much money or
too much time. It is a blessed doctrine. The utmost extremes of dress,
the love of colors, of fabrics, of jewels, of “featherses,” are, after
all, but an effort after the beautiful. The reason why the beautiful is
not always the result is because so many women are ignorant or merely
imitative. They have no sense of fitness: the short wear what belongs to
the tall, and brunettes sacrifice their natural beauty to look like
blondes. Or they have no adaptation; and even an emancipated woman may
show a disregard for appropriateness, as where a fine lady sweeps the
streets, or a fair orator the platform, with a silken or velvet train
which accords only with a carpet as luxurious as itself. What is
inappropriate is never beautiful. What is merely in the fashion is never
beautiful. But who does not know some woman whose taste and training are
so perfect that fashion becomes to her a means of grace instead of a
despot, and the worst excrescence that can be prescribed—a _chignon_, a
hoop, a panier—is softened into something so becoming that even the
Parisian bondage seems but a chain of roses?
In such hands, even “featherses” become a fine art, not a matter of
vanity. Are women so much more vain than men? No doubt they talk more
about their dress, for there is much more to talk about; yet did you
never hear the men of fashion discuss boots and hats and the liveries of
grooms? A good friend of mine, a shoemaker, who supplies very high heels
for a great many pretty feet on Fifth Avenue in New York, declares that
women are not so vain of their feet as men. “A man who thinks he has a
handsome foot,” quoth our fashionable Crispin, “is apt to give us more
trouble than any lady among our customers. I have noticed this for
twenty years.” The testimony is consoling—to women.
And this naturally suggests the question, What is to be the future of
masculine costume? Is the present formlessness and gracelessness and
monotony of hue to last forever, as suited to the rough needs of a
work-a-day world? It is to be remembered that the difference in this
respect between the dress of the sexes is a very recent thing. Till
within a century or so men dressed as picturesquely as women, and paid
as minute attention to their costume. Even the fashions in armor varied
as extensively as the fashions in gowns. One of Henry III.’s courtiers,
Sir J. Arundel, had fifty-two complete suits of cloth of gold. No satin,
no velvet, was too elegant for those who sat to Copley for their
pictures. In Puritan days the laws could hardly be made severe enough to
prevent men from wearing silver-lace and “broad bone-lace,” and
shoulder-bands of undue width, and double ruffs and “immoderate great
breeches.” What seemed to the Cavaliers the extreme of stupid sobriety
in dress, would pass now for the most fantastic array. Fancy Samuel
Pepys going to a wedding of to-day in his “new colored silk suit and
coat trimmed with gold buttons, and gold broad lace round his hands,
very rich and fine.” It would give to the ceremony the aspect of a fancy
ball; yet how much prettier a sight is a fancy ball than the ordinary
entertainment of the period!
Within the last few years the rigor of masculine costume is a little
relaxed; velvets are resuming their picturesque sway: and, instead of
the customary suit of solemn black, gentlemen are appearing in blue and
gold editions at evening parties. Let us hope that good sense and taste
may yet meet each other, for both sexes; that men may borrow for their
dress some womanly taste, women some masculine sense; and society may
again witness a graceful and appropriate costume, without being too much
absorbed in “featherses.”
L.
SOME MAN-MILLINERY.
We may breathe more freely. The religious prospects of America brighten.
Our dealers have received the “Catalogue of Clerical Vestments and
Improved Church Ornaments manufactured by Simon Jeune, 34 Rue de Cléry,
Paris.”
Why are we not a nation of saints? Plainly, because the church-apparatus
has hitherto been so very deficient. Religion has been, so to speak,
naked. The dry-goods stores, supplying only the laity, have left the
clergy unclothed. In what ready-made-clothing store can you find any
thing like a proper alb? Ask your tailor, if you dare, for a chasuble.
At Stewart’s shop New Yorkers boast that you can buy any thing; but
fancy a respectable citizen entering those marble portals, and demanding
a cope or a dalmatic! As for an ombrellino, or an antependium, you might
as well attempt to go buffalo-hunting in Broadway. In that case you
would at least find the dried skin of the animal; but we doubt if there
is to be found on sale any thing nearer an ombrellino than a lady’s
parasol. They order this thing otherwise in France.
Mr. Simon Jeune provides every one of these simple luxuries. Not a
device by which a rich man may enter the kingdom of heaven, but he has
it at his fingers’ ends. None of your cheap salvations mar the dignity
of 34 Rue de Cléry. “We do not manufacture these articles at a low
price,” he calmly announces. There is no limit in the other direction.
You can lead souls to heaven in a robe worth twenty-five guineas; but,
if you insist on parsimony in your piety, you must patronize some other
establishment.