regards the influence of clothes on the social relations. My dress, so
long as it be not conspicuous for disorder, disruption, or display, has
much less effect on others than on myself. But as for myself, since I am
a woman, and it is ordained of fate that I be forever subdued to what
I wear, I shall never, except when I believe myself suitably dressed,
be able to look my fellow creature in the eye with the level gaze of
conscious equality which alone gains friendship. No woman was ever so
proud as not to cringe in an ugly hat. No woman is ever so happy as not
to be made unhappy by her clothes. Let the dress reformers prattle to
the breezes,--there is no exaltation like that of knowing one’s costume
stylish, becoming, and, if possible, expensive. Only by recognizing our
limitations may we women successfully cope with them; one’s own respect
is surest guarantee of other people’s; for women self-respect is soonest
secured by clothes: therefore, O women, dress!
I have digressed from the contemplation of my girlhood, but I have not
exhausted that time, for I have not touched upon second-hand clothes or
long dresses. As a girl I was perpetually made over. I came to regard
fresh material as something almost sacrilegious. Of all gift-horses,
clothes are the most difficult not to criticize, and especially old
clothes. My prosperous cousins did not possess my complexion, my tastes,
or my figure, and yet I inevitably succeeded to their clothes, so that I
came to watch their expenditures with morbid interest, and if they asked
for my advice, the strings of my sincerity were severely strained by “a
lively sense of favors yet to come.” In such circumstances it is well
to have in the family one who is mother, dressmaker, and genius, all in
one, for only such a combination of inspiration and devotion could have
kept my head up in those days when I was always second-hand.
To be honest, am I anything else now? What else is it to be fashionable?
With brain or scissors every woman is snipping and clipping and cutting
over other people’s clothes to fit her figure; real clothes or clothes
existent only in the fashion papers or her dressmaker’s brain, but
what is the difference? Every woman wears what somebody else has worn.
What woman would wear a dress she had not first seen on another woman?
Old clothes, making over, copying, copying, copying,--dear me, how
second-hand we women are!
The years from sixteen to twenty are those years in a woman’s life
when dress becomes an ecstasy--as never afterwards. We always look in
the glass when we put on our hats, but at sixteen we look at the face,
not the hat. It is not such a bad face to look at, at sixteen, with
its eyes and lips of wonder. For some few years Heaven lets dress be a
sheer delight, not the mere sordid comfort and decency of childhood, or
the studied concealment of imperfections of maturity, but a revelation
of the new self of which we are neither unconscious nor ashamed. It is
but the working of natural laws; in the spring do not the very trees
prank themselves out in a vain glory of blossoms, do they not prink
and preen in the mirroring water, arranging their leafy tresses, and
bedecking themselves for the masculine regard of sunbeams and breezes?
So girls, and many a one quite as unconsciously. The sap stirs and the
leaf sprouts, and the stirring of the sap is a thrilling of new joy, and
the leaf is a new and beautiful thing. What is it, what am I becoming?
Look in the glass and see. That is womanhood burning in my eyes, on my
cheeks,--Oh, yes, sir, you may look, too, if you wish. When my skirts
have grown all the way down, and my braids all the way up, then there
will be coronation robes ready, and a kingdom, and a king. Now I am
only a schoolgirl, but it is all coming, coming, coming! Do you wonder
that she counts each inch on her skirt in an agony of impatience, that
she arranges her hair high on her head at night before her mirror?
Schoolgirl nonsense, and something else. Then one day it is the hour at
last,--it is the first long dress, cut to show the regal throat, trained
like a queen’s. The hair is piled up diadem-wise. The princess is ready.
The color comes and goes, the slipper taps the floor--“I am all dressed
for you. I am waiting. Come, Prince, hurry, hurry!”
But, O little Princess, it is not at all like what you think, really;
so soon your long skirts will have ceased to tickle your toes with
delight, and your coroneted tresses will seem to have grown that way.
