A Complaint of the Decay of Finery

ALL my life long I have been a lover of finery. For as many years as I can remember, I have liked to read in the old books of “ ribbands and silks ” — silks scented with ambergris; of a bunch of feathers and a scarlet petticoat; and of the promises made by dramatic kings — kings that wore their crowns all day long, at home as well as in battle — to clothe their lovely tearful victims in ” costly cloth of massy gold.” I have learned all the pretty rhetoric of dress. I know that it is for the Passionate Shepherd to persuade his love with a gown of finest wool pulled from his lambs: that the chosen epithet for a silk is Median— unless perhaps it come from Samarcand; and that the metaphor appropriate to a great coquette, bedecked and gay, is “ a sailing ship with streamers waving.” I have lingered hours long before the painted dresses of old portraits, — the lady with a peacock feather embroidered on the yellow of her sleeve; Spanish little girls standing stiff in brocade, — and have been stirred to meditations on vainglory by the vanished crinolines and big bonnets of Victorian fashion-plates.

As an unassured girl, it is true, I knew certain unworldly doubts and questionings. Verses commending simplicity haunted me, the praises of “ a sweet disorder in the dress ” perplexed me, and arguments against ” the adulteries of art ” frightened me while still a child in school frocks. Often in those early days I reproached my own frivolity, and resolving to turn from gewgaws to severer contemplations, I felt as poignantly as though it were directed at me, the historian’s scorn for the King of Germany who buttoned his coat with a fortune in diamonds, and, in especial, the satire of old essayists against fans and flounces.

Ingenuous youth, I take it, will ever be misled by Addison’s railing at the extravagances of women of quality of Queen Anne’s day —elegant creatures! — and tremble in her own guilty heart lest she be that woman of “ weak mind and low education ” in danger of every embroidered coat that comes her way and fated to meet her ruin in the lure of a gold galloon. To the experienced lover of finery, such as I have come with the years to be, it is of course clear, page by page, that Addison knew the cut and color of every fashion as no virtuous moralist ever could, and distinguished between the hood and hat with all the emotion of a man of taste. He deplores the inundation of brocades from France! Do but open the covers of The Spectator and you will be swept away on a flood of petticoats and head-dresses and fans and powder-bags and puffs and little muffs. For all the color and splendor of ladies dress Addison had appropriated to his imagination and had set ingeniously as a decoration to his pages! Off his guard he will, moreover, avow his sympathy openly, as when he describes the cluster of ladies sitting together at the opera “ in the prettiest colored hoods.”" I looked,” he exclaims, " with as much pleasure on this little assembly as upon a bed of tulips.” And he notes with charming pedantry that one hood is blue and another yellow and another philomot; that the fourth is of a pink color and the fifth pale green. ” I did not know whether it might be an embassy of Indian Queens ; but upon going about the pit and taking them in front, I was immediately undeceived and saw so much beauty in every face that I found them all to be English.”

Surely it is not the part of an earnest Puritan to concern himself either with English beauties or Indian queens, or to know pink so scrupulously from Yellow, or blue from green, or to recognize philomot as a serious enough idea to entertain at all. Nor again can one account other than whimsical, protests against petticoats, big as canopies, on the part of the writer of the following sentences : “ I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may be adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet; the peacock, parrot and swan shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells, and the rocks for gems; and every part of nature furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of it. All this I shall indulge them in; but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can nor will allow it! ”

Thus, Addison for his own great, ends carrying on his hypocrisy, others followed his famous example, and the beautiful art of dress fell into disrepute among us. To-day finery has become a thing for fashion-mongers to parley and trade with. Even novelists and romancers dare no longer dress a girl generously in tradition’s pink and white finery; or a fop in lavender gloves and gold chains ; or put such a muff as Sophia Western never knew the want of into a lady’s hands on a winter’s morning, or pattern intricately the sunshade she raises above her lovely head on a midsummer afternoon. How different was it in the old days, when a poet had no sooner named the dwellingplace of his heroine and said that the gods loved the brightness of her hair, than he continued : —

But if she had no gloves, she had a fan.

And in the same way all the ladies in the old books had finery of their own, — “ Gloves, garters, stockings, shoes, and strings, of winning colors;” a strawberry handkerchief in a tragedy, and in a tale “a broche of gold,” lettered Amor vincit omnia.

So too, I remember, had fine gentlemen in the past — whether knights, courtiers, wits, or beaux — all in turn their rich attires. In the days, that was, when their armor mirrored the sun and “pagan knights stood all round bright as sky; ” when they themselves set the fashion in sleeves, — the sleeve Amadis and the sleeve à la Mameluck, — and before the plume à la gentilhomme had gone to droop from a lady’s toque. I can believe, indeed, that feathers may still float in their fancy, and that the finest gentleman of all stretches his imagination with the old popes and princes to peach-colored velvet and the sweet fashion of a brocade.

