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Title: The Perfect Gentleman

Author: Ralph Bergengren

Release Date: November 15, 2007 [EBook #23481]

Language: English

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            _The_

      PERFECT GENTLEMAN


             BY

      RALPH BERGENGREN


       [Illustration]


 The Atlantic Monthly Press
           Boston




 COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, INC.


_The author gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to The Century Co.
for permission to reprint "Oh, Shining Shoes!"_




CONTENTS


 The Perfect Gentleman         1

 As a Man Dresses             14

 In the Chair                 28

 Oh, Shining Shoes!           43

 On Making Calls              55

 The Lier in Bed              67

 To Bore or Not to Bore       79

 Where Toils the Tailor       93

 Shaving Thoughts            106

 Oh, The Afternoon Tea!      122




THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN


Somewhere in the back of every man's mind there dwells a strange wistful
desire to be thought a Perfect Gentleman. And this is much to his
credit, for the Perfect Gentleman, as thus wistfully contemplated, is a
high ideal of human behavior, although, in the narrower but honest
admiration of many, he is also a Perfect Ass. Thus, indeed, he comes
down the centuries--a sort of Siamese Twins, each miraculously visible
only to its own admirers; a worthy personage proceeding at one end of
the connecting cartilage, and a popinjay prancing at the other. Emerson
was, and described, one twin when he wrote, 'The gentleman is a man of
truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his
behavior; not in any manner dependent or servile, either on persons, or
opinions, or possessions.' Walter Pater, had Leonardo painted a Perfect
Gentleman's portrait instead of a Perfect Lady's, might have described
the other: 'The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the
tea-table is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years women
had come to desire. His is the head upon which "all the ends of the
world have come," and the eyelids are a little weary. He is older than
the tea things among which he sits.' Many have admired, but few have
tried to imitate, the Perfect Gentleman of Emerson's definition; yet few
there are who have not felt the wistful desire for resemblance. But the
other is more objective: his clothes, his manners, and his habits are
easy to imitate.

Of this Perfect Gentleman in the eighteenth century I recently
discovered fossil remains in the _Gentleman's Pocket Library_ (Boston
and Philadelphia, 1794), from which any literary savant may restore the
original. All in one volume, the Library is a compilation for Perfect
Gentlemen in the shell, especially helpful with its chapter on the
'Principles of Politeness'; and many an honest but foolish youth went
about, I dare say, with this treasure distending his pocket, bravely
hoping to become a Perfect Gentleman by sheer diligence of spare-time
study. If by chance this earnest student met an acquaintance who had
recently become engaged, he would remember the 'distinguishing diction
that marks the man of fashion,' and would 'advance with warmth and
cheerfulness, and perhaps squeezing him by the hand' (oh, horror!)
'would say, "Believe me, my dear sir, I have scarce words to express the
joy I feel, upon your happy alliance with such and such a family,
etc."' Of which distinguishing diction, 'believe _me_' is now all that
is left.

If, however, he knew that the approaching victim had been lately
bereaved, he would 'advance slower, and with a peculiar composure of
voice and countenance, begin his compliments of condolence with, "I
hope, sir, you will do me the justice to be persuaded, that I am not
insensible to your unhappiness, that I take part in your distress, and
shall ever be affected when _you_ are so."'

In lighter mood this still imperfect Perfect Gentleman would never allow
himself to laugh, knowing, on the word of his constant pocket-companion,
that laughter is the 'sure sign of a weak mind, and the manner in which
low-bred men express their silly joy, at silly things, and they call it
being merry.' Better _always_, if necessary, the peculiar composure of
polite sensibility to the suffering of properly introduced
acquaintances. When he went out, he would be careful to 'walk well, wear
his hat well, move his head properly, and his arms gracefully'; and I
for one sympathize with the low-breds if they found him a merry
spectacle; when he went in, he would remember pertinently that 'a
well-bred man is known by his manner of sitting.' 'Easy in every
position,' say the Principles of Politeness, 'instead of lolling or
lounging as he sits, he leans with elegance, and by varying his
attitudes, shows that he has been used to good company.' Good company,
one judges, must have inclined to be rather acrobatic.

Now, in the seventeen-nineties there were doubtless purchasers for the
_Gentleman's Pocket Library_: the desire to become a Perfect Gentleman
(like this one) by home study evidently existed. But, although I am
probably the only person who has read that instructive book for a very
long time, it remains to-day the latest complete work which any young
man wishing to become a Perfect Gentleman can find to study. Is it
possible, I ask myself, that none but burglars any longer entertain
this ambition? I can hardly believe it. Yet the fact stands out that,
in an age truly remarkable for its opportunities for self-improvement,
there is nothing later than 1794 to which I can commend a crude but
determined inquirer. To my profound astonishment I find that the
Correspondence-School system offers no course; to my despair I search
the magazines for graphic illustration of an Obvious Society Leader
confiding to an Obvious Scrubwoman: 'Six months ago _my_ husband was no
more a Perfect Gentleman than _yours_, but one day I persuaded him to
_mark that coupon_, and all our social prominence and _eclat_ we owe to
that school.'

One may say, indeed, that here is something which cannot conceivably be
described as a job; but all the more does it seem, logically, that the
correspondence schools must be daily creating candidates for what
naturally would be a post-graduate course. One would imagine that a mere
announcement would be sufficient, and that from all the financial and
industrial centres of the country students would come flocking back to
college in the next mail.

    BE A PERFECT GENTLEMAN

    In the Bank--at the Board of Directors--putting
    through that New Railroad in Alaska--wherever you
    are and whatever you are doing to drag down the
    Big Money--wouldn't you feel more at ease if you
    _knew_ you were behaving like a Perfect Gentleman?

    We will teach YOU how.

Some fifty odd years ago Mr. George H. Calvert (whom I am pained to find
recorded in the _Dictionary of American Authors_ as one who 'published a
great number of volumes of verse that was never mistaken for poetry by
any reader') wrote a small book about gentlemen, fortunately in prose
and not meant for beginners, in which he cited Bayard, Sir Philip
Sidney, Charles Lamb, Brutus, St. Paul, and Socrates as notable
examples. Perfect Gentlemen all, as Emerson would agree, I question if
any of them ever gave a moment's thought to his manner of sitting; yet
any two, sitting together, would have recognized each other as Perfect
Gentlemen at once and thought no more about it.

These are the standard, true to Emerson's definition; and yet such
shining examples need not discourage the rest of us. The qualities that
made them gentlemen are not necessarily the qualities that made them
famous. One need not be as polished as Sidney, but one must not scratch.
One need not have a mind like Socrates: a gentleman may be reasonably
perfect,--and surely this is not asking too much,--with mind enough to
follow this essay. Brutus gained nothing as a gentleman by assisting at
the assassination of Caesar (who was no more a gentleman, by the way, in
Mr. Calvert's opinion, than was Mr. Calvert a poet in that of the
_Dictionary of Authors_).

As for Fame, it is quite sufficient--and this only out of gentlemanly
consideration for the convenience of others--for a Perfect Gentleman to
have his name printed in the Telephone Directory. And in this higher
definition I go so far as to think that the man is rare who is not
sometimes a Perfect Gentleman, and equally uncommon who never is
anything else. Adam I hail a Perfect Gentleman when, seeing what his
wife had done, he bit back the bitter words he might have said, and
then--he too--took a bite of the apple: but oh! how far he fell
immediately afterward, when he stammered his pitiable explanation that
the woman tempted him and he did eat! Bayard, Sir Philip Sidney, Charles
Lamb, St. Paul, or Socrates would have insisted, and stuck to it, that
_he bit it first_.

I have so far left out of consideration--as for that matter did the
author and editor of the _Pocket Library_ (not wishing to discourage
students)--a qualification essential to the Perfect Gentleman in the
eighteenth century. He must have had--what no book could give him--an
ancestor who knew how to sit. Men there were whose social status was
visibly signified by the abbreviation 'Gent.' appended to their
surnames. But already this was becoming a vermiform appendix, and the
nineteenth century did away with it. This handsome abbreviation created
an invidious distinction between citizens which democracy refused longer
to countenance; and, much as a Lenin would destroy the value of money in
Russia by printing countless rouble notes without financial backing, so
democracy destroyed the distinctive value of the word 'gentleman' by
applying it indiscriminately to the entire male population of the United
States.

The gentleman continues in various degrees of perfection. There is no
other name for him, but one hears it rarely; yet the shining virtue of
democratization is that it has produced a kind of tacit agreement with
Chaucer's Parson that 'to have pride in the gentrie of the bodie is
right gret folie; for oft-time the gentrie of the bodie benimeth the
gentrie of the soul; and also we be all of one fader and one moder.' And
although there are few men nowadays who would insist that they _are_
gentlemen, there is probably no man living in the United States who
would admit that he isn't.

And so I now see that my bright dream of a Correspondence-School
post-graduate course cannot be realized. No bank president, no
corporation director, electrical engineer, advertising expert,
architect, or other distinguished alumnus would confess himself no
gentleman by _marking that coupon_. The suggestion would be an insult,
were it affectionately made by the good old president of his Alma Mater
in a personal letter. A few decorative cards, to be hung up in the
office, might perhaps be printed and mailed at graduation.

       A bath _every_ day
       Is the Gentleman's way.

 Don't break the Ten Commandments--
          Moses meant YOU!

      Dress Well--Behave Better.

 A Perfect Gentleman has a Good Heart,
     a Good Head, a Good Wardrobe,
         and a Good Conscience.




AS A MAN DRESSES


At some time or other, I dare say, it is common experience for a man to
feel indignant at the necessity of dressing himself. He wakes in the
morning. Refreshed with sleep, ready and eager for his daily tasks and
pleasures, he is just about to leap out of bed when the thought
confronts him that he must put on his clothes. His leap is postponed
indefinitely, and he gets up with customary reluctance. One after
another, twelve articles--eleven, if two are joined in union one and
inseparable--must be buttoned, tied, laced, and possibly safety-pinned
to his person: a routine business, dull, wearisome with repetition. His
face and hands must be washed, his hair and teeth brushed: many, indeed,
will perform all over what Keats, thinking of the ocean eternally
washing the land, has called a 'priestlike task of pure ablution'; but
others, faithful to tradition and Saturday night, will dodge this as
wasteful. Downstairs in summer is his hat; in winter, his hat, his
overcoat, his muffler, and, if the weather compels, his galoshes and
perhaps his ear-muffs or ear-bobs. Last thing of all, the Perfect
Gentleman will put on his walking-stick; somewhere in this routine he
will have shaved and powdered, buckled his wrist-watch, and adjusted his
spats.

When we think of the shortness of life, and how, even so, we might
improve our minds by study between getting up and breakfast, dressing,
as educators are beginning to say of the long summer vacation, seems a
sheer 'wastage of education'; yet the plain truth is that we wouldn't
get up. Better, if we can, to _think_ while we dress, pausing to jot
down our worth-while thoughts on a handy tablet. Once, I remember,--and
perhaps the pleasant custom continues,--a lady might modestly express
her kindly feeling for a gentleman (and her shy, half-humorous
recognition of the difference between them) by giving him shaving-paper;
why not a somewhat similar tablet, to record his dressing-thoughts?