The Prince will have come, and you will have got used to him, or he will
not have come, and you will have forgotten that you ever expected him;
the clothes of womanhood will no longer be a rapture, but an obligation
and a habit. You will find yourself wearing a personality restricted
by that thing you have somehow acquired, called a style of your own,
and restricted also by the style of all the other women in the world,
so that you will find yourself wearing those dresses only, and saying
those words only, that both yourself and others expect of you; it will
not seem a very wonderful thing to be a woman, after all. But remember,
Miss or Madam Princess, that you must still go on dressing, dressing,
dressing to the end.
What mockery to prate of the equality of the sexes when one sex
possesses the freedom of uniform, and the other is the slave of
ever-varying costume! Think of the great portion of a lifetime we
women are condemned to spend merely on keeping our sleeves in style!
Talk of our playing with scholarship or politics when we are all our
days panting disheveled after scampering Dame Fashion, who, all our
broken-winded lives, is just a little ahead! Yet dress-reform is the
first article in our creed of antipathies, and I, for one, am last of
ladies to declare myself a heretic. I am not ungrateful for the gift of
sex and species. Suppose I were a fowl of the air,--what condemnation of
hodden gray, and soul unexpressed either by vocal throat or personality
of plumage! Among things furred or feathered it is the male who dresses
and the lady who wears uniform; that it is otherwise with human beings
is due, I suppose, to some freakish bit of chivalry on the part of
the autocrat Evolution, the ring-master who puts the entire menagerie
through their tricks. No, I would not be a fowl; let me not repine; let
me at this business of dressing, pluckily.
Women are nobler than men; it is because we are purified in the fires
of more severe temptation. Man does not encounter the demoralizing
influence of the dressmaker, that creature with mouth of pins and suave
words. To what degrading subterfuge are we not reduced to get our own
way with the dressmaker, seeing with what delight and dexterity she
lifts her spurning foot against our desires! Do we presume to know
what we want to wear?--alternately she sporteth and scorneth--and yet
we lift not against her her proper scissors. She practices dark arts;
she runs an hypnotic finger along the seam, and the wrinkle is no more
seen--until the dress comes home. Lies are about her head. Her promises
are vanity, and her bills elastic as a fluted flounce. Counter-mendacity
alone can move her; the gown must be sent home, for we attend a wedding
in twenty minutes; even now the caterer “hath paced into the hall”; or
we leave for California in an hour, and even now our sleeper paws the
track. By the ways of unrighteousness alone may we be clothed, and yet
so signal is female virtue that after centuries of dressmakers we are
still unscathed in our integrity, and are still the church-goers of the
species.
There is something stirring to contemplate in woman’s devotion to
dress,--to see how we lay down health and comfort, and clamber up and
frizzle for a lifetime on the altar of the æsthetic. That is what our
dressing is to us,--an art and an aspiration. If our sex doffed its
radiance, and did on “blacks,” what loss to popular culture! What of the
universal hunger for color and form if so many curiosities of craft, so
many animated works of art no longer whisked about the streets of the
world?
For another reason, also, we are preoccupied of our costume,--our
invincible frankness; for we would have our clothes the expression of
our souls. With what fondness we cling to the frock that suits us! Such
a bundle of subtleties is woman that words are too gross--a black coat
and trousers an insincerity--for the hundred shades of shifting color
and form that we are inside. Though it take half our life, let us be
true to our clothes, our clothes to us; let the dress be the lady, and
the lady a symphony of soul and silk.
Verily, “my soul on its lone way” has traveled far from the days of
babyhood, kicking against all wrappings, to the days of womanhood, when
personality exists not, separate from frocks and hats and gloves and
shoes, and both the inner layer of individuality and the outer layer of
costume have become cosy and comfortable, so that by no means do I wish
to lay them aside.
What next? Some day I shall be given into the hands of those who
“fashion the birth-robes for them
Who are just born, being dead.”
Shall I be again enfolded in garments all ready for me, of skyey tissues
and opalescent tints? Shall I squirm and struggle again, and again be
slowly subdued to the clothing and conventions of another world?
