The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859

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_Tomes._ Come, Grey, be fair. You know that merit has no immunity from
ridicule.

_Grey._ True; but no less true that ridicule does no real harm to
merit. If this Mrs. Robinson Crusoe's gown had been truly beautiful, my
ridiculous comparison could not have so entirely disenchanted my wife
with it;--she, mind you, being supposed (for the sake of our argument
only) to be a woman of sense and taste.

_Mrs. Grey._ Accept my profoundest and most grateful curtsy,--on credit.
It's too much trouble to rise and make it; and, to confess the truth, I
can't; my foot has caught in my hoop. Help me, Laura.

_[Disentanglement,--from which the gentlemen avert modest eyes, laughing
the while.]_

_Grey._ I do assure you, Nelly, that, until you leave off that
monstrosity of steel and cordage, your sense and taste, so far as
costume is concerned, must be taken on credit, as well as your curtsies.

_Mrs. Grey._ Leave off my hoop? Would you have me look like a
fright?--as slinky as if I had been drawn through a key-hole?

_Miss Larches._ Leave off her hoop?

_Mr. Key._ Be seen without a hoop? Why, what a guy a woman would look
without a hoop! I suppose they do take them off at certain times, but
then they are not visible to the naked eye.

_Tomes._ Yes, Grey,--why take off her hoop? I don't care, you know, to
have hoops worn. But worn or not worn, what difference does it make?

_Grey_. All against me?--a fair representation of the general feeling
on the momentous subject at this moment, I suppose. But ten years
ago,--that's about a year after I first saw you, and a year before we
were married, you remember, Nelly,--no lady wore a hoop; and had I said
then that you looked like a fright, or, as Mr. Key phrases it, a guy, I
should have belied my own opinion, and, I believe, given you no little
pain.

_Mrs. Grey_. Master Presumption, I'm responsible for none of your
conceited notions; and if I were, it wasn't the fashion then to wear
hoops,--and to be out of the fashion is to be a fright and a guy.

_Miss Larches_. Yes, the fashion is always pretty.

_Grey_. Is it, Miss Larches? Then it must always have been pretty. Let
us see. Look you all here. In this small portfolio is a collection of
prints which exhibits the fashions of France, Italy, and England, in
more or less detail, for eight hundred years back.

_Miss Larches_. Is there? Oh, that's charming! Do let us see them!

_Grey_. With pleasure. But remember that I expect you to admire them
all,--although I tell you that not one in ten of them is endurable, not
one in fifty pretty, not one in a hundred beautiful.

_Miss Larches_. Why, there aren't more than two or three hundred.

_Grey_. About two hundred and fifty; and if you find more than two
that fulfil all the conditions of beauty in costume, you will be more
fortunate than I have been.

_Miss Larches_ [_after a brief Inspection_]. Ah, Mr. Grey, how can you?
Most of these are caricatures.

_Grey_. Nothing of the sort. All veritable costumes, I assure you. Those
from 1750 down, fashion-plates; the others, portraits.

_Mrs. Grey_. True, Laura. I've looked at them many a time, and thought
how fearfully and wonderfully dresses have been made. Not to go back to
those bristling horrors of the Middle Ages and the _renaissance_, look
at this ball-dress of 1810: a night-gown without sleeves, made of two
breadths of pink silk, very low in the neck, and _very_ short in the
skirt.

_Tomes_. And these were our modest grandmothers, of whom we hear so
much! They went rather far in their search after the beautiful.

_Grey_. Say, rather, in their revelation of it. That was, at least, an
honest fashion, and men who married could not well complain that they
had been deceived by concealment. But that tells nothing against the
modesty of our grandmothers. What is modest in dress depends entirely on
what is customary; and there is an immodesty that hides, as well as one
that exposes. Unconsciousness is modesty's triple shelter against shame.
See here, the dissolute Marguerite of Navarre, visible only at head and
hands; the former from the chin upwards, the latter from the knuckles
downwards; and here, _La belle Hamilton_, rightly named, as chaste as
beautiful, and so modest in her carriage that she escaped the breath of
scandal even in the court of Charles II., and yet with a gown (if
gown it can be called) so loose about the bust and arms that the pink
night-gown would blush crimson at it.

_Tomes_. The ladies seem convinced, though puzzled; but that is because
they don't detect your fallacy. You confound the woman and the fashion.
An immodest woman may be modestly dressed; and if it is the fashion to
be so, she most certainly will, unless she is able herself to set a
fashion more suited to her taste. For usually a woman's care of her
costume is in inverse proportion to that she takes of her character.

