THE MYSTERY OF CLOTHES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13396, 26 January 1907, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE MYSTERY OF CLOTHES.

BY TOIIUNtiA. i TitKsi', summer days those of us who have to go on working cast envious eyes on those who haven't, and ask earnestly why we. do it. swing that for a single shilling one can eat the lotus on the shimmering waters of Waitemata. Pcihaps it isn't quite as pleasant as it looks, but. it' it is only half or a quarter us pleasant it. will do. And while we civilised men march up and down our rainless Queen-street in clothes that are superfluous and linen that is as though it had just come from the washtub. envying the cool-seeming dress of women and wondering why we cannot let our white shoulders gleam through a muslin veil, we run across an occasional Fijian and envy his towel-costume most of all. j For we know, if we arc among the initiates, ; that a woman's dress is cooler in seeming j than in fact, and that she swelters still in j the corseting* which all our modern science j has not been able to abolish. While, the ; Fijian, child of the sun and walker through | the- tires, is about as cool and as comfort- j able as is possible in the summer time to ! those who would dodge the policeman. In fact, we common Britishers couldn't dodge the policeman if we tried to saunter down Queen-street in the Fijian towel. Perhaps this is because there is no justice on earth and because wo are a down-trodden race: or perhaps it is because from those who have much much is expected, on earth as well as in heaven : or perhaps it is hecause the instinct*: of mankind perceive that colour and clothing are closely related. The more coloured a man, or a woman either. the less clothing they need to be decent and respectable, so that the. King Billy of some Australian aboriginals is fully and completely dressed in a top-hat without a crown and the Chinese coolie stands, without shocking the sensitive, in a loin-cloth the size of a small handkerchief. The chief of the Fijians looks quite princely in a towel ; and a short summer jacket, which shows his i knees and the manly chest of him but imagine ' the shudder and the shock and toe wild I auger of Auckland if Sir Joseph Ward stepped jauntily from his railway carriage j thus attired. Now. why is this universal recoil on our white part from the display of our flush, when not another race in the world appeals to have the same impulse unless we make | a tine point and add the Semitic, which is , admittedly own cousin to the Aryan, and ; chiefly indicates its mental inferiority by refusing to believe in more than one Coil? ] The negro, the Hindoo—who has about as much Aryan in him as there is in the Mexi- j can, or less—the Chinese, the Japs, the Bed j Indians, and the rest of them are still able to walk the earth almost naked and quite unashamed. It is the Aryan-Semitic peo- ! ples who know they are naked and who hide among the trees if they are caught bathing. The first thing our missionaries are supposed to do is to impart the capacity for I being shocked by nakedness into the childlike minds of the heathen, this under the I peculiarly racial impression that nakedness j and viciousness go hand-in-hand. With us they would, of course. The white race would not last out a generation if it abandoned its clothes. But the Polynesians have lived for ages with a towel as full dress, and a ring in the nose as a sort of muiti, and would have lived on thus for ages more if the European hadn't come along. The mere fact of their persistence .shows that their average life in the past must have been what was "moral" in the true sense of , the term, for if there is one. thing true un- ' der heaven it is that vieo'slayeth and virtue ! keepeth alive. We. live to-day because, in spite of tailings, the moral dominated over the immoral, the virtuous over the vicious, in the lives of our ancestors. And man is the highest of the animals,—regarding him as an animal—because he is the must moral and the most virtuous. For nothing is more delusive than the idea that animals lack vices. They do lack many vices, for the simple reason that they have not the means to follow them—as drunkenness—but one has only to let cows into a field of green oats to see what would happen if they knew enough to make beer. " Animalism," "brutal,'' "beastial," and the Kindred terms are sound enough. Strong animals combine for self-defence, but they ruthlessly destroy the weak and the injured, and mankind could no more descend to their moral level than it could live on grass. We men are bad enough without making ourselves worse; just as we offend enough against the eternal canons without worrying over much concerning those which we have set up for ourselves. Coming back to clothes, the missionary evidently makes a mistake when he assumes that the customs of Christian England are necessarily to Ik- the customs of a Christianised Polynesia. But he doesn't make as big a mistake as the man who laughs at the missions and who assures us that clothes, like morals, are a mere matter of convention, meaning by convention not tilings like speech, but things like the trimming of a beard. The I'uropean clothing goes not only with the European skin bill with the European mind, and cannot be separated from them. No autocrat could permanently alter these things. No matter what force* he used and what temporary success he had. in a few years the European would he clothed and the coloured races be going naked. We' shall see this ill Japan. The .Mikado has decreed that the Japs shall be clothed, and that ladies and gentlemen shall not tub together on the front verandah. But is anybody foolish enough to think that the Mikado can alter the frame of mind which made public nakedness possible, merely- by suppressing the exhibition of racial characteristics that amazed European visitors'.' To white people colour is itself a clothing; of that no normal white man or woman can be in doubt. But why? Give a Fijian a towel and lie may stand before kings ; but the whit- man must be clothed more or less from head to heel to feel self-respect. He do, .n't do it because it is the most comfortable, hut, because it is a part of his whiteness to do it. even when it makes hint uncomfortable. And he has invariably associated clothing -has this Aryan-Semitic man—- with morality. This idea is in his sacred books, in his traditions, in his most fundamental conceptions. The "flesh" is a term for tie- vices of Life. They even prosecuted in Auckland the vendors of a picture that was devoted to unclothedness, and men have been gaoled in England for less. In a word, civilisation, as we understand it , is clothing. Whether in broadcloth or i in shoddy, in cotton or in silk, civilisation : from end to end is clothed. The very begj gar tries to cover himself. To be unclad is j lower than to be unfed. Whether we Europeans live in cold climates or in warm, this j is the rule, interwoven with our fundamental conceptions of public: ruder and of personal conduct. And why'.' Who can tell exactly why anything i- which is fundamental'' So that clothing to us is not a convention, but a principle, to which we adhere, 1111questioningly and under all circumstances. The Fijian may be more comfortable in the heat, but we only envy him without imitating ; and even the Fijian tends to imitate us, for is not clothing the sign and symbol of the higher race? And it may be that we. : are, the higher because the determination to ' be, clothed as well sis fed—possibly arising : under climatic conditions-litis driven the j rate to work and progress by an induce- ! ment which appealed to every unit and j could not be easily satisfied. ! In the warm summer weather, when the I balmy breath of sub-tropical was pours over ' the land, and when everything combines to - make us laze about and to make us wonder ! whv wo toil away for things that give us ' no pleasure, we. may have an inkling of the I perpetual frame of mind in which Polynesians and negroes exist, content to pluck the fruit from the trco and to sit in the shade. But it doesn't account for the whole I clothing problem, which is us much, a my- • stery to-day as it ever was.