THE DEAN OF CHESTER ON FASHION.
THE Dean of Chester seems to have given a very thoughtful sermon on Fashion to his audience at St. James's, Piccadilly, last Sunday, if we may judge of it by the interesting report in Monday's Daily News. He was not as hot against fashion as preachers usually think themselves bound to be, though, perhaps, his moral criticism gained in realism by this sobriety of tone. He thought fashion had its uses ; that its changes break up the monotony of life and prevent the stagnation of habit ; that its variations fix the attention of men on points not unfrequently of real interest which would be apt otherwise to escape adequate observation, just as fashion gave a stimulus to physical science in the days of Charles II., and has often given a stimulus to true philanthropic reforms, moral, social, and political, in our own ; and again, that the fixed conventions of society take a good deal of trouble and consideration off the minds and hands of people who would otherwise find it very anxious and onerous work to choose among all the small alternatives which, as it is, fashion decides promptly for them. But the evils of fashion, according to the preacher, corresponded very nearly to these advantages. If made much of, it is apt to break up men's thought into ripples quite too minute for coherence and steadiness in pur- suits which aim at higher than temporary and capricious ends ; again, it diverts attention from important subjects which really need it, to subjects which do not ; and as fashion is more and more magnified, instead of economising power by settling indifferent matters which would otherwise absorb time and effort, it wastes power by erecting purely conventional trifles into matters of great moment. In short, if we interpret Dean Howson's drift aright, the use of fashion is to guide our judgment in trifles in which it is usually better to go with the crowd, than to try to have a mind of our own ; while its abuse consists in making it a matter of first-rate importance that we should imitate the crowd, whereas the only advantage of imitating the crowd is the economy of moral and intellectual effort on insignificant points thereby secured to us. As regards the sequences and changes of fashion, Dean Howson even ventured to suggest that they might be regarded as in some sense the expressions of a sort of law of social phenomena, which, like some laws of physical phenomena, may turn out to be of more importance than the phenomena themselves. Why fashion passes from light to serious or from serious to light, why it becomes now simple and now highly artificial, why it patronises the uttermost idealism in art to-day and the stiffest realism to-morrow, why it is openly frivolous in one generation and ostentatiously earnest in the next,—this may really be a matter of more significance and better worth studying, than any particular fashion which may be in question. Even though you attach no great importance to following the fashion, the question why the fashion is what it is, may be a really important one, and the Dean of Chester may very probably be right in hold- ing that changes in fashion are subject to something like an intel- ligible law of their own,-instead of being the result of a confusion of various laws whose joint action is practically incalculable from the number of interferences with each other involved. Imitation is no doubt, as Dr. Howson says, the principle of fashion ; but in selecting what they shall imitate, how they shall set the ball roll- ing, the leaders of fashion are no doubt influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by some weariness of mood, or some unsatisfied craving, which really determines the new direction of the tide. And the secret of that weariness or craving may be worth knowing.
