Nevertheless, the intellectual preoccupation made its way, and people were willing to pay regard, up to a certain point, to Plato’s principle that the soul rather than the body is to be clothed: in other words they proclaimed a correlation between the colour of the petticoats and the state of the soul. Everybody knew that there are physical harmonies which hold absolutely; that sober tints suit the pale, dull colours people of bilious complexion, and bright tones faces inclined to ruddiness. But people rarely thought—they did not trouble to think—that there might be for souls a similar harmony, much loftier, of much greater importance, and much more necessary to observe; for the complexion may be improved by a touch of the paint-brush, while the soul must be kept as it is. M. Jules Lemaître, whose genius is thoroughly French and whose opinion it is always a pleasure to quote in matters of good sense, has in our own time this quaint idea: “Our fathers, who wore lace and feathers, coats red, blue, dove-coloured, apple-green, and soft-hued lilac, could not but feel more disposed to joy, seeing each other blooming like flower-beds. If fashion should some day make us walk the streets in purple silks, we should forthwith be rescued from doubt and despair.” That is philosophically true. It must be remembered that we cannot isolate ourselves; we are dependent in a high degree on the world around us. The inward joy we seek to create needs an external joy for its support; the sun, the blue sky, the luxuriance of flowers, the clearness of the air, the boundless gaiety and infinite cordiality of Nature quicken and penetrate us; a grey sky and a dull horizon will never kindle glowing reflections in our soul. It is needful and right that men, and above all women, should display an infectious joy and vitality also, that we should not have to puzzle out the real person under the tasteless guise of a vulgar fashion-plate, cut from a price list and flung over the shoulders. Everyone should make his dress a palpable expression of his life and joy, like the flowers and birds and fruits. The Catholic religion intuitively seized on this profound truth; it retained and developed, with the pageantry of its ceremonies, the gold-embroidered copes flashing with sombre brilliance, and all this red and white and blue the purpose of which is to make us forget that these celebrants singing as they move are men, and to represent them to us as the very flower of our ideas, as the essence of our tenderest prayers and affections. Of this admirable demand for the embellishment of life we have preserved only one melancholy symbol, mourning. Men, with their customary suits of solemn black, may be said to carry everywhere with them the idea of disenchantment, of the awful paltriness and the perpetual mournfulness of the soul: there is nothing of a man about them; they go about the streets like the scattered parts of one huge machine.