_The Ladies [having a vague notion that "inverse proportion" means
something horrible'_]. Mr. Tomes!

_Grey_. Don't misapprehend my friend Daniel. On this occasion he has
come to judgment upon a subject of which he knows so little that it is
worse than nothing. I have reason to believe that he has a profound
respect for one of you, and, being a bachelor, such exalted notions of
your sex in general that he would not wantonly misjudge the humblest
individual of it. His remark was but the fruit of such sheer innocence
with regard to your charming sisterhood, that he has yet to learn that
there is not a single member of it, who confesses to less than seventy
years, to whom, even if she is black, deformed, and the meanest hireling
household drudge, her dress, when she is to be seen of men, is not the
object of a watchful solicitude at least next to that which she feels
for her reputation. Among the sharpest of Douglas Jerrold's unmalicious
witticisms was his saying, that Eve ate the apple that she might dress.

_Mrs. Grey_. Eve's daughters--two of them, at least--are inexpressibly
obliged to you for your defence of the sex against the valorous Tomes.
Another time, pray, leave us to our fate. But, Laura, do look here! See
these hideous peaked and horned head-dresses of the fifteenth century.
That one looks like an Old-Dominion coffee-pot with wings. How
frightful! how uncomfortable! how inconvenient! How could the women wear
such things?

_Miss Larches_. Perfectly ridiculous! How could they get into their
carriages with those steeples on their heads? and how they must have
been in the way at the opera!

_Grey_. Miss Larches forgets. These head-dresses, monstrous as they are,
are not exposed to the objection of being inconsistent with the habits
of life of those who wore them, as so many of the fashions of later
periods and of the present day are. There were no such vehicles as
she is thinking of until more than a century after these stupendous
head-dresses were worn, until which time ladies very rarely used even
a covered wagon as a means of locomotion; and these steeple-crowned
ladies, and many generations after them, had passed away before the
performance of the first opera.

_Miss Larches_. No carriages? Why, how did they go to parties? No opera?
What did they do on winter evenings when there were no parties?

_Grey_. They went to parties in the day-time on horseback; and on the
days when there were no parties, of which there were a great many then,
they gave themselves up to a very delightful mode of passing the time,
when it is intelligently practised, known as staying at home.

_Mr. Key_. What a bore!

_Grey_. But don't confine your criticism of head-dresses to the
fifteenth century. Look through the costumes of the three succeeding
centuries, and see how often invention was taxed for artificial
decorations of the head, equally elaborate and hideous. Anything but to
have a head look like a head! anything but to have hair look like hair!
See this lady of 1750, her hair drawn violently back from her forehead
and piled up on a cushion nine inches high. She is plainly one of those
lovely, warm-toned blondes whose hair is of that priceless red that
makes all other tints look poor and sad; and so she defiles its
exquisite texture with grease, and blanches out its wealth of color with
flour. She might have gathered its gleaming waves into a ravishing knot
behind her head; but no, she has four stiff, enormous curls, noisome
with a mingled smell of hot iron, musk, and ambergris, hanging like
rolls of parchment from the top of her cushion to below her ear. O' top
of this elevation is mounted a wreath of gaudy artificial flowers, in
its turn surmounted by four vast plumes, two yellow, one pink, one blue,
from the midst of which shoot up two long feathers, one green and one
red, while behind hangs down a greasy, floury mass gathered at the
end into a club-like handle, which has some fitness for its place, in
suggesting that it should be used to jerk the heap of hair, grease, and
feathers from the head of the unfortunate who sustains it. Just think of
it! that sweet creature must have given up at least two hours of every
day to this disfigurement of her pretty head.

_Tomes_. And I've no doubt she made a sensation in the ball-room or at
court, in spite of all your ridicule, and so attained her purpose.

_Grey_. Certainly she did; for she was so beautiful in person and
alluring in manner, that even that head-dress, and the accompanying
costume with which she was deformed, could not eclipse her charms for
those who had become at all accustomed to the absurd disguise which she
assumed. But it was the woman that was beautiful, not the costume; and
the woman was so beautiful, in spite of the costume, that she was able
to light up even its forbidding features with the reflection of her own
loveliness. There have been countless similar cases since;--there are
some now.

_Mrs. Grey_. Miss Larches, doubtless, appreciates the approving glance
of so severe a censor.