Or when I pop up the lid of this upholstered bone-box, my body, shall my
soul be then and there set free,--escaped, volatile, elemental, as wind
or moonshine, having cast from it--one by one as a garment--age, sex,
race, creed, and culture? But what if in this off-shedding I strip from
me my personality, myself? This involuted wrapping in which I am duly
done up and ticketed and passed about among my acquaintance,--what if to
rend this were to leave me in the shivering nakedness of the impersonal?
X
_The Tendency to Testify_
People and periods sometimes think strange things about themselves. I am
constantly astounded by the contrast between my view of my friend and
his view of himself. Tact is the bridge that spans the chasm between a
man’s opinion of himself and his neighbor’s opinion of him. In truth
each opinion suffers from the lie of the label. There is nothing so
volatile as human personality, yet it has a passion for ranging itself
in bottles on a shelf, each with its little gummy ticket. If the peril
of the pigeon-hole is great for the individual, it is even greater for a
whole period, which is but the aggregate of personalities, each of them
only a breath, a vapor, the shaping of a cloud.
One of the largest, loudest labels with which we placard the present age
is its irreligion. Because we don’t build cathedrals? But let any one of
us look about into the hearts of say twenty of his immediate friends:
are there no churches building there? As for me, I am quite dinned
by their hammers, and often, when I want to steal into some one’s
soul, for a little quiet communion, I am incommoded by the obtrusive
scaffolding. No religion? Never so many religions, and from that very
fact, never so genuine. Obviously, if you make a religion yourself, it’s
your business to believe it. There is an analogy between clothes and
creeds: you wear with a different air those your father has bought for
you and those you have earned for yourself.
I do not find people indifferent to religion, I find them profoundly
responsible for it; my friends stand each at the door of a temple
exacting tribute, although there is not one who would not be horrified
by the blatancy of the metaphor. They do not call themselves religious,
but they do call to me to come in. The trouble perhaps is with my
listening ear. I was born with it, and without my will, or knowledge,
it has become an inconveniently obvious appendage. It takes a great
deal of time to have a listening ear. It has heard so many creeds of
late that I must perforce counter-label this irreligious age devout. I
am not inventing the list, and I do not believe the variety among my
acquaintance exceptional,--Neo-Hellenic, Neo-Hebrew, Catholic, Christian
Scientist, Episcopal, high, hot, and holy, Episcopal, low, hot, and
holy, Swedenborgian, Baptist, Presbyterian, and, latest, a sect that
scorns a name, but that I would call Destinarian. Miss Sinclair is of
this communion, for, in “The Three Brontës,” does she not call upon
Destiny to account for every mystery of those three strange lives? The
religion of the Destinarian consists in not having one, yet not one of
my friends pronounces so reverently the name of deity as my friend of
this no-faith murmurs the word, Destiny. “It is ordained,” she says of
some circumstance, and says it with awe, the humility before omniscience
with which the Hebrew prophets spoke his name Jah.
There they stand, my twenty men and women, beckoning me to the doors
of their temples; and yes, of course, I go in; it saves argument. I go
into each and each friend is so busy pointing out the architecture that
no one ever notices when I slip out, out into the open. When one stops
to think of it, it is curiously old-fashioned and orthodox, the open,
whether it is sea or sun. The planets are conspicuously conservative,
but the morning stars still sing together.
Now, not one of my friends here listed is that good old-fashioned work
of God, a shouting Methodist, and yet, in effect, there is not one of
them who is not exactly this. As a child, I attended camp-meetings,
I heard people testify. The tendency to testify is older than
camp-meetings, and it will outlast them. Today, though long grown-up, I
find my friends still shouting their experiences, I find myself still
the shy and wondering congregation. As in the word “camp-meeting” there
is military reminiscence, so the “professor” is lineal descendant of
_miles gloriosus_, his survivor in the church militant. A puzzling
number of people still like to exhibit their scars; a larger number
like to exhibit the particular philosophic armor by which they--by
implication--win in the battle of life still ever merrily waging. But he
who shows a scar deserves another, and no sword ever equally fitted two
hands.
It is the implication that I resent in all testifying,--super-sensitive
doubtless. I do not want to be converted. I grow shy and secret when I
suspect my friend of wanting to remodel me to the pattern of his creed.