'Clothes,' so wrote Master Thomas Fuller,--and likely enough the idea
occurred to him some morning while getting into his hose and
doublet,--'ought to be our remembrancers of our lost innocency.' And so
they are; for Adam must have bounded from bed to breakfast with an
innocency that nowadays we can only envy.

Yet, in sober earnest, the first useful thing that ever this naked
fellow set his hand to was the making of his own apron. The world, as
we know and love it, began--your pardon, Mr. Kipling, but I cannot help
it--when

  Cross-legged our Father Adam sat and fastened them one by one,
  Till, leaf by leaf, with loving care he got his apron done;
  The first new suit the world had seen, and mightily pleased with it,
  Till the Devil chuckled behind the Tree, 'It's pretty, but will it fit?'

From that historic moment everything a man does has been preceded by
dressing, and almost immediately the process lost its convenient
simplicity. Not since Adam's apron has any complete garment, or
practical suit of clothes, been devised--except for sea-bathing--that a
busy man could slip on in the morning and off again at night. All our
indignation to the contrary, we prefer the complicated and difficult: we
enjoy our buttons; we are withheld only by our queer sex-pride from
wearing garments that button up in the back--indeed, on what we frankly
call our 'best clothes,' we _have the buttons_ though we _dare not
button_ with them. The one costume that a man could slip on at night and
off again in the morning has never, if he could help it, been worn in
general society, and is now outmoded by a pretty little coat and
pantaloons of soft material and becoming color. We come undressed; but
behold! thousands of years before we were born, it was decided that we
must be dressed as soon as possible afterward, and clothes were made for
us while it was yet in doubt whether we would be a little gentleman or a
little lady. And so a man's first clothes are cunningly fashioned to do
for either; worse still,--a crying indignity that, oh, thank Heaven, he
cannot remember in maturity,--he is forcibly valeted by a woman, very
likely young and attractive, to whom he has never been formally
introduced.

But with this nameless, speechless, and almost invertebrate thing that
he once was--this little kicking Maeterlinck (if I may so call it)
between the known and the unknown worlds--the mature self-dresser will
hardly concern himself. Rather, it may be, will he contemplate the
amazing revolution which, in hardly more than a quarter-century, has
reversed public opinion, and created a free nation which, no longer
regarding a best-dresser with fine democratic contempt, now seeks, with
fine democratic unanimity, to be a best-dresser itself. Or perhaps,
smiling, he will recall Dr. Jaeger, that brave and lonely spirit who
sought to persuade us that no other garment is so comfortable, so
hygienic, so convenient, and so becoming to all figures, as the union
suit--and that it should be worn externally, with certain modifications
to avoid arrest. His photograph, thus attired, is stamped on memory: a
sensible, bearded gentleman, inclining to stoutness, comfortably dressed
in eye-glasses and a modified union suit. And then, almost at the same
moment, the Clothing Industry, perhaps inspired by the doctor's courage
and informed by his failure, started the revolution, since crowned by
critical opinion, in a Sunday newspaper, that 'The American man,
considering him in all the classes that constitute American society, is
to-day the best-dressed, best-kept man in the world.'

Forty or fifty years ago no newspaper could plausibly have made that
statement, and, if it had, its office would probably have been wrecked
by a mob of insulted citizens; but the Clothing Industry knew us better
than Dr. Jaeger, better even than we knew ourselves. Its ideal picture
of a handsome, snappy young fellow, madly enjoying himself in
exquisitely fitting, ready-to-wear clothes, stirred imaginations that
had been cold and unresponsive to the doctor's photograph. We admired
the doctor for his courage, but we admired the handsome, snappy young
fellow for his looks; nay, more, we jumped in multitudes to the
conclusion, which has since been partly borne out, that ready-to-wear
clothes would make us all look like him. And so, in all the classes that
constitute American society (which I take to include everybody who wears
a collar), the art of dressing, formerly restricted to the few, became
popular with the many. Other important and necessary industries--the
hatters, the shoemakers, the shirtmakers, the cravatters, the hosiers,
even the makers of underwear--hurried out of hiding; and soon, whoever
had eyes to look could study that handsome, snappy young fellow in every
stage of costume,--for the soap-makers also saw their opportunity,--from
the bath up.

The tailor survived, thanks probably to the inevitable presence of
Doubting Thomas in any new movement; but he, too, has at last seen the
light. I read quite recently his announcement that in 1919 men's clothes
would be 'sprightly without conspicuousness; dashing without verging on
extremes; youthful in temperament and inspirational.' Some of us, it
appears, remain self-conscious and a little afraid to snap; and there
the tailor catches us with his cunningly conceived 'sprightly without
conspicuousness.' Unlike the _vers-libre_ poetess who would fain 'go
naked in the street and walk unclothed into people's parlors,'--leaving,
one imagines, an idle but deeply interested gathering on the
sidewalk,--we are timid about extremes. We wish to dash--but within
reasonable limits. Nor, without forcing the note, would we willingly
miss an opportunity to inspire others, or commit the affectation of
concealing a still youthful temperament.

A thought for the tablet: _As a man dresses, so he is._

Thirty or forty years ago there were born, and lived in a popular
magazine, two gentlemen-heroes whose perfect friendship was unmarred by
rivalry because, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they were of such
different but equally engaging types of manly beauty. I forget whether
they married sisters, but they live on in the memory as ornamental
symbols of a vanished past--a day when fiction-writers impressed it, on
their readers with every means at their command, that a hero was
well-dressed, well-washed, and well-groomed. Such details have become
unnecessary, and grumpy stand-patters no longer contemptuously mutter,
'Soap! Soap!' when a hero comes down to breakfast. Some of our older
politicians, to be sure, still wear a standard costume of Prince Albert
coat, pants (for so one must call them) that bag at the knee, and an
impersonal kind of black necktie, sleeping, I dare say, in what used
jocularly to be called a 'nightie'; but our younger leaders go
appropriately clad, to the eye, in exquisitely fitting, ready-to-wear
clothes. So, too, does the Correspondence-School graduate, rising like
an escaped balloon from his once precarious place among the untrained
workers to the comfortable security of general manager. Here and there,
an echo of the past, persists the pretence that men are superior to any
but practical considerations in respect to clothing; but if this were
so, I need hardly point out that more would dress like Dr. Jaeger, and
few waste precious moments fussing over the selection of prettily
colored ribbons to wear round their necks.

Fortunately we need no valets, and a democracy of best-dressers is
neither more nor less democratic than one of shirt-sleeves: the
important thing in both cases is that the great majority of citizens all
look alike. The alarm-clock awakens us, less politely than a James or
Joseph, but we need never suspect it of uncomplimentary mental
reservations, and neither its appetite nor its morals cause us
uneasiness. Fellow-citizens of Greek extraction maintain parlors where
we may sit, like so many statues on the Parthenon, while they polish our
shoes. In all large cities are quiet retreats where it is quite
conventional, and even _degage_, for the most Perfect Gentleman to wait
in what still remains to him, while an obliging fellow creature swiftly
presses his trousers; or, lacking this convenient retreat, there are
shrewd inventions that crease while we sleep. Hangers, simulating our
own breadth of shoulders, wear our coats and preserve their shape.
Wooden feet, simulating our own honest trotters, wear our shoes and keep
them from wrinkling. No valet could do more. And as for laying out our
clothes, has not the kind Clothing Industry provided handy manuals of
instruction? With their assistance any man can lay out the garments
proper to any function, be it a morning dig in the garden, a noon
wedding at the White House, or (if you can conceive it) a midnight
supper with Mrs. Carrie Nation.

And yet--sometimes, that indignation we feel at having to dress
ourselves in the morning, we feel again at having to undress ourselves
at night. Then indeed are our clothes a remembrancer of our lost
innocency. We think only of Adam going to bed. We forget that, properly
speaking, poor innocent Adam had no bed to go to. And we forget also
that in all the joys of Eden was none more innocent than ours when we
have just put on a new suit.




IN THE CHAIR


About once in so often a man must go to the barber for what, with
contemptuous brevity, is called a haircut. He must sit in a big chair, a
voluminous bib (prettily decorated with polka dots) tucked in round his
neck, and let another human being cut his hair for him. His head, with
all its internal mystery and wealth of thought, becomes for the time
being a mere poll, worth two dollars a year to the tax-assessor: an
irregularly shaped object, between a summer squash and a cantaloupe,
with too much hair on it, as very likely several friends have advised
him. His identity vanishes.

As a rule, the less he now says or thinks about his head, the better: he
has given it to the barber, and the barber will do as he pleases with
it. It is only when the man is little and is brought in by his mother,
that the job will be done according to instructions; and this is because
the man's mother is in a position to see the back of his head. Also
because the weakest woman under such circumstances has strong
convictions. When the man is older the barber will sometimes allow him
to see the haircut cleverly reflected in two mirrors; but not one man in
a thousand--nay, in ten thousand--would dare express himself as
dissatisfied. After all, what does he know of haircuts, he who is no
barber? Women feel differently; and I know of one man who, returning
home with a new haircut, was compelled to turn round again and take what
his wife called his 'poor' head to another barber by whom the haircut
was more happily finished. But that was exceptional. And it happened to
that man but once.

The very word 'haircut' is objectionable. It snips like the scissors.
Yet it describes the operation more honestly than the substitute 'trim,'
a euphemism that indicates a jaunty habit of dropping in frequently at
the barber's and so keeping the hair perpetually at just the length that
is most becoming. For most men, although the knowledge must be gathered
by keen, patient observation and never by honest confession, there is a
period, lasting about a week, when the length of their hair is
admirable. But it comes between haircuts. The haircut itself is never
satisfactory. If his hair was too long before (and on this point he has
the evidence of unprejudiced witnesses), it is too short now. It must
grow steadily--count on it for that!--until for a brief period it is
'just right,' aesthetically suited to the contour of his face and the cut
of his features, and beginning already imperceptibly to grow too long
again.

Soon this growth becomes visible, and the man begins to worry. 'I must
go to the barber,' he says in a harassed way. 'I must get a haircut.'
But the days pass. It is always to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.
When he goes, he goes suddenly.

There is something within us, probably our immortal soul, that postpones
a haircut; and yet in the end our immortal souls have little to do with
the actual process. It is impossible to conceive of one immortal soul
cutting another immortal soul's hair. My own soul, I am sure, has never
entered a barber's shop. It stops and waits for me at the portal.
Probably it converses, on subjects remote from our bodily
consciousness, with the immortal souls of barbers, patiently waiting
until the barbers finish their morning's work and come out to lunch.

Even during the haircut our hair is still growing, never stopping, never
at rest, never in a hurry: it grows while we sleep, as was proved by Rip
Van Winkle. And yet perhaps sometimes it is in a hurry; perhaps that is
why it falls out. In rare cases the contagion of speed spreads; the last
hair hurries after all the others; the man is emancipated from
dependence on barbers. I know a barber who is in this independent
condition himself (for the barber can no more cut his own hair than the
rest of us) and yet sells his customers a preparation warranted to keep
them from attaining it: a seeming anomaly which can be explained only on
the ground that business is business. To escape the haircut one must be
quite without hair that one cannot see and reach; and herein possibly is
the reason for a fashion which has often perplexed students of the
Norman Conquest. The Norman soldiery wore no hair on the backs of their
heads; and each brave fellow could sit down in front of his polished
shield and cut his own hair without much trouble. But the scheme had a
weakness; the back of the head had to be shaved; and the fashion
doubtless went out because, after all, nothing was gained by it. One
simply turned over on one's face in the barber's chair instead of
sitting up straight.