_Grey_. And this head-dress _was_ open to the objection which Miss
Larches brought against that which preceded it three centuries. These
ladies were in each other's way at the opera; and while riding there
in their coaches, they were obliged to sit with their heads out of the
windows.

_Mrs. Grey_. Their carriages must have been of great service when it
rained!--But look at these stomachers, stiff with embroidery and jewels,
and with points that reach half-way from the waist to the ground! See
those enormous ruffs, standing out a quarter of a yard, and curving over
so smoothly to their very edges! What a protection the fear of ruining
those ruffs must have been against children, and--other troublesome
creatures!

_Grey_. It is true, that ruffs and stomachers seem to indicate great
propriety of conduct, including an aversion to children and--other
troublesome creatures; but students of the manners and morals of the
period at which those articles of dress were worn do not find that the
women who wore them differed much in their conduct, at least as to the
other troublesome creatures, from the women who nowadays have revived
one of the most unsightly and absurd traits of the costume of which
ruffs and stomachers formed a part.

_Mrs. Grey_. What can you mean? Our fashion like that frightful rig?
Why, see this portrait of Queen Elizabeth in full dress! What with
stomacher and pointed waist and fardingale, and sticking in here and
sticking out there, and ruffs and cuffs and ouches and jewels and
puckers, she looks like a hideous flying insect with expanded wings,
seen through a microscope,--not at all like a woman.

_Grey_. And her costume is rivalled, if not outdone, by that of her
critic, in the very peculiarity by which she is made to look most unlike
a woman;--the straight line of the waist and the swelling curve below
it, which meet in such a sharp, unmitigated angle. Look at the Venus
yonder,--she is naked to the hips,--and see how utterly these lines
misrepresent those of Nature. You will find no instance of such a
contour as is formed by the meeting of these lines among all living
creatures, except, perhaps, when a turtle thrusts his head and his tail
out of his shell.

_Miss Larches_. But there's a vase with just such an outline, that I
have heard you admire a hundred times.

_Grey_. True, Miss Larches; but a woman is not a vase;--more beautiful
even than this, certainly more precious, perhaps almost as fragile, but
still not a vase; and she shows as little taste in making herself look
like a vase as some potters do in making vases that look like women.

_Mr. Key_. But I thought it was decided that the female figure below the
shoulders should be left to the imagination. Does Mr. Grey propose to
substitute the charming reality of undisguised Nature?

_Grey_. True, we do not attempt to define the female figure below the
waist, at least; but although we may safely veil or even conceal Nature,
we cannot misrepresent or outrage her, except at the cost of utter
loss of beauty. The lines of drapery, or of any article of dress, must
conform to those of that part of the figure which it conceals, or the
effect will be deforming, monstrous.

_Mr. Key._ Does Mr. Grey mean, to say that ladies nowadays' look
monstrous and deformed?

_Grey._ To a certain extent they do. But such is the influence of habit
upon the eye, that we fully apprehend the effect of such incongruity as
that of which I spoke only in the costumes of past generations, or when
there is a very violent, instead of a gradual change in the fashion of
our own day. Look at these full-length portraits of Catherine de Medicis
and the Princess Marguerite, daughter of Francis the First.

_The Ladies._ What frights!

_Mrs. Grey._ No, not both; Marguerite's dress is pretty, in spite of
those horrid sleeves sticking up so above her shoulders.

