University of Virginia Library

III
Old-Clothes Sensations

People whom penury has never compelled in infancy or adolescence to wear other people's clothes have missed a valuable lesson in social sympathy. In our journey from the period when we first strutted thoughtlessly in our Cousin Charles's castoff coat on to the time when we resented its misfit, and thence to that latest and best day when we could bestow our own discarded jacket on poor little Cousin Billy, we have successively experienced all the gradations of soul between pauper and philanthropist. Most of us are fortunate enough to put away other people's clothes when we put away the rest of childhood's indignities; but our early experiences should make us thoughtful of those who have no such luck, who seem ordained from birth to be all the world's poor relations. In gift-clothes there is something peculiarly heart-searching both for giver and recipient.

This delicacy inherent in the present of castoff suit or frock is due perhaps to the subtle

clinging of the giver's self to the serge or silk. It is a strong man who feels that he is himself in another man's old coat. If an individuality is fine enough to be worth retaining, it is likely to be fine enough to disappear utterly beneath the weight of another man's shoulders upon one's own. Most of us would rather have our creeds chosen for us than our clothes. Most of us would rather select our own tatters than have another's cast-off splendors thrust upon us. It is no light achievement, the living up to and into other people's clothes. Clothes acquire so much personality from their first wearer,—adjust themselves to the swell of the chest, the quirk of the elbow, the hitch in the hip-joint,—that the first wearer always wears them, no matter how many times they may be given away. He is always felt to be inside, so that the second wearer's ego is constantly bruised by the pressure resulting from two gentlemen occupying the same waistcoat.

Middle children are to be pitied for being condemned to be constantly made over out of the luckier eldest's outgrown raiment. How can Tommy be sure he is Tommy, when he is always walking around in Johnny's shoes? Or Polly, grown to girlhood, ever find her own heart, when all her life it has beaten under Anna's pinafore?

The evil is still worse when the garments come from outside the family, for one may readily accept from blood-kin bounty which, bestowed by a stranger, would arouse a corroding resentment. This is because one can always revenge one's self on one's relatives for an abasement of gratitude by means of self-respecting kicks and pinches. A growing soul may safely wear his big brother's ulster, but no one else's; for there are germs in other people's clothes,—the big bad yellow bacilli of covetousness. People give you their old clothes because they have new ones, and this fact is hard to forgive.

There may, of course, exist mitigating circumstances that often serve to solace or remove this basic resentment. To receive gown or hat or boots direct from the donor is degrading, but in proportion as they come to us through a lengthening chain of transferring hands the indignity fades out, the previous wearer's personality becomes less insistent; until, when identification is an impossibility, we may even take pleasure in conjecturing who may have previously occupied our pockets, may even feel the pull of real friendliness toward the unknown heart that beat beneath the warm woolen bosom presented to us.

Further, the potential bitterness of the

recipient is dependent on the stage of his racial development and the color of his skin. The Ethiopian prefers old clothes to new. The black cook would rather have her mistress's cast-off frock than a new one, and the cook is therein canny. She trusts the correctness of the costume that her lady has chosen for herself, but distrusts the selection the lady might make for her maid. On assuming the white woman's clothes, the black woman feels that she succeeds also to the white woman's dignity. The duskier race stands at the same point of evolution with the child who falls upon the box of cast-off finery and who straightway struts about therein without thought of his own discarded independence.

I may be perceived to write from the point of view of one clothed in childhood out of the missionary box. Those first old clothes received were donned with gloating and glory; but later, in my teens,—that period so strangely composed for all of us out of spiritual shabbiness and spiritual splendor,— sensations toward the cast-off became uneasy, uncomfortable, at last unbearable. The sprouting personality resisted the impact of that other personality who had first worn my garments. I wanted raiment all my own, dully at first, then fiercely.

No one who has passed from a previous condition of servitude to the dignity of his own earnings will ever forget the pride of his first self-bought clothes. At last one is one's self and belongs not to another man's coat, or another woman's gown. It is a period of expansion, of pride: when one's clothes are altogether one's own, one's pauper days are done. But it is best for sympathy not to forget them, not only for the sake of the pauper, but for the sake of the plutocrat we are on the verge of becoming; for our sensations in regard to old clothes are about to enter a new phase; we are about to undergo the ordeal of being ourselves the donors of our own old clothes.

It was not alone for the new coat's intrinsic sake that we desired it; we coveted still more the experience of giving it away when we were done with it. There is no more soul-warming sensation than that of giving away something that you no longer want. The pain of a recipient's feelings on receiving a thing which you can afford to give away, but which he himself cannot afford to buy, is exactly balanced by your pride in presenting him with something that you can't use.

The best way to get rid of the pauper spirit is to pauperize some one else. This is cynical

philanthropy, but veracious psychology. It follows that the best way to restore a pauper's self-respect is to present him with some old clothes to give to some one still poorer; for clothes are, above all gifts, a supreme test of character. It was the custom of epics to represent the king as bestowing upon his guest-friends gifts of clothes, but they were never old clothes. If you could picture some Homeric monarch in the act of giving away his worn-out raiment, in that moment you would see his kingliness dwindle.

The man who can receive another man's old clothes without thereby losing his self-respect is fit to be a prince among paupers, but the man who can give another man his old clothes without wounding that man's self-respect is fit to be the king of all philanthropists.