THE VENUS OF MILO. SOCIAL ESTHETICS. TANFORD GREY sat in his library talking these men were yet notably unlike. Grey, though a student, as every thing about him showed, had the air of a man of the world and the manner of society. His very tone of voice, though as natural as the cry of a new-born child (and babies, especially girl babies, soon learn to cry affectedly), told of culture. His face expressed reserve, and was so remarkably free from any look of self-assertion that you might have thought it weak until you found the mild gray eye looking steadily back into yours, and saw, as the mustache curled away from the mouth, how firmly the lips were set together; and then, if you had learned the art to know men, you would see that this man had a strong will, though no excess of energy, and was brimful of courage, though he lacked pugnacity. A temperament this which made its possessor very tolerant of others' opin ions, but very tenacious of his own. His dress, though simple and inexpensive, was selected with an eye to harmony of color and becomingness; though this was not noticeable until attention was directed to it. The library in which he sat showed equally that the sense of the beauti ful pervaded his life. For although it was plainly his working-room, and a little Russia sewingcase and a cocoa-nut humming-top on a table in one corner gave evidence that it was invaded with impunity by at least one woman and one child, the prints upon the walls, the casts of antique statues standing wherever a nook could be made for them, the combination of rich, lowtoned colors throughout the apartment, and the very placing of the books which nearly covered the walls, and which were not shelved hap-hazard, but arranged so that their various hues relieved and set off each the other, all bore evidence to the exacting and never slumbering taste of the occupant. In Daniel Tomes the observant eye detected at once a singularly well-balanced organization. A head not noticeably large, poised upon a strong, well-rounded neck, springing from broad shoulders, a deep chest, muscular limbs, and a stature little short of six feet, showed a man of vigor and endurance, one sure of long life, if he escaped accident and pestilential poison. His black hair curled closely over his well-rounded head. His lips were full and red; the upper bowed. The lower part of his oval face had a blue tinge, given by his heavy, closely shaven beard; for he wore not even whiskers. His nose neatly approached the Grecian model-a form of the feature remarkably frequent in Americans of pure English blood. It was difficult to see his eyes, because they were covered with spectacles; but they were dark, and had that slight prominence which phrenologists have reason for associating with copious gift of language. The spectacles were worn only to aid short sight; for both he and Grey lacked three or four years of forty; and yet, although Tomes was but a year the older, a certain gravity and staidness of bearing caused Grey always to feel young by the side of his friend, and to look to And had ten years more experience of life. yet Grey had one very important experience which Tomes had not; for the former had been married some years, while the latter was a bachelor. Tomes was also plainly either indifferent to or incapable of the sense of beauty, which so penetrated the whole being of Grey. His manner was a strange mixture of shyness and selfconfidence; his movements were made with twice as much muscular exertion as was necessary; his voice, though full and rich and strong, was so ill-modulated, except under the influence of that strong excitement which makes almost every man eloquent, that what he said often lost much of its significance and weight; and his dress, although it cost twice as much as Grey's, looked as if it were made up of parts of various suits-which indeed it was; for to him a coat was but a coat, whatever its form, and a waistcoat but a waistcoat, whatever its color, and he wore his wardrobe promiscuously. With all this, he not only seemed, but was a man of mark among his acquaintances. His air was bold. and, when he was roused out of the brown stud. ies into which he was apt to fall, determined, almost aggressive. He was just and benevolent, but not very considerate of others' feelings. He looked as if he might have counseled Cromwell and fought beside him. Tomes had been making an argumentative onslaught upon his host, who was recovering himself with "Very true, Tomes, but-" when the other broke out "But, but ;' there's no ‘but' about it. There is no more connection between moral excellence and material beauty than there is between the appetizing inside and the forbidding outside of an oyster. They have nothing to do with each other; no relations of any kind whatever. A cock-pheasant is a handsome bird, and is good to eat; a canvas-back duck is not handsome, but is better; a terrapin is hideous, but is best of all. It is just so with men. Their merit has nothing whatever to do with their appearance; and the least attractive are often the most worthy." even you (pardon me!) are capable of instruc tion in the art of making life beautiful; and that you being so capable, all men also are, to a greater or less degree, with very few exceptions. Again pardon me But I know that you will take no offense." TOMES. "You are right in that. I can not believe that you could have the intention to offend me; and therefore I should not be offended at any thing that you would say, unless you plainly showed that intention. And, besides, to be offended I must first know with what you mean to charge me. What is this art of making life beautiful at my capacity for learning which you sneer?