_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 wistfuldesire to be thought a Perfect Gentleman. And this is much to hiscredit, for the Perfect Gentleman, as thus wistfully contemplated, is ahigh ideal of human behavior, although, in the narrower but honestadmiration of many, he is also a Perfect Ass. Thus, indeed, he comesdown the centuries--a sort of Siamese Twins, each miraculously visibleonly to its own admirers; a worthy personage proceeding at one end ofthe connecting cartilage, and a popinjay prancing at the other. Emersonwas, and described, one twin when he wrote, 'The gentleman is a man oftruth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in hisbehavior; not in any manner dependent or servile, either on persons, oropinions, or possessions. ' Walter Pater, had Leonardo painted a PerfectGentleman's portrait instead of a Perfect Lady's, might have describedthe other: 'The presence that thus rose so strangely beside thetea-table is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years womenhad come to desire. His is the head upon which "all the ends of theworld have come, " and the eyelids are a little weary. He is older thanthe tea things among which he sits. ' Many have admired, but few havetried to imitate, the Perfect Gentleman of Emerson's definition; yet fewthere are who have not felt the wistful desire for resemblance. But theother is more objective: his clothes, his manners, and his habits areeasy to imitate. 

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

If, however, he knew that the approaching victim had been latelybereaved, he would 'advance slower, and with a peculiar composure ofvoice and countenance, begin his compliments of condolence with, "Ihope, sir, you will do me the justice to be persuaded, that I am notinsensible to your unhappiness, that I take part in your distress, andshall ever be affected when _you_ are so. "'

In lighter mood this still imperfect Perfect Gentleman would never allowhimself 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 whichlow-bred men express their silly joy, at silly things, and they call itbeing merry. ' Better _always_, if necessary, the peculiar composure ofpolite sensibility to the suffering of properly introducedacquaintances. When he went out, he would be careful to 'walk well, wearhis hat well, move his head properly, and his arms gracefully'; and Ifor one sympathize with the low-breds if they found him a merryspectacle; when he went in, he would remember pertinently that 'awell-bred man is known by his manner of sitting. ' 'Easy in everyposition, ' say the Principles of Politeness, 'instead of lolling orlounging as he sits, he leans with elegance, and by varying hisattitudes, 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 amprobably the only person who has read that instructive book for a verylong time, it remains to-day the latest complete work which any youngman wishing to become a Perfect Gentleman can find to study. Is itpossible, I ask myself, that none but burglars any longer entertainthis 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 butdetermined inquirer. To my profound astonishment I find that theCorrespondence-School system offers no course; to my despair I searchthe magazines for graphic illustration of an Obvious Society Leaderconfiding to an Obvious Scrubwoman: 'Six months ago _my_ husband was nomore a Perfect Gentleman than _yours_, but one day I persuaded him to_mark that coupon_, and all our social prominence and _éclat_ we owe tothat school. '

One may say, indeed, that here is something which cannot conceivably bedescribed as a job; but all the more does it seem, logically, that thecorrespondence schools must be daily creating candidates for whatnaturally would be a post-graduate course. One would imagine that a mereannouncement would be sufficient, and that from all the financial andindustrial centres of the country students would come flocking back tocollege 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 findrecorded in the _Dictionary of American Authors_ as one who 'published agreat number of volumes of verse that was never mistaken for poetry byany reader') wrote a small book about gentlemen, fortunately in proseand not meant for beginners, in which he cited Bayard, Sir PhilipSidney, Charles Lamb, Brutus, St. Paul, and Socrates as notableexamples. Perfect Gentlemen all, as Emerson would agree, I question ifany of them ever gave a moment's thought to his manner of sitting; yetany two, sitting together, would have recognized each other as PerfectGentlemen at once and thought no more about it. 

These are the standard, true to Emerson's definition; and yet suchshining examples need not discourage the rest of us. The qualities thatmade them gentlemen are not necessarily the qualities that made themfamous. 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 reasonablyperfect, --and surely this is not asking too much, --with mind enough tofollow this essay. Brutus gained nothing as a gentleman by assisting atthe assassination of Cæsar (who was no more a gentleman, by the way, inMr. 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 gentlemanlyconsideration for the convenience of others--for a Perfect Gentleman tohave his name printed in the Telephone Directory. And in this higherdefinition I go so far as to think that the man is rare who is notsometimes a Perfect Gentleman, and equally uncommon who never isanything else. Adam I hail a Perfect Gentleman when, seeing what hiswife had done, he bit back the bitter words he might have said, andthen--he too--took a bite of the apple: but oh! how far he fellimmediately afterward, when he stammered his pitiable explanation thatthe woman tempted him and he did eat! Bayard, Sir Philip Sidney, CharlesLamb, 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 theauthor and editor of the _Pocket Library_ (not wishing to discouragestudents)--a qualification essential to the Perfect Gentleman in theeighteenth century. He must have had--what no book could give him--anancestor who knew how to sit. Men there were whose social status wasvisibly signified by the abbreviation 'Gent. ' appended to theirsurnames. But already this was becoming a vermiform appendix, and thenineteenth century did away with it. This handsome abbreviation createdan invidious distinction between citizens which democracy refused longerto countenance; and, much as a Lenin would destroy the value of money inRussia by printing countless rouble notes without financial backing, sodemocracy destroyed the distinctive value of the word 'gentleman' byapplying it indiscriminately to the entire male population of the UnitedStates. 

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

And so I now see that my bright dream of a Correspondence-Schoolpost-graduate course cannot be realized. No bank president, nocorporation director, electrical engineer, advertising expert, architect, or other distinguished alumnus would confess himself nogentleman by _marking that coupon_. The suggestion would be an insult, were it affectionately made by the good old president of his Alma Materin a personal letter. A few decorative cards, to be hung up in theoffice, 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 tofeel indignant at the necessity of dressing himself. He wakes in themorning. Refreshed with sleep, ready and eager for his daily tasks andpleasures, he is just about to leap out of bed when the thoughtconfronts him that he must put on his clothes. His leap is postponedindefinitely, and he gets up with customary reluctance. One afteranother, twelve articles--eleven, if two are joined in union one andinseparable--must be buttoned, tied, laced, and possibly safety-pinnedto his person: a routine business, dull, wearisome with repetition. Hisface and hands must be washed, his hair and teeth brushed: many, indeed, will perform all over what Keats, thinking of the ocean eternallywashing the land, has called a 'priestlike task of pure ablution'; butothers, faithful to tradition and Saturday night, will dodge this aswasteful. Downstairs in summer is his hat; in winter, his hat, hisovercoat, his muffler, and, if the weather compels, his galoshes andperhaps his ear-muffs or ear-bobs. Last thing of all, the PerfectGentleman will put on his walking-stick; somewhere in this routine hewill have shaved and powdered, buckled his wrist-watch, and adjusted hisspats. 

When we think of the shortness of life, and how, even so, we mightimprove our minds by study between getting up and breakfast, dressing, as educators are beginning to say of the long summer vacation, seems asheer 'wastage of education'; yet the plain truth is that we wouldn'tget up. Better, if we can, to _think_ while we dress, pausing to jotdown our worth-while thoughts on a handy tablet. Once, I remember, --andperhaps the pleasant custom continues, --a lady might modestly expressher kindly feeling for a gentleman (and her shy, half-humorousrecognition 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 ideaoccurred to him some morning while getting into his hose anddoublet, --'ought to be our remembrancers of our lost innocency. ' And sothey are; for Adam must have bounded from bed to breakfast with aninnocency that nowadays we can only envy. 

Yet, in sober earnest, the first useful thing that ever this nakedfellow set his hand to was the making of his own apron. The world, aswe know and love it, began--your pardon, Mr. Kipling, but I cannot helpit--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 bydressing, and almost immediately the process lost its convenientsimplicity. Not since Adam's apron has any complete garment, orpractical suit of clothes, been devised--except for sea-bathing--that abusy man could slip on in the morning and off again at night. All ourindignation to the contrary, we prefer the complicated and difficult: weenjoy our buttons; we are withheld only by our queer sex-pride fromwearing garments that button up in the back--indeed, on what we franklycall our 'best clothes, ' we _have the buttons_ though we _dare notbutton_ with them. The one costume that a man could slip on at night andoff again in the morning has never, if he could help it, been worn ingeneral society, and is now outmoded by a pretty little coat andpantaloons of soft material and becoming color. We come undressed; butbehold! thousands of years before we were born, it was decided that wemust be dressed as soon as possible afterward, and clothes were made forus while it was yet in doubt whether we would be a little gentleman or alittle lady. And so a man's first clothes are cunningly fashioned to dofor either; worse still, --a crying indignity that, oh, thank Heaven, hecannot remember in maturity, --he is forcibly valeted by a woman, verylikely young and attractive, to whom he has never been formallyintroduced. 

