The Champagne Standard

by Mrs. John Lane

If ever a young person looks as if she had had a chequered past, it is this young person, so radiant, so self-satisfied, and so prosperous. She is a painful satire on virtue in a mackintosh with a dripping umbrella, who has no earthly hope of diamonds, no matter how she may long for them, and who stares drearily at the lovely being until she is bounced out upon terra firma, and then pushed into the rain by other virtues with umbrellas and very sharp elbows. The charming woman further declared that virtue should be offered a more substantial reward than imitation pearls these days when the shoemakers, dressmakers and dramatists form a "combine" for the exclusive glorification of the lady in question.

But it is not only the eloquence of slippers, but the eloquence of petticoats! Are not our shop windows the Frenchiest of French novels, divided not into chapters, but into petticoats? Do they not form flamboyant rainbows behind those glittering plate-glass fronts? That there is no one inside of them takes nothing away from their charm. To see them out-spread against a window—a bewildering chaos of colours, frilly, fluffy and fantastic, is the outward and visible sign of an inarticulate poet who lives sonnets in silk without putting them on paper. How much more satisfactory to live poems than merely to write them!

So every shop window proclaims that this is the age of petticoats. Who buys them, who wears them? Why are they never seen again? Yet well may we ask what sylph can worthily wear those coquettish fantasies? It must be conceded, though it will hurt out national pride, that only the women of one nation have that sovereign right.

It is the Frenchwoman alone who can lift her skirts with that supreme elegance which turns even the worst mud puddle into an instrument for the display of her exquisite grace. She is the artist of the petticoat—and if she lifts her skirts rather high, it is because she does not feel it her duty to help the County Council to sweep the streets with the tail of a draggled gown.

Now when an English woman lifts her skirt, she does it as one on business bent; coquetry is not in it. She makes a frantic clutch at the back of her skirt, grabs a solid handful, and drags it uncompromisingly forward until she outlines herself with simple, cruel distinctness. Her silhouette is a curious study in angles.

Though she has no coquetry about her feet or her petticoats, the fatality of fate ordains that she should always wear high-heeled slippers and cobweb stockings in that downpour which Divine Providence reserves exclusively for the English nation. This opportunity she also takes to wear those lace petticoats which, having survived the terrors of the British laundry, succumb to British mud. Heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom, has denied to the Anglo-Saxons and Teutons that subtle turn of the wrist which makes the lifting of a skirt a fine art. Even the American woman, conqueror though she be of dukes and lesser things, has never yet conquered that Latin grace.

Now who buys those silken rainbows in the shops? Get the sphinx to answer that riddle if you can. Do they vanish into space, or are they bought by those radiant beings who flit about in electric landaulettes, and whom we never meet, because we flit about in 'buses?

If the rainbow ever touches earth it is on exceptional occasions which only prove the rule. And it is always when virtue, always elderly and stout, with big, flat feet in cloth boots, lifts her skirt and exhibits to the eye of the public a yellow or scarlet silk confection which hangs limp and dejected. Its melancholy flop and want of rustle plainly show its consciousness of being misunderstood and in a false position. The irreproachable petticoat, sacred to the eminently respectable, is usually black and of a material of the nature of horsehair. No shop boasts of it, and it is always pulled out of an ignoble pile when required, and is quite Spartan in its unadorned simplicity.

That virtue is best adorned by itself we concede; still virtue is a little handicapped. I put it to the dramatists: Why not give her better clothes and let her for once triumph in the second act? The dramatists, inspired photographers of manners though they are, have a great deal to answer for! At best they give her a white dress, a blue sash, ankle-ties and no conversation. One asks how is she to compete with a stately creature with dramatic red hair and that sinuous and glittering costume fraught with tragic situations? What a fatal contrast when studied by the youth of our land who have been taught to regard the stage as an educator!

The stage is conceded to be a great educational and moral force, and yet I beg of those excellent gentlemen who provide the lessons that the stage so eloquently recites not to lavish on the lady in question that bewildering wardrobe which must give her a sense of peace and calm security that even a good conscience cannot bestow. For once put her into a bargain coat and skirt left over from a sale at Tooting, adorn her with a tam o'shanter, the kind with a quill that sticks out in front, and put on her feet the boots of a perfect propriety, always short and broad, then see if the pit will adore her!