But unless it be thus in idea, the pride of dress is for them snuffed out. Velvet Venetians, doublets in damask, carnation silk stockings, fringed gloves, kneebuckles all a-glitter, hats furbelowed with jewels or feathers —all the old catalogue of gorgeousness belongs now for them not to the world of every day but to the stage world. No gentleman of present fashion could squander a fortune on his wedding clothes, if he would; no grave writer of tragedies could go, like Dr. Johnson, to the extravagance of bordering his coat with gold lace for a First Night; no “ fortunate youth ” of this late century could drive post through France to choose flowered silk for a waistcoat. The fop of fops — once “ a silken fellow,” a “painted image!” —has at the moment not a garment to appeal to the imaginative lover of finery — but he must “ love in serge,” must trick himself out, from boot to hat, according to the dictates of ugly modern oracles, the Convenient and the Correct. In behalf of the former, the Convenient, there is of course nothing to plead: briefly, the worship of ease is for the vulgar. The beautiful discomfort of armor, let us say, or of a powdered periwig, was to be endured. For the Correct, on the other hand, there is perhaps an argument to be brought. Its charm is academic, truly; but to temperaments that love a severe perfection, grave cloth and white linen unvaryingly disposed must always make their appeal — and who shall pronounce them for a monk or an idealist not suitable apparel ?

To the worldling serge presents grave dangers: and this not merely in the case of fine gentlemen but in that of their fair confederates as well. Addison himself noted the gentlewomen of his day who rode as female cavaliers, tying up their hair in a bag or ribbon in imitation of the smart part, of the opposite sex. An immodest custom! And I can imagine that as in the old world perukes had their seeming charm for “ tall lovely prudes,” so in the modern the greatcoat and stiff hat may allure them. Such affectations, I need hardly say, are not for the woman of feeling. Stuffs of pomp and color do rather persuade her; her head is full of beautiful intricate patterns; skirts softly flowing, capes and fichus, make her proper dress. Nor is the serious lover of finery dressed merely for the flattery of her looking-glass. She is conscious of her clothes as part of the world’s great show: she dresses for her type, whether it be Great, Lady, Shepherdess, or Blue Stocking. She is true to her period and will not aspire to powder and a high head-dress if she be born to the soft curls of Charles the Second’s day. Fashion, it is well known, favors the fair, and by an easy metaphor may be said to turn her wheel no less than Fortune does. So with a swing she will again dress her votaries à la Diane and a la Minerve, and let chapeaux Henri IV once more become outof-date vanities before Victorian bonnets.

For my part I commend a quick changing fashion, and, could I have chosen my period, would have fixed on the fickle years of the First Empire, when fashions shifted from week to week; and that, too, with such fine shades of difference that only the most frivolous could follow them. Then the Great Conqueror brought to Paris finery from the ends of the earth: muslins from India, garlands of roses from Bengal, stuffs shining with gold and silver from Cairo; from Turkey, of course, turbans; and from the far East shawls; shawls from Cashmere, from Persia, from the Levant; shawls particolored, blue — bright blue — and red and green and black and the clear yellow of the sun; shawls patterned with all the interlacings of Asian caprice, and fit, not only to hang from the shoulders of the fair, but to give a coquette of Eastern fancy day-long visions of the Orient. From the past, for all time as well as all the earth was then Napoleon’s, came the fashion of the troubadours, — chapeaux a Creneaux, sleeves à la Mameluck, cheveux à l’enfant, — lending to a very modern period, who can say what charming Gothic airs? How do not such revolutions of fashion enlarge the feminine heart and teach it to live in all ages and all climates!

A woman of mind will go even further; she will not merely have a sense of the romance of her clothes fetched from the ends of the world, but in the choice of every garment will let her wit play a part. “ I have bought myself a robe de chambre,” wrote Mme, de Sevigné to her daughter, “ of the same stuff as your last skirt. It is admirable: there is a little green in it, but violet prevails. In a word, I was tempted and I fell. They wanted me to face it with flame-colour, but that I thought would have the air of a final impenitence. The outside is sheer weakness, and such a lining would have been wickedness itself, and to my mind contrary to good taste.” So charming can a woman of feeling be about a mere dressing-gown! So can she by her own greatness put her finery beyond Time’s power to fade or tatter!

Mere fine ladies, fantastical coquettes, must look to others to celebrate their dresses, — to give themselves existence, I might say! For apart from their clothes there is no life, no delight in them.

These, however, they may not only trail through to-day’s pageant, but if they be born under the pretty star of an auspicious fashion and chance to catch a poet’s ear, they may trust the liquefaction of their clothes to last out three centuries with Julia’s.

The hope of all finery is in art, I should say, were it not yet more true that the hope of art is in “a good dressing.” Painters know this and have already adorned their canvases with the greatest garments of our age — a haughty Beauty’s riding-dress reflected for a moment in a mirror, a Dancer’s yellow petticoats, an Old Lady’s soft black and delicate laces. But all these still wait to be put into words. It is time for some poet again to rhyme, —

for the modern playwright to see to it that his ladies enter the scene as “ gallant ” as they did in King James’s time; and above all for the student of manners to find in present-day fashion his great theme. Time measures the duration of painted dresses no less than of those of silk and purple; but a skirt, a flounce, a slipper, set in a beautiful sentence, lives more than a mortal life. I long for the finery of our time thus to outdate its period; for it to go down the centuries in similes, exordiums, and metaphors ; and by its very imagery to suggest to less splendid ages all the beauty and luxury of ours.