This, then, is, or shortly will be, in a tasteless and exaggerated form, the style of dress among those "ladies of distinction" whose co-operation a "Clergyman's Wife" fondly hopes to enlist in her scheme for purging the kitchen of its "disgraceful" finery. It is just possible that she has not heard of these things. Perhaps in the retirement of the parsonage, with her eyes intently fixed on the moral havoc which dress is causing among "the lower orders of females," she has assumed that the dress of the higher orders of females is irreproachably modest and correct. If so, we are sorry to have to dispel an illusion which would go far to justify the self-complacent tone of her lecture. But unless she is blissfully ignorant of contemporary fashions in any sphere more elevated than the kitchen, we are struck with astonishment at the hardihood of an appeal at the present moment to ladies of fashion.
Is a being whose avowed object is to imitate as exactly as possible the cosmetic tricks of the demi-monde likely to prove an influential ally in a crusade against cheap finery? Is a mistress whose head-gear resembles the art-trophy of an eccentric hair-dresser, and whose clothing is described as nothing to speak of "until you get very nearly down to the waist," the person to be especially selected to preach propriety of dress to her maid? Or is it that a "Clergyman's Wife" objects to overdress only, and not to underdress; and that, while she would repress with severity any attempt on the part of "females of the lower order" to adorn their persons, she looks with a tolerant eye, among "ladies of position and fortune," upon the nude? We are curious to know at what point in the social scale she would draw the line above which an unblushing exhibition of the female torso is decent, and below which earrings and a parasol are immoral.
As a matter of fact, so far from discouraging the passion for dress among their female dependents, ladies of position and fortune are apt to insist on their dressing smartly. They like to see some of their own lustre reflected on their attendants. A dowdy in sad-colored print or linsey is by no means to their taste. This has been well pointed out in a letter in which a "Maid-servant" replied, through the Pall Mall Gazette, to the project of reform proposed by a "Clergyman's Wife." Looking at the question from her own point of view, she described in plain words how, when she first went into service, she had wished to dress simply, but was quickly made to understand that she must either spend more of her wages on dress, or seek another situation. We believe that her experience would be endorsed by the great majority of her class. If a "Clergyman's Wife" would take the pains to inquire into the facts of the case, she would not be long in ascertaining from what quarter the signal for unbecoming finery among "females of the lower orders" really comes.
The plain truth of the matter is, that a reform in the dress of "lower class females," and maid-servants in particular, can only be brought about in one way. The reaction in favor of a neat and simple style must come from above, and not from below; in the way of example, not of precept. When "ladies of position and fortune" cease to lavish their thousands on millinery, their copyists in the nursery and kitchen will cease to spend their wages on a similar object. When every one above the rank of a governess dresses in a manner suitable to her station, complaints will be no longer heard about "unbecoming" finery below stairs. The chief incentive to showy dress among the "lower orders of females" is unquestionably a desire to ape the extravagance of their betters. Remove that incentive, and the evil which a "Clergyman's Wife" so forcibly deplores will soon cure itself.
We hope that she may be induced to turn her reforming zeal into another direction. Instead of indulging in childish projects for putting the Sunday-school, and the church singers, and maid-servants, and the lower orders of females generally into uniforms, let her attack the mischief at its root, and persuade the fine ladies of the earth to curtail their monstrous prodigality and immodest vagaries in dress. Let her add her warning voice to that of the Head of Latin Christianity, who has recently denounced this scandal of the age with the same perennial vigor that characterizes his anathemas on the Subalpine Government.
ÆSTHETIC WOMAN.
It is the peculiar triumph of woman in this nineteenth century that she has made the conquest of Art. Our grandmothers lived in the kitchen, and debased their finer faculties to the creation of puddings and pies. They spun, they knitted, they mended, they darned, they kept the accounts of the household, and scolded the maids. From this underground existence of barbaric ages woman has at last come forth into the full sunshine of artistic day; she has mounted from the kitchen to the studio, the sketching-desk has superseded the pudding-board, sonatas have banished the knitting-needle, poetry has exterminated weekly accounts. Woman, in a word, has realized her mission; it is her characteristic, she tells us through a chorus of musical voices, to represent the artistic element of the world, to be pre-eminently the æsthetic creature.
Nature educates her, as Wordsworth sang long ago, into a being of her own, sensitive above all to beauty of thought and color, and sound and form. Delicate perceptions of evanescent shades and tones, lost to the coarser eye and ear of man, exquisite refinements of spiritual appreciation, subtle powers of detecting latent harmonics between the outer and the inner world of nature and the soul, blend themselves like the colors of the prism in the pure white light of woman's organization. And so the host of Woman, as it marches to the conquest of this world, flaunts over its legions the banner of art.
