From “Conversations on the Poets.”
(“John” speaks)
FASHION, being the art of those who must purchase notice at some cheaper rate than that of being beautiful, loves to do rash and extravagant things. She must be forever new, or she becomes insipid. If to-day she have been courteous, she will be rude to-morrow; if to-day thinks her over-refined, tomorrow will wonder at seeing her relapsed into a semisavage state. A few years ago, certain elaborate and amorphous structures might be seen moving about the streets, in the whole of which the only symptom of animated nature to be discerned was in the movable feet and ankles which conveyed them along. Now, even that sign of vitality has vanished; the amorphous structures move about as usual, but their motive principle is as mysterious as that of Maëlzel’s chess player. My own theory is that a dwarf is concealed somewhere within. They may be engines employed for economical purposes by the civic authorities, as their use has been conjectured by an ingenious foreigner, who observed our manners attentively, to be the collection of those particles of mud and dust which are fine enough to elude the birchen brooms of the police, whose duty it is to cleanse the streets. There is more plausibility in this theory, as they are actually provided with a cloth train or skirt of various colors, which seems very well adapted to this end. A city poet, remarkable for the boldness of his metaphorical imagery, has given them the name of “women,” though from so nice an analogy as hitherto to have eluded my keenest researches.
It must have been the same who gave the title of “full dress” to the half dress worn now by females of the better sort at parties, the sole object of which seems to be to prove the wearer’s claim to rank with the genus mammiferæ. One-half of the human race, I see, is resolved to get rid of the most apparent token of our great ancestors’ fall, and is rapidly receding to a paradisaical simplicity of vesture. Already have the shoulders emerged from their superstitious enthrallment, and their bold example will no doubt be rapidly followed by equally spirited demonstrations from the rest of the body impolitic. For the sake of consistency we must suppose that train oil will soon elbow the ices from the supper table. But a truce to this cynical vein. It is, nevertheless, mournful, that women, who stint not in large assemblies to show that, to the eyes of strangers which the holy privacy of home is not deemed pure enough to look upon, would yet grow crimson with modest horror, through the whole vast extent of their uncovered superficies, if one but dared to call by its dear English name that which, in the loved one, is the type of all maidenhood and sweetest retirement,—in the wife, of all chastity and whitest thoughts,—and in the mother, of all that is most tender and bounteous. On such a bosom, methinks, a rose would wither, and the snowy petals of a lily drop away in silent, sorrowful reproof. We have grown too polite for what is holiest, noblest, and kindest in the social relations of life; but, alas! to blush, to conceal, to lie, to envy, to sneer, to be illiberal,—these trench not on the bounds of any modesty, human or divine. Yes, our English, which for centuries has been the mother tongue of honest frankness, and the chosen phrase of freedom, is become so slavish and emasculate, that its glorious Bacons, Taylors, and Miltons would find their outspoken and erect natures inapt to walk in its fetters, golden, indeed, and of cunningest Paris workmanship, but whose galling the soul is not nice enough to discern from that of baser metal. The wild singing brook has been civilized; the graceful rudeness of its banks has been pared away to give place to smooth-clipped turf; the bright pebbles, which would not let it pass without the tribute of some new music, have been raked out; and it has become a straight, sluggish canal.
