CHAPTER V

RADIANCIES OF INDIVIDUALITY

I WANT to radiate individuality. I want to be myself and none other. If I see in others things to emulate, things that will more fully make me what I want and ought to be, then emulation becomes a joyful duty - the something in another becomes part of myself through my desire, my emulation, my longing to attain. Hence in the right seeking to be myself I seek also to be like all the good in others which appeals to me. Herein is no destruction of my individuality. It is a perfecting of it. I take what is my own, no matter where or how I find it.

It is so well known as to be trite that men and women are mere sheep. We follow our leaders. We are anything but individual. In religion, in medicine, in law, in speech, in dress, in amusements, in architecture, in literature, in food, in everything, custom and fashion dominate us.

I would radiate a healthy resistance to the dictates of fashion. Why should fashion ride roughshod over the wisdom of men and women? The hoop-skirt, the stove-pipe collar and hat, the

camel's hump of fifteen or twenty years ago that the ladies wore as an extra adornment, the chignon, and a thousand and one other foolish things that once domineeringly dared us to defy them have disappeared. Why should we ever have yielded to them? What is fashion, anyhow? She is a fickle damsel, generally proud of her money, whose good looks are often the result of powder and paint and chalk and rouge instead of good health, vigor, and love. She is a mere flirt, carried away for a few hours with anything as a whim to pass away the time; without heart, feeling, sensibility, brain, or knowledge. Her fads are more likely to be wrong than right, and when right are generally the result of a lapse into sensibility by relinquishing any pretense at thought into the hands of some one who can think for her. Fashion, a heartless, conscienceless, soulless jade whose friendship and favor are a curse, whose flatteries are hollow, insincere, and corrupting, and whose only use for any one or anything lasts merely so long as her own selfish pleasures are attained or desire for novelty satisfied.

Why let fashion dictate what we shall wear? Radiate your distrust of its judgment. Radiate your refusal to submit to its dictates. Radiate your full and calm determination, without argument, to live in your own way. If a certain "style" of dress, which is structural, honest, neat,

is suited to you to-day, it is suited to you to-morrow and for all time. Be yourself and wear that style regardless of the fluctuations of fashion. Why should fashion say that a man's overcoat this year shall fit him tightly and keep him warm, and next year fit him loosely and send him into the cold, through a storm, shivering and chilled? What sense, what manliness, what dignity, is there in allowing a "fashion-designer" to thus have the opportunity of ruining our health? Let us radiate our positive repudiation of such insane follies, of such sins against our bodies, and in our dress, our food, our social customs, be ourselves in a kindly, unselfish, unobtrusive manner.

Wherever fashion dictates in matters of dress, of personal custom, there you find at once a restricted and "provincial" people. For fashion compels adherence to her silly commands, hence picturesque individuality disappears. A few years ago the clever editor of the New York Journal wrote an editorial against men's wearing whiskers. One part of his argument was that the hairs were carriers of disease-germs, and that, therefore, a man with whiskers was dangerous and to be shunned. Thousands of the poor people of New York read and believed this man's preposterous screed, and were thus made unhappy and miserable, and by mental suggestion rendered more liable to the attacks of disease than they would

have been had these foolish words never been

penned.

It was fashion not a care for health that dictated those words. We Americans so love the intellectual conversation and edifying monologues of our barbers that we allow them to dictate to us whether we shall have hair on our cheeks or not, whether we shall have our necks shaved, and how much and whose "restorer we shall put upon our hair.

I use the barber here merely as a type. He by no means stands alone.

I am determined to radiate a quiet but forceful protest against having my life or that of my fellows dictated to, in purely personal matters, by any one, whether he be priest, doctor, lawyer, barber, or editor. Let each live his own life, within reasonable bounds, and let each expect every other to be himself. In nature there are no two things alike, yet fashion would have us all alike; and, it might be added, therefore, all foolish.

In seeking for the expression of yourself do not for one moment think it is necessary for you to think out something new, original, startling, or strange. That is not the idea at all. Your life may be yours- purely individualistic, and yet everything you do and say and think and feel be as old as the hills. The idea is this. No matter where you get the thoughts from that incite you

to action, make them your own; let them become a part of yourself, then your life will be yours indeed; an expression of your own soul, and not that imitation of another that Emerson so truthfully says is suicide.

But in the radiating of my own individuality I must be so filled with the true spirit of individuality that I shall in no way interfere with that of others. Too often men and women in seeking to be "individual" have seriously trespassed upon the rights, the joys, the comforts of others. This is a fundamental error. The first law of individualism is this: "What I claim for myself I thereby freely accord to all others." Note the word "thereby." In the very fact and act of claiming I thereby freely recognize to the utmost the right of every one else to claim the same right. There is no selfishness in individualism; there are no special" privileges in its exercise. It is the habit of a few to believe that they should have special" privileges accorded them. True individualism recognizes no such special rights. In taking we give. In claiming we avow the right of others to claim.

66

66

The trouble with mankind is that it has not learned that souls are individuals; that the diversities seen between plants, the differences that exist even between blades of grass, so that there are no two blades exactly alike, is but indicative of the