Fortunately we begin having a haircut when we are too young to think,
and when also the process is sugar-coated by the knowledge that we are
losing our curls. Then habit accustoms us to it. Yet it is significant
that men of refinement seek the barber in secluded places, basements of
hotels for choice, where they can be seen only by barbers and by other
refined men having or about to have haircuts; and that men of less
refinement submit to the operation where every passer-by can stare in
and see them, bibs round their necks and their shorn locks lying in
pathetic little heaps on the floor. There is a barber's shop of this
kind in Boston where one of the barbers, having no head to play with,
plays on a cornet, doubtless to the further distress of his immortal
soul peeping in through the window. But this is unusual even in the city
that is known far and wide as the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I remember a barber--he was the only one available in a small town--who
cut my left ear. The deed distressed him, and he told me a story. It was
a pretty little cut, he said,--filling it with alum,--and reminded him
of another gentleman whose left ear he had nipped in identically the
same place. He had done his best with alum and apology, as he was now
doing. Two months later the gentleman came in again. 'And by golly!'
said the barber, with a kind of wonder at his own cleverness, 'if I
didn't nip him again in just the same place!'

A man can shave himself. The Armless Wonder does it in the Dime Museum.
Byron did it, and composed poetry during the operation; although, as I
have recently seen scientifically explained, the facility of composition
was not due to the act of shaving but to the normal activity of the
human mind at that time in the morning. Here, therefore, a man can
refuse the offices of the barber. If he wishes to make one of a
half-dozen apparently inanimate figures, their faces covered with soap,
and their noses used as convenient handles to turn first one cheek and
then the other--that is his own lookout. But human ingenuity has yet to
invent a 'safety barber's shears.' It has tried. A near genius once
invented an apparatus--a kind of helmet with multitudinous little
scissors inside it--which he hopefully believed would solve the problem;
but what became of him and his invention I have not heard. Perhaps he
tried it himself and slunk, defeated, into a deeper obscurity. Perhaps
he committed suicide; for one can easily imagine that a man who thought
he had found a way to cut his own hair and then found that he hadn't,
would be thrown into a suicidal depression. There is the possibility
that he succeeded in cutting his own hair, and was immediately 'put
away,' by his sensitive family where nobody could see him but the
hardened attendants. The important fact is that the invention never got
on the market. Until some other investigator succeeds to more practical
purpose, the rest of us must go periodically to the barber. We must put
on the bib--

Here, however, there is at least an opportunity of selection. There are
bibs with arms, and bibs without arms. And there is a certain amount of
satisfaction in being able to see our own hands, carefully holding the
newspaper or periodical wherewith we pretend that we are still
intelligent human beings. And here again are distinctions. The patrons
of my own favored barber's shop have arms to their bibs and pretend to
be deeply interested in the _Illustrated London News_. The patrons of
the barber's shop where I lost part of my ear--I cannot see the place,
but those whom I take into my confidence tell me that it has long since
grown again--had no sleeves to their bibs, but nevertheless managed
awkwardly to hold the _Police Gazette_. And this opportunity to hold the
_Police Gazette_ without attracting attention becomes a pleasant feature
of this type of barber's shop: I, for example, found it easier--until my
ear was cut--to forget my position in the examination of this journal
than in the examination of the _Illustrated London News_. The pictures,
strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, but
there is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is always
wisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest. Otherwise
you may get to looking in the mirror.

Do not do that.

For one thing, there is the impulse to cry out, 'Stop! Stop! Don't cut
it all off!

  'Oh, barber, spare that hair!
    Leave some upon my brow!
  For months it's sheltered me!
    And I'll protect it now!

'Oh, please! P-l-e-a-s-e!--'

These exclamations annoy a barber, rouse a demon of fury in him. He
reaches for a machine called 'clippers.' Tell him how to cut hair, will
you! A little more and he'll shave your head--and not only half-way
either, like the Norman soldiery at the time of the Conquest! Even if
you are able to restrain this impulse, clenching your bib in your hands
and perhaps dropping or tearing the _Illustrated London News_, the
mirror gives you strange, morbid reflections. You recognize your face,
but your head seems somehow separate, balanced on a kind of polka-dotted
mountain with two hands holding the _Illustrated London News_. You are
afraid momentarily that the barber will lift it off and go away with it.

Then is the time to read furiously the weekly contribution of G. K.
Chesterton. But your mind reverts to a story you have been reading about
how the Tulululu islanders, a savage but ingenious people, preserve the
heads of their enemies so that the faces are much smaller but otherwise
quite recognizable. You find yourself looking keenly at the barber to
discover any possible trace of Tulululu ancestry.

And what is he going to get now? A _kris_? No, a paint-brush. Is he
going to paint you? And if so--what color? The question of color
becomes strangely important, as if it made any real difference. Green?
Red? Purple? Blue? No, he uses the brush dry, tickling your forehead,
tickling your ears, tickling your nose, tickling you under the chin and
down the back of your neck. After the serious business of the haircut, a
barber must have some relaxation.

There is one point on which you are independent: you will not have the
bay rum; you are a teetotaller. You say so in a weak voice which
nevertheless has some adamantine quality that impresses him. He humors
you; or perhaps your preference appeals to his sense of business
economy.

He takes off your bib.

From a row of chairs a man leaps to his feet, anxious to give _his_ head
to the barber. A boy hastily sweeps up the hair that was yours--already
as remote from you as if it had belonged to the man who is always
waiting, and whose name is Next. Oh, it is horrible--horrible--horrible!




OH, SHINING SHOES!


In a democracy it is fitting that a man should sit on a throne to have
his shoes polished, or, to use a brighter, gayer word, shined. We are
all kings, and this happy conceit of popular government is nicely
symbolized by being, for these shining moments, so many kings together,
each on his similar throne and with a slave at his feet. The democratic
idea suffers a little from the difficulty of realizing that the slave is
also a king, yet gains a little from the fair custom of the livelier
monarchs of turning from left foot to right and from right to left, so
that, within human limits, neither shoe shall be undemocratically shined
first.

Nor is it uncommon for the kings on the thrones to be symbolically and
inexpensively served by yet other sovereign servants. Newspapers in
hand, they receive the reports of their lord high chancellors, digest
the social gossip of their realm, review its crimes, politics,
discoveries, and inventions, and are entertained by their jesters, who,
I have it on the authority of a current advertisement, all
democratically smoke the same kind of tobacco. 'You know 'em all, the
great fun-makers of the daily press, agile-brained and nimble-witted,
creators of world-famed characters who put laughter into life. Such
live, virile humans as they _must_ have a live, virile pipe-smoke.'
There are, to be sure, some who find in this agile-brained and
nimble-witted mirth an element of profound melancholy; it seems often a
debased coin of humor, which rings false on the counter of intelligence;
yet even at its worst it is far better than many of the waggeries that
once stirred laughter in mediaeval monarchs. The thought renders them
bearable, these live, virile humans, who only a few centuries ago would
have been too handicapped by their refinement to compete successfully
with contemporary humorists.

But there are a good many of us, possessors of patience, self-control,
and a sponge in a bottle, who rarely enjoy this royal prerogative. We
shine our own shoes. Alone, and, if one may argue from the particular to
the general, simply dressed in the intermediate costume, more or less
becoming, that is between getting up and going out, we wear a shoe on
our left hand, and with the other manipulate the helpful sponge.
Sometimes, too anxious, it polka-dots our white garments, sometimes the
floor; it is safe only in the bottle, and the wisest shiner will perhaps
approach the job as an Adamite, bestriding, like a colossus, a
wide-spread newspaper, and taking a bath afterward. Or it may be that
instead of the bottle we have a little tin box, wedded to its
cover,--how often have we not exclaimed between clenched teeth, 'What
man hath joined together man can pull asunder!'--and containing a kind
of black mud, which we apply with an unfortunate rag or with a brush
appropriately called the 'dauber.' Having daubed, we polish, breathing
our precious breath on the luminous surface for even greater luminosity.
The time is passing when we performed this task of pure lustration, as
Keats might have called it, in the cellar or the back hall, more fully,
but not completely, dressed, coatless, our waistcoats rakishly
unbuttoned or vulgarly upstairs, our innocent trousers hanging on their
gallowses, our shoes on our feet, and our physical activity not
altogether unlike that demanded by a home-exerciser to reduce the
abdomen. Men of girth have been advised to saw wood; I wonder that they
never have been advised to shine their own shoes--twenty-five times in
the morning and twenty-five times just before going to bed.

My own observation, although not continuous enough to have scientific
value, leads me to think that stout men are the more inveterate patrons
of the shoe-blacking parlor,--Caesar should have run one,--and that the
present popularity of the sponge in a bottle may derive from superfluous
girth. Invented as a dainty toilet accessory for women, and at first
regarded by men as effeminate, it is easy to see how insidiously the
sponge in a bottle would have attracted a stout husband accustomed to
shine his own shoes in the earlier contortionist manner. By degrees,
first one stout husband and then another, men took to the bottle; the
curse of effeminacy was lifted; the habit grew on men of all sizes. It
was not a perfect method,--it blacked too many other things besides
shoes, and provided an undesirable plaything for baby,--but it was a
step forward. There was a refinement, a _je ne sais quoi_, an 'easier
way,' about this sponge in a bottle; and, perhaps more than all, a
delusive promise that the stuff would dry shiny without friction, which
appealed to the imagination.

Then began to disappear a household familiar--that upholstered,
deceptive, utilitarian hassock kind of thing which, when opened,
revealed an iron foot-rest, a box of blacking,--I will not _say_ how
some moistened that blacking, but you and I, gentle reader, brought
water in a crystal glass from the kitchen,--and an ingenious tool which
combined the offices of dauber and shiner, so that one never knew how to
put it away right side up. This tool still exists, an honest, good-sized
brush carrying a round baby brush pickaback; and I dare say an
occasional old-fashioned gentleman shines his shoes with it; but in the
broader sense of that pernicious and descriptive phrase it is no longer
used 'by the best people.' Of late, I am told by shopkeepers, the tin
box with the pervicacious cover is becoming popular; but I remain true
to my sponge in a bottle: for, unlike the leopard, I am able to change
my spots.

Looking along the ages from the vantage of a throne in the shoe-blacking
parlor, it is a matter of pleased wonder to observe what the mind has
found to do with the feet; nor is the late invention of shoe-polish
(hardly earlier than the Declaration of Independence) the least
surprising item. For the greater part of his journey man has gone about
his businesses in unshined footwear, beginning, it would appear, with a
pair of foot-bags, or foot-purses, each containing a valuable foot, and
tied round the ankle. Thus we see him, far down the vista of time, a
tiny figure stopping on his way to tie up his shoe-strings. Captivated
with form and color, he exhausted his invention in shapes and materials
before ever he thought of polish: he cut his toes square; he cut his
toes so long and pointed that he must needs tie them to his knee to keep
from falling over them; he wore soles without uppers,--alas! poor devil,
how often in all ages has he approximated wearing uppers without
soles!--and he went in for top-boots splendidly belegged and
coquettishly beautified with what, had he been a lady, he might have
described as an insertion of lace. At last came the boot-blacking
parlor, late nineteenth century, commercial, practical, convenient, and
an important factor in civic aesthetics. Not that the parlor is
beautiful in itself. It is a cave without architectural pretensions, but
it accomplishes unwittingly an important mission: it removes from public
view the man who is having his shoes shined.

