LADY WALDEGRAVE ON VILLAGE ESTHETICS. MHE Dowager Countess Waldegrave, an
old lady of eighty, 1. who speaks in a very kindly though somewhat lofty tone, has been expressing to some Cumberland girls, scholars in a school maintained by Mr. George Moore, the disgust secretly entertained by most old ladies at the way in which English girls of the poorer classes dress. They spend more than they can afford, she says, on "unnecessary and useless finery," and do not look well after all. She has watched through a long life the increase of this tendency, and feels at length disposed to speak out, and warn village girls and their mothers that, while cheap fineries, "penny flowers" in particular, arc "not neat," neither are they desirable, for they will find that most mistresses "will object to that kind of finery, which is not suitable to the station in which it has pleased God to place them." We fear her ladyship's reasons for being neat will not weigh quite so heavily with English girls; even in Cumberland, or with their mothers, as she probably hopes they may. Girls of the present day, like boys, are apt to think that the Catechism is a production with Tory tendencies ; that their " stations " were fixed by man, and not by God, and to regard the desire to get out of them—to "get on," as men put it—as anything rather than a vice. To be a servant is not the one form of a "girl's young dream," nor is 4 the first object of any social system to produce good servants, else were that of New England a humiliating failure. If the only evil of cheap finery were a little discontent among the mis- tresses, cheap finery might be put up with very easily, if only under the belief, that a girl who dresses well according to her lights is very apt to have more virtues than the slattern, that the vanity of appearance is very near akin to the virtue of self- respect. Very few of us would be quite as good in rags, or even in clothes which subjected us to ridicule or remark from every passer-by. The Countess, however, took advantage of her years to state a very unpalatable but still very genuine truth,—the extreme distaste of the educated class for the dress which girls of the poorer sort, more especially in the country, accustom themselves to wear. It is with many a positive loathing, and it is not altogether unjustifiable. The dress is very bad, and it is becoming, as the Countess says, worse every day. The men's dress in many places is bad enough, the service- able and really handsome velveteen and corduroys, or the less good-looking but neat fustian, being discarded for second-hand black cloth, ill made, ill fitted, and ill in accord alike with boots
and hat, the two articles in which cost tells most distinctly ; but the men are well dressed compared with the women. They will imitate a costume made beautiful only by taste and costliness in cheap and tasteless materials, usually ill in accord as to colour, always ill cut, often set off by flashy ribbons, as much out of place and as conspicuous as the ribbons in a recruiting-serjeant's cap, and sometimes improved by cheap jewellery of designs which till within the last two years were uniformly wretched. Some of the French patterns now introduced in such things are, we admit, in better taste,—brooches, in particular, of sound design, being sold for a shilling or two, or sometimes even less. The decent cap of our grandmothers' time is disappearing, the shawl or cloak is replaced by something believed to be a mantilla, the expense of washing increases every day, and the boot is replaced by a thing which everybody but the girl herself would call a ball slipper' half worn out. A French peasant girl spending half the sum manages to look better,—better, that is, as a picture, apart alto- gether from the air of brassiness Englishwomen of almost any grade acquire from being over-dressed. The evil is a great one, not only because mistresses do not like finery—they have to put up with annoyances much more reasonable than that,—but because a genuinely bad costume lowers the class which wears it, impairs natural dignity, corrupts the natural taste, and causes in the long run an exasperation of that petty class jealousy which of all the smaller vices produces the worst results. The poorer class would be as much the better for not mimicking the middle- class, as the latter would be for not imitating the French demi- monde.
