XIThe Mystery of Dress
PROFESSORMaturinwas leaning sidewise on his cane, gazing at the river. I stood by his side several moments before he came out of his reverie, greeted me warmly, and proposed a walk along the Drive.
“I was thinking,” said he, “of Fitzgerald’s falling overboard and coming up serenely, still wearing his top hat. This morning, while reading Scarron’s sonnet on the decay of the pyramids and his black doublet, I noticed that I too needed a new coat. Later, I lunched with one colleague who is as dressy as Disraeli, and another who goes almost as much out at elbows as Napoleon when he entered Moscow. I have just left a third, who is devoted to Lowell’s favorite combination of short coat and top hat. That brought me, by way of Old Fitz, to a general contemplation of the custom of wearing clothes. Hast any such philosophy in thee, shepherd?”
“But little, I fear,” replied I, “unless Carlyle’s will do.”
“Scarcely, if you mean ‘Sartor Resartus,’” was his answer. “Do you believe that man, by naturea naked animal, is demoralized by clothes, and that a return to nudity would dissolve society? On the contrary, when Humphrey Howarth, the surgeon, went to a duel naked for fear of the infection of cloth in a gunshot wound, his antagonist came to his senses and withdrew his challenge. Of course, I agree that whatever represents spirit is a kind of clothing, and that wisdom looks through vestures to realities. But clothes in ‘Sartor’ are merely the beginning of a philosophy of things in general. Carlyle’s irritation when Browning called on him in a green riding-coat, and his own refusal to carry an umbrella are more to my point. It is obviously appropriate that George Borrow should always have carried an umbrella, I understand how Goethe could ignore waistcoats and Coleridge forget his shirt, but why did Dickens dress like a dandy and Swinburne like a farmer? What do clothes mean?”
“They sometimes represent the state of their owners’ finances,” said I. “Lack of suitable clothing made Poe decline dinners and Johnson dine behind the screen—if he really did.”
“And Lovelace vary between cloth of gold and rags,” continued Professor Maturin meditatively, “much as Rembrandt varies his dress in his portraits of himself. But that was when oneman would wear the worth of a thousand oaks and a hundred oxen, when mantles were conferred by royal patent, and orders grew rich out of hat monopolies. To-day, however, in spite of adulterations that I am told call for a pure textile law, few of us are in need either of Pepys’ prayers to be able to pay his tailor, or of Lord Westminster’s thrifty making over his servants’ liveries for himself.
“Habit influences us more than cost, but what influences habit? Why did Milton always wear black, Pope gray, and Lamb snuff color? Why did distributing his cast clothes ‘disconsolate and intender’ Montaigne? Why did Tennyson send his old clothes to be measured for new ones? Why do I find myself repeating an outfit I once chose because it suggested what naturalists call protective coloration—when an animal, like a squirrel on a tree-trunk, is scarcely distinguishable from its background? Do I make a good principle gloss a dull habit?”
“Such a habit,” I replied, “like George Fox’s suit of leather, does deprive you of the interest that accompanies even unsuccessful effort for variety. The fairer sex is never wearied in its quest of beautiful garb, nor sated with the rapture of attainment.”
“How curiously we have changed all that,” replied Professor Maturin, “in the three centuries since James Howell said that a letter should be attired simply, like a woman; an oration richly, like a man. I would not, like him, have putting on a clean shirt an occasion for special prayer; but perhaps we have gone too far in our neglect of finery. Dr. Holmes’s counsel, ‘always err upon the safe side,’ may be too cautious. Allingham says that Leigh Hunt was old in street costume, but young in his dressing-gown. Perhaps Goldsmith’s satin, or Jefferson’s plush, or Mark Twain’s white flannels would renew my youth.”
“Are you elated by your scarlet gown on Commencement Day?” said I.