You know him, as the advertisement says of the live, virile humans who
_must_ have the live, virile pipe-smoke; but happily you know him
nowadays chiefly by effort of memory. Yet only a little while ago
kindly, well-intentioned men thought nothing of having their shoes
shined in the full glare of the sun. The man having his shoes shined was
a common spectacle. He sat or stood where anybody might see him, almost
as immobile as a cigar-store Indian and much less decorative, with a
peripatetic shoeblack busy at his feet. His standing attitude was a
little like Washington crossing the Delaware; and when he sat down, he
was not wholly unlike the picture of Jupiter in Mr. Bulfinch's
well-known _Age of Fable_. He had his shoes shined on the sidewalk,
congesting traffic; he had them shined in the park, with the birds
singing; wherever he had them shined, he was as lacking in
self-consciousness as a baby sucking its thumb. Peripatetic shoeblacks
pursued pedestrians, and no sensitive gentleman was safe from them
merely because he had carefully and well shined his own shoes before he
came out. But how rarely nowadays do we see this peripatetic shoeblack!
Soon he will be as extinct as the buffalo, and the shoe-blacking parlor
is his Buffalo Bill.

In the shoe-blacking parlor we are all tarred with the same brush, all
daubed with the same dauber; we have nothing, as the rather enigmatical
phrase goes, _on_ one another. Indeed, we hardly look at one another,
and are as remote as strangers sitting side by side in a theatre.
Individually, in a steady, subconscious way, I think we are all
wondering how we are going to get down when the time comes. One will
hop, like a great sparrow; another will turn round and descend backward;
another will come down with an absent-minded little wave of the foot, as
if he were quite used to having his shoes shined and already thinking of
more serious business; another--but this is sheer nervousness and lack
of _savoir-faire_--will step off desperately, as if into an abyss, and
come down with a thump. Sometimes, but rarely, a man will fall off. It
is a throne--and perhaps this is true of all thrones--from which no
altogether self-satisfactory descent is possible; and we all know it,
sitting behind our newspapers, or staring down on decadent Greece
shining at our feet, or examining with curious, furtive glances those
calendars the feminine beauty of which seems peculiar to shoe-blacking
parlors, and has sometimes led us to wonder whether the late Mr.
Comstock ever had his shoes shined.

And now, behold! the slave-king at my feet has found a long, narrow
strip of linen, not, I fear, antiseptic, but otherwise suggestive of a
preparedness course in first aid to the injured. He breathes on my shoes
(O unhygienic shoeblack!), dulling them to make them brighter with his
strip of linen. It is my notice to abdicate; he turns down the bottoms
of my trousers. I do not know how I get down from the throne.




ON MAKING CALLS


I know a boy who dislikes to make calls. Making a call, he says, is
'just sitting on a chair.'

I have had the same feeling, although I had never defined it so nicely.
One 'just sits on a chair'--precariously, yet with an odd sense of
unhappy security, of having grown to and become part of that chair, as
if one dreaded to fall off, yet strongly suspected that any real effort
to get up and go away would bring the chair up and away with him. He is,
so to speak, like a barnacle on a rock in an ocean of conversation. He
may exhibit unbarnacle-like activity, cross and uncross his legs, fold
and unfold his arms, twiddle his useful fingers, incline his tired head
this way and that to relieve the strain on his neck, assume (like an
actor) expressions of interest, amusement, surprise, pleasure, or what
not. He may even speak or laugh. But he remains sitting on his chair. He
is more and more certain that he cannot get up.

He is unlike the bottoms of his own trousers. Calmly, quietly, and by
imperceptible degrees _they_ get up. Higher and higher they ascend
kneeward; they have an ambition to achieve the waist. Every little while
he must unostentatiously, and with an easy, careless, indifferent,
well-bred, and even _blase_ gesture, manage to pull them down.

I am referring, you understand, to the mature, married gentleman.
Between boyhood and maturity there is a period (without which there
would be fewer marriages, and perhaps none at all) when a call is a
personal adventure, and it often happens that the recipient of the
call, rather than the caller himself, fears that somehow or other he and
his chair have grown together. But my boy friend, as I think you will
agree when you consider his situation, does not, strictly speaking,
call: he is taken to call. And just so is it with the average mature,
married gentleman; the chief difference--and even this does not
invariably hold good--is that he dresses himself. He has become part and
parcel (particularly parcel) of a wise and necessary division of life in
which the social end is taken over by a feminine partner. She is the
expert. She knows when and where to call, what to say, and when to go
home. Married, a gentleman has no further responsibilities in this
business--except to come cheerfully and sit on his chair without
wriggling. Sometimes, indeed, he takes a pleasure in it, but that is
only when he has momentarily forgotten that he is making a call. These
are his rewarding moments; and then, the first thing he knows, somebody
is 'making signs' that it is time to go home!

The wise man, noticing these 'signs,' comes home. He stands not upon the
order of his coming, but comes at once.

A call, says Herbert Spencer, in his _Principles of Sociology_, is
'evidently a remote sequence of that system under which a subordinate
ruler had from time to time to show loyalty to a chief ruler by
presenting himself to do homage.' The idea is plausible: was it not for
this very reason that Cleopatra galleyed down the Cydnus to call on
Antony,--a call that would probably have had a different effect on
history if the lady had brought a husband,--and Sheba cameled across the
desert to call on Solomon? The creditor character of the visitation
survives in the common expression 'paying a call.' In both these cases,
however, the calls took on a lighter and brighter aspect, a more
reciprocally admiring and well-affected intimacy, than was strictly
necessary to an act of political homage. One is, after all, human; and
the absence of marital partners, whose presence is always a little
subduing, must be taken into consideration. 'But Solomon,' you say,
'Solomon?' Sir and madam, I rise to your question. In such a situation a
man with seven hundred wives is as good as a bachelor; and I think the
fact that Solomon had seven hundred wives proves it.

Later the Feudal System provided natural scope for innumerable calls of
this nature; visits, as we should now term them, because it was
customary for the callers to bring their nighties--or would have been
if the callers had had any. The Dark Ages, curiously enough, lacked this
garment of the dark. But it was only after the Feudal Period that the
call, as we now know and practise it, became a social custom; and even
to this day feudalism, in an attenuated form, rules society, and the
call is often enough an act of homage to the superior social chief. One
might argue (except for the fact that Sheba _gave_ as well as exhibited
her treasurer to Solomon) that Mrs. Jones is but following historic
precedent when she brings and exhibits Mr. Jones to Mrs. Smith. Or,
again, it might be pointed out that both Cleopatra and Sheba _brought
their slaves_. There is, apparently, more than one sequence (as Mr.
Spencer would say), but there is also a wide divergence from original
type. Only partly and occasionally an act of homage, the call has
become, broadly speaking, a recognition of exact social equality, as if
the round, dignified American cheese in Grocer Brown's ice-box should
receive and return a call from the round, dignified American cheese in
Grocer Green's ice-box.

And it has become divisible into as many varieties as Mr. Heinz's
pickles.--The _call friendly_ ('Let us go and call on the Smiths: I'd
like to see them'); the _call compulsory_ ('We really _must_ make that
call on the Smiths'); the _call curious_ ('I wonder if it's so, what I
heard yesterday about the Smiths'); the _call convenient_ ('As we
haven't anything better to do this evening, we might call on the
Smiths'); the _call proud_ ('Suppose we get out the new motor, and run
round to the Smiths'); and so forth, and so forth. But, however we look
at it, the call is dependent upon feminine initiative. Our mature
married gentleman, unless he has had already a call to the ministry, has
no call, socially speaking, to make calls. It is his wife's business. As
British soldiers have grimly sung on their way to battle, 'He's there
because he's there, because he's there, because he's there.' But it is
his plain duty to _sit on his chair_. I do not hold it legitimate in him
to 'sneak off' with Mr. Smith--and smoke.

Fortunately, however, once he is there, little else is expected of
him--and nothing that a man should not be willing to do for his wife. A
smile, an attentive manner, the general effect of having combed his hair
and washed behind his ears, a word now and then to show that he is awake
(I am assuming that he controls the tendency to wriggle)--and no more is
needed. He is a lay figure, but not necessarily a lay figure of speech.

Unless a man who is taken to call is of an abnormally lively
conversational habit, quick to think of something that may pass
for a contribution to current thought, and even quicker to get it
out, he had best accept his position as merely decorative, and try
to be as decorative as possible. He should be so quick that the first
words of his sentence have leaped into life before he is himself
aware of what is to come hurrying after them; he may be so slow
that the only sentence he has is still painfully climbing to the
surface long after the proper time for its appearance has passed
and been forgotten. Swallow it, my dear sir, swallow it. Silence,
accompanied by a wise, appreciative glance of the eye, is better;
for a man who has mastered the art of the wise look does his wife
credit, and is taken home from a call with his faculties unimpaired
and his self-respect undiminished: he is the same man as when he was
taken out. But not so the man who starts, hesitates, and stops, as if
he actually said, 'Hold-on-there-I-'ve-got-a-fine-idea--but--er--on
second thought--er--I--er--that is--I guess--er--it isn't--worth hearing.'

Such a man, I say, adds little to the pleasure of himself or the
company; he attracts attention only to disappoint it: and others are
kind as well as sensible to ignore him. He should have kept on rapidly
and developed his fine idea to the bitter end. Nor is it wise to attempt
to shine, to dazzle, to surprise with a clever epigram, thoughtfully
composed and tested by imaginary utterance before an imaginary charmed
circle while dressing; for nothing so diminishes confidence in an
epigram as successive failures to get it into circulation. In calling,
one must jump on the train of thought as it speeds by a way station; and
there is no happy mean between jumping on a passing train and standing
still on the platform--except, as I have suggested, a pleasant wave of
the hand as the train passes.

'There are not many situations,' said Dr. Johnson, 'more incessantly
uneasy than that in which the man is placed who is watching an
opportunity to speak, without courage to take it when offered, and who,
though he resolves to give a specimen of his abilities, always finds
some reason or other for delaying to the next minute.'

I know that resolve; and yet how often have I, too, failed at the
crucial moment to give the hoped-for specimen of my abilities! 'Not
yet,' I have said to myself, 'not yet. The time is not ripe.' And so I
have waited, incessantly uneasy,--as Dr. Johnson well puts it,--but
always finding some reason or other to postpone the fireworks. I was
beset by a kind of gross selfishness--an unwillingness to give _anybody_
a specimen of my abilities. Let them chatter! Little do they guess--and
never will they know--the abilities sitting on this chair! Give _them_ a
specimen! Yet I must confess also that my specimen seemed somehow
isolated and apart from my environment. It was all right in itself, but
it needed a setting; it was like a button without a coat, like an eye
without a face, like a kiss without a companion.




