Some Ladies of the Old School
  

SOME LADIES OF THE OLD SCHOOL.

WE are often favored with remarks eulogizing the ladies of the old school at the expense of ladies of the present day. I do not doubt that a vast majority of the ladies whom our ancestors loved were estimable beings; but, then, folly is of no age; it belongs to all times, to every race, and to both sexes. Ladies of the old school ! How old? How far must we go back before we come to those admirable and faultless creatures ?

Shall we say the last century? People who enjoyed the personal acquaintance of ladies who lived a hundred years ago do not appear to have thought so highly of them as some living persons do who know them only by report. Consider one of their habits. What are we to think of their passionate, reckless, universal gambling ? Down to 1790, gambling was so universal in the higher circles, that we may almost say society and gambling were synonymous terms. There appears to have been high play at every court and mansion every night. It was the regular resource among the idle classes for getting through the evenings. Fox, whom Nature formed to be the foremost Englishman of his time,—Fox, the Prince Hal of politics,—lost two hundred thousand pounds at cards by the time he was of age; and his father had to pay most of it. The card-table was spoken of sometimes as a school for the acquisition of nerve, fortitude, and good temper, since it was required of every one to bear losses with an appearance of cheerfulness. But human nature not unfrequently triumphed over the restraints of decorum, as well as over the rules of the game. There were high-born dowagers, with whom it was a costly honor to play. Nor were losses always borne with equanimity. A writer of the last century relates a terrific scenewhich he witnessed in a London drawing-room.

Two elderly ladies were seated at a table, playing for pretty high stakes. Without going near them, it was easy to tell which was losing and which was winning, from the expression of their faces. At length, the game suddenly ended in a crushing disaster for one of them. The author describes the sweet and pleasant manner in which the gamester of fifty years' standing bore her loss. " Her face," he says, " was of a universal crimson: and tears of rage seemed ready to start into her eyes. At that moment, as Satan would have it, her opponent, a dowager whose hair and eyebrows were as white as those of an Albiness, triumphantly and briskly demanded payment for the two black aces.

"'Two black aces!' answered the loser in a voice almost unintelligible by passion. 'Here, take the money; though, instead, I wish I could give you two black eyes, you old white cat!' accompanying the wish with a gesture that threatened a possibility of its execution. The stately, starched old lady, who, in her eagerness to receive her winnings, had half risen from her chair, sunk back into it as though she had really received the blow. She literally closed her eyes and opened her mouth, and for several moments thus remained fixed by the magnitude of her horror."

We hear a good deal about the high-breeding and invincible politeness of the old time. There was more ceremony ; there was more deference paid by poor to rich, by employed to employer, by commoner to lord, by citizens to their public servants; but after a wide survey of the records of the past, and noting hundreds of indications too trilling for mention, I am fully persuaded, that in our hourly intercourse with one another as mere human beings, without regard to rank or caste, we are more polite than our ancestors,—more generally considerate of one another's feelings, rights, and dignity.

I was turning over in Scribner's, some time ago, The Correspondence of the first Earl of Malmesbury." Good heavens! what savages some of the ladies of England appear in those volumes of familiar letters ! Think of the ladies in the Pump-Room at Bath getting into a free fight, tearing one another's hair and clothes, so that the Riot Act was read, and read in vain ! We don't do so at Saratoga. We hear much now-a-days of the girl of the period. There was a Woman's Club in London composed of ladies of rank, who came and went at all hours of the night, ate, drank (drank deeply too), played for high stakes, talked loud, showed brawny arms, and boasted in loud, coarse voices of their physical prowess. A new dance came up, which these strong-minded and strong-limbed sisters much affected. It was for two couples, who began the dance by a quarrel ; next they fought a pair of duels, firing real pistols; then the couples danced a reconciliation figure, which ended in an embrace; and the dance concluded with kisses, well-timed and loud, that went off like the pistols employed in the fight. The dress of these high-born barbarians was as monstrous as their manners. We read of one lady, who, on seeing the Duchess of Devonshire enter a room with two feathers sixteen inches high nodding from the lofty summit of her head-dress, was stricken with jealousy, and thenceforth took no coin-fort in life until her undertaker gave his promise to send her two taller plumes as soon as one of his hearses came home from a job.
With regard to decency, as we understand the term, it did not exist. Consider the anecdote related by Hannah More, bearing upon this point. In her old age, she had a curiosity to read again a novel which had been a favorite in families in her youth, and which she had her-self often read at home to the family circle. Upon getting the book she was utterly amazed and confounded at its indecency : at eighty years, she could not read to herself a work which at sixteen she had read aloud to father, mother, and friends.