-well, since you look so deprecatingly, at which you jeer? There's no offense, you know." GREY. "Let me read again the passage whence our brief discussion started. You acknowledge that Arthur Helps is one of the soundest and healthiest thinkers of the day, though you say he is not remarkably original; and this is what he says in his paper on the Art of Liv GREY. "Who disputes such truth as that? Not I, certainly. Pray let your man of strawing:' 'I think it may also be observed that, rest without more demolishing." TOMES. "You may not dispute it by word, but you do by deed. There is not an act that you perform, or an article with which you provide yourself, which is not a silent assertion of the cardinal point of your faith, that the good and the beautiful are coexistent if not the same. Why-Let me see your watch.-There, that's a thing for a man of sense like you to carry, when the only reasonable object you can have in carrying it is the service it can render you; for you carry it concealed, and neither you nor any one else sees it but for the moment when you consult it. A thin, wafer-like gimcrack, that it must cost you a good part of your income to keep in any sort of order. Why not carry something like this?-There, that belonged to my father before me; and it was the best one that money could buy in England. It looks like what it is substantial, solid, serviceable." GREY. "Illustration unhappily chosen, O sagest Mentor! For my Jurgensen, with a little care, will run within half a second a day of the true time, the whole year round; while your Tobias-I can see it's a Tobias at this distance —can't be kept within much less than a quarter of a minute by all the attention you and the watch-maker can give it. And besides, O Daniel! you have digged a pit and fallen into it. For even you are pleased with the beauty of your watch, and praise it." independently of these errors committed with regard to scientific matters, such as change of air, maintenance of warmth, and the supply of light, there is also a singular inaptitude of means to ends, which prevails generally throughout the human aids and appliances for living-I mean dress, houses, equipages, and household furniture. The causes of this unsuitableness of means to ends lie very deep in human nature, and in the present form of human society. I attribute them chiefly to the imitative nature of the great bulk of mankind, and to the division of labor; which latter practice being carried to a great extent in every civilized state, renders a man expert in his own business, but timid even in judging of what he has not to make but only to use. The result is, I believe, that more than one-half of what we do to procure good is needless or mischievous: in fact, that more than half of the labor of the world is wasted: in savage life, by not knowing what is necessary; in civilized life, by the pursuit of what is needless." Helps follows his subject out only in its moral aspects, and considers the want of truth, the vanity, shyness, imitation, foolish concern about trifles, want of faithfulness to society, and Puritanical notions, which he rightly regards as hindrances to social culture and improvement. Now, what I call making life beautiful, is the bringing of intellectual refinement and cultivated taste to bear not only upon mere works of literature and TOMES. "When? How? I do no such art, but upon these very material everyday matthing." GREY. "Did you not just now say that your watch looked like what it is-substantial, solid, serviceable? In other words, you attributed to it the beauty of fitness. That beauty gratified you. You were in error as to the excellence of which you regarded it as the exponent; but that mistake does not affect the genuineness of the gratification which was founded upon it, or, I think, its reasonableness. It showed me that ters of dress, houses, equipages, and household furniture; so that the world which we make for ourselves may be, if possible, as beautiful as the natural world in which God has placed us." TOMES. "Perhaps there is no positive harm in that. And yet there may be, by its causing neglect of that which is of more importance. For of what real use is that intellectual refinement upon which you set so high a value? How much better is discipline than culture! Of how much greater worth to himself and to the world | barbarity than the parti-colored face of the one than your gentleman of cultivated tastes is the or the perforated nostril of the other." man who, by physical and mental training, the use of his muscles, the exercise of his faculties, the restraint of his appetites, has acquired vigor, endurance, self-reliance, self-control! Let a man be pure, honorable, and industrious, and what remains for him to do, and of time in which to do it, is of very small importance." GREY. "You talk as if you were the son of a Stoic father by a Puritan mother, and had inherited the moral and mental traits of both your parents." TOMES. "Many worse things have been said of me, and few better; but to describe me is not to meet my arguments." TOMES. "No surer evidence of barbarity! Grey, what do you mean? Would you place an offense against good taste on a level with oppression of the weaker half of mankind, selfish and cruel addition to the burdens which nature has laid upon it?" GREY. "I certainly said no surer evidence; and I stand to it. But the certainty of the evidence has nothing to do with the nature of the act. This you know; and so I sha'n't take offense at your exclamations or interrogations, or even refer you to Mrs. Grey as to my comparative estimate of offenses against taste and against the sacredness of her sex.