The most perilous thing in friendship is to let a friend know that we
want to reform him. The very essence of friendship is in the lines,--
“Take me as you find me, quick,
If you find me good!”
and in a recent dedication to one who was “Guide, philosopher, _but_
friend.” In all testifying, there is an implied “Copy me,” which our
own skittish _ego_ resents. We all incorporate in ourselves our friends’
virtues, but only those of which they are most unconscious; whereas
people are always conscious of their battles; they always want to talk
about them; and yet how many different ways there are of winning the
same battle. If I admire your bravery, I may copy the creed that created
it, but you need not hold up that creed for my inspection, for it is you
yourself who are under my inspection. You are your sole argument, you
need no testifying.
I have been much talked to of late, and much talked at. I have seen the
fanatic spark in eyes that would have been aghast to know its presence
there. Once upon a time there was only one church, and excommunication
from that was a simple and straightforward matter; it can hardly be an
irreligious age when one can feel, in listening to the testimony from
the score of temples one’s friends have built, that one is in danger of
being excommunicated from all twenty. But better excommunication than
that, entering and accepting, I, too, might feel called upon to testify.
I, too, _could_ testify,--I, a mere sunworshiper. I could point out
the vaulted sky of my private chapel, most ancient and most orthodox.
I could repeat for you the liturgies the wind has made, much the same
that it chanted for Moses on Sinai; for are any of your creeds so new,
my friends? I could point out to you altar-lights genial and tolerant,
the taper-flames of stars. There was once One long ago who went to
the mountain for prayer, for there is nothing new about the temple of
out-of-doors; but if I, its worshiper, do not carry forth some peace
from its great silence, some joy from its godly mirth, then would
not even my infinite temple shrink to the size of words, if I should
testify?
XI
_Letters and Letter-Writers_
It is a popular fallacy that letter-writing is a bygone art. Arguments
for this opinion point to the array of picture-cards expressing every
sentiment known to experience, and saving, by the neatness and dispatch
of their machine-made couplets, all the fumbling effort we used to
expend in saying thank you to a hostess, _bon voyage_ to a friend, or
even in offering sympathy to one bereaved. The night-message also seems
to indicate a sorry substitution for the formality of the post. The
truth is that the picture-card, by doing the work of the duty letter,
clears the way for the real letter, so spontaneous that it can’t help
being written; while the night-message contributes to epistolary art a
terseness and vigor that should not be undervalued. While we continue
to look back at the voluminous eighteenth century and to regret the
decay of letter-writing, we are every one of us every week receiving
from a dozen different correspondents letters vibrant with personality,
vivid, readable, inviting preservation. Far from not writing letters,
people never wrote more letters than they do to-day, nor better ones; if
ours are not so long as the letters of the past, they are far livelier.
Both in theory and in fact the present time is peculiarly fitted to be
epistolary.
If each one of us will examine that packet of letters we are loath to
destroy because they have made us see pictures or think thoughts or
chuckle with appreciation, we shall pause to ponder how diverse in
character are the authors. One missive, guiltless of grammar, is racy
with backwoods wisdom; another shows the rapier wit and apt allusiveness
of the Hellenist; another is as crisp and keen as the typewriter that
clicked it forth; still another peals with freshman skylarking. It is
not at first easy to perceive underlying all the variety the essential
characteristics which belong alike to all these correspondents and which
differentiate that happily constituted being, the born letter-writer;
man or woman, young or old, educated or illiterate, certain qualities he
must inalienably possess.
The letter-writer is always an observant person. He has the pictorial
eye and the pictorial pen. The view framed by his window sash must never
grow stale for him, across it the clouds must always roll as if across
a painter’s canvas, and its commonplace roof-line must keep always
its quaintness and its quirks. Of the groups of people that crowd his
day, he must see each as if staged for a play, he must perceive the
color of hair and the cut of clothes and the connotation of attitudes
as vividly as if he were always seated before a rising curtain. This
freshness of vision varies in different people. It is always found in
every good letter, but of the writers, some require the stimulus of an
unusual scene; while they have not the power to see or to paint the
pictures of Dulltown Center, they can portray Tokio or Archangel till it
glows on the wall before the reader’s eye; others, more really gifted,
see drama everywhere, even if they have never been twenty miles from
their own farm and forest. Whether our correspondent is stay-at-home
or traveler, he must so combine his gift of observation with his gift
of representation that his angle of vision is unique. We have all of
us received narratives of travel that were colorless as guide-books
and narratives of a village sewing society that were palpitant with
portraiture. The true letter-writer makes us feel not only that we have
been present at a scene but that we have been present with him.
