Men have not consulted women. In order to weave complex designs, heap up a medley of arches and oriels, and condemn our wives to carry churches on their backs, men have provided a heavy groundwork of the stoutest wools; the whole being despatched from London and Paris to be servilely woven by the Indians who have unlearned their own arts.
Our intelligent Parisian merchants, who have reluctantly followed in the path traced out for them by the great producers, may very well escape from these rich and heavy styles. Let some one lose patience, and turning his back on the copyists of antique absurdities, go to Nature herself in search of advice,—to the great insect collections and the conservatories of the Jardin des Plantes.
Nature, being feminine, will tell him that if he would fitly decorate his sister in the soft and airy tissue of the ancient cashmere, he must delineate thereupon—not the towers of Notre-Dame,[N] but a hundred charming creatures—that little, but, if you will, very common marvel of the cicindela, in which all styles are combined;—or the purple scarabæus glorified in its lily;—or the emerald chrysomela, which this very morning I found sensually reposing at the bottom of a rose.
[N] Notre-Dame is the metropolitan cathedral of Paris.
Do I mean that you should copy these? Not at all. I should call these living creatures, in their robe of love, from which they derive all their charm, an animated aureola, which cannot be translated. We must be content to love and contemplate them, to draw our inspiration from them, to convert them into ideal forms, and new rainbows of colours, and exquisite posies of blossoms. Thus transformed, they will become, not what they are in Nature, but fantastic and wonderful,—as the child who pants for them sees them in its slumber, or the maiden yearning after a beautiful attire, or as the young pregnant wife when dreaming of them in her hours of longing.