Dr. Franklin's paper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, the best paper ever published in the Colonies, and among the most decent, contains fifty things which no newspaper now-a-days, not the most unscrupulous of all, would dare or wish to publish. Among the shorter tales of Voltaire, there are several which he wrote at the request of ladies, to be used by them in liquidation of forfeits incurred iii games. These tales were read aloud, by or for the ladies, to the whole circle at the chateau or palace ; oftener palace than chateau, some of them being written for German princesses. Those tales we should consider quite indecent, all of them. No periodical in Europe or America would publish them. The same author used to lend manuscript cantos of his " Pucelle," a poem of incredible freedom, to the most distinguished ladies in Europe, who regarded the loan as an homage to their taste and discretion, and sat up at night making copies for preservation. He read that poem to the Queen of Prussia, mother of Frederick the Great; and one day, upon looking up, he saw the queen's daughter listening on the sly. The queen, too, saw her a moment after, and exchanged meaning smiles with Voltaire, but did not send her away ; and the reading went on as before, the flavor of the jests being In :re keenly relished because shared by virgin cars.

For two or three months one summer, I lived at a beach on the coast of Maine, where, in all, during the season, there must have been as many as two thousand persons, of all sorts and conditions, of all religions and nationalities. I can almost say that there was not a rude or ungracious act done by one of them. Nobody- was stuck up; nobody made any parade of wealth,, or pretended to any superiority on account of his family or occupation. At the same time proper privacy was not intruded upon. Every one seemed to wish well to others, and the utmost friendliness prevailed at all times. Cards every evening, but no gambling ; dancing every evening, but all over at eleven o'clock ; plenty of hilarity, but scarcely any drinking. All was pleasant, cheerful, elegant, decorous, free. Warm discussions upon politics and religion, but no intolerance or ill temper. I say with the boldness arising from long research, that such a company, gathered for a similar purpose, in a similar place, during the last century, would have been less innocent, less decorous, less polite. There would have been high play, deep drinking, love intrigues, and no meeting of rich and not rich, distinguished and undistinguished, on terms of friendly equality.

Another fact: In a drawer of the bowling alley, I found one day a Latin dictionary, a Livy, and a Vergil ; and I discovered, a few days after, that they belonged to the boy who had charge of the alley. He was preparing for college ! When no one was playing, out came his Vergil from the drawer ; and he kept at it till the next customer strolled in. And the best of it was, that no one saw anything extraordinary in this. If he came to a pas-sage he could not translate, he would bring his book to the piazza, and get assistance from some of the gentlemen there who were learned in the classics of antiquity ; all of which seemed quite natural and ordinary.

Then as to chivalry—the grand politeness, the Sidney style, supposed by some to be extinct. In our war, many a Sidney served in the ranks; one act of one of whom was this: Twenty men, thirsty and wounded, were waiting on a hot day, after a battle near Chattanooga, their turn to be attended to. One of the gentlemen of the Christian Commission came up at length, bearing the priceless treasure of a pail of water and a tin cup. He handed the first cupful to the soldier who seemed most to need the cooling, cleansing liquid ; for he was badly wounded in the mouth, from which blood was oozing.

"No," said this sublime Sidney of the ranks : " I must drink last ; for, you know, I shall make the cup bloody."

And there were a thousand men in that army who would have done the same. In this country certainly, and, I think, throughout Christendom, if the spirit of caste still lives in vulgar minds, it is generally recognized as vulgarity ; it hides itself, and is ashamed.
" Would you believe it ? " said Horace Walpole, " when an artist is patronized now-a-days, he thinks it is he who confers distinction !

The courtly old pensioner evidently thought that this was mere insolence and absurdity. This man, who had lived all his life on the bounty of the English people—on an unearned pension of four thousand pounds a year, pro-cured for him by his father, Sir Robert,—had not the slightest doubt of his intrinsic superiority to Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Johnson, Fanny Burney, Carrick, or Handel ! Nor had any other man of his order in Europe. Some
one was congratulating the great French actor, Leaking, upon the glory and the money which he had gained during a prosperous season.

" As to money," said he, " we do not get as much as people think. My income, at the most, is only ten or twelve thousand francs a year."

