Part 10 (2/2)
or a ”medium straw bonnet” should a.s.sume a darker form, and a system of domestic ”rattening” should spread terror through the tranquil parsonages of England? Is she prepared to brave the system of intimidation by which a union of vindictive cooks and nursery-maids might a.s.sert their inherent rights to lockets and earrings? Has she the nerve to crush the secret plots of kitchen Fenianism? Ultimately, no doubt, her efforts might be crowned with success. When that happy time arrived, when ”her suggestions were generally adopted,” and the ”requirements of ladies, especially those of fortune, were generally known” to comprise a uniform for the maid-servant, she might succeed in closing the market of domestic service to the flaunting abigail whose audacious finery renders her to the outward eye indistinguishable from her own daughters.
But as that time would be long in coming, and probably would never arrive in her lifetime, she would have to face the discomforts of a long period of transition, during which she would have to rely on herself and her daughters for the discharge of the various operations of the household. Meantime we beg to suggest another way of effecting her purpose quite as easy, and much more effectual. Why not go in for an Act of Parliament, having for its object the total suppression of the instinct of vanity in the female bosom? Let it be enacted that, on and after the 1st of next April (the date would be appropriate), feathers, flowers, and the other abominations which she seeks to proscribe, shall be for ever abjured and disused by the fair s.e.x. As the prelude to that full entry on her social and political rights which is nowadays claimed for woman, a proposal of this magnitude would commend itself, no doubt, to the philosophic section of the House of Commons.
There is another feature in the manifesto of a ”Clergyman's Wife” which calls for observation. She lays particular stress on securing the adhesion to her plan of ”families of wealth and distinction,” ”ladies of position and fortune”--of the leaders of fas.h.i.+on, in short, wherever those mysterious but potent decoy-ducks are to be found. Its success depends on ”making it fas.h.i.+onable to adopt the uniform,” on making simplicity of dress among maid-servants the sole avenue to the ”best situations.” Now, as it is conceded that the ”present disgraceful style of dress among servant girls” is the result of their ambition to imitate their superiors, it is worth while, in order to estimate both the amount of their responsibility for the said disgrace and the chances of success of the proposed reform, to glance from the style of dress in vogue in the kitchen to the style of dress in vogue in the drawing-room.
Oddly enough, on the very day on which a ”Clergyman's Wife” was permitted to ventilate her project in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the public was favored with the latest intelligence on this point, in the columns of a fas.h.i.+onable contemporary. Paris, we all know, is the sovereign arbiter of dress to all ”ladies of position and fortune” in this country, the center of an authority on all matters relating to the toilette, which radiates, through ”families of distinction and wealth,”
to those calm retreats where clergymen's wives, in chastely severe attire, exchange hospitalities with their neighbors. What is the fas.h.i.+onable style of dress in Paris at the present moment? The correspondent of our contemporary shall speak for himself. ”We are living,” he says, ”in an age which seems to be reviving the cla.s.sical period in the history of drapery. You see pretty nearly as much of the female _torso_ now as the Athenians did when the bas-reliefs of the Parthenon copied the modes of the Greeks so many hundred years ago, and when the mult.i.tude did not wors.h.i.+p the drapery of the G.o.ddess only.”
After some piquant remarks on the style of dress in the theatres, he goes on to inform us how ”in the more refined and virtuous society” the ladies are dressing this winter. ”At a _fete_ graced by all that is elegant, refined, and aristocratic in Paris,” he observed the d.u.c.h.ess, the countess, and the baroness imitating the costly toilettes of the _demi-monde_, arrayed like one of them precisely, in the very height of fas.h.i.+on. We are favored with a minute account of one representative toilette in the room:--
”The lady is of a n.o.ble Hungarian family, fair, with that dark brown reddish hair which is just going to begin to be golden, but never s.h.i.+nes out. Pale oval face, heavy eyebrows, bright bronze eyes. Small festoons of hair over the brow, imprisoned by a golden metal band. Behind a Bismarck chignon. A ma.s.s of twisted hair, in a sort of Laoc.o.o.n agony, was decorated with small insects (of course I don't mean anything impossible), glittering gem-like beetles from the Brazils. Three long curls hang from the imposing ma.s.s, and could be worn before or behind, and be made to perform--as I witnessed--all sorts of coquettish tricks. . . . Now for the dress. Well, there is nothing to describe till you get very nearly down to the waist. A pretty bit of lace on a band wanders over the shoulder; the back is bare very low down, and more of the bust is seen than even last year's fas.h.i.+ons permitted. . . . You may, as far as I could observe, dress or half-dress just as you like; caprice has taken the place of uniform fas.h.i.+on. As the panorama of _grandes dames_ floats before my mind's eye, I come to the conclusion that I have seen more of those ladies than one could have hoped or expected in so brief a s.p.a.ce of time.”