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

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

The tailor survived, thanks probably to the inevitable presence ofDoubting Thomas in any new movement; but he, too, has at last seen thelight. I read quite recently his announcement that in 1919 men's clotheswould be 'sprightly without conspicuousness; dashing without verging onextremes; youthful in temperament and inspirational. ' Some of us, itappears, remain self-conscious and a little afraid to snap; and therethe tailor catches us with his cunningly conceived 'sprightly withoutconspicuousness. ' Unlike the _vers-libre_ poetess who would fain 'gonaked in the street and walk unclothed into people's parlors, '--leaving, one imagines, an idle but deeply interested gathering on thesidewalk, --we are timid about extremes. We wish to dash--but withinreasonable limits. Nor, without forcing the note, would we willinglymiss an opportunity to inspire others, or commit the affectation ofconcealing 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 popularmagazine, two gentlemen-heroes whose perfect friendship was unmarred byrivalry because, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they were of suchdifferent but equally engaging types of manly beauty. I forget whetherthey married sisters, but they live on in the memory as ornamentalsymbols of a vanished past--a day when fiction-writers impressed it, ontheir readers with every means at their command, that a hero waswell-dressed, well-washed, and well-groomed. Such details have becomeunnecessary, and grumpy stand-patters no longer contemptuously mutter, 'Soap! Soap!' when a hero comes down to breakfast. Some of our olderpoliticians, to be sure, still wear a standard costume of Prince Albertcoat, pants (for so one must call them) that bag at the knee, and animpersonal kind of black necktie, sleeping, I dare say, in what usedjocularly to be called a 'nightie'; but our younger leaders goappropriately clad, to the eye, in exquisitely fitting, ready-to-wearclothes. So, too, does the Correspondence-School graduate, rising likean escaped balloon from his once precarious place among the untrainedworkers to the comfortable security of general manager. Here and there, an echo of the past, persists the pretence that men are superior to anybut practical considerations in respect to clothing; but if this wereso, I need hardly point out that more would dress like Dr. Jaeger, andfew waste precious moments fussing over the selection of prettilycolored ribbons to wear round their necks. 

Fortunately we need no valets, and a democracy of best-dressers isneither more nor less democratic than one of shirt-sleeves: theimportant thing in both cases is that the great majority of citizens alllook alike. The alarm-clock awakens us, less politely than a James orJoseph, but we need never suspect it of uncomplimentary mentalreservations, and neither its appetite nor its morals cause usuneasiness. Fellow-citizens of Greek extraction maintain parlors wherewe may sit, like so many statues on the Parthenon, while they polish ourshoes. In all large cities are quiet retreats where it is quiteconventional, and even _dégagé_, for the most Perfect Gentleman to waitin what still remains to him, while an obliging fellow creature swiftlypresses his trousers; or, lacking this convenient retreat, there areshrewd inventions that crease while we sleep. Hangers, simulating ourown breadth of shoulders, wear our coats and preserve their shape. Wooden feet, simulating our own honest trotters, wear our shoes and keepthem from wrinkling. No valet could do more. And as for laying out ourclothes, has not the kind Clothing Industry provided handy manuals ofinstruction? With their assistance any man can lay out the garmentsproper to any function, be it a morning dig in the garden, a noonwedding at the White House, or (if you can conceive it) a midnightsupper with Mrs. Carrie Nation. 

And yet--sometimes, that indignation we feel at having to dressourselves in the morning, we feel again at having to undress ourselvesat night. Then indeed are our clothes a remembrancer of our lostinnocency. We think only of Adam going to bed. We forget that, properlyspeaking, poor innocent Adam had no bed to go to. And we forget alsothat in all the joys of Eden was none more innocent than ours when wehave just put on a new suit. 

IN THE CHAIR

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

As a rule, the less he now says or thinks about his head, the better: hehas given it to the barber, and the barber will do as he pleases withit. 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 becausethe man's mother is in a position to see the back of his head. Alsobecause the weakest woman under such circumstances has strongconvictions. When the man is older the barber will sometimes allow himto see the haircut cleverly reflected in two mirrors; but not one man ina thousand--nay, in ten thousand--would dare express himself asdissatisfied. After all, what does he know of haircuts, he who is nobarber? Women feel differently; and I know of one man who, returninghome with a new haircut, was compelled to turn round again and take whathis wife called his 'poor' head to another barber by whom the haircutwas more happily finished. But that was exceptional. And it happened tothat 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 atthe barber's and so keeping the hair perpetually at just the length thatis most becoming. For most men, although the knowledge must be gatheredby keen, patient observation and never by honest confession, there is aperiod, lasting about a week, when the length of their hair isadmirable. But it comes between haircuts. The haircut itself is neversatisfactory. If his hair was too long before (and on this point he hasthe evidence of unprejudiced witnesses), it is too short now. It mustgrow steadily--count on it for that!--until for a brief period it is'just right, ' æsthetically suited to the contour of his face and the cutof his features, and beginning already imperceptibly to grow too longagain. 

Soon this growth becomes visible, and the man begins to worry. 'I mustgo 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 postponesa haircut; and yet in the end our immortal souls have little to do withthe actual process. It is impossible to conceive of one immortal soulcutting another immortal soul's hair. My own soul, I am sure, has neverentered a barber's shop. It stops and waits for me at the portal. Probably it converses, on subjects remote from our bodilyconsciousness, with the immortal souls of barbers, patiently waitinguntil the barbers finish their morning's work and come out to lunch. 

Even during the haircut our hair is still growing, never stopping, neverat rest, never in a hurry: it grows while we sleep, as was proved by RipVan Winkle. And yet perhaps sometimes it is in a hurry; perhaps that iswhy it falls out. In rare cases the contagion of speed spreads; the lasthair hurries after all the others; the man is emancipated fromdependence on barbers. I know a barber who is in this independentcondition himself (for the barber can no more cut his own hair than therest of us) and yet sells his customers a preparation warranted to keepthem from attaining it: a seeming anomaly which can be explained only onthe ground that business is business. To escape the haircut one must bequite without hair that one cannot see and reach; and herein possibly isthe reason for a fashion which has often perplexed students of theNorman Conquest. The Norman soldiery wore no hair on the backs of theirheads; and each brave fellow could sit down in front of his polishedshield and cut his own hair without much trouble. But the scheme had aweakness; the back of the head had to be shaved; and the fashiondoubtless went out because, after all, nothing was gained by it. Onesimply turned over on one's face in the barber's chair instead ofsitting 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 arelosing our curls. Then habit accustoms us to it. Yet it is significantthat men of refinement seek the barber in secluded places, basements ofhotels for choice, where they can be seen only by barbers and by otherrefined men having or about to have haircuts; and that men of lessrefinement submit to the operation where every passer-by can stare inand see them, bibs round their necks and their shorn locks lying inpathetic little heaps on the floor. There is a barber's shop of thiskind in Boston where one of the barbers, having no head to play with, plays on a cornet, doubtless to the further distress of his immortalsoul peeping in through the window. But this is unusual even in the citythat 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--whocut my left ear. The deed distressed him, and he told me a story. It wasa pretty little cut, he said, --filling it with alum, --and reminded himof another gentleman whose left ear he had nipped in identically thesame place. He had done his best with alum and apology, as he was nowdoing. Two months later the gentleman came in again. 'And by golly!'said the barber, with a kind of wonder at his own cleverness, 'if Ididn'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 Ihave recently seen scientifically explained, the facility of compositionwas not due to the act of shaving but to the normal activity of thehuman mind at that time in the morning. Here, therefore, a man canrefuse the offices of the barber. If he wishes to make one of ahalf-dozen apparently inanimate figures, their faces covered with soap, and their noses used as convenient handles to turn first one cheek andthen the other--that is his own lookout. But human ingenuity has yet toinvent a 'safety barber's shears. ' It has tried. A near genius onceinvented an apparatus--a kind of helmet with multitudinous littlescissors inside it--which he hopefully believed would solve the problem;but what became of him and his invention I have not heard. Perhaps hetried it himself and slunk, defeated, into a deeper obscurity. Perhapshe committed suicide; for one can easily imagine that a man who thoughthe 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 possibilitythat he succeeded in cutting his own hair, and was immediately 'putaway, ' by his sensitive family where nobody could see him but thehardened attendants. The important fact is that the invention never goton the market. Until some other investigator succeeds to more practicalpurpose, the rest of us must go periodically to the barber. We must puton the bib--