-But to return to our topic. Call this desire to enjoy beauty, and to be a part of that beauty which contributes to the enjoyment of others, the lust of the eye or what you please, you will find it coextensive with the race; and that its reasonable gratification tends to har and even to invigorate it by giving it the healthy stimulus of variety; that it helps to lift men above debasing pleasures, and to foster the finer social feelings by promoting the higher social enjoyments." GREY. "Well, then, Zeno Barebones, don't you see, that, after man has provided for his first necessities-food, shelter, and clothing-he must needs set about making the life comfortable that he has made possible; that he will seek first comfort and then pleasure; and that the pleas-monize and to mollify mankind, to sweeten life, ures which he will seek, next after those which are purely sensual, will be the embellishment of his external life-his person, his clothes, his habitation, his tools, and weapons? And do you not also see that the craving which he thus supplies is just as natural, that is, just as much the inevitable result of his organization, as those to which necessity gave precedence? There is not a savage in any country who does not begin to strive to live handsomely just as soon as he has contrived to live at all; that is, if he is any thing more than a mere animal; and his efforts in this direction are a sure gauge of the degree of his intelligence and even his moral tone." TOMES. "Your savage is more unfortunately chosen by you than my watch was by me. What do you think of your red man, who makes no provision for the morrow, but supplies his animal needs for the moment as he can, and living in squalor, filth, and discomfort, yet daubs himself with grease and paint, and adorns his head with feathers, his neck with bears' claws, and his girdle with scalps? What of your black barbarian, whose life is a succession of unspeakable abominations, and who embellishes it by blackening his teeth, tattooing his skin, and thrusting a fish-bone or a ring through the gristle of his nose? Either of them will barter his last morsel for a glass bead or a brass button. What can be more manifest than that all this business of the embellishment of life is a mere manifestation of personal vanity-inborn lust of the eye and pride of life, shown by the savage according to his savageness, and by the civilized man according to his civilization ?" TOMES. "Yes; that sounds very fine. It harmonizes mankind, or womankind, by making them jealous of each other's success in what you call society. It makes women sneer at their dear friends' bonnets, and turn up their noses at their carpets and furniture; or what's worse, daub them-I mean the friends, not the furniture-with slimy, loathsome flattery. It mollifies them by making them envious and covetous. It sweetens life by creating heart-burnings about trifles. It gives a stimulus of variety by making all human creatures, especially women creatures, strive to dress exactly alike; to wit, in the fashion. It promotes high social enjoyments by making people give 'at homes,' at which they crowd their houses with a mob of acquaintances they don't care a button for, and who come only to show their dresses and get their supper, and who succeed only in getting their dresses torn off their backs, and in spilling their suppers in each other's laps." GREY. "That's the society into which you go, Tomes. I have nothing to do with such vulgar people. But, seriously: granted the truth of your caricatured description, what has the manifestation of vanity, envy, hatred, and vulgarity to do with that which is the mere occasion, as any thing else, even religion, might be the occasion of their exhibition? There is not the least connection in the world between a cultivated taste and the petty and contemptible vices which you have just catalogued with so much gusto." TOMES. "I'm not so sure of that. At any rate, they are very often found in company to GREY. "Certainly the love of the beautiful is common to all men. The savage does manifest this love according to his savageness. When a man rises in the scale of civilization his whole nature rises. You can't go up a ladder piece-gether." meal. The red man's smoky wigwam, the ne- GREY. "True; but not oftener than honesty gro's filthy mud hut, the degradation which both and meanness, kindness and clownishness, sininflict upon women, are no surer evidence of cerity and hardness of heart, hospitality and de bauchery, chastity and uncharitableness; and with no more connection with each other than these virtues and these vices have." Tomes hesitated a moment for a reply; and whether he could have made one which would have satisfied even himself will never be known. For while his host was speaking steps were heard in the hall, and before Tomes had thought what to say, the library door opened slowly, and a clear, soft voice said, "May we come in?" "Certainly," answered Grey, "here's your ancient enemy, Mr. Tomes; now my antagonist and prospective vanquisher." And Mrs. Grey entered, but not alone. She was followed by a fair, brown-haired beauty, Miss Laura Larches, whom Grey greeted with that mingling of deference, admiration, and courtesy with which your man of society tacitly recognizes the claims of an acknowledged belle. Tomes was presented to her, and bowed like a well-sweep. The ladies were attended by Mr. Carleton Key, an exceedingly exquisite person, and manifestly of " very soft society," whom