Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/196

184 for there is nothing more beautiful than beauty in old age. If she have moderate beauty, she should do her utmost to make the best of it. If she have no beauty, she ought to impart all that is possibly near to it by every kind of justifiable supplement. If she be positively ugly, the more is it her duty to use every legitimate art to hide the fact, and to transform even ugliness into passable presentation. Look at an ugly woman badly attired, and showing all the lines that offend taste. Look at the same woman gracefully attired and fairly, artistically gotten up, with some approach toward the beautiful, and who would hesitate to pronounce in favor of a longer téte-à-téte with the last of that woman as compared with the first? Why! we blockheads of men are sometimes entirely taken in by skillful, ugly women. We look upon them as handsome. The deception is justifiable, and our satisfaction is more than a recompense for our stupidity.

What is good for women is not worse for men, but I am sorry to say that men are far behind women in their endeavors to assume the beautiful. In my time I have never, off the stage, seen a man dressed many removes from the hideous. When I first began to look at my male seniors, universal black was the rage, black from head to foot; the very head, which was the only part of the animal that emerged out of darkness, rising from a broad black ring called a stock, into which the chin sometimes dropped. A little later, and an extremely tight mode of dress came into fashion, a mode which is not yet entirely discarded, but which still fits closely to those strangely occupied individuals called "copers," about whom there is a mystery as to whether their clothes were not originally and permanently modeled to their bodies. Recently there has been some attempt at improvement in English male attire. The surtout-coat, rather loosely fitting, and cut so as to hang well from the shoulders, has imported a modest but good change in fashion, while the looser and better-shaped nether habiliments have so improved in design that even the sculptors have, at last, with much compunction of conscience, ventured to reproduce them in marble.

Still, in the attire of men, and I think I must say in the attire of women also, a great deal is wanting in taste, and the most bigoted Darwinian would hardly, I think, dare to declare the doctrine of "the survival of the fittest" in respect of modern clothes, whatever he might say of the wearers of them.

I name these points that I may not be accused of feeling no care for the fashion connected with dress. I would have good fashion go with every hygienic improvement in clothes and clothing, and I know it would be easy to prove that hygiene of dress could always be combined with the most artistic and perfect of fashionable designings, by which combination health, comfort, and elegance would all be insured.

Such combination set forth as a national fashion should pass, as I think, through all classes of the community; for, assuredly, even at