Here, however, there is at least an opportunity of selection. There arebibs with arms, and bibs without arms. And there is a certain amount ofsatisfaction in being able to see our own hands, carefully holding thenewspaper or periodical wherewith we pretend that we are stillintelligent human beings. And here again are distinctions. The patronsof my own favored barber's shop have arms to their bibs and pretend tobe deeply interested in the _Illustrated London News_. The patrons ofthe 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 sincegrown again--had no sleeves to their bibs, but nevertheless managedawkwardly to hold the _Police Gazette_. And this opportunity to hold the_Police Gazette_ without attracting attention becomes a pleasant featureof this type of barber's shop: I, for example, found it easier--until myear was cut--to forget my position in the examination of this journalthan in the examination of the _Illustrated London News_. The pictures, strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, butthere is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is alwayswisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest. Otherwiseyou 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 cutit 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. Hereaches for a machine called 'clippers. ' Tell him how to cut hair, willyou! A little more and he'll shave your head--and not only half-wayeither, like the Norman soldiery at the time of the Conquest! Even ifyou are able to restrain this impulse, clenching your bib in your handsand perhaps dropping or tearing the _Illustrated London News_, themirror gives you strange, morbid reflections. You recognize your face, but your head seems somehow separate, balanced on a kind of polka-dottedmountain with two hands holding the _Illustrated London News_. You areafraid 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 abouthow the Tulululu islanders, a savage but ingenious people, preserve theheads of their enemies so that the faces are much smaller but otherwisequite recognizable. You find yourself looking keenly at the barber todiscover any possible trace of Tulululu ancestry. 

And what is he going to get now? A _kris_? No, a paint-brush. Is hegoing to paint you? And if so--what color? The question of colorbecomes 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 anddown the back of your neck. After the serious business of the haircut, abarber must have some relaxation. 

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

He takes off your bib. 

From a row of chairs a man leaps to his feet, anxious to give _his_ headto the barber. A boy hastily sweeps up the hair that was yours--alreadyas remote from you as if it had belonged to the man who is alwayswaiting, 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 havehis shoes polished, or, to use a brighter, gayer word, shined. We areall kings, and this happy conceit of popular government is nicelysymbolized by being, for these shining moments, so many kings together, each on his similar throne and with a slave at his feet. The democraticidea suffers a little from the difficulty of realizing that the slave isalso a king, yet gains a little from the fair custom of the liveliermonarchs of turning from left foot to right and from right to left, sothat, within human limits, neither shoe shall be undemocratically shinedfirst. 

Nor is it uncommon for the kings on the thrones to be symbolically andinexpensively served by yet other sovereign servants. Newspapers inhand, they receive the reports of their lord high chancellors, digestthe 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, alldemocratically smoke the same kind of tobacco. 'You know 'em all, thegreat fun-makers of the daily press, agile-brained and nimble-witted, creators of world-famed characters who put laughter into life. Suchlive, virile humans as they _must_ have a live, virile pipe-smoke. 'There are, to be sure, some who find in this agile-brained andnimble-witted mirth an element of profound melancholy; it seems often adebased 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 thatonce stirred laughter in mediæval monarchs. The thought renders thembearable, these live, virile humans, who only a few centuries ago wouldhave been too handicapped by their refinement to compete successfullywith 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. Weshine our own shoes. Alone, and, if one may argue from the particular tothe general, simply dressed in the intermediate costume, more or lessbecoming, that is between getting up and going out, we wear a shoe onour left hand, and with the other manipulate the helpful sponge. Sometimes, too anxious, it polka-dots our white garments, sometimes thefloor; it is safe only in the bottle, and the wisest shiner will perhapsapproach the job as an Adamite, bestriding, like a colossus, awide-spread newspaper, and taking a bath afterward. Or it may be thatinstead of the bottle we have a little tin box, wedded to itscover, --how often have we not exclaimed between clenched teeth, 'Whatman hath joined together man can pull asunder!'--and containing a kindof black mud, which we apply with an unfortunate rag or with a brushappropriately called the 'dauber. ' Having daubed, we polish, breathingour precious breath on the luminous surface for even greater luminosity. The time is passing when we performed this task of pure lustration, asKeats might have called it, in the cellar or the back hall, more fully, but not completely, dressed, coatless, our waistcoats rakishlyunbuttoned or vulgarly upstairs, our innocent trousers hanging on theirgallowses, our shoes on our feet, and our physical activity notaltogether unlike that demanded by a home-exerciser to reduce theabdomen. Men of girth have been advised to saw wood; I wonder that theynever have been advised to shine their own shoes--twenty-five times inthe morning and twenty-five times just before going to bed. 

My own observation, although not continuous enough to have scientificvalue, leads me to think that stout men are the more inveterate patronsof the shoe-blacking parlor, --Cæsar should have run one, --and that thepresent popularity of the sponge in a bottle may derive from superfluousgirth. Invented as a dainty toilet accessory for women, and at firstregarded by men as effeminate, it is easy to see how insidiously thesponge in a bottle would have attracted a stout husband accustomed toshine his own shoes in the earlier contortionist manner. By degrees, first one stout husband and then another, men took to the bottle; thecurse of effeminacy was lifted; the habit grew on men of all sizes. Itwas not a perfect method, --it blacked too many other things besidesshoes, and provided an undesirable plaything for baby, --but it was astep forward. There was a refinement, a _je ne sais quoi_, an 'easierway, ' about this sponge in a bottle; and, perhaps more than all, adelusive promise that the stuff would dry shiny without friction, whichappealed 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_ howsome moistened that blacking, but you and I, gentle reader, broughtwater in a crystal glass from the kitchen, --and an ingenious tool whichcombined the offices of dauber and shiner, so that one never knew how toput it away right side up. This tool still exists, an honest, good-sizedbrush carrying a round baby brush pickaback; and I dare say anoccasional old-fashioned gentleman shines his shoes with it; but in thebroader sense of that pernicious and descriptive phrase it is no longerused 'by the best people. ' Of late, I am told by shopkeepers, the tinbox with the pervicacious cover is becoming popular; but I remain trueto my sponge in a bottle: for, unlike the leopard, I am able to changemy spots. 

Looking along the ages from the vantage of a throne in the shoe-blackingparlor, it is a matter of pleased wonder to observe what the mind hasfound to do with the feet; nor is the late invention of shoe-polish(hardly earlier than the Declaration of Independence) the leastsurprising item. For the greater part of his journey man has gone abouthis businesses in unshined footwear, beginning, it would appear, with apair of foot-bags, or foot-purses, each containing a valuable foot, andtied round the ankle. Thus we see him, far down the vista of time, atiny figure stopping on his way to tie up his shoe-strings. Captivatedwith form and color, he exhausted his invention in shapes and materialsbefore ever he thought of polish: he cut his toes square; he cut histoes so long and pointed that he must needs tie them to his knee to keepfrom falling over them; he wore soles without uppers, --alas! poor devil, how often in all ages has he approximated wearing uppers withoutsoles!--and he went in for top-boots splendidly belegged andcoquettishly beautified with what, had he been a lady, he might havedescribed as an insertion of lace. At last came the boot-blackingparlor, late nineteenth century, commercial, practical, convenient, andan important factor in civic aesthetics. Not that the parlor isbeautiful in itself. It is a cave without architectural pretensions, butit accomplishes unwittingly an important mission: it removes from publicview 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 himnowadays chiefly by effort of memory. Yet only a little while agokindly, well-intentioned men thought nothing of having their shoesshined in the full glare of the sun. The man having his shoes shined wasa common spectacle. He sat or stood where anybody might see him, almostas immobile as a cigar-store Indian and much less decorative, with aperipatetic shoeblack busy at his feet. His standing attitude was alittle like Washington crossing the Delaware; and when he sat down, hewas not wholly unlike the picture of Jupiter in Mr. Bulfinch'swell-known _Age of Fable_. He had his shoes shined on the sidewalk, congesting traffic; he had them shined in the park, with the birdssinging; wherever he had them shined, he was as lacking inself-consciousness as a baby sucking its thumb. Peripatetic shoeblackspursued pedestrians, and no sensitive gentleman was safe from themmerely because he had carefully and well shined his own shoes before hecame out. But how rarely nowadays do we see this peripatetic shoeblack!Soon he will be as extinct as the buffalo, and the shoe-blacking parloris his Buffalo Bill. 