We admit Lady 1Valdegrave's case, but is she, or are the thousands of English mistresses who sympathize with her, quite in the right as to their mode of attacking the admitted evil? Do they not make too much of a caste question of it, treat the matter too much as if a little cheap finery affronted their pride, instead of merely outraging their taste? It is rather annoying even to a Cumberland girl, we should fancy, to be told that God has fixed her " station" for ever, so that a bit of finery is almost a crime, a parasol a wickedness deserving comment from the pulpit, and a penny flower an offence for which a mother may be lectured in her own house. Are not employers a little silly when- they treat a bare head as an impertinence, and with their own daughters' hair falling down to the waist scold a parlour-maid because she, too, thinks ample hair something of a natural adornment ? There is no reason that we know of why, while foot.. men wear a livery, housemaids should not wear one too, for though it might be wiser to discontinue both, neither as yet conveys any real sense of degradation. The American idea, that a "coach-- man in his own clothes is a citizen who gets his living by driving, but a coachman in livery is a thing "—a sentence hurled at Pre- sident Pierce—has not yet reached England, and till it has house- hold livery is no oppression. Still, the notion of a fitting uniform for each class, which is the root of all arguments like Lady Waldegrave's, is passing away with the Feudal system ; in towns has wholly disappeared. Would it not be expedient, therefore, considering the way things are going, just to inquire if the root of the mischief may not be mere bad taste, to be corrected not by dignified lectures from people who would be very much hurt if their hearers lectured back, but who have no more right to lecture than to listen—the remark does not apply to Countess Walde- grave, whose age amply justified her speech—but by introducing better standards? English women have not instinctive taste—if there be such a thing—and what standards have they to learn from? There is and has been for a century no national costume such as forms the foundation of the Parisian servant dress, and of that of the working Scotch girl, and the village girls are driven to copy some- thing. What should they copy except the best dressed class they see?—and this is all they do, the secret of all their failures. There is nobody else to imitate, and they must either devise for them- selves—an impossible task, even if they had the courage to attempt it—or make the best imitation they can. Only one class, the drapers' shop girls in some great cities, wear a uniform at once neat enough and handsome enough to be a standard, and how many Cumberland girls see that, or could make it if they did see it ? Expense enters heavily into tbe question, for
girls and mothers such as Lady Waldegrave cautioned do not pay milliners' bills, and very few close-fitting dresses can be made without some skill. The very best one a working woman could wear, a riding habit of stuff cut short at the ancles, is utterly beyond ordinary village skill, and its beauty depends entirely upon make. The poor girls are literally driven to imitate one particular kind of dress, and will not be driven out except by careful instruction. A few patterns, or rather a few specimens of good dresses, cheap, neat, and good-looking, and not too nnlilre ordinary costume, and a few lessons in dressmaking, or rather cutting-out—for the root of failure is there—would, we suspect, do much more than any number of lectures, which cannot always be delivered by Countesses of eighty, and are apt when they come from less highly placed and less venerable persons to sting a natural and in its way a decidedly healthy pride. Suppose Mr. George Moore tries the experiment in Wigton, where he has done so much? We will answer for it, he will effect in five years more reform than in fifty years of lecturing. The present dress is not a convenient one, while it is an expensive one, and there is, therefore, nothing to prevent that education of the eye which Parisians, Spaniards, and English gipsies seem to acquire without effort, but which among English people must be instilled as care- • fully and as slowly as the arts of reading and writing or the mystery of arithmetic. Surely we might teach village girls that cherry-coloured ribbons do not " go " with a pink bonnet before we lecture them on the iniquity of such pads ? How are they, bred under grey skies and but just escaped from barbarism, to know that brightness is not an absolute equivalent for beauty, that yellow braid on a scarlet bodice is not the perfection of taste ? "None of your gaudy colours for me," said the old woman ; "I'm for plain red and yeller," and she spoke the true feeling of un- trained Northern taste. The girls do not wear barred muslins because they like cross bars, but because they want to look well, and could be taught that bars do not suit dumpy figures just as easily as they can be taught that dishes should be set square, or towels hung straight on the towel horse. The quarrel about the cap is, we suppose, incurable, being a matter of caste, and crino- line is dying, but the bonnet might be improved into a hat, and the boots into something fitted for walking in a very litttle while. As to ornaments, Mr. Cole is, perhaps, a little extravagant in his praises of the Castellani collection of democratic jewellery,—at least if he really said he would go down on his knees to Birmingham to buy it,—but he is on the right scent. Pretty things will not be re- jected if they are once seen because they are artistic, or because they are cheap ; but where are the pretty things? At present the country girl has no ideal except a brass imitation of an ornament, often ugly enough in gold, or the glass rubbish carried about by the tallymen, rubbish manufactured by the hall-ton at a time, and utterly discreditable to the designers. It can't be bet- ter? Pooh! we have bought shell flowers for three-pence arranged as brooches which bees would light on ; and a Maltese will make a bracelet out of a sixpenny-piece. We shall be told, of course, that all these ideas preclude the imitation of one class by another, and that imitation is the end, but we simply reply that we accept the end, and only suggest the imitation of good models instead of bad. Look at that rector's daughter going to trim flowers in a brown holland dress, without an ornament, and why should not that be copied as well as the airified costume, which only experience and expense can make becoming?
The boys want the msthetic lessons and the pictures of costume just as much as the girls, and do not even get lectures from Countesses. They have, at least, two chances of a good and effective costume, and at present use neither. They see every day the railway porter's dress, the neatest, most convenient, and most durable yet used in Europe, and they do not adopt sit; and very little would turn the smock into the blouse, but nobody shows them how to make the effort. Their vanity is as great as that of the girls, and their ignorance greater, but both can be con- quered by education. It- is no more difficult to teach a country lad that a jacket is becoming, and a short coat is not, than it is to teach him the rule of three, a feat which half a century since was gravely believed to be quite impossible, just as our country readers will to-day assert that teaching msthetics to villagers under twenty is ludicrous waste of time. It may be so, but if it is so the effort to educate is waste of time too, and we would just recall one little but very encouraging fact. Do our readers remember what cheap china was like before 1851? It has not taken sixteen years to induce even villagers to see that a lunatic design like the willow-pattern plate was offensive to the eye, and that absurdity had a support which the cherry-coloured ribbons have not—the reluctance of the trade to give up a pattern producible in any number at the lowest price.
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