But the Dean of Chester, with all his thoughtfulness, does not appear to have struck on the greatest of all the moral uses of fashion, though his text,—" The fashion of this world passeth away,"—would have been less of a pun, if he had hit upon it. Of course, as the Dean warned his audience, the "fashion of
this world" in St. Paul's sense, only included what we call fashion, as an abstract idea includes all that can by any means be brought under it. Of course, what St. Paul was speaking of was "the form" (TO a xij ct) of this world, its external sequences and temporary order as a whole ; and only so far as human fashion is a part of this great pageantry, which in all probability it was not con- sciously to St. Paul's thought at the moment, could it be supposed that he was referring to it when he said, "The fashion of this world passeth away." But what he certainly was referring to was the whole temporary order and visible spectacle of the society in which he lived, including the highest as well as the lowest visible phenomena, the signs of human affections, the grief and laughter of the heart, no less than the commercial habits and the domestic insti- tutions of society and the outward shows of the physical universe : and he classed them all together because he regarded all as mere temporary manifestations of something that would endure, but that would endure in a very different shape from that in which it then existed. Hence we think the passage on which the Dean of Chester was commenting would have been taken in a somewhat more real and less strained sense, if he had insisted on one of the greatest of all uses of fashion,—the tendency of its essential changefulness, if not caprice, to create a hunger for the realities which do not change,—realities which can alone make the spectacle of the constant flux of tastes and habits in human society, toler- able to the human heart. No doubt St. Paul was not referring more to that changefulness which expresses restlessness, than to that changefulness which comes of a direct law of change like the changes in external nature. It was the temporary character of all that is seen, that he was dilating on, not specially the fickleness of human life. But no doubt, too, the Dean's subject, fashion,' does bring home to us the transitoriness of the outsides of things more closely than any other variable element in the external universe, for whether it is really so or not, fashion appears to be variable by preference and design ; inconstancy is, as it were, the excellence of fashion; indeed the only thing it would like to perpetuate is inno- vation. Incessant transformation is, according fo science, the law of the universe, heat being only another form of motion, and nervous action, it is believed, only another form of heat; but in these cases the mind assumes, at all events, a sameness beneath the difference, and under the name of the "correlation of forces" asserts that every such change of force is more apparent than real, and that something called ' force ' persists through every change. But fashion,' in the technical sense, is change from which all trace of permanence is purposely, as far as possible, excluded. It is the symbol of a perpetual weariness and incessant unrest. And for that very reason, it drives the mind more than any other kind of change into the longing for "a repose that ever is the same." More than any other element in the whirl of life, the whirl of fashion makes the head grow giddy and the heart dry ; nor is this wonder- ful, for it is not mere external change, but the changefulness of desire which fags us, and scorches up the reserve of living power in us.
Dean Howson would probably say that it would be a little odd to enumerate as one of the uses of fashion, that it repels men till they come within the attraction of the opposite pole of that great magnet of the universe which is constituted in equal proportions of permanence and change. If that be correct, why should we not say with equal accuracy that it is one of the great uses of the contemplative or the habitual life to throw one back on the whirl of fashion? We should reply, that as regards mere conventional, or even mere monotonous habit, that might be said with equal truth. It is the result, and a good result, of a groove of mere dull habit, that it excites the craving for change simply as change, change which wakes up the life within the inanimate chrysalis. Nor does the scorn which religion tries to inspire for the fashion of this world, which passeth away," ever lead anybody back again to the life of mere habit ; on the contrary, the thirst for something more real than perpetual change, once experienced, can never be slaked by a re- turn to the life of routine. It is the use as well as the abuse of the quick, rapid, frivolous life, that it renders the dull, unmeaning life of "unconscious cerebration," as physiologists call mere habit, intoler- able, and obliges all who are not lost in the fascination of a whirl of shallow interests, none of which last beyond the day, to seek springs of deeper interest, all of which are permanent. The life of mere change, however rapid and fickle, is more of a human life than the life of mere routine, which is hardly conscious life at all, but only a physical preparation for life; but then the life which seeks to make the form (or fashion) express and embody some- thing permanent and eternal, is a much higher life than either. To feed a mind on change is impossible, but to feed it on what is permanent in change, is not only possible, but the most I truly natural of all human procedures. The use of the whirl of I external change is to rouse and then to repel,—to awaken the I hunger and thirst of men by giving them some conception of the scale and the velocity of the social universe, and then to sicken them of a process which does not satisfy, though it excites the deepest of their cravings. It is impossible to doubt that the original preachers of an eternal life had felt a considerable fascina- tion for the transitory elements of transitory excitement in their own youth. St. John surely could hardly have denounced "the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life," as being "not of the Father, but of the world," without having keenly felt them ; and St. Paul's own knowledge of the world, which was evidently wide, could not have been gained without a great insight into the secret of its attractions. "The world passeth away, and the lusts thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever," is the saying of one who knew pro- foundly the fascinations of the _ripple caused by the poorer ex- citements of life, and knew that the craving for them could only be quenched by a deeper and more permanent spring of pure feeling. Fashion, high or low, the eager current of social ex- citements, is one of the beat of all the witnesses to the vanity of change, and the yearning for a life in what is permanent. If the changes which fashion intxoduces- teach something, the protest it awakens against living in what is liable to pass away, teaches much more.
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