_Grey._ You are right. Those sleeves, rising above the shoulders--as
high as the ear in Catherine's costume, you will observe--are unsightly
enough to nullify whatever beauty the costume might have in other
points; though in her case they only complete the expression of the
costume, which is a grim, unnatural stiffness. And the reason of the
unsightliness of these sleeves is, that the outline which they present
is directly opposed to that of Nature. No human shoulders bulge upward
into great hemispherical excrescences nine inches high; and the peculiar
sexual characteristic of this part of woman's figure is the gentle
downward curve by which the lines of the shoulder pass into those of the
arm. Our memory that such is the natural configuration of these parts
enters, consciously or unconsciously, into our judgment of this costume,
in which we see that Nature is deliberately departed from; and our
condemnation of it in this particular respect is strengthened by the
perception, at a glance, that great pains have been taken to make its
outlines discordant with those of the part which they conceal. You
qualified your censure of Marguerite's dress partly because, in her
case, the slope of the shoulder is preserved until the very junction of
the arm with the bust, and partly because her bust and waist are defined
by her gown with a tolerably near approach to Nature, instead of being
entirely concealed, as in the case of her sister-in-law, by stiff lines
sloping outward on all sides to the ground, making the remorseless Queen
look like an enormous extinguisher with a woman's head set on it. And
these advantages of form in the Princess's costume are enhanced by
its presentation of a fine contrast of rich color in unbroken masses,
instead of the Queen's black velvet and white satin elaborately
disfigured with embroidery, ermine, lace, and jewels. You were prompt
in your condemnation of the fashion to which your eye had not been
accustomed: now turn to the costume that you wear, and which you are in
a manner compelled to wear; for I am not so visionary as to expect
a woman, or even a man under sixty, to fly directly in the face of
fashion, although her extravagant caprices may be gracefully disregarded
by both sexes and all ages. Here are two fashion-plates of the last
month,--[Footnote: March, 1869.] not magazine caricatures, mind you, or
anything like it,--but from the first _modistes_ in Paris. Look at that
shawled lady, with her back toward us. If you did not know that that is
a shawl, and that the thing which surmounts it is a bonnet, you would
not suspect the figure to be human. See; there is a slightly undulating
slope at an angle of about sixty-five degrees from the crown of the head
to the lowest hem of the skirt, so that the outline is that of a pyramid
slightly rounded at the apex, and nearly as broad across the base as
it is high. What is there of woman in such a figure? And this
evening-dress; it suggests the enchantments in the stories of the Dark
Ages, where knights encounter women who are women to the breasts and
monsters below. From the head to as far as halfway down the waist, this
figure is natural.

_Mr. Key._ Under the circumstances it could hardly be otherwise. _Au
naturel_, I should call it, except for the spice of a few flowers and a
little lace.

_Grey_. But from that point it begins to lose its semblance to a woman's
shape, (as you will see by raising your eyes again to the Venus,) and
after running two or three inches decidedly inward in a straight line,
where it should turn outward with a gentle curve, its outlines break
into a sharp angle, and it expands, with a sudden hyperbolical curve,
into a monstrous and nameless figure that is not only unlike Nature, but
has no relations whatever with Nature. The eye needs no cultivation,
the brain no instruction, to perceive that such an outline cannot be
produced by drapery upon a woman's form. It is clear, at a glance, that
there is an artificial structure underneath that swelling skirt; that a
scaffold, a framework, has been erected to support that dome of silk;
and that the wearer is merely an automatic machine by which it is made
to perambulate. A woman in this rig hangs in her skirts like a clapper
in a bell; and I never meet one without being tempted to take her by the
neck and ring her.

_Mr. Key_. Those belles like ringing well enough, but not exactly of
that kind.

_Grey_. The costume is also faulty in two other most important respects:
it is without pure, decided color of any tint, but is broken into
patches and blotches of various mongrel hues,----

_Mrs. Grey_. Hear the man! that exquisite brocade!

_Grey_.----and whatever effect it might otherwise have had, of form
or color, would be entirely frittered away by the multitudinous and
multiform trimmings with which it is bedizened; and it is without a
girdle of any kind.

_Mrs. Grey_. Oh, sweet Simplicity, hear and reward thy priest and
prophet! What would your Highness have the woman wear?--a white muslin
gown, with a blue sash, and a rose in her hair? That style went out on
the day that Mesdames Shem, Ham, and Japhet left the ark.

_Grey_. And well it might,--for evening-dress, at least No,--my taste,
or, if you will permit me to say it, good taste, craves rich colors, and
ample, flowing lines,--colors which require taste to be shown in their
arrangement and adaptation, and forms which show invention and knowledge
in their design. Your woman who dresses in white, and your man who wears
plain black, are safe from impeachment of their taste, just as people
who say nothing are secure against an exhibition of folly or ignorance.
They are the mutes of costume, and contribute nothing to the chromatic
harmony of the social circle. They succeed in nothing but the avoidance
of positive offence.

_Miss Larches_. Pray, then, Mr. Grey, what--shall--we--do? You have
condemned enough, and told us what is wrong; can't you find in all this
collection a single costume that is positively beautiful? and can't you
tell us what is right, as well as what is wrong?