THE LIER IN BED


If I had to get on with but one article of furniture, I think I would
choose a bed. One could if necessary sit, eat, read, and write in the
bed. In past time it has been a social centre: the hostess received in
it, the guests sat on benches, and the most distinguished visitor sat on
the foot of the bed. It combines the uses of all the other articles in
the '$198 de luxe special 4-room outfit' that I have seen advertised for
the benefit of any newly married couple with twenty dollars of their own
for the first payment. Very few houses, if any, nowadays are without
furniture that nobody uses, chairs that nobody ever sits on, books that
nobody ever reads, ornaments that nobody ever wants, pictures that
nobody ever looks at; an accumulation of unessential objects that does
credit chiefly to the activity of manufacturers and merchants catering
to our modern lust for unnecessary expenditure. Not so many centuries
ago one or two books made quite a respectable library; dining-room
tables were real banqueting boards laid on trestles and taken away after
the banquet; one bench might well serve several Perfect Gentlemen to sit
upon; and a chair of his own was the baron's privilege. Today the $198
de luxe special 4-room outfit would feel naked and ashamed without its
'1 Pedestal' and '1 Piece of Statuary.' Yet what on earth does a happy
couple, bravely starting life with twenty dollars, want of a pedestal
and a piece of statuary? And I notice also that the outfit--'a complete
home,' says the description--makes no provision for a kitchen; but
perhaps they are no longer de luxe.

It is impossible, at this time, to recover with complete certainty the
antiquity of the bed. We may presume that the Neanderthal man had a wife
(as wives were then understood) and maintained a kind of housekeeping
that may have gone no further than pawing some leaves together to sleep
on; but this probably was a late development. Earlier we may imagine the
wind blowing the autumn leaves together and a Neanderthal man lying down
by chance on the pile. He found it pleasant, and, for a few thousand
years, went out of his way to find piles of leaves to lie down on, until
one day he hit upon the bright idea of piling the leaves together
himself. Then for the first time a man had a bed. His sleep was
localized; his pile of leaves, brought together by his own sedulous
hands, became property. Monogamy was encouraged, and the idea of home
came into being. Personally I have no doubt whatever that the man who
made the first bed was so charmed with it that the practice of lying in
bed in the morning began immediately; and it is probably a conservative
statement that the later Pliocene era saw the custom well developed.

One wonders what the Neanderthal man would have thought of a de luxe
4-room outfit, or complete home, for $198.

Even to-day, however, there are many fortunate persons who are never
awakened by an alarm-clock--that watchman's rattle, as it were, of
Policeman Day. The invention is comparatively recent. Without trying to
uncover the identity of the inventor, and thus adding one more to the
Who's Who of Pernicious Persons, we may assume that it belongs naturally
to the age of small and cheap clocks which dawned only in the
nineteenth century. Some desire for it existed earlier. The learned Mrs.
Carter, said Dr. Johnson, 'at a time when she was eager in study, did
not awake as early as she wished, and she therefore had a contrivance
that, at a certain hour, her chamber light should burn a string to which
a heavy weight was suspended, which then fell with a sudden strong
noise; this roused her from her sleep, and then she had no difficulty in
getting up.'

This device, we judge, was peculiar to Mrs. Carter, than whom a less
eager student would have congratulated herself that the sudden strong
noise was over, and gone sweetly to sleep again. The venerable Bishop
Ken, who believed that a man 'should take no more sleep than he can take
at once,' had no need of it. He got up, we are told, at one or two
o'clock in the morning 'and sometimes earlier,' and played the lute
before putting on his clothes.

To me the interesting thing about these historic figures is that they
got up with such elastic promptness, the one to study and the other to
play the lute. The Bishop seems a shade the more eager; but there are
details that Mrs. Carter would naturally have refrained from mentioning
to Dr. Johnson, even at the brimming moment when he had just accepted
her contribution to the _Rambler_. For most of us--or alarm-clocks would
not be made to ring continuously until the harassed bed-warmer gets up
and stops the racket--this getting out of bed is no such easy matter;
and perhaps it will be the same when Gabriel's trumpet is the
alarm-clock. We are more like Boswell, honest sleeper, and have 'thought
of a pulley to raise me gradually'; and then have thought again and
realized that even a pulley 'would give me pain, as it would counteract
my internal disposition.' Let the world go hang; our internal
disposition is to stay in bed: we cling tenaciously to non-existence--or
rather, to that third state of consciousness when we are in the world
but not of it.

There are those, no doubt, who will say that they have something better
to do than waste their time wondering why they like to stay in bed,
which they don't. They are persons who have never been bored by the
monotony of dressing or have tried to vary it, sometimes beginning at
one end, sometimes at the other, but always defeated by the hard fact
that a man cannot button his collar until he has put on his shirt. If
they condescend so far, they will say, with some truth, that it is a
question of weather, and any fool knows that it is not pleasant to get
out of a warm bed into a cold bedroom. The matter has been considered
from that angle. 'I have been warm all night,' wrote Leigh Hunt, 'and
find myself in a state perfectly suited to a warm-blooded animal. To get
out of this state into the cold, besides the inharmonious and uncritical
abruptness of the transition, is so unnatural to such a creature that
the poets, refining upon the tortures of the damned, make one of their
greatest agonies consist in being suddenly transported from heat to
cold--from fire to ice. They are "haled" out of their "beds," says
Milton, by "harpy-footed furies"--fellows who come to call them.'

But no man, say I, or woman either, ever lay in bed and devised logical
reasons for staying there--unless for the purposes of an essay, in which
case the recumbent essayist, snuggle as he may, is mentally up and
dressed. He is really awake. He has tied his necktie. He is a busy
bee--and I can no more imagine a busy bee lying in bed than I can
imagine lying in bed with one. He is no longer in the nice balance
between sense and oblivion that is too serenely and irresponsibly
comfortable to be consciously analyzed; and in which, so long as he can
stay there without getting wider awake, nothing else matters.

Lying in bed being a half-way house between sleeping and waking, and the
mind then equally indifferent to logic and exact realism, the lier in
bed can and does create his own dreams: it is an inexpensive and
gentlemanly pleasure. If his bent is that way, he becomes Big Man Me:
Fortunatus's purse jingles in his pocket; the slave jumps when he rubs
the lamp; he excels in all manly sports. If you ask with what authority
I can thus postulate the home-made dreams of any lier in bed but myself,
the answer is easy. It is common knowledge that the half-awake minds of
men thus employ themselves, and the fashion of their employment may be
reasonably deduced from observation of individuals. The _ego_ even of a
modest man will be somewhat rampant; the _ego_ of a conceited one would,
barring its capability for infinite expansion, swell up and bust. But
this riot of egoism has as little relation to the Fine Art of Lying in
Bed as a movie play has to the fine art of the drama. The true artist
may take fair advantage of his nice state of unreason to defy time and
space, but he will respect essential verities. He will treat his _ego_
like the child it is; and, taking example from a careful mother, tie a
rope to it when he lets it out to play. Thus he will capture a kind of
immortality; and his lying in bed, a transitory state itself, will
contradict the transitory character of life outside of it. Companions he
has known and loved will come from whatever remote places to share these
moments, for the Fine Art of Lying in Bed consists largely in
cultivating that inward eye with which Wordsworth saw the daffodils.

Whether this can be done on the wooden pillow of the Japanese I have no
way of knowing; but I suspect there were some admirable liers in bed
among the Roman patricians who were grossly accused of effeminacy
because they slept on feathers.

The north of China, where bedding is laid in winter on raised platforms
gently heated by little furnaces underneath, must have produced some
highly cultivated liers in bed. The proverbial shortness of the German
bed (which perhaps explains the German _Kultur_) may have tended to
discourage the art and at the same time unconsciously stimulated a
hatred of England, where the beds are proverbially generous. One can at
least hope, however, that all beds are alike in this matter, provided
the occupant is a proper lier, who can say fairly,--

  My bed has legs
    To run away
  From Here and Now
    And Everyday.
  It trots me off
    From slumber deep
  To the Dear Land
    Of Half-Asleep.




TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE


'Take me away,' said Thomas Carlyle, when silence settled for a moment
over a dinner-table where one of the diners had been monologuing to the
extreme limit of boredom, 'for God's sake take me away and put me in a
room by myself and give me a pipe of tobacco!'

Little as we may otherwise resemble Carlyle, many of us have felt this
emotion; and some realize (although the painful suspicion comes from a
mind too analytical for its own comfort) that we may have occasioned it.
The nice consideration for the happiness of others which marks a
gentleman may even make him particularly susceptible to this haunting
apprehension. Carlyle defined the feeling when he said, 'To sit still
and be pumped into is never an exhilarating process.' But pumping is
different. How often have I myself, my adieus seemingly done, my hat in
my hand and my feet on the threshold, taken a fresh grip, hat or no hat,
on the pump-handle, and set good-natured, Christian folk distressedly
wondering if I would never stop! And how often have I afterward recalled
something strained and morbidly intent in their expressions, a
glassiness of the staring eye and a starchiness in the smiling lip, that
has made me suffer under my bed-cover and swear that next time I would
depart like a sky-rocket!

Truly it seems surprising, in a fortunate century when the
correspondence school offers so many inexpensive educational advantages
for deficient adults, that one never sees an advertisement--

    STOP BEING A BORE!

    If you _bore people_ you can't be loved.
    _Don't you want to be loved?_ Don't YOU?

    Then sign and mail this coupon _at once_.
    Let Dynamo Doit teach you through his
    famous mail course, _How not to be a Bore_.

The explanation, I fancy, must be that people who sign and mail coupons
_at once_ do not know when they are bored; that the word 'boredom,' so
hopelessly heavy with sad significance to many of us, is nevertheless
but caviar to the general and no bait at all for an enterprising
correspondence school.

A swift survey of literature, from the Old Testament down, yields some
striking discoveries. To take an example, Job does not appear to have
regarded Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar as bores. And there is Bartlett's
_Familiar Quotations_, out of which one can familiarly quote nothing
about boredom earlier than Lord Byron. The subject has apparently never
been studied, and the broad division into Bores Positive and Bores
Negative is so recent that I have but this minute made it myself.

The Bore Positive pumps; the Bore Negative compels pumping. Unlike
Carlyle, he regards being pumped into as an exhilarating process, and
so, like the Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad's tired shoulders, he sits
tight and says nothing; the difference being that, whereas the Old Man
kept Sinbad walking, the Bore Negative keeps his victim talking. Charlie
Wax--who lives down town in the shop-window and is always so
well-dressed--would be a fine Bore Negative if one were left alone with
him under compulsion to keep up a conversation.

Boredom, in fact, is an acquired distaste--a by-product of the
printing-press and steam-engine, which between them have made and kept
mankind busier than Solomon in all his wisdom could have imagined. Our
arboreal ancestor could neither bore nor be bored. We see him--with the
mind's eye--up there in his tree, poor stupid, his think-tank (if the
reader will forgive me a word which he or she may not have _quite_
accepted) practically empty; nothing but a few primal, inarticulate
thinks at the bottom. It will be a million years or so yet before his
progeny will say a long farewell to the old home in the tree; and even
then they will lack words with which to do the occasion justice.

Language, in short, must be invented before anybody can be bored with
it. And I do not believe, although I find it stated in a ten-volume
Science-History of the Universe, that 'language is an internal
necessity, begotten of a lustful longing to express, through the
plastic vocal energy, man's secret sense of his ability to interpret
Nature.' An internal necessity, yes--except in the case of the Bore
Negative, who prefers to listen; but quite as likely begotten of man's
anything but secret sense of his ability to interpret himself.