The genuine epistolary endowment shows qualities in pleasant poise. A
letter should be personal, but not over-personal. A self-analyst may
cover many pages of notepaper, but we read him only under protest, and
drop him promptly into the waste-basket. We enjoy the record of personal
observation just so long as it is balanced by detachment. We like to see
our friend moving across the scene he describes, but we don’t want to
see him bulking large in his own landscape. In a well-penned letter the
people written about stand forth as vividly as does the author. It is
this power of amused detachment that makes all true letter-writers true
humorists as well.
To write letters it is not enough to be observant, objective, humorous:
one must have the impulse to express the observation and the fun. This
impulse is, of course, the literary will to write, but there is a sharp
distinction between the littérateur and the letter-writer. The latter
does not merely wish to write, he wishes to write to somebody. He is
not lyric, for it is not enough for him to burst into song unheard;
he is not a diarist, for it is not enough for him to talk to himself;
he is not a genius, for it is not enough for him to talk to a vast,
formless creature called the Public. A letter-writer is one who finds
life so entertaining that he must talk about it to a friend. Never a
self-sufficient person, he is as genial as he is shy; it would therefore
no more occur to him to pour himself out upon paper that nobody was to
read than to pour himself into print that everybody was to read. He has
the literary impulse without the literary ambition. He must be sure of
his auditor before his pen will move, and yet when it once begins to
gambol, it carries him off and away, after the manner of all pens, until
the friendly listener becomes idealized from homely reality into very
quintessence of sympathy.
The individual auditor is not only the first requisite for the
letter-writer, but the determining influence that gives to letters
themselves the qualities which distinguish them from other forms
of literature. Letters stand halfway between the formlessness of
conversation and the formality of essay or fiction. A letter to a
friend has this advantage over a chat with him, that you can choose
the impression you wish to make and make it without interference from
the interlocutor’s telepathy, or interruption through his rejoinders.
Conversation gives and takes, but a letter only gives, and gives exactly
what it wishes, no more. In a letter one employs words, weaving them
happily to one’s will, but it is a mistake to suppose that conversation
is much concerned with words. It is a far more shifting and subtle
thing than that, for mere speech is constantly supplemented or corrected
or contradicted by the twinkle in our eyes, the tautness or tremor in
our voice, the twisting of our lips. The attention of the listener is
diverted by watching all these manifestations. While it has all the
camaraderie of chat, the letter, in the clarity and singleness of its
impression, is distinctly different from talk.
The epistolary form differs as much from the memoir as it does from
conversation. The diarist is a self-important person, talking to himself
and to the future, and conscious of his effect upon both. If he is
great enough, that effect is worth making, and we read his account of
himself and his times with the reverence we accord to history. We do not
read, however, with the pleasant personal warmth with which we peruse a
letter, for we know the diarist is not speaking as comrade to comrade.
We know and he knows that he is speaking to posterity.
The letter has the advantage of not belonging at all to conscious or
commercialized literature. It is not written to be seen of men, nor
yet to be sold to them. It is literature intimate, unintentional,
overheard. In so much as it is personal expression, plus detachment
but minus self-importance, and also in so much as it endeavors to adapt
itself sympathetically to another person’s interest and point of view,
the letter strikes through the merely individual and touches deep and
universal feeling, thus in all its humbleness fulfilling the ancient
dictum for art. The letter-writer, scribbling himself forth merely
to please himself and his friend, is not constrained by servility to
the public taste; his medium allows him ease, fluidity, and a happy
inconsequence, vital artistic qualities impossible to literature written
to meet the market.