As We Were Saying | Page 6

conforming
things to itself. By degrees one article after another in the lady's
wardrobe was laid aside, and another substituted for it that answered to
the demanding spirit of the hat. In a little while this plain lady was not
plain any more, but most gorgeously dressed, and possessed with the
desire to be in the height of the fashion. It came to this, that she had a
tea-gown made out of a window-curtain with a flamboyant pattern.
Solomon in all his glory would have been ashamed of himself in her
presence.
But this was not all. Her disposition, her ideas, her whole life, was
changed. She did not any more think of going about doing good, but of
amusing herself. She read nothing but stories in paper covers. In place
of being sedate and sober-minded, she was frivolous to excess; she
spent most of her time with women who liked to "frivol." She kept Lent
in the most expensive way, so as to make the impression upon

everybody that she was better than the extremest kind of Lent. From
liking the sedatest company she passed to liking the gayest society and
the most fashionable method of getting rid of her time. Nothing
whatever had happened to her, and she is now an ornament to society.
This story is not an invention; it is a leaf out of life. If this lady that
autumn day had bought a plain bonnet she would have continued on in
her humble, sensible way of living. Clearly it was the hat that made the
woman, and not the woman the hat. She had no preconception of it; it
simply happened to her, like any accident--as if she had fallen and
sprained her ankle. Some people may say that she had in her a
concealed propensity for frivolity; but the hat cannot escape the moral
responsibility of calling it out if it really existed. The power of things to
change and create character is well attested. Men live up to or live
down to their clothes, which have a great moral influence on manner,
and even on conduct. There was a man run down almost to
vagabondage, owing to his increasingly shabby clothing, and he was
only saved from becoming a moral and physical wreck by a remnant of
good- breeding in him that kept his worn boots well polished. In time
his boots brought up the rest of his apparel and set him on his feet again.
Then there is the well-known example of the honest clerk on a small
salary who was ruined by the gift of a repeating watch--an expensive
timepiece that required at least ten thousand a year to sustain it: he is
now in Canada.
Sometimes the influence of Things is good and sometimes it is bad. We
need a philosophy that shall tell us why it is one or the other, and fix
the responsibility where it belongs. It does no good, as people always
find out by reflex action, to kick an inanimate thing that has offended,
to smash a perverse watch with a hammer, to break a rocking-chair that
has a habit of tipping over backward. If Things are not actually
malicious, they seem to have a power of revenging themselves. We
ought to try to understand them better, and to be more aware of what
they can do to us. If the lady who bought the red hat could have known
the hidden nature of it, could have had a vision of herself as she was
transformed by it, she would as soon have taken a viper into her bosom
as have placed the red tempter on her head. Her whole previous life, her
feeling of the moment, show that it was not vanity that changed her, but
the inconsiderate association with a Thing that happened to strike her

fancy, and which seemed innocent. But no Thing is really powerless for
good or evil.

THE LOSS IN CIVILIZATION
Have we yet hit upon the right idea of civilization? The process which
has been going on ever since the world began seems to have a defect in
it; strength, vital power, somehow escapes. When you've got a man
thoroughly civilized you cannot do anything more with him. And it is
worth reflection what we should do, what could we spend our energies
on, and what would evoke them, we who are both civilized and
enlightened, if all nations were civilized and the earth were entirely
subdued. That is to say, are not barbarism and vast regions of
uncultivated land a necessity of healthful life on this globe? We do not
like to admit that this process has its cycles, that nations and men, like
trees and fruit, grow, ripen, and then decay. The world has always had a