Tomes set down at sight as an egregious ass. All took chairs but Mrs. Grey, who, indulging in her own house and among friends, a woman's liking of a low seat, sank down with a little feminine sigh of satisfaction upon a hassock, where her head and shoulders crowned a vast hemisphere of silk and crinoline. After customary salutations and inquiries, Grey turned to his wife: "How did the reception go off, Nelly? A brilliant affair, I suppose, as all Mrs. Moulton's affairs are ?" MRS. GREY. "Of course it was. A woman as clever as Mrs. Moulton is don't grow gray and keep beautiful during twenty-five years' devotion to society, with all material means and appliances of success, without having her pick of the whole town, and the tact to put her acquaintances to good use. She asked for you." GREY. "That of course, too; and was quite desolate that's the phrase, isn't it?-while you were in hearing, because I wasn't there; and when your back was turned was radiant with delight because some one else-Miss Larches or Mr. Key-was there." too. MRS. GREY. "You're an incorrigible creature, Stanford. I'm sure she likes you, and me, Must a woman be heartless because she's the fashion? And then you're never tired of admiring her dress, and her black eyes and gray curls.". MISS LARCHES. "I'm sure every body must love dear Mrs. Moulton. She is so elegant, has such charming manners, and is always so kind to every body." TOMES. "What, Miss Larches, to those who don't deserve kindness?" this retort from such a quarter-uttered, too, as it was, with a calm evenness of tone which was almost languid. GREY. 66 As to Mrs. Moulton she's no more heartless, I suppose, than any other woman, who is as heartless as she. But the best proof of her honesty that I know of, and of her good tastenext to her professed liking for me-is that she was the first woman, in our society at least, to let her curls grow gray in full sight of the world; though it is so becoming that I more than suspect that I must credit her taste much and her honesty nothing. As to you, Nelly, you are married, and so are no longer a magnet to attract young men to her rooms; you are poor, and can't entertain; and so I don't believe she really cares a hair-pin whether she ever sees you again, except in so far as you make one of a passably well-dressed and tolerable well-bred crowd of people that she likes to have around her." MRS. GREY. "Such is the gallantry of husbands! Laura, take warning. Over the door of the house that a woman enters as a married mistress is written, though she don't see it when she goes in, 'Who enters here leaves all hope— of compliments-behind." MR. KEY. "Quite a woman's idea of the Inferno, I should say." TOMES. "Why should a woman be complimented? Why should any one be complimented? Complimenting is fit amusement for little girls, who take pleasure in making believe. When any one compliments me it makes me angry." MRS. GREY. "That's the reason you are always so good-humored, Mr. Tomes, isn't it?— except when you're here." See Tomes was used to this from his friend's wife, who, he knew, respected him, and for whom he had a real regard; and so he took it gruffly but kindly. But Grey returned to the charge and broke out, "Nelly, I take back what I said just now. I said you were one of a crowd of passably well-dressed people. It isn't so. You are abominably ill dressed; and so-I beg Miss Larches's pardon-are all women nowadays. as you sit there with your gown all puffed out around you-you look like one of those Dutch toys that are human creature o' top and ball below, and as if Mr. Key would but give you a gentle touch you would bob back and forth for half an hour. There's not a fold or a line about you that has any of the grace of drapery; and not only so, but not a tint about you, except that orange ribbon, can be rightly called a color. To be passably well dressed you would have to begin by taking off your hoop." MRS. GREY. "Take off my hoop? Would you have me look like a fright? as slinky as if MISS LARCHES. "Why yes, Mr. Tomes, be- I had been drawn through a keyhole?" canse-because-" MR. KEY. "Because, Mr. Tomes, you know, as Hamlet says, 'Use every man according to his desert, and who should escape whipping?'" Mrs. Grey's brown eyes flashed merry malice at the astonishment with which Tomes received MISS LARCHES. "Take off her hoop!" MR. KEY. "Be seen without her hoop? Why, what a guy a woman would look without her hoop? I suppose they do take them off at certain times; but then they are not visible to the naked eye." TOMES. "Yes, Grey, why take off her hoop? I don't care, you know, to have hoops worn. But worn or not worn, what matter? A woman, I suppose, is not like a barrel, liable to fall into ruins if her hoops are taken off." GREY. "Yes, I suppose that a woman would really rather be seen with a hole in the heel of her stocking now than without a hoop. Yet ten years ago no woman wore a hoop; and did they then look like frights and guys? How was it with you, Nelly? About that time we were married; and perhaps you were a fright, but people generally didn't think so, whatever my private opinion-of which you knew nothingmight have been." MISS LARCHES. "But it wasn't the fashion then to wear hoops, Mr. Grey; and to be out of the fashion is to be a fright and a guy. The fashion is always pretty." GREY. "Is it, Miss Larches? I think that it is true that those who wear the fashions are generally pretty. But as to the fashions themselves, see here. This port-folio contains a collection of prints which shows the fashion of ladies' dresses in Italy, France, and England, for HORNED HEAD-DRESSES. |