This, then, is, or shortly will be, in a tasteless and exaggerated form, the style of dress among those ”ladies of distinction” whose co-operation a ”Clergyman's Wife” fondly hopes to enlist in her scheme for purging the kitchen of its ”disgraceful” finery. It is just possible that she has not heard of these things. Perhaps in the retirement of the parsonage, with her eyes intently fixed on the moral havoc which dress is causing among ”the lower orders of females,” she has a.s.sumed that the dress of the higher orders of females is irreproachably modest and correct. If so, we are sorry to have to dispel an illusion which would go far to justify the self-complacent tone of her lecture. But unless she is blissfully ignorant of contemporary fas.h.i.+ons in any sphere more elevated than the kitchen, we are struck with astonishment at the hardihood of an appeal at the present moment to ladies of fas.h.i.+on.
Is a being whose avowed object is to imitate as exactly as possible the cosmetic tricks of the _demi-monde_ likely to prove an influential ally in a crusade against cheap finery? Is a mistress whose head-gear resembles the art-trophy of an eccentric hair-dresser, and whose clothing is described as nothing to speak of ”until you get very nearly down to the waist,” the person to be especially selected to preach propriety of dress to her maid? Or is it that a ”Clergyman's Wife”
objects to overdress only, and not to underdress; and that, while she would repress with severity any attempt on the part of ”females of the lower order” to adorn their persons, she looks with a tolerant eye, among ”ladies of position and fortune,” upon the nude? We are curious to know at what point in the social scale she would draw the line above which an unblus.h.i.+ng exhibition of the female _torso_ is decent, and below which earrings and a parasol are immoral.
As a matter of fact, so far from discouraging the pa.s.sion for dress among their female dependents, ladies of position and fortune are apt to insist on their dressing smartly. They like to see some of their own l.u.s.tre reflected on their attendants. A dowdy in sad-colored print or linsey is by no means to their taste. This has been well pointed out in a letter in which a ”Maid-servant” replied, through the _Pall Mall Gazette_, to the project of reform proposed by a ”Clergyman's Wife.”
Looking at the question from her own point of view, she described in plain words how, when she first went into service, she had wished to dress simply, but was quickly made to understand that she must either spend more of her wages on dress, or seek another situation. We believe that her experience would be endorsed by the great majority of her cla.s.s. If a ”Clergyman's Wife” would take the pains to inquire into the facts of the case, she would not be long in ascertaining from what quarter the signal for unbecoming finery among ”females of the lower orders” really comes.
The plain truth of the matter is, that a reform in the dress of ”lower cla.s.s females,” and maid-servants in particular, can only be brought about in one way. The reaction in favor of a neat and simple style must come from above, and not from below; in the way of example, not of precept. When ”ladies of position and fortune” cease to lavish their thousands on millinery, their copyists in the nursery and kitchen will cease to spend their wages on a similar object. When every one above the rank of a governess dresses in a manner suitable to her station, complaints will be no longer heard about ”unbecoming” finery below stairs. The chief incentive to showy dress among the ”lower orders of females” is unquestionably a desire to ape the extravagance of their betters. Remove that incentive, and the evil which a ”Clergyman's Wife”
so forcibly deplores will soon cure itself.
We hope that she may be induced to turn her reforming zeal into another direction. Instead of indulging in childish projects for putting the Sunday-school, and the church singers, and maid-servants, and the lower orders of females generally into uniforms, let her attack the mischief at its root, and persuade the fine ladies of the earth to curtail their monstrous prodigality and immodest vagaries in dress. Let her add her warning voice to that of the Head of Latin Christianity, who has recently denounced this scandal of the age with the same perennial vigor that characterizes his anathemas on the Subalpine Government.
aeSTHETIC WOMAN.
It is the peculiar triumph of woman in this nineteenth century that she has made the conquest of Art. Our grandmothers lived in the kitchen, and debased their finer faculties to the creation of puddings and pies. They spun, they knitted, they mended, they darned, they kept the accounts of the household, and scolded the maids. From this underground existence of barbaric ages woman has at last come forth into the full suns.h.i.+ne of artistic day; she has mounted from the kitchen to the studio, the sketching-desk has superseded the pudding-board, sonatas have banished the knitting-needle, poetry has exterminated weekly accounts. Woman, in a word, has realized her mission; it is her characteristic, she tells us through a chorus of musical voices, to represent the artistic element of the world, to be pre-eminently the aesthetic creature.