In the shoe-blacking parlor we are all tarred with the same brush, alldaubed with the same dauber; we have nothing, as the rather enigmaticalphrase 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 allwondering how we are going to get down when the time comes. One willhop, like a great sparrow; another will turn round and descend backward;another will come down with an absent-minded little wave of the foot, asif he were quite used to having his shoes shined and already thinking ofmore serious business; another--but this is sheer nervousness and lackof _savoir-faire_--will step off desperately, as if into an abyss, andcome down with a thump. Sometimes, but rarely, a man will fall off. Itis a throne--and perhaps this is true of all thrones--from which noaltogether self-satisfactory descent is possible; and we all know it, sitting behind our newspapers, or staring down on decadent Greeceshining at our feet, or examining with curious, furtive glances thosecalendars the feminine beauty of which seems peculiar to shoe-blackingparlors, 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, narrowstrip of linen, not, I fear, antiseptic, but otherwise suggestive of apreparedness course in first aid to the injured. He breathes on my shoes(O unhygienic shoeblack!), dulling them to make them brighter with hisstrip of linen. It is my notice to abdicate; he turns down the bottomsof 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 ofunhappy security, of having grown to and become part of that chair, asif one dreaded to fall off, yet strongly suspected that any real effortto 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. Hemay exhibit unbarnacle-like activity, cross and uncross his legs, foldand unfold his arms, twiddle his useful fingers, incline his tired headthis way and that to relieve the strain on his neck, assume (like anactor) expressions of interest, amusement, surprise, pleasure, or whatnot. He may even speak or laugh. But he remains sitting on his chair. Heis more and more certain that he cannot get up. 

He is unlike the bottoms of his own trousers. Calmly, quietly, and byimperceptible degrees _they_ get up. Higher and higher they ascendkneeward; they have an ambition to achieve the waist. Every little whilehe must unostentatiously, and with an easy, careless, indifferent, well-bred, and even _blasé_ 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 therewould be fewer marriages, and perhaps none at all) when a call is apersonal adventure, and it often happens that the recipient of thecall, rather than the caller himself, fears that somehow or other he andhis chair have grown together. But my boy friend, as I think you willagree 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 notinvariably hold good--is that he dresses himself. He has become part andparcel (particularly parcel) of a wise and necessary division of life inwhich the social end is taken over by a feminine partner. She is theexpert. She knows when and where to call, what to say, and when to gohome. Married, a gentleman has no further responsibilities in thisbusiness--except to come cheerfully and sit on his chair withoutwriggling. Sometimes, indeed, he takes a pleasure in it, but that isonly when he has momentarily forgotten that he is making a call. Theseare his rewarding moments; and then, the first thing he knows, somebodyis 'making signs' that it is time to go home!

The wise man, noticing these 'signs, ' comes home. He stands not upon theorder 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 subordinateruler had from time to time to show loyalty to a chief ruler bypresenting himself to do homage. ' The idea is plausible: was it not forthis very reason that Cleopatra galleyed down the Cydnus to call onAntony, --a call that would probably have had a different effect onhistory if the lady had brought a husband, --and Sheba cameled across thedesert to call on Solomon? The creditor character of the visitationsurvives in the common expression 'paying a call. ' In both these cases, however, the calls took on a lighter and brighter aspect, a morereciprocally admiring and well-affected intimacy, than was strictlynecessary to an act of political homage. One is, after all, human; andthe absence of marital partners, whose presence is always a littlesubduing, must be taken into consideration. 'But Solomon, ' you say, 'Solomon?' Sir and madam, I rise to your question. In such a situation aman with seven hundred wives is as good as a bachelor; and I think thefact that Solomon had seven hundred wives proves it. 

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

And it has become divisible into as many varieties as Mr. Heinz'spickles. --The _call friendly_ ('Let us go and call on the Smiths: I'dlike to see them'); the _call compulsory_ ('We really _must_ make thatcall on the Smiths'); the _call curious_ ('I wonder if it's so, what Iheard yesterday about the Smiths'); the _call convenient_ ('As wehaven't anything better to do this evening, we might call on theSmiths'); the _call proud_ ('Suppose we get out the new motor, and runround to the Smiths'); and so forth, and so forth. But, however we lookat it, the call is dependent upon feminine initiative. Our maturemarried gentleman, unless he has had already a call to the ministry, hasno call, socially speaking, to make calls. It is his wife's business. AsBritish soldiers have grimly sung on their way to battle, 'He's therebecause he's there, because he's there, because he's there. ' But it ishis plain duty to _sit on his chair_. I do not hold it legitimate in himto 'sneak off' with Mr. Smith--and smoke. 

Fortunately, however, once he is there, little else is expected ofhim--and nothing that a man should not be willing to do for his wife. Asmile, an attentive manner, the general effect of having combed his hairand 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 isneeded. 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 livelyconversational habit, quick to think of something that may passfor a contribution to current thought, and even quicker to get itout, he had best accept his position as merely decorative, and tryto be as decorative as possible. He should be so quick that the firstwords of his sentence have leaped into life before he is himselfaware of what is to come hurrying after them; he may be so slowthat the only sentence he has is still painfully climbing to thesurface long after the proper time for its appearance has passedand 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 wifecredit, and is taken home from a call with his faculties unimpairedand his self-respect undiminished: he is the same man as when he wastaken out. But not so the man who starts, hesitates, and stops, as ifhe actually said, 'Hold-on-there-I-'ve-got-a-fine-idea--but--er--onsecond 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 thecompany; he attracts attention only to disappoint it: and others arekind as well as sensible to ignore him. He should have kept on rapidlyand developed his fine idea to the bitter end. Nor is it wise to attemptto shine, to dazzle, to surprise with a clever epigram, thoughtfullycomposed and tested by imaginary utterance before an imaginary charmedcircle while dressing; for nothing so diminishes confidence in anepigram 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; andthere is no happy mean between jumping on a passing train and standingstill on the platform--except, as I have suggested, a pleasant wave ofthe hand as the train passes. 

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

I know that resolve; and yet how often have I, too, failed at thecrucial moment to give the hoped-for specimen of my abilities! 'Notyet, ' I have said to myself, 'not yet. The time is not ripe. ' And so Ihave waited, incessantly uneasy, --as Dr. Johnson well puts it, --butalways finding some reason or other to postpone the fireworks. I wasbeset by a kind of gross selfishness--an unwillingness to give _anybody_a specimen of my abilities. Let them chatter! Little do they guess--andnever will they know--the abilities sitting on this chair! Give _them_ aspecimen! Yet I must confess also that my specimen seemed somehowisolated and apart from my environment. It was all right in itself, butit needed a setting; it was like a button without a coat, like an eyewithout 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 wouldchoose a bed. One could if necessary sit, eat, read, and write in thebed. In past time it has been a social centre: the hostess received init, the guests sat on benches, and the most distinguished visitor sat onthe foot of the bed. It combines the uses of all the other articles inthe '$198 de luxe special 4-room outfit' that I have seen advertised forthe benefit of any newly married couple with twenty dollars of their ownfor the first payment. Very few houses, if any, nowadays are withoutfurniture that nobody uses, chairs that nobody ever sits on, books thatnobody ever reads, ornaments that nobody ever wants, pictures thatnobody ever looks at; an accumulation of unessential objects that doescredit chiefly to the activity of manufacturers and merchants cateringto our modern lust for unnecessary expenditure. Not so many centuriesago one or two books made quite a respectable library; dining-roomtables were real banqueting boards laid on trestles and taken away afterthe banquet; one bench might well serve several Perfect Gentlemen to situpon; and a chair of his own was the baron's privilege. Today the $198de 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 happycouple, bravely starting life with twenty dollars, want of a pedestaland a piece of statuary? And I notice also that the outfit--'a completehome, ' says the description--makes no provision for a kitchen; butperhaps they are no longer de luxe. 

