Mrs. Grey. What can you mean? Our fashion like that frightful rig? Why, see this portrait of Queen Elizabeth in full dress! What with stomacher and pointed waist and fardingale, and sticking in here and sticking out there, and ruffs and cuffs and ouches and jewels and puckers, she looks like a hideous flying insect with expanded wings, seen through a microscope,—not at all like a woman.
Grey. And her costume is rivalled, if not outdone, by that of her critic, in the very peculiarity by which she is made to look most unlike a woman;—the straight line of the waist and the swelling curve below it, which meet in such a sharp, unmitigated angle. Look at the Venus yonder,—she is naked to the hips,—and see how utterly these lines misrepresent those of Nature. You will find no instance of such a contour as is formed by the meeting of these lines among all living creatures, except, perhaps, when a turtle thrusts his head and his tail out of his shell.
Miss Larches. But there's a vase with just such an outline, that I have heard you admire a hundred times.
Grey. True, Miss Larches; but a woman is not a vase;—more beautiful even than this, certainly more precious, perhaps almost as fragile, but still not a vase; and she shows as little taste in making herself look like a vase as some potters do in making vases that look like women.
Mr. Key. But I thought it was decided that the female figure below the shoulders should be left to the imagination. Does Mr. Grey propose to substitute the charming reality of undisguised Nature?
Grey. True, we do not attempt to define the female figure below the waist, at least; but although we may safely veil or even conceal Nature, we cannot misrepresent or outrage her, except at the cost of utter loss of beauty. The lines of drapery, or of any article of dress, must conform to those of that part of the figure which it conceals, or the effect will be deforming, monstrous.
Mr. Key. Does Mr. Grey mean, to say that ladies nowadays' look monstrous and deformed?
Grey. To a certain extent they do. But such is the influence of habit upon the eye, that we fully apprehend the effect of such incongruity as that of which I spoke only in the costumes of past generations, or when there is a very violent, instead of a gradual change in the fashion of our own day. Look at these full-length portraits of Catherine de Médicis and the Princess Marguerite, daughter of Francis the First.
The Ladies. What frights!
Mrs. Grey. No, not both; Marguerite's dress is pretty, in spite of those horrid sleeves sticking up so above her shoulders.
Grey. You are right. Those sleeves, rising above the shoulders—as high as the ear in Catherine's costume, you will observe—are unsightly enough to nullify whatever beauty the costume might have in other points; though in her case they only complete the expression of the costume, which is a grim, unnatural stiffness. And the reason of the unsightliness of these sleeves is, that the outline which they present is directly opposed to that of Nature. No human shoulders bulge upward into great hemispherical excrescences nine inches high; and the peculiar sexual characteristic of this part of woman's figure is the gentle downward curve by which the lines of the shoulder pass into those of the arm. Our memory that such is the natural configuration of these parts enters, consciously or unconsciously, into our judgment of this costume, in which we see that Nature is deliberately departed from; and our condemnation of it in this particular respect is strengthened by the perception, at a glance, that great pains have been taken to make its outlines discordant with those of the part which they conceal. You qualified your censure of Marguerite's dress partly because, in her case, the slope of the shoulder is preserved until the very junction of the arm with the bust, and partly because her bust and waist are defined by her gown with a tolerably near approach to Nature, instead of being entirely concealed, as in the case of her sister-in-law, by stiff lines sloping outward on all sides to the ground, making the remorseless Queen look like an enormous extinguisher with a woman's head set on it. And these advantages of form in the Princess's costume are enhanced by its presentation of a fine contrast of rich color in unbroken masses, instead of the Queen's black velvet and white satin elaborately disfigured with embroidery, ermine, lace, and jewels. You were prompt in your condemnation of the fashion to which your eye had not been accustomed: now turn to the costume that you wear, and which you are in a manner compelled to wear; for I am not so visionary as to expect a woman, or even a man under sixty, to fly directly in the face of fashion, although her extravagant caprices may be gracefully disregarded by both sexes and all ages. Here are two fashion-plates of the last month,—1 not magazine caricatures, mind you, or anything like it,—but from the first modistes in Paris. Look at that shawled lady, with her back toward us. If you did not know that that is a shawl, and that the thing which surmounts it is a bonnet, you would not suspect the figure to be human. See; there is a slightly undulating slope at an angle of about sixty-five degrees from the crown of the head to the lowest hem of the skirt, so that the outline is that of a pyramid slightly rounded at the apex, and nearly as broad across the base as it is high. What is there of woman in such a figure? And this evening-dress; it suggests the enchantments in the stories of the Dark Ages, where knights encounter women who are women to the breasts and monsters below. From the head to as far as halfway down the waist, this figure is natural.
Mr. Key. Under the circumstances it could hardly be otherwise. Au naturel, I should call it, except for the spice of a few flowers and a little lace.
Grey. But from that point it begins to lose its semblance to a woman's shape, (as you will see by raising your eyes again to the Venus,) and after running two or three inches decidedly inward in a straight line, where it should turn outward with a gentle curve, its outlines break into a sharp angle, and it expands, with a sudden hyperbolical curve, into a monstrous and nameless figure that is not only unlike Nature, but has no relations whatever with Nature. The eye needs no cultivation, the brain no instruction, to perceive that such an outline cannot be produced by drapery upon a woman's form. It is clear, at a glance, that there is an artificial structure underneath that swelling skirt; that a scaffold, a framework, has been erected to support that dome of silk; and that the wearer is merely an automatic machine by which it is made to perambulate. A woman in this rig hangs in her skirts like a clapper in a bell; and I never meet one without being tempted to take her by the neck and ring her.
Mr. Key. Those belles like ringing well enough, but not exactly of that kind.
Grey. The costume is also faulty in two other most important respects: it is without pure, decided color of any tint, but is broken into patches and blotches of various mongrel hues,–
Mrs. Grey. Hear the man! that exquisite brocade!
Grey.–and whatever effect it might otherwise have had, of form or color, would be entirely frittered away by the multitudinous and multiform trimmings with which it is bedizened; and it is without a girdle of any kind.
Mrs. Grey. Oh, sweet Simplicity, hear and reward thy priest and prophet! What would your Highness have the woman wear?—a white muslin gown, with a blue sash, and a rose in her hair? That style went out on the day that Mesdames Shem, Ham, and Japhet left the ark.
Grey. And well it might,—for evening-dress, at least No,—my taste, or, if you will permit me to say it, good taste, craves rich colors, and ample, flowing lines,—colors which require taste to be shown in their arrangement and adaptation, and forms which show invention and knowledge in their design. Your woman who dresses in white, and your man who wears plain black, are safe from impeachment of their taste, just as people who say nothing are secure against an exhibition of folly or ignorance. They are the mutes of costume, and contribute nothing to the chromatic harmony of the social circle. They succeed in nothing but the avoidance of positive offence.
Miss Larches. Pray, then, Mr. Grey, what—shall—we—do? You have condemned enough, and told us what is wrong; can't you find in all this collection a single costume that is positively beautiful? and can't you tell us what is right, as well as what is wrong?
Grey. Both,—and will.