_Grey_. Both,--and will. The first, at once; the last, if you continue
to desire it. Here are two costumes, quite unlike in composition and
effect, and yet both beautiful;--the first, the fashions of 1811 and
1812 (for the variations, during that time, were so trifling, and in
such unessential particulars, that the costume had but one character, as
you will see by comparing the twenty-four plates for those years); the
second, that worn by this peasant-girl of Normandy. Look first at the
fashion-plates, and see the adaptation of that beautiful gown to all the
purposes for which a gown is intended. How completely it clothes the
entire figure, and with what ease and comfort to the wearer! There is
not a line about it which indicates compression, or one expressive of
that looseness and languishing abandonment that we remarked just now
in the costume of _La belle Hamilton_. The entire person is concealed,
except the tip of one foot, the hands, the head and throat, and just
enough of the bust to confess the existence of its feminine charms,
without exposing them; both limbs and trunk are amply draped; and yet
how plainly it can be seen that there is a well-developed, untortured
woman underneath those tissues! The waist, girdled in at the proper
place, neither just beneath the breasts, as it was a few years before
and after, nor just above the hips, as it has been for many years past,
and as it was three hundred years ago, is of its natural size:--compare
it with the Venus, and then look at those cruel cones, thrust, point
downward, into mounds of silk and velvet, to which women adapted
themselves about 1575, 1750, and 1830, and thence, with little
mitigation, to the present day. How expressive the lines of one figure
are of health, and grace, and bounteous fulness of life! and how poor,
and sickly, and mean, and man-made the other creatures seem! See, too,
in the former, that all the wearer's limbs are as free as air; she can
even clasp her hands, with arms at full-length, above her head. Queen
Bess, yonder, could do many things, but she could not do that; neither
could your great-great-grandmothers, ladies, if they were people of the
least pretensions to fashion, nor your mothers. Can you?

[_Mrs. Grey, presuming upon her demi-toilette, with a look of arch
defiance, lifts her hands quickly up above her head; but before they
have approached each other, there is a sharp sound, as of rending and
snapping; and, with a sudden flush and a little scream, she subsides
into her crinoline_.]

_Miss Larches_. Why, you foolish creature! you might have known you
couldn't.

_Mr. Key_. A most ignominious failure! Mr. Grey, you had better announce
a course of lectures on costume, with illustrations from the life. Your
subjects will cost you nothing.

_Grey_. Except for silk- and mantua-making. I have no doubt that I could
make such a course useful, and Mrs. Grey has shown that she could make
it amusing. But we can get on very well as we are. Observe this figure
again. Its chief beauty is, that the gown has, or seems to have, _no
form of its own_; it adapts itself to the person, and, while that is
entirely concealed, falls round it in lines of exquisite grace and
softness, upon which the eye rests with untiring pleasure, and which,
upon every movement of the wearer, must change only for others also
beautiful. Notice also, that, although the gown forms an ample drapery,
it yet follows the contour of the figure sufficiently to taper
gracefully to the feet at the front, where it touches the floor lightly,
and presents, as it should, the narrowest diameter of the whole
figure,--not, contrary to Nature, (I beg pardon of your _modistes_,
ladies,) the widest.

_Tomes_. You needn't apologize so ceremoniously to the ladies; for
you've involved yourself in a flagrant contradiction. You said that
these two costumes were equally beautiful; and here's the lady of 1812
with her dress all clinging in little wrinkles round her feet, while the
peasant-girl's frock is wider at the bottom than it is anywhere else.

_Grey_. A most profound and logical objection, 0 Daniel! which in due
time shall be considered. But I am not now to be diverted from two other
very important elements of the beauty of these costumes of 1811 and
1812. They are in one or two, or, at most, three colors,--the tissues of
the gowns, the outer garments, (when they are worn,) and the bonnets or
head-dresses being of one unbroken tint; and they are almost entirely
free from trimming, which appears only upon the principal seams and the
edges of the garments, and then in very moderate quantity, though of
rich quality.

_Miss Larches_. Why, so it is! I should not have noticed that.

_Grey_. You did not notice the lack of it, because it is not required to
make the dress complete or give it character. It is only the presence
of trimming that attracts attention; its absence is never felt in
a well-designed costume.--Now turn to my pretty peasant-girl, who,
although she is not in full holiday-costume, is unmistakably "dressed,"
as ladies call it; for we see that she is going to some slight
merry-making, as she carries in her hands the shoes which are to cover
those stockingless feet. She, too, is entirely at her ease and
unconscious of her costume, except for a shy suspicion that it becomes
her, and she, it. Her waist is of its natural size and in its proper
place. Her shoulders are covered, and her arms have free play; and
although her bodice is cut rather low, the rising chemise and the
falling kerchief redeem it from all objection on that score.

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