It is impossible, at this time, to recover with complete certainty theantiquity of the bed. We may presume that the Neanderthal man had a wife(as wives were then understood) and maintained a kind of housekeepingthat may have gone no further than pawing some leaves together to sleepon; but this probably was a late development. Earlier we may imagine thewind blowing the autumn leaves together and a Neanderthal man lying downby chance on the pile. He found it pleasant, and, for a few thousandyears, went out of his way to find piles of leaves to lie down on, untilone day he hit upon the bright idea of piling the leaves togetherhimself. Then for the first time a man had a bed. His sleep waslocalized; his pile of leaves, brought together by his own seduloushands, became property. Monogamy was encouraged, and the idea of homecame into being. Personally I have no doubt whatever that the man whomade the first bed was so charmed with it that the practice of lying inbed in the morning began immediately; and it is probably a conservativestatement that the later Pliocene era saw the custom well developed. 

One wonders what the Neanderthal man would have thought of a de luxe4-room outfit, or complete home, for $198. 

Even to-day, however, there are many fortunate persons who are neverawakened by an alarm-clock--that watchman's rattle, as it were, ofPoliceman Day. The invention is comparatively recent. Without trying touncover the identity of the inventor, and thus adding one more to theWho's Who of Pernicious Persons, we may assume that it belongs naturallyto the age of small and cheap clocks which dawned only in thenineteenth century. Some desire for it existed earlier. The learned Mrs. Carter, said Dr. Johnson, 'at a time when she was eager in study, didnot awake as early as she wished, and she therefore had a contrivancethat, at a certain hour, her chamber light should burn a string to whicha heavy weight was suspended, which then fell with a sudden strongnoise; this roused her from her sleep, and then she had no difficulty ingetting up. '

This device, we judge, was peculiar to Mrs. Carter, than whom a lesseager student would have congratulated herself that the sudden strongnoise was over, and gone sweetly to sleep again. The venerable BishopKen, who believed that a man 'should take no more sleep than he can takeat once, ' had no need of it. He got up, we are told, at one or twoo'clock in the morning 'and sometimes earlier, ' and played the lutebefore putting on his clothes. 

To me the interesting thing about these historic figures is that theygot up with such elastic promptness, the one to study and the other toplay the lute. The Bishop seems a shade the more eager; but there aredetails that Mrs. Carter would naturally have refrained from mentioningto Dr. Johnson, even at the brimming moment when he had just acceptedher contribution to the _Rambler_. For most of us--or alarm-clocks wouldnot be made to ring continuously until the harassed bed-warmer gets upand 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 thealarm-clock. We are more like Boswell, honest sleeper, and have 'thoughtof a pulley to raise me gradually'; and then have thought again andrealized that even a pulley 'would give me pain, as it would counteractmy internal disposition. ' Let the world go hang; our internaldisposition is to stay in bed: we cling tenaciously to non-existence--orrather, to that third state of consciousness when we are in the worldbut not of it. 

There are those, no doubt, who will say that they have something betterto 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 themonotony of dressing or have tried to vary it, sometimes beginning atone end, sometimes at the other, but always defeated by the hard factthat a man cannot button his collar until he has put on his shirt. Ifthey condescend so far, they will say, with some truth, that it is aquestion of weather, and any fool knows that it is not pleasant to getout of a warm bed into a cold bedroom. The matter has been consideredfrom that angle. 'I have been warm all night, ' wrote Leigh Hunt, 'andfind myself in a state perfectly suited to a warm-blooded animal. To getout of this state into the cold, besides the inharmonious and uncriticalabruptness of the transition, is so unnatural to such a creature thatthe poets, refining upon the tortures of the damned, make one of theirgreatest agonies consist in being suddenly transported from heat tocold--from fire to ice. They are "haled" out of their "beds, " saysMilton, by "harpy-footed furies"--fellows who come to call them. '

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

Lying in bed being a half-way house between sleeping and waking, and themind then equally indifferent to logic and exact realism, the lier inbed can and does create his own dreams: it is an inexpensive andgentlemanly pleasure. If his bent is that way, he becomes Big Man Me:Fortunatus's purse jingles in his pocket; the slave jumps when he rubsthe lamp; he excels in all manly sports. If you ask with what authorityI 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 ofmen thus employ themselves, and the fashion of their employment may bereasonably deduced from observation of individuals. The _ego_ even of amodest man will be somewhat rampant; the _ego_ of a conceited one would, barring its capability for infinite expansion, swell up and bust. Butthis riot of egoism has as little relation to the Fine Art of Lying inBed as a movie play has to the fine art of the drama. The true artistmay take fair advantage of his nice state of unreason to defy time andspace, but he will respect essential verities. He will treat his _ego_like the child it is; and, taking example from a careful mother, tie arope to it when he lets it out to play. Thus he will capture a kind ofimmortality; and his lying in bed, a transitory state itself, willcontradict the transitory character of life outside of it. Companions hehas known and loved will come from whatever remote places to share thesemoments, for the Fine Art of Lying in Bed consists largely incultivating that inward eye with which Wordsworth saw the daffodils. 

Whether this can be done on the wooden pillow of the Japanese I have noway of knowing; but I suspect there were some admirable liers in bedamong the Roman patricians who were grossly accused of effeminacybecause they slept on feathers. 

The north of China, where bedding is laid in winter on raised platformsgently heated by little furnaces underneath, must have produced somehighly cultivated liers in bed. The proverbial shortness of the Germanbed (which perhaps explains the German _Kultur_) may have tended todiscourage the art and at the same time unconsciously stimulated ahatred of England, where the beds are proverbially generous. One can atleast hope, however, that all beds are alike in this matter, providedthe 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 momentover a dinner-table where one of the diners had been monologuing to theextreme limit of boredom, 'for God's sake take me away and put me in aroom by myself and give me a pipe of tobacco!'

Little as we may otherwise resemble Carlyle, many of us have felt thisemotion; and some realize (although the painful suspicion comes from amind too analytical for its own comfort) that we may have occasioned it. The nice consideration for the happiness of others which marks agentleman may even make him particularly susceptible to this hauntingapprehension. Carlyle defined the feeling when he said, 'To sit stilland be pumped into is never an exhilarating process. ' But pumping isdifferent. How often have I myself, my adieus seemingly done, my hat inmy 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 distressedlywondering if I would never stop! And how often have I afterward recalledsomething strained and morbidly intent in their expressions, aglassiness of the staring eye and a starchiness in the smiling lip, thathas made me suffer under my bed-cover and swear that next time I woulddepart like a sky-rocket!

Truly it seems surprising, in a fortunate century when thecorrespondence school offers so many inexpensive educational advantagesfor 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, ' sohopelessly heavy with sad significance to many of us, is neverthelessbut caviar to the general and no bait at all for an enterprisingcorrespondence school. 

A swift survey of literature, from the Old Testament down, yields somestriking discoveries. To take an example, Job does not appear to haveregarded Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar as bores. And there is Bartlett's_Familiar Quotations_, out of which one can familiarly quote nothingabout boredom earlier than Lord Byron. The subject has apparently neverbeen studied, and the broad division into Bores Positive and BoresNegative is so recent that I have but this minute made it myself. 

The Bore Positive pumps; the Bore Negative compels pumping. UnlikeCarlyle, he regards being pumped into as an exhilarating process, andso, like the Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad's tired shoulders, he sitstight and says nothing; the difference being that, whereas the Old Mankept Sinbad walking, the Bore Negative keeps his victim talking. CharlieWax--who lives down town in the shop-window and is always sowell-dressed--would be a fine Bore Negative if one were left alone withhim under compulsion to keep up a conversation. 

Boredom, in fact, is an acquired distaste--a by-product of theprinting-press and steam-engine, which between them have made and keptmankind busier than Solomon in all his wisdom could have imagined. Ourarboreal ancestor could neither bore nor be bored. We see him--with themind's eye--up there in his tree, poor stupid, his think-tank (if thereader will forgive me a word which he or she may not have _quite_accepted) practically empty; nothing but a few primal, inarticulatethinks at the bottom. It will be a million years or so yet before hisprogeny will say a long farewell to the old home in the tree; and eventhen they will lack words with which to do the occasion justice. 

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

Speech grew slowly; and mankind, now a speaking animal, hadcenturies--nay, epochs--in which to become habituated to thelongwindedness 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 somethingmore interesting than himself. He becomes a menace to happiness inproportion as the span of life is shortened by an increasing number ofthings to do and places to go between crib and coffin. Coleridge'sAncient Mariner, full of an unusual personal experience that theleisurely reader finds most horridly entertaining, bored the WeddingGuest because at that moment the Wedding Guest wanted to get to thewedding, and was probably restrained from violence only by thesubconscious thought that it is not good form to appear at suchfunctions with a missing button. But the Mariner was too engrossed inhis own tale to notice this lack of interest; and so invariably is theBore Positive: everything escapes him except his listener. 