"What ! " cried a young nobleman, " a vile actor not content with twelve thousand francs a year; while I, who am in the king's service, who sleep upon a cannon, and shed my blood for my country,—I am only too happy to get a thousand francs ! "

The actor, inwardly boiling with fury, quietly said : "Do you count it for nothing that you dare to speak to to me in that manner ? "

Paris, it is said, marveled at the audacity of the veteran actor, not at all at the insolence of the boy lieutenant. All that, let us hope, is over forever. We may boast, too, that an approach has been made to a substantial equality of human conditions and opportunities. Bishop Kip tells us, in a very agreeable article, how tranquil, dignified, and captivating New York society was in the olden time. Very well. But he gives us to understand in the same article, that to maintain one of those refined, dignified families, required an estate ten or fifteen miles square ; and there were only about fifty of them in the whole vast Province of New York. We are also reminded, now and then, of the first families of Virginia, and the grand life they lived ; but it took a plantation of five thousand acres, five hundred slaves, and fifty house servants, to keep up one establishment. We must learn to live beautifully at a much cheaper rate than that ; and I feel assured that we are learning it.

I went over a clock-factory, in Connecticut, some time ago—a spacious and handsome edifice, filled with intelligent, polite men and women doing clean, inviting work ;the water-wheel performing all that was hard and laborious. The only important difference I could discover between the proprietor and the workmen was, that the men came to work every morning at seven, and the owner at half-past six. All of them, in fact, came an hour too soon and stayed an hour too late. The workmen lived in pretty cottages—their own, if they choose to buy,—with good, large gardens around them. Their children went to the same school—common school and high school—as his children, and had access to the same library and lyceum. All lived in the same sweet, umbrageous village, and looked out upon the same circle of wood-crowned mountains ; nor did there appear to be in the place a mind small enough to hold the barbaric idea, that one man could be higher than another because he has more money, or earns his livelihood by a different kind of work.

Mr. Emerson, in speaking of an improvident marriage, says : " Millenium has come and no groceries " I said to myself, as I strolled about this village, "Here is a fore-taste of millennium, and groceries in abundance. Here are ladies and gentlemen, not of the old school, who are living the polite and intelligent life upon eight and twelve dollars a week."

Ladies of the present day themselves lament that they should be so little able to resist the tyranny of fashion. Ladies of the old school were more submissive to fashion than they, without lamenting it. Let me say that, of all tyrannies, the most ancient and the most universal is that of fashion. It began with the beginning of civilization, and it is precisely in the most civilized nations that its control extends to the greatest variety of details. Philosophers laugh at it ; but show me, if you can, a philosopher who is philosopher enough to wear in broad day-light his grandfather's Sunday hat! Is it not a good hat? It is an excellent hat. The soft and silken fur of the beaver covers it ; it is lined with the finest leather ; it glistens in the sun with a resplendent gloss ; it is no uglier iii form than the stove-pipe of today; it has all the properties of a good covering for the head. The original proprietor wore it with pride, and cherished it with care in a. dust-tight bandbox, in which it has reposed unharmed for fifty years. What is the matter with this superior hat, that a man capable of marching up to the cannon's mouth shrinks with dismay from wearing it a mile on a fine afternoon in the street of his native city ?

The hat is simply out of fashion; nothing more. The present owner knows that, if he were to wear it, his friends would take him for a madman, his creditors would fear for his solvency, and the boys would set him down as a quack doctor. Su rooted, so unconquerable in this tyranny, which many of us deride, and all of us obey' I said it is the oldest of our tyrants. In Egyptian tombs, which were ancient when Antony wooed Cleopatra, there have been found many evidences that Egyptian ladies were as assiduous devotees of fashion as the fondest inspector of fashion-plates can now be. In the British Museum you may inspect the implements of Egyptian fashion conveniently displayed. There are neat little bottles made to hold the coloring matter used by the ladies of Egypt for painting their cheeks and eyebrows. Some of these vessels have four or five cells or compartments, each of which contained liquid of a different shade for different portions of the face. These were applied with a kind of long pin or bodkin, several of which have been brought to this country.

Professor W. H. Flower, a distinguished member of the Royal Society of London, has recently published a a little book called " Fashion in Deformity,' in which he mentions several ways in which ladies torment, as well as deform themselves, in obedience to the tyranny of fashion. He passes over Egypt ; perhaps because of the superabundance of material illustrating his subject which the Egyptian collections present to view. if he had con-fined his work to such a testimony as the Egyptian tombs have yielded, he could have made a volume ten times the size of the modest discourse with which he has been so good as to favor us. One of the absurd Egyptian fashions appears to have been of some service. Herodotus tells us that, when he was on his travels, he once walked over a battle-field where the Egyptians and the Persians had fought some years before.

