I cry in sore distress, Alack!
Later on in the same poem his clothes philosophy is summed up in six lines:—
Although men's clothes are always vile—
The coat, the trousers and the "tile"—
Some sense still lingers in each style.
But women's garments should be fair,
All graceful, gay, and debonair,
And if they lack good sense, why care?
Slaves of Fashion
In the last three lines we find the whole essence and spirit of Du Maurier's method. He proved to demonstration again and again that women could dress in the fashion of the moment and be delightful to look at, so long as they were the judicious interpreters and not the Slaves of Mode. If he saw no beauty in the designs of the "Rationalists," and habitually ridiculed the sprawling attitudes, the shapeless garments, and unwholesome languor of the female "æsthetes," he did not spare the monstrosities and barbarities of the ultra-fashionables. The age of lateral expansion had given place to a craze for compression, to the "eel-skin" model. Skirts were so tight in 1875 that Du Maurier suggests that upholsterers should devise a special sort of chair suited to the peculiar exigencies of ladies who can neither stoop nor sit down. Three years later a lady and a hussar officer at a dance are depicted as both equally unable to depart from a rigidly perpendicular attitude. Tight lacing was again in fashion but met with no approval from Punch. In 1877 Du Maurier depicts a lady resolutely determined to lace down to the waist measurement of a rival, and Punch quotes with approval Miss Frances P. Cobbe's indictment of the causes which led to the "Little Health of Women." Besides tight lacing the list includes the neglect of exercise, the discouragement of appetite, sentimental brooding over disappointments, the lack of healthy occupation for mind and body, false hair, bonnets that don't protect the head, heavy dragging skirts, high heels and "pull-backs"—a tolerably comprehensive catalogue. Punch renews his attack on tightly-laced pinched-in figures in his Horatian ode to "A Modern Pyrrha" in 1880, and in 1889 Jones, after offering the wasp-waisted Miss Vane tea and strawberries at a garden party, remarks to himself: "By Jove! she takes 'em—she's going to swallow 'em! But where she'll put 'em—goodness knows!"