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

Dynamo Doit, teaching his class of industrious correspondents, wouldprobably write them, with a picture of himself shaking his fist toemphasize his point: 'Do not try to exhaust your subject. You will onlyexhaust your audience. Never talk for more than three minutes on anytopic. 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 followinganecdotes. ' And I am quite sure also that Professor Doit would write tohis class: 'Whatever topic you discuss, _discuss it originally_. Be apt. Be bright. Be pertinent. Be _yourself_. Remember always that it is notso much what you say as the _way you say it_ that will charm yourlistener. Think clearly. Illustrate and drive home your meaning withilluminating figures--the sort of thing that your hearer will rememberand pass on to others as "another of So-and-so's _bon-mots_. " Here youwill find that reading the "Wit and Humor" column in newspapers andmagazines is a great help. And speak plainly. Remember that unless youare _heard_ you cannot expect to _interest_. On this point, dearstudent, I can do no better than repeat Lord Chesterfield's advice tohis son: "Read what Cicero and Quintilian say of enunciation. "'

But perhaps, after all, enunciation is no more important thanrenunciation; and the first virtue that we who do not wish to be boresmust practise is abstemiousness of self. I know it is hard, but I do notmean 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 (asColonel Roosevelt might have said) is not to be utterly discardedwithout danger of such a silence as would transform the experimenterinto a Bore Negative of the most negative description. Practicallydeprived of speech, he would become like a Charlie Wax endowed withlocomotion and provided with letters of introduction. But one can atleast curb the pronoun, and, with shrewd covert glances at hiswrist-watch, confine the personally conducted tour into and about Myselfwithin reasonable limits. Let him say bravely in the beginning, 'I willnot 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 theirreducible minimum; and he will be surprised to feel how his popularityincreases 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 doesnot know that he is a bore. It is only the Occasional Bore, a sensitive, well-meaning fellow who would not harm anybody, whose head liessleepless on a pillow hot with his blushes while he goes over and overso apt and tripping a dialogue that it would withhold Gabriel fromblowing his trumpet. So it seems to him in his bed; but alas, thesedialogues are never of any practical use. They comfort, but they do notcure. For no person ever talks to us as we talk to ourselves. Thebetter way is to decide firmly (1) to get a wrist-watch, and (2) to getto sleep. 

There is, however, one infallible rule for not being a bore, --or at anyrate 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 fifteenminutes. Fifteen minutes is not really a very long time, although it mayseem so. But to apply this rule successfully one must become adept inthe Fine Art of Going Away. Resting your left hand negligently on yourright knee, so that the wrist protrudes with an effect of careless gracefrom the cuff, you have glanced at your watch and observed that thefifteen minutes are up. You get up yourself. Others get up--or, if thereis but one other, she. So far, so good. But now that everybody is up, new subjects of conversation, as if catching this rising infection, comeup also. You are in a position in which, except by rather too oratoricalor dramatic a gesture, you cannot look at your watch; more than that, ifyou bore a person sitting down and wondering when you are going to getup, you bore far worse a person standing up and wondering when you willgo away. That you have in effect started to go away--and not goneaway--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 andthen on the other, rapidly becomes almost, but never quite, unendurable. Reason totters, but remains on the throne. One can almost lay down alaw: _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 onlya niggling and unsatisfactory solution; it is next door to alwaysstaying at home. Then certainly you would never be a bore (except to thefamily); but neither by any possibility could you ever be that mostdesirable factor in life, the Not-Bore. The Hermit is a slacker. Betterfar to come out of your cave, mingle, bore as little as may be--andthank Heaven that here and there you meet one whom you somehow feelreasonably certain that you do not bore. 

WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR

Of the several places in which a man waits to have something done tohim, no other is so restful as the establishment of his tailor. Hisdoctor and his dentist do their best with inviting chairs and a pile ofmagazines on the table: one gets an impression that both of them wereonce liberal subscribers to the current periodicals, but stopped a yearor two ago and have never bought a magazine since. But these, in theirofficial capacity, are painful gentlemen; and a long procession ofpreceding patients have imparted to the atmosphere of theirwaiting-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 witha headache, --any of our modern grandees under difficulties, --might haveenvied that peace over which Mr. Goren presided: and he was an enviableman. He loved his craft, he believed he had not succeeded the millionsof antecedent tailors in vain. '

And so it is, I dare say, in varying degree with all tailors; or at anyrate should be, for tailor and customer meet on the pleasantestimaginable plane of congenial interest. A person whose chief desire inlife at the moment is to be becomingly dressed comes to one whose chiefambition in life at the moment is to becomingly dress him. No hideousand insistent apprehension preys on the mind of the waiting customer;for the tailor's worst tool is a tape-measure, and his worst discoverymay be that the customer is growing fat. One waits, indeed, withoutserious apprehension, at the barber's; but here the company is mixed andthe knowledge inescapable that it will look on with idle interest whilehe cuts your hair or covers your honest face with lather. Only theharmless necessary assistant will see you measured, and he, by longpractise, has acquired an air of remoteness and indifference that makeshim next thing to invisible. So complete indeed is this tactfulabstraction that one might imagine him a man newly fallen in love. 

I have seen it stated, though I cannot remember just where, that the OldTestament makes no mention of the tailor; the Book, however, showsplainly that Solomon was not only a sage but also a best-dresser, and itstands to reason that his wives did not make his clothes. One wife mighthave done it, but not three hundred. A tailor came at intervals to thepalace, and then went back to where, somewhere in the business sectionof the ancient city, there was doubtless a tablet with a cuneiforminscription:--

 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, quitenaturally, beneath the notice of the Old Testament writers--unfashionablemen, one may readily believe, living at a convenient period when agarment 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 tailorsthan one can imagine a complex state of society in which, for example, the contemporary _Saturday Evening Post_ would publish its ExclusiveSaturday Evening Styles, and gentlemen would habitually buy theirpatterns by bust-measure and cut out their new suits at home on thedining-room table. The idea may seem practical, but the bust with men isevidently not a reliable guide to all the other anatomical proportions. Nor, again, however little the Old Testament concerns itself withtailors, did it fail to mention the first of them. The line goes back toAdam, cross-legged under the Tree--the first tailor and the firstcustomer together--companioned, pleasantly enough, by the first 'littledressmaker. ' They made their clothes together, and made them alike--animpressive, beautiful symbol of the perfect harmony between the sexesthat the world lost and is now slowly regaining. 

Times have changed since Adam: the apron of his honest anxioushandicraft--for it was the penalty of his sin that he would never behappy until he got it finished and put it on--has undergone manychanges, in the course of which even its evolution into Plymouth RockPants, 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 decadesa gentleman had a tailor as inexorably as he had a nose. But now theimmemorial visit to his tailor is no longer absolutely necessary. Hemay, if such is his inclination, --as I am sure it would have beenAdam's, --get his new suit all finished and ready-to-wear. Charley Wax, the sartorially Perfect Gentleman, smiles invitation and encouragementfrom many a window; an army of elegant and expeditious employees, eachas much like Charley Wax as is humanly possible, waits to conduct him toa million ready-to-wear suits. His intellect is appealed to by theplausible argument that we live in a _busy time_, in which the _leadersof men_ simply cannot _afford to waste_ their valuable hours by going tothe tailor: at the ready-to-wear emporium you simply pay your money andtake your choice. 

Many a gentleman, suddenly discovering that he is a 'leader of men, ' hasdeserted his tailor: many a gentleman, learning by experience that ittakes as long to try on clothes in one place as another, has presentlygone back to him. Starting with the democratic premise that all men areborn equal, the ready-to-wear clothier proceeds on the furtherassumption that each man becomes in time either short, stout, ormedium; and this amendment to the Declaration of Independence has indeedcreated a new republic of shorts, stouts, and mediums, in which CharleyWax is the perpetual president. Here, indeed, would seem to be a steptoward patterns for gentlemen: one sees the gentleman in imaginationhappily cutting out his new spring suit on the dining-room table, orsitting cross-legged on that centre of domestic hospitality, while hehums a little tune to himself and merrily sews the sections together. 