Nature educates her, as Wordsworth sang long ago, into a being of her own, sensitive above all to beauty of thought and color, and sound and form. Delicate perceptions of evanescent shades and tones, lost to the coa.r.s.er eye and ear of man, exquisite refinements of spiritual appreciation, subtle powers of detecting latent harmonics between the outer and the inner world of nature and the soul, blend themselves like the colors of the prism in the pure white light of woman's organization.
And so the host of Woman, as it marches to the conquest of this world, flaunts over its legions the banner of art.
In one of the occasional pa.s.sages of real poetic power with which Walt Whitman now and then condescends to break the full tide of rhapsody over the eternities and the last patent drill, he describes himself as seeing two armies in succession go forth to the civil war. First pa.s.sed the legions of Grant and M'Clellan, flushed with patriotic enthusiasm and hope of victory, and cheered onward by the shouts of adoring mult.i.tudes.
Behind, silent and innumerable, march the army of the dead. Something, we must own, of the same contrast strikes us as we stand humbly aside to watch the aesthetic progress of woman.
It is impossible not to feel a certain glow of enthusiastic sympathy as the vanguard pa.s.ses by--women earnest in aim and effort, artists, nursing-sisters, poetesses, doctors, wives, musicians, novelists, mathematicians, political economists, in somewhat motley uniform and ill-dressed ranks, but full of resolve, independence, and self-sacrifice. If we were fighting folk we confess we should be half inclined to shout for the rights of woman, and to fall manfully into the rank. As it is, we wait patiently for the army behind, for the main body--woman herself. Woman fronts us as noisy, demonstrative, exacting in her aesthetic claims. Nothing can surpa.s.s the adroitness with which she uses her bluer sisters on ahead to clear the way for her gayer legions; nothing, at any rate, but the contempt with which she dismisses them when their work is done. Their office is to level the stubborn incredulity, to set straight the crooked criticisms, of sceptical man, and then to disappear. Woman herself takes their place. Art is everywhere throughout her host--for music, the highest of arts, is the art of all.
The singers go before, the minstrels follow after, in the midst are the damsels playing on the timbrels. The sister Arts have their own representatives within the ma.s.s. Sketching boasts its thousands, and poetry its tens of thousands. A demure band of maidens blend piety with art around the standard of Church decoration. Perhaps it is his very regard for the first host--for its earnestness, for its real womanhood--that makes the critic so cynical over the second; perhaps it is his very love for art that turns to quiet bitterness as he sees art dragged at the heels of foolish virgins. For art _is_ dragged at their heels. Woman will have man love her for her own sake; but she loves art for the sake of man. Very truly, if with an almost sublime effrontery, she re-christens for her own special purposes the great studies that fired Raffaelle or Beethoven. She pursues them, she pays for them, not as arts, but as accomplishments. Their cultivation is the last touch added at her finis.h.i.+ng school ere she makes her bow to the world. She orders her new duet as she orders her new bonnet, and the two purchases have precisely the same significance. She drops her piano and her paint-brush as she drops her coquetries and flirtations, when the fish is landed and she can throw the bait away. Or, what is worse, she keeps them alive as little social enjoyments, as reliefs to the tedium of domestic life, as something which fills up the weary hours when she is fated to the boredom of rural existence.
A woman of business is counted a strange and remarkable being, we hardly know why. Looking coolly at the matter, it seems to us that all women are women of business; that their life is spent over the counter; that there is nothing in earth or heaven too sacred for their traffic and their barter. Love, youth, beauty, a British mother reckons them up on her fingers, and tells you to a fraction their value in the market. And the pale sentimental being at her side, after flooring one big fellow with a bit of Chopin, and another with a highly unintelligible verse of Robert Browning, poses herself shyly and asks through appealing eyes, ”Am I not an aesthetic creature?”
The answer to this question is best read, perhaps, in the musical aspect of woman. Bold as the a.s.sumption sounds, it is quietly a.s.sumed that every woman is naturally musical. Music is the great accomplishment, and the logic of her schools proves to demonstration that every girl has fingers and an ear. In a wonderful number of cases the same logic proves that girls have a voice. Anyhow, the a.s.sumption moulds the very course of female existence. The morning is spent in practicing, and the evening in airing the results of the practice. There are country-houses where one only rushes away from the elaborate Thalberg of midnight to be roused up at dawn by the Battle of Prague on the piano in the school-room over-head. Still we all reconcile ourselves to this perpetual rattle, because we know that a musical being has to be educated into existence, and that a woman is necessarily a musical being. A glance, indeed, at what we may call the life of the piano explains the necessity.
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