Fashions in Literature | Page 3

most of them, especially of those that are not familiar to you in your
own decade. They are not only inappropriate and inconvenient to your
eye, but they offend your taste. You cannot believe that they were ever
thought beautiful and becoming. If your memory does not fail you,
however, and you retain a little honesty of mind, you can recall the fact
that a costume which seems to you ridiculous today had your warm
approval ten years ago. You wonder, indeed, how you could ever have
tolerated a costume which has not one graceful line, and has no more
relation to the human figure than Mambrino's helmet had to a crown of
glory. You cannot imagine how you ever approved the vast balloon
skirt that gave your sweetheart the appearance of the great bell of
Moscow, or that you yourself could have been complacent in a coat the
tails of which reached your heels, and the buttons of which, a
rudimentary survival, were between your shoulder-blades--you who are
now devoted to a female figure that resembles an old-fashioned churn
surmounted by an isosceles triangle.
These vagaries of taste, which disfigure or destroy correct proportions
or hide deformities, are nowhere more evident than in the illustrations
of works of fiction. The artist who collaborates with the contemporary
novelist has a hard fate. If he is faithful to the fashions of the day, he
earns the repute of artistic depravity in the eyes of the next generation.
The novel may become a classic, because it represents human nature, or
even the whimsicalities of a period; but the illustrations of the artist
only provoke a smile, because he has represented merely the
unessential and the fleeting. The interest in his work is archaeological,

not artistic. The genius of the great portrait-painter may to some extent
overcome the disadvantages of contemporary costume, but if the
costume of his period is hideous and lacks the essential lines of beauty,
his work is liable to need the apology of quaintness. The Greek artist
and the Mediaeval painter, when the costumes were really picturesque
and made us forget the lack of simplicity in a noble sumptuousness,
had never this posthumous difficulty to contend with.
In the examination of costumes of different races and different ages, we
are also struck by the fact that with primitive or isolated peoples
costumes vary little from age to age, and fashion and the fashions are
unrecognized, and a habit of dress which is dictated by climate, or has
been proved to be comfortable, is adhered to from one generation to
another; while nations that we call highly civilized, meaning commonly
not only Occidental peoples, but peoples called progressive, are subject
to the most frequent and violent changes of fashions, not in generations
only, but in decades and years of a generation, as if the mass had no
mind or taste of its own, but submitted to the irresponsible ukase of
tailors and modistes, who are in alliance with enterprising
manufacturers of novelties. In this higher civilization a costume which
is artistic and becoming has no more chance of permanence than one
which is ugly and inconvenient. It might be inferred that this higher
civilization produces no better taste and discrimination, no more
independent judgment, in dress than it does in literature. The vagaries
in dress of the Western nations for a thousand years past, to go back no
further, are certainly highly amusing, and would be humiliating to
people who regarded taste and art as essentials of civilization. But
when we speak of civilization, we cannot but notice that some of the
great civilizations; the longest permanent and most notable for highest
achievement in learning, science, art, or in the graces or comforts of life,
the Egyptian, the Saracenic, the Chinese, were subject to no such
vagaries in costume, but adhered to that which taste, climate,
experience had determined to be the most useful and appropriate. And
it is a singular comment upon our modern conceit that we make our
own vagaries and changeableness, and not any fixed principles of art or
of utility, the criterion of judgment, on other races and other times.

The more important result of the study of past fashions, in engravings
and paintings, remains to be spoken of. It is that in all the illustrations,
from the simplicity of Athens, through the artificiality of Louis XIV
and the monstrosities of Elizabeth, down to the undescribed modistic
inventions of the first McKinley, there is discoverable a radical and
primitive law of beauty. We acknowledge it among the Greeks, we
encounter it in one age and another. I mean a style of dress that is
artistic as well as picturesque, that satisfies our love of beauty, that
accords with the grace of the perfect human figure, and that gives