But unfortunately the shorts, stouts, and mediums are not respectivelystandard according to bust-measure. A gentleman, for example, maysimultaneously be short in the legs, medium in the chest, and stout inthe circumference: the secret of the ready-to-wear clothier lies in hisability to meet on the spot conditions which no single pattern couldhope to anticipate. We must go back toward nature, and stop short atAdam, to find a costume that any gentleman can successfully make forhimself. 

Personally I prefer the immemorial visit to the tailor; I like thisrestful atmosphere, in which unborn suits of clothes contentedly awaitcreation in rolls of cloth, and the styles of the season are exhibitedby pictures of gentlemen whose completely vacuous countenancescomfortably repudiate the desirability of being 'leaders of men. ' On thetable the _Geographical Magazine_ invites to unexciting wonder at theway other people dress. From the next room one hears the voice of thetailor, leisurely reporting to his assistant as he tape-measures acustomer. In the lineage of a vocation it is odd to think that hisgreat-great-great grandfather might have sat cross-legged to inspire thepoem

 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-timetailor 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 inhis little stall or beside his open window, more skilled with shears andneedle than with lethal weapon, despite the gallant brigade of tailorswho went to battle under the banner of Queen Elizabeth. Yet I cannotimagine my own tailor sitting cross-legged beside an open window; nor, for that matter, sitting cross-legged anywhere, except perhaps on thesands of the sea in his proper bathing-suit. His genealogy begins withthose 'taylours' who, in the nineteenth year of Henry VII, 'sewyd theKynge to be callyd Marchante Taylours'--evidently earning the disfavorof their neighbors, for a 'grete grudge rose among dyuers other craftysin the cyte against them. ' Very soon, I fancy, these Marchante Tayloursbegan to pride themselves on the straightness of their legs, and letsubordinate craftsmen stretch their sartorius muscles. But why, asCarlyle puts it, the idea had 'gone abroad, and fixed itself down in awide-spreading rooted error, that Tailors are a distinct species inPhysiology, not Men, but fractional Parts of a Man, ' nobody has yetexplained satisfactorily. 

So one muses, comfortably awaiting the tailor, while the eye travelsthrough far countries, glimpsing now and then a graceful figure thatsomehow reminds one of a darker complexioned September Morn, and helpsperhaps to explain the wide-spread popularity of a magazine whose titleseems at first thought to limit it to a public-school circulation. 

And yet, strangely enough, there are men whose wives find it difficultto persuade them to go to the tailor; or, for that matter to theready-to-wear clothier. There is, after all, something undignified instanding on a little stool and being measured; nor is it a satisfactorysubstitute for this procedure to put on strange garments in a littlecloset and come forth to pose before mirrors under the critical eye of aliving Charley Wax. Fortunately the tailor and the polite andexpeditious salesman of the ready-to-wear emporium have this in common:art or nature has in both cases produced a man seemingly with no senseof humor. Fortunately, too, in both cases a gentleman goes alone toacquire a new suit. I have seen it suggested in the advertising columnof the magazine that a young man should bring his fiancée with him, tohelp select his ready-to-wear garments; but the idea emanates from theimagination of an ad-writer, and I am sure that nobody concerned, exceptperhaps the fiancée, would welcome it in actual practice. Wives indeed, and maybe fiancées, sometimes accompany those they love when a hat is tobe tried on and purchased; but I have been told in bitter confidence bya polite hatter that 'tis a custom more honored in the breach than inthe observance; and this I think is sufficient reason why it should notbe extended, so to speak, to the breeches. 

SHAVING THOUGHTS

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

So they talked of shaving at Dr. Taylor's before the advent of thesafety-razor; and our curiosity can never be satisfied as to just whatso acute an observer as Dr. Johnson would have thought of thischaracteristically modern invention to combine speed and convenience. Ican imagine Boswell playfully reminding the doctor how that illustriousfriend had quite recently expressed his disapproval of bleeding. 'Sir, 'says Samuel, as he actually did on another occasion, 'courage is aquality necessary for maintaining virtue. ' And he adds (blowing withhigh derision), 'Poh! If a man is to be intimidated by the possiblecontemplation of his own blood--let him grow whiskers. ' At any rateamong a thousand shavers to-day, two do not think so much alike that onemay not be influenced by this consideration, and regard Byron, composinghis verses while shaving, as a braver poet than if he had performed theoperation 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 eachsafety razor as soon as it is invented and is never so happy as whenabout to try a new one. To a shaver of this class, cost is immaterial. Asafety-razor for a cent, with twenty gold-monogramed blades and aguaranty of expert surgical attendance if he cuts himself, would stirhis active interest neither more nor less than a safety-razor for ahundred dollars, with one Cannotbedull blade and an iron-clad agreementto pay the makers an indemnity if he found it unsatisfactory. He buysthem secretly, lest his wife justly accuse him of extravagance, andpractises cunning in getting rid of them afterward; for to aconscientious gentleman throwing away a razor is a responsible matter. It is hard to think of any place where a razor-blade, indestructible andhorribly sharp as it is, --for all purposes except shaving, --can bethrown away without some worry over possible consequences. A baby mayfind and swallow it; the ashman sever an artery; dropping it overboardat sea is impracticable, to say nothing of the danger to some innocentfish. Mailing it anonymously to the makers, although it is expensive, isa solution, or at least shifts the responsibility. Perhaps the safestcourse is to put the blades with the odds and ends you have been goingto throw away to-morrow ever since you can remember; for there, whileyou live, nobody will ever disturb them. Once, indeed, I--but this isgetting too personal: I was simply about to say that it is possible topurchase a twenty-five cent safety-razor, returnable if unsatisfactory, and find the place of sale vanished before you can get back to it. Butbetween inventions in safety-razors, the extraordinary-safety shaver islikely to revert to first principles and the naked steel of hisancestors. 

And as he shaves he will perhaps think sometimes of the unhappy EdwardII of England, who, before his fall, wore his beard in three corkscrewcurls--and was shaved afterward by a cruel jailer who had it done _withcold water_! The fallen monarch wept with discomfort and indignation. 'Here at least, ' he exclaimed reproachfully, 'is warm water on mycheeks, whether you will or no. ' But the heartless shave proceeded. Razed away were those corkscrew curls from the royal chin, and so hecomes down to us without them, shaved as well as bathed in tears--oneof 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 minecan warm that cold water; perhaps, after all, the cruel jailer had anatural and excusable hatred of corkscrew curls anywhere. I should feelquite differently about it if he had warmed the water; but although aman may shave himself with cold water, certainly nobody else has a rightto. 

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

Nevertheless, wives continued to respect their husbands in about thenormal proportion. Within the relatively brief compass of the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, I, who would have gone smooth-shaven in thefourteenth, could conceivably have fluttered in at least thirty-eightseparate and beautiful arrangements of moustaches, beard, and whiskers. Nor, I suspect, did these arrangements always wait upon the slowprocesses of nature. One does not _have_ to grow whiskers. Napoleon'syouthful officers were fiercely bewhiskered, but often with the aid ofhelpfully adhesive gum; and in the eighteen-thirties there occurs in theBoston _Transcript_, as a matter of course, an advertisement of'gentlemen's whiskers ready-made or to order. ' We see in imagination aquiet corner at the whisker's, with a mirror before which the Bostoniantries on his ready-made whiskers before ordering them sent home; oragain, the Bostonian in doubt, selecting now this whisker, now thatfrom the _Gentlemen's Own Whisker Book_, and still with a shade ofindecision 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 isreassuring. 'Elegant whiskers!' he repeats at intervals. 'They will dous both credit. '

The matter has, in fact, been intelligently studied; the beautifyingeffect of whiskers reduced to principles. If my face is too wide, abeard lengthens it; if my face is too narrow, it expands as if by magicwith the addition of what have sometimes been affectionately called'mutton chops, ' or 'siders'; if my nose projects, almost like a nosetrying to escape from a face to which it has been sentenced for life, apair of large, handsome moustaches will provide a proper entourage--anest, so to speak, on which the nose rests contentedly, almost like asetting hen; if my nose retreats backward into my face, the æstheticsolution is obviously galways. A stout gentleman can do wonders with hisappearance by adopting a pointed beard, and a suit of clothes, shirt, necktie, and stockings with pronounced vertical stripes. A thin one, onthe other hand, becomes at once substantial in effect, without beinggross, if he cultivates side-whiskers, and wears a suit of clothes, shirt, cravat, and stockings with pronounced horizontal stripes. If myface lacks fierceness and dynamic force, it needs a brisk, arrogantmoustache; 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 themoustache are dependent on the muscle called _depressor alæ nasi_. Byspecially cultivating this muscle, men might in course of time make themovements of the moustache subject to voluntary control. '

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

It has been said by some critics that whiskers are a disguise. I shouldbe unwilling to commit myself to this belief; nor can I accept thecontrary conviction that whiskers are a gift of Almighty Providence inwhich the Giver is so sensitively interested that to shave them off isto invite eternal punishment of a kind--and this, I think, destroys thetheory--that would singe them off in about two seconds. Whiskers arereal, and sometimes uncomfortably earnest; the belief that they betokenan almost brutal masculine force is visible in this, that those whosewhiskers are naturally thinnest take the greatest satisfaction inpossessing them--seem, in fact, to say proudly, '_These_ are mywhiskers!' But I cannot feel that a gentleman is any more disguised byhis whiskers, real, ready-made, or made to order, than he would be if heappeared naked or in a ready-made or made-to-order suit. Whiskers, infact, are a subtle revelation of real character, whether the kind thatexist as a soft, mysterious haze about the lower features or such asinspired 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, asit were, on his own face. 