“By no means so much as the boys are,” he replied with a chuckle. “But that suggests another aspect of the matter. Outward and visible signs move those who are blind to inward graces. Since Protestantism is retrieving some of its banished ceremonial, it might advance learning to clothe it with more circumstance. Yet, we seem to hesitate at symbolic clothing. Police and military uniforms help law and order, but we tolerate ecclesiastical, judicial, and academic costume only during the performance of specific functions. We are so far from intellectual blue-stockingsand politicalsans-culottes, that we smile at musicians’ hair and painters’ cloaks, and banish yachting and golf clothes from every-day wear.
“Simplicity seems the only unwritten law that has succeeded so many written ones concerning clothes. Tradition itself is weak. We wear the Roman orator’s neck-cloth, the wrist-bands that marked the gentleman’s freedom from manual labor, the nobleman’s black evening clothes, the courtier’s sword-belt and gauntlet buttons, and a sailor king’s long trousers—but all because we wish to, or, at least, do not mind. Names are naught, whether of mackintoshes or cravenettes or bluchers or tam-o’-shanters. We ignore even fashion, with its ever varying promise of equality to the uncomely and its powerful economic urge. We are emancipated by a common sense in clothes that would have jailed a man in Addison’s day.
“We may dress as we like, so long as we are inconspicuous, but we must be that. We will no longer tolerate clothes-advertising like the Admirable Crichton’s. The man who lost his lawsuit for damages because his horse ran away when he saw the first top hat in England, would recover at least costs to-day. Gautier deserved the mobbing his pink doublet cost him. Tennyson was rightto charge a young woman with creaking stays, and to apologize when he found that the sound came from his own braces.”
“What other principles would you adduce?” said I.
“A modicum of care,” he continued, “in agreement with Plato and Ruskin, that ‘clothes carefully cared for and rightly worn, show a balanced mind.’ I would have clothes appropriate, too, to climate, use, and the individuality of the wearer. I was once advised, most profitably, by a friendly portrait painter as to what was appropriate to my figure, features, and coloring. He objected especially to my hats.
“It is curious how difficult hats are,” continued Professor Maturin, after a pause that I forbore to break. “I doubt if any one, except Fortunatus, ever had a perfect one. The Greeks were wise in having little to do with them—suppose all Greek statues had their straw bonnets tied under the chin! Indeed, hats are chiefly developments of the last five centuries, and, it is said, baldness with them. Yet, Synesius wrote ‘In Praise of Baldness;’ Caesar prized the privilege of continually wearing a laurel crown because it hid his, and I do not know why else the academic mortar-board comes down so far behind. I will notwear a ventilating hat like Rossetti’s, although I long for summer and the straws that America has done so much to popularize.
“I am too thin for the comfortable Tennysonian sombrero. I enjoy, as a dressing-gown, a cowled Capuchin robe that I once had made on Lake Orta, because of my theory that the flowering of the monastic mind in the Middle Ages was due to the germinating heat of hoods. But, generally, I would emulate an acquaintance who usually carries his hat in his hand, or another who actually owns none, were that not too conspicuous. Even Leigh Hunt’s charming essay on ‘Hats, Ancient and Modern’ has no help for me—although I believe I might like a cocked hat or a chapeau.
“I can take comfort in a coat,” he continued, “if it is loose; and in overcoats, if they resemble Socrates’ cloak, or the cloak that Petrarch bequeathed to Boccaccio. Indeed, I should welcome a return to shawls. I am uncomfortable in any neckwear but black, or in any but reindeer gray gloves. I should disesteem trousers had I not once inadvertently worn a striped pair with evening clothes—since then I have respected their power. In shoes I emulate Wellington’s care, for, like William Morris, I need rather large ones.And I enjoy canes as much as Wellington did umbrellas.”
“All of which,” said I, as we reached Professor Maturin’s door, “even if unvaried, is sufficiently sober, appropriate, and individual.”
“And simple enough,” concluded he, “for Frederick the Great or Newton. But, most of all, I wish that the Germans would extend their investigations in the hygiene of clothing. If we knew more about that, we might trust its architecture and ornamentation to any discriminating tailor.”