DRESS AND FASHION

Jan. 2, 19—.

My dear Alexa,—

Don’t be alarmed at getting a letter from me not in reply to one of yours. Nothing has happened. “All is silver grey,” as Andrea del Sarto says. I won’t add “placid and perfect with my art” as he does, because it is cheek to call one’s work perfect even when it is, but, at any rate, both I and my art are placid enough.

No, nothing has happened. That is the worst of it. When one reaches my age nothing ever does happen unless one makes it happen. When one is young adventures, excitements, thrills, come suddenly out of the void, thus adding to the ordinary joy of them the throb of the unexpected. But when one is older one has to fare forth out into the void and seek diligently adventures, excitements, thrills; and if one has one’s living to earn, and a whole lot of little things to seeafter, why then one hasn’t much time for excursions into the void.

This is a purely selfish letter. It is written to relieve my mind; by way of getting down in black and white some thoughts that have been twisting and twirling about like maggots in my brain all the afternoon. In that respect, at least, I am an artist, Alexa, and, forgive me, my daughter, in that same respect, you are not.

The artistic temperament is not, as fools of novelists appear to think, an itching to be singular or noticeable in any way, an inclination to wear ridiculous neck-ties, to omit to wash behind the ears, or to live with people to whom one is not married; and to quarrel with them. It is the desire, the invincible desire, to externalise and express in paint or pencil, in clay or marble, in musical sounds or in written words, one’s emotions, one’s thoughts, one’s aspirations, one’s dreams.

You, for instance, draw. For a girl of your years and training you draw rather well. But when you see a thing that appeals to you—a face, a landscape, a little bit of an interior, you do not ache and ache until you have got it down in pencil upon paper. You are quitecontent to keep it within you. I, when I get ever such a stupid idea in my head, am miserable until I see it before me in words, in words arranged as well as I know how to arrange them. I would rather, far rather, keep an aching tooth in my jaw than an aching idea in my head. And so, though my neck-ties are ever the correctest of their kind that Bond Street knows, and though I never do any of those other things peculiar to the artistic temperament of rubbishy fiction, I do claim to belong to the great company of artists.

By the way, I have often wondered what the author of theTe Deumwas about not to have added another line to it:—

“The great Brotherhood of Artists, throughout all the world: Praise Thee.”

Every artist, in every bit of honest work he does, though he may not mean it or know it, praises God. How supremely well Kipling expressed the gist of our creed when he wrote in that exquisiteEnvoito “Life’s Handicap”; you remember it:—

“One instant’s toil to Thee deniedStands all Eternity’s offence.”

“One instant’s toil to Thee denied

Stands all Eternity’s offence.”

And now to come down from the heightsto the valley—I never could breathe freely on mountain tops, Alexa; that’s why I hate Switzerland so cordially. It is not the touring Anglican clergy and their impossible wives I object to so much; it is those appalling Alps. But, as I was going to say, I write this letter because I spent a whole half-hour this morning reading a woman’s paper. At least, I’m not sure it called itself a woman’s paper, it might have been a woman’s page in an ordinary paper. I don’t know where the thing has got to now, so I can’t refer to it. I found it on the hall table when I came down to breakfast.

Doesn’t it make you feel a good deal ashamed of your sex and of yourself, as one of it, when you come across a woman’s page in a newspaper? Doesn’t it make you feel pretty much as you would feel if you saw someone of your own standing behaving rudely at dinner? or being impolite to a child? Don’t you ask yourself, with something as near to a swear word as you can get, “Whom on earth is all the rest of the paper for then? Are women so small, so narrow, such children, such idiots as to have no interest in politics, in art, in science, in literature; in all the extraordinary doings of human beings allover the world, such as the rest of the paper discusses and records?”

“The Women’s Corner!” Think of it, Alexa, child of my heart! The corner into which the poor stunted, shrivelled, petty-minded creature must betake herself to read about dress. Pah!

Here your feminine intuition will tell you that I am in rather a bad temper. There, there, I don’t mean to sneer at feminine intuition. Heaven knows I have both profited and suffered from it enough, and more than enough in my time, and when the sum comes to be cast up it will be found, I daresay, that I have profited as much as I have suffered.

But I am in rather a bad temper with that woman’s paper, not because it was all about dress, but because it was all wrong about dress. I don’t mean wrong in the absurd details—I know nothing of them—but wrong in the essence, wrong in the soul of it.

Here anyone but you would say “What in the world does the man mean by talking about soul in an article on dress?” You won’t say it because you know—we have agreed about it often—that an article onanything whatever that has no soul in it, is not an article at all; it is just a bladder of rattling peas.

It is not because I despise or even think lightly of dress, that I am so unwontedly annoyed with the person who wrote all this slops. On the contrary, it is because I am fulfilled with the idea of the importance of dress and of the part it plays in the amenities and pleasures of life. You have often told me after we have been out together, or people have been here, and I have been admiring this lady or that, that I did not even know what she had on. Precisely. That was because she was well-dressed. Had she been badly dressed I should have known fast enough. The woman is well-dressed of whose costume you remember only theensemble, what we artists call the total impression—an impression of colour and contour. Or sometimes of nothing even so definite as that, of fluffiness merely.