Speech grew slowly; and mankind, now a speaking animal, had
centuries--nay, epochs--in which to become habituated to the
longwindedness that Job accepted as a matter of course in Eliphaz,
Bildad, and Zophar. So that even to-day many, like Job, Eliphaz, Bildad,
and Zophar, bore and are bored without really knowing it.

In the last analysis a bore bores because he keeps us from something
more interesting than himself. He becomes a menace to happiness in
proportion as the span of life is shortened by an increasing number of
things to do and places to go between crib and coffin. Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner, full of an unusual personal experience that the
leisurely reader finds most horridly entertaining, bored the Wedding
Guest because at that moment the Wedding Guest wanted to get to the
wedding, and was probably restrained from violence only by the
subconscious thought that it is not good form to appear at such
functions with a missing button. But the Mariner was too engrossed in
his own tale to notice this lack of interest; and so invariably is the
Bore Positive: everything escapes him except his listener.

But no matter how well we know when we are bored, none of us can be
certain that he does not sometimes bore--not even Tammas. The one
certainty is that _I may bore_, and that on the very occasion when I
have felt myself as entertaining as a three-ring circus, I may in effect
have been as gay and chatty as a like number of tombstones. There are
persons, for that matter, who are bored by circuses and delighted by
tombstones. My mistake may have been to put all my conversational eggs
in one basket--which, indeed, is a very good way to bore people.

Dynamo Doit, teaching his class of industrious correspondents, would
probably write them, with a picture of himself shaking his fist to
emphasize his point: 'Do not try to exhaust your subject. You will only
exhaust your audience. Never talk for more than three minutes on any
topic. Wear a wrist-watch _and keep your eye on it_. If at the end of
_three minutes_ you cannot change the subject, tell one of the following
anecdotes.' And I am quite sure also that Professor Doit would write to
his class: 'Whatever topic you discuss, _discuss it originally_. Be apt.
Be bright. Be pertinent. Be _yourself_. Remember always that it is not
so much what you say as the _way you say it_ that will charm your
listener. Think clearly. Illustrate and drive home your meaning with
illuminating figures--the sort of thing that your hearer will remember
and pass on to others as "another of So-and-so's _bon-mots_." Here you
will find that reading the "Wit and Humor" column in newspapers and
magazines is a great help. And speak plainly. Remember that unless you
are _heard_ you cannot expect to _interest_. On this point, dear
student, I can do no better than repeat Lord Chesterfield's advice to
his son: "Read what Cicero and Quintilian say of enunciation."'

But perhaps, after all, enunciation is no more important than
renunciation; and the first virtue that we who do not wish to be bores
must practise is abstemiousness of self. I know it is hard, but I do not
mean total abstinence. A man who tried to converse without his _I's_
would make but a blind stagger at it. This short and handsome word (as
Colonel Roosevelt might have said) is not to be utterly discarded
without danger of such a silence as would transform the experimenter
into a Bore Negative of the most negative description. Practically
deprived of speech, he would become like a Charlie Wax endowed with
locomotion and provided with letters of introduction. But one can at
least curb the pronoun, and, with shrewd covert glances at his
wrist-watch, confine the personally conducted tour into and about Myself
within reasonable limits. Let him say bravely in the beginning, 'I will
not talk about Myself for more than thirty minutes by my wrist-watch';
then reduce it to twenty-five; then to twenty--and so on to the
irreducible minimum; and he will be surprised to feel how his popularity
increases with leaps and bounds at each reduction--provided, of course,
that he finds anything else to talk about.

Your Complete Bore, however, is incapable of this treatment, for he does
not know that he is a bore. It is only the Occasional Bore, a sensitive,
well-meaning fellow who would not harm anybody, whose head lies
sleepless on a pillow hot with his blushes while he goes over and over
so apt and tripping a dialogue that it would withhold Gabriel from
blowing his trumpet. So it seems to him in his bed; but alas, these
dialogues are never of any practical use. They comfort, but they do not
cure. For no person ever talks to us as we talk to ourselves. The
better way is to decide firmly (1) to get a wrist-watch, and (2) to get
to sleep.

There is, however, one infallible rule for not being a bore,--or at any
rate for not being much of a bore,--and that is, never to make a call,
or talk to one person, or to several at once, for more than fifteen
minutes. Fifteen minutes is not really a very long time, although it may
seem so. But to apply this rule successfully one must become adept in
the Fine Art of Going Away. Resting your left hand negligently on your
right knee, so that the wrist protrudes with an effect of careless grace
from the cuff, you have glanced at your watch and observed that the
fifteen minutes are up. You get up yourself. Others get up--or, if there
is but one other, she. So far, so good. But now that everybody is up,
new subjects of conversation, as if catching this rising infection, come
up also. You are in a position in which, except by rather too oratorical
or dramatic a gesture, you cannot look at your watch; more than that, if
you bore a person sitting down and wondering when you are going to get
up, you bore far worse a person standing up and wondering when you will
go away. That you have in effect started to go away--and not gone
away--and yet must go away some time--and may go away at any minute:
this consciousness, to a person standing first on one tired foot and
then on the other, rapidly becomes almost, but never quite, unendurable.
Reason totters, but remains on the throne. One can almost lay down a
law: _Two persons who do not part with kisses should part with haste._

The way to do is to go like the sky-rocket--up and out.

But the fifteen-minute call followed by the flying exit is at best only
a niggling and unsatisfactory solution; it is next door to always
staying at home. Then certainly you would never be a bore (except to the
family); but neither by any possibility could you ever be that most
desirable factor in life, the Not-Bore. The Hermit is a slacker. Better
far to come out of your cave, mingle, bore as little as may be--and
thank Heaven that here and there you meet one whom you somehow feel
reasonably certain that you do not bore.




WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR


Of the several places in which a man waits to have something done to
him, no other is so restful as the establishment of his tailor. His
doctor and his dentist do their best with inviting chairs and a pile of
magazines on the table: one gets an impression that both of them were
once liberal subscribers to the current periodicals, but stopped a year
or two ago and have never bought a magazine since. But these, in their
official capacity, are painful gentlemen; and a long procession of
preceding patients have imparted to the atmosphere of their
waiting-rooms a heavy sense of impending misery.

The tailor is different. 'There was peace,' wrote Meredith, 'in Mr.
Goren's shop. Badgered ministers, bankrupt merchants, diplomatists with
a headache,--any of our modern grandees under difficulties,--might have
envied that peace over which Mr. Goren presided: and he was an enviable
man. He loved his craft, he believed he had not succeeded the millions
of antecedent tailors in vain.'

And so it is, I dare say, in varying degree with all tailors; or at any
rate should be, for tailor and customer meet on the pleasantest
imaginable plane of congenial interest. A person whose chief desire in
life at the moment is to be becomingly dressed comes to one whose chief
ambition in life at the moment is to becomingly dress him. No hideous
and insistent apprehension preys on the mind of the waiting customer;
for the tailor's worst tool is a tape-measure, and his worst discovery
may be that the customer is growing fat. One waits, indeed, without
serious apprehension, at the barber's; but here the company is mixed and
the knowledge inescapable that it will look on with idle interest while
he cuts your hair or covers your honest face with lather. Only the
harmless necessary assistant will see you measured, and he, by long
practise, has acquired an air of remoteness and indifference that makes
him next thing to invisible. So complete indeed is this tactful
abstraction that one might imagine him a man newly fallen in love.

I have seen it stated, though I cannot remember just where, that the Old
Testament makes no mention of the tailor; the Book, however, shows
plainly that Solomon was not only a sage but also a best-dresser, and it
stands to reason that his wives did not make his clothes. One wife might
have done it, but not three hundred. A tailor came at intervals to the
palace, and then went back to where, somewhere in the business section
of the ancient city, there was doubtless a tablet with a cuneiform
inscription:--

  I am he that makes the
  Glory of Solomon: yea,
  and Maker of the Upper
  and the Nether Glory.

The Smart Set of Solomon's day patronized him, yet he remained, quite
naturally, beneath the notice of the Old Testament writers--unfashionable
men, one may readily believe, living at a convenient period when a
garment very much like our own bath-robe answered their own purposes,
and could probably be bought ready-to-wear.

But one can no more think of a full-blown civilization without tailors
than one can imagine a complex state of society in which, for example,
the contemporary _Saturday Evening Post_ would publish its Exclusive
Saturday Evening Styles, and gentlemen would habitually buy their
patterns by bust-measure and cut out their new suits at home on the
dining-room table. The idea may seem practical, but the bust with men is
evidently not a reliable guide to all the other anatomical proportions.
Nor, again, however little the Old Testament concerns itself with
tailors, did it fail to mention the first of them. The line goes back to
Adam, cross-legged under the Tree--the first tailor and the first
customer together--companioned, pleasantly enough, by the first 'little
dressmaker.' They made their clothes together, and made them alike--an
impressive, beautiful symbol of the perfect harmony between the sexes
that the world lost and is now slowly regaining.

Times have changed since Adam: the apron of his honest anxious
handicraft--for it was the penalty of his sin that he would never be
happy until he got it finished and put it on--has undergone many
changes, in the course of which even its evolution into Plymouth Rock
Pants, yes even those once seemingly eternal lines,--

  When the pant-hunter pantless
    Is panting for pants,--

are now fading from human memory; yet until within the past few decades
a gentleman had a tailor as inexorably as he had a nose. But now the
immemorial visit to his tailor is no longer absolutely necessary. He
may, if such is his inclination,--as I am sure it would have been
Adam's,--get his new suit all finished and ready-to-wear. Charley Wax,
the sartorially Perfect Gentleman, smiles invitation and encouragement
from many a window; an army of elegant and expeditious employees, each
as much like Charley Wax as is humanly possible, waits to conduct him to
a million ready-to-wear suits. His intellect is appealed to by the
plausible argument that we live in a _busy time_, in which the _leaders
of men_ simply cannot _afford to waste_ their valuable hours by going to
the tailor: at the ready-to-wear emporium you simply pay your money and
take your choice.

Many a gentleman, suddenly discovering that he is a 'leader of men,' has
deserted his tailor: many a gentleman, learning by experience that it
takes as long to try on clothes in one place as another, has presently
gone back to him. Starting with the democratic premise that all men are
born equal, the ready-to-wear clothier proceeds on the further
assumption that each man becomes in time either short, stout, or
medium; and this amendment to the Declaration of Independence has indeed
created a new republic of shorts, stouts, and mediums, in which Charley
Wax is the perpetual president. Here, indeed, would seem to be a step
toward patterns for gentlemen: one sees the gentleman in imagination
happily cutting out his new spring suit on the dining-room table, or
sitting cross-legged on that centre of domestic hospitality, while he
hums a little tune to himself and merrily sews the sections together.

But unfortunately the shorts, stouts, and mediums are not respectively
standard according to bust-measure. A gentleman, for example, may
simultaneously be short in the legs, medium in the chest, and stout in
the circumference: the secret of the ready-to-wear clothier lies in his
ability to meet on the spot conditions which no single pattern could
hope to anticipate. We must go back toward nature, and stop short at
Adam, to find a costume that any gentleman can successfully make for
himself.