We have, indeed, but to visualize clearly the spectacle of a gentlemanshaving himself and put beside it the spectacle of a gentleman starchingand curling his whiskers, to see the finer personal dignity that hascome with the general adoption of the razor. I am not going to attemptto describe a gentleman starching and curling his whiskers, --it wouldbe too horrible, --but I like to dwell on the shaver. He whistles orperhaps hums. He draws hot water from the faucet--Alas, poor Edward! Hemakes a rich, creamy lather either in a mug or (for the sake of literarydirectness) on his own with a shaving-stick. He strops his razor, orperhaps selects a blade already sharpened for his convenience. He rubsin the lather. He shaves, and, as Dr. Johnson so shrewdly pointed outthat night at Dr. Taylor's, 'Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do notshave so much alike as not to be distinguished. ' Perhaps he cutshimself, for a clever man at self-mutilation can do it, even with asafety; but who cares? Come, Little Alum, the shaver's friend, smartlyto the rescue! And then, he exercises the shaver's prerogative andpowders his face. 

Fortunately the process does not always go so smoothly. There are timeswhen the Local Brotherhood of Razors have gone on strike and refuse tobe stropped. There are times at which the twelve interchangeable bladesare hardly better for shaving than twelve interchangeablepostage-stamps. There are times when the lather might have been fairlyguaranteed to dry on the face. There are times when Little Alum, theshaver's friend, might well feel the sting of his own powerlessness. Butthese times are the blessed cause of genial satisfaction when everythinggoes 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--anobfuscation of the chin, cheeks, and upper lip--a horror of unseemlygrowth--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 stropyour favorite razor! I wonder, while stropping mine, if any man stilllives who uses a moustache cup?

OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA!

Any man who knows that, sooner or later, he must go to another afternoontea cannot but rejoice at the recent invention of an oval, platter-likesaucer, large enough to hold with ease a cup, a lettuce or othersandwich, and a dainty trifle of pastry. The thing was needed: themodesty of the anonymous inventor--evidently _not_ Mr. Edison--revealshim one of the large body of occasional and unwilling tea-goers. We, thereluctant and unwilling, are all strangely alike at these functions; andwe have all been embarrassed by the old-fashioned saucer. Circular inshape, and hardly larger than the cup that belies its reputation anddances drunkenly whenever another guest joggles our elbow, --whichhappens so often that we suspect conspiracy, --the old-fashioned sauceraffords no reasonably secure perch for a sandwich; responds with delightto the law of gravitation if left to itself; and sets us wishing, thoseof us who think scientifically, that evolution had refrained from doingaway 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 OligoceneEpoch instead of the seventeenth century, we are convinced thatevolution, far from discarding this useful appendage, would haveperfected it. A little hand would have evolved at the end of it--such aone as might hold a Perfect Gentleman's saucer while he sipped from histea-cup. 

Nay, more. In many ways that will at once occur to the intelligentreader this little hand would be helpful in our complex moderncivilization. It would hold this essay. It would turn the music at thepiano. It would enable two well-disposed persons cordially to shakehands when their four other hands were busy with bundles. It would slapthe coward mosquito that stabs in the back. It would be absolutelyperfect for waving farewell. Nor would there be anything 'funny' aboutit, or shocking to the most refined sensibilities: the vulgar wouldlaugh and the refined would hide a shudder at the sight of a man with notail! We would, of course, all look like the Devil, but everybody knowsthat _his_ tail has never yet kept him out of polite society. 

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

The truth is, we do not like your afternoon teas--except those littleones, like the nice children of an objectionable mother, that areinformal, intimate, and not destructive of our identity. At largergatherings we have no identity: we are supernumeraries, mere tea-cupbearers, wooden Indians who have been through Hampton, hand-carvedgentlemen, 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 weare smiling because we can feel it; we remain where we are laid untilforcibly moved to another spot, and we are capable, under pressure, ofemitting a few set phrases that resemble human speech. 

Yet within this odd simulacrum of a worldly, entertaining, andinterested gentleman, a living mind surveys the gay scene with astrange, emotionless detachment--just so, perhaps, will it eventuallysurvive the body. We are really alive, conscious that we dislikechange, nervous when moved and stood up in another place, andintellectually certain that no real harm can come to us. One is remindedof 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 cannotfollow Seneca to his conclusion and comfort ourselves with the thoughtthat we are 'truly great. '

I have often wondered, while 'dolling up, ' as the strikingly appropriatemodernism puts it, for such a function, whether there is any universalreason why a reluctant man should go to an afternoon tea. There are, ofcourse, many individual reasons, more or less important to theindividual tea-goer; but for us the impulsion comes inevitably fromwithout. The verb 'drag, ' often applied to the process by which a man isbrought to a tea, indicates how valuable would be the discovery of aUniversal Reason wherefore any man might hope to derive some personalgood from this inescapable experience. 

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

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

As for useful experience, this afternoon tea reminds me of those lowersocial gatherings where liquor is, or used to be, sold only to be drunkon the premises. Granting that I become a finished tea-goer, easy ofspeech, nodding, laughing, secure in the graceful manipulation of mytea-things, never upsetting my tea, never putting my sandwich in the wayof an articulating tongue, yet is all this experience of no use whateverto me except at other afternoon teas. I go to school simply to learn howto go to school. The most finished and complete tea-goer, if he behavesanywhere else as he does at an afternoon tea, creates more widely thesame unfavorable impression that he creates, in his own proper sphere, on me. Can I then reasonably regard experience as useful which I observeto be useful only for doing something which I observe to be useless? Thesoap agrees that I cannot. Yet, says the sponge, _if_ I might hope atsome afternoon tea to discover my immortal soul, the case would bedifferent; this experience would be valuable. O foolish sponge! I amcompelled to tell you that at afternoon teas it is especially difficultfor a mortal gentleman to believe that he has any immortal soul to lookfor. It is a gathering essentially mundane and ephemeral. For it we puton our most worldly garments. For it we practise our most worldly smirksin dumb rehearsal before our mirror and an audience of one silly, attentive image, thinking that this time, this time--But it is alwaysthe same: the observant mind in the immovable body. As for the immortalsoul, 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 whereone featherless, plantigrade, biped mammal of the genus _Homo_ may meetanother whom he might hope some time to call a friend? I do not mean 'myfriend What's-his-name?' but rather such another biped as Tennyson hadin 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 towhom this thought sounds sublimated and extravagant: a poet says thissort of thing because such is his poetic business. We come nearerperhaps to the universal understanding in John Hay's definition that'Friends are the sunshine of life'; for it is equally true that all menseek sunlight and that every man seeks a friend after his own kind andnature. The best and most intelligent of us admit the rarity and valueof friendship; the worst and most ignorant of us are unwittingly thebetter for knowing some friendly companion. But these afternoon teas areinimical to friendship; and the first duty of a hostess is to separate, expeditiously and without hope of again coming together, any other twoguests who appear to be getting acquainted. On this count, even were wenot Automaton Tea-Goers, debarred by inherent stability from any normalhuman intercourse, the afternoon tea must prove more disheartening thanhelpful. We might at best glimpse a potential friend as the desertislander sights a passing sail on the far horizon. 

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

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

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

THE END

Transcriber's Note:

 Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.