Now the writer of all this abominable fustian knew nothing of that, that elementary philosophy of dress. He, she, it—I don’t know what the sex of the creature was—thought all of the costume and nothing of thewoman. With him, her, it, the woman was a thing to be worn with a costume, not the costume a thing for a woman to wear. You do see the tremendous difference, don’t you? But, of course, you do.

Really—but there, one must be tolerant. These people are flatly ignorant, and, moreover, they are the hirelings of others whose business it is to make money out of dress. That, nowadays, at anyrate, is the meaning of fashion in the restricted sense of the word. Fashion is not a mode of being beautiful or even of changing from one variety of beauty to another, or of changing to meet changing circumstances. It is a means of putting money into the pockets of dressmakers and manufacturers. These people are getting stronger and stronger, more and more arrogant.

Take a case in point. Once upon a time, not so long ago, every woman in our class had what was called “a set” of furs. It was horribly expensive to begin with, but it was taken care of and it lasted, oh, I don’t know how long. Of course, that didn’t suit the furriers and fur sellers—the fierce competition of commerce and all the silly rest of it—andso, though the wearing of furs is still the comfortable fashion, each season sees a change in the smaller fashion of the furs, the cut of them, the kind, and so on, and the women even in our class, who don’t adopt the latest thing, feel hopelessly uncomfortable and out of it. They either go cold, or wear cat-skin or rabbit-skin faked to look like something expensive, or spend money that they haven’t got.

With that rabbit-skin and cat-skin I have struck the note of fashion as it is in the suburbs, the provinces, and everywhere else except among the rich and idle people to whom money does not matter, the people who do nothing to make money, and so have most of it to spend. The designers for the big dressmakers design something that is perhaps, though by no means certainly, beautiful enough. If perchance it be beautiful, its beauty lives in the artistry and science of its fashioning, and the material of which it is made. Now the people at the top can purchase, without feeling it, the artistry, the science, the rare and costly material. But the others, you see, can’t.

Nevertheless, pricked and spurred by thelow-down fashion journalists, they feel that life is a desert without the new thing in some shape or another. So they get it inartistically designed, unscientifically cut, and of some cheaper, commoner stuff. Result, they don’t look a bit like Duchesses after all, but only like what they are, silly and snobby women. These are hard words, Alexa, but I am cross to-day.

Fashion in its smaller sense, “the fashion” as it is forced upon women by the dressmakers and designers, as a card is forced by a sharper on a flat, is for nine people out of ten an accursed thing, a monstrous thing. It assumes that all women will look well dressed in the same way. Now, if anything is certain, it is that of any hundred women selected haphazard, not more than ten can dress in the same way and look anything but ridiculous. The human body is, as you learnt when you used to draw it at the Slade and at Colorossi’s, a subtle thing, and demands the subtlest treatment. There are idiosyncrasies of body as there are of mind. I don’t mean merely that some women are tall, some short, some thick, and others thin, some curvy and others angular. That has to be remembered, too,but I mean something more elusive than that.

Let us take a concrete case. You are not very different in height or form from your friend, Berta Roselli. You are not a bit prettier. A person just looking casually at you two—a second-rate milliner sort of person—would say that the same sort of costume would suit you both equally well. Yet how delightful you used to look in those frocks which you call, I think, “Princess” frocks, and how completely they took away the delightfulness from Berta. I told her so once in so many words when we were walking round the garden together, and she had the good sense never to wear them again. If you ask me why they enhanced your charm, and destroyed Berta’s, I can’t tell you. Perhaps there is no “why.”

Then again, colour. It drives the artistic soul furious to be told that “heliotrope is to be fashionable in the approaching season,” because one knows at once what one is in for. Think of heliotrope or of any other colour or tint in the universe worn beside every sort of complexion, with every sort of shade of hair! It makes one’s nerves stand on endlike quills. There again, the rich women score because they can, and do, change their complexions and their hair to “match,” as this putrid paper calls it, the fashionable colour. The poorer women try to do the same thing, and look—well. Or don’t even try, and then!—

This is merely a grumbling letter, not a didactic essay, and so I will offer no advice in it. To offer advice one should be in a judicial mood, serene, detached! but I may just say this. The one fatal thing in dress is to wear anything because you happened to have admired it on someone else, and for that reason only. The one triumphant thing in the matter of dress is to remember that you are yourself and not that other person. In all other matters women seem to remember it easily enough. In the matter of dress only do they lose their sense of identity.

Now, Alexa, turn on me, do, andriposteby telling me that men are every bit as bad; that they too are the slaves of fashion. Say things about my waistcoats if you like; I don’t care, for I have a crushing retort up my sleeve. Think of the things that tailor people have tried to force upon us and how miserably theyhave failed; how they have tried to make us go back to peg-tops, to wear coloured coats and knee-breeches, as evening dress. Think of these things and withhold the gibe. Or, don’t. I do not mind. Sedate in my sense of my sex’s immeasurable superiority,

I remain,

Your angry and æsthetic

Father.

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