Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1915-09-27
OUR ENJOYMENT
OF DRESSING UP
We're Frankest About 1t in Child
hood, But the Fondness Lasts
Longer-It Only Proves That
the Worlds a Stage
BY WARREN BARTON BLAKE


WHO doesn't enjoy dressing up? or
w course, we are frankest about It in
childhood. The small boy joyfully sketches
black mustache with burnt cork when he
plays soldier and what little girl doesn't
revei in putting a long skirt, doing her
hair and giving tea party TO all her lady
friends each in her mothers second-bcst
short skirt?
Dressing up" is not, however, easily out
grown. Jean jacques Rousseau wore an
American costume with fur trimmings that
seems to have been highly becoming 1--WE
Judge by the old Prints; Tolstoi, Rousseaus
heir used the smoclx Of the Russian peasant.
Balzac wrote his best novels in the garb Of
a monk. Chateaubriand never weared of
clothes for clothes sake nor OF exotic touches.
Robert Louis Stevenson, who loathed
Chateaubriand, dotted on dinky little caps and
tight trousers and enjoyed making up for
amateur theatricals.
Making Faces in the Mirror
Pierre Lott, Chateaubriands literary grand
son and Stevensons rival travel writer, is
rumored to know something about powder
and rouge pot; yet who would deny him these
accessories. or the Persian costume he wears
in his country house at Rochefort-if in
deed, he likes Persia and paint? Latlns are
born actors; let that be the excuse Of every
Lott Latns are not so much afraid as
Anglo-Saxons are of being bit different"
or even bit ludicrous. Lott is said to sleep
in bedroom modelled on the chamber of a
Breton peasant, with checked cotton COW
erlet and a pair of wooden shoes under the
bed; nor do these eccentricities impair the
flavor of his exquisite prose. In Morocco,
Lott has delighted in Arab habiliments and
a burnoose; in his book about that country
he avows his weakness for "the fantasy Of
disguises." 1t is q harmless indulgence. II
Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI lost their
heads, It was not because they played at
mlllmaid and matchmaker.
This love of dressing up, which is one of
the bits of child-play which these so diff
ferent men of genius have carried with them
far beyond the age of childhood (but not be-
yond its sense of romantic wonder), is only
one of many bits Of evidence that all the
worlds stage and all the men and women
fond of acting. Most of the acting is harm
less Some of It is vanity-some merely a
kind of playful youthfulness of spirit. One
of my dearest friends loves to make faces in
the mirror. He writes clever short stories
(and sometimes gets them publishedD; he
has written wise editorials for a very
academic newspaper once edited by the
author of "Thanatopsis"; he has right TO
after his name by way of indicating all the
degrees awarded to him by an ancient uni
versity; yet he enjoys looking at himself in
the glass, arranging his features a little
otherwise than nature ever intended and
bidding you guess who it is he is interpreting,
Napoleon, or Theodore William Randolph
Hearst. Probably he could earn a living pos
ing for the movies my academic friend; GER
tainly he "gets" the grimace of those heroes
of romance, and no mistake. He enjoys II;
who, for that matter, doesn't naturally en-
Joy the drama? For that is what this max
ing faces is-the art of drama at its very
simplest.
So is dressing up" So is Mardi Gras
After all, acted drama is a mere matter of
dialogue plus disguises just as fiction is
descriptions plus (or minus) disguise
Charlotte Bronte," Mr. Chesterton writes
electrified the world by showing that an
infinitely older and more elemental truth
(than that conveyed in the novel of man
ners) could be conveyed by a novel in which
no person, good or bad, had any manners at
ALL Her work represents the first great as
sertion that the humdrum life of modern
civilization is a disguise as tawdry and de-
ceptive as the costume of bal masque.
She showed that abysses may exist inside
governess and eternities inside a manufac-
turer."
A Dramatist, Not the Devil
We are told that there are only seven plots
in nterature-or is it eleven? It doesn't mat
ter. Any one who reads the new fiction, any
one who goes to the theatre, knows there are
very few. But think how few plots there
would be without dressing and undressing!
Think how the absence Of clothing purify
ing but at the same time woefuly simplify
ing character. would reduce its literary varia-
tions to next to nothing at all! Instead Of
eleven plots, there would be only three or
four. The book OF Genesis makes the Ser
pent Indirectly guilty OF imposing clothes
upon our naturally virtuously naked an
cestors-that first family OF Eden from whom
the faithful trace their ultimate ascent
Ironic Anatole France, in his history OF mod
ern civilization that he calls Penguin
Island" makes the devil directly responsible
for giving women clothes to wear.
I don't think 1t was the devil think 1t
was some dramatist-some one who guessed
what fun 1t would be to children of all ages
TO be perpetually dressing up in front of a
long glass.