“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 one man 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-stockings and political sans-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 right to 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.