Personally I prefer the immemorial visit to the tailor; I like this
restful atmosphere, in which unborn suits of clothes contentedly await
creation in rolls of cloth, and the styles of the season are exhibited
by pictures of gentlemen whose completely vacuous countenances
comfortably repudiate the desirability of being 'leaders of men.' On the
table the _Geographical Magazine_ invites to unexciting wonder at the
way other people dress. From the next room one hears the voice of the
tailor, leisurely reporting to his assistant as he tape-measures a
customer. In the lineage of a vocation it is odd to think that his
great-great-great grandfather might have sat cross-legged to inspire the
poem

  A carrion crow sat on an oak
  Watching a tailor shape a coat.

  'Wife, bring me my old bent bow
  That I may shoot yon carrion crow.'

  The tailor shot, and he missed the mark,
  And shot the miller's sow through the heart.

  'Wife, O, wife, bring brandy in a spoon,
  For the old miller's sow is in a swoon.'

The quick and unexpected tragedy (for the sow) etches the old-time
tailor at his work: one gets, as it were, a crow's-eye view of him.
Such, I imagine, was his universal aspect, cross-legged on a bench in
his little stall or beside his open window, more skilled with shears and
needle than with lethal weapon, despite the gallant brigade of tailors
who went to battle under the banner of Queen Elizabeth. Yet I cannot
imagine my own tailor sitting cross-legged beside an open window; nor,
for that matter, sitting cross-legged anywhere, except perhaps on the
sands of the sea in his proper bathing-suit. His genealogy begins with
those 'taylours' who, in the nineteenth year of Henry VII, 'sewyd the
Kynge to be callyd Marchante Taylours'--evidently earning the disfavor
of their neighbors, for a 'grete grudge rose among dyuers other craftys
in the cyte against them.' Very soon, I fancy, these Marchante Taylours
began to pride themselves on the straightness of their legs, and let
subordinate craftsmen stretch their sartorius muscles. But why, as
Carlyle puts it, the idea had 'gone abroad, and fixed itself down in a
wide-spreading rooted error, that Tailors are a distinct species in
Physiology, not Men, but fractional Parts of a Man,' nobody has yet
explained satisfactorily.

So one muses, comfortably awaiting the tailor, while the eye travels
through far countries, glimpsing now and then a graceful figure that
somehow reminds one of a darker complexioned September Morn, and helps
perhaps to explain the wide-spread popularity of a magazine whose title
seems at first thought to limit it to a public-school circulation.

And yet, strangely enough, there are men whose wives find it difficult
to persuade them to go to the tailor; or, for that matter to the
ready-to-wear clothier. There is, after all, something undignified in
standing on a little stool and being measured; nor is it a satisfactory
substitute for this procedure to put on strange garments in a little
closet and come forth to pose before mirrors under the critical eye of a
living Charley Wax. Fortunately the tailor and the polite and
expeditious salesman of the ready-to-wear emporium have this in common:
art or nature has in both cases produced a man seemingly with no sense
of humor. Fortunately, too, in both cases a gentleman goes alone to
acquire a new suit. I have seen it suggested in the advertising column
of the magazine that a young man should bring his fiancee with him, to
help select his ready-to-wear garments; but the idea emanates from the
imagination of an ad-writer, and I am sure that nobody concerned, except
perhaps the fiancee, would welcome it in actual practice. Wives indeed,
and maybe fiancees, sometimes accompany those they love when a hat is to
be tried on and purchased; but I have been told in bitter confidence by
a polite hatter that 'tis a custom more honored in the breach than in
the observance; and this I think is sufficient reason why it should not
be extended, so to speak, to the breeches.




SHAVING THOUGHTS


'Talking of shaving the other night at Dr. Taylor's,' wrote the
biographer Boswell, 'Dr. Johnson said, "Sir, of a thousand shavers, two
do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished." I thought this
not possible, till he specified so many of the varieties in
shaving,--holding the razor more or less perpendicular; drawing long or
short strokes; beginning at the upper part of the face, or the under; at
the right side or the left side. Indeed, when one considers what variety
of sounds can be uttered by the windpipe, in the compass of a very small
aperture, we may be convinced how many degrees of difference there may
be in the application of the razor.'

So they talked of shaving at Dr. Taylor's before the advent of the
safety-razor; and our curiosity can never be satisfied as to just what
so acute an observer as Dr. Johnson would have thought of this
characteristically modern invention to combine speed and convenience. I
can imagine Boswell playfully reminding the doctor how that illustrious
friend had quite recently expressed his disapproval of bleeding. 'Sir,'
says Samuel, as he actually did on another occasion, 'courage is a
quality necessary for maintaining virtue.' And he adds (blowing with
high derision), 'Poh! If a man is to be intimidated by the possible
contemplation of his own blood--let him grow whiskers.' At any rate
among a thousand shavers to-day, two do not think so much alike that one
may not be influenced by this consideration, and regard Byron, composing
his verses while shaving, as a braver poet than if he had performed the
operation with a safety.

The world of shavers is divided into three classes: the ordinary shaver,
the safety shaver, and the extraordinary-safety shaver, who buys each
safety razor as soon as it is invented and is never so happy as when
about to try a new one. To a shaver of this class, cost is immaterial. A
safety-razor for a cent, with twenty gold-monogramed blades and a
guaranty of expert surgical attendance if he cuts himself, would stir
his active interest neither more nor less than a safety-razor for a
hundred dollars, with one Cannotbedull blade and an iron-clad agreement
to pay the makers an indemnity if he found it unsatisfactory. He buys
them secretly, lest his wife justly accuse him of extravagance, and
practises cunning in getting rid of them afterward; for to a
conscientious gentleman throwing away a razor is a responsible matter.
It is hard to think of any place where a razor-blade, indestructible and
horribly sharp as it is,--for all purposes except shaving,--can be
thrown away without some worry over possible consequences. A baby may
find and swallow it; the ashman sever an artery; dropping it overboard
at sea is impracticable, to say nothing of the danger to some innocent
fish. Mailing it anonymously to the makers, although it is expensive, is
a solution, or at least shifts the responsibility. Perhaps the safest
course is to put the blades with the odds and ends you have been going
to throw away to-morrow ever since you can remember; for there, while
you live, nobody will ever disturb them. Once, indeed, I--but this is
getting too personal: I was simply about to say that it is possible to
purchase a twenty-five cent safety-razor, returnable if unsatisfactory,
and find the place of sale vanished before you can get back to it. But
between inventions in safety-razors, the extraordinary-safety shaver is
likely to revert to first principles and the naked steel of his
ancestors.

And as he shaves he will perhaps think sometimes of the unhappy Edward
II of England, who, before his fall, wore his beard in three corkscrew
curls--and was shaved afterward by a cruel jailer who had it done _with
cold water_! The fallen monarch wept with discomfort and indignation.
'Here at least,' he exclaimed reproachfully, 'is warm water on my
cheeks, whether you will or no.' But the heartless shave proceeded.
Razed away were those corkscrew curls from the royal chin, and so he
comes down to us without them, shaved as well as bathed in tears--one
of the most pitiful figures in history.

Personally, however, I prefer to think of kindlier scenes while shaving.
Nothing that I can do now can help poor Edward: no indignation of mine
can warm that cold water; perhaps, after all, the cruel jailer had a
natural and excusable hatred of corkscrew curls anywhere. I should feel
quite differently about it if he had warmed the water; but although a
man may shave himself with cold water, certainly nobody else has a right
to.

There have been periods in the history of man when I, too, would
probably have cultivated some form of whiskering. Perhaps, like Mr.
Richard Shute, I would have kept a gentleman (reduced) to read aloud to
me while my valet starched and curled my whiskers--such being the mode
in the seventeenth century when Mr. Shute was what they then called,
without meaning offense, a turkey merchant; and indeed his pride in his
whiskers was nothing out of the common. Or, being less able to support a
valet to starch and curl, and a gentleman to read aloud 'on some useful
subject,'--poor gentleman! I hope that he and Mr. Shute agreed as to
what subjects were useful, but I have a feeling they didn't,--I might
have had to economize, and might have been one of those who were 'so
curious in the management of their beards that they had pasteboard cases
to put over them at night, lest they turn upon them and rumple them in
their sleep.'

Nevertheless, wives continued to respect their husbands in about the
normal proportion. Within the relatively brief compass of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, I, who would have gone smooth-shaven in the
fourteenth, could conceivably have fluttered in at least thirty-eight
separate and beautiful arrangements of moustaches, beard, and whiskers.
Nor, I suspect, did these arrangements always wait upon the slow
processes of nature. One does not _have_ to grow whiskers. Napoleon's
youthful officers were fiercely bewhiskered, but often with the aid of
helpfully adhesive gum; and in the eighteen-thirties there occurs in the
Boston _Transcript_, as a matter of course, an advertisement of
'gentlemen's whiskers ready-made or to order.' We see in imagination a
quiet corner at the whisker's, with a mirror before which the Bostonian
tries on his ready-made whiskers before ordering them sent home; or
again, the Bostonian in doubt, selecting now this whisker, now that
from the _Gentlemen's Own Whisker Book_, and still with a shade of
indecision on his handsome face as he holds it up to be measured.
'Perhaps, after all, those _other_ whiskers--'

But the brisk, courteous person with the dividers and tape-measure is
reassuring. 'Elegant whiskers!' he repeats at intervals. 'They will do
us both credit.'

The matter has, in fact, been intelligently studied; the beautifying
effect of whiskers reduced to principles. If my face is too wide, a
beard lengthens it; if my face is too narrow, it expands as if by magic
with the addition of what have sometimes been affectionately called
'mutton chops,' or 'siders'; if my nose projects, almost like a nose
trying to escape from a face to which it has been sentenced for life, a
pair of large, handsome moustaches will provide a proper entourage--a
nest, so to speak, on which the nose rests contentedly, almost like a
setting hen; if my nose retreats backward into my face, the aesthetic
solution is obviously galways. A stout gentleman can do wonders with his
appearance by adopting a pointed beard, and a suit of clothes, shirt,
necktie, and stockings with pronounced vertical stripes. A thin one, on
the other hand, becomes at once substantial in effect, without being
gross, if he cultivates side-whiskers, and wears a suit of clothes,
shirt, cravat, and stockings with pronounced horizontal stripes. If my
face lacks fierceness and dynamic force, it needs a brisk, arrogant
moustache; or if it has too much of these qualities, a long, sad,
drooping moustache will counterbalance them. I read in my volume of
_Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ that 'the movements of the
moustache are dependent on the muscle called _depressor alae nasi_. By
specially cultivating this muscle, men might in course of time make the
movements of the moustache subject to voluntary control.'

Just think what a capacity for emotional expression lies in such a
simple organ as the dog's caudal appendage, aptly called the
'psychographic tail' by Vischer; and moustaches are double, and
therefore equal to two psychographic appendages! Truly I know not of
which to think first--a happy gentleman wagging his moustache or a happy
dog wagging two tails. And yet here am I, shaving away the daily effort
of this double psychographic appendage to become visible! One might
almost think that my _depressor alae nasi_ was a vermiform appendix.