" I observed," he says, " that the skulls of the Persians were so soft that you could perforate them with a small pebble, while those of the Egyptians were so strong that with difficulty you could break them with a large stone."

Upon inquiring into the cause of this, he was informed that it was owing to the different head fashions of Egypt and Persia. In Egypt it was the fashion for mothers to shave the heads even of young children, leaving only a lock or two in front, behind, and one on each side ; and while thus shorn they were allowed to go out into the sun without hats. The Persians, on the contrary, wore their hair long, and protected themselves from the sun by soft caps. We learn also from this passage in Herodotus, that it was not the fashion in his time to bury the dead after a battle.

All the ancient civilized races took great liberties with their hair, as well as with the hair of other people. Persons of rank in Egypt, after shaving off their own hair, wore wigs to distinguish them from bare-headed peasants. A still more inconvenient fashion of Egyptian dandies was the wearing of false beards upon the chin, composed of plaited hair, and varying in length according to the rank of the wearer. We find that, in all the ancient civilizations, fashion selected similar objects upon which to exercise its authority. Sir Gardner Wilkinson mentions that there was a fashion in dogs in ancient Egypt, which changed from time to time. Some breeds were fashionable on account of their extreme ugliness, others for their beauty or size. The favorite dog of a popular princess would set the fashion in dogs for a long time, as it does in more modern days. As favorite dogs were frequently mummied, and placed in the tombs of their owners, we are able to trace several changes of fashion in these creatures.

Professor Flower could have drawn some apt illustrations from the burdensome head dresses found in ancient tombs. Some of these were not merely burdensome, but hideous, the hair being extended in such a way as to make the head four or five times larger than nature made it.

It were well if human beings would be satisfied with self-torment for fashion's sake. On almost any afternoon you may see in Broadway terriers bred so small that a full grown dog does not weigh much more than a large rat. This custom of changing the natural form and size of animals for fashion's sake is both ancient and wide-spread. The Hottentots twist the horns of their cattle into various fantastic shapes while the horns are young and flexible, and in some parts of Africa the horns of sheep are made to grow in several points by splitting the horn with a knife when it begins to grow. Among ourselves, too, horses tails are still occasionally docked for old fashion's sake, and Professor Flower remarks that the ancient custom of cropping the cars of horses is not yet . extinct in England.

Among savages the modes of fashionable deformity are more numerous than with civilized people, though they are less injurious. Some tribes color their nails red or black. Tattooing the skin in an almost universal practice. Some savages blacken their teeth ; others pull the mouthall out of shape with heavy pendents ; others make holes in their ears, and continue to stretch them, until a man can pass his arms through his ears. It is a strange thing that the practice of flattening the head, in use among our Flathead Indians, does not appear to injure the brain. White men who have resided in that tribe report that any mother who should fail to flatten the heads of her children into the fashionable shape, would be thought a very indolent and unkind parent, since it would subject her children to the unsparing ridicule of their playmates. Nor could the girls ever hope for marriage, nor the boys aspire to have any influence in the tribe.

The two worst fashions in deformity, according to Professor Flower, are cramping the feet and compressing the body. The sufferings undergone by Chinese girls, in reducing their feet to the fashionable size, are so severe and long continued as to excite our wonder even more than our pity. The learned professor gives a pair of pictures to show what ladies do with themselves when they try to conform to the fashion of half-yard waist. One presents to us the statue of the Venus of Milo in all the majestic amplitude of nature. The other exhibits the Paris waist of May, 1880, a silly, trivial, nipped figure of the fashionable number of inches in circuit, an object of equal horror to the anatomist and to the artist.

We moderns, however, have one comfort. We have evolved the fashion of not following the fashion. Thus, the late Lord Palmerston never would wear boots which did not give to each of his toes all its natural rights, and so he set the fashion of not wearing the fashionable boot. In every American community there are now to be found ladies of the new school, who, if they follow the fashion at all, follow it at a rational distance, and know how to preserve their health and freedom without singularity. It is no longer difficult to follow the fashion of following the fashion, as Chesterfield advised, " . three paces behind."
  

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