It has been said by some critics that whiskers are a disguise. I should
be unwilling to commit myself to this belief; nor can I accept the
contrary conviction that whiskers are a gift of Almighty Providence in
which the Giver is so sensitively interested that to shave them off is
to invite eternal punishment of a kind--and this, I think, destroys the
theory--that would singe them off in about two seconds. Whiskers are
real, and sometimes uncomfortably earnest; the belief that they betoken
an almost brutal masculine force is visible in this, that those whose
whiskers are naturally thinnest take the greatest satisfaction in
possessing them--seem, in fact, to say proudly, '_These_ are my
whiskers!' But I cannot feel that a gentleman is any more disguised by
his whiskers, real, ready-made, or made to order, than he would be if he
appeared naked or in a ready-made or made-to-order suit. Whiskers, in
fact, are a subtle revelation of real character, whether the kind that
exist as a soft, mysterious haze about the lower features or such as
inspired the immortal limerick,--I quote from memory,--

  There was an old man with a beard
  Who said, 'I am greatly afeard
      Two larks and a hen,
      A jay and a wren,
  Have each made a nest in my beard.'

Yet I feel also, and strongly, that the man who shaves clean stands, as
it were, on his own face.

We have, indeed, but to visualize clearly the spectacle of a gentleman
shaving himself and put beside it the spectacle of a gentleman starching
and curling his whiskers, to see the finer personal dignity that has
come with the general adoption of the razor. I am not going to attempt
to describe a gentleman starching and curling his whiskers,--it would
be too horrible,--but I like to dwell on the shaver. He whistles or
perhaps hums. He draws hot water from the faucet--Alas, poor Edward! He
makes a rich, creamy lather either in a mug or (for the sake of literary
directness) on his own with a shaving-stick. He strops his razor, or
perhaps selects a blade already sharpened for his convenience. He rubs
in the lather. He shaves, and, as Dr. Johnson so shrewdly pointed out
that night at Dr. Taylor's, 'Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not
shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.' Perhaps he cuts
himself, for a clever man at self-mutilation can do it, even with a
safety; but who cares? Come, Little Alum, the shaver's friend, smartly
to the rescue! And then, he exercises the shaver's prerogative and
powders his face.

Fortunately the process does not always go so smoothly. There are times
when the Local Brotherhood of Razors have gone on strike and refuse to
be stropped. There are times at which the twelve interchangeable blades
are hardly better for shaving than twelve interchangeable
postage-stamps. There are times when the lather might have been fairly
guaranteed to dry on the face. There are times when Little Alum, the
shaver's friend, might well feel the sting of his own powerlessness. But
these times are the blessed cause of genial satisfaction when everything
goes happily.

Truly it is worth while to grow a beard--for the sake of shaving it off.
Not such a beard as one might starch and curl--but the beginnings--an
obfuscation of the chin, cheeks, and upper lip--a horror of unseemly
growth--a landscape of the face comparable to

          that ominous tract which, all agree,
  Hides the Dark Tower

in Browning's grim poem of 'Childe Roland.' _Then_ is the time to strop
your favorite razor! I wonder, while stropping mine, if any man still
lives who uses a moustache cup?




OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA!


Any man who knows that, sooner or later, he must go to another afternoon
tea cannot but rejoice at the recent invention of an oval, platter-like
saucer, large enough to hold with ease a cup, a lettuce or other
sandwich, and a dainty trifle of pastry. The thing was needed: the
modesty of the anonymous inventor--evidently _not_ Mr. Edison--reveals
him one of the large body of occasional and unwilling tea-goers. We, the
reluctant and unwilling, are all strangely alike at these functions; and
we have all been embarrassed by the old-fashioned saucer. Circular in
shape, and hardly larger than the cup that belies its reputation and
dances drunkenly whenever another guest joggles our elbow,--which
happens so often that we suspect conspiracy,--the old-fashioned saucer
affords no reasonably secure perch for a sandwich; responds with delight
to the law of gravitation if left to itself; and sets us wishing, those
of us who think scientifically, that evolution had refrained from doing
away with an extension by which alone we could now hope to manage it.
_We mean a tail!_ If afternoon teas had been started in the Oligocene
Epoch instead of the seventeenth century, we are convinced that
evolution, far from discarding this useful appendage, would have
perfected it. A little hand would have evolved at the end of it--such a
one as might hold a Perfect Gentleman's saucer while he sipped from his
tea-cup.

Nay, more. In many ways that will at once occur to the intelligent
reader this little hand would be helpful in our complex modern
civilization. It would hold this essay. It would turn the music at the
piano. It would enable two well-disposed persons cordially to shake
hands when their four other hands were busy with bundles. It would slap
the coward mosquito that stabs in the back. It would be absolutely
perfect for waving farewell. Nor would there be anything 'funny' about
it, or shocking to the most refined sensibilities: the vulgar would
laugh and the refined would hide a shudder at the sight of a man with no
tail! We would, of course, all look like the Devil, but everybody knows
that _his_ tail has never yet kept him out of polite society.

This digression, however, leads us away from our subject into alien
regrets. We put it behind us.

The truth is, we do not like your afternoon teas--except those little
ones, like the nice children of an objectionable mother, that are
informal, intimate, and not destructive of our identity. At larger
gatherings we have no identity: we are supernumeraries, mere tea-cup
bearers, wooden Indians who have been through Hampton, hand-carved
gentlemen, automaton tea-goers. In short, we are so many lay figures,
each with a tea-cup in one hand and food in the other; we know that we
are smiling because we can feel it; we remain where we are laid until
forcibly moved to another spot, and we are capable, under pressure, of
emitting a few set phrases that resemble human speech.

Yet within this odd simulacrum of a worldly, entertaining, and
interested gentleman, a living mind surveys the gay scene with a
strange, emotionless detachment--just so, perhaps, will it eventually
survive the body. We are really alive, conscious that we dislike
change, nervous when moved and stood up in another place, and
intellectually certain that no real harm can come to us. One is reminded
of Seneca's observation: _Vere magnum, habere fragilitatem hominis,
securitatem dei._ There is about us something of the frailty of a man,
something of the security of a god; the pity of it is that we cannot
follow Seneca to his conclusion and comfort ourselves with the thought
that we are 'truly great.'

I have often wondered, while 'dolling up,' as the strikingly appropriate
modernism puts it, for such a function, whether there is any universal
reason why a reluctant man should go to an afternoon tea. There are, of
course, many individual reasons, more or less important to the
individual tea-goer; but for us the impulsion comes inevitably from
without. The verb 'drag,' often applied to the process by which a man is
brought to a tea, indicates how valuable would be the discovery of a
Universal Reason wherefore any man might hope to derive some personal
good from this inescapable experience.

An excellent place for the thinker to examine this problem is in his
bath-tub preparatory to dolling up. He is alone and safe from
interruption, unless he has forgotten to lock the door; his memory and
observation of afternoon teas past is stimulated by afternoon tea to
come; and he is himself more like the Universal Man than on most other
occasions. Featherless biped mammals that we are, what need have we in
common that might conceivably provide a good and sufficient reason for
the dolling up to which I am about to subject myself? Substantial food,
less fleeting, however, than a lettuce or other sandwich and a dainty
trifle of pastry; protective clothing; a house, or even a cave, to
shelter us in cold or stormy weather--these, evidently, are clearly
apprehended necessities, and we will march on the soles of our feet,
like the plantigrade creatures we are, wherever such goods are
obtainable.

If all men were hungry, naked, and homeless, and the afternoon tea
provided food, clothes, and a home, any man would jump at an invitation.
But there are other necessities of living--and here, too, I in my
porcelain dish am one with Christopher Columbus, Lord Chesterfield,
Chang the Chinese Giant, the Editor of the _Atlantic_, and the humblest
illiterate who never heard of him--of which we are not so vividly
conscious. Yet we seek them instinctively, each in his own manner and
degree--amusement, useful experience, friends, and his own soul. So I
read and accept Tagore when he says, 'Man's history is the history of
man's journey to the unknown in quest of his immortal self--his soul.'
Willy-nilly, even higglety-pigglety and helter-skelter, these are what
the featherless biped is after.

As for useful experience, this afternoon tea reminds me of those lower
social gatherings where liquor is, or used to be, sold only to be drunk
on the premises. Granting that I become a finished tea-goer, easy of
speech, nodding, laughing, secure in the graceful manipulation of my
tea-things, never upsetting my tea, never putting my sandwich in the way
of an articulating tongue, yet is all this experience of no use whatever
to me except at other afternoon teas. I go to school simply to learn how
to go to school. The most finished and complete tea-goer, if he behaves
anywhere else as he does at an afternoon tea, creates more widely the
same unfavorable impression that he creates, in his own proper sphere,
on me. Can I then reasonably regard experience as useful which I observe
to be useful only for doing something which I observe to be useless? The
soap agrees that I cannot. Yet, says the sponge, _if_ I might hope at
some afternoon tea to discover my immortal soul, the case would be
different; this experience would be valuable. O foolish sponge! I am
compelled to tell you that at afternoon teas it is especially difficult
for a mortal gentleman to believe that he has any immortal soul to look
for. It is a gathering essentially mundane and ephemeral. For it we put
on our most worldly garments. For it we practise our most worldly smirks
in dumb rehearsal before our mirror and an audience of one silly,
attentive image, thinking that this time, this time--But it is always
the same: the observant mind in the immovable body. As for the immortal
soul, O sponge! it may, and doubtless does, go to strange places--but it
_cannot be dragged_.

And so we come to the final question: is the afternoon tea a place where
one featherless, plantigrade, biped mammal of the genus _Homo_ may meet
another whom he might hope some time to call a friend? I do not mean 'my
friend What's-his-name?' but rather such another biped as Tennyson had
in mind when he wrote,--

  Since we deserved the name of friends
      And thine effect so lives in me,
      A part of mine may live in thee
  And move thee on to noble ends.

I grant you, peering out of my tub at the world, that there are many to
whom this thought sounds sublimated and extravagant: a poet says this
sort of thing because such is his poetic business. We come nearer
perhaps to the universal understanding in John Hay's definition that
'Friends are the sunshine of life'; for it is equally true that all men
seek sunlight and that every man seeks a friend after his own kind and
nature. The best and most intelligent of us admit the rarity and value
of friendship; the worst and most ignorant of us are unwittingly the
better for knowing some friendly companion. But these afternoon teas are
inimical to friendship; and the first duty of a hostess is to separate,
expeditiously and without hope of again coming together, any other two
guests who appear to be getting acquainted. On this count, even were we
not Automaton Tea-Goers, debarred by inherent stability from any normal
human intercourse, the afternoon tea must prove more disheartening than
helpful. We might at best glimpse a potential friend as the desert
islander sights a passing sail on the far horizon.

There is, alas, no Universal Reason why a man should go to an afternoon
tea!

So the matter looks to me in my tub, but perhaps, like Diogenes, I am a
cynic philosopher. After all, when a thing cannot be escaped, why seek
for reasons not to escape it? Let us, rather, be brave if we cannot be
gay; cheerful if we cannot talk; ornamental if we cannot move. As the
grave-digger in Elsinore churchyard might say: 'Here lies the afternoon
tea; good: here stands the gentleman; good: If the gentleman go to this
afternoon tea and bore himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes,--mark
you that? But if the afternoon tea come to him and bore him, he bores
not himself; argal, he that goes not willingly to the afternoon tea
wearies not his own life.'

So, in effect, he that is _dragged_ to an afternoon tea does not go at
all; and when he gets there, he is really somewhere else. This happy
thought is a little difficult to reconcile with circumstances; but when
one has become thoroughly soaked in it, it is a great help.


THE END




Transcriber's Note:

    Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.





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